by Jessica Sims
Perhaps I was not the only great actor here.
I turned in Ramsey’s arms, unwilling to unwrap my legs from around his torso, and glanced at the wolf pack.
I shouldn’t have looked. All the naked men were staring very pointedly at me. And several of them had erections.
Oh jeez. Had I just made things worse? What if they didn’t believe us and I had to go with them? What if I left with them and they all held me down and raped me? Would they even have to hold me down? Or would the alpha bark a command and I’d just drop to all fours?
Fear quickened my breath, and I felt the tight, uncomfortable band of a headache surge through my scalp. Oh no. That was another sign of an imminent shift.
The wolf leader put his hands on his hips and stared at Ramsey, then at me, then at the Russells. His body looked tense, his posture wary. “If she’s your mate,” he growled, “then why’s she so fucking scared?”
Ramsey’s hand on my ass tightened. “You,” he snarled.
The leader looked surprised. “Me?”
“She doesn’t like wolves.” Ramsey’s bass voice rumbled through his body.
“She must have liked wolves enough at some point,” the Anderson leader said crudely. “She let one between her legs.”
Ramsey’s response was a low growl.
A chorus of growls rose from the throats of the wolf pack. Fuck. This was getting worse, not better.
I unhooked my legs from Ramsey’s body and slid down him. “Let’s be reasonable about this,” I said in my cheeriest voice. “There’s no reason to—”
The wolf alpha leveled his gaze at me. “Get over here, girl.”
Caught by that compelling stare, I shrank my shoulders and moved away from Ramsey, dropping to my knees. I couldn’t stand tall in front of the alpha; had to show my submission—
Ramsey roared—a feral sound—and I heard the Russells surge forward, though I wasn’t sure if they were going to stop Ramsey or stop the wolves. The Andersons rushed forward as well and I was suddenly surrounded by a pack of naked men as their leader tried to pull me away from the furious Ramsey.
“A wolf belongs with her alpha,” the Anderson leader snarled.
“No,” I gasped, but I was unable to rise from the ground. My legs tightened. One of the Andersons reached for me, taking my arm in his hand. To my horror, my skin rippled in his grasp. The Anderson wolf gave me a look of surprise and let go of my arm just in time for a convulsive wave to crash over me.
Not here. Not now. My back arched and my body undulated with pain. I cried out and dropped to my haunches, my panicked body beginning the painful transformation to wolf.
In humiliation, I endured the endless rounds of agony. My jaw cracked and shifted, my nose elongating, every muscle stretching like a rubber-band pulled taut. My skin shivered the entire time as the wolf worked her way through me. I tried not to cry out, but this change was so hard and sudden that I nearly blacked out with the pain of it, and I’m pretty sure I made a few whimpering noises.
The clearing was deathly silent except for the sound of my labored breathing and the roaring of blood in my ears as I became the hated half of me. I struggled to go back, turn the tide and remain human, and that made things harder. It was like torture as my hands turned to paws, and I felt each excruciating twist of tendon and bone acutely. Long minutes passed and then my shredded clothes fell to the ground. I gave a long, humiliated body shiver, then rose shakily to my feet. My wolf feet.
Both sides stared at me—the Russells in something like chagrin, the Andersons in surprise. Ramsey’s expression was one of disappointment. For some reason that made me feel worse, and my stomach lurched and gagged. I threw up blood in the grass, unable to keep it down. On some of the more painful changes, I vomited blood. Today, it seemed, was one of those days.
The Anderson leader pointed at me and the stink of wolf rolled off him, my nose attuned to the scent. “That,” he said, his voice an echoing boom in my sensitive wolf ears, “was a fucking disgusting show.”
A small whine crept out of my throat.
“You’re letting her kill herself!” he continued. “She keeps transforming like that and she’s going to slaughter herself. And you assholes ain’t helping her?” The Anderson leader spat at Ramsey’s feet. “I thought you said you wanted to be her mate.”
I heard the creak of Ramsey’s knuckles as he clenched his fists and I looked up at him. He didn’t look at me.
The Anderson leader moved toward me. I shied back, but he held a hand out, fingers extended, and the wolf in me felt compelled to sniff them. I did so, and he touched my ears, then ran a hand down the ruff of my neck. I endured it, feeling the wolf’s need to please the alpha.
“Ain’t supposed to be slow and painful like that,” the Anderson leader said, his voice softer. “Ain’t supposed to make her puke blood. If that’s what she’s doing, she’s gonna be dead before a year is out.”
My sister’s breath caught in her throat, the start of a soft sob. “No.”
My body was still radiating pain, though it was ebbing slowly. Humiliation tore through my thoughts, along with fear. Was this a trick? Or was he right and I was going to die? What could I do? I didn’t want to go with the wolves. I whined. I wanted to go back with my sister. I wanted to run away. My tail flicked.
As if sensing my thoughts, the Anderson leader tried to put a hand on my ruff again but I flinched away, skittering back a few feet, human fear overriding wolf instinct.
“We can help her learn how to change,” he said in a calm, low voice meant to soothe. “Send her with us and we can save her. Even wolf babies know how to shift better than she does. Not only is she putting herself at risk, she’s putting others at risk. What if she changes in public?”
Ramsey looked down at me, into my wolf eyes, and must have seen the fear there. He looked back at the Anderson leader and took two steps forward, getting in the man’s face. To his credit, the wolf leader did not back down.
“She is my mate,” Ramsey said in a low, dangerous voice. “She stays with me. The laws make it so.”
The Anderson leader looked at me, then back at Ramsey. “If you aren’t gonna let her come with us, then one of us is going to go with you. I’m not gonna let you kill her. She’s one of us.”
Ramsey growled.
Beau stepped forward. “Hang on. This is an arrangement I am interested in. I want to hear what you have to say.”
A half hour later my flesh began to ache and crawl again, and I hurried off to the woods, my sister trailing behind me with my clothes. Several long, agonizing minutes later, I lay in the grass, naked and panting and human, waiting for the nausea to pass.
My sister crouched next to me and handed me my clothes. “Oh, Sara,” she said softly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I sat up and took the T-shirt from her. “Tell you what?”
“About the changes. How it hurts.”
I shrugged, slipping the shirt over my head and then dragging on my jeans. My bra and panties had been destroyed in the change, and the shirt was in tatters. “I didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to hurt. How could I have known?”
“When Beau changes, he’s not in pain. I watched him once. It wasn’t like yours.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. Jeez. I wanted to die of embarrassment. I’d had an ugly, messy transformation in front of everyone. Shifting was private. You didn’t talk about it, any more than you’d describe the last time you’d taken a leak. “Let’s just go, Bath. I want to hear what they’re saying.”
But when we returned to the rendezvous, all the deciding had already been done. Beau was smiling and the Anderson leader looked mollified. Only Ramsey continued to scowl. I approached slowly, holding my tattered shirt together.
“It’s been decided,” Beau said and beckoned me forward. Reluctantly, I went.
“Levi wants to help you,” Beau said. “They can teach you how to shift properly. And they want to make sure your mating to Ramsey is of your own cho
osing. So Connor Anderson is going to stay with you for the next month and teach you how to be a wolf.”
Levi—the alpha—nodded, and gestured for one of his wolves to move forward. Connor turned out to be the young, handsome wolf who had brought out Savannah. I wondered what the story was there.
“And what does Levi get out of this?” my sister asked. “My sister doesn’t want to live with them. She wants to live with her mate.”
“Don’t want nothing but the well-being of my wolves,” Levi said. His arms crossed over his chest. “I’m the alpha and it’s my job to make sure my wolves are safe. All of ’em.”
“And in the meantime,” Beau added, “we’re going to discuss the possibility of the Anderson wolves joining the Alliance. A few have expressed interest in the Midnight Liaisons service, as their pack is looking for a few mates to add to their family.”
“Oh,” my sister said with pleased surprise. “That would be very good.”
Midnight Liaisons was the dating agency my sister and I owned, and it catered exclusively to paranormal clientele.
Seemed like everyone was getting something out of this deal but me. I looked over at Ramsey, whose mouth was still pressed into a tight line of disapproval.
“All right,” I said meekly.
Levi clapped me on the shoulder, nearly startling me out of my skin. “Looks like you get to have your Huggy Bear after all, girl. Why don’t you go give him a big kiss and wipe that scowl off his face?”
Oh, jeez. It looked like the last thing Ramsey wanted right now was to kiss me. But I was terrified of losing the fragile peace, so I moved forward to Ramsey.
This time I didn’t have the courage to do more than give him a light kiss on the mouth. His lips didn’t part under mine.
Fantasy.
Temptation.
Adventure.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
