by Alisa Woods
“I don’t doubt you, son,” his father said. “Not least because I received a call shortly afterwards from Crittenden. He claims it happened without authorization, and those wolves are being punished. But the offer, or I should say threat, still stands.” He glanced at Mia, but his pointed, and definitely angry, look was all for Lucas.
“The offer that they’ll leave Mia alone if we back down on Loop Source.” At his father’s raised eyebrows, he added, “She knows everything.”
“Well… not really,” Mia protested. “Who is Crittenden?”
His father’s look for her was soft again. “He’s the alpha of the Red pack. They have the same reports we do, Mia. They seem convinced LoopSource is the next big thing in mobile computing, but they know we can outbid them. The only way they’ll be able to score the deal is by getting us to back down.” He glanced at the reports clutched in Lucas’s hands. “I’m still waiting to hear whether LoopSource is worth our time…” He looked back to Mia. “But I promise you. Under no circumstances will we allow them to hurt you.”
Mia seemed to relax a little under his father’s warm assurance. The man in Lucas was glad to see it, but his wolf growled at the intrusion of his father’s alpha. He pushed his wolf’s jealous thoughts to the back of his mind. His father had already extended pack protection to Mia, and he was simply reassuring her of that. Lucas was lucky his father was willing to step in and help where Lucas couldn’t without a pack of his own. He had little to offer Mia and no claim to make. His wolf had better get used to that fact.
“However,” his father continued, “now that they’ve attacked, that puts me in a very bad position. Mia wasn’t harmed, so technically, my prior threat to hold Crittenden personally responsible hasn’t been triggered. But the fact remains that the Red pack violated our territory when they tried to take her. A pretty brazen act, even if it wasn’t authorized by their alpha. And not something we can just let go.”
“Are you planning to retaliate?” Lucas swallowed. This could escalate quickly. Which meant even more danger for Mia. Not to mention his brothers.
“I already have.”
Mia’s face had gone pale. “But I’m fine! I don’t want anyone to get hurt over me.”
“This isn’t your fault, Mia,” Lucas said. “This is pack business.”
“Lucas is right,” his father said, with an approval that unexpectedly warmed Lucas. “None of this is your responsibility. You’re just a bartering chip to the Reds.”
“Maybe you could convince them that I’m not… I don’t know… anything special?” Mia’s face had scrunched up, and the need to touch her became suddenly overwhelming.
Lucas edged closer and allowed himself to put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re already special enough that I beat the crap out of them when they tried to take you.” He gave a small smile. “Twice.”
“Short of your death, Mia, we’re not going to convince them otherwise. And there’s no way we’re going to let that happen.” His father’s gaze was hot on Lucas’s back. He had to be wondering exactly what kind of relationship Lucas had with Mia, especially now that she had turned out to be a shifter. Lucas hardly knew what to call their relationship himself, much less how to explain it to his father. Besides, it was irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
Lucas’s arm slid around Mia to hold her. She seemed to need it, and he couldn’t help himself anyway. He turned back to his father. “What kind of retaliation did you decide upon?” Lucas knew his father would have given it a great deal of thought before putting any of his pack in danger.
His father sighed. “I didn’t want to escalate the situation too badly, but we had to have a response. Last night, I sent Llyr and some of his pack to incur on the Red pack’s territory—they didn’t hurt anyone, just trashed one of Crittenden’s offices. All in wolf form, no DNA traces. But it should show them we’re serious. And that we can incur again, if need be.”
Lucas nodded. “Has Crittenden responded?”
“Not yet.” The muscles in his father’s jaw twitched as he clenched it. “The Reds have always been dangerous and running to the dark side of their wolves, but this new territory, even for them. Some of these younger wolves are overconfident and clearly willing to provoke a pack war. Maybe they’re out to prove themselves. Maybe they’ve just gone a little too far into their dark side. Whatever it is, I want you to pull this LoopSource evaluation together now. Prove to me that making that deal is worth my time and money.”
Lucas nodded. “You want to put it to rest.”
“I want to rub their noses in it,” he said with a hard look. This was the alpha he grew up with—the one who knew that sometimes you had to hit back hard to stop a bully.
Lucas let out a small huff of air. “Yes, sir.”
He gave his father a short nod, then led a wide-eyed Mia from his office. Figuring out what to do with her—other than keeping her absolutely safe—would have to take back seat in his mind for a while. His father wasn’t Lucas’s alpha anymore, but he recognized marching orders when he heard them.
And putting the LoopSource deal to bed might just put all of this behind them.
Mia shouldn’t have been surprised by the luxurious hotel suite Lucas found for her, not after working in the upscale offices of SparkTech for a week and having spent the night at Lucas’s modern millionaire-bachelor apartment. But she was still amazed at the stunning views of the Bay, the private balcony, and the marbled entranceway to the enormous living area, easily ten times the size of her dorm room.
The only disappointing part was that the suite came with two separate bedrooms.
Of course, if Lucas carried through with his threat to hire a bodyguard, rather than staying with her himself, then separate bedrooms would be fine. But if Lucas was her bodyguard… her inner beast whined every time she glanced at the closed bedroom doors. It wasn’t right to be separated like that. And Mia had to agree.
Lucas worked on the tan leather couch in the center of the living room, the paper LoopSource report spread on the low ebony table, and his laptop balanced on one leg as he compared notes. Mia had set up in a nearby chair that was shaped like a giant half-circle and had deep brown nubuck leather as soft as a baby’s skin. All her notes and her laptop fit within the circular confines of the chair, and it was angled so she had a view out the windows.
It was perfect for working, which was what she should have been doing. Instead, her gaze had drifted to the boats skimming the waters of the Bay. The waves sparkled with the afternoon sun, but from this distance, the boats didn’t seem to move—as if the brightly colored sails were ornaments carefully placed to make the ocean more lovely. Lucas and Mia had been working for hours, but time felt likewise suspended for her. As if she was waiting for a gust of wind to come fill her sails and let her breathe again.
She turned away from the timeless marina and watched Lucas instead.
His brow was furrowed in concentration, and she could tell his mind was lost in the numbers spread before him. He was attacking this due diligence analysis like their lives depended on it—in a way, she guessed that maybe hers did. Or possibly others in Lucas’s family. The dedication he was throwing into his work warmed her heart, but she couldn’t help wishing he would turn those intense, dark eyes to her every once in a while.
Her chair felt like it was a million miles away, even though, physically, Lucas was only a dozen feet from her. But he had made it abundantly clear that their first night together was supposed to be their last. Still, she hadn’t given up hope of changing his mind. Thoughts of last night still sent shivers of pleasure racing down between her legs, but more than she needed mind-bending sex, she needed him to open up about his past. He’d only given her hints, but she knew that it was preventing them from being together the way they should. His past was keeping her from belonging to him in the present, the way her wolf wanted.
The way she wanted.
Strangely enough, she’d felt the pull of that belonging when she had met Luc
as’s father, the senior Mr. Sparks. The way he smiled at her was something she’d never experienced before—it was like a gentle love, not sexual, but powerful and caring nonetheless. Like she was something worth treasuring and protecting. She guessed this was how daughters felt when they actually had fathers.
It dredged up a nameless ache inside her: how different would her life have been if her father had stuck around? If he’d provided a pack for her to grow up in? She could have learned all the things a young female shifter needed to know. She could have embraced who she was instead of hiding it. She would have belonged. The ache grew into a stabbing pain, like she had just discovered something broken inside her that she had never known existed.
She gasped in a breath involuntarily, then drew it deeper on purpose and let it out, breathing through the pain. No wonder that craving to belong had been working her so hard and so persistently.
“Are you all right?” Lucas’s voice was gentle, but pointed. Like he thought she was having a heart attack or something.
But it was only a heart break. From something that happened a long time ago.
She met his concerned gaze across the span of feet separating them. “Yeah, I…” She swallowed. “I just realized that…” Could she tell him? No… it felt too raw to share. “I was just thinking how nice it must have been to be raised in a pack. With other shifters who understood you. Loved you.”
He frowned and glanced at the papers and computer in his lap, as if he was wondering the relevance of that thought to what they were working on.
She let out a small laugh. “Not that I really know anything about being in a pack. Or being a shifter, for that matter.” She waited for his gaze to meet hers again. “Or having a mate.”
With that, his face sank into a scowl. But he folded up his laptop and set it aside. “What do you want to know?”
She tried to hold in her surprise, but she mirrored him by closing her laptop and setting it on top of her stack of papers. She wanted to leave her circular chair-island and sit by him on the couch, but she sensed that would be invading his carefully constructed territory of business surrounding and isolating him. Instead, she folded up her legs and tucked them underneath her.
He was watching her every move.
“What does it mean to have a mate?” she asked.
He sighed and looked away. Her heart lurched and then pounded erratically. She’d pushed too hard, jumping right to the heart of it. But she held her breath and waited, hoping. After a long moment, he pushed away the remaining papers surrounding him and turned to face her. He laced his hands, propped his elbows on his knees, and took a long moment before he looked her in the eyes.
“Being wolf means you have certain… desires, certain bonds, that humans do not.” He paused, like he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to go any further. But then he took a breath and pressed on. “It’s like the submission we talked about before. When you’re part of a pack, you submit to its alpha. It’s a ceremony, but there’s also a real bond with real power behind it. You don’t simply promise to obey the alpha; there is a deep compulsion to it. Not impossible to break, but nearly so.”
“Like with the Red wolves—they couldn’t break their submission to you. At least in wolf form.”
“Right.” Lucas took another breath, but this one seemed to be easier for him. “It’s strongest in wolf form, but there is some carry over to human form as well. Just as you feel your wolf inside you, pushing and pulling you, encouraging one action or discouraging another… you’ll feel the submission bond as well. For males, it is a compulsion to serve and protect. It’s the bond that ties the pack together. For females… it’s a little more complicated.”
“Women usually are.”
That drew a tiny smile out of him. “No doubt an ancient truth.” But the humor quickly died on his face, and his gaze dropped to his hands.
Mia waited, watching the muscles in his arms move as he fisted and unfisted his hands.
Finally, he said quietly, “For females, the submission can be the same as males. Every female submits to the alpha just the same as the males of the pack. But submission can also be the first step to mating.” He paused again.
Mia wasn’t sure if he would continue this time. “What are the other steps?” She had to chase the words with a hastily sucked in breath. Her wolf was at full attention.
He nodded, seemingly to himself, still staring at his hands. “First, submission. In wolf form, of course, because that’s where the bond forms. Second, a coupling. This time in human form. Ritually from behind.” He raised his gaze to hers. “And then the bite.”
She had forgotten how to breathe. “Bite?” Her wolf whimpered: a needy, sexual sound that had heat pumping throughout her body.
“The male’s canines will protrude and enable him to bite the female while coupling.” His voice was dead. Leaden by words he wasn’t saying or maybe by the weight of the emotion behind that technical description of what Mia could only imagine was a wildly passionate and, if the whimpering of her wolf was any indication, highly erotic act.
“That seems…” She was definitely laboring to breathe. “…painful.”
He smiled a little. Bitter and sweet, and that tiny movement of his mouth nearly broke her heart.
“I’ve only mated once,” he said, and there was a gentleness in his tone that tore at her. “Afterward, I ask Tila what she thought. I was… well, somewhat caught up in the moment at the time. But I’d been told that females don’t experience the pain as you might expect… that it actually enhanced the…” He broke off, his smile fleeing. “She said it was the best experience of her life. That it made her feel like she belonged to me in a way that could never be broken.” He stopped. His mouth worked but in wordless pain.
Mia was out of her chair before she thought about what she was doing. She flew across the space separating them. He needed her. She knew it. And she didn’t care if he knew it or not.
He seemed surprised by her arms around his neck, but she held him tightly, cradling his head to her. Tears ran down her face, but she didn’t brush them away, too intent on holding him until he held her back. He was breathing heavily, pulling in gasps, but eventually, his arms went around her.
But his hold on her was weak, like he was simply keeping her in place. Like he couldn’t bring himself to hug her back.
She held him that way until his breathing evened out again. Slowly, reluctantly, she released him and eased down to the couch to sit next to him. He wasn’t crying or anything, but there was a tightness around his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
“You must have loved her very much,” Mia said softly, searching his face for some sign of what to say or do to ease his pain.
He laughed lightly, and it settled her heart to hear it. “Mating is something more powerful than love, Mia. It’s almost as powerful as death.” The smile faded. “The bite isn’t just a symbolic claiming of the female, a ritual binding of the two more than just their physical lovemaking. There’s an actual physical or perhaps chemical bond that occurs. I believe its part magic as well.”
Mia frowned, fascinated and slightly horrified. “Is there some kind of venom in the bite?”
He smiled again. “No, no. Although I suppose you could think of it that way. The male’s saliva carries some kind of ancient magical substance in it. It’s not unlike whatever triggers the shift from human DNA to wolf DNA in the first place. But when he claims her, his bite adds something to her blood that literally changes her DNA. She is then connected to him. Physically bound. She literally belongs with him: they are paired. Now, if she bears pups, they will be stronger, healthier, more fully wolf, than if they had been conceived without the claiming first.”
Mia’s heart rate picked up and raced faster with every word he was saying. This was it; this was the pull to belong to him that she had been feeling all along. Only he had already claimed a mate once before.
“Is this something you can only do once in your life?” she aske
d, breathless.
He dropped his gaze. “For the females, yes. They can only be claimed once, and the bond can only be broken by the death of the male. Then she’s able to mate again, at least in theory. Most are devastated by the loss. It’s not uncommon for females to die soon after their mates.”
Mia’s eyes were wide as he explained all of it. “And for the males?”
He shook his head. “The bond is really one way in a sense. He bites her, not the other way around. She’s bound to him. The magic occurs inside her body. But it affects him as well. The submission becomes permanent, and it crosses over even stronger to your human form. And that works both ways. He must always protect her. She will always be his.”
Mia frowned. “Wait… if she’s bound to him, but he’s not bound to her… does that mean he could mate with more than one female at a time?”
Lucas gave a disgusted look and shook his head. “No decent wolf would do that.”
Mia swallowed. She already knew not all wolves were as decent as Lucas. Hell, she hadn’t met any humans who were anywhere near as fiercely loyal and protective as he was. But regardless of that, she knew what she needed to know: that males could mate more than once. And the mating bond was severed by death. That had to mean… it was at least possible…
He could be her mate.
If he would have her.
She drew in a deep breath. Even if it were technically possible, that didn’t say anything about the darkness she knew he still carried about his mate’s death.
His mate. She understood now how much power those words held.
Mia laid a hand on Lucas’s where it rested on his knee. “I’m so sorry, Lucas. I can imagine how hard it must have been to lose your mate.”
He pulled his hand away and rubbed both hands over his face. “I told you, Mia. I didn’t lose her. She’s dead because of me.”
“You can’t really mean that,” she said, pleading with him to let go of whatever ridiculous guilt he was carrying around. “You can’t blame yourself for whatever happened. It’s like you said. You were her mate. You were bound to protect her by this…” She waved her hand around, not really knowing what she was saying. “…this ancient magical bond. Whatever happened, it wasn’t your fault.”
