Wolf and Prejudice (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 2) (18 page)

His silence said more about the years she’d deprived him of his sons more than anything he could have said in answer to her explanation for why she was crying.

“Are they okay?” she asked.

“They’re fine,” he said.

And that was all he said, but Alisha believed him. What other choice did she have, without sending herself straight into nervous breakdown territory?

She set her mind to trying to ignore the absence of movement behind her. Was he staring at her? Glaring a hole into her back? His scent filled her nostrils, and—

Oh no, oh please God no!
She bit down on her wolf, and clenched her core tight, knowing what would happen if she let herself unclench.

“Turn around,” he said behind her.

She squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t want to.”

There came the sound of him taking another step toward her, and then his hot breath on the back of her neck. “You also didn’t want to come back here with me. But you’re here, aren’t you? Turn around,” he repeated.

An involuntary shiver coursed through her body, but she kept her whole body clenched tight.
Don’t let go,
she pleaded to herself.

“No, thank you,” she answered out loud.

“Alisha.” He broke off, and laid his forehead against the back of her head. She heard him breathe in deep through his nose and she didn’t know whether he was taking in her scent, or trying to get a hold of himself. Either way, the action caused his lips to brush her neck. Just one brush of the lips, maybe not even intentional, but that was all it took for her to lose control over her body.

She unclenched and an unmistakable smell filled the cage. It was similar to what her heat had smelled like, but less overwhelming. More like an announcement than a demand. Yet there was absolutely no denying what it was.

“You want me,” he snarled behind her. “Turn around,”

And this time she did, not because he had commanded her to, but because it was true. Despite everything, she wanted him. It had been almost five years. Five really long years, and she wanted him now, even more than she wanted to maintain what little was left of her pride.

He placed his hands at each side of her head, effectively trapping her against the wall as his eyes raked over her body. “You want me,” he said. He was breathing hard now, like a beast being held at bay.

And though it made her prideful human cringe inside, she released that beast with just one word, “Yes.”

The period dress she was wearing, so well preserved it would make a perfect gift to the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History—he ripped that dress right off her body. Straight down the middle, ruining the shift underneath as well and leaving the front of her exposed to him.

The cool air hit her breasts and pussy, but only for a moment. Because soon after, he slammed into her, entering her in one body rocking thrust. His hand tangled in her hair and he growled into her ear. “You leave me without even a note, and you make me drag you back here. And you dare to get this fucking wet.”

His words were almost as rough as his thrusts as he drove himself into her without care or mercy, but that didn’t stop Alisha’s body from responding. Deep, aching bolts of pleasure shot through her entire core as he ravaged her, and her leg went up around his waist. She wanted more, as much as he would give her.

Then he moved aside one half of her ruined dress and took her large breast in one hand, squeezing it hard and clamping her engorged nipple between the pad of his thumb and the side of his index finger. A hard, unforgiving pinch that had her pussy spasming in response, clenching around him hard, even though she wasn’t in heat and was no longer biologically compelled to pull the sperm out of his cock.

No, this time, it was all her, desperate and hungry to make the fantasies she’d been having about him nearly every morning since they parted come true. But this was better than those fantasies, she thought as Rafe continued to plow into her, with slow punishing strokes.

Maybe it was because it felt so wrong to let the man she’d crossed time to escape, the man who’d thrown her in this prison, do this to her. Maybe it was simply because it had been so long. Whatever the reason, when she came, she came hard, so hard, Rafe pulled out and watched with fascination as her release squirted out of her.

When it finally subsided, he looked at her. And she looked back at him, speechless over what he had just witnessed come out of her out-of-control body.

A few shocked seconds. Then he slammed her back against the wall and plunged himself inside her. This time, though, there was no pumping action, just his arm wrapped tight around her neck, the most sexual of chokeholds, as he spilled his seed inside her in one curt stroke.

However, one stroke was all it took to set her off. She came again, spasming around his cock, her body shuddering with her second release.

He continued to hold her in that same position, which now felt less like a chokehold and more like a hug, while she climaxed. The shaking seemed to go on forever before it subsided, yet it felt like way too soon when he let her go, pushing away from her, like he was fleeing the scene of a horrific car wreck.

He didn’t say anything as he picked up his pants and pulled them on with such ferocity, his anger felt like a palpable thing hanging between them along with their newly restored mating scent. When he was done getting dressed, he looked at her, in her torn dress, her breasts exposed, what they’d just done dripping down her thighs, her entire body trembling under his gaze.

And he left without another word, locking the door of the cell behind him.

It took a while for Alisha to move, much less think, clearly. But after she cleaned up and got into her prison bed, she realized with bewilderment that Rafe would no longer be able to compellingly sue for sole custody. Because now her scent was all over him.

18

R
afe
entered Grady’s trailer office without knocking and slapped his copy of the key to Chloe’s turning cage on the sheriff’s desk.

“You keep my key, too, until further notice.”

Grady squinted at him and sniffed his nose toward Rafe—

“Don’t”
Rafe said in American Sign Language, swiping his hands in an X-formation across his body.

Grady just shook his head and dropped them into his top drawer,
You dumb bastard
written across his face even if he had enough respect for Rafe’s alpha status not to sign it.

Yes, Rafe felt like a dumb bastard indeed as he walked back to the kingdom house. Paying Alisha a visit was supposed to have been about revenge. He’d wanted to see the look on her face when he told her he’d be getting sole custody of the boys while she rotted in Chloe’s turning cage. He wanted her to feel what he had felt for the last five years, being forced to live apart from his kin, knowing someone else had made the decision to keep them from her. He wanted her to know she wouldn’t have to apply for a wolf annulment in three weeks, because he’d be applying for one himself and taking the boys with him. That had been the plan from the start.

Her tears should have brought him joy, and they did give him a certain amount of bitter satisfaction. However, that small victory had made him cocky. Too cocky. He’d opened the cage with complete confidence. After all, he’d managed to kill two Vikings with his bare hands that very morning, surely he could handle one she-wolf.

But getting that close to her had been his undoing. The way she looked from behind with her wild hair spilling down her back. Those curls, he wanted to touch them, to caress the curves taunting him underneath that Viking dress—she might as well have been a porn star, sitting there naked and beckoning him with a sultry glance.

And now he was walking home, his long-plotted plan in ruins. There was no way the Lupine Council would grant him sole custody now. Truth was it had become a long shot once it turned out he’d be suing for custody of triplets. Many she-wolves only went into heat once, so a she-wolf who’d given birth to triplets—well, wolves were wolves, and even the most misogynistic of the council members would hold Alisha in awe.

Even Rafe’s own parents had immediately been willing to forgive the treacherous she-wolf who’d kept them from their grandcubs when they saw she’d given birth to triplets.

“Oh,
Dios Mios
!” his mother had cried, crossing herself like Alisha was the Virgin Mary, before offering to bake cookies.

But now that he and Alisha had remated, resetting the five year clock on a wolf annulment, there was no way he’d get full custody, not smelling like this, not with their scents intermingled as could only happen when two weres mated hard.

He didn’t know what was worse: that he had fucked Alisha or that he wanted to do it again.

The image of her standing there with his cum dripping down her soft thighs… his cock turned into a battering ram between his legs and it was all he could do to keep himself from turning around and going back to Grady’s trailer to demand the key to her cell.

He was almost grateful when he arrived home to complete chaos. Knud, the fully black pup, dashed past him, his nails skittering against the living room’s hard wood floors.

“Goddammit, Knud, come here. Come here right now!” his father yelled, following the skinny black pup into the living room.

But Knud seemed to be having too much fun, dashing across the furniture and spilling stuff everywhere as he skidded over the coffee table.

Meanwhile, his mother was crouched in front of Nago with a plate of sugar cookies in her hands. “I’ll give you another sugar cookie if you change back to a human,” she wheedled.

“Hell, she-wolf, they don’t need any more sugar,” his father yelled over his shoulder as he chased Knud out of the living room. “Don’t offer them any more sugar!”

Rafesson, Rafe noticed, was watching this entire scene unfold from his perch on top of the living room’s wingback chair.

“What’s going on?” Rafe asked.

His mother sighed. “Oh, it’s bedtime, and they not only don’t seem to get the concept of bedtime, but they’re also refusing to turn back to their human form. We never had these kind of problems with F.J. He was such a good puppy.”

F.J. or Fenris Junior had been the cub Chloe had given birth to in Colorado before she went back to Norway for good. His mom had actually been disappointed that he hadn’t seen or spoken directly to the then-pup, now probably teenager, while he’d been in Norway. Like he had traveled a thousand years into the past to pay a social visit.

“They’re not F.J.,” he told his mom now. “F.J. was born here. They were born over a thousand years ago. All the pups in the village were in wolf form. For all I know, they’re completely feral now, all because their mother thought it would be a good idea to jump into the past in order to avoid being with me.”

His mother suddenly straightened, her head whipping around toward him as she sniffed the air. “You smell…” she sniffed some more just to make sure. Then she smiled, huge as a summer day. “You smell like Alisha!”

Rafesson turned his head to look at him now, and Erylace abandoned the plate of sugar cookies, which Nago happily burrowed into as soon as she turned her back.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said to both his mother and his oldest son.

But the Erylace train had already left the station. “You’re getting married!” Again with the crossing herself. “Thank you! Thank you, my sweet Lord and savior!” she shouted up to the sky.

Then she looked at Rafe with the sharp recrimination of a Catholic she-wolf mother. “You are getting married, right? You wouldn’t have walked in here smelling of Alisha if you didn’t plan to marry the mother of your cubs and finally provide my grandsons with a stable home?”

Even if he had been actively planning to mate Alisha without also marrying her, he doubted even he was alpha enough to confess that to the small she-wolf standing before him, literally clutching the long string of pearls around her neck as she awaited his answer.

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Yeah, I guess we’re getting married,” he said. “Before the next full moon,” he added, telling himself the short lead time was to keep his mother’s wedding planning from going into frenzy mode and not because of the vow Alisha made back in Norway.

But Erylace went with it. “Three weeks—that’s not a lot of time, but I can work with that. And you can cut your hair before the ceremony, so you look like a nice Catholic boy when you walk down the aisle, and not like some blood-thirsty savage from a movie Western—” She broke off her culturally insensitive comparison with a frown. “But where’s Alisha? We have so much to go over.”

Rafe stared at her, and Erylace’s face fell. “Oh, Rafe, surely you don’t plan to…”

“If you want to plan the wedding with Alisha, feel free to visit her at Chloe’s, because that’s where she’ll be staying until the wedding.”

His mother looked horrified. “But Rafe,” she began.

“Mom I love you, but I’m talking as your alpha now. Don’t push me on this.”

A conflicted look passed over his mother’s face, but then she clamped her mouth shut.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll call Wilma and we’ll get started.” She perked up. “Maybe I can bring Alisha a cheese plate tomorrow and we’ll go over dress samples and talk about the food. Though, I wonder who we could get to cater at this late notice…”

His mother’s words were practically drowned out by the loudness of Rafesson’s stare.

“What?” Rafe asked, turning to face the son who had been nothing but openly hostile to him since the moment they met. “If you have something to say, turn back into a human and say it.”

Rafesson gracefully leaped down from the couch and came to stand in front of his father. Rafe thought for a few seconds that his oldest son would actually turn back into human, but Knud came crashing back into the living room, Dale chasing behind him.

“Come back here, you little shit!” Dale yelled at him.

“Honey, don’t call him that!” Erylace said, looking truly appalled.

Knud barked in response to both his grandparents and it almost sounded like laughter.