Fur Factor (6 page)

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generation strong enough to do the same. An alpha without cubs didn’t do them any good.”

The information left a sour taste in Graham’s mouth, like rotten meat. He pushed the rest of his snack aside. “And Curtis thinks that because he fucked a brick-stupid omega and got her pregnant, he’s suddenly the big wolf on campus?”

“Brick-stupid omega or not, Frannie whelped a healthy pup,” Logan pointed out.

“According to Common Law, that means something.”

“Fuck Common Law!” Graham snarled. “I’m not stepping down so my cousin can feed his megalomaniac delusions of grandeur, especially not when he hasn’t got the balls to challenge me to dispute like a real alpha contender.”

“Hey, I’m on your side,” Logan said, leaning forward to meet Graham’s furious gaze. “But Common Law still holds a lot of weight with the pack, especially with the elders and the conservatives. You and I know there’s a lot more to being alpha than getting cubs, but traditions die hard for Lupines.”

“What do you suggest? I just step aside and let Cousin Curtis take over my pack and lead them all to hell in a hand basket? Should I wave to them on the way down?”

“You can take your sarcasm and shove it up your ass,” Logan barked, scowling.

“I’m trying to help you here. All I’m saying is that you’re going to need to tread pretty carefully if you want to get around Curtis’s argument. It would be a lot easier if you’d at least taken a mate.”

Graham stilled, not sure he felt quite ready to share the news of his mate, not even with his beta. Logan would have to know eventually though, and the knowledge rankled. It felt almost like sharing her, and he still didn’t have this possessive streak quite under control. He forced his mind away from the sleepy, sexy blonde in his bed and gritted his teeth.

“Even if you were newly mated and didn’t have cubs yet, they’d have to give you one season of moon cycles to prove your fertility as a breeding pair,” the beta continued. “If she got pregnant, the challenge would be thrown out and things could go back to normal.”

Shit
. Graham knew it would be hard enough to explain to Missy about their mate bond. How was he supposed to break the news that he needed to knock her up as soon as possible? And it was all her fault. If she hadn’t been wearing that ass-flaunting dress, he’d never have noticed her, and never have gotten close enough to smell her. Damn her and her sugar cookie scent.

Logan stared at him, brows knitting together and head tilting to the side. “What are you thinking?” he asked. “You’ve got a really weird look on your face, and if you inhale any harder, I think your face might cave in. Not that I don’t agree she smells fabulous, but—“

“Keep your nose to yourself, Hunter.” The possessive warning lashed, jagged and sharp, between them.

Christine Warren

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Logan eyed his alpha’s feral snarl, and his eyebrows shot toward his hairline. “Tell me you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

“It’s none of your damn business what I’m thinking,” Graham growled, scooping up the remains of his snack and dumping the lot into the garbage. He needed to get back upstairs to Missy.

“It is if you’re thinking about taking someone you just met last night to mate. And it’s doubly my business if that someone happens to be human!” Logan grabbed Graham by the arm to keep him from leaving the kitchen. “That makes it pack business, Graham, and the pack will not appreciate having a human as its alpha female.” Graham ripped his arm out of the other Lupine’s grasp and growled a warning. “I don’t care what the pack wants, Hunter. The pack will do what I tell it to do, or it will face the consequences.” His snarl held a world of menace and more than a hint of frustration. “If it’s so important that I take a mate, then let the others live with my choice of one.”

Logan’s hands curled into fists in his effort to keep them to himself, a wise move if he wanted to leave the alpha’s house with both intact. “They would be able to live with any choice you made if it was one of our own kind. Silverback alphas have been bred by your family for the last seven generations, but you won’t breed the eighth if you insist on getting your cubs on a human.”

“It’s not like it’s never happened before. We’ve been interbreeding with the humans from the first, and our genes are always dominant. Our pups are still Lupine.”

“But they’re not fullbloods. They’re mongrels, and none of the pack are going to be willing to submit to a mongrel alpha.”

“They’ll submit if he’s strong enough to make them,” Graham proclaimed, arrogant and unyielding in the knowledge that the decision had already been made, sometime when he wasn’t looking. It was irrevocable. Missy was his mate. Case closed. “Alpha isn’t a matter of heredity anyway. It’s a matter of power. If my pup isn’t strong enough to lead the pack, someone who is ought to have the job.”

“And give up seven generations of tradition?” The confusion in Logan’s tone drained away some of Graham’s anger. If his beta didn’t get it, he ought to get used to no one else getting it either.

“Traditions can be broken and new ones founded, but a mate is permanent.” Logan went for a new tactic. “Lupines may mate for life, but humans don’t. What happens if she changes her mind?”

Graham’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “She won’t.”

“It’s been known to happen.”

“Not this time.”

Logan was silent for a moment. “It really doesn’t matter to you what I say, does it?”

“No.”

Christine Warren

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Graham knew it to be absolutely true. Missy was his mate. Whether he would have admitted that after one night if not for the challenge from Curtis was a moot point. He needed a mate, and his instincts wouldn’t let him have any mate but Missy. He met his friend’s gaze with a steady one of his own.

Logan sighed. “Does it matter what she says, then?” Graham thought of the things she’d said when he’d had her pinned against his bedroom door, and the things she’d said when he’d woken her an hour later with his tongue buried in her dripping pussy. His lips curved into a smile, and his cock hardened beneath his jeans.

“No,” he said, heading for the stairs and feeling a lot happier about his decision than he probably had a right to. “It doesn’t matter at all.” Christine Warren

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I could always say I was drunk
.

Missy lay in the unfamiliar bed, curled up beneath a nubby, cotton blanket that didn’t quite combat the chill of the room, and practiced the fine art of not panicking.

He didn’t spend much time talking to me, so he probably won’t remember if I was slurring
my speech. Wait, he can probably smell stuff like that, and I know I didn’t smell like a brewery.

Darn it.

She’d woken up when Graham left the bed. Sleeping in a sixty-degree bedroom was fine when you had a werewolf radiator cranking out heat beside you, but once he got up, the cold brought awareness back in a hurry. Not that she hadn’t pretended to still be unconscious. Until she figured out how to handle this situation, she had every intention of playing possum.

Except you can’t stay here forever, unfortunately,
her inner voice told her.
So that really
isn’t an option. Better go to Plan B.

There is no Plan B.

There should always be a Plan B.

Squeezing her eyes shut, Missy groaned and yanked the blanket up over her head.

The movement let some of the icy air seep into her cocoon, and she felt her skin pucker into gooseflesh. She doubted even a higher power could deliver her from the situation she’d managed to get herself into. Even she couldn’t quite grasp the reality of having been kidnapped and screwed senseless by the wickedly sexy werewolf of her dreams, who had never been able to remember her name before last night.

To be precise, he couldn’t remember it last night, either. In fact, I’m not quite sure he’s
managed to figure it out yet. You may still just be slut du jour.

And that’s what was turning her stomach into a Gordian knot. Missy was not the slut type. She was a kindergarten teacher, for heaven’s sake! Kindergarten teachers were not sluts. They were plain and kind and boring and wore sensible shoes and unflattering clothes. Missy had been living with those guiding principles for the entire four years of her teaching career and had even gotten in some practice while she was still in college. After her disastrous experience with Jim from her child psychology practicum, she had pretty much resigned herself to the whole frumpy spinster with cats scenario, and she was okay with that. After all, someone had to be the frumpy spinster.

Cliché preservation could be an admirable cause, and Missy had been serving dutifully until some twisted instrument of Fate had decided to step in and make her fantasies come true.

Christine Warren

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How the heck was she supposed to deal with that? She wasn’t the type of woman who lived fantasies, not even when her friends handed them to her with a great big bow on top. This one night had managed to set her entire world tipping into surrealism.

The only thing that kept her from convincing herself that she had dreamed the whole thing was the irrefutable physical evidence. Like the fact that she was lying in a strange bed, under a strange blanket, in a strange room. Naked. Whisker-burned. And sore in some really uncomfortable places.

She winced and sat up, then immediately shifted her weight onto one hip, pulling the blanket with her to wrap it around her like a cape. That’s when she realized she had no idea what to do next.

The problem with abstinence, she decided, was that once you got out of practice, picking up on the ritual behaviors of sex stopped being second nature. Once upon a time—back in college when she’d actually had sex occasionally—the idea of what to do the morning after had seemed like second nature. But now, as she sat in the strange bed, the language of bedroom etiquette made about as much sense to her as the things Dmitri mumbled in Russian when Reggie exasperated him.

Was she supposed to stay where she was? Maybe she should throw off the blanket and pose across the sheets or something, so she’d be ready when Graham came back to bed. Or maybe she should feign asleep, so she could pretend that he woke her when he crawled back in. That way she could take her cues from him. If he seemed like he wanted to talk, she could do that, or if he seemed like he wanted more sex…well, maybe she could suffer through that, too. After all, Graham may get to sleep with women four times prettier than her every day, but she knew the chances of her ever again getting the opportunity to snuggle up to a man half as gorgeous as Graham Winters—precisely nil.

But, oh no! What if the reason he had disappeared was because he realized who he’d gone to bed with, and he just wanted to get away from her? Maybe he woke up and had a coyote moment, and he’d really left to give her the chance to be gone before he came back?
What the heck was she supposed to do?

“Okay, first, calm down,” she told herself, closing her eyes and taking a couple of slow, deep breaths. “No need to panic. Everything’s okay. Just breathe.” That worked for about fifteen seconds before the demons of embarrassment and low self-esteem made themselves known by raking icy fingers down her back and urging her to get while the getting was good. No matter how remote the possibility, there was no way she’d survive it if Graham came back and he really was disappointed in her. She’d rather cut and run now, before he left her heart and her ego in shreds on his bedroom carpet.

She eased carefully to the side of the bed and slid to the floor. The boards chilled the bottoms of her feet, but she ignored it while she hurried around the dimly lit room in search of her belongings. If she could get dressed and sneak out before Graham returned, she might actually get to preserve her illusions and treasure this as the best Christine Warren

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night of her life instead of the stage for her most humiliating one. But where the heck was her left shoe?

She found it tossed into a corner between a dresser and the wall, along with her purse. She grabbed both, then nearly jumped out of her skin when her purse chimed at her. Terrified Graham would hear the noise, she grabbed her cell phone and flipped it open before the first ring had ended.

“Hello?” She kept her voice low and cast a wary eye toward the bedroom door. It remained closed.

“What is the matter with my friends? Do none of them have the
least
little trace of manners in their stubborn bodies? What is it about them that compels them to run out on prearranged meetings with perfectly luscious men, who are then left wondering what the hell is going on, while I am forced to explain that it isn’t them? It’s my lame-brained, flaky, irresponsible and uncivilized friends.”

“Don’t start with me, Av,” Missy hissed, gathering up her ruined panties and bra and the balled up wad of black fabric she assumed was her dress. “I’ve had a really bad morning so far, and I don’t need you adding to it. I think you’ve done enough already.”

“It’s only four twenty-two. There hasn’t been a morning yet,” Ava dismissed.

“Besides, you deserve everything you get for running out like that. Do you have any idea how hard it is to explain to a man why his blind date took one look at him and ran from the party? Do you?”

“That’s not why I ran. I didn’t even see the guy. And why the heck are you calling my cell phone at four thirty in the morning?”

“Why the hell are you answering?”

Missy froze. “Um…I asked first.”

“Oh, that’s very mature, darling,” Ava drawled. “If you must know, I’m calling your cell phone to try and find out where you are in the middle of the night, since you didn’t go back to your apartment.”

“How do you know I’m not at my apartment? Where else would I go?”

“If you’re at your apartment, why don’t you roll over and tell Stephen I said hello, since I gave him the spare key you left with me and told him to wait for you.” The silky tone made Missy blanche almost as pale as the idea of a strange man waiting in her apartment for sex, because if this Stephen guy was her Fantasy Fix, he wasn’t planning on discussing the finer points of macramé with her. “I can’t believe you sent a man to my apartment to wait for me to come home and have sex with him. Don’t you realize how creepy that is? Ava, I gave you that key so you could water my plants when I went away to visit my parents, not so you could let strangers into my apartment. How do you know he hasn’t emptied my apartment and pawned my stuff?”