Cry of the Wolf (2 page)

“It wasn’t planned. And they weren’t your mates anyway; you can’t pick and choose—”

“Maybe they could have been … with more time, I don’t know…”

God, do all the females in the pack feel this way? Do they all hate me?

Selena’s eyes shimmered with contempt. “It doesn’t matter now because you’ve ruined everything. And don’t get me started on the rumours flying about from what the pack saw at the warehouse.”

Her blood turned cold. “What do you mean?”

“How you were struck by lightning. How it should have killed you.”

She couldn’t say anything to defend herself against that one. They hadn’t officially told any of the pack members about her being a storm-wielder yet, and she knew there was a chance it would split the group in half. Storm-wielders were feared. No wonder everyone hated her; she’d waltzed right in, taken three of their eligible males – one of them the Alpha – and she posed a threat to all of their safety.

“Selena.”

Both women jumped at the sound of Lawrence’s voice from the open kitchen door.

He leaned against the door frame, assessing the situation, arms crossed, flaxen hair falling to his shoulders… He looked like some kind of Scandinavian god.

Selena immediately shrank back and bowed her head.

Lydia rolled her eyes. “Selena brought me cookies,” she explained, her tone clipped and flat.

“I see,” said Lawrence. “Lydia, it’s half past nine. I need you outside.”

Ah, yes – for training.
“I’ll be right there.”

“Was there anything else, Selena?” asked Lawrence.

“No, sir.”

“Right you are then.” He turned and left them to it.

Selena didn’t bother to say anything else, but scurried out after him.

Lydia sighed. She hoped this wasn’t going to be the start of a really long day.

“You’ve got to feel it in your core,” he stated, impatiently.

“As if I’m not trying…”

“Well, do you feel anything?”

You, being a pain in my arse,
thought Lydia, but she kept her mouth shut. Lawrence was trying to awaken her to her storm-wielding abilities, but either he was a crap teacher, or the one single time she’d commanded a storm had been a fluke. And the whole storm-wielder thing sort of freaked her out anyway. She was one of very few female wolves to have the ability. Apparently, only females could wield storms; the males can carry the gene, but it isn’t active in them. But the bit that freaked her out was the role of a storm-wielder: by harnessing a storm, they could secure successful mating and breeding for their pack, because werewolves can only claim their mates on the night of a full moon,
during a thunderstorm
, the storm itself providing some kind of electrical charge needed for their DNA to mesh, or whatever. Apparently, the textbooks explained it. Apparently, she didn’t have advanced intelligence Lawrence-brain.

To have a storm-wielder present, meant no more praying for or chasing storms for werewolves. No more uncertainty, or fifty-fifty chances of bonding … as long as no one ever found out she was a storm-wielder, because if they did, The Trident might get whiff of it and annihilate them all, just to get to her, which is what they’d been doing to packs that housed storm-wielders since the wolf clans were flushed out and thinned in the 18
^th
Century.

No pressure.

“Look,” she sighed, pacing the grounds outside his home –
their
home, since Lawrence dictated she live here and she had next to no say in the matter – “maybe the last time it happened was because it wasn’t just me doing it. There were four of us there all connecting with each other. Maybe—”

“Do you really want to go there again?”

He said that as if the very idea disgusted him. It cut her, and she really wished it didn’t because Lawrence, of all people – or werewolves – was the one she liked the least. She didn’t
dis
like him, she just liked him
the least
, although she couldn’t say that her wolf shared her feelings.

Bad enough she
had
to be mated to three males, but that one of them had to be
him
… god!

The weight of the morning and Selena’s earlier words finally got to her. “Sorry to have tainted your perfect little pack,” she bit back, her voice barely a whisper that she couldn’t keep the tremble of hurt from, and by god it pissed her off big time that he affected her this way. She shouldn’t care.

The air around them seemed to still and she glanced up to find him staring at her angrily with those ice-blue eyes.

Yeah. She got it. He hated her – he didn’t have to drive the fucking point home with his sabre-like glaring.

She refused to look away and scowled right back at him.

“Isn’t this lovely!” came Ryan’s cheery voice from her left.

They both turned and saw him practically bouncing towards them – what must be two hundred pounds of muscle, grinning from ear to ear – seemingly oblivious to the tension that crackled between her and Mr Uptight. But then, nothing really broke Ryan’s spirit anyway … and his happiness was positively contagious. Lydia found herself smiling back.

“Is it?”

“Is it?” asked Lawrence in unison with her, her voice light and buoyant; his, about as flat as you can get. She scowled at him again for killing the mood, not that Ryan noticed – or maybe he was just used to it…

“Yeah, it is,” he beamed, as he came up to her from behind and slid his arms around her waist. “It’s Saturday morning, it’s sunny and all my dreams have come true. It’s one of those things that never gets old.”

Her anger melted to nothing but comforting warmth. Ryan had the power to do that – always had, even as some intangible figment that had ruled her dreams for a decade. Yeah – both their dreams had come true, although her half of their shared dreams had held more romance and love than Ryan’s obviously had, given he showed no indication that the ‘L’ word was even part of his vocabulary. Still … she’d found him. Their dreams had led her to him, so she wasn’t about to give up on the romantic side of them just yet.

She grinned up at him, and he nuzzled her hair.

Mr Uptight seemed to have turned to statue, and she knew he was fighting his nature to claim her now that Ryan was here. She wasn’t an idiot. Besides, her instincts were primed now – to all three of her mates and their moods and sensitivities, ever since their heated, thunderstorm ménage that shouldn’t have been able to occur in the first place, because wolves didn’t share their mates.

And now the three males found themselves mated to her, and her to them, and they were all struggling to figure out how to deal with it. Well, all except Ryan. He seemed to have no struggle with the need to be completely hands-on with her, initiating copious amounts of sex, several times a week. She never thought she’d say this having had a high libido all her life – before she even knew she was a werewolf and ‘on heat’ once a month – but there had been a couple of times she’d actually backed away for needing some space. At least, she’d tried to. Ryan always won.

Lawrence was the exact opposite of Ryan in every possible way. Closed off, aloof, cold and distant, he hadn’t touched her once since that day she’d woken here after her transformative sleep – since that day she’d denied him. Her inner-wolf still scolded her for that, and often too. She had tried to reason with it, but for reasons she simply couldn’t fathom, her wolf seemed to want to lay at Lawrence’s feet and do his every bidding. It riled her up no end.

Taylor, the most ‘human’ out of the three males – probably owing to the fact that he
had
been human – had remained the perfect gentlemen with a remarkable amount of self-restraint, knowing what he must be feeling when around her. She wondered where he was this morning – he seemed to have mysteriously disappeared. He was truly a friend in every way. Having said that, they
did
share cuddles and kisses; most of them comforting, some heated. But they’d gone no further, although she readily burned up at the thought of being with him
that
way again – the one time they’d had sex at the theatre had been super-hot. It would be nice to repeat it whilst in a more conscious state.

But she valued his friendship more than the lust he so easily mustered in her, and he seemed to respect Ryan’s “claim” on her, even though, in truth, they all had a “claim” on each other. And she couldn’t think of the word “claim” without air-quoting it in her head because the whole principle was so chauvinistic it made her gag. It hadn’t been the way she’d been brought up – which was as a human. Her wolf, however, which was close to emerging in physical form for the first time ever on the full moon next week, seemed to be more than happy with the idea of being “claimed” by all three of them.

Yeah, and who wouldn’t?
teased her mind.
Have you
seen
them!

She ignored her inner-voice – which, bizarrely, no longer sounded like her Great Aunt Gladys since the thunderstorm-ménage-mating – and returned her focus to Ryan who had slipped his hand under the front of her vest, and now rested it on her belly.

Yeah – totally hands-on.

“Training’s over,” said Lawrence, curtly. “You said you had some things to do in town – I’ll give you a lift.”

“I’ll take her,” said Ryan, and Lydia bit back a sigh. There they went making decisions and speaking for her again. But she wanted to get out of here for the day, smoothly and with no hiccups, so she just smiled up at Ryan again and said, “Thanks.”

Lawrence turned and walked away.

Lydia battled with the overwhelming urge to chase after him and soothe him, not that she could anyway with Ryan pinning her to the spot. What was it about her wolf that wanted to constantly soothe him?

Yes, getting away would be good round about now. She was growing to adore her new pack quite quickly, but she was still an independent woman that needed some freedom. Taylor was the only one who seemed to get that. Lawrence left her alone by default, although she could sense his dominant nature a mile away, but she practically had to beat Ryan over the head with heavy, blunt instruments to get him to loosen his hold of her. With Ryan, though, she mostly didn’t mind because the thing was, Ryan was playful with his dominance, and she almost always ended up exhausted but content when in his presence. She doubted she’d feel so content and happy with Lawrence’s brand of big, bad wolf.

“He’ll get over it,” said Ryan, gruffly.

“What are you talking about?”

“I can feel your pull to him. Don’t worry – he’ll be fine.”

She let out the sigh that she’d previously held back. “It’s not that I
want
to be pulled towards him.”

“Biology, sweetheart. None of us can help what we are or who we’re mated to.” He said that last bit with disgruntlement. Nobody was happy with having to share her, not even Lydia – talk about going against the grain – but once bonded, mates could only find relief with the one they were bonded to. In her case, three. She could feel her need for each of them rising, as well as their need for her, and it was disconcerting to say the least, because it meant she had to face the fact of what Ryan was saying.

“I don’t believe that,” she frowned. “I don’t care if I’m a wolf – I have a mind, I have thoughts and the ability to make decisions, and all those things are nothing to do with some animal behaviour I can’t control.”

Without warning, his hand darted past the waistband of her jeans and underwear, past her pubic mound, and pressed firmly against the folds of her sex.

She gasped – tried to fight it – then moaned – tried to fight it – then writhed against him to heighten the sensation … and she had learnt over the past few weeks that her arousal wasn’t just lust-based. Sometimes, the smallest thing that had absolutely nothing to do with sex would set it off, and her arousal was also not limited to sexual heat: her hearing became aroused, her sight became aroused, all her senses; the way her surroundings stroked her skin, the way the air tasted on her tongue and carried the scents of the day through her nasal passages…

“Ooh, Ryan … god…”

“Three seconds, Lydia,” he whispered into her ear, his voice hoarse because he was as fired up as she. “It took three seconds from my touching you, to you gushing all over my hand, and the full moon’s in a week. It’s only going to get worse.” He rubbed her faster, soliciting moan after moan as his fingers slid with her juices, slipped inside her… “Do you know what it feels like for a wolf when the moon’s full? Imagine you’re the sea… You’re being pulled, and pulled, and pulled towards the sky…” He tugged at her clit with his thumb as his fingers sank deeper… “You’re pulled so much it hurts, the pain starts to swell and you think you might tear in half… But the moon wants you, it needs you, and you have no choice, Lydia –
no choice
– because if you don’t release your tide and let the moon have a piece of you, the pain will consume you; crush you; you’ll break into a million pieces under her…”