Wolf and Prejudice (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 2) (3 page)

“Seriously, she agreed to let you go to a yacht party? You’re only twenty.” And yacht parties were known for the copious amounts of drugs and alcohol that flowed through them. “You and Vince aren’t humans. Messing around with that stuff could send him into an accidental shift and you into an early heat.”

“We’re just going to dance, and I’ll be twenty-one in a few months!”

“Yeah, still not a great idea, which is why I’m finding it hard to believe Mom is cool with her precious youngest flower going to a yacht party.”

“Well, she might not know about the party part,” Tu admitted with a shrug. “In my version of the story, I stayed in Juneau until the wee hours of the morning, trying to convince you to come back with me.”

Alisha didn’t know who to be more annoyed with, her mother for coming up with this scheme or Tu for exploiting it to her own purposes. “All right, all right. Might as well get this over with. Who is Mom trying to set me up with now? The first-born son of a Texas oil tycoon? The alpha prince of a state that’s poor but has several fracking opportunities?”

“Actually, it’s Rafe Nightwolf.”

Both Alisha’s heart and her red grading pen dropped. “What!?”

Tu leaned in, cupping a hand around her mouth like an old-fashioned busybody. “He showed up on our doorstep a few days ago. Get this, he and Chloe broke up, but he won’t say why.”

“
What
?” Alisha said again. Then, “But I don’t understand, why would he come to Alaska?”

Tu sucked her teeth. “Dad said something about Rafe consulting on a resort project. He wants to develop that old hot spring up the road from us into a resort like the Nightwolfs have in Wolf Springs. And I’m like, ‘Okay, but why would an Alaska oil baron be interested in something as small change as building a resort?’ And they’re all like, ‘No, it’s a great opportunity, blah, blah, blah, people can come there to see the Northern Lights, blah, blah, blah’… then I got bored, so I just let it go. Though you know Dad’s got to be super pissed he pushed Janelle at King Mag so hard now that Rafe’s back on the market. Anyway, Rafe’s been here maybe five days, and Mom’s all like, ‘Go get Alisha. Make sure she comes home for the weekend!’ like it’s Defcon 1. So here I am attempting to fetch you.”

Tu finished her explanation with the bored shrug that only a hip, young person could manage after telling such a soap opera of a story.

Alisha, on the other hand, was shocked to the core by this news. Shocked and vaguely guilty. She fumbled to pick up her phone and text Chloe.
“WHAT HAPPENED??? Do you need to talk? I’m here if you need to talk.”

“So what do you want me to tell Mom?”

Alisha stared at the text screen. No answer, not even a little gray box with ellipses inside to let her know Chloe was typing. And that made her feel even worse about the break up, even though Alisha couldn’t exactly explain why. It wasn’t like she was still a teen crushing on the alpha prince who only had eyes for Chloe. In fact, she was so beyond that stupid infatuation, she was offended her mother would even consider matching her up with Rafe just because Janelle was no longer available.

“Tell Mom it’s the middle of the semester, and I’m knee-deep in my ‘She-Wolves in Post-Colonial Alaska’ research,” Alisha answered her sister.

“Do you think she cares?” Tu asked, her voice as frank as their Detroit-raised mother’s got whenever she dropped her queenly airs.

“I know she doesn’t,” Alisha answered. “But there’s no way I’m getting caught up in the Game of Wolves.”

“Why not?” Tu asked with what looked like genuine confusion. “Rafe is so freaking hot. I mean hotter than Mag and he’s got that bad boy tribal thing going for him.”

“First of all, I’m appalled you just reduced something as steeped in history as the Inuit practice of face tattooing down to a ‘tribal thing.’” Alisha ignored her sister’s huge eye roll and continued on, “Second of all, there’s more to compatibility than being hot.”

“
Really freaking hot
,” Tu corrected, fanning herself with her hand.

Alisha pressed on, “And last but not least, I’m a history professor. That means I like to keep all the drama in the past.”

“Alright, well, I tried,” Tu said, giving up on her mission with almost comedic speed. She headed for the door. “See ya at Easter.”

“Not coming home for Easter either,” Alisha informed her sister. “Not coming home until Mom stops trying to mate me off.”

Tu laughed. “In that case, see you next lifetime!”

NOT SURPRISINGLY, Alisha’s mother didn’t take her “no” or Alisha’s many follow-up “
Sorry mom, so busy”
texts well. After receiving increasingly blatant threats about what would happen if she didn’t come home as soon as possible, Alisha had to turn off her phone and put it away in a locked drawer. She also had to change her office number, and put her mother’s email address on her account’s blacklist.

It seriously felt like she was being stalked. By her own mother. And she was more than happy when the semester ended and she was able to travel to Canada with Matt to teach summer college at a university thousands of miles away from Alaska.

However, her summer escape plan proved to be too short term.

“What do you mean he’s back here?” she asked when Tu called her right as she was pulling up in front of the modest, twenty-unit brick apartment building she called home.

“I mean, I’m watching him play basketball with Dad on the back deck right now. That’s how back here he is.”

“I thought you said he left right after I went to Canada,” Alisha heaved her heavy suitcase from the trunk of her car. It must be a weak moon tonight. With her wolf strength usually she wouldn’t have had any trouble picking up her suitcase, even if it had been filled with bricks as opposed to a bunch of books she’d brought back from Canada. However the daytime hour combined with a weak moon meant she actually had to put in some effort.

“He did leave. But now he’s back, and Mom’s throwing this dinner party for him tonight, because you know how she is, and even Mag came up from Wyoming for it. But don’t worry, she didn’t ask me to invite you, so maybe she’s finally given up on trying to make Rafe and you happen.”

“Maybe. But if she’s given up, why is Rafe back?” Alisha asked, setting her suitcase on ground.

“I don’t know,” Tu answered. “I mean Janelle just moved back in with us, so maybe he’s waiting for her to go into heat… although that doesn’t make any sense since Mag is like his best friend.” Tu cut herself off with a gasp. “Wait, do you think he’s waiting for
me
to go into heat?”

Tu sounded excited by the possibility, even though, in Alisha’s opinion, she was still too young to go into heat. However, Alisha knew it had happened to girls even younger than Tu and it was a distasteful possibility that Rafe might claim her sister as a mate despite her only being twenty—she could actually see her mom going for this.

Wilma had only been eighteen when she went into heat while their father, the newly-dubbed Alpha King of Alaska, had been visiting their home for a formal business meeting with her father, the Alpha of Detroit (technically Michigan--but the royal alphas had taken the city name as their title ever when her great-grandfather won the state from his white predecessor in a challenge fight back in the sixties). It was supposed to be a diplomatic trip--the newly appointed twenty-year-old Tikaani had been interested in taking on Wilma's second oldest brother, Wilford, a college linebacker, as his beta. But one look had passed between the new king and the princess, and the Michigan alpha had ended up clearing out of his own home for several days while her parents rutted in a heat frenzy until Janelle was conceived.

Her mother had often recounted this as a sort of wolves-meet-cute tale, but the story had always unsettled Alisha. And now, she couldn’t imagine Tu having her whole life overturned because of what basically amounted to supernatural body chemistry established a long time ago when wolves tended to mate much younger. In her opinion, Tu was still way too young and ditzy to get saddled with a cub and an alpha husband.

“Maybe you should come stay with me for a while,” Alisha said to her sister as she walked toward her first floor apartment with her suitcase. “It’s never too late to go to college. And since you’re such a fan of underage drinking, you could do it here. Plus, we have one of the best wolf programs in the country.”

“It’s also never too late to shoot myself in the head and I am old enough to buy a gun in Alaska and do just that if I come out there and let you bore the hell out of me,” Tu said.

“Nice, Tu. Seriously, I’m worried about you. Mom and Dad will pledge you off as soon as you turn twenty-one, just like they did with Janelle, just like they’re trying to do with me now. I’m just saying maybe you should try to do something substantial with the little time you have until you’re pulled into your own special episode of the Game of Wolves. There’s more to life than partying, and you might regret wasting the few single years you’ve been granted.”

Tu’s answer to her impassioned speech was a snort of derision. “And I’m just saying maybe you should come home and give the Colorado prince a chance to send you into heat.”

“Eww, Tu, gross! He used to be engaged to one of my best friends and I haven’t even started my post-colonial she-wolves book. Going into heat now would be a disaster!”

“That’s not going to keep Mom from coming after you like the Terminator. She wants all her daughters married off, you know she doesn’t give a damn about your book.”

Alisha laughed and pulled out the key to unlock her apartment door. “Poor Mom, it’s probably driving her crazy that I managed to avoid coming home all this time when there’s an eligible wolf on the premises—”

Big strong arms grabbed her from behind. And despite the heavy cologne her attacker was wearing, she immediately recognized him as a fellow werewolf due to the iron-like nature of the hold. A normal human she could have fought off easily, but a male werewolf was almost impossible to beat in a fight without a tranquilizer gun or a silver bullet. And both of her guns were currently locked in a drawer inside her apartment

“Alisha? Alisha? Are you still there?” she heard her sister asking through the phone.

The wolf snatched the phone from her hand, ending the call and pocketing it before she had a chance to respond.

Before Alisha could even think to scream, duct tape was placed over her mouth and plastic cuffs around her wrists. The next thing she knew, she was being thrown into the back seat of an old Cutlass sedan.

It all happened so fast, she didn’t see the wolf’s face until he climbed into the driver’s seat.

Vince!!
She tried to yell (but it came out as a muffled squeal beneath the duct tape) when her younger, but still much stronger than her, African-American cousin turned around to grin at her over the seat. She would have immediately recognized his scent if he hadn’t gone out of his way to mask it with cologne—so she’d never smell him coming.
What the hell?!

“Sorry, Cuz,” Vince said, putting on his seatbelt. “But…” He cleared his throat and said in his most formal tone, “Aunt Wilma requests your presence at her dinner party for the Alpha Prince of Colorado tonight.”

3

I
t didn’t take long for Rafe to figure out Alisha had been forced to attend tonight’s dinner party in his honor. He watched her cousin’s floater plane splash down on the dock outside the Ataneq’s three-story yellow cedar kingdom house from his guest room window. And even though Vince had gone through the trouble of securing Alisha’s hands in front of her with a pair of what appeared to be zip-tie cuffs, he still had a hard time pulling the she-wolf out of the plane, she was fighting him so hard. The young wolf was lucky it was still daylight and there’d only be a waxing crescent of a moon that night. Otherwise, Alisha would have easily had enough wolf strength to rip apart the plastic cuffs with a tug of her wrists.

That might also explain why she hadn’t morphed into wolf form in order to escape her cousin. Either that or, as angry as she was, she held too much affection for Vince to risk her wolf hurting him. Most weres couldn’t control themselves in wolf form and that was one of reasons the council had strictly forbidden non-full moon night shifts.

“I can’t believe you kidnapped me!” she yelled as he dragged her up the stone steps that led to the house. She was so loud, Rafe had no doubt he would have been able to hear her even without his wolf ears.

“What kind of cousin are you!?”

“The kind who needs a Cessna 185,” the young man answered in a cheerful, matter-of-fact voice as he tugged her toward the front door, which was flanked one either side by totem poles. “Aunt Wilma said she’d give me enough for a down payment if I picked you up.”

“Don’t try to sugar coat it,” Alisha snapped as he rang the doorbell. “You didn’t pick me up, you kidnapped me in exchange for a new bush plane! And now I’m even more insulted because you only got a down payment for it. You should have at least held out for the whole plane.”

Her cousin frowned, “You think I could have gotten a plane? Just for kidnapping you?”

“Never mind that kidnapping is a crime, even if your insane queen sanctions it. Yes, I
do
think you could have gotten more for illegally kidnapping me and flying me here against my will!” Alisha answered. “But now I guess you’ll have to make do with your thirty pieces of silver. Serves you right.”

Vince looked confused. “She promised me a lot more than thirty pieces of silver, which—duh, we’re allergic to anyway. Where are you getting your numbers from?”

Alisha rolled her eyes. “It’s a reference to Judas of Iscariot, Vince.” Then, just in case he still wasn’t getting it: “Because you’re a
total
Judas!”

Vince actually looked hurt. “Aw, Cuz, don’t be like that. Here let me take you out of those cuffs.”

He brought out a large hunting knife to cut the cuffs off, but Alisha yanked her arms back over her shoulder. “No, the Alaska queen paid you to drag me out here all trussed up like a gypsy bride. Don’t start acting like you have issues with human trafficking now!”