Filed to story: Mated to the Alpha and His Beta Novel Free >>???
That’s it. No trouble from me, okay?”
“I can smell his fear. He’s not going to try anything to hurt us,” Lanie thought toward me. Out loud, she said, “You have instructions for us?”
The little as shole was dancing nervously from foot to foot. “Yeah, yeah. I gotta make sure you’re the uh… the right…customers, though.”
“It’s the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere. Who the f uck else would we be?” I growled, towering over him with my fists clenched and my teeth fully out.
“Dam mit!” Lanie whisper-shouted. “Back the f uck up off him!”
A pulse of her energy centered between my shoulder blades and at the base of my spine, yanking me back a few steps as easily as if she’d used her hands. My hackles rose. I knew tensions were high, sure, but the fact she could compel me like that, even for a few seconds…
“I need you to be with me on this,” she said through the link. “We’re going to give this guy what he needs so he can give us the wolvesbane and the herbs, and we’re going to get back home. Please stop wolfing out. Can’t you see he’s terrified? He’s no threat to us.”
“Of course he’s not. I could break him in half with one hand.”
“But you won’t,” she said.
“Uh…guys?” The little sh it said, looking back and forth from Lanie to me. He put his hands up. “I don’t want no trouble.”
“You said that already.” The words clipped out of me, sharp as knives, but I backed up.
“It ought to be halitosis,” I muttered.
He backed up another step. “That ain’t it. Look, I’m just here to do a job, okay? I got bills to pay, same as youse. And believe you me, the last thing I wanna do is pi ss off a barker, okay?”
My claws bit into my palms. “The f uck did you just call me?”
“A woofer, a…s hit, man!” The guy whined. “I’m f ucking nervous, okay? You’re over there looking at me like you want to gobble me up and use the bones to pick your teeth!”
“He’s not going to hurt you, so long as you give us what I paid for.” Lanie’s voice was soothing.
She pulsed Luna energy out and around me and the human. I didn’t know if it would work on the little pr ick…could humans be affected by it? But it worked on me, even though it made me wary at the same time. I did not f ucking like that she was manipulating me, even if I could tell she was doing it. F uck, maybe especially because I could.
“Code phrase,” the guy said.
“Anaked American man stole my balloons,” she said.
“The f uck?” I shot at her through the link.
Lanie didn’t even blink in my direction. The human snort-laughed. She sent out another calming wash of energy, but kept her light dim. Probably so it didn’t freak him out.
“Yeah, that’s it. Okay, you’re legit.” The man went for something in his pocket, and I bristled, stepping forward in case it was something stu pid like a knife.
He pulled out a small vial. It had a faint rainbow shine when he held it up to the beam from his flashlight. He turned it side to side.
I caught a whiff of something sweet.
My mouth watered.
“Here’s the candy,” the guy said in a low, hurried voice. “You need only a drop or two, okay, this is cut with some powerful shi t.
It ll get your di ck hard and your brain soft, you get what I’m sayin?”
“I don’t have a di ck,” Lanie answered mildly, “but yes.
“Just a drop or two. You mix it with whatever you want. Take it straight under the tongue, I don’t care, but the taste is nasty. You wait five minutes. If you ain’t throwing up by then, you take another two drops. But no more than that, or I can’t be responsible.”
“The arrangements stated clearly that you’re not responsible for any reason,” she said calmly and took the vial from his hand.
“Now get out of here, before my mate here decides he wants to eat you.”
Mason–
Gabriela had gone to bed. The kids were all sleeping Zane and I had taken up our posts on the front porch, not saying much. He sipped occasionally from a glass of whiskey, neat. I had one, too.
“They should’ve been back by now,” he said into the silence that had stretched out so long and thin it was like a spider web between us. Making a trap.
“My brother will make sure nothing happens to her.”
Zane eyed me. “I know that.”
“Well,” I told him amiably, “I know it, too.”
There was more silence between us, but it wasn’t as sticky.
“Are you ready for this?” I asked him after a few more minutes had passed.
“F uck, no.”
I laughed, and after a moment, Zane joined in.
“When you knew her as Katie,” he said. “Was she different?”
The whiskey in my glass tasted like smoke, and I let it roll over and around my tongue before I answered him. “I didn’t know her before she was Katie, so I can’t say if she was different than she’d been. But she was different than she is now, yeah. In a lot of ways. But in some, she’s exactly the same.”
“It was a good thing she had you,” he said quietly. “When we couldn’t be there for her.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I started, but Zane shook his head..
“Fault doesn’t matter. We weren’t there for her the way we should have been before she was sent to Stillwood, before she became Katie. Me and Xander…we were a pair of arrogant pr icks.”
“From what I understand, you were in love with a woman who made promises she had no intentions of keeping.” I cleared my throat so it wouldn’t squeeze tight with angry memories.
Zane raised his glass toward me. “You were in love with her, too. Seems like no matter what any of us had planned, we were all three destined to end up with the same woman, one way or another.”
“I don’t know about love. I’d have agreed with you before, but after falling in love with Katie…with Lanie,” I amended. “Once I felt what I do for her, everything that I’d ever felt for anyone else, including Alice, just doesn’t seem like it matters too much. But maybe you’re right. The Moon Goddess had plans for the three of us we could never have guessed. I mean, what are the odds that we’d all fall for the same woman not once, but twice?”
“It sure seems like we were as destined for each other as we were for our Luna,” Zane said.
It might’ve been the nerfect moment to ask him how he felt about being my Reta too but I didn’t have the Il words. We’d shared a lover, a bed, pups, and a mate, but even that didn’t seem intimate enough pledge himself to me.
While I was still thinking about this, Zane got to his feet. “There they are.”
The two wolves bounded out of the forest and across the yard. Hunter carried the duffel in his mouth while Lily pranced around him in circles. She ran to the porch and put her front paws on the bottom step. Her tongue tolled out as she grinned. I felt the joy she was experiencing from the long run coursing off her in waves, and Colt pressed forward, eager to greet her.
I stripped bare in half a minute and changed. Colt joined Hunter and Lily, leaping and rolling onto his back for a few seconds before jumping up again. Blade was there, too.
Blade sat back to lift his muzzle to the moon. He bayed, and Hunter joined. Lily’s howl rose into the chorus and finally, so did Colt’s.
Four wolves in perfect harmony.
Perfect sync.
Colt would’ve run forever, but when Lily’s great s haggy form rippled and shifted, returning to Lanie’s human shape, we all did the same.
Now, four naked people stood in a circle on the grass with a duffel bag in the center of us. The wolves’ happiness lingered. My heart had lifted. There’d been a lot of tension going around, but our quartet sharing in the ritual of giving our wolves control felt like it had bonded us even closer.
“You got it?” Zane asked Lanie. He had one arm slung over Xander’s shoulders and the other over mine.
She nodded and moved toward him for a kiss. “Yes. We got it. You’ll have just enough time for the fasting period to complete before it’s time to take it, if we go inside right now and have the biggest breakfast anyone ever ate”
“In a minute,” Zane said. “I want us to stand like this, just another minute.”
So we did. Four souls bound to each other for reasons we didn’t know and would probably never be able to find out. We’d truly been granted the blessings of the Moon Goddess.
Lanie unhooked herself from under my arm. Her voice was bright and cheerful, but there was something much darker in her eyes. A flash of emotion I couldn’t figure out, and I realized it wasn’t Lanie I was seeing in that moment. It passed, quicker than a flash of lighting, but I’d seen her as Katie.
Not the woman we all loved and shared, but the one I’d loved and who’d loved me alone.
Zane–
Everything I’d ever eaten in my entire life had come out of me.
“I’m good,” I lied as Lanie rubbed my back in soothing circles and Xander pressed a damp cloth to the back of my neck. “T’ll be good. Just give me a few minutes.”
“It’s working,” she said. “I’m sorry it’s making you so sick, love, but that means it’s working.”
“I know.”
The nausea didn’t pass like magic, but it did pass. I was able to take a shower and brush my teeth. My eyes were red, though, and I looked like I’d been hit by a truck and dragged for a few miles.
New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
Dayson was the alpha of the largest pack in North America. Powerful figures from other packs sought to offer gorgeous girls as potential mates for Dayson. He steadfastly rejected these advances, he was not a pawn to be manipulated. But eventually there came a mysterious girl he could hardly say No. Who was she?