Wolf and Prejudice (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 2) (12 page)

And even after that, he continued to hold on to his wolf. He simply smiled at her and gave her a sweet kiss before knotting inside her and quietly releasing his seed.

They didn’t say anything to each other, out loud or telepathically. Just settled in, him positioning himself, so she wasn’t bearing the full burden of his weight. Then they fell asleep, locked down below and also up high, in each other’s arms.

However, when she woke a few hours later, she found herself alone on the couch. Also, the heavy sensation inside her loins, the constant tugging feeling that had accompanied her every waking moment for the last three days, was gone, too. She felt fine now. Worked over, like she’d just spent the last few days in a dryer, but her old self nonetheless, her human firmly in charge and her wolf buried deep inside of her, until the next full moon or the next time she got in an argument with somebody.

But where was Rafe?

The sound of the shower switching on in the next room answered that question. Great idea, she thought. She couldn’t wait to take one of her own. Fresh heat was incredibly intoxicating, but this old heat she was now lying in made her feel like a walking brothel. Maybe, she would join him…

But then she spotted a large interoffice envelope on top of the five boxes she had just finished packing when her heat came on. The boxes must have been brought over from her office, when her father’s people had relocated her and Rafe. But Alisha hadn’t packed any envelopes, she was almost sure of it.

She opened it with a scholar’s need to know and pulled out a photocopy of Ibn Fadlan’s original journal pages, written in the tenth century traveler’s neat Arabic hand. There was also a handwritten note from Matt, scrawled with what looked like haste on a piece of notebook paper.

Alisha, I’m writing this while waiting for your father’s guards to arrive, but if you’re reading this, you are most likely already mated to Rafe Nightwolf. I’ve come to admire you over the course of our friendship, and I feel sick to my stomach that I was a party in this scheme. I’m hoping an explanation of my acts will help you understand and perhaps forgive what I did.

When your father came to me, he was very persuasive. He told me he’d unwisely pledged your sister Janelle to a wolf he didn’t believe would be best suited to takeover the kingship of Alaska. He made it seem like the future of your state pack was on the line if I didn’t go along with Rafe’s plan to ensure you married him, which would make him a two-state king when your father chose him as a successor in five years.

Alisha broke off at this point in the letter. What did he mean by “Rafe’s plan?” Hadn’t the protocol that had kept her unmated until Rafe showed up been her father’s plan alone? And what was this about Rafe becoming a two-state king? The deal had already been struck that Mag would be her father’s second. Was her father planning to go back on the deal? And would Rafe really betray his best friend like that? She read on, hoping Matt would provide her with more answers.

I’ll also admit the history nut inside me was curious to see this scenario play out, since, as you know, it’s been over a century since we’ve had a two-state kingship. But watching you suffer like this, I can now see my actions were greedy and I’ve hurt you irreparably. I tried to call it off before Rafe got on the plane. There is a professor here, one who is not gay, who I think you could be compatible with—at this point it’s been hours and I’m gravely concerned for your life. But when I called your father and tried to get him to call off the guards outside your door so I could get the professor to you, King Tikaani told me in no uncertain terms Rafe would kill me if I arranged for another to mate with you—kill me and kill whoever you mated before him. I’m concerned your father will consider my request an act of betrayal and have me removed from your office soon. This is why I’m writing this letter as fast as I can. Hopefully, I can successfully hide it with your packed boxes, and it will eventually find its way to you.

Alisha, please understand I did not do this for a small amount of money. Rafe Nightwolf paid me a fortune to ensure you became his mate, even though you made it clear you did not want to. He is as ambitious as Ivan the Terrible and as ruthless as Sun Tzu, and he’ll do anything to get his way. Even if I could think of a way to get you out of here before the guards came, I doubt there would be anywhere you could go to escape his machinations. If I hadn’t agreed to his plan, he would have found someone else, but I’m still sorry I agreed to do this. You are an intelligent and passionate person who I’ve come to respect. You don’t deserve this. I doubt he’ll let you continue your research into what happened to Chloe Adams, so I wanted you to have these manuscript pages. Hopefully they’ll give you some solace in the years to come.

With deepest apologies,

Matt

Alisha didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath for the entirety of the letter, until it all came out of her in one big, agonized gush.

No,
her wolf cried out inside of her, not wanting to believe what she’d just read, that Rafe, not her father, had been behind the plan to mate her, that he had been manipulating her future to suit his needs since February. That all the things he’d said about wanting her, about liking her, about looking forward to their lives together—she couldn’t bring herself to accept that all his sweet words had been lies.

She crumpled the note up in her hand and tried to come up with a plausible explanation for why Matt would lie to her about Rafe. But then, as if in answer to her fervent wish to deny everything she’d just read, there came the sound of heavy vibration.

It was Rafe’s phone, going off in her bedroom. She found it lying on the nightstand where he’d set it down before getting in the shower, with a black box on the front screen that read “Text message from Uncle Tikaani” followed by the words:
“Chloe book handled. My guy on Lupine Council will make sure not approved for study. Let #hardheaded blame me for this, too. #weddingpresent #tamingoftheshrew”

Normally, Alisha was amused by her father’s love of hashtags, but in this case… the phone fell out of her hands and landed with a dull thud on the carpeted floor, along with her heart.

12

T
was
two weeks before Christmas, and Rafe was killing off his fifth tumbler of Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey. He might as well have been drinking it straight from the bottle as fast as he was downing it. Would have done just that if he weren’t currently at the Wolf Springs Resort bar. He’d killed off his own stash of Stranahan back at his kingdom house this morning after receiving the report that Alisha still hadn’t been found, despite having crossed over the Canadian-Washington State border over forty-eight hours ago. So it had been necessary to come down to the hotel’s bar and drink with the humans.

He’d been fascinated by Alisha shrewd intelligence just a few days ago, the fact that her vast knowledge of history made her sharp as a tack in other areas, as well. But she’d been too smart to rent a car or make any large transactions or do any of the other things that might have made it easier for his people to find her. Now he was cursing her cleverness while drinking himself into a coma.

She’d been gone two days, and it felt like she’d cleaned out his heart and the rest of his internal organs when she disappeared. Like he was little more than an empty vessel, with nothing left but a liver to process the copious amounts of alcohol he had to drink to keep from going crazy without her.

Every time he closed his eyes or let his mind rest even a little, that last night played out in his head. He could still smell her heat in his nose, feel the weight of her body in his arms and the tug of her pussy milking his dick as she settled into him with a peaceful sigh that told him she was finally his, that she had finally accepted him completely as her mate, both her human and her wolf. That moment had been enough to make his heart burst all over again with the long delayed happiness she had given him with the gift of her acquiescence.

But that remembered happiness was fleeting, because the memory of the next morning followed heavy on its heels. Him coming out of the shower, wanting her again, even though he could now smell she was with cub. Actually, the smell of her pregnancy had been even stronger than usual, or at least stronger than any other pregnancy he’d ever smelled on another she-wolf—perhaps because he knew it was his pup she carried within her womb. And that knowing made him want her even more.

But he had sensed something wrong as soon as he came out of the bathroom. There was the smell of her heat, stale and in the past, but the new scent of her pregnancy—it was gone. Then he spotted his phone on the floor near his bed, and his confusion was replaced with dread, because the last thing he’d done before getting in the shower was send King Tikaani a message assuring him of the success of what the Alaska king had dubbed in his hashtag heavy texts as Mission #tamingoftheshrew. “Only problem—think she still wants to write Chloe book,” he’d added as an afterthought.

Later, after three hours of unsuccessfully trying to reach Alisha on her cell phone, Matt had been brought in for questioning, and after a few none-too-veiled threats, the Canadian wolf had confessed to the letter. Only King Tikaani had been able to keep Rafe from going after the academic with his bare hands.

“No, son,” he said to Rafe, holding the younger man back. “I can’t let you hurt one of my subjects, right in front of me. It’s not a killable offense under any law and he’s already proven how much he likes squealing. If you beat him up, he’ll go to the authorities, and he’s not worth a Council investigation. Just try to calm yourself down.”

Rafe backed down, but he was nowhere near calm. His mate was out there by herself. Both his biological and protective instincts were going crazy. “If anything happens to her... to my cub…”

“Nothing will happen to her, because we’re going to find her,” the king assured him. “Soon.”

But they hadn’t found her. She’d managed to cross the border into the lower forty-eight, and they hadn’t heard from her since. And now he was back in Colorado, pining over Alisha and waiting for news from the many state wolf packs engaged in the search for his mate.

For the past year, he’d thought not mating with Alisha would be his worst nightmare, but as it turned out, mating her and having her leave him like this was even worse. He could barely function, he wanted her back so bad. The physiological nature of their mating bond combined with his protection instinct now that she was with cub made him want to tear his human skin off his body, turn wolf, and run through the vast spread of America looking for his she-wolf even though he had no idea where she was.

He raised his hand, signaling for another whiskey, needing another shot glass-sized dose of oblivion. But when he looked up, the bartender was gone. In fact, the whole bar was empty. As if it had been quietly cleared out while he stared into his drink.

“Son.” His father was standing in the doorway now, and he walked over to him in a way Rafe had seen a few times before. Tight and regretful. The stance of a king who didn’t want to tell one of his wolves that his mate had been killed by someone hunting illegally during a full moon night, who wished like hell he didn’t have to console a couple whose pup had come out still-born. It was the same way Dale had looked when he’d come to Rafe’s house the morning after that February full moon to tell him Chloe had been mated to another.

“Is Alisha all right?” he asked his father now. He’d suspected she’d been hitchhiking since she crossed the border and though she-wolves could usually handle themselves when it came to human males, if one had managed to drug her without her knowledge… his heart skittered thinking of what could have happened to her and his cub because she had been running from her mate. “Just tell me she’s all right. I don’t care about anything else as long as she and our pup are all right.”

But his father soon proved him a liar.

“She’s all right as far as I know. But I just got off the phone with Mag. She showed up in Wyoming an hour ago. Janelle’s not exactly being forthcoming, but from what Mag could piece together, Alisha got her hands on some kind of spell that allowed her to open the Wyoming portal gate…”

Rafe would find out many weeks worth of research later that Alisha had found a written word spell on Chloe’s computer, and that this written word spell took its speaker back to whatever time and place the written words she quoted were created as long as they were chanted next to a portal. Professor Henley had found the spell for Chloe during her return visit to Colorado, but his ex-fiancée hadn’t been able to use it because she didn’t know of any words written by Fenris. But Alisha… Alisha had the photocopy of Ibn Fadlan’s journal entry about Chloe, perhaps written while he was in the village.

No, Rafe didn’t know any of that when his father first told him about the spell, but the word “spell” alone froze him in place with dread.

“No,” he said, even as his wolf began to keen inside him, like it could hear something his human couldn’t, something terrible and unfathomable to a newly mated shifter.

Then Dale took him by the shoulders and confirmed what Rafe’s wolf already knew, causing him to howl with rage. And his soul to scream with emptiness. The moon was strong that night, and his father narrowly escaped the bar before Rafe shifted. It would take weeks to repair the damage he did to the space upon finding out his she-wolf had gone to a place where he could not follow.

Twas two weeks before Christmas, and Rafe’s heart had been ripped apart.

13

Almost five years later

A
lisha woke up to the sound of a rooster shrieking in her ear—okay, not in her ear exactly. He was outside with the rest of the chickens, but he might as well have been inside the longhouse, he was that loud, the sound of his wake-up call easily piercing through the wooden walls of the Fenris king's longhouse.