by Selena Scott
A Mate for Orion
Selena Scott
Copyright 2019 by Selena Scott - All rights reserved.
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Other books by Selena Scott
PROLOGUE
“The moon is powerful, Diana. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking it’s just a rock in the sky. There’s big magic in the moon.”
Diana’s mother, the most beautiful woman in the world, knelt in front of her, her long skirt pooling on the dewy grass.
Diana was cold. She was barefoot, in thin pajamas at 5 AM with the full moon rising overhead. But she would never tell her mother that it was too chilly to be outside right now. Diana would have walked across Antarctica in shorts and a t-shirt if her mother had asked her to.
At seven years old, Diana thought that her magical, flighty, spooky mother was perfection. She had no interest in having one of the other, buttoned-up, boring mothers on her block. Her mother was beautiful and funny and weird and perfect.
She just wished that her stepfather felt the same way. Even at just seven years of age, Diana could tell that her stepfather wished her mother was different. He was always buying her sweaters with pearl buttons and hinting that it might be time for a haircut for all that wild, black hair her mother could never seem to contain.
And he really didn’t like when her mother took Diana on one of her special adventures, like they were doing right this very minute. “You’ll make her turn out just like you,” he’d say. As if that were a bad thing.
Diana wanted to turn out exactly like her mother.
So, even though her toes were frozen against the wet grass and her nightgown was too thin and the black forest that encircled them was a little too scary for her, Diana just imitated her mother, raising her hands to the sky and saying a prayer of thanks to the full moon.
The sky lightened just a touch, turning sapphire blue at one edge, the black of the night starting to recede, and Diana wondered if her mother had done that. If that was all because of some magic power her mother had, even though her stepfather insisted it was all hooey.
Together they greeted the dawn, put the full moon to bed. They chanted and danced in circles and laughed with each other. When neither of them could hide their shivers a second longer, her mother swooped Diana up in her arms.
“Breakfast?” she asked. “Berry pancakes?”
Diana was thrilled to her core. Woken up in the night by her spooky, mysterious mother and then dancing in the dark together? All followed up by berry pancakes? She didn’t think it could get any better than this.
They held hands and ran through the forest and back to the house. Diana’s stomach sank. The kitchen light was on. She was almost positive they hadn’t left the kitchen light on. Which could only mean—
“Toni!”
Diana’s mother winced, her smile somehow weak and defiant all at once. “Good morning, Robert.”
“You took her out in the middle of the night with no clothes on?”
Diana’s stepfather stood in the threshold between the kitchen and the living room, his pajamas on, but his feet shoved into his unlaced boots, like he’d just been getting ready to go out and look for them. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d come to find them on a full moon night.
“I’m not naked!” Diana insisted, wanting desperately to defend her mother. “I have my nightgown on.”
Diana’s mother blinked down at her, as if seeing her for the first time. “Oh. Honey. I didn’t think that you might be cold dressed like that.”
“That’s right!” Robert yelled, taking two steps toward them. “You didn’t think, Toni. Her lips are blue!”
“I—“ Her mother trailed off, the joy of the moment officially burned away in the jetstream of Robert’s anger.
Diana wanted to scream, to lock Robert in his bedroom. She wanted to rewind the morning and come back earlier so that Robert would never know that they’d been missing. She wanted berry pancakes with her smiling mother.
“Diana, sweetie,” Robert said in a much softer voice. “Why don’t you go take a warm shower and put some clothes on. There’s only a few hours before I have to be at work. I’ll drop you off at the daycare center on my way.”
Diana felt her disappointment gather even more steam. Robert had taken a morning that had been filled with so much wonder and possibility and squashed beneath the heel of his unlaced boot.
“I don’t want to go to the daycare center today,” Diana said quietly. “Why can’t I stay here with Mom?”
“You know the reason why,” he said through gritted teeth.
And she did. They’d been through it many, many times before. It was too much for her mother to look after Diana on her own all day. It strained her. And besides, stuff like going into the woods and dancing barefoot happened when she was alone with her mother. And Robert hated stuff like that. So he forced her to spend her weekends, and after-school time, and summer days in a daycare center.
With all the other kids whose parents couldn’t be around.
“Don’t argue, my love,” her mother whispered in her ear, planting a brisk kiss on the shell of Diana’s ear. “Robert knows what’s best. I’m sorry you’re cold.”
Diana turned back to claim that she wasn’t even that cold and that Robert didn’t know what was best for her when she caught sight of the blue in her mother’s lips. She looked down and saw that her mother’s bare feet were just as reddened and grass stained as her own. Her other’s beautiful face was sunken with fatigue.
Don’t argue.
She wasn’t reprimanding Diana, she was making a request. The arguments tired her mother out.
Diana nodded and stalked past Robert on her way out of the kitchen. But something made her pause before she headed upstairs to the shower. She looked back and already Robert was there, folding her mother up in a hug and whispering in her ear.
Diana’s mother’s eyes filled with tears. “I know,” she whispered back. “I know.”
Diana had no way of knowing, but that was the last time she and her mother would ever dance under the light of the full moon. Just three months later, Toni would be gone. And it would sometimes seem to Diana that the gossip mill that had plagued her mother for years would be the only thing that kept her mother alive.
Because Robert certainly didn’t speak of Toni at night around a quiet dinner table as they ate whatever dry, sensible thing he’d prepared for them. She might be only seven, but she was very aware of the fact that he hadn’t known he was signing on to be a single parent when he’d married Toni. But there they were. Just the two of them.
No more barefoot dancing. No more berry pancakes. No more chanting to the full moon. No more magic in Diana
’s life.
CHAPTER ONE
Orion Wolf wasn’t a complicated man. He wasn’t a complicated wolf, either. He enjoyed being outside significantly more than being inside. He liked ice cold water to drink and, about once a week, an ice cold beer. He liked working hard enough that he sweat. Even after a year of spending most of his time in his human form, sweating was still a novelty to him. Wolves didn’t sweat. But humans did. And he was a part of the human world now.
Let’s see, what else did he like? Ah. He liked sex, though he hadn’t had any in almost two years. And he’d never had it with someone he loved, or even knew very well. And according to his brother, Phoenix, who’d just fallen in love not six months ago, sex with a woman you loved was a very different experience than with a stranger. Orion was interested in giving that a whirl.
And that brought him right down to the thing on his list that he like more than all the other things: Diana Paul.
She of the tight ponytails.
She of the freakishly piercing eyes somewhere between ice blue and spring green.
She of the pursed lips and authoritative tone of voice.
She of the tight skirts and pointy heels.
She of the endless paperwork.
He did not like paperwork, for the record. But he liked her enough to make up for it. He liked her eye for detail. Nothing got past her. Nothing caught her unawares. He liked how she made all the people who worked for her feel good about the work they’d done well. And he also liked how she made all the people who worked for her want to do better on the work they hadn’t done well.
He knew very little about male/female dynamics in the human world, but as Diana was one of the first people he’d really gotten to know when he and his siblings had joined the human world last year, he’d been shocked to find out that generally men had more social power than women had. Because Diana Paul, in Orion’s eyes, seemed like the most powerful being on earth.
He’d watched as a single raised eyebrow on her part sent men and women alike scrambling to rectify any perceived wrong. He watched as she ran her center with ruthless efficiency, a firm handle on each department’s inner workings. He’d once watched as an angry, irrational, mountain lion shifter had shifted right there in front of her, yowling and snapping. She’d merely pulled the pepper spray from a keychain in her pocket and showed it to the giant cat.
“We can do this the hard way, Mr. Wallace, or the easy way.” She’d pointed calmly to her office.
Mr. Wallace, seconds later, had shifted back into his human form, picked up the shredded pieces of his clothing, and meekly taken the easy way.
Yeah, not much got past Diana Paul.
In fact, the only thing he’d ever seen ruffle her feathers was, well, himself.
To use yet another human expression that he’d learned over the last year of living in Portland, he didn’t want to blow his own horn -which he’d always thought was anatomically impossible, by the way- but there was something about him that threw Diana off her typically immaculate game.
He liked that. He liked that a lot, in fact. Orion wasn’t a man in need of validation. He didn’t need anyone explaining to him just how special he was. But all the same, he liked knowing that in some regard, Diana Paul found him special. If she didn’t find him special, she would have treated him just the same as she treated everyone else.
Okay, okay. Maybe the way she treated Orion was with an ever-simmering temper that she just barely hid under her icy demeanor. And maybe she didn’t exactly indicate that she liked Orion. But he knew for sure that the way she treated him was distinctly different than the way she treated others, and for now, that was enough.
Which led him directly to cigarettes.
He’d never bought any before, so when the man behind the counter asked him which kind he’d like to buy, Orion was stymied.
“Hmm. The kind with the smallest amount in the pack?”
The man blinked at him. “Never heard that one before.”
Orion got that a lot. He just blinked back at the man.
“Well,” the cashier said eventually, leaning forward on his elbows and squinting at Orion. “They all got at least 20.”
Twenty. That was an awful lot. And an awful lot of waste. “I only need one.”
“Ah. Well, gimme a dollar.” The cashier reached into his own back pocket and pulled out a semi-crushed pack of cigarettes, slipping one out.
“Perfect.” The exchange was made, but then Orion was left to stare blankly at the white and tan cylinder in his hand. What was it that he was supposed to do next? Ah. Right. “Will you light it for me?”
He handed the cigarette back to the cashier.
Again, more blinking.
Orion was used to humans blinking at him like this. So were his siblings, Phoenix and Dawn. It didn’t bother Orion or Phoenix because he didn’t care whether or not humans thought he was smart. It bothered Dawn, however. Who had started to say that those blank looks always made her feel one egg short of a dozen. One of Orion’s favorite human phrases.
The man took the cigarette from Orion. “You want me to light it for you and then give it back to you?”
“Yes.”
“Son,” the man cocked his head to the side again. “You know that means I have to put my mouth on it, right?”
“Oh. I didn’t realize that. I’ve never smoked a cigarette before.”
“Yeah. I’m getting that.”
“But I don’t care how you light it. I’m not going to smoke this one either.”
“You just paid a dollar for a cigarette you’re not going to smoke?”
Orion glanced across the street at Diana’s center. This conversation was taking longer than he’d thought it would and he didn’t want to miss his chance of catching her in her office.
“That’s right. Diana told me not to smoke cigarettes, and I trust her on that, but I also know that she really hates the smell of cigarette smoke, so I figured I’d have a lit cigarette but not smoke it.”
“Hold on, son. Diana? That tall one with the fancy clothes who works across the way?” The man nodded his head toward Diana’s center.
“Yeah.”
The man smiled a smile that didn’t show his teeth, just a touch of pink in his cheeks. “‘Round here we refer to her as Legs.”
Something about the man’s tone indicated to Orion that were Diana here, she might not particularly like the nickname. But he had to admit that she had really, really great legs. He chose not to comment on that.
“So, you’ll light it for me?”
“I suppose if you’re shootin’ your shot with Legs, far be it for me to be the one who stops me. I was already to old for her twenty years ago. Rex! Taking a smoke break!”
The man stepped from around the counter and led Orion outside.
“You’re a big fella,” the man said, popping the cigarette in his mouth but not lighting it as he eyed Orion for a nice long time.
“Yeah.” He was definitely larger than average. He’d only met one or two men who were taller or wider than he was. He’d met plenty who weighed more, though they tended to be a little soft around the middle.
The man eyed him up some more. “You a nice man?”
This was one of those human questions that Orion wasn’t sure how to answer. It seemed simple on the outside, but sometimes humans inherently understood all the hidden layers to a question that Orion could never hope to. In this case, he chose to answer simply, hoping the question had been simple. “Yeah.”
“See, the way I see it,” the man said, the cigarette bobbing between his lips. “If you’re not a nice man, and I sic you on Legs, and Legs gets hurt, part of that is on me.”
Ah, he understood now. And actually, he kind of liked this man. He liked thinking of Diana having people who looked out for her. Even if they nicknamed her for her body parts. “I won’t hurt Legs— er, I mean Diana.”
The man pursed his lips, apparently not satisfied with Orion’s answer, though it was as
sincere as an answer could possibly be. “Your parents still together?” the man asked, and Orion sensed a test of some kind.
“Dead.” The usual split second of grief raced through him when he unexpectedly thought of his folks. It was natural, he supposed, to still feel this level of pain at their unexpected and untimely deaths all those years ago. But still, the cold, wet wave of grief made Orion feel like a kid again. A kid who’d had to figure out how to keep his wolf pack together once he was the oldest.
The man’s face quirked, obviously remorseful that he’d poked that wound. “Both of ‘em?”
“Yeah.”
“Shee-it, son. That’s the short end of the stick.”
Orion had no understanding of why, but apparently having dead parents was the way out of this conversation. The man apparently dubbed Orion nice enough to pursue Legs. Without another word, he lit the cigarette with a pursed-lip inhale and handed it over to Orion.
“She’s right about not smoking them,” he said to Orion. “They’ll kill you.”
“Why do you smoke them, then?” Orion asked, mindful not to let the cinders on the end of the cigarette burn him.
The man shrugged his shoulders. “Worse things than dyin’.”
That sentiment wouldn’t have made sense to Orion in the least just a little over a year ago. To him, dying was the worst fate the universe could dole out on a soul. But then he’d seen his brother caught in a wildfire and burned half to death. He’d carried Phoenix down out of the wilderness and straight into a hospital in Portland. He’d endured Phoenix’s screams of pain. His begging for death. Like the pain he was enduring wasn’t worth the life he was fighting for.
“Thanks for the help,” Orion said, not quite sure how he’d ended up in this particular conversation with this particular man.
“Yap. Come on back sometime and tell me how it went with Legs.”
Orion smiled. “You got it. Name’s Orion, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you, Ryan. Name’s Pete. Good luck with your girl.”