by Roxie Noir
“It’s the pack,” she went on, her voice gaining strength. “They’re poisonous. Toxic. This place is a pit of vipers, and you’re not going to lift them up, they’re going to bring you down to their level, and I can’t—” her voice broke— “I can’t watch that happen to you.”
“I’ll change it, I promise,” he said, the words tumbling out now. He’d do anything to get her to stay, he knew — promise to give up Alpha, not even a full day after he’d won it, promise to order everyone to play nice from here on out. Anything.
Anything.
Delilah shook her head. The tears were falling down her face now, and she wasn’t even bothering to wipe them away.
“You can’t,” she said.
He wanted to reach out and touch her, take her in his arms, make her feel better, but an invisible wall had gone up between them, and he was totally incapable of breaching it.
“I’ll do anything,” he said “I’ll overhaul the pack, I’ll exile anyone who acts out. I’ll give up Alpha.” He felt like there was a black hole in the center of his body, threatening to collapse in on itself.
Delilah looked away again. She was already shaking her head.
“Just don’t go. I can’t watch you leave again, Del.”
She walked around him, to the driver’s side of the car, and unlocked it. She didn’t say a word to Miles. He felt like he was in a tunnel, everything around him narrowing down to a few degrees of vision: just Delilah, by the car, about to drive away from Fjords forever.
He moved fast and blocked her, standing between her and the driver’s seat, holding the door open, his body in the way.
“Please don’t go,” he said, talking fast now, only half-aware of the words spilling from his mouth. It didn’t matter what he said, he thought, only that she didn’t leave.
“I love you,” he told her. “I still love you. I loved you when you left before and I thought I would stop, but I didn’t, and I thought I was going to be okay until you showed up again—”
“Stop it,” she said, her voice shaking. “You think I want to have to leave you again? You think I like having to do this twice?”
Miles looked stunned.
“I can’t live here,” she said. “Not with people who wanted to kidnap and rape me, Miles, and I know you think you can fix it and maybe we’d be okay for six months, a year, but not forever. You became Alpha by force. What’s to stop someone else from taking it the same way? Then where would you be?”
Delilah swallowed hard. Miles opened his mouth to speak, but she stopped him.
“This can’t end well and we know it,” she said, quietly this time, looking Miles dead in the eye. “So just let me go and forget I was ever here. Marry a nice girl from Fjords and have some kids. Before you know it it’ll be like I never existed.”
“I don’t want to forget you were here,” Miles whispered.
He put one hand on Delilah’s face and she jerked her head away from it, her jaw flexing. Another tear trickled down her face.
Behind her, the morning was turning from gray to pink, the long slow sunrise of an Alaska summer, the only kind he’d ever known.
Suddenly, Miles knew what he had to do. It was dead simple, really, so obvious he nearly laughed out loud.
19
Delilah
“Let me come with you,” Miles said.
Delilah blinked.
“What?” she said, suddenly confused.
“Let me come with you,” he said. He was smiling all of a sudden, almost grinning, and Delilah felt like the world had turned upside-down, like she couldn’t trust her own eyes and ears.
“You’d leave Fjords?” she asked. “You’ve never left Alaska before.”
“Fuck this place,” he said. “Fuck the pack. Fuck being alpha. I’d rather have you.”
Delilah blinked, still stunned. “You’re alpha, aren’t there rules or something?”
Miles shrugged. He seemed almost giddy.
“I don’t care,” he said.
Is it really that simple? Delilah wondered. She looked up at Miles, and despite herself, she started smiling.
“You can just do that?” she asked.
“Who’s going to stop me?” he asked. He couldn’t stop grinning.
Delilah couldn’t help it. She started giggling, half from sheer surprise, half from delight, tears still running down her face.
“Can I come?” he asked. He put a hand on her cheek again, and this time she let it stay. “Wherever you’re going?”
She put her hand over his, interlacing their fingers.
“How could I say no?” she said, half-laughing, half-crying.
Miles swooped down and picked her up in his arms and Delilah yelped, looping her arms around his neck.
Then he bent his head down and kissed her, their lips touching softly, electricity singing between them.
She felt like there was nothing else in the world besides Miles, like there could never be anything else, and she never wanted that kiss to end.
At last, he put her down on the gravel driveway, and they looked at each other.
“They’ll be pissed,” she said, reality beginning to settle in a little. “When they figure out you’re gone.”
Miles snorted. “I don’t care what they think,” he said. He took her hands in his, twining their fingers together, kissing Delilah’s knuckles. “Let’s just go, before they find out.”
“Right now?”
“I’m ready if you are.”
Delilah pressed her hands to her temples, all the reasons why this was foolish flooding into her brain. “You’ve got a house, and you’ve got family, and you’ve got a job, you can’t just walk away. You’ve gotta sell the house, and put in notice—”
Her took her chin in his hands, very seriously.
“Forget it,” he said. “We’ll figure that out tomorrow. There are ATMs in the rest of the world. Nathan can have the house.”
“But—”
“I’m coming with you.”
Delilah swallowed, then nodded. She wasn’t spontaneous by nature, she was careful and methodical, but all at once she felt swept away by this giddy whirlwind.
“Okay,” she said. Then she started laughing again. “This is crazy.”
“This is perfect.”
She leaned her face up for one more long, hard kiss, then pulled away, her car keys in her hand.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Epilogue
Five Years Later
Delilah drove up a long, gravel driveway to a log house in the woods. Just like always, it somehow looked exactly right there, like it was part of the forest.
She parked, gathered her stuff, and went inside.
“I’m home!” she shouted, wiping her shoes on the doormat, just inside the door.
She’d talked Miles into going easy on the woodsy decor inside — looking like a log cabin on the outside was acceptable, she felt, but she’d wanted a regular house on the inside. Aside from the exposed beams and rock fireplace, she’d gotten it.
“In here!” came his voice, and Delilah dumped her stuff on the couch, took her shoes off, and walked through the big door to the kitchen.
“Smells good,” she said, coming around to Miles and putting a hand on his back. “What is it?”
“Cajun stuffed pork chops,” he said, turning the meat with big tongs.
He looked busy, so Delilah kissed his t-shirt clad shoulder.
“I was going to grill, but then it rained,” he said.
“The nurses at the clinic say it’s time to take the snow tires off the car,” she said. “Though they said that this time last year and you know what happened then.”
“What did they say was the reason this time?” Miles said, a smile creeping into his voice. “Did one of them see an eagle fly counterclockwise at noon or something?”
Delilah laughed.
“Sometimes their country wisdom is right,” she said, and poked him in the side. He scooted away her fro
m a little, but not fast enough. “Besides, I don’t think you’ve got room to talk.”
The meat in the pan sizzled, and Miles put the tongs down, wiped his hand on the kitchen towel, and turned to properly kiss his wife.
“GROSS,” came a small voice from across the room.
Delilah laughed, still kissing Miles, and pulled his head down closer to her, her thumb feeling the scar on his cheekbone.
“Get a ROOM,” said the little voice, and this time she let him go.
“Where on earth did you learn that?” she asked the child, watching them from about ten feet away.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Cade, can you put your toys away before dinner, please?” asked Miles.
“Can Mom read me a story?” Cade asked.
“After dinner,” Delilah said. “Come on, put your toys away.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Looking very serious for a four-year-old, Cade walked into the other room.
“I’m going to go change,” Delilah said, giving Miles’s shoulder another squeeze.
“Dinner’s in ten,” he said.
As she left, he leaned back just far enough to gently swat her ass.
“Hey!” she said, giggling.
“Can I have a bedtime story too?” he asked, grinning.
“Only if you’re well behaved,” she said.
“It’s hard with you around,” he teased.
Out of her scrubs and in her comfy fleece-lined jeans, Delilah took a moment to look out the window of her house. Five years ago they’d more or less picked Crestline, Montana off of a map, a little town in the mountains, not far west of Glacier National Park.
It had been rough at first — living in a trailer on land they bought with savings, Delilah working a night shift at a hospital and Miles filling in at a garage in town — and that first winter had been cold, but they could shift whenever they wanted and they’d gotten through it together and now, here they were, happier than she’d ever let herself hope they’d be.
From downstairs, she heard the loud clang of a the dinner bell, and rolled her eyes. Miles had insisted on that thing.
“Coming!” she shouted, and went downstairs to join her little family.
The End
Shifters & Soulmates
North Star Shifters Book Two
1
Nathan
Nathan revved his bike’s engine, sitting at one of three stoplights in town. He knew it was probably pissing off the shopkeepers of Fjords, Alaska, but he reveled in the sound echoing off their brick-and-glass storefronts.
If he had to attend this engagement party, then he could make them listen to his racket. He already knew that Violet, his alpha’s mate, was probably going to murder him when he showed up on his motorcycle, but he didn’t particularly care. She couldn’t actually do anything to him, and this terrible party wouldn’t even have alcohol.
What kind of party was a dry party, anyway?
The light turned green and he roared forward, shooting ahead of the cars at the same intersection. For a moment, he considered not going to the party, just taking the bike up the mountain and driving around for a few hours.
But then Brock, his alpha, would be pissed, and his opinion actually did matter. Nathan’s job was security, though he didn’t know how much he’d have to do at a party with no booze. He sighed again and gunned his motorcycle into the gravel parking lot of the Fjords Room, his town’s most upscale event space.
That wasn’t really saying much.
“I thought you were going to wear a tie,” said Violet when he walked up to the door. She and Brock stood outside, greeting all the North Star clan members as they made their way inside.
He could hear the acid in her voice, but he didn’t really care what Violet thought.
Nathan shrugged, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket.
“I don’t have one,” he said, meeting her steady blue gaze.
He clenched his jaw, determined not to be the first one to look away, and he wasn’t. Instead, her eyes took a long, steady trip down his body, disapproval practically dripping from her face.
“No jacket, either?”
“Nope,” said Nathan.
Brock, the North Star clan’s alpha, wasn’t paying attention to them. Instead he was looking over the men and women trickling into the building, and Nathan could tell that he was mentally ticking off who was there and who was late.
“Well, we were hoping to impress our visitors,” Violet said, pursing her lips. She looked up at Brock as she did, seeking backup.
“It’s fine,” he said distantly, his eyes still roaming over the mostly-gray landscape, looking for people in the parking lot. “You know the Yukon City clan is somewhere between religious fanatics and rednecks.”
Nathan’s eyebrows shot up, and Violet looked around quickly, to make sure that no one had heard him. Brock had been trying to get the Yukon clan to agree to this betrothal for weeks.
“No one heard me,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. He, of course, wore a dark gray suit, tailored to perfection.
Finally, he looked Nathan in the eyes, coming back to earth.
“You’re at the front table, on security.”
Nathan nodded. He was always on security. It was, after all, his role in the clan. The enforcer.
“You expecting anything?”
Brock shook his head. “No. They seem like they ought to know how to behave, but there are some cousins of the bride’s coming from pretty deep into the country. I don’t get the impression they spend a whole lot of time as humans.”
Inwardly, Nathan groaned.
It was true that being a bear was in their nature — it was in his nature, too — but there was such a thing as too much bear time. If you didn’t shift back into human form at least sometimes, you tended to go feral. Your social graces and manners went to shit. You roared and tried to claw other people at the smallest slight. You might start throwing your wine glass around, just because someone said the wrong thing.
In short, they were a lot harder to control.
“I expect Jonah’s got them on their best behavior, though,” Brock said, going back to scanning the parking lot. “He does have an impressive level of control over that clan.”
The words sent a slight shiver down Nathan’s spine. Was a level of control like that what Brock wanted, as the North Star clan’s alpha? It sure seemed like he already had a hold over them.
“I’ll head in now,” Nathan said, nodding his head at the alpha mates. They nodded back, and he bounded up the steps to the Fjords Room.
In some past life, the Fjords Room had been a fishery, perched perfectly on the rocky edge of the water, leaning over the sea on enormous columns. Then, sometimes in the past fifty years, the fishing business had changed, moving further out into the ocean. Now, fisherman mostly processed fish on their own boats, making buildings like this one obsolete.
All the others had been torn down, but the town had managed to save this one, completely remodeling it into a big room with a kitchen. The sort of place where people held weddings or big parties.
Or, in this case, a betrothal, whatever the hell that was. Not that it really mattered to Nathan, since he’d understood for years that he’d never get married or have a mate.
Opening the big wooden door, Nathan scanned the room quickly, but nothing really stuck out to him. Boring, nicely dressed people milled around tables, drinking water and coffee. No one would quite make eye contact with him, and when they did, they looked at him and then at the floor, almost as if they were slightly afraid of him.
Nathan knew he had a reputation, and tried not to let it bother him. Enforce the rules of an alpha as rigid as Brock and you got one after a while, he thought. It didn’t really matter.
He wished again that he were somewhere else, doing something that interested him even a little.
I can’t believe this is a dry party, he thought agai
n.
Instead, he sauntered over to a side table, where there were a dozen platters full of cookies, pastries, and other sweets, all covered in a thin layer of plastic wrap. The sight of them made his mouth water, and he wondered when the last time he’d eaten had been.
Well. It had been lunch, two hours ago. That didn’t make the desserts any less appetizing, though.
Not even bothering to be sneaky, he lifted the wrap on an incredible-looking platter of some kind of chocolate-filled tart and grabbed one from the edge. He replaced the wrap messily, and then lifted the confection to his mouth and bit in.
The crust offered just a little resistance and then his teeth sank into the chocolate center, soft but firm at the same time. It practically melted on his tongue, and it tasted absolutely divine, like the fanciest chocolate he’d ever tasted, but fancier.
He groaned, deep in his chest, very quietly.
Just as he was taking another bite, the kitchen door swung open and someone came out, carrying a huge cake on a cake stand.
Then she stopped short, just in front of him.
“Are you eating the mousse tarts?” a female voice asked, accusingly.
Nathan had just sunk his teeth into another bite, and his mouth was full as he looked down to see who’d just accosted him.
He forgot to chew.
She had curly red hair, pulled back, and bright blue eyes. Freckles smattered across her nose and cheeks, with high cheekbones, a strong chin, and perfectly plush lips. The kind of lips that Nathan could just imagine pressing his own against, or even better, the kind of lips he could just imagine wrapped around his cock, pumping up and down...
She was still staring at him, eyes flashing with irritation, and she put the huge cake down in the spot reserved for it, then wiped her hands on the apron she wore.
“They’re wrapped up for a reason,” she snapped, glaring at him. Then she pushed past him to the platter he’d disturbed, wrapping the plastic tightly again.