“I dinnae have to. That’s a disgusting thing for anyone to do, especially one of my kind.” Those steel eyes bore into mine. “Especially to such a beautiful woman.”
A beautiful woman. I wanted to fold my arms and laugh off that comment, the way Bianca did whenever a man fell over her with obvious flattery. But I wasn’t Bianca, and I could already feel the flush creeping up my neck and spreading across my cheeks and neck. No one had ever called me beautiful before. It wasn’t a word that could possibly belong to my broken body.
The heat in my veins flared against my skin. “I … you … don’t say things like that.”
“Why not?”
“It … I … just don’t do it.”
“You’re a very odd woman.” The Scot studied my face in a way that made me feel utterly naked. “I cannae figure you out.”
“Look, you don’t need to figure me out or worry about me. I’m not going to reveal your secret. I know more than anyone how important it is that you wolves stay hidden, although Robbie’s little display might take a bit of explaining. I just want to forget this whole night ever happened. I promise I’ll leave town as soon as I can and you can get back to whatever it is you and your friend Robbie here are trying to do in Crookshollow. So you can just go back to the party now and—”
“Do you want to get out of here?” His eyes danced over my body, before focusing on mine once more. My stomach fluttered.
“You mean, leave the party? With you? Why?”
The Scot shrugged. “Parties are hard work when you dinnae really ken anybody. I thought … maybe you and I could go for a walk and ken each other.”
He’s smiling at me. He looks hungry for more than just flesh. Why is it lighting my whole body up like a Christmas tree?
I opened my mouth to say no. I was in charge of this party. I had to go into damage control mode, get the thing back on track somehow. I couldn’t be outside, alone, with a werewolf—
“Yeah, sure.”
Um, what? Hello mouth, it’s me, your brain. Asking what the hell do you think you’re doing?
I’d gone crazy. Those grey eyes had destroyed all rational thought. It was as if some magnetic force drew me to the Scot, my whole body begging to close the distance between us.
“Aye, you’ve made a poor wolf very happy.” He held out a hand, and I took it. As soon as our skin touched, a jolt of electricity shot through my arm, surging in my chest. His fingers tightened around mine, and the electrical charge circled through my body. My heart skipped in my chest. Even if I wanted to, there was no way I’d be able to pull my hand away now.
I didn’t want to, not one bit.
I let the Scot lead me out into the garden. A cool breeze brushed against my bare shoulders. The wolf removed the cropped jacket he wore, and laid it over my shoulders. Underneath, he wore a crisp white shirt and waistcoat that accentuated his broad shoulders. The edges of tattoos peeked from his cuffs and collar. The kilt slung low across his narrow hips. Around his neck, a small coin hung from a leather chain.
My fingers itched to run down his body, to unbutton his shirt and discover the hard muscle beneath. Where was this coming from? I never thought about men like this unless I was alone in my room with my Rabbit and a Benedict Cumberbatch DVD.
I have to stop thinking like this. Even if he wasn’t a wolf, which he is, he knows about my leg, which means he couldn’t possibly want me. Look at his face, how satisfied he looks. He doesn’t feel the weird churned energy the way I do.
Does he?
A set of steep wooden steps led down into the back garden, which backed right down to the edge of the forest. I moved down them sideways, which was easier on my prosthetic. At the bottom, the Scot adjusted his grip, knitting his fingers into mine. The warmth of his hand sent another shot of heat from my fingers straight to my chest.
“I don’t think I introduced myself,” he said, as we strolled down one of the cobbled garden paths. Strings of solar fairy lights bordered the flower beds, casting a warm glow over us as we walked away from the house. “My name is Irvine, from the Baird pack of Aberdeen.”
“Willow.” I managed to choke out. The name still sounded odd on my tongue, but after a month in Crookshollow I was getting used to it. “Willow Summers, formerly of London.”
“It is a pleasure, Willow.”
How long … how long since I’d held hands with another person … since I’d felt the excitement and anticipation of an unspoken promise, of the possibility of a kiss. I knew exactly how long – four years, seven months, twenty-one days, since Curtis broke up with me.
Not that I was counting.
Irvine led me across the garden, navigating through the maze of beds as if he knew exactly where he was going. He moved slightly ahead of me, keeping a slow pace that was easy for me to match. At the edge of the garden, he walked down a final set of steps with me, until we stood right on the edge of the forest.
Down here, the noise from the party faded into a steady hum. The rolling lawn and garden beds gave way to gnarled roots and pools of purple primroses. The waxing moon – only a few days away from full – shone down on us, casting Irvine’s strong features in a cool blue glow. I knew I should be terrified of standing with a werewolf so far from the safety of the crowd, but with Irvine’s fingers tingling against my skin, I felt about as far from terrified as it was possible to feel.
I was exhilarated.
Irvine turned to me. “You are a dream,” he said, those grey eyes wide with wonder and desire.
Before I could react, his lips found mine, hard and urgent. A shudder of delight coursed through my body as he parted my lips and his tongue claimed my mouth.
I tried to pull away, terrified of what he’d discover if we went further. But then I remembered … I’d already shown him my prosthetic. And he was still kissing me. He still wanted me.
God, it felt so good to be wanted.
Especially by this man, with his tight muscles and deep eyes and husky Scottish brogue.
Overcome by the draw of Irvine’s body, I rose to return the kiss. Our lips seared against each other, drawing the heat around us. His hands seemed to be everywhere – touching my cheeks, tangled in my hair, cupping my neck, caressing my hips …
I’m kissing a werewolf.
My mother’s voice burned in my ears, echoing the warning she gave me every time I asked about my father. You cannot trust a werewolf, Carol. That animal nature may seem attractive, but it will only lead to heartache when he loses control, like the animal he is.
Irvine’s hands slid over my body, and Mum’s voice faded away. All that existed was Irvine, his touch searing my skin, his tongue dancing with mine, his hard chest pressed against mine. His body heat radiated through his clothes. I longed to strip away the layers between us and collapse into him.
All around us, the air crackled with energy – a heat that burned against my skin and drew out every touch, every sensation to its absolute height.
I closed my eyes, sinking deeper into the kiss, losing myself in the heady wolf scent … and in my mind, Curtis’ face appeared, his mouth set in a firm line, his eyes wide with shock and disgust.
That’s disgusting, Curtis’ voice burned against my skull. I can’t fuck you. I’m never going to get hard staring at a stump.
No. I tried to shove the image away, but it was too late. The words pounded in my ears, pushing out all the fire that Irvine had stirred up within me. I wrenched away, stumbling back as my prosthetic limb slid over the uneven ground. I grabbed onto a tree trunk to steady myself, and tried to shuffle my foot back to steady ground.
Irvine reached for me, but I dodged his hands and slipped back, collapsing against another tree as my prosthetic foot hit a gnarled root. My hands and knees burned as they scraped against the bark, and my leg screamed in pain as my stump sheared inside the socket.
“I can’t do this,” I gasped, turning away so Irvine wouldn’t see the tears brimming in my eyes as I tried to stand up.
; “Willow,” he growled, his voice rough with desire. He reached out for me again, his hand circling my waist.
No. Don’t touch me. Don’t make me believe that things could be different.
I tore myself from Irvine once more, leaned hard on my left foot, and managed to propel myself to my feet. I fled back across the garden as fast as my prosthetic would take me.
2
Irvine
I stared after the retreating woman, every muscle in my body screaming at me to follow her. But I ken that look on her face – it was a look that said she needed to escape. I ken that feeling well.
I just wish like hell she didn’t want to escape me.
My body burned with desire for her. It was more than just lust, although there was plenty of that. And no wonder – Willow Summers was fucking gorgeous. It was more than the fact that she ken what I was, because I still hadn’t quite got to the bottom of how that could be. It was way more than the fact I wanted to find out who’d taken her leg so I could rip their throat out.
A surge of burning energy rolled through my veins, and I knew exactly what that meant. Every werewolf did. It was the biological connection tying me to my fated mate.
Willow was the one I’d been waiting for, the partner I would love and protect for the rest of my life. And everything I ken about her so far told me I was one lucky guy.
Finding one’s fated mate was pretty rare. In my own pack, the Bairds, there were only five mated pairs, and only two were what we called fated – possessing that unique connection that meant they were perfectly in sync. Weirdly, the Lowe pack whom I was supporting in Crookshollow contained six fated pairs. That was almost unheard of – but then, everything about the Lowe pack was unconventional.
I rubbed my arm, where the heat still surged in my veins. Willow’s intoxicating scent swirled around me. Not even the sickly scent of the primrose bushes on the edge of the forest could extinguish it. My fated mate, right here in Crookshollow.
Now that I ken she existed, I had to figure out what, if anything, I was going to do about it.
The timing could not have been worse. Of course I had to find my mate now, right on the cusp of the most important task I would ever complete in my entire life. The whole reason I’d come down to Crookshollow and aligned with Caleb Lowe’s unorthodox pack was because we were planning to reveal the existence of shifters to the world. My whole life I’ve fought against the idea that our kind had to live in the shadows, without options or opportunities, all because of some misguided ancient belief that we couldn’t openly coexist with humans. It was an earth-shattering, worldview imploding course we’d undertaken together, one I believed in with every hair on my wolfish body, and I couldn’t afford any distractions.
Even if they were earth-shatteringly beautiful brunettes who bit their lip and hid a world of hurt behind their dark eyes.
I sucked in a deep breath, drawing in the scent and taste of her. My cock stirred against my leg, telling me just what he thought about Willow’s sudden appearance in my life.
Down boy. I exhaled, pushing out Willow’s taste, expelling her. Time to get serious. Even if Willow Summers wanted me, which she clearly doesn’t, I can’t be with her and do my duty. Fated mate or not, the plan is more important.
Besides, I should be more on guard. I was too distracted by her pretty face to even ask her how she ken I was a werewolf. That just doesn’t make any sense, unless there’s more she’s not telling me. Is it a coincidence she’s turned up now, right when Caleb’s reputation is starting to grow? Maybe not. She could be dangerous.
Oh, she’s dangerous all right. I licked my lips, relishing the lingering taste of her.
Time to stop dreaming and get back to that party. I’ve got bigger things to worry about than one human, even if she is the most interesting person I’ve met since I arrived.
I took one last, lingering look at the path down which Willow had fled. Half of me wished she was waiting there, the moonlight dancing off her silky brown hair, biting her lip in that way that made her utterly irresistible. But she wasn’t. Of course not. If I’d been through what she had, I’d never get involved with a werewolf, either – fated mates or not.
Willow Summers, if only things could have been different, I would've given you everything your heart desired.
* * *
When I re-entered Primrose House, Caleb ran up to meet me, his usually jovial features set hard. Caleb Lowe was the alpha male of the Lowe pack, and my ally, and he didn’t need to speak to tell me he was spitting tacks over Robbie’s accidental shift.
Caleb and I had actually grown up near each other in the forests near Aberdeen, in rival wolf packs. Caleb’s stepfather, Douglas Maclean, ran A-class drugs through the city and across most of Scotland. My father – Jonas Baird, alpha of our pack – was his biggest rival, until the day he was shot by a gamekeeper while taking a shortcut to deliver a shipment. After I took over as alpha of our pack, I got out of the drug trade, but that meant conceding a lot of power to the Macleans. Caleb and I had come up against each other in turf wars between our packs, but it was always clear to me that neither he nor his stepbrother Robbie really wanted to commit the crimes Douglas forced them into. They were trapped by circumstance, just like me.
When I heard that Caleb had left his stepfather to return to Crookshollow to take back his birth father’s ancestral lands, I ken that he would become a worthy alpha. At the same time, his mother came to me with the story of the Benedict Ring, an ancient Lowe-family artefact that contained unmentionable power. She wanted the same thing I did – freedom for all shifters. She convinced Caleb and I to form an alliance and find the ring, so that we could use its power to free all shifters.
Even though we’d spent most of our lives as rivals, Caleb and I made a good team. We were both tired of living in the shadows, of being forced into the sidelines of society, of having shifter crimes go unpunished and shifter victims ignored under the banner of secrecy. We wanted freedom for our people, and I ken as soon as I saw his face that Caleb believed Robbie had just blown our chance.
“I’m going to kill him,” Caleb growled, his usual jovial features twisted into a nasty scowl. He balled his hands into fists at his sides. “This is the single stupidest thing he’s ever done, which is saying a lot. He’s cost us everything.”
“It was idiotic,” I agreed. “But I think there might have been mitigating circumstances.” I doubted the image of Bianca and Willow kissing would leave Robbie any time soon. It was definitely permanently burned into my memory, but for entirely different reasons.
As I recalled the image of Willow’s lips pressed against Bianca’s, my cock stirred to life. No. Don’t think of Willow now. You have to forget about her. Caleb’s right. We have a huge problem on our hands.
“I don’t care how upset he was. This could destroy everything, and we don’t even have the ring yet.”
At the mention of the Benedict Ring, Caleb’s scowl deepened. He’d entrusted the hunt for the ring to Robbie, and I knew he was regretting that decision. After several weeks of research, we were no closer to having the ring, which meant all our plans were currently stalled until we had it in our possession.
While I agreed with Caleb that we needed the ring sooner rather than later, I also needed to diffuse him before we had a second agitated wolf shifting tonight.
“You Lowes, so dramatic.” I picked up an open bottle of champagne from the sideboard and took a swig. The sickly sweet alcohol did little to calm the fire rushing through my veins. “We can fix this. We just need to control the story—” I glanced up, just as a man in a tiger costume rushed by, waving his smartphone at a friend of his who wore a capelet covered in black feathers. An idea leapt into my head. “It’s easy. We need to make everyone believe this was some kind of performance art. If anyone’s gonnae buy that, it’s this crowd.”
Caleb clapped me on the shoulder, his face lighting up with excitement. “That’s perfect. It’s exactly how Ryan got away with fighting I
sengrim in the middle of his exhibition opening. I knew there’s a reason I let you hang out with us.”
I grinned. “I thought it was my rugged good looks.”
“I’ll get the pack to spread the word that it was just a publicity stunt.” Caleb leaned against the heavy banister, some of the tension in his face dissipating. “Of course, I can’t find Robbie or Bianca anywhere. We’ll need them to confirm this if we’re going to pull this off.”
“Maybe they’re making up,” I said, raising an eyebrow.
Caleb shook his head. “I don’t even want to know. For Robbie’s sake, I hope not. I warned him this fake-marriage was a bad idea, and you know how much I hate being right all the time. By the way, where did you go off to? I saw you run outside. I could've done with this revelation of yours twenty minutes ago.”
Had it only been twenty minutes since Robbie changed? I rubbed my arm, where the heat from my connection with Willow still burned against my skin. It was what your fated mate did to you – burned you inside and out. I already felt as though I’d known Willow for days, for weeks … that kiss alone seemed to last for hours. Or maybe that was just my own wistful thinking. “I went after Willow. You ken, the wedding planner? She was a bit freaked out.”
“What did you say to her?”
I paused. I should tell Caleb that Willow ken about the existence of werewolves, and that she was my fated mate. But he was already so agitated, it would just give him one more thing to worry about. And besides, I didn’t want to go telling Willow’s secrets. I couldn’t tell Caleb what had happened without mentioning her prosthetic leg, and that was not my story to tell. Instead, I shrugged. “I told her it was a publicity stunt, to promote Bianca’s art house. That’s where I got the idea.”
“She bought it?”
“Oh, yeah.” I thought of Willow biting her lip. “She bought it hard.”
“Good. Let’s find the others. We need to get this sorted.”
I followed Caleb back inside the ballroom. This time, I saw it in a completely new light. When I’d first entered the room at the beginning of the night and seen the skull decorations everywhere and scantily-clad aerialists hanging from silk ribbons secured to the chandeliers, I’d thought it was classic Bianca. Now, I realised Willow’s hand was everywhere – she’d taken Bianca’s crazy ideas and pulled the whole thing together in no time at all. The creativity and organisation required to pull an event on this scale off … my mate really was something special.
Wedding the Wolf: A wolf shifter paranormal romance Page 2
