Her answer to that command was to carefully lower herself down to the ground and crisscross her legs under her swollen belly, “I thought we were getting along now.”
He gritted his teeth. “We are.” He turned away from her, soaping himself in the opposite direction, hoping that would put an end to the conversation.
But she said behind him, “Then under our communication contract, I would have your thoughts.”
He slowly turned around to face her unable to keep his annoyance off his face.
“Be there need to know my thoughts when there is so much for you to attend?” he asked.
“Just the fact that you’re acting like you care how much I have to do is setting off my alarms, Fenris, so come on, spill.”
“I know not this ‘setting off alarms’—” he began.
“You’re stalling.”
Indeed he was. But how to tell her in words his feelings when he did not understand them himself? “I did try,” he confessed.
“You tried what?” she asked, shaking her head.
“You think I saw not all the work you have been doing, that I care not for your well-being or what you would want. But I did see you have been tired of body and slowed in your actions because of our pup. I am a wolf but I did not want to act the animal. And I did try to stay away from you, to give you the days you did need to make ready for our wedding. It nearly drove me mad.”
She folded her hands on top of her belly. “So let me get this straight. You’re angry now because you were so horny?”
“I know not the meaning of ‘horny.’”
“Full of losti.”
He shook his head. “Tis not losti, that is what does irk me. A Viking warrior can ignore losti. I have felt it before and did shove it aside when it meant getting a thing done. No, my upset comes from—“ he broke off. “I have no wish for the poison of the fated mates, but I find myself unable to fully resist it. I cannot resist you. You are inside of me, and even when we are apart, with you is where I long to be.”
She looked down at him, and for many moments nothing was said accept by the birds in the trees. But then she whispered in his own tongue, “Hvart elskar pu mik?” Do you love me?
He had not thought of it that way. Love in his mind, ‘twas but a word featured in the songs of the traveling skald, and then mayhap, only because it made human women swoon and offer their wares to its singer after the great feast, at which he performed.
He did not care for this love, did not want to believe in its existence, but as soon as she asked him this question in his own tongue, he knew the answer to be yes. And under the communication contract, he said, “Yea, I am in love with you, but I fear you are still in love with another.”
Another long silence passed, in which his fated mate sat, looking as if he had slapped her.
He hefted himself from the water and sat on the bank beside her just close enough for him to feel the heat from her body, but not close enough for their skin to meet.
“I am aggrieved this has happened, too,” he told her. “But now that I have put a mind to it, I believe I have been in love with you for a great number of moons. When we did first come to this place and you would not mind-speak or leave our bed closet, my aunt did give me words I might use to break the fated mates spell and send you back to your own time on a scrap of fabric. Yet, did I not use them. They remain pinned to my winter fur.”
She turned to him, with tears brimming in her eyes. “So even when I was crazy-depressed and not talking to you, you never considered using it?”
“No, and that is how I have come to realize now how much I truly love you.”
He braced himself for her anger, but it never came. Instead she did the one thing that could hurt him the most. She started crying.
Quiet tears fell down her face, and she rocked back and forth with her hands around her stomach.
“I am sorry you still love the other wolf,” he said, his heart growing stony with regret for confessing his feelings. “But I still cannot let him have you.”
“No, I don’t love Rafe,” she said through her tears. “I mean I love him but not in the way of mates. I love him like you love Randulfr. As a dear friend. Only imagine if you and Randulfr weren’t both friends and the girl version of him asked you to mate before her heat night.”
“That would be impossible,” he answered. “Girl and boy wolves from different houses have no reason to become as fast of friends as myself and Randulfr.”
She dismissed these words with a wave of her hand. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in my time period, girl and boy wolves go to school together. In fact, we don’t do anything but receive tutoring in the same place for nine full moons straight, six hours a day or more, from the time we’re six winters to the time we’re eighteen. So please try to expand your mind just enough to understand Rafe and I could have become as fast of friends as you and Randulfr. And if you were in my position, it would have been easy to mistake that friendship for love, especially if you lived in a time when fated mating was fairly uncommon.”
She laid her hand on his arm now. “The day I hugged Rafe—it wasn’t because I still wanted him over you, it was because I felt like I had betrayed him. It was because I didn’t understand then what true love is. But now I do.”
Now it was she who reached for his hand and laid it over her heart, covering it with her own. “Because of you. You’ve given me a family and the way of life I yearned for, and now you’ve given me your love. I love you, too, Fenris, more than I ever thought possible and to the end of time and back.”
His heart swelled to hear these words fall from her lips, but he still did not understand: “Then why do tears continue to fall from your eyes?”
She squeezed his hand against her chest. “When I was a pup of four summers, I was living in a small wolf settlement, somewhere in Washington, I think. My mom went into heat when she was only fifteen, and she and my dad didn’t have much money. Plus, they were overwhelmed with having to take care of me.”
“Did they not have family to help them with your raising?” he asked.
“Wolf families from my time aren’t like wolf families from your time. We don’t all live together like you do. And if a she-wolf chooses to mate with a wolf her parents don’t approve off, they disown her—kind of like how you banish wolves from the village for crimes.”
He shook his head. “That is not like our way at all. As king I only banish if the crime is grievous. If it be but a mating unapproved, the family must accept it and continue on as a family.”
“Yeah, that’s really not how it works in my time. In my time, if you go into heat like my mother did and go running straight to the wolf who sells drugs to humans as his main hustle, then they pretty much kick you out. But my mom found out quick how uncool living with a drug dealer could be. ” She shook her head. “My first memories are of trying to stay quiet and make myself very small, so they wouldn’t get mad at me, but it didn’t help. They were always angry, yelling at each other, yelling at me, or behind closed doors, doing something I would only later come to understand was fucking.
“But one day it all came to a head. They got to yelling at each other so loud I went and hid in my room and covered my ears, but it was still loud enough for me to hear my dad tell my mom that either she got rid of the kid or he was going to leave her.”
“Yea, I see,” he said, nodding. “Your parents parted ways because your father did not wish to do his duty. In our village, when this happens, we send the young wolf on an ocean voyage, which is oft enough to make him see the lure of hearth and home. But I would guess you do not have such a practice in your time and it must have caused you great sadness when your parents parted.”
She looked up him. “They didn’t part.”
He shook his head, confused. “Then why does this memory continue to sadden you to tears?”
“Oh, my gosh, you can’t even fathom, that’s so…” And to his surprise, she began to have tears again. “My mother chose him.
She left me by the side of the road and drove away with him. That’s how I came to be in Wolf Springs, that’s why I don’t have a family of my own, and that’s why it moves me to tears when you say you’re never going to let me go. I didn’t know until now how much I needed someone who would never let me go.”
He dragged her into his wet arms, holding her to him tightly as she cried, wishing to go forward in time again, if only to punish both of her parents for having done this to his queen.
But at the same time, he could no longer curse his fate or hers. What had happened to them both was the reason the spell had delivered him across time to her, his fated mate, his dark beauty, the one he had always been destined to love above all others.
Chapter 21
CHLOE wore the scrap of fabric with what she called the “divorce spell” on it pinned inside her wedding dress, right next to her heart. Fenris teased her about making it into a memento, but she didn’t care. It had shot past her woman’s dagger as her as most valued treasure, because it more than any told the story of how much Fenris loved her. And at the wedding when she and Fenris drank a special non-alcoholic version of bridal ale she’d concocted from the same wolf-head shaped drinking vessel, she held her hand over the divorce spell, not caring that the pin pricked her skin. After this, she decided, she’d wear it inside her tunic, as a daily reminder. She’d never forget her Viking would never abandon her.
At that point the festivities had been going on for nearly a week. The trading boats had returned, and it was the rare day that everyone in the village was given leave by Fenris the Serious to put aside their work and celebrate. Also, hundreds of alpha chieftains and their contingents had come from far and wide to celebrate the wedding of their king. The wolves of their village were taking full advantage of the many feasts and all the new faces. It caused Uncle Olafr to joke that at least two or three she-wolves would have gone into heat by the time the festivities were over. At least she thought he was joking.
In any case, to her great relief, though the young wolves flirted madly, with one of the alpha chieftains even putting in a heat night claim for Aunt Bera’s daughter, no one actually went into heat. And though the festivities went on for many days, it felt like Chloe blinked her eyes, and suddenly it was time for the wedding banquet. In her time, wolves married as any pregnant human would—as close as possible to the conception date, so as not to have a bride with a significant bump, and in one day with the usual wedding and reception to follow.
In this time, though, not only did they spend a week celebrating, but they also set up a small market so their many guests could trade and barter throughout the festivities. Instead of a receiving line, she and Fenris received many visitors in their longhouse over the week. While most weddings took place in the spring and summer in her time, most Norse wolf weddings took place as close to the fall harvest as possible, so as to ensure enough food for the festivities – there were even a few cases of wolf couples getting married after their pup was born if the conception happened right after the harvest times. And instead of a reception after the wedding, there was a wedding banquet before the ceremony.
Not coincidentally, every wolf but she and Fenris, was pretty drunk when they all spilled from their house to the meadow between the lake and the forest right before the moon was set to rise. Apparently they did not understand the meaning of solemn occasion, because Chloe could barely hear herself speak her vows above the hooting and hollering of the wolves of Norway, who all stood naked as the day they were born in a semi-circle around them.
But then, thankfully the moon rose, robbing all of the guests, except for Fenris and her, of their human speaking voices. Still, the wolves did manage to create quite a bit of ruckus as Fenris presented Chloe with a golden ring on the hilt of his sword. They howled to the sky, even more so, when Chloe put a gold band for Fenris on The King Maker sword and pushed the hilt back towards him to take.
But the biggest howls of all came when they kissed much longer than necessary under the light of the full moon, which hung large and low in the sky that night.
When they finally broke off the kiss, Fenris raised his sword in the air and pointed it toward the forest. It was Norse wolf tradition that the groom lead the pack on a hunt to fell a deer, while the bride went back to their home to prepare their bed with goldgubbers, palm-sized gold plates with wolves imprinted on them.
“Make quick work of the bed, beauty,” Fenris said inside her mind as he ran toward the forest with the other wolves at his heels. “As I will make quick work of this deer, so I might have the pleasure between your legs that much sooner.”
“I’ll get it decorated as fast as I can, considering I’m carrying a bowling ball around.”
“I know not what you mean by ‘bowling ball,’” he answered, somewhat predictably.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said, heading back to the village. “I’m going now.”
She just hoped she was at least able to make it back to the longhouse before Fenris did. He was nothing if not quick, and as Rafe might have said, “Dude knows how to hunt.”
She smiled thinking of Rafe and Colorado. They were now like a memory that was good until it got bad, but then got good again, because she was now so happy. Rafe would eventually find another she-wolf, hopefully one who pleased him in every way as Fenris said often of her. And eventually his anger would fade, and he’d see their split, though dramatic and humiliating, was for the best.
Her thoughts were abruptly cut short by a low growl and the sudden stench of a wolf who had not taken his Saturday bath in a very long time.
She froze in her tracks when she saw a large red wolf, standing halfway between her and the door of the king’s longhouse.
Fenris had assured her all wolves were trained to be in control of themselves while in wolf form and she had seen for herself over the course of her seven months in the village how much more civilized they were in wolf form than people from her own time.
But she could tell just by looking at this wolf that he wasn’t civilized. Though, he wasn’t frothing at mouth, his gray eyes looked crazed.
She took two steps back and the wolf took as many steps towards her, crouching low.
“Fenris?” she said, calling his name out loud, because she didn’t quite know what to do.
Then the wolf charged her. She cried out and ran, hoping to God there wasn’t a distance limitation on telepathy as she yelled, “Fenris! Fenris! One of the wolves is after me, it’s trying to—”
A growl pierced the air beside her, right before the stinky red thing threw itself at her back, pitching her forward. She caught herself on her wrists, keeping her belly from hitting the ground. She had to protect the baby, she thought. But she also had to protect herself.
“Chloe? Chloe?” she heard the Viking ask frantically inside her head. “By Fenrir, answer me!”
The wolf lunged at her, burying its sharp teeth in her side, as if its sole intent was to tear the baby out of her womb. Red-hot pain ripped through her side, and she nearly passed out when he opened his jaw wide and sank his long, hot teeth into her again.
She screamed partly out of pain, but mostly out of terror.
But then she remembered the woman’s dagger, the one she had worn, only to tease Fenris about always nagging her to wear her dagger.
“Tis your wedding gift,” she had said in her joking speech after recounting for their guests how often they’d gone back and forth about this.
But now she ripped it from the looped belt from which it hung, and she didn’t know where the strength came from, but she, Chloe Adams, who was too squeamish to even wring a chicken’s neck, stabbed the crazed wolf in his gray eye.
It let go of her side with a screech of pain. And Chloe followed it, her mind pitch-black with rage over what he had done to her and her baby. She stabbed it over and over again, in the heart, in the other eye, in the stomach, until it let out one last hideous yelp and morphed back into a human form, a young man with unwashed red hair
, who she would bet money was Fenris’ cousin.
And only then did she feel the cramping in her pelvis and the dampness. Between her skirts.
“No, no, no, not now,” she cried in realization.
Her water had broken.
Fenris was closing in on a deer he could smell about half an acre away when Chloe pushed into his mind, “Fenris! Fenris! One of the wolves is after me, it’s trying to—”
And his heart went cold when she cut off mid-sentence.
“Chloe? Chloe?” he asked, already turning around and running the other way, much to the surprise of the wolves he was leading in the hunt. “By Fenrir, answer me!”
The other wolves did not understand what was going on, but nonetheless, they followed him as a pack. Then they heard her scream. And this time it was not in ecstasy as his family had teased her for before. It was a scream of pain.
Fenris ran. Faster than he had ever run without shifting into a wolf as he did so. He had missed shifting over the course of the last seven moons, but never as much as he did now when he was confined to this human body while the woman he loved above all others screamed in the distance.
The other wolves also became compelled by the scream and they left him behind. He hoped to Fenrir they got to her in time, before... no he couldn’t finish the thought. It made his vision go red at the edges.
“Chloe? Speak to me. Let me know you are unharmed, beauty.”
Again, no answer.
And as he ran down the village’s main thoroughfare toward her scent, he could now smell the thickness of her blood in the air as well as the acrid stench of his cousin.
He rounded the corner toward his longhouse and spied his cousin’s human body lying in the distance, eyeless with angry stab wounds in his heart, stomach, and the side of his head. He would find out later his queen killed the large wolf, with nothing but her will to live and her tiny woman’s dagger. And that would make what happened soon after much harder for him to bear.
But at that moment, his eyes searched around for her, until he realized she must be inside the large gathering of wolves.
Her Scottish Wolf (Howls Romance): Loving World Page 27
