Wilding
Authors: Erika Masten
Copyright
© 2014 Erika Masten
ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED
Erika
Masten
Contact:
[email protected]
Website:
http://erikamasten.com
Blog:
http://erikamasten.blogspot.com
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Published
by Sticky Sweet Books. This book contains material protected under
International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint
or use of this material is prohibited. Without limiting the rights under
copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
on, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without
the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above
publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to actual
persons or events are purely coincidental.
Warning: Explicit content.
Intended for mature readers only. All characters depicted herein are 18 years
of age or older, and all sexual activities are of a consensual nature. This is
a work of erotic fantasy. In real life, please protect yourself and your lover
by always practicing safe sex.
Erika
Masten
H
e was perfect in every way:
bigger, stronger, faster, smarter than he had any business being. The ultimate
male specimen. Kim couldn’t stop watching him; she was making a career of it,
quite literally. Of all the absurd things to do…. She had fallen in love with a
wolf.
Okay, well, not in a weird, bestiality kind
of way, thank heavens, Kim thought as she lowered her heavy, Forest
Service-issued binoculars to scribble a few hurried notes onto the hardbound
notepad she always used in the field. And damn but it was a good day for it,
being out in the rocky, wooded Sierra Nevadas, on the western slopes where the
trees grew thicker and taller and greener than on the Mojave side. Between
about six thousand to ten thousand feet in elevation, a girl could have
forgotten how much of Central California was a baking hot, scrubby desert made
fertile only through impressively extensive irrigation canals distributing the
lifeblood of dying glaciers farther and farther south.
Catching movement from the corner of her
gray eyes, Kim brought her binoculars up again quickly. Her free hand steadied
her teetering notebook and pen on her bare knees. Had to love a job that let
her wear shorts on the days she wasn’t confined to the ranger station doing
paperwork or helping out with staffing the permits desk. The olive green cargo
shorts might not have been the best color or style for a girl on the heavier
side, but her wolf didn’t seem to mind. These days, he seemed to watch Kim as
much as she watched him.
Like he was doing right then. The movement
she’d seen, making her wonder if he was done devouring the hare he’d caught
that morning and was ready to go hunt down another, had actually just been the
massive gray wolf stretching out on a huge slab of granite for a rest.
“You’ve earned a little laze, haven’t you,
217?” Kim muttered under her breath, then lowered her binoculars just long
enough to puff out her bottom lip and blow back the loose wisps of wavy brown
hair that had escaped her ponytail and her uniform cap. “You ran three miles
catching that meal.” Most wolves wouldn’t have chased small prey more than a
mile, mile and a half. Any wolf but 217 would have lost that hare once the
element of surprise was gone—a quick kill or no kill at all.
Wolf A217, that was his name, or the name
hikers and tourists and biologists like herself had for him from North Carolina
all the way to California. He had roamed hundreds of miles since the first
report of the huge gray wolf a few months back, earning something close to
urban legend status for his size and the wide dispersal of sightings. More than
a few of her fellow biologists disregarded the accounts from citizens of a
two-hundred-pound lone male wolf trekking westward across the United States
like some kind of canid retiree seeing the sights. After all, people
exaggerated, didn’t know their directions, mistook colors in twilight or from a
distance, and had a hard time judging size without manmade standards of
comparison on hand. Kim had been expecting to see a wolf maybe fifteen or
twenty percent larger than normal, at best, if Wolf A217 wandered into
Kingswood National Park at all. And when he did…. Wow. He was twice the wolf he
was supposed to be.
“If you were only a man.” She chuckled. “If
only, if only.” As a human, he’d have been over six feet tall, surely, with the
musculature of a triathlete, considering the normal routine of a
wolf—running up scree-covered slopes, swimming rivers, hunting all manner
of prey as the apex predator he was. Despite Wolf A217 being an oddly luxurious
dark gray—and not all gray wolves were—Kim always imagined Man A217
with brown hair, a little on the longish side, trailing wet down the back of
his neck as he strode naked from the river.
A cracking twig behind Kim made her jump.
She bonked herself in the brow with the binoculars as she looked down just as
her notebook and pen slid off her lap. Heart tapping out a wild, panicked
rhythm against the inside of her chest, Kim stood and whirled… on the squirrel
skittering and bouncing through the underbrush like a hyperactive fur ball.
Even realizing what had caused the noise,
it took Kim a full two minutes of deep breathing to get her pulse
and her
libido
under control. There was nothing like a good Man A217 fantasy to
sidetrack her from her work and keep her addle-brained the rest of the day.
“Jesus, Kim,” she said, removing her hat to
wipe her damp forehead with the back of her arm. “Lay off the ice cream at
night, lose some weight, get a boyfriend, before you start believing you can
hear 217 answering you when you talk to him.” Like that,
any of that
,
was ever going to happen.
Squirrel or not, it was still a little
unnerving being startled like that. What if it had been the bear that had been
getting aggressive with campers down at the lower campsites? Or worse, what if
it had been Northrup? Maybe he wouldn’t have been able to read her mind and
write her up for impure thoughts about a poor, simple canid, but her supervisor
still would have found something he could have used to dress her down. He was
that kind of scary good at being passive aggressive, sometimes omitting the
passive part entirely.
A couple of the other female staff back at
the station kept telling Kim it was because the square-jawed, handsome jock of
a supervisor couldn’t handle the idea that he was so attracted to her, to a
short little chubby girl with round thighs and puffy knees and chipmunk cheeks
when she smiled. Indeed, there had been a time, right after Daniel Northrup had
started working at the park, when she had gotten the feeling he fancied her.
She’d caught his gaze skimming her body and a rising bulge in his pants more
than once. Now the only thing he raised around Kim was his voice.
Whatever the reason, Northrup made it his
mission to rain on Kim every single day she worked. He assigned her the oldest,
most broken down 4x4 they had, refused to let her sign out a tranquilizer gun,
interrogated her every week about her timesheet, and was riding her ass
constantly now for a full report on Wolf A217.
“217!” Kim gasped and swung back around,
but the shady spot on the rock was empty. The ranger frowned to herself, at her
recent distractibility. “Only very lonely little fat girls fall in love
imagining wolf men, Kimberly,” she scolded herself, knowing she owned every
pejorative in that statement, before collecting her scattered belongings and
starting her hike back to the 4x4. If she was lucky, when she got there, the
engine would even start.
F
rom the deeply mottled shadow
of the trees, from hardly more than leaping distance away, he watched
half-crouched and ready as the alarmed human female glanced back and forth over
one shoulder, then the other. He never wondered anymore why the sight of her,
healthy and full-bodied, and the salty sweet sweat-and-berries smell of her
always brought strange sounds and thoughts to mind. No other animal in the
woods brought its own language up inside his head. The wolf looked at her and
thought
woman
and
ripe
and
mate
in sounds like those that
came from her own pink mouth when she was… was
talking
to herself. He
never wondered anymore, because his instincts told him when he’d gotten here
after roaming for so long that this woman was what had drawn him on, always
toward the setting sun. She wasn’t prey, and yet she was, not in the way of a
rabbit or a deer but in a way that a soft, fertile, unmated she-wolf was prey
to a male about to make his claim.
When the woman had started and spun toward
movement behind her, he had jumped from his rocky post to meet the danger. Now,
she looked forlorn back toward the place he had been. Her inability to smell
him and sense his nearness, to realize how close he was, just proved how much
this little she-beast needed his protection.
His protection…. Another strange instinct
that lingered with her tempting human scent in the woman’s absence. Like the
dreams. He settled alone in the cool dirt of a depression at the base of a
towering redwood and braced himself for sleep, for dreams that changed his body
into one like hers but different. His dream body was male, much larger and
harder than hers, and with the unique ability to shift back and forth between
wolf and man—to even take a form in-between the two. In his sleeping
mind—in something he had begun to call memories—he battled others
like himself, other wolves who were not exactly wolves, not
only
wolves.
And some fought with him, fought for him, as their alpha. Words that tasted
familiar, that carried feelings of pack loyalty and ferocious hatred, and of a
creeping danger that drew closer the longer he remained so near his human
woman, hinted at a life he could not quite recall. Odin’s Wolf. Fenris Wolf.
Varg. Wilding.
Wilding
. More than any other,
this word brought pain to his chest and roused him in the twilight hours before
he stalked alone through the night. The word was a… a fate, a point of no
return, a passage from one life to another. And the woman, she was that which
was not meant to exist—a way back.
I
t was bad enough that Northrup
acted half the time like he wanted to fire Kim. Worse was the fact that he
sabotaged every chance that came her way to transfer to another supervisor or
division. If she was such a bad employee, so obstinate and incompetent, why
wouldn’t he have seized the opportunity to get rid of her? Kim fumed as she
stomped along the trail toward the river where she most often found A217 in the
morning. It was like Northrup just wanted to keep her around to torment her,
like it was her fault she gave him wood, that she dared appeal to him more than
the skinny blond grant administrator who always wore the short skirts down in
the regional office on the valley floor. Nailing her would have been great for
his career, especially since her dad was his manager’s manager.
“Too bad he just can’t seem to get it up
for a size double zero,” Kim scoffed as she swung her backpack off her
shoulders and slung it to the ground with more force than strictly necessary.
With no one to see her do it, she briefly grabbed the swell of her breasts. “I
guess it takes double D’s.” Then the curve of her hips. “And a size 20 ass to
get that jock cock to stand at attention.”
Kim frowned at her own crassness. It was as
unlike her to be crude as it was to embrace the idea that her well-padded
figure was the object of someone’s desire. But she was frustrated, goddammit,
and not just sexually. Northrup was pushing too hard, too far.
And that was what it came right down to:
Northrup wanted Kim’s report on Wolf A217, and he had made it clear that
morning that he expected it immediately. She didn’t want to do it.
He—217—was hers. He was her secret, her discovery, the only special
thing in her life. Bigger, stronger, faster, smarter. Her perfect wolf. Once
she filed her report, and all those rumors about him became the hard analytical
data of a recognized natural scientist, the interest in 217 was going to grow,
and fast. Others were going to want to study him, at the very least. Some might
even have wanted to capture him for closer examination. Kim’s shoulders slumped,
along with her heavy heart sinking in her chest, at the idea of Wolf A217
denied his place here, robbed of his freedom, studied as a curiosity instead of
admired as… as an exquisite beast, a true apex predator, an alpha in ways
beyond their understanding.
An alpha. No, Wolf A217 had no pack
following him, but that was what Kim knew he was. The realization, the
knowledge, washed over her in a wave of vertigo. And just as she peered across
the river and saw the wolf himself slip into the water and begin to swim toward
her. That was how she knew she’d lost it, gotten too deep into her little
illusion of having her own wolf, a deep personal connection to Wolf A217 and
her fantasy Man A217. Because it really did seem like he was looking right at
her, swimming straight at her,
to
her.
“I’m officially crazy now,” she mumbled to
herself as she watched the wolf’s back begin to bow, just as he emerged from
the water and waded toward the bank. She would have sworn he was still staring
at her, stalking toward her, intent on communicating to her. Then she gasped.
“What the….?” He was changing, growing, color fading from steely blue gray to a
light tawny shade, his form shifting as he came toward her. She was just
standing there with her hands and her knees and her stomach inside her
trembling in a steady vibration of fear and disbelief and….
And aching need, in her tingling breasts
and nipples, in her suddenly wet pussy, in the throb of her tender clitoris, as
Wolf A217 straightened up onto two legs. His fur receding to the gleam of wet
skin, he stopped being a wolf and became a full-fledged psychotic delusion.
“No, this is not….” she tried to say, but the lump in her throat choked off her
words, and again when she attempted to insist, “I’m not seeing….”
Not seeing a naked man, broad and heavily
muscled, brown-haired and green-eyed, close to a foot taller than her own
height of 5’4”, stalking toward her with increasing speed and purpose.