Becoming the Alpha (4 page)

Lukas growled and then threw back his head with a huff. Doc Walden looked visibly relieved, so I could only assume that Lukas’s answer had been that he would allow a yield. Doc Walden gave him a brief nod and then stepped around him, although I couldn’t help but notice that he kept a wide berth.

Doc Walden moved across the arena floor and stopped over the sheriff’s prone form. He knelt down and touched the sheriff’s neck. I saw the brief closure of his eyes, and then he gave another short nod. This time it was to no one in particular. He stood.

“The opponent to Lukas Kasper’s claim is unable to advise on his wishes, and thus per the clan’s guidelines this is an automatic forfeiture of any further claim. The victor is Lukas Kasper; the new alpha of the Greyelf Grizzly clan.”

My eyes swept back to Lukas, and my mouth fell open again as I saw that he had phased back to his human form. He stood tall and proud in the middle of the area. I couldn’t help but notice that he was also very naked.

A chant began somewhere behind me.

“Lukas! Lukas! Lukas!” More voices joined in, and within moments the arena walls were shaking with the strength of the cheers.

He made a slow turn in a tight circle. His eyes locked on mine again, and I felt a flush crawl up my cheeks at the intensity of the heat that I saw there.

Lukas had gotten his wish. He was the alpha. Now I was about to find out what that meant for both of us.

Lukas’s jaw was covered in blood, and it made me queasy to think about the fact that it wasn’t his blood. His left shoulder looked torn up, but it isn’t as bad as I would have expected given the way the sheriff’s teeth had been ripping at it. Other than the sweat and dirt, he looked fine. My heart beat painfully inside my chest though. I felt the tight binds of stress finally releasing from around my mid-section. He was alive, and he was okay.

A small smirk pulled up the corners of his mouth as his eyebrow rose in a mocking expression. It was almost as if he could read my thoughts, and he was giving me a hard time for even thinking that the match could have turned out any other way. Just like that, he got my gall up, and I wanted to smack him. I crossed my arms and glared at him.

A pretty young woman appeared at Lukas’s side with a blanket in her hands. I felt a bolt of jealousy as I noticed the way that her eyes traveled up and down his body as he took it from her. I cared even less for the way he smiled at her. Lukas wrapped the blanket around his waist and knotted it on the side. The brazen display of his virile manliness should have made me uncomfortable, but instead I felt heat building in my core. No matter what they said, every woman in this arena right now wanted him, and every man wanted to be him. He was the center of attention. This was Lukas’s element.

The cheering hadn’t stopped since the moment Doc Walden declared him the victor. Lukas smiled at the crowd and put his arms up gesturing for silence. It still took a few more moments before the crowd settled down. Something epic had just happened in front of all of us, and I think it was just sinking in.

Once the crowd finally quieted, Lukas’s voice filled the air. “I know that many of you are uncertain about the future. My brother was a shining beacon of light in the night so many years ago. What he did for all of us will never be forgotten.” Several cheers went up at those words, and Lukas paused as he waited for them to settle again.

“What he did for me personally is something that I will never forget either. He led a country of shifters and shaped the lives of each and every one of us. But to me, he was most often just my big brother. He allowed me the freedom to fail and fail on a massive scale in the role of becoming a man and a shifter in this world of ours, and I tell you all that was the most humbling experience of my life. He gave me the room to discover my own voice and find out what I was really made of by challenging me to live outside the walls of White Oaks. Markus didn’t believe in special treatment or coddling. That’s not the way of the Grizzly clan. We have to be strong and focused, otherwise there are those who would take away everything we’ve built and achieved.”

I was shocked. I had never seen this side of Lukas before. As I glanced around, I saw every eye was focused on him. He had the crowd mesmerized. Truth be told, he had me mesmerized too.

“I can only hope that today, as I begin the journey of following in my brother’s footsteps, you will see that his legacy lives on through me. This is a new day and a new time for our clan. There are different enemies that plague us today than when Markus brought us together all those years ago. I am confident that you will see that I continue to have only the clan’s best interests at heart, and I will uphold our values and beliefs until the day that I no longer draw breath in this life. I am a proud member of the Greyelf Grizzly clan, and today I am honored to become your alpha.”

The crowd erupted all over again, and I drew out my phone. No one was paying attention to me, and I burned Lukas’s words into my mind even as I opened the camera app and started to take pictures of him. Then the people around me pushed forward, and Lukas disappeared from my sight as members of the clan surrounded him.

“You shouldn’t be here, Maren.” The voice next to my ear startled me. I stepped away from it. Billy was in my space in the most uncomfortable way.

“And you should have told me that you were a bear shifter,” I retorted. I was still trying to process everything that I had just seen and what it meant for me and my relationship with Lukas. “We’ve been to second base. That seems like an important thing to relay before we even go to the ball game.”

“I’m not much for analogies,” Billy said. His expression was unreadable, but I saw his long appreciative look up and down my body. “I didn’t want to keep it from you, but the sheriff thought it best to keep my true identity to myself around town, especially since I was on the council.”

“So all that talk about law enforcement running in your family and keeping your nose clean?” I couldn’t help but wonder how much what of Billy had shared with me over the course of the last few months as we explored the idea of dating had been real.

“All true,” he said, slinging his fingers into the belt loops of his jeans. Billy had always come across to me as a genuinely nice guy; albeit a bit simple. He had an easy smile and a relaxed attitude that, while nice, had bored me to tears. He was physically attractive, but I hadn’t felt the necessary spark of chemistry between us to think that it was a relationship that could go anywhere. If anything, I had been humoring myself with him trying to appear normal.

But the man who stood next to me now only bore the slightest resemblance to the man that I thought I knew. There was a knowing gleam in his eyes that told me he had been noting everything, cataloging it all away for some other purpose down the road. He was a council member too, which meant that the entire encounter with Lukas at the restaurant the evening before had been nothing but a show. A show for my benefit.

“I never lied about anything I told you,” he said with a small shrug. “I omitted one detail.”

“Omission is a lie’s best friend,” I said, shaking my head.

“I honestly didn’t expect you to agree to go out on a date with me to begin with,” Billy said. “But then you did, and then you accepted a second date, and we started to get to know each a little bit better.” He gave me a wink that told me exactly where his mind had wandered.

I flushed. I wasn’t a prude, but I didn’t care for Billy’s reminder of our previous romantic history either; especially when I still felt the burn of Lukas’s bite on my shoulder. My mind latched onto something he said. “Why did you even ask me out then if you thought I was going to say no?”

Click. Whirr. Fit into place.
The gears of my mind were working overtime, and the information they produced couldn’t be true, but it made perfect sense. “You wanted to find out about Lukas.”

Billy had the decency to avert his eyes. “I was asked to check into it. Find out if you were still in contact with him. That’s it. I kept asking you out because I liked you.”

I took a step backward. “I don’t think I know you at all.”

Billy pursued me. “Look, you might not agree with the methods, but I didn’t have any ill intent. And now you know everything, so I was hoping that we could start over. Hell, you know more about me now than any woman I’ve ever been with.”

“Over is the operative word in that sentence, Billy,” I said. “And there was no
with
. We went on a few dates and fooled around. But I can’t trust someone who isn’t honest with me.” Even if I wanted to see Billy again, I had a feeling finding out that I bore Lukas’s mark would put the kibosh on that whole idea.

“But you are willing to trust a guy who never appreciated you and then took off without even saying goodbye?”

Shit, what had I told Billy about my past with Lukas? I had gotten a little drunk during our second date, and I had to admit some of the details of our conversation later in the evening were a bit fuzzy. I had woken up the next day on my couch half-dressed with one hell of a hangover.

“I trust myself,” I said carefully. There were verbal landmines everywhere.  “Look, I should have said something long before now, but whatever it was that we were doing wasn’t a long-term thing. It was fun, but we’re just too different; even more so than I even realized apparently.”

“So I’m a bear shifter. So what?” Billy stepped closer to me. He reached out to touch my face. “We both know that you don’t have a problem with that kind of thing.”

Billy’s hand was caught mid-air before it fully crossed the distance between us. I didn’t know how I hadn’t felt Lukas’s approach. Back when it seemed like he spent every waking minute with me, I innately felt his presence everywhere. I guess ten years apart had made me rusty in that department.

Lukas twisted Billy’s hand, and then he dragged Billy forward until they were only a few inches apart. “I believe Maren has made it clear that whatever tenuous relationship you think the two of you had, it’s over.”

A tightening of the lines around Billy’s eyes was the only indication he gave that Lukas’s grip was affecting him at all. “I’d be careful, Lukas. I am a council member, and you don’t want to get on the wrong side of a council member mere minutes after assuming the alpha role.”

“I am the alpha,” Lukas said as if that explanation covered everything. He released Billy’s wrist. “Take my advice. Keep your paws off things that aren’t yours if you know what’s good for you.”

Lukas moved so that he stood mostly blocking me from Billy’s view. I wasn’t a bear shifter, but even in human society the gesture was meant to prove a point. Although Lukas had yet to openly acknowledge what was going on between us, he was letting his feelings on the matter be seen. But based on what I had learned from Marilee so far, I didn’t think that was necessarily a good thing.

The Greyelf Grizzly alpha’s mate had already been chosen by the council. She was supposed to be mated to Markus in the fall, but then Markus had met an untimely demise last week. From what Marilee said, it fell on the new alpha then to take Markus’s intended mate. But so far, Lukas wasn’t having any of it. He said he wanted me, but the reason had everything to do with who he felt he could trust, and nothing to do with anything remotely romantic.

And yet I had thrown my lot in with him anyway, just like I always did. Something new was simmering between the two of us now though. I felt it in the parking lot, and I felt it in the woods during our short hike to the arena. Something had shifted in our relationship, but I felt foolish even contemplating or looking forward to what that might be. Because Lukas had disappointed me before thinking there was something more between us. Look where that had gotten me.

Doc Walden and Mr. Bennett joined our small circle. I couldn’t help but notice it seemed as if all eyes were suddenly on us. I moved to stand beside Lukas so that it looked less obvious that he was trying to protect me from something.

“The opening gala for the Summit is this evening,” Doc Walden said.

“I am aware,” Lukas replied. He cut a glance across the arena. “What’s the verdict on the sheriff?”

“He’ll live,” Doc Walden said simply without any further explanation. “What about you?”

“I’ll be fine. Just a flesh wound,” Lukas said dismissively. He cocked an eye toward Billy. “Guess that makes you the interim sheriff then.”

Billy glowered at him. “If you’re concerned about security at the Summit, don’t be. We know what we’re doing.”

Lukas’s facial expression grew grimmer. “I’ll be the judge of that. Stop by my house in an hour. I’ll want a full report out on the security detail.”

I could tell that Billy wasn’t pleased by the command, but he allowed his head to drop a fraction of an inch.

“Maren, you’re with me,” Lukas said. He turned on his heel and started back toward the path. I saw the three council members exchange a look, and I didn’t like it one bit. Lukas was the alpha, but I didn’t think that he could trust the three men to have his back at all. I didn’t wait for Billy to say anything else but hurried after Lukas. I kept far enough back that I could watch as different members of the clan approached him and offered him a hand. Lukas stopped for each one and gave a small murmur of thanks, but he managed to keep his forward progression fairly steady.

Once we were over the top of the hill and surrounded by the forest again, I pushed a bit faster to move to his side. His long legs were moving fast, and I found that I was out of breath trying to keep up.

“Slow down, will you?”

“Keep up, or you’ll be left behind,” was the sharp reply.

I wanted to ask him questions, but a small cloud of darkness had enveloped the grizzlies’ new alpha. I recognized it immediately. Maybe Lukas hadn’t changed that much after all.