by Amelia Jade
“BELAY THAT!” he bellowed, his voice clear and oozing command. “OUT THE FRONT. FIGHT THROUGH THEM!”
Stephen looked over at him from where he’d just hopped back down from the loft.
“Trust me!” Aiden shouted and pointed at the front doors. Then he leapt toward Stephen. The Alpha’s eyes went wide as he assumed Aiden was coming at him.
But Aiden kept going, pushing past Stephen and tackling the wolf that was coming at his rear. He fell on it heavily, using his knee to crack some ribs before driving his elbow hard into its head. The wolf lay there stunned while Aiden got to his feet, picked it up, and hurled it at the back door, wincing as it hit a post and whirled away into the shadows.
Stephen took one look at what had just happened and came to his decision. “Let’s go, boys!” he roared, and as one the now-awake pack shot toward the front door.
As they went, Aiden allowed himself to flow into his wolf form, ignoring the stomach-wrenching shiver that always came just before he turned. Eight men had run toward the front doors, but now they were eight wolves, led by Aiden’s midnight-black beast and Stephen’s gray and black wolf, the duo running side by side.
They shot through the opening, flashing past the bonfires while keeping their heads low to retain their night vision as best they could before disappearing into the growth that surrounded the barn. They ran along by scent and sound more than sight until they reached the edge of the field, at which point they regrouped and fled across the meadow and into the forest.
The pack ran for hours, until they were positive that any pursuit had given up. Then they ran upstream in a small river for half an hour to obscure their scent before finally heading home. Another hour later they were finally back home at the pack house. Stephen ordered them all back into human form and they started washing themselves off in the wading pool out back.
Meanwhile Patrice went and got them all towels so that they could dry off. The cool evening air didn’t penetrate their skin enough to be a real bother, but it wasn’t exactly comfortable either. Their breath was visible each time they exhaled, which was often as they fought to recover from the run.
All around him the pack were high-fiving and exchanging stories of their harrowing escape. He smiled as several of them even included him in their moments, too caught up in the adrenaline to remember they were supposed to hate him.
“How did you know?”
He turned to see Flint staring at him suspiciously. “Know what?”
“That they were coming.”
Aiden shrugged. “I didn’t. But I was on a team for a decade. I know procedure.”
“Did you know that?” Flint asked, turning to Stephen.
“Yes, I was more than aware of that fact,” the Alpha said, glaring at his Second, obviously not appreciating the way Flint was acting. “I’m aware that he was kicked off the team, and then kicked out of Mack’s group. But his knowledge came in handy back there.” He looked at Aiden. “How did you know going out the front door was the option?”
“It’s one of their tactics. I’m not sure if any of you noticed, but only eight of them came in the front. Which meant another four were waiting out back for you. If we’d gone that way, none of us would have escaped. At least, certainly not as a coherent group. They could then track us down individually.”
Stephen seemed satisfied, and then waved for them all to head inside.
Aiden allowed himself to be swept up into the moment again, despite the turmoil he was feeling inside. Even as shoulder-slaps, fist-bumps, and congratulatory remarks rained down on him, he was feeling sick to his stomach.
I just assaulted several members of a Regional Response Team. Who have now seen me participating in an illegal Frenzy. I’m so dead. No matter what, I’m screwed unless I can find out just what Stephen is up to.
He decided to use his goodwill from that night as best he could to ingratiate himself with the rest of the pack. A genuine smile spread across his face. Perhaps tonight had been good for something after all. He could use this to his advantage, to bring down Flint, Stephen, and the entire damn pack.
Ten
Willow
The noise when the pack returned was unmistakable.
Not only that, but it was early, and she was still up. Nobody sounded upset or worried, but she hadn’t expected to see anyone until the next morning. Willow wasn’t an idiot; she knew what her father had organized out in the bush. Whores and illicit substances to try and get his men to relax and stop fighting each other.
And Aiden had gone to take part.
The double doors at the rear of the house parted, and the pack walked in, all smiles. In the middle of them, Aiden seemed the recipient of the praise. She watched, shocked as he accepted high-fives and praise with a big grin on his face. The group walked up to her and then stopped.
“I guess you had all kinds of fun tonight, didn’t you,” she snapped, glaring at Aiden before leaving.
It might not have been the wisest course of action to openly show that she had feelings for him right then and there in front of everyone, but she just didn’t care. Besides, the others weren’t dumb. If they hadn’t already figured out that the two of them were involved, then they were dumber than she thought.
Storming off, she first headed to her room, but then decided against that. Aiden would go right there to find her, to try and talk to her. She didn’t want that. Instead she took a left near the front doors and went down a hallway and into the library. As a child this had been one of her favorite rooms. The high bookshelves filled with all sorts of hardcover books, more than she could ever hope to read in a lifetime. As she’d grown older, her interest in reading had waned somewhat.
Now though, she plopped herself down in a chair on the far side and contemplated why she’d stopped coming to the room.
Because you realized you were already living in a fantasy world, filled with werewolves and other creatures that most people don’t know exist. After that, books became boring to you, since you were living it.
It was true. Especially after college, Willow had truly begun to retreat from the human world. Going away to school had been a hard experience for her. Surrounded by people that all seemed immature, and on top of that, were completely blinded to the real world all around them. People who would have laughed if she’d told them she grew up adopted by werewolves.
There had been several occasions where she was drunk that Willow almost spilled the beans. With modern technology it would have been easy for her to get proof for the couple of people who had put up with her while she was at school. In the end though, her loyalty to her father had won out, and she hadn’t done anything.
Upon receiving her diploma, she’d come home and gone straight to work at his company, where she didn’t have to worry about being ridiculed and called crazy for things she’d seen with her very own eyes. Home was her shelter. Her safe place.
“This is cozy.”
She sighed heavily at Aiden’s voice. Of course he would find her. He was a werewolf. Why had she felt that coming here would make things any more difficult for him than if she’d just gone to her room and locked the door? She couldn’t obscure her scent, which meant he’d find her anywhere. Willow was just going to have to suck it up and deal with the fallout now.
“It was.” Her voice sounded frosty and harsh, even to her.
“Until I got here, you mean.”
“Mmm.”
“I’m assuming this is about the party. I’m not aware of anything else that might have angered you, but please do correct me if I’m wrong.”
Willow stayed silent.
“It’s not like I wanted to go.”
He was still standing at the doorway, having remained respectfully out of the room. This had the added effect of forcing him to speak to the back of her head. She turned to look at him now, pinning him in place with a glare.
“It sure didn’t sound like that earlier,” she shot back. “I was there, Aiden. I heard you talking to my f
ather about it.”
The broad-shouldered werewolf sighed. “Willow, your father is my Alpha. If he tells me I’m going, then I’m going. I don’t really have much choice.”
“Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean you have to sound as enthusiastic about it as you did. Or come home like that.” She jerked her head back in the direction of where she’d first encountered him before turning to give him the back of her head to look at once more. It was the only time he was going to be getting that particular view.
“Seriously? Think about things from my side here, Willow. I’m new to the pack. I have exactly one shot to make it work out, or else your father will attempt to kill me. Sounding uninterested in something that should be a huge amount of fun for any shifter in this pack is not the way to go about it. He’ll pick up on my reluctance, and then so will the others. That will lead to suspicion, and one way or another, I’ll be out.” He paused. “Try and tell me I’m wrong.”
She wanted to do just that. To scream at him and tell him how dumb he was being about it all. That his fears were those of a paranoiac, that nobody actually thought that way. But she couldn’t, because the truth was, Willow knew her father and his pack. And that’s exactly how they would react. They would kill him. Not try, like he seemed to assume, but they would definitely get the job done.
“Not to mention your father already told me to stay away from you.”
“What does that have to do with you going to the party?”
Aiden sighed and walked into the room and around her chair, leaning against a sturdy table, forcing her to look at him now.
“Why are you so upset that I went?”
She sneered at him. “That was bad enough. But you came home as part of the pack, Aiden. They were high-fiving you, giving you congratulations. For your actions at an unsanctioned and illegal drug orgy. Take a page from your own book and look at that from my side of things.”
Willow thought the exaggerated surprise “jaw-drop” was something that only happened in movies or books. But Aiden’s mouth fell open in an imperfect O shape that could rival some cartoon characters.
“Wait. That’s what this is all about?” He started to laugh.
“Laughing is not helping right now,” she snapped, feeling angry and embarrassed.
“Willow. Those high-fives were not about my sexual prowess, nor my ability to ingest drugs.”
“Bullshit.”
“Will you just listen,” he said, his tone growing hard as she half-interrupted him.
Willow crossed her arms and glared at him some more, not responding.
“I didn’t sleep with anyone at the party. Hell, the only drugs I did were those that got into my system from the fumes of other people smoking them. The reason that they were all giving me praise is because while we were there, we were jumped by a Regional Response Team. They’d found out about the party, Willow, and they came after us. Because I used to be a member of one, I recognized their tactics. Because I was sober, I was able to get us out of there safely, without a single person getting captured or worse. Because I helped save the pack, I earned some of their praise.” He snorted.
“But—”
He cut her off with a sharp chop of his hand. Willow fell silent at the angry motion.
“Oh, I had the opportunity to sleep with plenty of women there. It’s not like it was hard. Your father brought in dozens of them and drugged them up with booze and other stuff to make them easily pliable. They were falling all over themselves to get to me.”
He was sneering now as he insulted her father. Willow wanted to say it wasn’t him, but deep down, she knew him well enough to know he’d do whatever was necessary for his pack. If that meant providing them with easy women to calm them down, then he would do it.
“But I didn’t do anything with them. Do you know why?”
“No, I don’t know why, Mister I’m-Too-Good-For-All-Women. Why don’t you enlighten me?” Willow hated how pathetic her comeback sounded.
Aiden rolled his eyes. “I didn’t do anything, because they were all plain. They didn’t interest me.”
She sniggered. “Oh, and why is that?”
“Because they weren’t you.”
She froze. What? That wasn’t the answer she’d been expecting at all. Him saying he preferred respectable women, sure. Women who were more wholesome. Things that perhaps obliquely referred to her, that wouldn’t have surprised her. But for Aiden to come right out and say he didn’t want any of them because he wanted her instead? That was a stunner.
“You can’t expect me to believe that,” she said weakly.
Aiden just continued to gaze at her steadily. He never wavered while her eyes kept darting around the room, desperately looking for something, anything to fix upon that weren’t a pair of deep brown circles that drew her in like a bee to honey.
He was telling the truth. She couldn’t deny it any longer.
“An RRT jumped you?”
“Yes. They almost got us too. It was close there for a bit, but your father’s pack responded quickly. Quicker than I expected.”
Willow nodded. “Thank you for getting him out of there.”
She watched him smile weakly.
“Just him? Not the rest of them?”
“The rest of them are a bunch of useless assholes, Aiden. Don’t act like you don’t know that. I’ll take them or leave them.”
Aiden chuckled softly while looking over her shoulder as if to pretend one of them was there. She wasn’t falling for that though.
“So you really didn’t sleep with anyone?”
He shook his head.
Willow stood up, uncurling from the chair she’d been on, a sense of relief filling her body, leaving it all tingly and awake.
“I thought you’d been waiting all day for that party.”
Aiden pushed off the desk and stood up straight as well. “No, I was waiting for something else.”
“Really? For what?”
“This.”
He crossed the space between them in the blink of an eye. Willow wasn’t aware of them crossing the distance, but her shoulders hit the shelf of a bookcase and she gasped as he held her aloft, his lips nearly smothering her with the frenzied passion of their first kiss.
It was so hot. Willow wrapped her legs around him, forgetting that moments earlier she’d been furious with him. Her desire for the odd werewolf burned brightly, with the intensity of a laser. Her breasts swelled under her clothing as his hands held her hips tightly, preventing her from falling.
Aiden’s mouth, hungry and tender, was everywhere. Her lips, her jaw. Down her neck where he nibbled on the sensitive skin, drawing soft moans and even a hiss of delight when he bit down a little harder. Then along her collarbone, that so oft-neglected erogenous area that made her turn red, the blush flowing from her cheeks all the way down across her upper chest and through her breasts as well. She hated it, and that just spurred her on, making the flush deeper.
“Oh my,” Aiden remarked, pulling back to admire it, his voice throaty and full of testosterone.
“Stop it.”
He shook his head. Willow was dying from embarrassment, but he had the perfect cure. She tilted her head back and she let him kiss her some more as he held her there, his body pressed firmly against her, pinning Willow to the bookcase.
Holy fuck this is hot.
“So you’ve been waiting all day for that?” she gasped several minutes later, breathing heavily.
“Okay, maybe all week,” he confessed.
Willow giggled, leaning in to press her lips tenderly against his once more. Then she wiggled free of his arms, placing a hand against his chest.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, concerned he’d done something wrong.
“I just don’t want my father to catch us. We need to be more discreet in the future, that’s all.”
Aiden nodded. “Right. Good point. I just sort of acted on impulse there, sorry.”
She lifted a finger to his lips. “Don�
��t be. That was…worth it,” she finished softly, her mind drifting back to the way he’d just taken control of everything, including her.
“Am I forgiven?” he asked, whispering the words into her ear before gently tugging on her lobe with his teeth.
Willow hissed. “I suppose. But if I find out you’re lying, it won’t end well for you.”
Aiden smiled. “I would be worried, if I weren’t telling the truth. But I promise to always do that for you.”
“You’d better,” she said, letting her fingers drag down his chest, stopping below his belt, but above anything else.
Aiden inhaled sharply, but she went no further. Instead she just tossed him a wink and walked out of the study. Oh, he was forgiven, she supposed. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t above a bit of petty payback, like leaving him all riled up like that.
Besides, they couldn’t do anything further that night. Not with the pack home. Things would have to happen at another time. She could wait.
Maybe.
Eleven
Aiden
He awoke the next morning with a tightness in his groin, despite having spent some time in the shower alone after Willow had left him high and dry the night before.
It didn’t help that he’d dreamt all night about her soft porcelain skin, and just what he was going to do if he got his hands on her without the others anywhere nearby.
“This just won’t do,” he muttered to himself.
Another trip to the shower was in order it would seem. He heaved himself to his feet and proceeded to do his best to relax himself so that he could make it through the day.
It didn’t help.
By the time the end of the day rolled around and he got back home, Aiden wondered if he was going to be able to wait. His body was coming to life in a way he’d never known before. With the floodgates opened between him and Willow, he was now having a hard time shutting them. It had never been such a struggle to contain himself around a woman before.
Did this mean that she was his mate?
He wished things were clearer to him. Instead it was like trying to look into a muddy puddle while trying to see the bottom. It was impossible. Aiden knew that the odds of him actually finding a mate were near mythical. To find the one woman in the world that fit perfectly with his half-man, half-wolf person was astounding enough. That she might be found in the same city as him was extraordinary, and highly unlikely.
