Wolf and Soul (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 3) (11 page)

And Grady was right. When the front door opened a few hours later, letting in a gust of cold wind, it was Donnelly who came through it. But what Grady hadn’t anticipated was that he’d also be carrying Tu in his arms like a baby. She was visibly trembling, even though she had a blanket wrapped around her, and the heat smell rolling off of her… it was strong—strong enough to send Grady’s beast into a frenzy inside of him, clawing to get out.

The sheriff must have realized this because he set Tu down in front of the fire in the other room, carefully like she was a live mine. He did not meet Grady’s eyes as he backed away from the she-wolf, nor did he look directly at Tu—even when her back arched off the floor, throwing off the blanket and thrusting her naked breasts into the air as another wave of her heat thrall overtook her. Grady could see the sweat making her entire body damp, even though as a rule, weres didn’t sweat while in human or wolf forms. She was in dangerous territory, he could tell, the adrenaline rocketing through her system, making it so if she didn’t get an anecdote to what ailed her soon, her heart would give out from the exertion.

Considering he was chained to the wall, Donnelly should have set her closer, but Grady understood why he hadn’t. There was a reason they’d sent an older wolf to do this job, not just because he was the beta and happily mated, but also because he was over forty and therefore not susceptible to a she-wolf’s heat scent—natures way of preventing May-December matches among werewolves.

However, male wolves in the middle of a heat session were highly dangerous. One as big as Grady even more so. No one in his right mind would come anywhere near a six- foot-five wolf built like a tank after carrying in his mate who was more than a couple of hours gone into a heat wave. It’d be like getting close to a starving pit bull with a piece of red meat. Maybe you’d make it out alive with all your body parts intact. Maybe you wouldn’t.

Grady would’ve like to have said the sheriff didn’t have anything to worry about from him, a fellow former sheriff himself, but then his arm jerked backwards. That was when he discovered that while his human had been thinking the situation through logically, his wolf had come to its feet, knocking all the food Tu had left aside, and pulled on the chain so hard, it felt like his arm would come out of its socket.

Now the sheriff wasn’t just backing away. He turned and ran, slamming the door shut behind him. And though Grady had no conscious thought of pulling at the chain, a few seconds later he stumbled forward, falling onto his knees. He looked over his shoulder. The stone the wolf shackle had been attached to was now lying in two pieces on the floor, a large rectangular hole in the wall behind it.

Then he could feel his voice box working so hard it hurt. He could only imagine the sounds coming out of it. That was when he realized… his human had been shoved to a place Grady could no longer reach him, strapped into a seat and rendered as helpless a spectator as his beast had been before.

And Tu… by God, Tu. His beast was going to have her, whether his human liked it or not.

11

P
ain, so much pain. Worse than when she’d arrived pregnant in Alaska and had to come down from everything cold turkey: the alcohol, the drugs, all of it, in one mind-melting week of withdrawal. She vaguely registered the trip back to the cabin after Doc Fisher told her it was too late for him to shoot her up with the HCG-sedative cocktail which would trick her body into thinking it was pregnant long enough to come out of heat.

“Once you start the process, you can’t unstart it,” Doc Fisher informed her. She was too far gone, he said, and if she wasn’t mated again soon, she’d die.

She’d meant to tell him to let her die, that she’d been planning to take the desperate way out eventually anyway. That she’d rather die than—

But then another wave of heat hit, a yearning so great, her whole body clenched around her core as she screamed out Grady’s name.

Things got fuzzy after that. The king came to the clinic. Not Rafe, but Tu’s own father, Tikaani. And not the teddy bear version of the wolf she and her sisters had grown up with, but a grim shadow giving instructions in a low voice. Then there was a car ride, the sound of another wolf’s voice telling her it would be all right. Sheriff Donnelly? She couldn’t say for sure… but now she was in front of the fire again, the one she’d stoked who knew how many hours ago so Grady would be warm until someone came to get him.

After that there came the sound of a lot of chain rattling, a door slamming closed, a gigantic thunk, and then growling. So low and fierce she was sure there was an animal in the room. Was it possible Grady had morphed into wolf form while she was away? According to her high school health class, that was impossible. Male wolves couldn’t morph after they began the mating process, but Grady’s mother had been human. Maybe—

He fell on top of her like a brick building collapsing. Rough hands on her body turned her over and pulled her to her knees. A huge thigh pushed hers apart and then… yes, oh yes… he was inside of her, thick and hard as a steel beam, stretching her to the full limit, the chain rattling as his thickly muscled arms came down on either side hers. He was so big, so heavy on top of her. His weight should have crushed her, but their height difference ended up working out in her favor, with him able to support his own weight on his front arms while slamming in and out of her from behind.

She came instantly, in a great flash of all consuming heat. She had never known anything like this. To have needed as badly as she had over the past few hours, and then to have her needs met by this crazed animal she and Luke used to call Dudley Do-Right in their meaner moments. He had her trapped under him. She couldn’t have gotten away from him again, couldn’t have run, even if she wanted to. And she suddenly understood clearly why this act was referred to as both mating and claiming.

Then he knotted inside of her and it was too much, she shattered into pieces, screaming through her second release as it cut through her. Grady came unhinged on top of her. His teeth found her shoulder, biting down hard at the same time he drove his knotted penis even harder into her. So hard, her body would have moved forward if his arms and teeth weren’t keeping her in place, making it so she couldn’t move an inch, much less slip off his knot.

The growling stopped and for a moment, all she could hear was the rattle of his chain and his body slapping against hers, his thrusts becoming more wild and desperate with every hard shove until he came with a frantic bellow. His knot contracted and expanded, sending another body sizzling climax ripping through her, and the sounds coming out of Grady as he flooded into her… harsh and ragged, like the wolf—no, the
beast
who had just fucked her had gone to hell and back in order to claim her. It was so insane that as the fire of her own climax crackled out, she had to wonder if Grady’s human hadn’t left the building permanently.

But then his voice pushed into her head, “Tu? Tu, are you all right?”

She felt herself rocked backwards as Grady sat their connected bodies up, his legs crossing underneath her butt and his chin pressing into the side of her head as he cradled her to him.

“Did I hurt you? Fuck, please tell me I didn’t hurt you!”

“You didn’t,” she assured him.

“Are you sure?” he asked. Pressing his fingers into her ribs, obviously checking for broken bones.

“You didn’t. You didn’t. It was intense. I mean really crazy intense, but it didn’t hurt, I promise. If you could have felt what my body felt… I came three times, dude. Trust me, you didn’t hurt me.”

“Good. I’m so damn glad I didn’t…” His mind went quiet for a few seconds, while they both calmed down, breathing together until their heartbeats slowed to a normal rhythm.

“Talk to me, Tu,” he eventually said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t apologize. I don’t care about sorry. Just talk to me.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You were the one who mated me after I did everything possible to help you get away.”

“I know.”

“What changed?”

“It stopped snowing,” she answered. That answer didn’t make any sense. She knew it didn’t make any sense.

She felt his body stiffen behind her. “And you realized you could get away, find another wolf. One who wasn’t defective.”

Was that what he’d thought?

“No, no dude! That wasn’t it at all. It wasn’t you.”

“It’s not you, it’s me,” he quoted, his voice skeptical.

“No, it wasn’t me either. I wasn’t running away from our mating. I was running away from the result.”

He physically flinched, like she’d just round-housed him in the chest. And she waited for him to fly off the handle, accusing her of not wanting his pup. Mated wolves were… well, ridiculous. There was no other word for it. She knew if Rafe or Mag ever suspected their wives didn’t want their pups, they would have lost it.

But there was nothing but understanding in the voice that pushed inside her head. “This isn’t about us. It’s about the pup you lost.”

She nodded against his cheek.

His arms straightened a little as he brought both hands to rest on top of her belly. “Tu… your nose is pretty good, too, so you can probably smell what I’m smelling

right now, right?”

HCG. The pregnancy hormone. Not the synthetic kind that might have gotten her out of this mating if she’d left when Grady told her to, but the real deal. Faint now, so faint most wolves wouldn’t be able to smell it. But Tu and Grady weren’t most wolves. Tu pressed her fist into the bridge of her nose, feeling like her heart was breaking all over again, and she nodded once more.

“I know you’re scared, but it’s going to be okay.”

“But what if—?”

“No matter what happens, it’s going to be okay.” He held on to her tight. “But you running—that can’t happen again. Because my wolf is a fucking beast and I don’t want him coming out like that again. So no more running. If you’re scared, come talk to me. But no more running. Okay?”

“Okay,” she answered her voice meek and small.

“No, I need you to promise me. You said you never break your promises, so promise me you won’t run away again.”

He went silent then. But not the “I’m done” kind of silent. This silence had a stubborn edge to it, and it said louder than words that Grady wasn’t going to let this go until she gave him her word.

In the end, she made him a promise she hadn’t known she was in a position to make a few hours ago when she’d driven the Audi back to Wolf Springs.

“Okay, I promise” she whispered into his head. The smell of her new pregnancy was amping up, even as the smell of her heat faded. “No more running.”

12

“
N
o more running,” she’d promised. Yet when Grady woke up beside the fire, he found himself alone once again.

He sat up, the need to be near her and the baby growing in her womb exploding inside his gut and propelling him toward the door to go after her, even though he had no idea where she was.

Yet when he ripped open the front door, he found her right there, on the cabin’s wrap-around porch staring out into the forest. She was dressed in a long, black skirt and a long-sleeved ballet top—also black. But her hair, it was still down, its stretched out curls catching the rays of the rising sun so light haloed around it. She looked like an angel.

Tu turned to him with a smile and he could see she held a cup of tea in her hands. “Good morning,” she said inside his head.

Grady covered his heart with his hand. God, would he ever get used to the sound of her voice in his head, sexy and melodic with a quality to it that made him think of smoke? He didn’t think so and he didn’t see himself ever taking for granted the gift she’d given him when she’d forced him to claim her against his better intentions.

“Good morning,” he pushed back into her head. Casual, like he hadn’t just run out of the house in a panic.

“I was thinking we should probably get on the road. I’m starving and we’ve pretty much gone through all our provisions.”

Grady’s stomach grumbled, having been reminded of how poorly he’d eaten over the last few days. The four sandwiches she’d made him were long gone, and he knew he could do something to a whole stack of pancakes.

“All right,” he said. “But… where are we getting on the road to?”

Tu took another sip of her tea. “You’re the King of Oklahoma, so I guess we should go back to your place.”

And just like that, the good cheer that had come with the thought of eating breakfast went and died.

“My place… it’s not what you’re used to. I mean, my old sheriff’s house is nicer than the Oklahoma kingdom house. Not sure if you remember it, since you were....” He trailed off, trusting she’d know he was referring to the fact that she’d stumbled into the house with Luke, already drunk and reeking of marijuana, on Thanksgiving morning and had been more or less drunk, high, or drunk and high the rest of her time there.

Her eyes darkened. “I remember it.” She looked off into the brand new day. “Maybe if we go now, we can make it there before sunset.”

“Sure, sure,” he said, happy to get off the subject of the last time she’d been to Oklahoma. “Let’s go.”

She smiled. “Might want to put some clothes on first, Wolf, and maybe get rid of that shackle.”

He looked down at himself. Sure enough he was still naked. Also still connected to part of the stone he’d pulled out of the wall. Weird. Apparently being in Tu’s presence made him forget all about the cold or anything else that might be weighing him down. She still had that effect on him.

And then something even more embarrassing happened. After crying like a baby when he heard her voice inside his head for the first time, after going beast on her the night before, after tearing out of the house buck naked into the freezing cold because he’d been so sure she’d run away again—after all of that, his manhood had the nerve to swell between his legs. And not just a little bit, but to its full, rigid length, so she’d have no possible doubt what he was thinking about right now as he stood before her.