by Tarrah Betts
I wouldn’t freeze to death though; Weres were gifted with a warmer internal temperature than humans. It was as if we were driven by an internal furnace; a characteristic that I shared with all my pack mates.
An elevated body temperature was one of the first signs that all Weres experienced whenever we underwent the change for the first time.
I still remembered when I had first phased, back when I was twelve years old. I thought I would incinerate from the blistering heat. My skin burned so badly, it felt like I was being consumed by fire. But I survived it, just like every other Were who successfully made it through the change.
My pack family consisted of twenty-two male Weres and eleven females and all our combined extended families. It was a fair sized pack, close to 75 people in its entirety.
We all lived on a highly secluded acreage up near the Caledonian mountain range, on the outskirts of Spruce Hollow.
The land had been bought and held in trust for the pack many years ago and continued to be passed down generation to generation. The tract of land was large, some 70 miles across and gave us ample room to phase and run without exposing who we really were to the nearby human townspeople, who lived in the town of Spruce Hollow
We didn’t attract much attention anyway, as we had quite a number of Were/human families in the pack. A Were’s mate was not always another Were but sometimes a human man or woman.
Mates were never consciously selected by a Were, but were made known to us instinctively. So, you never knew what or who you were waiting for, so that made it that much more difficult to find your mate.
Once your mate appeared though and you laid eyes on them, you just instinctively knew that they were meant only for you. It was like a bolt of lightning streaking out of the sky, and hitting you square in the chest.
Dead on.
There was no mistaking the mating bond, that’s for sure. Once a Were’s mate appeared, that was it. For life.
A Were mating bond was so strong that it could not be broken until death and Weres rarely, if ever, took on another mate after the death of their first mate. A Were with a deceased mate was a depressing, pitiful sight to see.
I rolled over onto my back and looked up towards the ceiling of the forest. My eyesight was excellent in the dark and I could make out the intricate details of the leaves up above. There was something about sleeping outdoors that made me feel wild and feral, just like I was meant to be.
I found that sleeping indoors generally made me feel closed in, like there was a part of me that longed to be outside, always, no matter if I was in my human form or not. You’d think I’d get used to it after all these years, but so far, this was one part of my Were existence that I had not adapted well to.
I was a Mi’kmaq warrior, as my proud Mi’kmaq father liked to remind me, or at least my ancestors were. My mother was of French descent with milky white skin, light eyes and hair. Therefore I didn’t quite fit the typical stereotype of one of the First Nations People.
For one thing, I had light blue eyes, not brown like most of my pack mates.
I had the type of blue eyes that were penetrating and difficult to look away from once you gazed into them because they were so striking and unusual. I attracted a lot of female attention, just from that one feature alone. Women always seemed to gravitate towards a guy with attractive eyes.
My current girlfriend, Andie, said she felt like I was gazing right into her souI whenever I looked at her.
Yup, I know it was a messed up situation, but in addition to my mate, Aspen, I also had a girlfriend named Andie.
Having a girlfriend made me feel like an adulterer sometimes, even though Aspen didn’t even know she was destined to be mine yet.
Andie had been working at the local bar my pack brother’s and I hung out at for the past six months and she had flirted shamelessly with me for the first two. I ignored her at first, but I was lonely and needed someone and she was there. Not very romantic, I know, but that was the truth of it.
Andie was a knockout though, all legs, big boobs and a nice smile. She would have made a great Hooters waitress, that’s for sure.
What man could resist that?
Andie wasn’t the first girl I’d dated over the past ten years since I’d found out Aspen was my mate. I frequently grew lonely, and in the past year, increasingly sexually frustrated waiting for her to mature and usually found myself settling for one of the women that constantly seemed to surrounded my pack brothers and I whenever we went out.
Don’t get me wrong, the women I’ve surrounded myself with over the years, while I’d waited for Aspen to grow up, have always been well treated.
I loved women and they sure seemed to love me.
But I was not that guy. I wasn’t someone that they could build a life with. I was someone who could satisfy their sexual urges and take them out and show them a good time, but that was where it ended. I never let anyone get too close and I guarded myself well from emotional entanglement. As long as everyone understood the rules, then everyone was happy.
“She is not our mate!” Crap. Not this again.
My wolf picked up his ears at the mention of my girlfriend Andie’s name. My wolf vehemently disliked her and not necessarily because she was a bad person, but mostly because she wasn’t Aspen. He and I agreed on a great many things, as was crucial for a symbiotic relationship such as ours to succeed. But this was one area where we did not see eye to eye.
You see, my wolf loved my mate, Aspen, intensely. He had for years. But there really wasn’t anything either of us could do about it. Aspen had been only six years old when I’d first laid eyes on her all those years ago.
But I was not only a wolf, I was a man too. And sometimes men get lonely, or bored or horny waiting around for their mate to get old enough.
Besides, Andie definitely wasn’t for the long term; she and I both understood that. She was saving up until she had enough money to “buy a plane ticket out of here” and was moving out west to pursue her lifelong dream of acting.
I wasn’t sure whether she could act or not but she certainly had the looks for it. She was sex on legs with her long blonde hair, full red lips and killer body. She was the perfect entertainment and distraction from Aspen and was always ready whenever I came looking for relief.
My wolf grumbled, turned away from me and laid his black muzzle on his paws with a chest-heaving sigh.
He was not happy.
Living with a wolf inside you was a difficult thing sometimes because wolves tended to be slaves to their instincts and biological urges. They had a pack mentality and had loyalty, protection and procreation of the pack ingrained into their psyche. Anything that didn’t fit into those select few categories held very little importance to my wolf.
It was not like there was anything wrong with my girlfriend Andie. She was a fun and beautiful girl. But unfortunately, she also had the mental and emotional depth of a Twinkie. She kind of reminded me of a fluffy, blonde Pomeranian dog.
I didn’t mind though. The sex was pretty good, she liked to go out and have a good time and besides, there were fewer problems to deal with living this way. My life was complicated enough as it was with Aspen.
Uncomplicated was good for once.
Pushing my hair off my forehead, I sat back up again and rubbed my hands up and down my arms, trying to warm up.
I had the trademark dark hair of my people and if I had to describe it, I’d say that I wore it in a sort of messy, spiky look. I don’t know, my last girlfriend had been a hairdresser and had begged me to let her do my hair for months until I finally relented and this is what she came up with.
I supposed it didn’t look too bad though, when I was out at the bar, women always seemed to want to touch it and run their fingers through it.
Stretching out my long, muscular legs, I shook out a muscle cramp in my thigh. Sleeping in wolf form for extended periods of time had drawbacks that only appeared once you phased back, namely muscle cramping and stiffness.
I was fairly tall, just over six foot four and well built with lean muscle mass and a well developed, ripped and toned core.
Although my father had also been tall, my physical prowess had little to do with genetics and everything to do with the Were gene that coursed through my blood.
I often wondered what I would look like if I weren’t a full-blooded werewolf? Would I be as tall? Would my body be as hard and muscular?
It was difficult to say. I certainly couldn’t look to any immediate male descendant as any indication. They had all been Weres too.
The genes were strong in my family. Sometimes it stayed dormant and passed over several generations, only to suddenly appear again. But in my family, my father, uncle, grandfather and great grandfather had been affected.
Andie, the fluffy blonde Pomeranian girl, frequently called me a “hot piece of ass”, and although I rarely thought about such things, I supposed it must be partially true, as I’d had my fair share of incredibly physically attractive girlfriends over the years.
In addition to being blessed with my werewolf induced physical attributes, I supposed I had an all right looking face. My mother was quite a beauty in her day and I had inherited a straight nose, straight teeth and a full mouth from her.
I also had a strong, square jaw line that balanced out my face nicely. So, instead of looking like a pretty boy or a “male model”, I was more rugged looking.
It didn’t hurt things any that I carried myself with an extremely capable air…with maybe a slight touch of an arrogant swagger thrown in there for good measure. I couldn’t help it, I was a Were and Weres were confident and powerful predatory beasts.
One thing was for sure; I was never lonely for female attention in my human state.
I brushed myself off and stood up. There was no sense in trying to get back to sleep. All this thinking about Aspen and Andie made me feel trapped and cagey. It’s funny how just thinking about someone can turn you inside out.
Standing up to my full height and stretching my back out, I figured I might as well get going and head back into town. I looked down at my watch again, it was three forty–five and I had to get ready for work in an hour anyway.
The walk would do me good because I really needed to get rid of this Aspen dream nonsense before I went to work for the day, otherwise I would be thinking of my mate, half dressed and whimpering with need, all day long.
I had a long day ahead of me as it was, because after work I was meeting some of my pack brothers at the local bar to talk pack business and blow off some steam from the long week before we finally met up with the rest of the pack for our full moon run.
“We could run home,” my wolf offered helpfully. “Yes, I suppose that would probably clear my head.”
My wolf picked up his ears at this, completely alert now.
“Yes, running is good. Let’s go now before we run out of time. Maybe, if we get back early enough, we could lay on our mate’s bed and watch her sleep before we go to work?”
”You’re such a pervert, wolf,” I chuckled as I sprinted off into a running jump toward home and phased mid air.
Chapter 2
***
“Miss Greystone! Perhaps you might find it more to your benefit to actually listen in class rather than staring blankly out the window,” Mr. Johnson said irritably.
I blinked and reluctantly turned my head away from the most exciting part of Mr. Johnson’s class: the window.
Trying to feign interest in the Pythagorean theorem was not my strong suit but if I put in a solid five minutes of listening, I knew that meant I could soon go back to doing what I really wanted to do, which was to stare out the window and try to get a glimpse of my secret man crush across the street.
That was way more exciting than anything I could possibly learn in Math class anyways.
In no time at all, my eyes were soon back at the window, staring out of my 3rd period Math class for the hundredth time that morning.
Besides, Mr. Johnson should be happy. I’d always hated Math with a passion before I was fortunate enough to land in his class this year. Could it be his riveting lectures or the extra help that he so graciously offered during lunch hour that made me love Mr. Johnson’s Math class so much?
No, it was much more convoluted than that. It was because Mr. Johnson’s Math class was ideally situated to give me the perfect view of Sabre’s Auto Body shop across the street.
And that is where my secret man crush worked.
His name was Roan Sabre and I’ve been in love him for as long as I could remember. He was a friend of my Mom’s and was ten years older than me but that didn’t matter; there was just something about him that made that fact unimportant in my eyes.
Plus, it didn’t hurt that he was the hottest and sexiest man that I had ever laid eyes on either.
Roan was handsome. Oh, who was I kidding, he was beautiful and had the most attractive eyes I’d ever seen on a man, or a woman for that matter.
They were blue, like the color of the water in the Caribbean Sea. I could just sit there and stare at them forever but then he’d probably gruffly say “Aspen, what the hell are you staring at?”
He was kind of irritable like that with me sometimes, especially now that I was older, but I knew he still cared about me underneath his gruff exterior.
Physically, Roan was pretty darn near perfect. He was tall and extremely physically fit, kind of like a cross between a body builder and a swimmer. He was all lean muscle mass, which made for some pretty spectacular muscle definition in his six pack.
His smile was sexy and hinted at something dirty and playful under the surface. I think it was the way his eyes and lips and teeth worked in tandem whenever he smiled at you.
It just gave me the shivers.
His hair was dark and always styled in such a way that I longed to run my fingers through it.
I loved his hair; it was so silky and black. It used to be a lot longer when I was a little kid and he used to let me run my hands through it then but there was no way in hell that he would tolerate that kind of behavior now, he was strictly a “hands off” kind of guy nowadays.
When I was younger though, and Roan wasn’t so irritable, I used to love to cuddle up into his lap and watch tv, while holding my blankie and twirling my fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck.
It was comforting and reassuring to me.
Roan was the pack Beta, which was kind of like the law around here. The Alpha was the leader of the Were pack, while the Beta was his right hand man. Roan’s job was to make sure that everyone behaved and followed the rules that the Alpha had set up for the protection of the entire pack.
What did all this mean?
It meant that Roan was a Were, which in of itself, was pretty freaking cool. My mother was part of the Were pack too.
Not me though, I was just a regular old teenaged girl, living in a werewolf world.
I thought it must have been so cool to be a Were. Then you would be super strong and could run really fast.
Plus, you’d never feel alone either due to having a wolf living and breathing inside of you every minute of the day, that’s for sure.
I’d known Roan since I was a kid. He used to come over and visit me all the time. I think he must have felt sorry for me when I was adopted into the pack because I was an orphan and had lost both my parents. Roan had lost his father when he was a kid too and then his mother left him.
So, I guess we sort of understood one another.
I’d always had a crush on Roan, since I was old enough to have crushes at least, but in the last year, things have changed. Dramatically.
For one thing, the crush I have on him is no longer of the “puppy love” variety. It has quickly developed into the “I want to strip my clothes off and rub my naked body against yours” type of infatuation.
For another thing, Roan moved in to live with my mom and I.
My mom said we needed a roommate to help pay the mortgag
e and so Roan was willing to help out and moved in with us.
I’m not sure why we needed a roommate though; we’d gotten along just fine, financially speaking, ever since I’d lived here, so I’m not sure why things have changed so drastically now.
Things probably cost a lot more than they used to, I bet.
Anyway, Roan lived with us now and sometimes I got these weird feelings whenever he was around, it was like my insides were on fire.
Or he could make my heart flutter whenever he looked at me or flashed me that megawatt smile of his.
But, Roan didn’t smile at me very much anymore. I seemed to make him angry and frustrated more than anything else since I started high school a year ago.
But I didn’t care; I knew the old Roan was still in there somewhere. I saw glimpses of him sometimes when he let his guard down.
Like this one time, last summer, Roan was helping me wash my mom’s car and we had a water fight with the hose. He’d even started it, when he told me that my shorts were way too short and to go into the house and change.
I said “No way!” and he cocked his head and looked at me, as if to say “Yeah, you might want to reconsider that”, then sprayed me with the hose until I was soaked and screeching, so I’d have to go in the house and get changed.
But I got him back; I picked up the bucket full of soapy water, threw it at him and ran away giggling madly.
I got him really good too and his shirt was drenched, so he took it off and laughingly threw it at me and I squealed as the wet, soapy fabric landed on my retreating back.
I turned to throw it back at him and I thought my heart was going to pound out of my chest from seeing his perfectly ripped abs and hard pecs.
It was almost like he could hear my heart hammering inside my chest though, because he looked at me strangely, put down the hose, went in the house and got changed and then hopped into his truck and left for the rest of the day.
Since then, he’d started looking at me strangely like that more and more often.
I caught him all the time when he didn’t think I was paying attention to him. His face would get all serious and intense looking, especially now that my boobs were getting bigger. When I would turn and look at him, to try and catch his eyes, he always looked away from me, like he wasn’t staring in the first place.
