by Tarrah Betts
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Temptation: Journal of the Wolves of Spruce Hollow is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Tarrah Betts
All rights reserved.
Published by The Fairy Factory
Libary and Archives Canada
Betts, Tarrah.
Temptation: Journal of the Wolves of Spruce Hollow/Tarrah Betts
ISBN 978-0-9936146-0-6
No part of this novel may be reproduced, stored or transmitted without the prior permission, in writing, from the author.
~ Acknowledgements ~
I'd like to dedicate this book to my grandmother, Eva Jean, who inadvertently introduced me to my lifelong love of Romance novels. Grammie, I'm sorry that I read your Harlequin "stories" that were stashed in your bedside table when I was ten.
Love you forever.
Also, much love to Dan. Your encouragement when I was overwhelmed and your understanding when I was on fire allowed me to realize this crazy dream of mine.
Go Team IPhone!
Prologue
Weres can take only one mate in their lifetime and are blood bound to that mate until death.
I started dreaming of my mate when I was a teenager.
Her face, her body, her beautiful green cat eyes; I searched for those eyes in the faces of every woman I passed on the street.
I would’ve known my mate anywhere.
I finally met her today at a public pool
…. She was six years old.
Chapter 1
***
I slept in the woods again tonight, deep in the forest outside our small town of Spruce Hollow. But it didn’t matter; home, the forest,I couldn’t get away from her no matter where I slept.
Even though I was miles away, Aspen, my mate followed me still.
Tonight, she was taunting me in my dreams with her pouty little mouth and her flashing green eyes begging me to take what was rightfully mine.
Sometimes it was just easier to sleep outdoors, and avoid her, than to face my demons at home and tonight was certainly no different than any other night in the past year or so.
Sleeping in the forest demanded that I stay in my wolf form; it was safer that way, as the forest awoke from her slumber at night.
I perked up my ears and listened, more out of habit than necessity. The forest was darkly alive with the sounds of insects, the bubbling stream and wild animals foraging or hunting for their prey. They all played an instrument in the symphony of the night.
It was beautiful to my wolf ears.
There was nothing out there that could hurt me, not man nor animal. I was the fearless king of this jungle.
As I got up and phased into my human form, the air crackled around me with electricity as my lupine attributes disappeared. I never got tired of the surge of infinite raw power I felt shooting down my spine whenever I phased. It was almost better than sex.
Almost.
I shook my head, to clear it, as I looked down at my watch. It was 3am.
It was getting harder and harder to stay asleep throughout the night. Aspen would not leave me in peace. She called to me through my dreams, beckoning and begging me to come to her and sate myself. But I resisted her and would continue to do so until the time was right.
Even though I couldn’t see it through the dense tree cover, I could sense the moon’s position in the sky. Those of my kind were always sensitive to the siren’s call of the moon.
Tomorrow night, there would be a full moon and in less than twenty-four hours, my entire Were pack would gather at the pack Alpha’s house when the moon was at it’s zenith. Then we would phase and hunt on pack lands as a large group, just as we were meant to. By Were standards, it was the human equivalent of a family reunion and I was looking forward to mingling with my brothers and sisters.
“Damn, I have to get up for work in two hours,” I thought to myself, as I scrubbed my hands up and down my face. I was going to be tired all day but I knew that I’d be unable to settle down and get myself back to sleep for those two precious hours.
It was useless to even try.
Besides, I still had to run back through the woods to get home; then I had to take a shower and change my clothes before work.
I was deep in the misty green woods of the Caledonia Mountains, far from my home in Spruce Hollow, a small town of 705 people, which was situated just to the south of the Caledonia mountain range.
It would take me about thirty minutes of running through the woods, in wolf form, to get myself back to the raised ranch style home that I shared with my pack sister, Valerie, and her daughter (and my mate), Aspen.
Just the merest whisper of Aspen’s name and intimate images of her full breasts and round little ass surged through my head, so I sat back down on the damp, mossy earth and looked off into the blackness. I might as well be out here, in the woods, than confined in the house with Aspen’s intoxicating scent clinging to everything. Besides, I still had lots of time to get home and get ready before I headed into work anyway.
I ran my hands back and forth through my hair, making the ends stand up, all spiky and wild. It was something I did whenever I was thinking or felt irritated about something.
Tonight, I was thinking AND irritated because I thought Aspen might finally be driving me crazy.
Now, normally you’d think reoccurring dreams about a beautiful, young girl would be a good thing, and you’d be right.
But not this beautiful girl. No, this beautiful girl drove me crazy and set my teeth on edge. She kept me awake at night, thinking about her and longing to be closer to her.
If I were honest with myself, I’d say that dreaming about Aspen bothered me because she was the only one in this world who had the power to unnerve me to the core.
And I didn’t do unnerving. I was a man who liked things orderly. I reveled in control, dominance and power; all qualities that had served me well as Beta of my Were pack.
Aspen, on the other hand, was the exact opposite of the principles that I led my life by.
Aspen was a force of nature. She was young and wild and full of life. She reminded me of a whirlwind or a hurricane and I didn’t enjoy the disorder and destruction that Hurricane Aspen brought into my life.
My life was ordered and I was always disciplined and able to exercise restraint over every situation. In my world, I always had the upper hand.
But not with Aspen. Nope. And I didn’t like it, not one little bit.
It left a bad taste in my mouth.
I suppose what bothered me so much was that Aspen, and the feelings she wrenched out of me, made me feel out of control.
And not being in complete control of every facet of my life was an alien emotion to me.
One that made me feel weak.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much that I could do about it, other than stay away from her as much as possible…
…because Aspen was only sixteen years old.
“You are troubled about our mate,” my inner wolf said.
“What do you mean?” I replied with more of an edge to my voice than I would have liked. “You grow weary of waiting for her. That is what’s really bothering you tonight, is it not?”
“That’s ridiculous, I’m not awake because of Aspen. Go back to sleep, wolf.”
“You cannot hide your thoughts from me, Roan Sabre. We are one and the same, you and I. I know your innermost thoughts and you are indeed awake this night because of our mate. She troubles you greatly,” my wolf said yawning widely.
“Oh, be quiet and go back to sleep, won’t you? I can’t think with you chattering away in my head.”
My wolf was ancient and wise. And sometimes he could be difficult and annoying as hell, like right now. Our psyches were so deeply connected, it was difficult to tell where I ended and he began.
My wolf was a large Were, intimidating, with intelligent eyes, a broad chest, large paws, strong legs and a black shiny coat. He was fearless and commanded respect from the other Weres in the pack.
You didn’t mess around with my wolf. He was power and absolute violence held in check.
And it was impossible for me to hide anything from him.
You see, the problem with wolves was that they saw everything in either Black or White. Things were pretty cut and dry and therefore, uncomplicated with them. Something either “was” or it “wasn’t”. There were no shades of grey thrown in there anywhere.
I don’t know why I even bothered to try to keep things from my wolf. It was pointless; he was always in my head. We were two halves of the same whole and I could sense him inside me at all times, just as he could sense me. We were always together, each a half of the same entity and I trusted his wise council…most of the time.
Admitting out loud to my wolf that Aspen bothered me and that I was awake because her made me feel weak somehow. It was acknowledging that someone else held some sort of power over me. And anyone, mate or not, having power over you was never a good thing in the wolf world.
Yet, here I was again, awake in the woods, in the middle of the night and all because of a sixteen-year-old girl.
Damn her!
There was just something about Aspen that called to me on a primal, guttural level. I felt it there, right in the pit of my stomach. She held my attention so acutely that I couldn’t look away from her, even if I wanted to. It was something that I couldn’t really describe in words. I wasn’t very good with words sometimes. I was much better with actions. With actions, you got results and results made me happy.
My mate did not make me happy.
Aspen irritated me to no end, like a scratchy label on a shirt collar. Why couldn’t she just stay out of my head? The situation between us was bad enough as it was in my waking hours, did she need to haunt what little sleep I managed to get too?
I felt out of sorts because the connection I felt with my mate was unbalanced. For one thing, she wasn’t even aware that she was my mate yet. Although I’d been waiting for her for over ten years now, she was still only a teenager.
It was very frustrating.
If I was truthful about Aspen, which I didn’t like to be because it made me feel like a creep, my mate set my body on fire with desire and longing. I frequently had wild, animalistic sex with her in my dreams and always woke up with a hard on for her.
I don’t know whether it was the mating bond talking or not but I thought Aspen was the most beautiful girl I had ever laid eyes on. So much so, that it sucked the air right out of my lungs sometimes whenever I looked at her.
She was lovely in the way that the gentle summer rain was beautiful. Or the sun setting on the lake was beautiful. She was like that.
Aspen had an earthy, quiet and unassuming beauty encompassing her entire little being. I could close my eyes and picture her in my head; it was so easy, like she’d been imprinted on the insides of my eyelids.
She had a long, tousled mass of strawberry blond curls falling down her back and graceful shoulders. Her hair was sexy as hell and I longed to stretch my hands into it and feel it’s softness wrap and coil itself around my strong fingers.
Her face was small and heart shaped with a pert little nose and delicate brows. Her mouth was small and pouty, with soft pink lips that turned up at the corners in a smile that could be either seductive or mischievous. Or sometimes both at the same time.
I wanted to kiss that mouth. Badly. I had pictured it in my head repeatedly over the past year.
Physically, she was small, at only five foot three; I towered over her whenever she stood next to me. She was delicately boned and for all intents and purposes, looked like a very breakable human girl.
Fate had chosen her for my mate; but physically, she certainly didn’t look like she could handle me or my wolf.
Not yet, at least.
I hoped she filled out a little more, she was pretty scrawny, and sooner rather than later too. I was getting tired of waiting for her.
Ten years is a really long time to wait for someone.
The most beautiful part of Aspen was her green eyes. I loved them. A lot.
Her eyes were a beautiful shade of light green rimmed by dark green, they reminded me of gently upturned cat eyes. In my dreams, she always appeared to me with her beautiful green eyes begging and pleading with me to take what was, in reality, already mine.
Aspen’s beautiful, hypnotic, jade green cat eyes haunted me. I compared them to the eyes in the faces of every single woman that passed me by on the street. But no one ever had eyes as beautiful as hers.
My dreams about Aspen always left me feeling confused and guilty…and aroused. There was always an urgency to them too, like I needed to get up right away and go do something about it.
However, other than jerk off, I’m not sure what else I was supposed to do in the middle of the night about a sixteen year old mate.
Dreams had always held such deep meaning and importance to my pack. They were prophetic, conveyed messages and could show you a glimpse of the future. The only problem was, there was nothing I could do about my dreams of Aspen, other than sit around and wait for her to grow up, so she could take her place as my mate.
It was frustrating not having all the answers for once.
When Aspen was a little girl, things were so much simpler. I knew my role. I knew what was expected of me. But now, Aspen was quickly turning into a sexy, attractive young woman and the situation between us and the rules that governed our relationship were as clear as mud.
And ever since she’d turned sixteen, staying away from her was getting harder and harder to do.
What I did know was that between the dreams, the lack of sleep, my role as pack Beta and work, I was exhausted.
It had gotten so bad, that I’d even gone to the pack Alpha a few weeks back for advice. Unfortunately, Slade Johnson had just regarded me with calm, cool appraisal and said, “Don’t worry Roan, these things always sort themselves out, one way or another. Aspen won’t be sixteen forever, you know.”
What he should have said was “Look son, I have no clue what to tell you. This is a highly unusual situation for a Were because normally our mates are only sent to us when it’s the right time, not at six years old.”
I was the pack Beta and Slade was the Alpha, or pack leader. I was Beta, which meant that I was the pack enforcer and I made sure everyone followed the rules set out by the pack Alpha. My duties also involved protection of the pack and keeping the peace, as well as learning the role of the Alpha, as one day, I would take the Alpha’s pl
ace when he could no longer fulfill his duties to the pack.
“What kind of advice was that, anyway? How were those words of wisdom supposed to help me right now?” I complained irritably into the darkness.
“The Alpha is right, it will all sort itself out. Stop holding on so tightly. You will drive yourself crazy because you can’t have control here, Roan. Let it go. The situation will right itself eventually and our mate will grow up and take her place by our side,” my wolf agreed optimistically.
“Yeah, I know she will. It’s just that I’ve been waiting for so long. It makes me question whether she is truly my mate or not?”
“Only you know the answer to that, Roan. Look inside yourself, the answers are there. Be patient and calm your mind, only then will you gain the insight you seek.”
Deep down something inside my gut told me things that my head just didn’t want to hear. I knew the answers, I just didn’t like them very much, and the truth was that Aspen was without a doubt my mate. She was mine, chosen by destiny to walk by my side through life.
I sighed, resigned to my fate, my chest heaving as I exhaled heavily.
It was already November and the air was cold with the promise of the winter soon to come. I inhaled a deep cleansing breath to try and clear my head from those unwanted thoughts of my mate. I could smell the crisp, clean air of the forest coming in through my nose.
Big breath in, big breath out.
There was something so healing and calming about the forest air of the Caledonia Mountains and I needed it right now because at present, I felt anything but calm.
Confused and guilt ridden maybe. But certainly not calm.
Shivering, I found myself wishing that I had brought my jacket, for the nights were starting to get cold, even for a hot-blooded Were like myself. Unfortunately, I was only wearing worn blue jeans, a black t-shirt and boots. The black leather jacket, that I normally wore, was back home, thrown into the back seat of my truck and I was starting to feel the autumn chill seep in my bones.
