CLAIMED BY THE ALPHA UNDERBOSS

by Candace Ayers

  "I want you to believe me when I say I'm here to help you, Bentley. I've been in your shoes before. I was once young and uninformed and falling on my ass in the middle of the woods with my knees bent back the wrong way."

  "You tackled me!" Kira exclaimed. "I didn't fall on my—"

  "All I'm saying is, at the time I would have given anything for someone to be there to help me through it," Donovan continued. He rose and offered his hand to her. After a moment's hesitation, Kira accepted, and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. "I'm offering my help now, but you have to do something for me in return."

  "I knew it," she muttered. She blew a strand of tousled blond hair out of her face and waited impatiently. She could affect indifference all she wanted, but on the inside she was apprehensive about Donovan's ultimatum. What would it be? More sandwiches? More blackmail?

  "You can't drop out of school. Give it another semester." Professor Donovan's eyes shone with conviction. "Give me another semester. And if we can't work together to find a way for you to balance your dual lives, then you have my permission to give up school and seek out something else."

  "I don't believe I asked for your permission to begin with," Kira muttered. Their hands were still linked, however, from him offering her help up from the ground, and she gripped his fingers a little harder in silent agreement. Professor Donovan gave her a shake of approval before withdrawing. The terms of their arrangement were set.

  But what did he have to gain from helping her? Kira studied the man's back as he turned away. "Wait a few minutes before you follow me out," he advised over his shoulder. "Wouldn't want to give anyone who might see us the wrong impression."

  Kira was glad her professor exited the woods before her, because he would have seen the expression on her face if he had waited up. She ran a hand through her hair out of nervous habit and shook the remaining leaves from her tresses as she contemplated his words.

  "The wrong impression?" she repeated under her breath. She could still feel the possessive heat of his lips on hers. "What would the right impression be, professor? Please tell me, because even I don't know."

  CHAPTER 7

  When he had told Kira Bentley "a few minutes", he hadn't meant an hour and twenty.

  Sawyer Donovan watched as Kira walked through the door to his classroom late and navigated her usual route along the wall to her desk. He had left her alone in the woods an hour before the start of class, and now he was already a third of the way through his lesson. He knew firsthand that she had no excuse for being tardy today.

  Kira sat down, crossed her long legs, and… Jesus, he hadn't realized what a knockout smile the girl had, she expressed it so rarely. She was grinning right at him, and Donovan momentarily forgot where he was or what he was doing. The students in the front row shifted uncomfortably, and several shot looks over their shoulders to see what had distracted him from his lecture. But Kira folded her smile back up like an origami crescent moon, and she was now idly flipping forward through her copy of Jane Eyre to the pages he had specified on the whiteboard.

  He wanted to call her out. The class would be expecting it from him—his dynamic with Kira Bentley, their almost constant friction, was well-known at this point. But all he could think about in that moment was another kind of friction they had shared against the closed door of his office, with only a taped window and a panel of wood screening them from anyone who happened to pass by in the hallway…

  So no, he couldn't think of anything funny to say at her expense, and Kira spent the remainder of his lesson jogging the ankle crossed over her knee beneath the desk and looking pleased with herself. Well, he supposed she had a reason to smile. She had just found out she wasn't alone in what she was going through.

  He'd let her off easy today.

  "You know, it isn't necessary to come late to my class just to keep up the pretense," Donovan said when she rejoined him in his office after English. Kira crossed to her usual seat and sat down. It almost amused him to see how readily she entered his domain now, when she had always been so reluctant and mopey to do so before. He sat back and rotated his pen between his fingers as she set a brown paper bag down between them.

  "Don't you ever have other students stop by?" she inquired with a raised eyebrow.

  "So far this semester it's been only you."

  "I guess I wasn't sure if I still needed an excuse." Kira watched as he unwrapped his usual roast beef sandwich. "I mean, not that I needed one before to… see you. But I'm guessing that's why you called me in here so often. The whole lycanthropy thing."

  "Guess again." Donovan brandished his sandwich at her, and watched as she recoiled a bit. "I call you in here because I need to make sure you stay caught up with the material. It wouldn't be any different if you were any other student." His claim was partially true, at least. "I hate to say it, but you didn't miss much in my lecture this morning, so your trip to my office today is at least unnecessary in that regard. Want a bite?"

  He offered the sandwich to her, mainly to see if she would retreat from it again. She did, and put her hands up to rebuff his offer.

  "No thanks. I'm a vegetarian," Kira said.

  Donovan choked. He actually had to turn his head aside and pound a fist against his sternum to dislodge the piece of food that had gotten stuck there on his incredulous intake of breath. Kira watched him suspiciously, as if uncertain of whether or not he truly needed help. Once he had recovered himself, Donovan took a quick swig of coffee, slammed his mug down on his desk, and leaned forward.

  "You cannot be a vegetarian," he emphasized.

  Kira crossed her arms and scowled at him. "Of course I can. I've been a vegetarian my entire adult life."

  Donovan gave a sharp laugh at this, and he could practically see the girl bristling at his amusement. Her flashing eyes demanded the unvoiced question: you don't think I'm an adult? Donovan knew a little too well that Kira Bentley was an adult, but that was beside the point.

  "You cannot be a vegetarian," Donovan repeated, "because it is physically impossible for you to be so. Have you ever heard of a wolf surviving on fruits and veggies in the wild? Of course you haven't." His eyes raked her as this latest revelation sank in. No wonder Bentley had lost so much weight these past few weeks. If all she was attempting to put down was herbivorous fair, there was no way her changing body was keeping it down; she was essentially starving herself to death without realizing it. It horrified him to think of what might have happened to her if he had waited any longer to confront her on the subject.

  The look on her face said it all. The girl was devastated. Donovan sat back and ran a hand through his hair as he considered how to proceed with the situation. There was so much he needed to go over with her before the next full moon, it was probably best that they start with the basics.

  "All right, I get that this is a major life change for you," he said. "I'm not unsympathetic, Bentley, believe me. And I'm not trying to be an asshole."

  The blonde snorted.

  "But you're going through a lot of major life changes right now," Donovan continued. "So we'll start from the beginning. You need meat in your diet, and you're going to need a lot of it. Your body is going to be burning a lot more calories from here on out, and it's important for you to stay healthy. Not only that, but having excess energy to burn is going to help you remain in control of your shifts. There's no fighting the wolf and winning if you're running on empty. I'm willing to bet the reason your symptoms keeps flaring up is your body is trying to shift into a form better suited to feeding itself. That's a nice way of saying your biology is wigging out, Bentley."

  "Ugh." The girl dropped her head into her hands. "There's nothing nice about this! There's nothing nice about eating meat!"

  "You don't have the luxury of being human anymore." Content that there were no more surprises in store for him, at least for the moment, Donovan took another enormous bite out of his sandwich. He couldn't imagine ever purposefully choosing to be a vegetarian, but he ha
d been a werewolf for much longer than she had.

  "It just feels like every choice has been taken away from me," Kira muttered miserably. "I never asked to be bitten."

  Donovan stilled at this, but she was so caught up in her own emotions that she was beyond noticing.

  "I feel like I'm losing myself," she said finally as she raised her eyes to look at him. "I know it sounds stupid."

  "It doesn't sound stupid," he replied. "Not to me."

  They sat in silence for a moment. It would have been easier to endure if they hadn't locked eyes before Donovan said the words; now, he found that he couldn't look away from her. Kira's beautiful hazel eyes searched his for something more, some unvoiced meaning behind his words, but he couldn't allow her to find anything there. His sandwich was long finished, so he used his free hand to pluck his glasses off the desk and push them back up his nose. The move broke the spell, and Kira looked away.

  "Have dinner with me." He surprised them both with the invitation. He followed up quickly so she wouldn't have time to read between the lines. "I cook for myself every night, and I can show you the basics of how you should be eating now. In exchange, you can help me grade quizzes."

  "Do you even remember how to grade them yourself at this point?" Kira asked as she arched an eyebrow. They both rose in unison and headed for the door. His intention was to hold it open for her, but Kira stopped dead in her tracks, and Donovan realized his error too late. The last time the two of them had been in the doorway to his office together…

  He gazed down at her and wet his lips; his mouth felt suddenly dry beyond words. In the wake of everything that had happened that morning, he thought Kira's stunt—and his guileless reciprocation—could go unacknowledged, but he saw now this wasn't the case. The kiss weighed heavily on Donovan's mind, almost every time he looked at her, and he could tell by her reluctance to join him in the doorway that it was the same for her. Maybe he should say something—but what was there for him to say that wouldn't make it more awkward? What words, and in what combination, would succeed in releasing them both from the memory?

  It occurred to Donovan that maybe he didn't want to be released, and that was the worst realization at all. If that truly was the case, then he wasn't fit to call himself her teacher. No matter how similar their situations were—no matter how fired up Kira Bentley got him—he couldn't let himself be more than a mentor to her. Thinking about her in any other way betrayed all that he stood for.

  "I'll come."

  Donovan blinked. It took him a moment to remember the thread of their conversation. Kira was gazing up at him, and looking more vulnerable than he had ever seen her. Her pale, upturned face had managed to regain some of its usual color in the few minutes they had spent together in his office. Why? Surely it wasn't on account of something he had said? Unless the renewed flush to her cheeks was due to frustration…

  "To dinner," she reiterated. "I'll be there. What time?"

  "I haven't even given you my address yet," Donovan said, an amused smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

  "I'll meet you back here after classes. You're driving." She shrugged beneath his outstretched arm, and allowed him to continue to hold the door open for her as she left. Donovan leaned his head out of his office to watch her trot back down the hallway. When he turned, he noticed one of the older male professors had paused in coming out of the breakroom to scrutinize their exchange. Dr. Kilman, was it? Donovan flipped the other man a casual wave as he receded back into his office.

  The invitation had probably been a good idea, all things considered. The frequency with which Kira visited his office was starting to get noticed, and not in a good way.

  Donovan crossed back to his desk and unnecessarily straightened a stack of papers, whistling all the while. His pulse had started to speed the moment she agreed to have dinner with him, the same way it would have had a beautiful woman at the bar accepted his offer of a date. But this was not a date, and he was not meant to enjoy being in the company of his student this evening. Kira Bentley had a lot to learn about being a werewolf, and unless he wanted professors like Dr. Kilman hovering suspiciously outside his door, then this was the only conceivable way for Donovan to continue his lessons. They required complete privacy moving forward, like it or not… and Donovan was beginning to suspect that he liked it too much.

  I never asked to be bitten.

  The echo of her words yanked him from his thoughts, and his smile died instantly. Donovan threw the papers back down on his desk and dragged his hands through his hair. His happiness gave suddenly and viciously away to despair, and he crossed to the far side of the room. The calendar he had used to mark the days since the last full moon hung on the wall, right above where Kira sat, like a terrible clue waiting to be discovered.

  He tore it from the wall.

  CHAPTER 8

  Professor Donovan's—Sawyer's—apartment was significantly larger than the dorm room she shared with her roommate; all the same, the smallness of the space took Kira by surprise.

  "I guess they must not pay you very much," she noticed as she bent to take her shoes off in the entryway. Professor Donovan crossed to the kitchen and set an armful of groceries down on the counter. They had stopped off at the store first, and come away with items Kira would never have dreamed of putting on her own shopping list two weeks ago… breasts and ribs and flanks, all dressed in seeping blood-soaked butcher paper and tied off like nightmarish Christmas presents. They spent more time browsing the meat aisle than she had ever spent inside his classroom—a fact that Professor Donovan was all too happy to point out to her on their way back to his place.

  "Most of my money goes toward buying groceries," Donovan replied now to her comment about his living conditions, and Kira blushed to think of what his budget must have been now that he was buying for her. Well, it served him right, she thought—she had already spent half of the remaining balance on her student account buying his stupid overpriced sandwiches from the quad. "If you choose a life of professorship, this is what you have to look forward to," he continued. He held out his arms to encompass his domain, and Kira couldn't help but laugh a little at how proud he looked. She crossed in stocking feet to the kitchen and took a stool on the opposite side of the counter from him.

  "Now I know why you practically live in your office," she agreed as she surveyed the tiny living area. She could see the bathroom further down the hallway, right next door to an alcove that housed a washer and dryer, and a closed door across from these amenities which she could only assume was Professor Donovan's bedroom. She felt her curiosity immediately piqued, but tried to distract herself by helping him unpack the groceries. She hoped he hadn't noticed the way her eyes had lingered on the door.

  "It's better than having a roommate at my age," Donovan said. "Roommates are sort of out of the question, anyway, considering my affliction. I just have to live sparingly."

  "My roommate goes home every weekend," Kira mentioned. "But it's still been… difficult. I'm thinking about moving out of the dorms next semester to live on my own."

  "Probably a good idea," Professor Donovan said as he turned the stove on. "Even once I've taught you to control your shifts, you'll still want your privacy. Next semester."

  "I see what you're doing," Kira warned him. She had been the first one to bring up her nebulous next semester, of course, but Professor Donovan had latched onto it instantly. She played with the string tying one of the packages together until he took it away from her. "Professorship. Next semester."

  Donovan replaced the package he had whisked out from beneath her hands with a slim brown bottle. A wisp of carbon dioxide escaped out the neck of the freshly-opened beer. Kira's eyes widened. "Drink this," he ordered. "I like to maintain my reputation as a young, hip professor, and it will help you relax. I'm driving you home later, anyway."

  "Are you sure this is a good idea?" Kira raised the bottle hesitantly. It's not as if she had never had a beer before, but she wasn't much of a social
drinker—she usually left that up to her roommate.

  "It's a terrible idea. Drink it anyway." Professor Donovan also had a beer in hand, which made her feel a bit better. Once he had laid a slab of seasoned meat out on the heating skillet, he turned back to her and leaned casually on the counter. Kira leaned forward as well. "To being cursed," he toasted as he raised his bottle to her. Kira clinked hers against it, and they both took a long, communal sip together. The richly bitter carbonated liquid raced down her throat and hit her empty stomach within seconds, and Kira pulled back with a wet gasp. She could feel her abdominal muscles already clenching at the invasion.

  "This was a terrible idea," she stated as she set the bottle down. Professor Donovan watched her with twinkling gray eyes. "Professor, I can't remember the last time I had anything to eat."

  "Which is why I'm only allowing you one until after dinner." He turned away from her once more to busy himself over the stovetop. "If you manage to keep solid food down, we can celebrate with another."

  The smell of sizzling meat hit her like a one-two punch, and Kira's mouth immediately started watering. It was the same reaction she had to the hot dog stands on the fun fair midway, and she felt no less guilty for it now. The vegetarian in her was mortified, but the carnivore—the wolf—was ravenous. She knew it was only a matter of time before the latter won.

  "So you eat meat and live alone," Kira mentioned as she took another tentative sip off the top of her beer. "What else do I need to know to be a successful werewolf?"

  "The only time you should ever need to shift completely is during a full moon." She watched her professor's broad-shouldered figure move about the kitchen industriously, and felt a tightening in her stomach that had nothing to do with how empty it was. Maybe it was the effects of the alcohol already hitting her, but she was suddenly aware of how intimate their current situation was. There had to be a dozen rules against this sort of thing, and they were breaking all of them. Her fingers clenched over the cold bottle as she forced herself to concentrate on his answer.