Wolf and Punishment (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 1) (9 page)

9

J
ANELLE loved him, too. Janelle loved him, too. Mag played the best game of his life that afternoon. Fifteen tackles, two interceptions. The defensive line coach slapped him on the back as he came back off the field, their team having easily won the game 45 to 17.

“You keep playing like that and you’re going top three in the draft pick, son!”

His teammates praised him with a shower of Gatorade inside the locker room. Then Rafe made a speech about his performance at the after-party at a local bar. The only thing that could have made the day any better would have been if Janelle had been there to see it. And if his asshole teammate, Kenny, hadn’t.

The defensive tackle sat in the booth closest to the door with three of his football buddies and yet another of his townie blondes. But while his teammates and the blonde were having a good old time, you wouldn’t know Kenny was on the winning team by the way he’d been scowling at Mag all night.

When Mag caught him glaring at him for the fifth time that night while he was walking over to the bar to get another free round of beers, he decided to do something about it.

“Something wrong with your eyes?” he asked Kenny as he passed by the table. “Cuz I don’t swing that way.”

Kenny’s eyes flicked over him, his hatred clear. “Notice you haven’t been talking to any girls all night. Maybe you do swing that way.”

Mag shrugged, keeping his face as expressionless as possible, even as the thought that none of the girls in this bar could hold a candle to Janelle popped into his head.

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m on the fence. But I still wouldn’t do your ugly ass, yeah?” He knocked on the table and left it at that.

Mag would rather have Kenny and his buddies think he was bi than cause any trouble with Janelle at home. One: he didn’t really care what Kenny and his buddies thought of him. None of them were draft-level material, even with their extra wolf strengths. And two: he was secure enough in his manhood that he didn’t have to take offense if he was mistaken for someone who got down with other dudes.

Still, he made sure to flirt with the pretty brunette bartender as she pumped beer into four steins for him. She had a body like Janelle’s, he noticed, but without the butt and thighs he loved to grab onto as he was… and now he was hard again. Hell.

He went back to the high round table where Rafe was standing, his arm slung around his pretty little fiancée’s shoulders while he talked about the game with Grady.

Mag was a big, tough motherfucker, often compared to a truck by the players he took down. However, Grady made him look like a Mini-Cooper, with his barrel chest, legs the size of tree trunks, and a buzz cut that not only made you think of the army, but of the tanks the army guys got around in. If anyone deserved to go to the NFL, it was the blond wolf from Oklahoma. But the reason he wouldn’t be going was evident in the way he used his hands to talk with Rafe rather than his mouth.

It was shitty but true: there was no way in hell the Lupine Council would be giving what they considered a defective wolf a wild card to play in the NFL. Still, Mag respected the hell out of him. Like Mag, Grady had come from a less than pretty background. He’d been born the first son of a mange king, as they called the alphas whose state packs didn’t have a shitload of money and made up for their lack of resources with small-time meth dealing… mostly to humans but they had no problem selling to wolves, too.

Not only had the crown that was supposed to go to Grady already been earmarked for his younger brother, his mean-as-fuck dad hadn’t even considered Grady fit to serve as his brother’s beta. Grady had been forced to teach himself ASL, and to this day, no one in his kingdom pack understood a word of it. From what Grady had told Rafe and Mag over the years, it had been an upbringing that made Mag’s look like an episode of Family Ties. Mag’s parents had been fucked up, but at least they’d loved him and his brother equally.

So Mag had mad respect for his fellow linebacker. Grady had made it out of Oklahoma and he was glad Rafe had no plans to let their friend go back to that life. Rafe would be inheriting the state crown the year he turned twenty-five, and he’d already formally asked Grady to be his beta, his first line of defense between him and any would-be challengers to the throne.

Proving how close the three of them had grown during the years since they met at their first college football practice, Grady had quickly agreed to lay down his life for Rafe and fight anyone who would think to take Rafe’s crown.

“Here let me help you with that,” Chloe said, taking two of the beers Mag had clamped under his arms. “You know, I was thinking of trying out this beer recipe that belonged to Benjamin Franklin while you guys are at your away game next weekend. I found it online and it looks pretty solid. If I get the brew right, it might be ready in time for a big celebration after finals!”

Mag rubbed his hands together. “Tell me more, tell me more. Especially about the food part of this celebration.”

Chloe had a talent for cooking, crafting, and recreating anything she wanted, completely from scratch. Rafe called it “extreme DIY,” and he acted like it was an out-of-control hobby he indulged but wished Chloe would just let go of already. However, Mag’s stomach rumbled at the thought of the back-to-school dinner she’d prepared for them. A lamb dish so succulent and tasty, Mag, who hadn’t even known he liked lamb, ended up asking for fourths.

Chloe laughed. “Well, I could make a party version of that lamb curry dish you liked so much and maybe…”

His phone went off in his back pocket, and his heart lit up when he saw Janelle’s number pop up on the caller ID. “That sounds great, Clo. Hold that thought… I got to step outside to take this call.”

“Who is it?” Rafe asked.

Mag cringed a little inside. Rafe might be richer than every other wolf on the team, but unlike Kenny, he’d never been a dick about his wealth. He’d given his pledge to Chloe, a girl who’d been fostered by his kingdom town, seen the value in a “defective” wolf from Oklahoma, and hadn’t hesitated to befriend his first-year dorm mate, even after finding out he’d grown up in an RV and came from the trashiest pack in Alaska. Mag felt worse than bad about lying to him

But he’d promised Janelle early on that he wouldn’t tell Rafe, and he’d rather lie to him than break even his smallest promise to her.

“Kang,” he answered, hating that he was using his brother to sell his lie.

He answered the phone as soon as he cleared the back entrance of the bar. “Hey, b—”

“Hello, Maguyuk. It's Janelle, the she-wolf you ran into yesterday.”

Mag froze. He could tell immediately something wasn't right, just by the way she said his full name.

“Yeah, hey Janelle.” He thought about her parents, the ones she'd promised to tell about their relationship before she left that morning. Maybe they were there with her? “Everything alright?”

“Everything’s fine. And I’m sorry for interrupting, as I know you probably weren’t expecting me to call,” she said. “But there’s something I want to discuss with you. I should have told you this before, but I’m one of the Alaska princesses. The oldest daughter of the family.”

“What?” he said, wondering if he was hearing her wrong. He had to be hearing her wrong. “You’re black.”

“I’m half-black actually,” she said. “My father is King Tikaani, my mother is the former Princess of Detroit. I’m sorry if I didn’t make that clear to you when we last spoke.”

She sounded so cold. Like a businesswoman with a stick up her ass, not like his Janelle.

“Janelle,” he said, suddenly growing scared for her. “Are you okay? Where are you? Who are you with?”

“Actually, I’m in Alaska with my fiancé, Jeffrey Varg, the Crown Prince of Wyoming.”

His heart stopped, like someone had put a shotgun straight to his chest and blasted a hole through it. “You’re pledged to the Prince of Wyoming?”

“Yes.” Her voice was clipped, no emotion whatsoever.

He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe… “Why— why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“It didn’t come up,” Janelle answered. “But I am engaged. Happily engaged, and I won’t be visiting Colorado again unless I’m being received by Rafe at his home. Anything else would be inappropriate, and I hope you can understand why we can no longer remain friends, especially given your background.”

When he would think back to this night in the years to come, he’d wonder why he didn’t blow her cover right there. Why he didn’t yell, “Fuck you, Janelle. Fuck you like I fucked you all over that hotel room for the past two days!” into the phone, loud enough for Prince Jeffrey to hear. Why, instead, did he just say, “Okay, yeah, whatever,” and hang up by whipping his phone against the bar’s brick wall, receiving exactly zero percent satisfaction when it shattered into pieces upon impact.

He guessed it was for the same reason he never breathed a word of what had happened between them to anyone. Not to Rafe, to Grady, or his brother—no one. Love—that’s a pretty powerful emotion, but hate—that’s something else. And a hate so bad you know you won’t be able to rest until the person who made you feel that way is punished? You can move mountains with that kind of hate. You can do just about anything if you have enough of it in your heart.

Fuck, love. That night Janelle gave him enough hate to change the course of his life forever.

10

Three years later

T
HE sun was not shining when Janelle woke up. Of course it wouldn’t be. It was January in Interior Alaska. Their small town would be lucky if the sun rose before ten o’clock, and even then, it would only hang out for a little while before sinking right back down around three in the afternoon as if it couldn’t be bothered anymore.

Yet you wouldn’t be able to tell by the pleasant expression on Janelle’s face that it was anything less than a sunny day: gentle eyes, a relaxed forehead, lips set in such a position as to make it easier for them to spread into a warm—but not
too
big—smile. (“Nobody needs to see your gums” her mother had told her).

Janelle pulled on her workout clothes with that same pleasant expression. And she kept it on her face as she jogged for a few miles on her treadmill, just long enough for a dewy sheen to break out across her forehead. She got off before her exercise “glow” stepped over the line into a heavy sweat and an image crashed into her brain: Mag collapsing on top of her after he came, after he made her come… her not knowing if the slick dampness she felt where his chest lay against her breasts was her sweat or his…

Yoga. Next she did her Monday yoga routine under the light of the moon shining through her picture window—moons. His eyes had been like moons…

No, Janelle
, she admonished, plastering the pleasant expression back onto her face. She didn’t let it fall off again. Not when she showered, not when she pulled out today’s outfit: a classic, checkered black-and-white pencil skirt, which she paired with heavy black tights, a black boat neck sweater, the beaded nephrite jade necklace her grandmother had given to her before she died, and the slouchy wedge boots Tu gave her for Christmas.

She also put on a heavy silver bracelet, which her father had gifted her with on her twenty-fifth birthday. Many of the same symbols that graced the large totem pole outside the house, the one that told the story of how the first alpha in their ancestral line had become the King of Alaska in the early 1900s, also graced this bracelet. It was made out of silver from the mine her ancestor had owned, the mine that had stayed in the family even though it was now depleted.

Secure in outfit, she picked up her flat-iron and straightened her long hair and fringed bangs, smoothing in heat protectant as she went along. After she was done, she checked the final silken results in her three-way mirror, then inspected herself for stray hairs at every angle.

There were none. She looked every bit the perfect princess, steeped in history and tasteful designer clothes with a pair of fashionable boots on her feet. The person staring back at her in the mirror had definitely never had sex. Didn’t know anything about the act, and certainly hadn’t been haunted for three years by a wolf she’d only spent three days with in person. The pleasant expression remained in place, and she deemed herself ready to go downstairs.

Her mother was already at the breakfast table when Janelle arrived, flipping through a two-month old tabloid and sipping a cup of tea. She was dressed in a leopard print robe, even though as early as she could remember, one of her mother’s most steadfast rules had been that none of her girls were to come out of their rooms anything less than impeccably coiffed and dressed.

“Why do we have to get dressed up every day and you get to walk around in whatever you want?” Alisha had once asked her mother after some intense back and forth about whether Alisha would be allowed to leave the kingdom house wearing jeans.

Her mother’s answer to that had been to hold up her left hand, the diamond-encrusted monstrosity she called a wedding ring winking under the breakfast room’s lights.

“Cuz I
got
my double rings,” the Alaska queen answered in the frank Detroit accent she only employed when she was home with her girls and no servants were present. When people were watching, she had the enunciation of Cecily Tyson, but when it was just the family, she was more than happy to use her mange state accent to intimidate her three girls. “When you get a ring on your finger and on your head, then we can talk about you getting the final word in what you wear. Til then, my word is bond when it comes to what you walk out my house in.”

Their father had just laughed, as always utterly charmed by what Tu referred to as their mother’s tendency to be Detroit in the house, and a queen when she’s out.

Today her mother glanced up at Janelle’s outfit. “You’re all covered up again. What happened to that V-neck I brought you back from Fairbanks? And if you’re going to wear tights, why not wear a mini-skirt with them?”

Janelle sighed inwardly. She thought of her style as Jackie O-meets-Diahann Carroll. But her mother was more a Diana Ross-type and dressed in a way Tu had once described as “cougar meets she-wolf.” She’d been try to slut up Janelle’s wardrobe ever since she’d turned twenty-one, which was considered by royals to be the best pledge age for a princess.