Her Viking Wolves: 50 Loving States, Michigan (33 page)

Alisha’s eyes merely flash, defiant as always. “I think you’re going to have to call in Clyde. I want to know just how far you’ll go to advance the Lupine Council’s rollback agenda to keep me and every other she-wolf in North America under their thumbs because they’re afraid of all the sexual freedom we have now.”

Rafes clenches his jaw. “Mom. If you accuse me of being anti she-wolf one more time—“ He stops and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m not anti she-wolf. I’m actually trying to protect you and every other she-wolf in North America. And if I have to deny a few wolves their dramatic love stories to do that, so be it.”

Alisha sucks her teeth again. “Yeah, right. Do you know how many human and wolf rollback initiatives have been pushed through on the premise of protecting women?” Alisha makes air quotes around those last two words. “Nah, I’ll take our portals and leave the protecting up to the individual wolves themselves.”

Rafes truly respects his father more than any other wolf on earth. But he seriously cannot understand how he’s put up with this she-wolf for over three decades.

He throws up his hands. “Okay, Mom, I don’t care. Go to Norway. Try to convince them to turn down my black box request. But you’ll be wasting your time because nothing you can do or say will keep these boxes from going up. First here, then around every other portal in the world.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“Yeah,
you
will,” Rafes answers, standing his ground.

Total silence, only relieved by birdsong and the faint hum of the small craft the construction workers used to hover in to the construction site. Which reminded Rafes…

He has work to do here. And no time for bleeding hearts—even if this one is his mother. He walks away from her dramatic chain show towards the portal that
will
be contained within the black box by the end of the day, no matter what she says.

“Face Clyde,” he says, elling his fingers open.

“What’s up, little cuz,” Clyde says, his face filling up the finger screen an instant later.

Ignoring the glare of his mother’s disappointed eyes on his back, Rafes says, “Clyde we’ve got a problem. I need you to—”

The portal erupts right in front of him, emitting a sound like a contained sonic boom. Then comes a sharp burst of light illuminating everything and everyone at the construction site before it contracts back inside the portal like a nuclear mushroom cloud.

But not before leaving something behind.

Behind him, he hears his mother and the construction workers gasp. And Rafes’s own eyes widen as a woman with curly red hair and brown skin raises up to her arms from where she’s been unceremoniously dumped on the time gate’s grassy meadow. Obviously disoriented, she climbs to her feet, legs shaky, like a newly born foal.

Rafes’ heart stops. She’s naked. Completely naked save for her mouth which is covered in blood.

But despite that…and despite how he knows he should be responding to this situation, Rafes can’t stop his eyes from traveling up and down her body. Taking in her full breasts with their dark brown aureolas and the wide hips creating such a nice canvas for the feminine triangle housed within.

Staring at her, he feels himself harden inside his slacks. Every ounce of his fiber whispering one word: “Mine.”

And somewhere in the distance, he hears his mother say, “Myrna? Myrna is that you?”

T
HE VIKING GIRL HAS ARRIVED
.

Standing on the balcony of his hotel suite, Damianos, or simply Anos as he is known during this iteration of his lifetime, reads the words on his finger screen once, then twice, then three more times.

Finally he closes the floating screen with a quick tap of both his index fingers against both of his thumbs and turns to watch the sun cast a yellow shadow over Lycaeon as it sets in the distance. Nestled in the hills of a remote island called Lukos, the sleepy village is so small and underdeveloped, it has never become a human tourist site. To most eyes, it looks like there’s nothing much here. Just a collection of square white houses with blue doors and one lonely two-story hotel with a terracotta roof. The hotel doesn’t even bother to advertise.

Yet if a human tried to make a reservation, he’d find the hotel at capacity. Fully booked up year-round by a certain kind of traveler. Wolf travellers who preferred to stay in a place—a kingdom town, as they called the communities that sprouted around their time portals—where they’d be free to shift during the full moon.

But even those shifter travelers had no idea this particular hotel was open to wolves but not actually owned by one.

No, Anos bought this place in a secret deal many years ago, when the country was going through a financial crisis and the Greek alpha found he was in need of liquid funds. Anos happened to have such funds and also a willingness to keep the details of their agreement completely secret. So the Greek alpha sold to him, just like the Italian alpha, and the Romania alpha, and quite a few other alphas who’d panicked during their country’s financial downturns—a few of which he himself had orchestrated.

If you live long enough, you learn a few things.

And now he had finally lived long enough.

The girl from the woods was here. Which meant it was time. Finally.

All their plans. All their dreams. They’d pay off soon.

Behind Anos, the balcony’s sliding glass doors whisper open and close.

“Sir, may I get you anything else?” Colby, his faithful human assistant, asks with a dip of his gray head as he hands him his nightly glass of wine.

Colby’s been with him a long time—at least by human standards. And he’s proven himself invaluable. Like his father who served Anos before him, he performs every task with discretion and without question. And like his father before him, he has never asked why Anos never appears to age much.

“That will be all, Colby,” Anos answers the old man with a dip of his large head. “But before you leave for the evening, please turn on some music.”

The speakers in this hotel are very old. So old they still have to be accessed through a physical device via a Bluetooth connection located in his suite’s sitting room.

Colby dips his head. “Of course, sir. Your usual after-dinner playlist?”

“No, I’d like to listen to my workout playlist tonight.”

If the old human finds his request strange, he doesn’t give any indication. The doors slide closed and a few moments later, an older song from a few decades ago comes blasting out of the balcony’s speakers. “Radioactive,” by Imagine Dragons.

Normally he reserves any music made during the current millennium for his daily workouts. But tonight…

Tonight when he can feel his wings pulsing inside his back, this song in particular feels more appropriate than any other.

Anos takes a sip of his wine and looks over the kingdom town that will soon be his, along with several other kingdom towns and their portals.

“
Yes
,” he says aloud in the old language of the Greek isles. “
Welcome to the new age, indeed
.”

“
S
O have
you thought about what you’re going to wear on your first heat night?” Rafe asked Chloe as they climbed up King’s Trail, their boots crunching in the freshly driven snow.

Despite the frigid mountain air, Chloe’s cheeks went hot with embarrassment. “No,” she answered, keeping her voice as neutral as possible, so as not to betray how uncomfortable this subject made her. “Have you?”

Rafe slid her the most wicked of grins. “I’m thinking red lace, maybe some of those black garters. If you give me your measurements, I can put in an order online and have exactly what I want to see you in sent over to your place.”

At that moment, Chloe was grateful for the darkness of her skin, because she could feel her initial blush spreading over her entire body. And this despite the fact she was wearing little more than her favorite hand-knitted sweater over one of the many long prairie dresses she’d also made herself and favored even when she wasn’t filming episodes of Black Mountain Woman. Why did having these kinds of conversations with Rafe always make her so uneasy? He wasn’t just her fiancé, he was also her best friend—really her only truly close friend offline—and she’d become accustomed to bringing all of her problems to him.

But of course, she couldn’t tell him how uncomfortable it made her to talk with him about anything of a sexual nature. Was this how all she-wolves who hadn’t gone into heat felt about the subject of sex? If she were a normal person, she would go to the internet with her problem. Find a forum of similar women with a similar issue. Or maybe she’d consult one of her Black Mountain Woman fans. Many of them had come to feel like real friends over the three years she’d hosted her blog and YouTube show, and she knew at least a few of them had navigated their way around sticky relationship issues.

However, the North American Lupine Council had strictly forbidden talking on the internet about anything involving their species. It was bad enough, in their opinion, that interest in werewolves was at an all time high these days, with everything from books to movies being made about their supposedly mythical race. Better not to fuel the frenzy with a blog or forum that any non-paranormal could happen across.

Besides, even if she were able to reach out to other she-wolves on line, she doubted she would find much commiseration. There were only a few hundred alpha wolves in the entire world, and Rafe Nightwolf, the alpha prince of Colorado, had chosen her, a nobody she-wolf who had literally been abandoned at the side of the road outside their shifter town.

Rafe also happened to be ridiculously hot, with his Native American father’s high cheekbones and long, sharp nose, softened by the light brown eyes and toasted brown skin he’d inherited from his Latina mother. When he’d proposed to her in front of everyone at their high school graduation, the other young she-wolves in their class had only been half-joking about how jealous they were. Any other she-wolf would kill to have a werewolf as good-looking and well off as Rafe ask for her hand in marriage.

He was also kind and had proven himself to be incredibly patient. So far he’d waited over six years to consummate their relationship, since North American Lupine Council law forbade marrying or even mating with a she-wolf who hadn’t yet had her first heat. Most she-wolves went into heat between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, which was why female wolves tended to marry and start their families rather young by modern standards.

However, Chloe had turned twenty-five a couple of months ago, and even Rafe’s seemingly infinite patience was showing signs of wearing thin. He’d been snapping at her more and more lately for little things like wearing her prairie dresses to formal events and spending too much time working on her Black Mountain Woman shows. He’d also begun bringing up their heat night whenever they were alone together, imagining out loud what they would do and how they would do it. And though she’d had six years to get used to the idea, and had even watched a few porn movies in the hopes it would jump start her into heat, she still couldn’t bring herself to talk about it or even fully imagine it in her own head.

“Hey, did I tell you? I’m working on a chicken and fennel recipe for the next episode of Black Mountain Woman,” she said, covering up her rather unsubtle subject change with a bright smile. “Maybe I’ll have it ready in time for the wedding.”

He gave her a quizzical look, “You’re marrying an alpha prince. You can’t cook for your own wedding.”

“Why not?”

“What would people say?” he asked. “Listen, Clo, you know I love you and I support your weird hobby as much as I can, but I’ve got to draw the line somewhere. We’ll have people flying in from all over the world to attend our wedding. You can’t serve them homemade chicken and fennel.”

Chloe opened her mouth to argue. First of all, he didn’t really support her Black Mountain Woman projects. She’d garnered hundreds of thousands of fans over the years with her from-scratch recipes, DIY crafting projects, and organic cleaning tips. She was also able to support herself off the money she made from advertisers on her blog and her YouTube revenue stream. But her own fiancé referred to what she did for a living as a “weird hobby.” One, she knew without having to discuss it, he expected her to give up as soon as they married.

But before she could point out any of this, he asked, “Why is it every time I bring up our heat night, you change the subject to Black Mountain Woman?”

“Um…” She scrambled to come up with a good excuse, but could only produce a weak, “Do I?”

He regarded her with cool eyes. “Yeah, you do.”

Silence descended as they continued to press up the mountain. Many of her fellow wolves loved to hike King’s Trail, but Chloe had never seen the appeal of walking up a steep precipice just because. Her glutes were already starting to protest this rare trip to the portal, a gate through space and time, which was located on a plateau about two miles up the mountain that bordered Wolf Springs. According to their lookout, Jeb, who had a cabin nearby, it flashed thirty minutes ago, which meant they had a visitor. Maybe even one from the past.