“Don’t be afraid,” he told her. “I would never hurt you.”
Her mouth was dry and just to prove she wasn’t in charge, her panties were becoming slightly wet again just from the sight of him. Then she watched as the most bizarre, frightening, unreal…beautiful thing happened to the man in front of her. He morphed in front of her eyes from a gorgeous man into a huge, silky white wolf with bright blue eyes.
Selena was riveted to the spot. He must be some kind of magician or something. The wolf came toward her, and she took a step back. He stopped and looked at her, cocking his head to the side. His eyes were green now. Selena couldn’t take her eyes off of them as she remembered watching them change when Conner had told her not to be afraid, that he wouldn’t hurt her.
The wolf stepped toward her again, but instead of stepping back, she stood her ground until it was right in front of her, close enough to touch. The highest part of the wolf’s back came up to her waist. She didn’t know that wolves got so big.
That must be why he’s the Alpha, she caught herself thinking. Then she chastised herself once again for giving credence to any of this.
The beautiful wolf rubbed its fur against her leg and then turned its back to her and changed…back into Conner.
“What the hell was that?” she said to his very nice-looking back.
He went over and picked up his clothes off the ground. Shaking them off, he started putting them back on. “I told you, Selena, I’m a wolf.”
“There’s no such thing as a werewolf,” she said.
“You just saw it happen, before your own eyes,” Conner said.
“It was some kind of trick.” Her mind was refusing to let her believe this. Selena was a left-brained kind of person. That was why she had always done so well with math and numbers. She was a logical thinker and werewolfs had no logic, whatsoever.
“It’s not a trick, Selena. It’s who I am. It’s who we all are…the town.”
“The whole town? You all think you’re werewolves?” That made a lot of what she had seen and heard since she’d been here make sense, the fact that they were all so obsessed with wolves and wolf words. He had his clothes back on now and he took a step toward her. She took one back.
“I think I just want to go home,” she said. To New York, a place where no one believed they were wolves.
“Selena…”
“No, Conner. Give me some time to think about this, okay. Let my brain process what you just told me, and I’ll get back to you.”
Conner knew he couldn’t force her to believe this or to want to be a part of it. But she needed more information. He knew how analytical her mind was. He had seen it in the short time that he’d known her. She needed to see it in black and white.
“Okay,” he told her. “But when you get home, I want you to go online and look up Adlet, okay?”
“What is that?” she said.
“It’s what I am descended from. It’s where my people came from. We evolved into what we are today…civilized werewolves. We don’t eat people, we’re not blood-thirsty killers, and we don’t change humans into werewolves. Unless they ask us to.”
“Are you immortal?” Selena asked, only half-joking.
“No, not in the way you think of immortality. We can be injured, we can get sick, and we can even die. But we rarely get sick, we recover ten times faster than an ordinary human when we do, and we can only die if we bleed out.”
“No silver bullets?” she asked.
Conner smiled. “No, that’s Hollywood. This is real life.”
Selena didn’t think it felt like real life. Hollyweird was exactly what this felt like. “Take me home, Conner. Please.”
Conner did as she asked, and although he wanted to touch her so badly when they got there, he could see how much he had frightened her, and he didn’t want to scare her any further. He watched her go in the house, and he texted Cub to make sure he and Slam’s other brother Bram were in place to watch the house. He still had the rogue wolves to worry about, and he didn’t want anything to happen to Selena.
Cub texted him back, saying they had been leaving when they saw him pick her up, but they would go back. Conner had to go to this festival. The pack was unhappy with him already, because of his choice of a mate outside of one of their own. They feared that if he fell in love with an outsider, he would leave. That’s what had happened with their last Alpha. The fact that he was trying to come back now was beside the point. He had already been shunned as Conner would be, were he to leave.
When Selena got inside the house, the first thing she did was pull out her laptop, before she realized that she was too far out in wilderness for it to work. She looked at her iPhone. It had three bars. She typed in Adlet. It came back with thousands of hits. Selena clicked on the first one, which described an Alaskan Inuit creature of legend. They were blood-thirsty beasts who bore resemblance to the better-known werewolf. The Inuit believed the Adlet were a race of people said to have the lower body of dogs and the upper body of humans. They were believed to be the offspring of an Inuit woman and a dog, brought about through an unnatural mating. The woman gave birth to ten children, half of whom were dogs and the other half Adlet. The village was in an uproar because once the children were old enough, they began to eat every piece of meat they could get their hands on, even other people’s livestock.
The villagers began hunting them like animals and in order to keep the family safe, the grandfather of the half-dog/half-human children sent them to a remote part of the wilderness in Alaska. They lived in a cave and ran at night with the wolves, eventually breeding and evolving as such.
The article had something in it also that said werewolves could be “made” but only by consent of the entire pack. It also mentioned bloodletting as a means of killing the creatures. The most startling thing of all in Selena’s mind was a passage she read about how the wolves’ eyes could shift color based on their mood. It said this trait was more prevalent in wolves with dominant genes.
Adlet legend was based in far north mythology but giving the story more credence in Selena’s mind was the fact that versions of the story could be found as far away as Greenland and Europe.
Selena told herself after reading the passage for a second time that the key to the whole thing was that it said both legend and myth. Selena had always assumed that legends and myths were the same thing as fables. But because this was suddenly so important to her, she looked up both of those words.
Legend was a popular story handed from earlier times, whose truth has not been ascertained. So, it was something that people have believed, and talked about for hundreds, or even thousands of years, but there was no factual basis to it.
She looked up myth next, and it said that a myth is usually regarded as a true account of the remote past, a true account. She read further to find out that myths are usually religion based. She had to think about that, if she refused to believe things that were based in legend and myth, then perhaps she would have to re-evaluate her whole belief system. Why was this so different? Who had ever really seen God?
Selena needed to find Conner. She still had a million questions, but she wasn’t willing to walk away from a man who made her feel so alive because she refused to believe in the same things that he did. She grabbed her purse and keys and pulled open the door.
Lloyd, her boss, was standing in the doorway.
CHAPTER THREE
Selena had been disappointed to see Lloyd, but she’d had no choice but to invite him in and offer him a seat and some tea or coffee. He took the seat but declined the beverage.
“So how are you settling in here, Selena?” he asked.
“Believe it or not, Lloyd, I’m adjusting,” she told him, honestly. “They are a different sort of people up here. I started thinking a lot about that after we sent you up, and I thought maybe I should talk to you about that and clear some things up.”
Selena smiled. “That’s nice, Lloyd, but you could have called.”
&nb
sp; He laughed. “You know how hands on I am. I thought I should come up and put my hands on the situation. How are you and your fiancé? What was his name? Tony...something? How are you faring in your long-distance relationship?”
Selena thought that an odd and startlingly personal question for him to ask her. She wasn’t comfortable with Lloyd the way she was with Daniel. She thought maybe it would be better to just answer him simply, rather than get up in arms about him getting too personal with an employee so she said, “We’ve broken up.”
“Oh dear. I’m so sorry to hear that. I hope it wasn’t because you were sent here.”
“It was…kind of. It turned out to be a good thing though,” she told him, thinking about Conner.
Lloyd did the oddest thing then. He put his head back and sniffed the air. Selena breathed in deeply, but she didn’t smell anything. “Selena, you haven’t gotten involved with Conner, have you? I know what a playboy he can be.”
“I’m sorry, Lloyd, but all of these questions seem so personal. Would you like to hear what I’ve found out about the company finances since I’ve been here?”
Lloyd smiled. Selena suddenly found his smile to be creepy and lecherous. She all at once didn’t like the idea of being so far out here alone with him. “I’m just trying to know you better, Selena. If we’re going to be working closely together, shouldn’t we know each other better?”
“We’re going to be working closely together?” she asked. She was confused.
“Yes. I think I’m going to move my home office up here and bring in my own executive staff.”
“What about the people who already hold those jobs here…and Conner?” she asked.
He sniffed the air again.
“What is it that you smell?” He looked directly at her then and she saw his eyes shift from blue to brown. “Your arousal. Every time Conner’s name is mentioned.”
Selena was really frightened now. She got up from the couch and took a few steps away from him toward her phone.
He grinned again. “You’ve already mated with him. That little pup moves fast, I’ll give him that.”
“I’m sorry, Lloyd,” she said. “I am not comfortable with this conversation. I’d like for you to leave.”
Lloyd stood up, but he didn’t look to be headed toward the door. “I think taking his company and his title won’t be enough. I think I’ll defile his mate as well.”
Selena saw his eyes shift to black, and she pounced for her phone, which was lying on the counter. Before she got there, a large gray wolf was between her and the counter, teeth bared. Just as quickly, Lloyd was back. Only now his clothes lay in a shredded pile at his feet, and he was nude. His pot belly and gray chest hair did nothing to hide the fact that he was also excited.
Trying to buy time, Selena said, “Lloyd, why did you send me here?”
Lloyd grinned again. It was horrendously unattractive. “To seduce and distract my alter Alpha,” he said, like that made all the sense in the world. “These people are old school. They won’t turn their back on their Alpha for many things. The one thing they will not forgive is for their Alpha to become involved with an outsider. They will never consent to allowing him to change you, but you’re under his skin now, and he won’t stay without you. I know…because I’ve been put in that situation myself. It only took Tony two years to bore you to tears and push you into a sexually frantic state. Aroused to the point of a simple push from a dominant man, and you were relegated to a rutting animal.”
“Tony? What do you know about Tony?” she asked.
Lloyd laughed. “I know that I had to supply my son with plenty of wild whores to keep him docile when he was with you. We had many a row about it.”
“Tony…He’s…”
“Yes, dear. He’s my son. He’s a wolf like me, and he was exiled as I was while yet in his mother’s womb. As your child will be.”
Selena really felt like she was in Hollyweird now. But some innate instinct led her to place a protective hand across her belly. Lloyd laughed again.
“Yes, Selena. The Alpha rarely plants his seed without it taking root. I think I can even smell the little creature growing its claws inside of you as we speak.”
The room was spinning, Selena needed to sit down. She backed as far away from Lloyd as she could, not wanting to turn her back on him, and she reached back for a chair. Dropping down into it, she put her head into her hands. “What have you done to me?”
“I’ve made you the Alpha female,” he said with a grin. “You just have to take that title elsewhere because these old-fashioned people won’t have it here. You could have stayed a bit longer, had you and that young wolf been able to practice a modicum of self-control. My Tony called me last night after you broke up with him and told me that you were ready…so soon. The poor boy was a little put off by it.”
There was a knock on the door. Lloyd went over to it and sniffed around. He crossed back to her and whispered, “I’ll be in the bedroom. If you don’t want your pathetic new friends bleeding out on your pretty wood floor, I suggest you get rid of them.”
Lloyd went in and closed the bedroom door. There was another knock. “Miss Selena, it’s Slam and Cub. Can we come in?”
Selena opened the door. Slam stepped in and put his finger to his lips as Cub went over to the bedroom door. “Miss Selena, we were just on our way to the festival and wondered if you would be up to going with us?” Slam was shaking his head no as he spoke.
“No, thank you, Slam,” Selena said, playing along. “I think I’m going to stay in for the evening.” Cub had on a rubber glove and was putting something in the doorknob as she and Slam talked.
“Okay then, come on, Cub, Conner will be expecting us. I wouldn’t want him coming out here looking for us.”
Cub went over to the kitchen then and said, “Do you mind if I get a drink of water, Miss Selena?”
“No, Cub. Go ahead.”
Instead of water, Cub started quietly looking through her cabinets until he found a bottle of white vinegar.
“Okay then, Miss Selena. You have a good night.”
Selena knew they had some kind of plan but it made her insides turn to see them go, knowing they were leaving her here alone with crazy wolf in there. As soon as the front door closed, Lloyd came out of the bedroom. He didn’t touch the outside door knob. Selena wondered what would have happened if he did. He was still nude, and he was still semi-aroused. When he crossed to look out the door, she went over and, covering her hand with her sleeve, she closed the bedroom door.
Lloyd turned around when he heard it. “Closing it won’t do any good. As soon as I know Tweedledee and Tweedledum are gone, we’ll be going back in, and I’ll be mating you properly. It will be fun not knowing who fathered your little bastards, I think.”
He took a step toward her, and she took another one back. “Oh, we’re going to dance. This will be fun.”
Selena stepped behind the kitchen counter, but within seconds the big gray wolf had jumped across and over and was now behind her. She went back around to the living room, and Lloyd changed again, this time grabbing her and holding tightly. She fought against him but he was too strong. He lifted her feet off the floor and carried her to the bedroom door.
“Open it!” he said.
Selena kicked him in the thigh, her only regret being she couldn’t reach higher. “Open it yourself!”
He tucked her under one powerful arm and opened the door with the other hand. Selena was waiting for something to happen, but it didn’t. He continued to carry her until he got her to the bed and then he threw her down on it. She turned on her belly and tried to scramble away but he heaved his heavy body on top of her and held her down with his heavy thighs. Then, he began ripping at her blouse. Selena screamed and when he covered her mouth with his hand, she bit him, drawing blood.
Lloyd laughed. “Conner’s in for a treat. You might be well worth giving up the Alpha spot for.”
Selena heard a click from the doorway
then.
“I’d like you to get off the lady, please,” Slam demanded.
Lloyd looked over his shoulder, and Selena got a glimpse of Slam holding a rifle trained on Lloyd. “You got silver bullets in that thing, son? If not, then I suggest you either go, or watch me have my way with the lady.” Lloyd reached down and touched himself, trying to reposition as he stripped away the rest of Selena’s clothes.
Slam waited until he was finished and then he said, “Sir, you just wiped wolf’s bane on your skinny little stick there. I think here in a minute it may not be willing to work for you.”
Lloyd looked at his hand. It was starting to turn purple and mottle. He jumped up off of Selena then. “You little son of a bitch.” He morphed and lunged for Slam.
Slam changed as well, just as a big white wolf ran into the room. Selena grabbed the comforter off the bed and covered herself where her breasts were exposed. She watched what was going on in the room, numb and in disbelief.
The gray wolf had Slam’s wolf form by the throat when Conner came crashing in. Conner bit Lloyd on the back of his neck, hard apparently, causing him to howl in pain, letting go of Slam. Conner shook his head then, his powerful jaws sunk deep into the other animal. Before Selena realized what was happening, her room was beginning to fill with wolves, every size, shape and color. It was insane.
They all just stood and watched the two in the center do battle, barking or whining at times as blood and fur flew across the room. It looked to Selena like Conner had the upper hand, but the old gray wolf wasn’t giving up yet. He suddenly put his front paws out and dipped his head low to the floor. Then, in one fell swoop, he flipped Conner over his shoulders and the big, beautiful white wolf landed hard against the wall. Conner got up and bared his teeth again. The fur was standing up on the back of his neck.
Alaskan Alpha: 3-Book Bundle (Books 1-3) Page 8
