The Wolf's Mate
Page 1
Table of Contents
THE WOLF’S MATE
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
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Fourty
Thank you!
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THE WOLF’S MATE
Emilia Hartley
© Copyright 2018 by Blues Publishing. - All rights reserved.
The contents of this book may not be reproduced, duplicated or transmitted without direct written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Legal Notice:
This book is copyright protected. This is only for personal use. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental. The author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.
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Chapter One
Although it was the closest populated place to the Oregon State Tuberculosis Sanatorium, you couldn’t really call Ripple a town. From what Trina Adams could see, the whole thing consisted of a gas station and a general store on one side of the crossroads, a bar on the other, and a B&B a ways down the street. Well, she hadn’t driven all the way across the country for culture. She was here to be the first paranormal investigator to document a haunting in that old, abandoned hospital.
Or, maybe not. It seemed the site she wanted to visit might not exist anymore.
Much like more popular spots for paranormal investigation, Waverly Hills or the Trans-Atlantic Lunatic Asylum, for instance, the TB hospital had recorded nearly two thousand deaths. Abandoned since the 1940s, it seemed the ideal place to search for ghosts.
In order to save money, she’d driven across the country, her SUV full of camera and sound equipment. Now she wished she’d flown. Then she might have arrived in time to film the place before it fell down. If it had fallen down.
Maybe she could still salvage the show she was trying to get off the ground. From the general store parking lot, she headed for the gas station, the only place she saw any people. Her old show had been cancelled, but the network offered her an opportunity to do a new show solo. As she had with Eerie County four years before, Trina jumped at the chance.
“Hi, I’m Trina Adams. I’d like to interview you about the Oregon State TB hospital for a television show.” She approached a tall, young-looking guy with a hipster beard and lots of plaid.
The guy smiled as she lifted the camera. He scratched his nose. “From what I heard, the place fell down. Total collapse. It’s on one of the best bike trails around, but I haven’t seen it myself.”
She had heard this before but hadn’t seen any corroborating news stories. Trina asked, “Have you experienced any paranormal activity around here? Haunted houses, bigfoot, anything like that?”
The man’s face collapsed into a scowl. “Nope. Nothing like that around here. You’d best be moving on, Miss.”
Damn it. Another one. Trina turned the camera on herself, using it as a mirror. Her makeup looked good, and nothing was stuck in her teeth. But if it wasn’t her, then what was going on?
Three high-school aged girls walked out of the gas station with candy, laughing among themselves. Trina waved, lifting the camera. “Hey, you girls want to be on a TV show?”
“Awesome,” said a girl with brown hair in a ponytail.
Trina waited while the camera auto-focused and the shotgun mic was aimed at the trio. “Tell me about any paranormal activity around here. Haunted houses, ghosts, anything like that.”
As with the hipster, the girls lost their smiles. Giving each other edgy looks, they backed away. Brown ponytail ducked her head. “Sorry. No paranormal stuff around here. It’s just boring.”
What the hell was up in Ripple? Everyone wanted to be on TV, right? Why was this so hard? Trina didn’t get it. Her mother always said for everything bad, something good would come, and Trina had found that to be true.
Her father, older sister, and brother had died in a car accident when she was in middle school. Insurance policies left her and her mother financially well-off. You only need to wait for the good to happen, her mother’s voice said in her head. They leaned on each other back then so much, that Trina would only cry when she was alone. She was fairly certain Mom did the same. Had either one of them broken down, Trina didn’t think they could go on. So Trina shoved her anguish in a tightly sealed box. It opened on birthdays, on the anniversary of the accident, whether she wanted it to or not. Trina always made sure to find some private time for when the memory, the emotion, would emerge full-blown. The fact that her mother always accommodated her spoke of a similarity between the two. Maybe it wasn’t all that emotionally healthy, but it got them through.
By the time she entered the University of Pittsburgh, she blossomed. No longer the girl with the dead family, she became popular on campus. Like her mother said, she only needed to wait for the good. Everything balanced out. Her lack of popularity led to a scholarship. At Pitt, she sailed through her BA in communications. After graduation, a final project she’d worked on got pitched to a network. Suddenly, she was in show business.
Life, though littered with tragedies, had never been difficult for her. And now, she couldn’t even get someone to do an interview. What the hell? Something would come up. Something always did for her. If she kept plugging along, showing up prepared, an opportunity would fall in her lap.
That was the way life worked, right?
A car with bikes on the roof pulled up to the pumps. Trina waved to the two guys who jumped out. Trina gave her usual spiel.
“Hey, cool.” Both of them wore bike apparel, and were good-looking, fit; just right for television. “We’re not from around here, just come for the bike trails. That old hospital fell down. Incredible. It’s just a mountain of bricks and a flooded lake.”
Damn it. Then it was true. Where was she going to shoot now? “Have you ever had a paranormal experience around here?”
The first guy shook his head. The second nudged his friend. “What about the clearing, Jack?”
Jack, the first guy, lit up. “Oh, yeah! That
’s a creepy place. Ted won’t ride there anymore, even though there’re some sick twists in that logging road.”
Ted, the second guy, gazed into the distance. “Last time, I swear to God, something was following us. It’s out in the middle of nowhere. Real dark, lots of shadows moving. I don’t like it there.”
“You’re a pussy,” Jack said. “But that clearing, it’s weird as hell. Nothing growing there, no ferns, no grass, it’s this big dirt circle bisected by an old logging road. It’s freaky, but the ride is awesome. We should ride there next weekend, Ted.”
“Fuck you.”
Ted would be bleeped out later.
The bikers told her how to get there. The logging road was unnamed, branching off from Ripple Road after it turned into a national forest road. “If you hit 26, you’ve gone too far.”
Trina thought it might be a possibility, although shooting out in the middle of the woods might prove difficult, or worse, boring, At least it was something.
Across the highway, in the bar parking lot, a truck arrived. Three men exited. Trina ran across the blacktop. Other than a discrepancy in their sizes, the three looked alike, dressed alike. All were good looking, sharp featured, and well-muscled in black T-shirts and jeans.
“Hi, my name’s Trina Adams.”
The shortest one gave her the eye. “Do I know you from someplace?”
“Have you ever seen Eerie County? It’s a paranormal investigation show.”
They all exchanged an expression she couldn’t read. The shortest one excused himself. Trina found that a little odd.
“Haven’t seen it,” the tallest one said. “Paranormal investigation, you said?”
“I’m here to shoot a pilot for a new show. I wanted to shoot at the TB hospital, but I heard it fell down.”
“Yeah, I heard that, too,” the tall one said. “So I guess you’ll have to find someplace else to do your pilot.”
“Have you heard of anyplace haunted around here? Have you had paranormal experiences yourselves? I’d love to get you on camera.”
“No, no, nothing like that,” the shorter one said. “This is a boring place. Hell, we don’t even have a stop sign. You’d probably have better luck in Portland. Ain’t nothing going on in Ripple.”
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Chapter Two
Casper heard the woman crying. It didn’t take the supernatural senses of a wolf-shifter to figure out where it came from. At the end of the general store’s parking lot, an SUV sagged to the right on two flat tires. Gem-like glass piled on the blacktop, remnants of the passenger side window. Embarrassment flooded him, a response to the gut-wrenching wails and raw emotion issuing from the vehicle. Casper started toward the truck. She was a damsel in distress. Was that sexist? Either way, he considered himself chivalrous.
Rounding the car, he saw another flat tire. He could see the slash through the sidewall. No repairing that. Someone sure didn’t like this woman. She hunched over behind the wheel, a small video camera in her lap. Her hair was red, falling straight down her back. She jerked when Casper tapped on the glass.
She zipped down the window. Casper almost took a step back. Her face was broad with a spray of freckles, blue eyes vivid with tears, cheeks rosy. A beautiful face, and a pretty crier. Her full lips were drawn down and puckered, a furrow between her eyebrows. She looked like a movie star shooting a scene. But this was no scene. Colors became more vivid, scents sharper, distant sounds more clear. Casper felt the universe shift ever so slightly as he stared at the woman. He mentally shouldered past this sudden change in perspective. It took a moment to find words.
“Looks like you might need some help,” Casper said.
She sobbed. “They took my purse—slashed my tires. Why?”
“People suck,” he offered.
“Nobody here will talk to me. It’s like I have the plague!”
Casper’s mother always said that when you were upset, you should eat. He had one of the general store’s crappy pre-made sandwiches in a bag. He unwrapped it, offering her half. “Get your blood sugar up.”
“I’m not hungry.” She took a huge bite of the sandwich.
Unsure why people wouldn’t talk to this gorgeous redhead, and had, in fact, vandalized her car and ripped her off, he introduced himself. “I’m Casper Marino. Do I know you? You look familiar.”
She chewed, brightening up a little. “Have you ever seen the show Eerie County?”
“Nope. Sorry.”
“I’m a paranormal investigator.”
Casper immediately got the picture. No one in Ripple, Oregon would want to talk about the paranormal. The majority of the tiny population were shifters like him. They tended to keep the ability a secret. Things got weird when the general public got even an inkling about were-creatures living among them.
“People are pretty conservative around here.” It was the best he could do.
“Conservative and criminal. I don’t have any credit cards, my cell phone. But they left thousands of dollars’ worth of camera gear in the back.” She pointed her thumb. “I mean, what the hell?”
Stupidity. Casper could call up three possible suspects to mind. He was related to them.
“Without my phone, I can’t call my bank. It’s Saturday night anyway. They’ll be closed. I can’t drive anywhere. I can’t book a room.” Tears again illuminated her baby blues.
Casper couldn’t stand to see it. While he never liked seeing a woman cry, it seemed she now formed the locus of his thoughts. “I’ve got a place you can stay.” He blurted it out before thinking.
“Ah, yeah, no. Sorry, you seem like a nice guy, but I don’t know you.”
He shook his head. “No, not like that. I’m a contractor. I build a lot of stuff. There’s an in-law unit behind my house. It’s nice. And I don’t have in-laws.”
“I’m supposed to get in a car with a complete stranger?”
He bobbed his head back and forth. “Well, we could walk. It’s about two miles. I gotta come back to the bar for a meeting.”
“You have a meeting in a bar?”
Casper colored a little. “We don’t have an office, per se, other than a spare room in my house.” He’d been working on the company books. His three brothers had mates and pups, so any business outside of actual construction fell to him. That, and the fact that his brothers, love them as he did, were not the brightest lights on the Christmas tree. “It gives me a chance to update them, and my brothers a chance to get away from the wives and kids for a while.”
“Sounds like your business isn’t doing well.”
“Hey, hey. We built those apartments over there.” He pointed across the street. “Marino Brothers Construction is in the black. We just—” What could he say? That his brothers’ wives were alpha bitches who controlled the pack? That as an unmated alpha male, he was considered immature despite his age, and had very little say in pack business? “We’re tightwads,” he said lamely.
She smiled a little. Even a little lit up her face with a glow that was nearly palpable to Casper. “Well, at least you’re honest.”
If half-truths counted as honesty, he thought. He was already dancing around subjects with her. It was no wonder she was freaking people out. “Well, keeping with being honest, it seems like you have two choices. You can stay in my in-law apartment, or sleep in a car with a broken window. This is Oregon, so of course it’s supposed to rain. Up to you. But I really do have a meeting with my brothers.”
“Do you usually offer a room to strangers crying in a parking lot?”
“All the time. But rarely on Saturday nights.”
She smiled again, just a little, just enough to rock him.
“I’ll be able to pay you, once I get this theft straightened out.”
“Fuggettaboutit. It’s just a room for a night or so. This is kind of an emergency, right?”
Trina sighed, resigned. “Okay, I’ll take you up on your offer. But I pay my own way, okay?”<
br />
He smiled at her. “I don’t doubt it.”
She popped the hatch, and Casper grabbed her luggage. Well, most of it. She had a big rolling suitcase and two duffle bags filled with electronics. Chivalry be damned, he couldn’t carry it all. Trina grabbed the second duffle.
Casper got a look at her as they walked to his truck. She wore a print dress that came to just above the knees. Nice stems. She had an hourglass figure, thin at the waist, not so much in other places. Va-va-voom. He liked the way the dress moved when she walked, the way her hair caught the wind.
“Which car is yours?”
She gave him a look over her shoulder. Blue eyes flashed. Her bangs and hair framed her face. Holy shit. Casper, get a hold of yourself.
“The white truck with Marino Bros. on the side” he nodded toward it.
Trina glanced at his burden. “Do you need a hand with those?”
“Even if I did, I’m too macho to admit it.”
She smiled, this time for real, a Hollywood smile that made his blood feel carbonated. The woman sported some dangerous curves. He wondered how much trouble he was in.
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Chapter Three
How had it come to this? Three months ago, she’d been on top of the world. Eerie County had been renewed for a third season. She had money, a cool loft apartment, people starting to recognize her on the street. Then, one of the crew accused the show’s star, Brian Truman, of faking evidence. The Destination America network dropped the show.
Worse, a clip that had been edited out of the program appeared on YouTube. She wondered if anyone would ever take her seriously again. Now, she was accepting a room from a stranger, her SUV violated, her cash and bank cards gone. She was stuck in a town that boasted a gas station, a general store, a bar and a B&B. Not even a stoplight.
Trina looked at the man driving the truck. What was it about him that made her trust him? He was very nice looking. The corded muscles in his arms and the firm frame under his T-shirt spoke of manual labor. His jeans revealed a small but shapely butt. His eyes were amber, with dark circles around the irises. In sunlight, his disheveled hair was equal parts dark and light brown with highlights of honey blonde. Very unusual. Almond-shaped eyes were tip-tilted in his face like a cat’s, the nose and chin sharp. The blue of a close shave covered his lower face, giving it the look of stone.