by J. L. Wilder
But Damon merely shook his head. “We both know that isn’t true,” he said. “You’re good, Owen, but you’re nothing special. You almost lost to the she-alpha five different times today.”
“I’ve told you not to call her that.” He felt wild, suddenly, half panicked. Hadn’t he ordered Damon not to call Fiona a she-alpha? He couldn’t remember. If he had, Damon shouldn’t have been able to do it.
What did that mean?
“She was in the woods,” Joel said. “She went in after you. I saw her. What happened between the two of you in there?”
Owen took a breath and tried to steady himself. “It’s really not any of your business,” he said.
“It’s not our business what you do with the alpha of a wolf pack?” Damon asked. “Would you say that if one of us was going off alone with one of the Hell’s Wolves?”
“Of course not,” Owen said. “But you must be able to see the difference. We’re the alphas. It’s our responsibility to plan the attack on the Feral Fangs together, and we have to make time to talk to each other and hear each other’s ideas.”
“And you have to do that all alone in the woods?” Damon asked.
“We can’t very well do it here,” Owen said. “Not with all of you around sniping at each other all the time. We have to spend every spare minute babysitting when we’re here, making sure you guys and the wolves aren’t killing each other. God forbid we should try to discuss actual attack plans around you. It would probably devolve into all out war.”
“We wouldn’t do that,” Joel protested. “We would listen. Maybe we could even help.”
“Don’t bother, Joel,” Damon said. “He’s just trying to distract you by making you feel like you can’t be trusted. That’s not what’s going on here at all. He’s the one who can’t be trusted. He’s the one who’s been sneaking off with a wolf, a she-alpha.”
“I told you,” Owen said angrily. “I haven’t been sneaking off. It’s important for me to make time to talk to her. We’ve been coming up with our plan.”
“Okay, fine,” Damon said. “What’s the plan, then?”
Shit.
“You were in the woods with her for hours,” Damon said. “Joel saw you leave ages ago. He told me himself. We’ve been waiting here on the porch ever since, so we’d be the first ones to know when you came back. You were in there with her all this time. If you went in there to plan, you must have come up with something. What are we doing?”
He couldn’t answer the question. There was no way. The only thing he could possibly do would be to lie, and it would be obvious that he had lied as soon as they settled on a real plan of attack.
“None of this is any of your business,” he managed, but he didn’t sound convincing, even to himself.
“Tell me you’re not having an affair with her,” Damon said.
Oh, God. There was no way to keep it a secret now. There was no way to keep the others from finding out. Everything was going to fall apart.
And Fiona will never forgive me.
The thought stunned him. Why had his mind taken him there? Of all the things that might happen now, surely being forgiven by Fiona was the least important?
But it really didn’t feel that way, somehow. The anger he knew she would feel at him for failing to keep the secret from his packmates hung over him like a black cloud.
“Sit down,” he said, pointing to two of the porch chairs.
Joel sat.
Damon struggled. Owen watched him fight the order. But in the end, he couldn’t resist it. He took the other seat.
Owen thought he might faint with relief. I still have command, then. I’m still his alpha. “I forbid you from talking to any of the others about this,” he said.
“Then it’s true?” Joel asked.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s true. Never speak of it to anybody else.”
But it wouldn’t be enough. He could see the truth of that in Damon’s eyes. His second was angry, angry enough to rebel. He hadn’t found an avenue to rebellion yet, but he would find one if he was given the opportunity.
There was only one way to keep them safe. Only one way to keep this from turning into a brawl between the Wild Grizzlies and the Hell’s Wolves, a violent battle with no leadership that would likely claim lives.
“You have to leave,” he said. “Both of you. You have to leave now.”
Joel’s eyes widened. “What do you mean? You’re sending us back home?”
“I can’t have you here,” Owen said. “You might give something away.”
“You’re choosing that she-alpha over your own pack?” Damon snarled.
“I’m doing this for the pack,” Owen snapped. “We’re facing a war with a hostile enemy. They don’t need to question their allies right now. They don’t need to question their leader right now. We can discuss all of this after the Feral Fangs are dealt with, but for now, both of you have to leave. Leave quietly, and right now.”
He walked into the house, leaving Damon and Joel on the porch, and forced himself not to look back.
Chapter Twelve
FIONA
Over the next couple of days, Fiona began to get the feeling that things were starting to come apart.
The first blow was the loss of two members of the Wild Grizzlies. There was no discussion and no warning; they were just gone one morning. Fiona sat through the entire breakfast waiting for them to appear, but they never did.
The Grizzlies had clearly discussed it already. None of them looked surprised by their packmates’ absence. She thought they looked a little unhappy, a little taken aback, but she couldn’t blame them for that. If two of her wolves had gone missing, she would have been deeply bothered by it too.
She tried to see it as a good thing. With two of the Grizzlies gone, their numbers were even—five bears, five wolves. But it wasn’t a good thing. Not really. She wanted numbers, no matter which pack they were from. She wanted them to outnumber the Feral Fangs. She couldn’t be sure that they would, and losing two made her even less certain.
“Where did they go?” she asked Owen when she finally got him alone in the woods later that day. She couldn’t wait for him to answer—her hands were already underneath his clothes, exploring, finding the now familiar sensitive spots that she knew would light him up. But she needed to ask her questions all the same.
“I sent them home,” Owen said.
“Why? Why would you do something like that?” She stepped back, shocked by his answer. “We need all the hands on deck that we can get, Owen.”
“I know.” He hesitated. “They found out. About us.”
Fiona inhaled sharply. “How?”
“Just by paying attention.” He sounded miserable. “They saw us go off into the woods together one too many times, I suppose, and then they guessed. They know me too well.”
“What do you mean, they know you too well? This can’t possibly be something you’ve ever done before.”
“No, I’m not saying that,” he said. “I just mean they know that I wouldn’t go off into the woods with you without taking someone with me or letting someone know where I was going and when to expect me back if I was actually afraid of you. It let them know that things weren’t as they seemed. That I was hiding something.”
“And you couldn’t make up a lie?”
“I tried,” he said. “I couldn’t come up with anything they’d believe. I had to send them away, or they would have acted weird around the others, and then it would only have been a matter of time before the truth came out.”
She sighed. “We have to stop this, don’t we?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, yes, logically, we do, but...I don’t know if I’ll be any good to the pack if I’m trying to resist you at the same time, Fiona. It’ll be all I can think about. You know?”
“I know.” She felt the same way. Even now, even in the face of this new problem, she was already working her hands beneath his shirt again. “It’s like you’re a drug
,” she whispered, pressing her forehead to his chest, inhaling the scent of him. “You’re terrible for me, and I know it’s all wrong, but...I have to keep going. Quitting would wreck me in a way I’m not equipped to deal with right now.”
“Yeah.” He was loosening her pants. He pushed them down past her knees, turned her around, and entered her easily, weighing her breasts in his hands. “I’d be a mess without you. People would definitely notice that...oh, yeah, fuck, do that again.”
She repeated a roll of her hips and he moaned happily, curling his body over hers. He cupped a palm between her legs, and for several minutes the conversation stalled as they lost themselves in each other.
Once they were sated, Owen lowered them both gently to the earth, pulling Fiona close so that her head rested on his shoulder. She knew they were going to have to resume their discussion soon—they would have to figure out what they were going to do—but for now, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to lay here with him, to smell the scents of the woods and listen to the wind in the leaves of the trees.
She never felt closer to her wolf self than she did during sex.
What must it be like for Owen? she wondered idling, tracing her fingers across his broad chest. What’s it like to be a bear? Does he experience the world the same way I do? Does it feel the same for him, reaching inward, finding his wild side?
Someday she would ask him. Someday, but not today.
“What are we going to do?” he asked her.
She sighed. “We can’t stay away from each other.”
“No,” he said. “We really can’t.”
“And we can’t come clean to the rest of our packs.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he agreed. “Joel and Damon were pretty pissed when they confronted me about it. The last thing we need is for everyone to blow up at us. It could destabilize us, and we need to be unified right now. We’ve got a battle ahead.”
“That’s why you sent them away, isn’t it?” Fiona asked. “You didn’t want to destabilize things.”
“I didn’t know if our packs would be able to continue working together if the truth came out,” Owen said. “They’re barely managing it now. And also...I thought it would be bad for us as leaders. It might be hard for us to maintain control.”
Fiona nodded. “You have a good point. I’ve worried about that too.” What would Percy say if he knew that she was fucking the Wild Grizzlies’ alpha, if he knew that she was so addicted to him that she felt unable to stop?
It would confirm all the worst things he and the others had ever thought about women in the alpha role.
SHE EXPECTED THAT THINGS would settle down as the days went by and people got used to the fact that two of the bears had gone home, but they didn’t.
The bears seemed unable to grow acclimated to their new surroundings. Fiona had asked Carla to try to get to know the two girls in Owen’s pack, Riley and Nova, hoping that the three women could find common ground, but Carla returned from each effort to talk to them looking surly and uncomfortable.
The physical training sessions were going fairly well, Fiona thought, but she had no way of knowing for sure. She had never fought with bears before. She didn’t know anything about their style. But more to the point, they still refused to shift for their training sessions.
“They’re not going to know who’s who when we get into battle for real,” she complained to Owen. “They won’t know which wolves are us and which are the Feral Fangs. That’s how people get hurt. They need to get used to seeing us in that form.”
“They don’t trust you in that form,” Owen said. “And I don’t blame them. I hardly trust you in that form.”
“Come on, be serious.”
“I am being serious. Wolves can kill bears.”
“And bears can kill wolves. And humans can kill humans by sneaking up on them in their sleep. If we were trying to kill you, it would have come to blows already.”
“I don’t know,” Owen said. “We’re all a lot closer to our baser selves when we’re in animal form, right? Resentments could flare up. It’s not safe, not for any of us.”
“We’re going to have to try eventually,” Fiona said. “If we don’t, none of this is going to work.”
“Okay,” Owen said. “You go first. You stay human, and we’ll shift.”
“You know I can’t ask my pack to do that.”
“You see the problem.”
“I’m not asking you to stay human!”
“Listen, we’ll get there,” Owen said. “Give it a few more days.”
But the next morning, Fiona woke up feeling as if she were underwater. The flu, she thought unhappily, her stomach roiling. Even the thought of Owen’s body brought her no pleasure today. She pulled the pillow back over her head and tried to fight the nausea that was swimming through her.
Eventually, she fell back into a cool and blissful sleep.
When she woke again, the sun was high overhead. Carla came into the room bearing a tray of soup and a can of soda. “Hey,” she said quietly. “Do you think you could eat?”
“How did you know I was sick?”
“You told us this morning. You don’t remember?”
“I guess I was really out of it, huh?” She reached out to accept the tray, finding as she sat up that she felt quite a bit better.
“Yeah,” Carla said. “We were worried. Even Owen was worried.”
Fiona almost spat out her sip of soda.
“It was weird,” Carla said. “He’s barely spoken to anyone all day. Maybe he thinks Percy is going to run him off our land if you’re not around to interfere.”
“That must be it,” Fiona managed.
“You look like you’re feeling a little better, though,” Carla said. “You’ve got some color back.”
“Yeah,” Fiona said. “I think I’ll be up for dinner.” In truth, she felt a little bit pathetic for having spent the whole morning in bed. It was clear to her now that whatever was wrong with her had been no big deal, and that she had overreacted.
At least I was able to sleep it off, she thought as Carla left the room. If I’d been laid up long term, Percy probably would have told the Wild Grizzlies to clear out.
As it was, though, the only thing she had lost was a morning of training. Well, that and an opportunity to steal away with Owen. She hadn’t felt up to it this morning, but thinking of him now stirred her to her core, and she knew that she really was on the mend.
I wonder what was wrong with me? she thought. Food poisoning? But if anybody else had gotten sick, Carla would have mentioned it. And I didn’t eat anything the others didn’t.
The flu? Maybe. But if it had been the flu, she had gotten over it remarkably quickly, even for a wolf.
But what else was there? What else could it have been.
She took another sip of her soda.
And almost choked as the truth hit her like a ton of bricks.
She tried to process the math in her mind as quickly as possible, running the numbers again, hoping each time that they wouldn’t add up in the way that she already knew they would. But she might as well have wished for wings. As soon as the idea had occurred to her, she had known it was right. There was simply no other explanation that accounted for her symptoms.
And God, she had no one to blame but herself. She had spent so much time worrying about being caught in what she was doing that she had put all her energy and focus into that side of things. She had been endlessly careful. She had told herself that over and over. Careful not to be seen. Careful not to be followed. Careful not to make too much noise. Careful not to give anything away in conversation when she spoke.
Well, she hadn’t been as careful as she should have been. She had overlooked one very important safety measure.
And now—there was no denying it—she was pregnant.
Pregnant with the baby of an alpha bear.
She let her head fall into her hands, despairing. Could this get any worse?
> Chapter Thirteen
OWEN
The fact that Fiona was sick was a distraction Owen couldn’t seem to get past. It was highly inconvenient—he needed to be focusing on training the packs, getting them ready for the coming fight. He was the only alpha in the field today, and though they didn’t seem to like it very much, the wolves were at least listening to him.
They weren’t the problem. He was the problem. His thoughts lingered upstairs with Fiona, worrying over what might be wrong with her.
I’m being incredibly stupid. So he hadn’t been able to drag her into the woods today, or be dragged there by her. What was one day? She would no doubt be better tomorrow. Shifters healed quickly. And Owen imagined they’d have great sex to make up for the day off.
So what was he so worried about?
He brooded, walking through the forest alone after hand to hand combat was finished, finding his way to familiar places he had visited with Fiona. The truth was, he was worried about her in the same way that he would have worried if a member of his own pack had been sick. Not because he wanted something from her, but because he wanted to know that she was all right.
Do I love her?
The thought appeared in his head unbidden, and he shied away from it—to fall in love with a member of the Hell’s Wolves would be terrible, destructive and damaging, and to fall for an alpha would be unproductive when it came to building the strength of his own pack. To do both at once...
Well, he wouldn’t have blamed Damon for trying to overthrow him.
But as soon as he’d had the thought, it had felt true, right, like a puzzle piece slotting into place. He was restless and worried today because he cared for her. He wanted to know that she was all right.
He was overwhelmingly relieved, therefore, when he came back to the house and saw her sitting on the porch steps, staring off into the distance. She was still a bit pale, and he suspected she was still on the mend. But she was up and about.
Of course, that solved only one of his problems.
She was healthy, but that didn’t help with the fact that he was maybe, probably, almost definitely falling in love with the worst possible person he could have fallen in love with.
