by J. L. Wilder
It was only a few hours’ drive back home. The pack must have heard them coming, because everyone was out in the yard when they pulled up, assembled and waiting to greet the newcomers.
Percy stared openly as Fiona swung herself off her bike. “They actually came,” he observed.
She felt a faint stab of pride. He hadn’t believed in her, but she had proven him wrong. “Yes,” she said. “This is Owen.” He had just disengaged his own engine beside her. “He’s their alpha. Owen, This is Percy, Wes, Leo, and Carla. My pack.”
Owen frowned. “This is all of them?”
“I did tell you we needed help,” Fiona said. “Did you think I came to you for the fun of it?”
He didn’t answer, but he flashed her a meaningful look, and in that moment she could have killed him.
“What are they doing here?” Percy asked.
“They’re here to help us fight off the Feral Fangs,” Fiona said. “You knew I was going to ask them for help.”
“But I didn’t know you were going to bring them back with you, Fi.” He sounded exasperated. “Where are we supposed to put seven bears? The house isn’t big enough for all of us?”
“They can sleep outside,” Carla suggested.
A snarl ripped out from somewhere behind Fiona. “Maybe you can sleep outside,” one of the bears suggested. “We’re here as guests doing you a favor, remember?”
“No one is sleeping outside,” Fiona said. “We’re shifters, not animals. And the bears are right, Carla. They are our guests. They’re here at my invitation. They can have my bedroom and the living room to split up between them as they see fit.” She glanced over her shoulder at Owen. “Will that be all right?” she asked. Much as she hated to show deference in this moment, it was preferable to letting a fight break out.
“That’ll be just fine,” Owen said. “We’ll figure it out. Thank you.”
“And where are you going to sleep?” Percy asked Fiona. Not as if he cared for her well-being. It was a challenge.
“I’ll move into your room,” she said.
“There are already four of us in there,” Wes pointed out. “There aren’t any extra beds.”
“So I’ll sleep on the floor.” Fiona was frustrated. Were they going to be difficult about every little thing. “We need the Wild Grizzlies here,” she told her pack. “We need their help. We’re not going to make their time here unpleasant, any more than we can help it.”
Nobody said anything. Fiona thought she heard one of the bears scoff, as if to say there was no avoiding unpleasantness while the twelve of them were crammed into one house. She ignored it, and so did Owen, but Fiona secretly thought whichever bear had voiced dissent probably had a point.
“Wes,” she said, “can you show the Wild Grizzlies to my bedroom and then to the living room please? And get them something to eat or drink, if they’d like it. Then leave them alone to settle in.” She turned to Owen. “I’m afraid there’s no door to the living room, but we have a sheet of particle board in the garage that we can put up in the doorway. Leo will bring it inside for you.”
“Thank you,” Owen said.
The bears followed Wes into the house. Carla hesitated, then went in after them. Fiona had expected that. She wouldn’t want Wes to be on his own with a pack of bears. Leo turned and headed for the garage. Fiona thought he would probably take his time about the chore he’d been given, wanting to avoid their guests as long as he possibly could.
A moment later, Fiona and Percy were alone in the yard.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked him.
He sighed. “Well, I think you’re insane.”
“But you already thought that.”
“No I didn’t,” he said, surprise crossing his face. “I never thought that. Not until you brought a bunch of bears home to stay with us. I thought you were, you know...”
“Incapable of leadership?”
“No, Fi, please don’t put words in my mouth, okay?” He sighed. “I thought you were too caught up in proving you could lead. I thought that when the time came to make the hard choices, you might do something stupid because you wanted to prove yourself.”
“And now?”
“Well, I just...never imagined stupidity on this scale.”
“Percy. You knew I was going to the Wild Grizzlies. If you had such a problem with it, you could have said something before I left.”
“I did say something,” he said. “You know I did. Don’t try to rewrite history now. And I had no idea you were bringing them here with you. You held that back intentionally, didn’t you? You didn’t tell us, because you knew someone would object.”
“Don’t talk to me that way,” she said sharply. “I’m still your alpha, even if you don’t approve of my decisions.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and said nothing. It was technically obedience, but it was a far cry from compliance.
“You need to get on board,” she told him. “This is happening.”
“You said you were riding up there to talk to them,” he said. “You said you were going to see if they’d be willing to help. Not to ask them to move in with us.”
“They’re on our side, Percy.”
“They’re bears, Fiona!” he exploded. “Bears kill wolves.”
“Wolves kill bears,” she pointed out.
“Wolves kill bears when they’re in the majority. Wolves kill bears when it’s a big pack against a single bear, or a cub, or something like that. They’ve got numbers on us. Did you notice that? There are seven of them, and five of us. And you invited them into our house like it was nothing.”
“I brought them here to fight wolves,” she said. “The fact that they’re good at it is a plus for us.”
“And what makes you think they’ll distinguish between the Feral Fangs and us?” Percy asked. “What makes you think they’ll even be able to, when we’ve all shifted and we’re in the middle of a fight? What if one of them kills one of us by mistake?”
“Are you afraid of them?”
He shook his head slowly. “They’re bears,” he said again. “I have a sensible, rational fear. And the fact that you don’t seem to have it scares me a lot more than any bear pack ever could.”
“They’re not going to hurt us,” she said.
“You don’t know that. There’s no way you can know that. You don’t know what’ll happen in the heat of battle. Hell, you don’t know what’ll happen over breakfast tomorrow.”
“I trust them,” she said. “I trust the alpha, anyway. I got to know him a little.”
“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 involved 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 th
e 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.
