“Nice, Tu. Seriously, I’m worried about you. Mom and Dad will pledge you off as soon as you turn twenty-one, just like they did with Janelle, just like they’re trying to do with me now. I’m just saying maybe you should try to do something substantial with the little time you have until you’re pulled into your own special episode of the Game of Wolves. There’s more to life than partying, and you might regret wasting the few single years you’ve been granted.”
Tu’s answer to her impassioned speech was a snort of derision. “And I’m just saying maybe you should come home and give the Colorado prince a chance to send you into heat.”
“Eww, Tu, gross! He used to be engaged to one of my best friends and I haven’t even started my post-colonial she-wolves book. Going into heat now would be a disaster!”
“That’s not going to keep Mom from coming after you like the Terminator. She wants all her daughters married off, you know she doesn’t give a damn about your book.”
Alisha laughed and pulled out the key to unlock her apartment door. “Poor Mom, it’s probably driving her crazy that I managed to avoid coming home all this time when there’s an eligible wolf on the premises—”
Big strong arms grabbed her from behind. And despite the heavy cologne her attacker was wearing, she immediately recognized him as a fellow werewolf due to the iron-like nature of the hold. A normal human she could have fought off easily, but a male werewolf was almost impossible to beat in a fight without a tranquilizer gun or a silver bullet. And both of her guns were currently locked in a drawer inside her apartment
“Alisha? Alisha? Are you still there?” she heard her sister asking through the phone.
The wolf snatched the phone from her hand, ending the call and pocketing it before she had a chance to respond.
Before Alisha could even think to scream, duct tape was placed over her mouth and plastic cuffs around her wrists. The next thing she knew, she was being thrown into the back seat of an old Cutlass sedan.
It all happened so fast, she didn’t see the wolf’s face until he climbed into the driver’s seat.
Vince!! She tried to yell (but it came out as a muffled squeal beneath the duct tape) when her younger, but still much stronger than her, African-American cousin turned around to grin at her over the seat. She would have immediately recognized his scent if he hadn’t gone out of his way to mask it with cologne—so she’d never smell him coming. What the hell?!
“Sorry, Cuz,” Vince said, putting on his seatbelt. “But…” He cleared his throat and said in his most formal tone, “Aunt Wilma requests your presence at her dinner party for the Alpha Prince of Colorado tonight.”
3
It didn’t take long for Rafe to figure out Alisha had been forced to attend tonight’s dinner party in his honor. He watched her cousin’s floater plane splash down on the dock outside the Ataneq’s three-story yellow cedar kingdom house from his guest room window. And even though Vince had gone through the trouble of securing Alisha’s hands in front of her with a pair of what appeared to be zip-tie cuffs, he still had a hard time pulling the she-wolf out of the plane, she was fighting him so hard. The young wolf was lucky it was still daylight and there’d only be a waxing crescent of a moon that night. Otherwise, Alisha would have easily had enough wolf strength to rip apart the plastic cuffs with a tug of her wrists.
That might also explain why she hadn’t morphed into wolf form in order to escape her cousin. Either that or, as angry as she was, she held too much affection for Vince to risk her wolf hurting him. Most weres couldn’t control themselves in wolf form and that was one of reasons the council had strictly forbidden non-full moon night shifts.
“I can’t believe you kidnapped me!” she yelled as he dragged her up the stone steps that led to the house. She was so loud, Rafe had no doubt he would have been able to hear her even without his wolf ears.
“What kind of cousin are you!?”
“The kind who needs a Cessna 185,” the young man answered in a cheerful, matter-of-fact voice as he tugged her toward the front door, which was flanked one either side by totem poles. “Aunt Wilma said she’d give me enough for a down payment if I picked you up.”
“Don’t try to sugar coat it,” Alisha snapped as he rang the doorbell. “You didn’t pick me up, you kidnapped me in exchange for a new bush plane! And now I’m even more insulted because you only got a down payment for it. You should have at least held out for the whole plane.”
Her cousin frowned, “You think I could have gotten a plane? Just for kidnapping you?”
“Never mind that kidnapping is a crime, even if your insane queen sanctions it. Yes, I do think you could have gotten more for illegally kidnapping me and flying me here against my will!” Alisha answered. “But now I guess you’ll have to make do with your thirty pieces of silver. Serves you right.”
Vince looked confused. “She promised me a lot more than thirty pieces of silver, which—duh, we’re allergic to anyway. Where are you getting your numbers from?”
Alisha rolled her eyes. “It’s a reference to Judas of Iscariot, Vince.” Then, just in case he still wasn’t getting it: “Because you’re a total Judas!”
Vince actually looked hurt. “Aw, Cuz, don’t be like that. Here let me take you out of those cuffs.”
He brought out a large hunting knife to cut the cuffs off, but Alisha yanked her arms back over her shoulder. “No, the Alaska queen paid you to drag me out here all trussed up like a gypsy bride. Don’t start acting like you have issues with human trafficking now!”
“Human trafficking?” Vince repeated, looking more and more alarmed. “Seriously, Cuz. It’s just a dinner party!”
He tried to grab for the cuffs again, but Alisha twisted away from him, seemingly more than willing to physically fight Vince. But then she saw Rafe watching from his guest room window and froze.
Their eyes met, and it was like a taser applied straight to Rafe’s heart. God, she was magnificent—her delicately slanted eyes blazing with righteous indignation, her creamy, milk chocolate skin aglow with anger. Her bountiful chest was heaving against her blouse and cardigan set, as if her breasts were begging to be released. Begging him.
Suddenly, he imagined himself thrusting into her from behind, taking her on the steps of her parents’ house. The vision hit him like a Mac truck. And though their locked stare seemed to be made of raw electricity, he had to look away, not necessarily because he wanted to, but because over the years he’d learned this was the only way to keep his wolf from taking over when he was in the same vicinity as Alisha. Rafe rubbed a hand over his face. It had been a long summer. Alisha had made it a long summer—truthfully, a long six years.
When Rafe proposed to Chloe right after their high school graduation, Alisha had been a pudgy teenager who’d been more interested in combing through history books at the town library than hanging out with Janelle, Chloe, and him. She’d been two years younger, a child to his adult, even if she had managed to skip two years of school and enter college at the University of Alaska-Juneau at the same time he and Chloe started attending classes at Denver University.
But then two more summers passed, Chloe still hadn’t gone into heat, and when his father’s best friend, King Tikaani, brought his three daughters down to Colorado for a summer visit, Alisha was definitely no longer a child. She’d gone from merely plump to bodacious, with dangerous curves that made his hands itch to explore them even though he was already pledged to another she-wolf.
And that was before she’d given him a friendly hug of greeting. The urge to mate her had come upon him so fiercely then, it had been necessary to abruptly pull away from her before the evidence of what she aroused within him announced itself against her stomach. But even putting space between them hadn’t been enough to make his erection subside. He’d quickly had to excuse himself. Then he proceeded to spend the rest of their four-week visit fighting the urge to mate her completely and thoroughly, even though the North American Lupine Council strictly forbad
e having sex with a she-wolf who hadn’t gone into her first heat yet.
When he looked at the tall and wild-haired Alisha, his mind went places. Dark places that didn’t give two damns about him already being engaged to Chloe, a gorgeous and generous she-wolf any male would want for a wife.
To look at Alisha, Rafe discovered upon that visit, was to want her underneath him, receiving his wolf, accepting his seed. So he had learned not to look at her, to keep his eyes averted and always focused on Chloe, so as not to be visited by graphic images of the many, many ways he would fuck Alisha if she were his. And every time she and her family came to visit, he prayed to both his father’s Great Spirit God and his Latina mother’s Christian one that Alisha didn’t go into heat while she was in Wolf Springs, because he didn’t know if he’d be able to control himself and let some other wolf claim her. Then when she left, he’d pray for Chloe to go into heat so he’d be safely mated to his best friend by the time the tall glass of temptation that was Alisha Ataneq came to visit again.
Four more excruciating years ticked by in this manner, then one February morning, another male wolf came along, and the very next day, Chloe betrayed Rafe the way he’d been trying not to betray her for years.
He’d been almost violently angry with Chloe for what she’d done, but the fact was, he’d wasted little time getting up to Alaska, ostensibly to consult on the resort the Alaska king was developing, but really to begin formally courting Alisha. And this time he didn’t make the same mistake he’d made with Chloe. He didn’t flout tradition by going straight to Alisha in Juneau like he wanted to. He did things in their proper order, getting his father’s permission to offer his pledge to Alisha, then getting her father’s permission to court her.
However, his original multi-month stay in Alaska had been anti-climatic at best. He’d been met with excuse after excuse from the Alaska queen for Alisha’s continued absence until it became more than obvious Alisha really wasn’t as busy as she kept on claiming. She simply did not want to come home. And then she’d gone to Canada.
So he'd gone back home to Colorado, only to have the King of Alaska call him a few months later to tell him he'd gotten all the financing and paperwork together for the resort project and would need him to come back right away because they'd soon be breaking ground. Rafe suspected the resort project had been less about making money and more about luring him back to the kingdom town at the beginning of the fall semester, and his suspicions were confirmed when King Tikaani added that his wife would be throwing Rafe an intimate welcome back dinner party. “And she's promising Alisha will be there, even if she has to kidnap her!”
Apparently the queen hadn’t been kidding. He was now standing above a very angry Alisha, only a window and two stories between them. Once again having to keep his eyes off of her, for fear of what his wolf would do.
Queen Wilma must have opened the door for them, because the next thing he heard was, “Seriously, Mom, you had me kidnapped!?!?”
And when he dared to look back down at Alisha, her eyes were no longer on his window but on the figure standing inside the front door. The last thing Rafe heard was her mother hissing something at Alisha, before pulled her into the house and slamming the door behind them.
Alisha’s unwillingness to so much as attend a dinner party in his honor had done nothing to deflate the hard-on inside his pants. The one that sprung up as soon as he’d set eyes on her. He didn’t know what was sadder: that she’d literally had to be kidnapped in order to be in the same room with him or that he didn’t give two fucks how and why Alisha had been forced to come here. The fact was she was here. Here in her kingdom town with him. And that meant he was closer than he’d ever been to making her his mate, to making her his forever.
RAFE DIDN’T KNOW how the queen managed to get Alisha into a cocktail dress for the dinner party, but no doubt it had been an ugly conversation. Though Alisha was dressed the part of an unclaimed princess receiving royalty in a purple cocktail dress that clung to her generous curves, she visibly fumed through most of the dinner, refusing to engage in the general conversation the many times her mother tried to include her.
Rafe could see the Alaska queen’s frustration in the looks she exchanged with her king. Mated wolves were able to communicate telepathically, and he imagined the Alaska alpha pair must have been furiously trying to figure out how to handle the middle princess, who was nowhere near as biddable as her older sister, Janelle.
It also didn’t help the overall mood that Alisha wasn’t the only one who looked like she didn’t want to be there.
Despite having flown up from Wyoming for this event, Mag had spent most of it silently watching Janelle, who was sitting at the other end of the long dining table at the king’s right, the traditional position of an unmated first born. He replied with terse answers to any questions that came his way.
Janelle, who’d always been the most dutiful of the three princesses in the past, now seemed too busy staring at the uneaten food on her plate to keep up her end of the conversational bargain. And Tu put more effort into making it plain she was bored, delivering the heavy sighs of a twenty-year-old thrust into an adult dinner party at intermittent points throughout the stilted conversation.
Still, Queen Wilma kept trying to engage Alisha.
“Rafe tells me the Nightwolf Trust is a long time contributor to the North American Lupine Council’s wolf residency program,” she said after the main course had been cleared away. “Isn’t that the program that pays you to do whatever it is you do?”
Alisha turned to her mother, her eyes cool with resentment. “Just in case you honestly don’t know what I’ve spent the last eight years of my life doing, I’ll go ahead and explain, yet again, that I’m a Postdoctoral Research Fellow,” she said, as if her mother were a dimwitted child and not the Queen of Alaska. “That means I’m the first she-wolf on either side of our families to earn a doctorate. That also means I’m one of the people responsible for teaching our Alaska wolves about their history at the college level.”
Alisha turned her cool stare on Rafe. “However, I had to threaten to sue the Council you donated so much money to for discrimination in the human courts before they would deign to grant me the fellowship I currently have—despite the fact that unlike the male wolves applying for the fellowship, I worked my ass off to get both my degrees, without any support from my parents whatsoever.”
“Alisha, language!” her mother said.
“But thank you for donating money to the Wolf Residency program. I’m very grateful.” Alisha said, her voice laced with so much sarcasm that no one could possibly think she was actually grateful in any way toward Rafe or the Nightwolf Trust, even though it was because of generous donations like his that wolves were able to take classes and study under other wolves at a university in almost every state.
Alisha put down her fork and said, “So, Rafe, I hear you want to marry me.”
The room went deathly quiet, and though Rafe could feel nearly every single eye in the room on him as they waited to see what he would say.
Traditionally, these weren’t matters discussed during dinner in a room full of family members looking on. Rafe put his own fork down, “Yes, I presented myself to King Tikaani and your father accepted my pledge proposal—”
“Happily,” the Alaska king added just in case his daughter had any doubts about how much he approved of her marrying the son of his best friend.
Rafe continued, “And he agreed to let me court you in the old way, under his roof and under the queen’s supervision.”
Most other she-wolves would have been over the moon to learn a wolf prince wanted her. Rafe wasn’t one to brag, but he knew he wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes, and Colorado, thanks to his father’s sound investments in tech, their multi-state chain of ski resorts, and his best friend, Tikaani’s, oil interests, Colorado had become one of North America’s richest state packs. Rafe had a title, good looks, and a fuck ton of money. Any way a she-wolf looked at
it, he was a catch, but Alisha just blinked, looking both confused and troubled.
“So you and Chloe broke up and now you want to marry me? Like a merger?”
“No, sweetie, not like a merger,” her father said. “Think of it as an alliance that will serve both our state’s interest.”
“But how would that work? I’m still finishing up my post doc—”
“Well, obviously this is more important,” her mother said, sounding much aggrieved that she was even having to explain this to her daughter. “You’ll have to quit your program—”
“You want me to quit my program!?” Alisha said, like her mother had just suggested she turn into a pig, sprout wings, and fly.
“Yes,” her mother answered as if her daughter’s acquiescence was a given. “And perhaps you should take Rafe with you when Vince flies you back to Juneau to pack your things,” Queen Wilma said. “It’s the least you can do, considering he’s practically been paying your salary all these years.”
The queen timed her suggestion just as the housekeeper and hired waiter entered with the dessert course. Nothing was said while the individual chocolate soufflés were set in front of each guest and coffee service offered, but as soon as the service wolves left, several pairs of eyes went to Alisha, the expectation of a fight between the queen and middle princess hanging heavy over the party.
But then Alisha picked up her dessert fork and said, “Rafe doesn’t have to come all the way to Juneau to help me pack, but maybe if he’s open to it, I could go to Colorado after this semester is over and we could begin the courting process there.”
Her mother’s first response was open-mouthed surprise, but then she quickly recovered and said, “That’s a great idea, honey. Maybe we could all make a courting trip to Colorado this year. We could leave out right after Christmas!”
Just the thought of seeing and wooing Alisha in Colorado made Rafe’s wolf rear up with joy. And there seemed to be a warm smile in Alisha’s voice when she asked, “Do you think you, Dad, and Tu could manage that with such short notice?”
Wolf and Prejudice (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 2) Page 3
