Sherry's Wolf (13 page)

He joined her on the bed, sitting cross-legged on the edge of the mattress. The little buckskin bag he always wore round his neck was in his hand. “Sherry, we’re really mated now,” he began.

She waited for panic to set in. It didn’t. Her tentative smile grew into something wide and more happy. “I know.”

“I love you, Sherry. Even if my wolf hadn’t chosen you, I would love you.” His blue, blue eyes closed briefly as if to hide inner pain. “I know you don’t love me, but I hope—”

“Wait a minute!” she interrupted. “Who says I don’t love you? I
do
love you!”

He blinked. “Yesterday you told me you hated me. You’re just saying that because of the sex.”

She sat up with a snap, her spine poker straight. “Excuse me? The sex was great. But I started to love you weeks ago. I was just too scared to see it at first. Yesterday I was just pissed off.”

“Really?” His voice was neutral, not quite hiding the doubt. Or the hope. “How long ago?”

Sherry gave her attention to carefully pleating the sheet. “I think I began loving you at the den, when you let me talk to the priest even though you really didn’t want me to.” She lifted her eyes to smile at him. “And when you left to give me the time I asked for. And most of all, because you really listened to me when I talked about my father and his family.” Her smile faded, swallowed by anxiety. “But why do you love me? All I’ve done is scream at you and cry.”

Stag’s knuckles were white from clenching the tiny leather bag. “Because you’re you. I was ready to love you because my wolf chose you. I’ve watched you. Even though your legs were broken you always did your share of the chores without complaining. You were in terrible pain for the first month, and you cried, but you accepted help without whining, unlike those two women who were with you in the healing lodge. They were hateful. You weren’t. So I knew you were brave and kind. Even when you were yelling at me, I knew it was because you were hurt and frightened in a world you didn’t know. But that day at the den, when you stood up to me and yelled that I didn’t have the right to keep you from your faith… That was when I really began to love you. You were so frightened of me, but you were brave enough demand your rights. I like it when you stand firm for what you want.”

Sherry drew in a shivering breath. “You know that old saying? If something seems too good to be true, it probably is? That’s you, Stag. You’re too good to be true.”

He snorted. “Me, too good to be true?”

“You love me, even though I’ve been a bitch. You made me come first tonight even though it was your first time and you were entirely allowed to be selfish, and when I yelled at you to thrust harder so I could come again, you did. And I did. Come twice, I mean.
That
is too good to be true.”

That adorable flush was back on his high cheekbones. “Good? I’m bossy, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.” It was true he was bossy. But she had been bossy too. And she had lied to him and tried to send him away for almost a year. Her only excuse was that she had been afraid, and that was a pretty lame excuse.

“And I keep trying to fatten you up,” he went on, far too blithely for it to be a regretful confession. He sounded proud, not ashamed.

“Yeah, that, too!” A little self-righteous rage sparked in Sherry. She glared at him, but only half-heartedly.

“I’ll try to stop making you eat more,” he went on reasonably, “if you’ll agree to try to eat one more bite at every meal. Just one bite.”

Sherry sighed. He was hard to argue with when he used that reasonable tone of voice. “Alright, alright. One bite.”

His smile was boyishly happy. “Do you why I want you to eat more? Plump women have an easier time conceiving than thin ones. In the first decade after the Terrible Times there weren’t many women left alive, and most of those were malnourished. They had a hard time conceiving because their courses weren’t regular.” He paused, to look down at the buckskin bag he still held, before looking directly into her eyes. “I want children, Sherry. I would love for us to have babies together.”

“Me, too.” That wasn’t hard for her to say. The other morning at breakfast she had felt a shocking stab of envy at Marissa’s news. “I could already be pregnant.” She laid a hand on her belly and watched Stag’s eyes follow her movement with longing in them. “Part of me wants to be pregnant right now, and part wants to wait a few months so we can spend more time with just each other. But that’s out of our control, unless we keep our hands and other body parts to ourselves. I don’t want that, do you?”

“No!”

Well
, Sherry smirked to herself,
that was definite
. Not that she was disagreeing. She wanted to know if two orgasms in one lovemaking session was a fluke. And she wanted to lick his thick length and suck on the tip of him. She got to her knees to move closer to him. He put a hand to her cheek to caress her jaw with his thumb.

“Sherry, you know my mother’s gone. But I do have a few things that belonged to her.” He opened the little sack he’d been holding and took out a pair of rings. “She was wearing these when she was stolen. I’ve carried them with me since I was thirteen years old. I always planned to give them to my mate. I know these aren’t fancy or sparkly like your wedding ring from the Times Before, but would you wear them?”

Sherry had to sniff to keep back the tears. The rings didn’t look like they were very expensive. One had a cat’s eye stone in a plain silver setting, the other was a simple pearl. Unlike the gaudy rock LeRoi had paid $10,000 for, these rings had a quiet elegance that appealed to Sherry. The fact that they had belonged to his murdered mother and he had carried them for fifteen years made them worth more than any amount of money.

“I think they’re beautiful, Stag. I’ll be glad to wear them.”

He took her left hand in his and looked down at the gorgeous, glittering ring LeRoi had given her. “Sherry, I know you loved your husband, but –“

She didn’t wait for him to finish. She pulled the heavy ring off and shoved it into his hand. “Put it on top of the dresser, Stag. When we go back to Kearney I’ll give it to my cousin Billy. He can give it to his wife when he finds one.

Stag reached to place the ring out of sight on the dresser without taking his eyes off her. The kiss he pressed to her naked finger made her want to cry again. “I love you, Sherry.” He fitted the cat’s eye ring onto her wedding ring finger, then he slid the pearl ring onto the third finger of her right hand. “I made wedding vows to you once, but I’ll be glad to do it again. Do you want me to bring that priest back so we can be married properly?”

Sherry cupped his face between her palms. “Maybe in the spring we could go to him? I would love to be married inside a real church.” She knew what the slight furrowing of his forehead meant. “Not by ourselves, of course. Maybe some of Taye’s Pack could ride along with us?”

Stag smiled at her. “If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do,” he promised.

As she climbed into his lap she inwardly marveled over the change in her life and how quickly it had happened. It was scary, how close she had come to allowing her fear to deny Stag forever. Thank God Stag hadn’t let her. Their life together might not be perfect, but she wasn’t afraid of him sexually or any other way anymore, and she wouldn’t want to live her life without him in it.

She straddled her mate’s waist and looped her arms around his neck to kiss him. A leap of faith wasn’t as scary as she had thought it would be. Stag’s arms were strong enough to keep her from hitting the ground. It would never occur to him that her demands would emasculate him. Stag was all man, and he was all hers.

“Thank you, Stag,” she whispered. “I love you.”

The End

Book 1: Sleeping With the Wolf

Carla is an up and coming country music star when she boards a plane for Denver in the year 2014. After the plane crashes in the year 2064 she learns that nuclear war destroyed technology and unleashed a plague that devastated the female population. Even now, decades after the plague has dwindled to isolated outbreaks, women are precious commodities to be fought for, and Carla finds herself offered as the prize in a Bride Fight. Alpha wolf Taye knows Carla is his mate. Losing her is unacceptable. He wins the Bride Fight. But can he win her heart?

Book 2: Wolf’s Glory

When goth-girl Glory Peterson’s plane crashes she walks to find help. What she finds are people living in teepees like it’s the Old West. Wolf’s Shadow knows Glory is his mate. Glory’s happy to take a roll in the hay with him while she’s waiting for transportation back to civilization, but when she finds out she’s gone fifty years into the future and Shadow is a bossy werewolf who thinks he owns her, her attitude changes fast. Shadow is used to giving orders that are obeyed. Glory hasn’t obeyed an order since kindergarten. When two strong-willed lovers clash, who will win?

Book 3: Wolf Tracker

Strong, independent Tami was a survivalist and mountain guide in 2014 when she was flung forward fifty years into a post-apocalyptic future where women are worth their weight in gold. She is taken by four men to be their wife, but when she escapes from them they hire the Tracker, a deadly loner from the Clan with a reputation for being able to track anything, to bring her back. But Tami knows how to ride and how to hide, and she leads him on a chase that rouses his admiration. Behind Tracker’s stone cold face is a man who yearns for a wife of his own. When he catches up with Tami and learns that she is not a willing wife, he knows he can’t give her up.

Maddy Barone was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the tail end of the baby boom. She now lives in Fargo, North Dakota, USA with her three rescue cats. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in History, which is probably why she works in the financial department at Medicare. Maddy has always had a need to create stuff. Quilts, cross stitch pictures, knitted items, historical costume, yarn and, of course, stories. Back in High School, she scribbled her stories in spiral bound notebooks while she should have been paying attention in class. Later she graduated to a big desktop computer with a monitor that doubled as a shelf for her cats. They were annoyed when she upgraded to a flat screen monitor and are not sure what to think of the laptop.

Maddy enjoys reading, knitting, spinning (with a spinning wheel. The other is just too much work) and playing dress up in the SCA, an international educational organization that recreates the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

To learn more about Maddy and her stories, visit her at www.MaddyBarone.com