Seduction (The Journal of the Wolves of Spruce Hollow) (6 page)

“Get off me, you big jerk,” I screeched at him as I kicked and floundered wildly underneath him.

Roan got up, put his knee into my back and effectively squashed me like a pancake. I could not move with his heavy, muscular, frame holding me down.

“You know, Aspen, being in the military taught me many useful skills. One of which was how to restrain hysterical little girls who don’t yet understand what is going on.”

Chapter 6

~Aspen~

I was curled up on my side on top of Roan’s bed with my hands zip tied behind my back and my mouth taped with a piece of silver duct tape.
 

Roan had said that if I didn’t stop screaming while he zip tied my hands together that he was going to shut me up and apparently this was what he’d had in mind.

I watched him, my eyes full of hatred, as he lazily brushed his teeth and unbuttoned the top button on his jeans.
He wasn’t going to get undressed right here, was he?
 

“I’ll be right back, don’t go anywhere,” he chuckled as he pulled a pair of pajama bottoms out of his dresser drawer and went back to the bathroom to spit out his toothpaste into the sink.
 

When he came back to the bedroom, his jeans were off and he was wearing the pajama bottoms. They fit low on his hips and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his body as he dumped his jeans into the clothes hamper.
 

His body looked different than I remembered it. I’d thought that he was in excellent shape before, but he was a machine now. He was leaner and every muscle in his back, chest, stomach and arms were hardened and defined. Black tattoos covered the right side of his back, right chest and his entire right arm in swirling tribal patterns and shapes. He looked every part the lethal killing and fighting machine that the military had trained him to be.
 

God, he was so different from the last time I’d seen him. He was dark and disreputable now. I wondered how the military had changed him in the years since he’d been away?
 

I’m sure most women found him very sexy with his handsome face, blue eyes and hard body, but not me. I only saw the heartless, cruel man who had broken me as a teenager.
 

 
He turned and looked at me, his eyes catching me looking at him. I quickly looked away but he didn’t say anything; he just smiled a half smile and kind of snickered as he picked up the tv remote.
 

Roan hopped up and stretched out on the bed beside me to watch tv. It reminded me of the first day that Roan and I had met, way back when I was six years old. Except that day we were sitting on the couch in the living room. I was confused and scared that day as well, just like I was now. The parallels were difficult to ignore.
 

Of course, Roan didn’t have me trussed up like a turkey when I was six but I suppose I
had
felt like a prisoner in my strange, new home.
 

That was the day that Roan had won me over and gained my trust, by plying me with patience and cookies. But, one thing was for sure; this time around there weren’t enough cookies in the entire world to allow Roan to regain my trust. I would never allow that to happen again.
 

There was no way.
 

I was older now and had life experiences under my belt. I was no longer a scared, little girl huddled on the couch with a pink blanket. I was now a jaded and hardened young woman who bore many emotional battle scars. I would never allow Roan to get inside my head and more importantly, my heart, and corrupt me with his lies ever again.

I stared at him, my eyes full of anger and hurt but if he felt me glaring hatred at him, he gave no indication, he just continued to watch tv.
 

It was as if I wasn’t even there.

Chapter 7

~Roan~

I looked down, as Aspen lay sleeping on my bed, and smiled. I felt like a smiling idiot, but I was so deeply content inside. My mate and I were finally together after all these long years apart.
 

God, how I had missed her.
The loneliness had been a bottomless, constant, physical ache deep inside me for the past five years.
 

When my errant wolf decided to challenge me for power, I’d had no other choice but to leave Spruce Hollow. I’d known it would be beyond my ability to stay away from Aspen with consistency, so I’d joined the military to keep myself away from her. They did what I couldn’t do and forced me to stay away by sending me on numerous overseas deployments. I wasn’t even in the same country as Aspen a lot of the time.
 

But when I was back on home soil and stationed at the base…I couldn’t help myself and I would watch her.
 

It would make me sick to my stomach with loneliness and wanting. But every single time I was on leave, I would come back to Spruce Hollow, stay with either Griff or Caver for a few days, and follow Aspen around town like a little, lost puppy in my wolf form.
 

She never knew the truth though. I’d made sure of that.
 

Aspen never once suspected that I was around, watching and following her every move. She was positive that I’d abandoned her and while I knew that my plan wasn’t perfect, I’d felt that I had no other option available to me. I wanted her to live a normal life and be free of our growing connection, a connection that neither one of us could act on until she got older.
 

However, it didn’t work out exactly as I’d hoped as Aspen had been utterly devastated by me leaving Spruce hollow. Valerie and I had kept in constant contact throughout the years, so I knew absolutely everything that was going on in Aspen’s life and unfortunately, I wasn’t always happy with what Valerie had to tell me. Apparently, Aspen’s personality had changed drastically once I left. She went from a secure, happy and bubbly teenager to an insecure, depressed and angry one who often hid in her room and cried every time she got a letter from me in the mail.
 

Logic would dictate that I should have stopped sending letters to her since they made her so miserable, but I knew Aspen and deep down, I was certain that stopping my weekly letters would have only made it worse for her in the long run. In her mind, I knew she saw my letters as the only remaining connection that she still had to me and things were horrible enough between the two of us without cruelly ripping that away from her too.

I wrote to her for two whole years, but then she graduated from high school and everything changed.
 

It had shocked the hell out of me at the time, because after graduation Aspen took off like a scared rabbit and ran as far away as from Spruce Hollow as she could possibly get. And I
really
wasn’t anticipating her making that move.
 

At all.
 

I guess in my mind, I had always figured that she’d stay here with the rest of the pack and maybe go to community college or something. She’d always loved animals and had expressed an interest in becoming a veterinary technician someday.
 

But no, she took off out of the blue one day and moved hours away, to Springbay. She’d cleaned out the savings account that both Valerie and I had deposited into every month since she was six years old and then used the money to buy a car and rent an apartment several blocks away from the ocean.
 

The bank had even called me the day she’d tried to withdraw the money for the car, as it was held in trust for her and they needed my permission to release it.
 

I could have said no. I certainly thought about it. I didn’t want her to leave town because she was safe and protected there. But, eventually, I realized that part of the reason that I had left her behind in Spruce Hollow in the first place was so that she could have normal human experiences before I claimed her as my mate. So, as much as it killed me, I gave my permission and they released the money to her.

I mean, it’s not like she was acting irresponsibly and blew all the money on partying, like most teenagers would have. On the contrary, after she bought the car she’d returned the leftover money back to her savings account and then she got herself a job waitressing at a vegetarian restaurant. She’d acted very responsibly, so I decided to let her go and be free for a while.

Aspen could have moved to Siberia and I would have found a way to watch over her. However, it was harder to conceal myself in the seaside college town as there were no forests for my wolf to slip into but I managed just fine in my human form. She never knew that I was there, watching over her on the beach and protecting her. I’d even eaten at her restaurant, dozens of times, while she was working. I’d sit in another waitress’s section and would watch Aspen work and interact with her customers.
 

She seemed lonely though. And sad. When she wasn’t at work or her apartment, she usually spent the rest of her time volunteering at the local animal shelter or sitting on the beach, by herself, and staring out into the ocean. She’d made very few friends in Springbay and had even fewer boyfriends, thank god.

When my military service was up and Aspen was
finally
old enough, I hightailed it back to Spruce Hollow with the hope that Aspen would return as well, but there was one little thing wrong with my plan; I had grossly underestimated just how much my abrupt departure from Spruce Hollow had damaged Aspen emotionally.

So, for almost a year after my discharge, I continued to clandestinely follow her around Springbay. I no longer had my military service to distract me from her and I missed her intensely.
 

But a funny thing had happened while I was off serving our country.
 

Aspen had grown up.
 

She was no longer this awkward, gangly teenager. But had turned into this beautiful, alluring young woman. She was delicate and fragile but so full of life and I was desperate to reconnect with her.
 

“Our mate is beautiful, isn’t she,” my wolf said appreciatively as I sat beside her on the bed and watched her sleep.

“Yes, she certainly is.”
 

I could finally say that now without feeling like a creep and frankly, it was a relief. But the truth was I had been physically attracted to Aspen since the time she had turned about sixteen or so. I remembered the day I’d first noticed her as something other than a little girl. It was summer and she was dressed in a bikini top and daisy duke jeans shorts. I was outside, working on my truck, when she’d walked down to the end of driveway. She was waiting for Sorcha, who had just gotten her license and the two of them were going to drive around and enjoy their new found freedom. I’d sniffed the air as she walked by and something about her scent had changed. It drew me in like a homing beacon and I couldn’t stop looking at her.
 

I’d had freaked me out and I went into the house to get away from her. I’d figured it had been a fluke because she was still too young but when I saw her again later that night, I knew that I was in big trouble.
 

After all this time, I still felt bad about the weird, semi-sexual tension that existed between Aspen and I from that point on. She’d was only a skinny, awkward teenager and I knew that our connection completely overwhelmed her. But the truth was, I was overwhelmed too.

But that was in the past. Besides, I had done the only thing decent thing I could think of to combat my Were biology and had left Spruce Hollow to protect her.

However difficult the ensuing years had been, my wolf and I were both deliriously happy over our reunion. The only one who was miserable right now was Aspen.

“I thought our mate would be ready for us by now,” my wolf said apprehensively, “she looked quite distressed to see us.”

“Human females are different from female Were’s. She will be content and settled soon enough. She just doesn’t realize it yet. Don’t worry, it will be alright.”

My wolf and I had made up a long time ago. Time away from Aspen had cleared his head and made him much more agreeable. Enlisting in the military had given us a lot of time to patch things up over the past five years. He’d saved me more than once during my overseas deployments, whether it was his night vision, scent or superior strength. I certainly owed him my life ten times over.
 

Even though we still occasionally disagreed, my wolf was absolutely right about one thing. Aspen was definitely not happy to see me. Horrified was a much better description for the look on her face.

When Valerie had passed away and I knew Aspen would be coming home for the funeral, I had planned out a dozen different scenarios in my head. God, I’d wanted the reunion between us to go smoothly. But when I’d returned home, from pack business in Shawfield, the knowledge that she was physically close by made all those carefully thought out plans go out the window and I’d made a beeline for her.
 

Of course, when I’d found her, she was sound asleep, laying in her childhood bed and surrounded by all the letters that I had written her while I was in the service.