by J. L. Wilder
“Oh, okay, good. Now you’re making friends with them.”
Fiona didn’t answer. Friends. Was that what she and Owen were?
Absolutely not. A friend was someone you liked. She didn’t like Owen. She didn’t like him a bit.
Did she?
One thing was for sure. She had been right in thinking she couldn’t allow her pack to find out what had happened between her and Owen the night before. She would have to take that secret with her to the grave.
Percy let out a sigh. “This is crazy,” he said. “This whole plan is crazy, Fiona. And if things start to go off the rails, I mean even a little bit, I’m taking everyone with the sense to come with me and getting the hell out of this state.”
He turned and walked back toward the house, leaving her alone in the yard.
Chapter Nine
OWEN
Owen allocated Fiona’s bedroom to the twins and Joel, in the hope that having a private space to themselves would keep them from becoming too agitated by the presence of wolves all around them. Who knew—maybe they would even come to see this place as enjoyable. Maybe, if he allowed enough time to pass, they would discover that they liked it here.
Anything was possible, right?
He himself set up camp in the Hell’s Wolves’ living room, along with Damon, Dusty, and Angus. The last thing he wanted was to share living quarters with Damon right now, but he knew it was the wisest possible choice. Damon annoyed him, but it was better to keep the rebellious element in his pack as close as possible. It gave Owen the best chance of keeping Damon under his control.
Wes and Carla, the two wolves who had shown them into the house, gave Owen a pile of blankets, and he and the others set about arranging them on the living room floor. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to use this space for much else while we’re in here,” Owen said apologetically.
“Don’t worry about it,” Carla said. “Fiona knows that. Besides, we never did that much in here anyway.” But her eyes flickered to the TV set against the wall, and Owen could tell she wasn’t being truthful.
“The important thing is that we get the Feral Fangs out of our territory,” Wes said. “We can put up with just about anything in the short term.” He grinned toothily, and Owen decided that maybe he liked this wolf. At least there was one person who didn’t seem too put off by the fact that their packs had temporarily blended.
“We’ll leave you alone to get settled in,” Carla said. She grabbed Wes’ arm and towed him out of the room. Almost definitely going somewhere to talk about us, Owen thought. He couldn’t really blame her, though. After all, the Wild Grizzlies were definitely going to talk about their hosts in their absence.
“This isn’t so bad,” Dusty said, once the wolves were out of earshot.
Damon scoffed.
“Can you stop making that sound?” Owen said. “You did it outside, too, and it’s rude. They’ve welcomed us into their home.”
“I wouldn’t call it welcoming,” Damon said. “It’s obvious they don’t want us here.”
“Is it?”
“You saw the way they looked at us when we rolled up,” Damon said. “Not like we took time out of our lives to come here and bail them out in a fight against a dangerous enemy, that’s for sure. More like something they scraped off their shoe.” He shook his head. “They’re putting us up because we didn’t kill their she-alpha when she came up to our place alone. That’s all it is. They owe us one.”
“You can just call her an alpha, you know,” Owen said without thinking.
Everyone around the room stopped moving.
“Are you defending her?” Damon asked.
Owen felt a spike of anxiety, as if he were about to be caught doing something he shouldn’t. But that’s crazy, he reassured himself. There’s only one thing I did that I shouldn’t have done, and there’s no way they could know about that. I didn’t tell anyone, and I’m sure Fiona didn’t tell either.
“So what if I’m defending her?” he asked, trying to sound as if it were inconsequential. “She’s a good leader. She’s been fighting for her pack. I’m an alpha myself. I know how it feels to lead a pack that doesn’t give you the respect you deserve.” And he shot a pointed look at Damon.
“What’s wrong with calling her a she-alpha?” Angus asked. “Isn’t she one?”
“It’s just, you know, probably really hard for a woman to be an alpha,” Owen said. “It’s probably hard for her to control her pack. How would you feel if we had a woman for an alpha?”
Damon snickered. “That would never happen.”
“Why not?”
“Women aren’t alphas, come on. It’s stupid. That’s just not...what an alpha is.”
“So if you call her a she-alpha, every time you say it, it’s like you’re simultaneously saying she isn’t what an alpha is,” Owen explained. “You’re saying alpha, but not really. You’re cutting her legs out from under her. And that was fine at our house, but we’re guests here. We’re not going to talk about her that way in front of her own pack.”
Damon stared. “You are defending her.”
“So I’m defending her. So what?”
“Why are you doing it?”
“Because she’s a good leader, and helping her is the entire reason I brought us here,” Owen snapped. “And you’re really starting to get on my nerves.”
“You’re really starting to get on my nerves,” Damon countered. “I don’t want to sit here and listen to you defending a wolf.”
“Is this because she’s a wolf, or is it because she’s a woman?”
Damon stared. “Why would I care that she’s a woman? I think it’s weird for a woman to be an alpha, but it’s not like she’s my alpha.”
“Yeah. Okay. Right.” Owen forced himself to calm down. That had almost been a bad slip. If Damon knew that he and Fiona had been intimate, he would definitely be angry about it. But since Damon didn’t have that knowledge, there was no reason for him to be upset about the mere fact that Fiona was a woman.
He shouldn’t still be thinking about this.
He should have put it behind him, left it upstate when they’d ridden south. He wasn’t going to continue his physical relationship with Fiona, that was for sure. It was the worst possible idea. And so he shouldn’t still be thinking about how intense that evening had been, how irresistible her body had been. He shouldn’t hear the sounds of her ragged breathing as she came every time he closed his eyes. He shouldn’t be fantasizing about what he would do to her if he had her in his arms again, how he would force her to submit to his authority, how she would beg him for her release.
It had felt so powerful, taking her like that. He had felt stronger than he ever had in his life. He had felt sure of every movement he made, knowing exactly what he needed to do to bring her to heel. And it had worked.
If only controlling the pack was that satisfying.
She had loved it too. He knew she had. She had been frustrated that she’d loved it so much, but there was definitely a part of her that had enjoyed surrendering control to him.
She can push me around as much as she wants in public, he thought, laying back on his blankets. We both know who’s in charge when we’re behind closed doors.
And then he was forced to shake off the thought. We’ll never be behind closed doors again, though, he told himself firmly. Not like that, anyway.
OVER THE NEXT COUPLE of days, Owen was determined to commit to his promise to himself and to stay away from Fiona.
In practice, it was harder.
She had decided that both packs should spend time training together in physical combat in order to prepare to take on the Feral Fangs. Owen didn’t oppose this idea—he thought she was probably right. They did need to learn how to fight together if they were going to have a chance against their rivals.
But it was complicated. Nobody really wanted to shift in mixed company, and nobody was comfortable with the other pack shifting either. Damon flat refused to get i
nvolved in the fighting if anyone was in wolf form, and though Owen could have ordered his second into battle, that was an order he didn’t want to give.
So they fought in their human forms, each of the bears matching up against a member of the wolves to test their skills. All too often, the matchups resulted in an alpha-on-alpha pairing.
As Fiona slammed Owen to the ground for the third time in a row, he struggled to control his attraction to her. It was all too easy to remember what this had been like when they had both been naked, when she had been throwing him into his bed instead of the ground. She was sweaty and her clothing clung to her, and she smelled absolutely delicious in the fresh autumn air.
“You’re not trying,” she snarled. “You’re pulling your punches.”
Please, he thought. You want me to try to neutralize you? I think we both know I could pick you up and play you like a fucking instrument if we weren’t surrounded by our packs right now. The sounds I’d get from you, girl...
He shook his head, trying to clear it. He couldn’t think like that. He was letting himself get distracted. “I’m not pulling my punches,” he protested.
In answer, she slugged him hard across the jaw.
He couldn’t hit her. He couldn’t bring himself to hit a woman, even if she was an alpha. But he didn’t have to take that. He grabbed her wrist, pulled her arm behind her back, and pushed her chest-first into a nearby tree, pinning her for the first time that day.
She struggled a little against him. “Let me go.”
Owen closed his eyes. Her hips were pushing back into him in a very arousing way. “No,” he said, and permitted himself one short rocking motion against her, creating beautiful, delicious, intoxicating friction between them.
She froze.
Owen waited.
She canted her hips backward. Inviting.
Owen panted.
We can’t, we can’t, we can’t...everyone was out here, for God’s sake. Everyone could see them. But he wanted her like air right now. He felt wild, insane, untamed. All he could think about, suddenly, was how little time he had spent with his hands on her breasts the other night. Now he was bent over her shoulder, looking down at their ripe fullness and feeling like he might lose his mind.
“Let me go,” Fiona barely breathed. “Someone will see.”
She was right. He knew she was right.
He released her. But as he did so, he let his hand trail along the length of her arm and up to her ribs, briefly—so briefly—squeezing one breast.
God, that was hot.
She inhaled sharply and stepped away from him. “Done for the day,” she called out to the others. “Take some downtime, and we’ll all reconvene at dinner, okay? We need to start making a plan for how we’re going to move against the Fangs.”
A congenial babble broke out in the yard as the group dispersed, wolves gravitating back toward members of their own pack, bears doing the same. They were relieved to be done with each other for the moment, Owen knew.
Fiona turned to him. “I need to speak to you,” she said quietly.
He shrugged expansively, feeling a bit giddy. He had clearly affected her. She was angry. He felt strangely proud of that. “So talk to me,” he said.
“Not here.”
“Okay, fine. Where?”
“Walk with me.”
She turned away without looking back to confirm that he was following and stalked off into the woods. After a moment’s hesitation, Owen shrugged and followed. If it came to a real fight, he thought he could take her, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t the direction this was going. She was angry with him, sure, but not that angry.
They walked until the house was out of sight, lost in the trees. Then Fiona turned and looked at Owen.
“In the front yard of my house,” she said, her voice tight. “Where anyone could see us.”
“Nobody saw anything,” Owen said.
Fiona inhaled deeply. Owen got the feeling, suddenly, that she was bringing herself under control.
“Take off your clothes,” she said quietly.
Chapter Ten
FIONA
Owen stared at her. “What?”
“You heard me.” She fought to keep the tremor out of her voice. Even setting aside the fact that he was much bigger than she was, there was also the fact that she definitely shouldn’t be doing what she was about to do, for any number of reasons.
She had gone off alone in the woods with a bear. If any of the rest of her pack had hinted that they might try such a thing, she would have issued a blanket order against it immediately. Why can’t I seem to stay away from him?
She knew why. It was because of the way he talked to her, as if she was his to command. A part of her was determined to show him how wrong he was, while another part of her had never been so turned on in her life. She felt as if she were losing her mind.
“I’m not going to take off my clothes in the middle of the woods,” Owen said.
“No, you’re just going to feel me up in full view of both our packs, is that it?” she asked. “You know, it’s bad for you too if they find out what’s going on between us. Maybe even worse for you than it is for me.”
“Nothing’s going on between us.”
“No?”
“Why is it bad for me?” he said. “It’s not bad for me. Embarrassing for me, maybe.”
“Because it’s going to make you look like the only reason you brought your pack here was so you could keep getting laid,” she said. “It’s going to look like you were willing to put them at risk just so you could get some action.”
“Nobody would believe that.”
“I definitely wouldn’t discourage the rumor, if it got started.”
“That wouldn’t make you look good either,” he pointed out. “You’d look like you couldn’t persuade me to come with logic and reason, so you got me here with sex.”
“I don’t care,” she said, heart pounding. “Just so I got you here, it doesn’t really matter how I did it. Especially if you help us run off the Feral Fangs. Once that’s over, nobody’s going to care how I made it happen. Nobody on my side of the line, anyway. They might even respect me for it.”
“I don’t think so,” Owen said.
“I don’t care what you think,” Fiona said. “Strip.”
He scoffed. “I’m not getting naked for you.”
“Yes you will.” She stepped in close, knowing that she was gambling, knowing that she was at risk of humiliating herself. But she couldn’t allow him to think that whatever was happening between them was going to be all on his terms. She couldn’t let him think he could just start something up in front of her pack like that.
There would have to be consequences.
She couldn’t give him an order. She didn’t have that power over him. But she thought she just might have another power.
He inhaled sharply as she entered his space. She didn’t touch him at all, but her hands went to the button on his jeans. With two fingers, as easily as if she’d snapped, she flicked it lose.
His hips bucked toward her involuntarily. Fiona felt a surge of satisfaction. This was going to be easier than she’d imagined.
“Strip,” she said quietly.
He hesitated only a moment before finding the hem of his shirt and pulling it over his head.
“All of it,” she said, indicating the pants he still wore.
He shoved them down and stepped out of them.
Fiona stood back, taking in the view. He was naked before her, his chest heaving with exertion, as if he had just run a marathon. His pupils were dilated. He looked drunk, dazed. She felt a bit drunk herself, high on the power she so clearly had over him. He thought he was in charge, she thought to herself, feeling deeply satisfied, but he isn’t. I am.
“You’re overdressed,” he said, his voice husky with desire.
“I’m fine,” she said.
He growled in frustration.
“Turn around,” Fiona said. �
�I want to see all of you.”
“No.”
“Turn around, I said.”
“Take your shirt off,” he countered.
“You turn around, and then I will.”
He turned on the spot, making rather a meal of it, flexing his muscles as he went. By the time he faced her again, Fiona had shed her shirt and unhooked her bra. She stood topless, facing him, feeling the balance of power begin to shift back in his direction.
“Let me touch you,” he begged.
She should say no. She should hang onto what little control over the situation she still had. She should put her shirt back on and walk away, leave him out here to deal with the fact that he had knuckled under at her command. Let him process who was really in charge.
He licked his lips, seemingly involuntarily, and she couldn’t help thinking of that wide, rough tongue on her body.
She nodded slowly.
He closed the distance between them, pulled her close, and lowered his mouth to her breast. He kissed around the nipple reverently, then drew it into his mouth.
She stifled a cry, arching her back. A moment later, a big, meaty palm came up to cover her mouth.
She snaked her hand downward to find his cock. He throbbed as she took hold of him, stroking gently, rhythmically. It wasn’t about power anymore. It was about need. She could feel the desperation coming off of him in waves, heightening her own wanting.
We’re not going to be able to stop doing this, she thought helplessly. As long as we’re living in proximity to each other, we’re not going to be able to keep our hands off of each other. We drive each other too crazy. We’re going to have to keep sneaking away together just to keep from losing our minds.
Right now though, somehow, that didn’t seem like such a bad thing. Right now, Fiona thought she could have spent hours, maybe even days, alone in the woods with Owen, learning the ways he liked to be touched, reveling in the feel of his mouth on her body.
She barely noticed the moment when her pants came off. All she knew was that suddenly she had been turned around in his arms so that her back was to him. Her cheek was up against the rough bark of a tree, just as it had been in the yard when they had been fighting. But this time, when she rocked her hips backward against him, she felt him slip inside her.
