Escaping Monsters: A Reverse Harem Wolf Shifter Romance (Grayhaven Book 1)

by Rita Stradling

  ESCAPING MONSTERS

  RITA STRADLING

  &

  ALEXA B JAMES

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents and places are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Rita Stradling and Alexa B James

  Edited by Stories Matter Editing

  Cover Art by Rainy Day Artwork

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit this book in any form or by any means. For subsidiary rights please contact the author.

  www.ritastradling.com

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Elven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  ESCAPING MONSTERS

  Prologue

  Ten Years Ago

  So, this was marital bliss.

  My husband of eight days panted above me so hard I was starting to worry that he was having a medical issue, which would really suck as we were camping dozens of miles away from anything resembling civilization. Kane slid in and out of me in quick furious thrusts, and I suddenly had an image of his manly bits as a boxing glove, punching my cervix.

  “Baby, can we move around?” I asked as I attempted to rock my hips forward in with Kane’s thrusts.

  “I like you where you are, Teagan,” Kane panted as he pinned my hips down. His shoulder-length curly blond hair dripped sweat onto my face as he hovered just a little way over me. “Stay right…” he groaned, “Right there.”

  I gave up. I was beginning to understand those celebrities that got divorced immediately after their honeymoons. I was also a little afraid that Kane wouldn’t finish before all of the wetness dried up from my vagina like a sponge left out on the counter. It was getting a little uncomfortable down there. Why hadn’t I listened to my sister and brought lube camping?

  Kane and I are in love, I had said. We don’t need lube on our honeymoon. Sure, we needed lube at home, but gripped in the sweet passion of our marital bliss, we weren’t going to need some generic brand Pleasure Jelly.

  How wrong I was.

  What I hadn’t anticipated was the eighty-five mosquito bites making me itch in places I had yet to discover on my own body. I also hadn’t anticipated the rocks that seemed to always position themselves under my ass in our two-person tent. Who knew that hiking forty miles through the wilderness on your honeymoon would be so un-romantic?

  And, was that a bear?

  I lifted my head as I heard the sound of cracking branches and footfalls outside our tent. Holy fuck, there was a bear outside.

  Kane’s thrusts were really starting to become abrasive up in the deeper parts of my vagina, and I realized that a bear trampling through our campsite might be the perfect excuse to stop.

  I touched Kane’s arm. “Bear.”

  “Not now, Teagan, I’m going to cum.” He panted the words as he continued to impale his dick up against my cervix.

  “Babe, finish quick. There’s a bear. He might get our food.”

  As soon as I said it, I realized that it was true. Shit! The bear might get our food! And we only had a specific amount rationed for the rest of the trip. That was one thing that I realized on Kane’s chosen honeymoon, there was an unexpected weight loss component to it. That one he sprung on me. I guessed he thought it would be a great wedding present.

  It was our first fight as husband and wife. If that bear took the remainder of our food, I would hunt it down and kill it with my bare hands.

  Kane moaned out above me and pushed in deep, and I thanked all that was holy that finally there was a little lubrication down there. It was beginning to feel like he was taking a cheese grater to my vaginal walls.

  “You feel so good, baby,” he whispered as he collapsed on top of me.

  “Yeah. Uh-huh. There’s a bear,” I wheezed as his weight pressed me into the uneven rocks below. “There is a bear in our campsite.”

  “What?” Kane lifted his head, and I got a good look at him for the first time in about thirty minutes. Once again, I had to marvel how good looking he was even under the blue-green glare of our electric lantern. He had the kind of perfect, chiseled model-esque face that had women passing him their phone numbers and room keys while we were on dates. That, and he was a twenty-eight-year-old millionaire and semi-pro tennis player. And yet, he wanted to marry a broke twenty-seven-year-old coffee shop manager from Bakersfield. Not that I didn’t love every inch of myself, but our matchup was pretty much at Hollywood rom-com level. I knew that. Everyone at our destination wedding knew that. Only my sister thought I was too good for him, bless her.

  “That’s not a bear,” Kane said, still looking toward the closed tent flap. “It’s much too small. Maybe a raccoon.”

  “That would be even worse.” I wiggled my fingers in the air. “They have those dexterous little hands that can get into practically anything.”

  Branches snapped next to our tent.

  “It’s getting closer.” I tapped his arm anxiously. “We can scare it off.” When he didn’t move right away, I tapped him harder. “The food.”

  Kane groaned and finally rolled off of me. I felt around the tent desperately, looking for my underwear and shoving them on. As soon as I unzipped the tent flap and shone my flashlight out, two pairs of eyes reflected back at me.

  “Wait, Teagan.” Kane pushed up beside me to look out of the flap. “Let me go out first.” He grabbed for my flashlight, but I pretended I didn’t notice and switched it to my other hand

  “Look. It’s two large North American Timberwolves.” I tapped Kane’s leg. “Can you feel for my camera over there?”

  “Get back in here, Teagan. I’ll go deal with it.” Kane pulled on a pair of jeans, grabbed a coat, and pushed past me. The moment he was outside, he grabbed for the tent flap and furiously zipped me in.

  “No, Kane...” I leaned down and felt around for my camera. “Seriously. We’re more likely to be attacked by a raccoon. There have been like two recorded attacks from healthy, uninjured wolves in the last hundred years.” My hand circled the round, smooth camera case. I unzipped the tent and lifted my digital camera. “They’re going to get spooked and run away any second now.”

  Now a total of four large adult wolves stood between the trees maybe a dozen yards away, and they didn’t so much as startle at Kane and my appearance. Kane stood feet away from the group with his hands out.

  “Teagan, I said stay where you are. That’s an order.”

  An order?

  Rolling my eyes, I climbed out slowly, clicking images as I went. The night was cool, and I immediately felt my skin prickling into gooseflesh as I slowly treaded over the underbrush. The wolves’ pelts shone in the patches of moonlight. Not wanting to scare Kane any more than he already was, I stayed a good distance away and zoomed in as far as I could, snapping photos of the
majestic animals as they stared straight at me.

  The shushing and churning sound of a river grew louder as I walked, and I peered down, making sure I wasn’t getting too close to our campsite’s drop off. We’d camped about a hundred yards from a cliff over a river, and I knew I was hugging the cliffside close, but moonlight streamed in through the trees from this angle, catching the wolves as they turned to watch me. I tested the stability of the ground under me and then took one more step. After snapping a series of pictures, I turned back, only to find Kane inches away from me.

  “Whoa,” I said, grabbing his arm. “I couldn’t hear you over the river. Look.” I held up my camera, showing my most recent shot. The photo had moonlight streaming through the trees and dappling two of the wolves. I turned the camera back to picture mode, thinking this would be an awesome moment to get a full moon photo of my new husband.

  Holding up the camera, I said, “Say cheese!” I peered through the lens, only to find Kane glowering with an almost frightening look on his face. I lowered the camera. “Everything okay?”

  “Card and Sons Pencils is bankrupt. It’s been heading that way for a while.” His voice was monotone, almost completely without inflection.

  Holy shit. He had definitely kept that one from me. And, he’d promised to support me while I pursued my dream of being a photographer. It sucked. But maybe he’d been self-conscious and depressed about it.

  “We’ll figure it out, baby,” I said after a prolonged silence. “Hey, if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s making it on next to nothing. Let’s just worry about all of that when we get back to our regular lives.”

  “I don’t need to worry about it. I came into some unexpected money recently,” Kane said, and then a warm smile blossomed on his lips. “You understand.”

  “Oh, that’s great.” His drastic shifts in mood were a little disconcerting, but I already had my camera raised, so I started to ask, “Can I take your…” I trailed off as one of the wolves stepped out of the tree line, coming straight toward us. “Kane. A wolf is heading this way.”

  Obviously, all of my reading nature magazines was for shit because the wolf was bounding straight at us, and it was huge. I grabbed Kane’s arm. “Come on! We have to climb a tree.”

  Kane didn’t budge. Only mere feet from us now, the wolf’s body morphed, growing and stretching. Bones bubbled out, and skin smoothed, until somehow, I wasn’t looking at a wolf anymore. Instead, a man peered at me from all fours. His eyes were a vivid green, and they seemed to shine in the moonlight. He was massive and muscular. Short dark hair stuck up around his face—and his face was one I recognized.

  “Triple cappuccino, dry,” I said, and then I raised a hand and covered my boobs. “Holy shit. I know you.” It probably wasn’t the standard way to react after seeing a wolf turn into a man before your very eyes, but this guy was one of my regulars at Cup’o’Joe. He’d been coming in every morning for about a year. He always rattled off his order like a drill sergeant, paid in cash without giving a tip, and then watched me from the counter as I made his drink as if he expected me to spit in the cup. I’d never successfully engaged the guy in a conversation, and half of the time, he’d take a single sip and toss his drink in the trash can on the way out the door. The guy was a dick… and, a werewolf?

  “What’s going on? Is this some kind of trick?” I looked between the men. “Kane?”

  Triple cappuccino guy stood up, towering over me. Across the counter, the guy seemed a hell of a lot less massive than he did now, plus, he was as naked as the day he was born. As I was standing only in a lacy pair of panties, I suddenly felt extremely vulnerable.

  “What the fuck?” Triple cappuccino pointed a thick finger toward my crotch and his gaze snapped over to Kane. “I didn’t pay you to fuck her, Michael. We had an agreement.”

  For one confused moment, I was thinking that this werewolf had mistaken my husband for someone else, his name was Kane, not Michael, but then the man I knew as Kane raised his hands. He nodded to me and said, “You paid me to marry her and take her on a honeymoon. Do you really think Teagan wouldn’t have grown suspicious if I refused to have sex with her?”

  The fuck?

  I didn’t give myself a second to consider the full implications of my husband’s words. My instincts kicked in, and I ran straight for the tree line. Undergrowth cut at my feet as I leaned into a run, and a branch scraped along my arm. Within seconds, I heard the thudding of footsteps behind me. Growls ripped through the night, and I glanced over my shoulder to see a glimpse of glowing green, predatory eyes. I lunged to the side, and the sediment under my feet suddenly gave way.

  I tried to get my feet under me, but there was only a ledge and then nothing but open air. I screamed as a tree root smacked into my ankle, and pain sliced through my leg as it snapped the wrong way. My stomach flew into my throat, and I just managed to inhale a deep breath when my back slammed into the water’s surface.

  My whole body felt as if it was shattering, and then I sunk under the dark water. The river was churning in every direction, ripping me one way and then the other. I fought upward and broke the surface, managing to gasp in one giant gulp of air, before the current pulled me back under. The ice-cold flow held me down like a massive hand, and my lungs ached.

  A blinding explosion of pain seared into my arm and ripped me up to the water’s surface. I gasped in air, looking around only to see that a spike from a log was impaling my arm and blood streamed from the wound. The log had yanked me up like a fish on a hook. I blinked at the injury, somehow unable to feel it.

  Screaming, I fought the immense drag of the passing water and wrapped my other arm over the log. It slammed into my stomach and wiggled in the current. All I could do was scream, horrid, ragged cries as the river did everything in its power to rip me from my log. Ahead, an outreaching tree hung into the frothy flow, and I kicked furiously with my one working leg. The river swept me closer, and my log hit with a loud crack. The spike yanked out of my arm, and the world went black. I woke with a jolt, caught in the limbs of the tree.

  Dragging my savaged arm and broken leg over the branches, I climbed toward the trunk. The merciless river burbled past, seeming to laugh at me as I clambered onto the thick wooden limb that grew horizontally over the river. Halfway across the branch, there was a loud crack. I was weightless for a moment, and then I plunged back under water. The river ripped me back and forth, and then I slammed into a hard surface. Every one of my ribs seared, and I opened my eyes to see that I had collided with a boulder. It felt as if the impact had shattered my ribcage. Reaching up, I grabbed onto the rock, found a groove and pulled myself onto the stone. I gasped in breath as I lay there on the cold stone outcropping. Using all of my remaining strength, I reached up and dragged my body a few more inches onto the rock.

  Every labored breath threatened to be my last. The world faded away, returning with a rush of water and searing pain, only to disappear again.

  “How the fuck did she survive all this way?” an unfamiliar male voice said from close by.

  Immediately, I thought it was Kane. Kane would save me. And, then my slow, groggy mind remembered that Kane had been pretending all along. Kane had made a deal with Triple Cappuccino, probably to save Kane’s pencil company that was bankrupt because it was a fucking specialty pencil company, not exactly a hot seller.

  “It doesn’t matter how she survived. It only matters that she did.”

  It was Triple Cappuccino’s voice, but all I saw was a bleary swirl of color. Hands grabbed me around my waist and knees and lifted me up. Pain exploded through every inch of my body.

  “She’s lost too much blood, Alpha,” someone said from a short distance away. “And it looks like the crashing against the rocks have battered all of her internal organs. She’s not strong enough to survive the bite.”

  “She’s strong enough.” Triple Cappuccino said from just above me, then he lay me down on the cool, slick rocks. His fingers pushed my wet hair from my
face and then traced down my cheek. His thumb brushed over my lips. “We’re your pack now. You’re never going to escape us again, Omega.”

  I had been saving up all of my energy, and I used it to bite down on his thumb. Instead of pulling away, the man just watched me until the strength of my jaw failed. “Fuck you,” I wheezed. “I’d rather die than go with you.”

  He grunted. “That’s a lie. You’ll never stop fighting to survive. It’s in your nature… you’ve already proven that. And so long as your heart beats, you’ll belong to me.”

  There was a rustling sound over me, and then sharp teeth pierced the length of my wrist. Liquid fire flashed through my limbs, and my vision went white before subsiding into darkness.

  Chapter One

  Ever since the day I became a werewolf ten years ago, fear has had a specific taste for me. It tasted metallic, like sucking on a penny. Right now, slouched in the back row of a mostly deserted bus, somewhere in Northern California, my mouth tasted like I swallowed a whole piggy bank.

  The bus seat under me vibrated with the telltale rhythm that signified we were decelerating on the highway. My heart raced and palms began to sweat. Something was very wrong. This wasn’t a scheduled stop.

  I had memorized every town on the route from Colorado to the border of Canada, and we shouldn’t have been stopping for another hour.

  No one else on the bus had seemed to notice something was wrong. They didn’t even look up as we pulled off the highway, all of them either sleeping or playing on their phones.

  We approached a city sign at a reduced speed, and I raised my digital camera and adjusted it to night-mode just in time to snap a picture as we passed. In the photo, “Welcome to Grayhaven” was illuminated in the bus headlights as the sign hung crooked on its post. Something was written under the welcome, and I narrowed my eyes to examine the blurry photo, but the battery light on my camera blinked on, and the screen went black.