Lone Wolf Dawn (Alpha Underground Book 2) (3 page)

But it sure felt that way.

Years later, when I’d needed a father, Harbor hadn’t been present. I’d ached to turn to him when I grew into my own skin and ran away from the pack to spend eight months wandering alone through outpack territory. I’d needed him again when I returned to my clan and slid into a new role, slowly learning to guide teenage shifters not much younger than myself. And I could sure have used his advice at the present moment as I strove to figure out a mate bond that left me alternately giddy with joy...and on the verge of fleeing in terror.

Still, I’d never picked up a phone to call Harbor because I’d known he wouldn’t come. When I was nine years old, my father had chosen Celia over me. And now he’d fled beyond my ability to follow.

We still have a mother
, my optimistic wolf whispered.

I only shook my head by way of reply. Because no matter what my inner animal thought, the one-body whose high heels were currently sinking into the sod before me was mother by blood alone. There was no point in poking my nose where it didn’t belong.

So I turned away from my father’s funeral even as I felt the electricity of transformation fill the air and heard my relatives howl out their eulogies to the clear blue sky. My wolf wordlessly yearned toward the possible companionship. But instead of pacing forward to join these family members who I barely recognized, I just retraced my steps back toward a shifter whose affections weren’t fickle and flighty, who cared for me with no strings attached.

I was plenty old enough not to need a parent. And I was better off without Celia in my life.

Hunter’s anger hovered over our hotel room like a lead weight. The puppies had been fed and washed and were now nestled down amid half a dozen pillows in the bathtub. We hadn’t heard a peep out of them for ten minutes, a sure sign that even Star was fast asleep at last.

Which meant my mate was finally free to release the pent-up frustration that had been building inside him during the entire drive home. “You were
right there
and you didn’t even bother talking to your
mother
?” he demanded. The uber-alpha’s amber eyes cut through my skin and made a beeline for my already aching heart.

Within my human body, my lupine half whimpered as the overwhelming aroma of frigid root beer splashed over us like an ocean wave tumbling a failed surfer toward shore. The effect was pure alpha compulsion, but my mate hadn’t put any intention behind it—only anger. Even so, I felt my shoulders bowing, my knees trembling, and the ground beckoning me to come closer.

The sensation pissed me off.

“Not that it’s any of your
business
,” I rebutted, opening my mouth with an effort. “But, no, I didn’t.”

I’d taken to letting my inner wolf hang out behind my eyes lately, but now I shushed her the same way I’d calmed the puppies moments earlier. And as my animal half disappeared from view, so did Hunter’s alpha compulsion. Abruptly, I was able to stand tall once more.

To stand tall and to march over to my companion, shoving both hands against his broad chest in a schoolyard show of aggression. “Playing top dog with your mate isn’t cool,” I ground out, expecting Hunter to apologize as he always had in the past when his wolf got the better of him and he slapped my weaker animal down.

Instead, the uber-alpha’s usually amber eyes glinted gold as he wrapped two huge hands under my armpits and lifted me up so we saw eye to eye. My feet kicked against nothing and I gulped. I liked to treat Hunter like my own personal lap dog, but the truth was that his overwhelming alpha dominance combined with his massive strength meant he could snap me like a twig if he felt like it. Maybe sass and backtalk wasn’t always such a smart move.

“Playing like you’re not my mate isn’t cool either,” Hunter rebutted after a long moment of tense silence.

Then his mouth smashed into mine and his hands slipped down to cradle my butt as I wrapped my legs around his waist. My mate’s proximity had flicked an internal switch from anger to arousal in an instant and I growled with pleasure as his tongue invaded my mouth, plundering and pillaging rather than easing into his usual gentle pleasuring.

Yep, my evasions of the L word earlier that day hadn’t been overlooked. Hunter was just as pissed as he was turned on.

Well, so was I.
Time to see if angry sex is as delicious as happy sex.

My back slammed up against a wall as we twirled through the air. I should have felt dizzy from the abrupt motion. But my eyes were still wide open and latched onto Hunter’s, a lifeline in the turbulent sea of our churning emotions.

The funeral, the puppy mill, my misspent childhood all fled from my mind as I grabbed Hunter’s hair in one fist, pulling him closer even as I fumbled at the clothes that lay between us. For all that was holy, what had he been thinking this morning when he donned a belt?

Luckily, my mate only needed one hand to hold me up now that my spine was sandwiched between his broad chest and the room’s cheerfully painted drywall. So his other five fingers were free to flick and twist and yank.

In seconds, both of our flies were open, my panties pushed to one side and Hunter’s engorged cock throbbing at my entrance. I was sopping wet with anticipation, shaking with desire, barely able to gasp around the passion that consumed us both.

But then Hunter paused and drew back, breaking the liplocked battle that I hesitated to call a kiss. Touching his forehead to mine, he closed his eyes and whispered, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to...”

Great. Of all the moments to squash his wolf....

So I took matters into my own hands, both literally and figuratively. “I’m
not
sorry and I
did
mean to,” I countered, wrenching myself down onto my mate’s member before he could stop me.

As always, Hunter filled me to bursting. But his sheer size wasn’t enough to still the aching neediness within. “Take me,” I growled to a bloodling who had regained his humanity at just the wrong moment.

For the first time since our first time, I thought Hunter might refuse my advances. My companion was in complete control as he held me aloft three feet above the ground, his broad hands and strong arms in charge of determining whether we ground together fast or slow or not at all.

As Hunter’s lips thinned into a hard line, I had a feeling he might be leaning toward not at all.

Confirming my hypothesis, my mate yanked me up off his cock and I gasped at the sudden emptiness within.
Uh uh, big guy
, I thought. Putting every ounce of strength I had into the gesture, I writhed
within his grip, wet folds skimming over iron hardness.

Now it was Hunter’s turn to growl. “We’re not done talking about this,” he muttered.

But I didn’t care. Because my mate had already surrendered to my need, ramming me back down around his hard length. The exquisite agony forced my eyes to squeeze shut as his manhood penetrated to the very core of my being.

Hunter was raw and rough and ruthless with desire. I was more animal than human as I responded in kind. We possessed each other in a frenzy, pounding, devouring, arching, erupting.

At last, sated, I sagged against his clad chest. Slipping fingers between the buttons of my mate’s shirt, I sought the bare skin above his galloping heart. Because despite the contentment of my body, a hard, melancholy knot remained in my throat that only skin-on-skin contact would ease.

Hunter was as present as ever by my side. But the tides were shifting, and I wasn’t sure even our mate bond would be sufficient to allow us to ride out the next wave together. Instead, I had a sinking suspicion that forces beyond our control would tear us asunder and shove us apart, leaving nothing to do but struggle to keep our heads above water as we stumbled toward opposite shores.

Sensing my changing mood, Hunter clenched me tighter in his arms. But despite the uber-alpha’s comforting proximity, I’d never felt quite so much alone.

***

I woke to complete darkness, the room chilled by an overactive air conditioner and my mate absent from our shared bed. “Hunter?” I whispered.

My inner wolf should have been able to hear his footsteps padding across the carpet toward us, but she was sound asleep. So I only noticed Hunter’s presence when the covers lifted and his long, lean body slid underneath to lie beside mine.

“Just checking on the munchkins,” he murmured, kissing my forehead as he encircled me in his arms once more.

“Were they alright?” I asked drowsily, nuzzling closer and feeling like a wolf pup in my own right. For all of Hunter’s passion and skill in the lovemaking department, this was my favorite part of shacking up—just lying by my mate’s side as his hands skimmed idly over my recumbent body.

I knew it was just my imagination, but Hunter seemed to run five degrees warmer than an average mortal. His fingers felt like flaming brands as they stroked my arms, my neck, my back, my hip. Tantalizing trails of sensation roused me and eased me in equal measure, and I forgot I was even waiting on an answer by the time Hunter spoke again.

“Star had climbed out of the tub and onto the toilet seat. Remind me to keep the lid down,” Hunter murmured.

It was too dark to make out the expression on his face, but it didn’t matter. In my mind’s eye, I could see the smile my mate was trying to hide behind feigned sternness, and my lips curled upward in reply. “Mmm,” I responded eloquently.

“I thought I might take them to Haven tomorrow,” he continued, referring to the current home of the pack I’d lived with for most of my life. Hunter didn’t have to elaborate on his thought processes because the solution was obvious. Haven’s leader was a bloodling himself and his pack consisted of a mismatched—but happy—band of oddballs. The orphaned pups would have a better chance of growing into fully functioning shifters there than anywhere else.

Still, the thought of being parted from the youngsters—and especially from Star—gave me a sharp pang of loss. I must have twitched beneath my companion’s gentle massage because his fingers paused as he asked, “Unless you want to keep them with us?”

Raise three traumatized bloodling puppies on our own when Hunter and I were still having trouble defining our own relationship? Rationally, I knew we weren’t up to the task, so I shook my head in negation. “No, we’ll take them to Haven.”

Now it was Hunter’s turn to hum noncommittally, and I regretfully raised myself up on one elbow so I could attempt to peer into his face. Unfortunately, my human eyes couldn’t make out so much as the outline of his body since my mate preferred pitch darkness for sleeping—another aspect of his bloodling nature that I simply accepted since it did no one any harm.

With no visual clues to go on, though, I was forced to ask my question out loud. “What’s wrong?”

“
I
can take the pups to Haven, but
you
need to go talk to your mother,” Hunter answered. Then, before I could argue, he pulled me closer and began stroking me into submission again.

It was hard to disagree while the bliss of my mate’s warm fingers roamed across tense muscles. So I lay back, figuring I could argue the point in the morning.

But Hunter wasn’t done speaking. I could count on one hand the number of times he’d mentioned anything about his past. Still, something about the anonymity of darkness must have called up his inner storyteller because Hunter’s deep rumble once again filled the air as I slid toward sleep.

“You might have guessed by now that my mother was a halfie,” my mate murmured. I would have thought I was dreaming if I hadn’t felt his breath teasing tendrils of hair around my ear. “Her pack put up with her,” he continued, “reluctantly. Even that acceptance stopped when she admitted she was pregnant with a human’s child.”

Once upon a time, there was a poor girl whose family treated her badly,
I thought, Hunter’s mother turning into Cinderella in my drowsy mind. I only realized I’d murmured the words aloud when my mate chuckled, smoothing down my mussed hair as he carried on with his tale.

“That’s exactly right, darling,” Hunter agreed. “But in this case, there was no fairy godmother. Instead, the young woman’s pack cast her out before her child was born. She turned wolf in order to survive.”

Visions drifted through my mind like dreams. A pack of mangy mutts, a stick-thin but glorious Mother Wolf, the acceptance and joy of group hunts. I was too relaxed to question how I could see the world through a young Hunter’s eyes, so I simply released myself into the experience.

Then an abrupt shift, literally and figuratively. Hairless human legs, the confusion of changing forms after a lupine life. A long run through pitch blackness at Mother Wolf’s heels, bare feet aching in a way lupine paws never had.

A strange two-legger opening a door, her aroma reminiscent of Mother Wolf’s but subtly different. Being ushered inside, the door shut behind me to keep Mother Wolf at bay.

Incalculable time lost to confusion, fear, anger. Then human words slowly changing from sound to meaningful expression.

“By the time I could speak with my aunt,” my mate murmured, “the choice my mother made for me seemed like the ultimate betrayal. I was a stupid kid, so I ran away. But not back to the wolf who birthed me. Instead, I struck out on my own.”

“Of course you were angry,” I murmured at last, tongue unruly with grogginess. “Your mother had
dumped you into a world that confused and scared you.”

In an instant, Hunter’s mood shifted to anger so strong I could
feel
the root-beer aroma pushing up against my skin. “
She’d done the best she could
,” my mate growled.

My muscles tensed in an instinctive urge to flee the danger. But then the uber-alpha forced his ire back down inside as he physically pushed the aroma away from my nose with a wave of one hand. “She’d done the best she could,” he repeated more quietly and gently this time around. “But when I finally got over myself and went back to find her, she was dead. Our pack of dogs was disbanded. I was too late.”

I couldn’t see my bed mate, but I could feel him as he unerringly clasped both hands around either side of my head. His touch was firm at first, then it gentled as he stroked calloused fingers across my unruly hair. “
That’s
why I’m asking you to give your mother another chance,” he whispered into the darkness. “She won’t be around forever and you never know when her time will run out.”

I thought he was done and my eyes were drifting shut once more when Hunter’s final words settled around me like a warm blanket. “I love you too much to help you make the same mistakes I’ve regretted for half of a lifetime,” he murmured.

My mate had invoked the L word, but I was too tired to protest. Instead, I fell asleep to the sensation of his warm lips gently pressing into my forehead, a happy smile imprinted on my face.