by Penny Alley
Rubbing his chest, Gabe watched her go until the crowd swallowed her and he couldn’t see her anymore. He breathed in, still able to smell her. But then, she’d been in his nose for years. That she wasn’t harboring hopes of rank made him feel better, but it wasn’t going to be an alpha or an omega who caught her. Nor would it be some wanderer from the Scruff, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be someone from Scullamy. Maya was his, in his heart if not in fact. All he needed to make it official was the rise of tomorrow’s sun.
His pulse quickened, his blood firing in his veins. Tomorrow could not come soon enough.
The wind shifted, chasing away the lingering sweetness of honeyed chicken skewers. His hackles rose at the scent that replaced it. Following his nose, Gabe found the source. It was Deacon, in his camp on the far side of the Ridge and conspiring with his latest recruit. As if his massive army of a pack required any further strengthening. A female stood with them. They grew them pretty in Scullamy, Gabe would grant them that. Like the Deacon’s own daughter, the woman was small, blonde, well-made (if a little too thin), and like everyone else from that packline, full to the Scullamy brim with treachery.
Concluding the meeting, Deacon left them, and the Scruff male and small female went into the tent. Though none of them were close enough to see the insult, Gabe spat on the ground. The ratio of male-to-female runners was such he had no doubt that every Bride would be claimed by the end of the Hunt, including the Scullamy bitches. He pitied every male forced or fool enough to Claim one. Gabe was neither, and he’d be damned if he welcomed that kind of Bride into Hollow Hills, much less his life.
CHAPTER TWO
Neoma lay on her side, the heat of Wayman like a furnace at her back. His arm lay heavy around her waist, holding her close in a way that had less to do with trapping her to him than it did simply trying to accommodate two people on a narrow camping cot meant for one. She hadn’t slept all night. Dawn was almost on her the way Wayman was on her, every nude inch of him pressed against her, one waking breath and a whim away from taking her all over again.
She couldn’t hate him for that. She wanted to; she’d tried to. He’d satisfied himself on her three times during the night—a male exploring every feature of his newest toy. She couldn’t hate him for that either. He hadn’t been cruel or unkind. Who knew how long he’d spent in the Scruff, traveling aimlessly among the chevolak without the protection of a pack, but he hadn’t been rough with her. The bruises on her arms had been given in the height of passion. The suckling bite marks on her breasts and neck had fired her every bit as much as it had him. Five years without a husband could do that, she’d told herself. It wasn’t reasonable to expect a woman so long untouched to feel nothing when a man’s competent hand finally found her again. And Wayman’s hand had been so very competent.
Blooms of residual lust unfurled deep in her belly, sending a warm flow of liquid need trickling down to her greedy sex. She squeezed her thighs together, afraid the smell would rouse him again. Or worse, someone else along this row of close-quartered cots. They were not alone. Privacy was a luxury few in Scullamy knew, and apparently the Scruff knew even less. No one had minded sharing the tent with them, and the presence of the other recruits hadn’t bothered Wayman or cooled his attention. When need had risen, he’d simply pulled the blanket up over them both and ignored the ribald comments muttered not quite under breath from those who chose to watch.
All but her seemed to be asleep now, though. An unsynchronized chorus of snoring filled the tent, the disharmony underscored by the low conversations of sentries as they walked the perimeter outside.
Where was Scotty, she wondered. Tucked in safe and warm with one of the matron mamas, she hoped. Perhaps sharing a sleeping bag with his friend, Tobby, whose father Detric stood a loyal second lieutenant to the Alpha they both served—a friendship that had likely been assigned to give Detric an excuse to stay close to her. Neoma closed her eyes, but blocking out the memories of his harsh hands grabbing her by the hair and yanking her from Matson’s truck were much harder. It was a horrible trick of her weary imagination that turned the smell of sweat and sex and so many unwashed men into the haunting odor of damp earth, crushed vegetation and blood.
She bit her bottom lip, fighting hard to keep her breathing slow and steady and the burning tears from escaping. She’d been so close. Just one more day, one hard run with a little good luck, and she and Scotty could have escaped Scullamy for good.
“You’re shaking the whole bed,” Wayman mumbled into the back of her head.
Neoma opened her eyes, apprehension moving in to curdle the lingering arousal. “Sorry,” she whispered.
Breathing in, Wayman’s arm snaked that much tighter around her waist. “You don’t feel cold.” He shifted, his hand moving down to cup between her thighs. “Mm,” he rumbled, ignoring it when she squeezed her legs together in a belated attempt to keep him out. “In fact, you feel pretty fucking hot right now.”
“Sorry,” she said again, a tinge of bitterness creeping into her apology.
Wayman stilled. She felt it when he lifted his head, staring down at the back of hers until her neck crawled. “Am I going to have problems with you, girl?”
So close. She’d been so very, very close. Unshed tears blurred the shadows within the tent.
“No,” she whispered.
“You sure?” he pressed, a hard edge entwined within the softness of his tone. Dangerous despite the gentle caress of his fingertips, stroking along her tender slit, coaxing her to open to him like the petals of a flower. “I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m pretty sure I know how to deal with rebellious little girls. How old are you anyway?”
It was a little late to be worried about statutory rape. Neoma kept that locked behind firmly pressed lips. Although once she might have been described as having a falsely youthful face, worry had robbed her of it long ago, etching lines around her mouth and eyes like scars. Life in Scullamy often dealt out both. “Twenty.”
“And your boy? How old is he?”
Her mouth ran dry. Instinct reared in instant defense of Scotty, but there was simply no advantage to be gained in avoiding his question. “Five.”
Wayman grunted. “Don’t much care for kids,” he admitted. “But at least he’s past the diapers, puking and crying all night. Not that it’ll be that way for long, I suppose. I plant a pup in your belly and I get a bonus. Didn’t specify what that might be, but since he’s already promised a car and a place to live, money works for me. He give you a place to live?”
“We all get places to live.” The one-room slum she and Scotty shared might not be luxurious, but it was, technically, a place to live. She closed her eyes, wishing she could close her nerves against the proprietary hold in which he gripped her, content simply to cup her sex. As if he owned it.
Because he did. Her jaw clenched.
“Homes,” he echoed, seeming to like the word. “Tell me about it. What’s yours like?”
Not liking where his touch was going, Neoma pushed at his arm, but he was strong and he was stubborn. And when she didn’t give up right away, he grabbed her thigh and in a single hard jerk, pulled her leg up and over the top of him, splaying her open wide. When she froze, his touch again turned gentle. He cupped her again.
“Your place?” he said, as if nothing had happened.
“It’s small.” She grit her teeth, finally able to hate him at last.
“One bedroom, or two?”
“One. It’s an apartment, although I did have a house once.”
“A nice one?”
She grit her teeth harder. “Yes.”
He grunted again, the upward glide of one finger slipping into the slick wet heat of her folds. “The apartment probably has paper for walls. I’ll bet you hear every fart your neighbors make.”
Neoma struggled to feel nothing, but that blossom in her belly grew against her will and a low throb began to pulse beneath his thickly calloused fingers. He circled her c
lit, coaxing it from its protective hood.
“Where’s your boy sleep?”
“In bed with me.” She glared at the shadowy wall of the tent, that low throb of lust between her legs beginning now to mingle with an even hotter throb of anger.
“That’s going to change.” He shifted, leaning back in a way that forced her to as well. He took his hand from her, pushing it down between them instead. She closed her eyes when he gripped himself and she felt the first questing bumps as the head of him sought entrance. An intrusion of light stopped him before he could slide into her slick heat. He lifted his head just as the tent flap was swept aside. Wayman stiffened, then swore, and finally with a deprecating laugh, released Neoma.
“It’s time,” old Elda said, holding her Coleman lantern to light the tent’s interior.
Shaking his head, Wayman rubbed his face as Neoma scrambled out of bed. Grabbing her clothes off the floor, she hugged them to her as she fled.
“Hey,” Wayman called, stopping her before she could duck past Elda and leave the awful tent behind.
Aching to run, Neoma made herself stop. She turned enough to show she was listening, but didn’t look back, afraid the amber defiance of her angry inner wolf showed now in her eyes.
“Run straight into the rising sun,” he said. “Take the hard path up the hill. It won’t stop everyone from chasing you, but it will slow them down long enough for me to catch up.”
Her stomach churned, her traitorous body pulsing with the most unwelcome arousal.
Rolling onto his back, Wayman folded his hands behind his head, displaying his blatant erection without the slightest trace of embarrassment. His smile turned crooked as he said, “You’d better be worth the run.”
She wasn’t, but she didn’t tell him that. Because it didn’t matter. He was going to chase her no matter what she did; she could see that determination growing in the honeyed hues of his lupine eyes. His next house and car depended on it. No matter where she ran, he was going to catch her because that was what Deacon had told him to do. It really didn’t matter if his touch was tender or not. It didn’t matter if, in the very back of her mind, she couldn’t help wondering if she might have found him handsome had they met in some other time or place. Maybe she might have liked him, simply because he hadn’t been cruel to her.
But they weren’t in another time or place; they were in Hollow Hills. If she didn’t want to end the day on a bus bound back to Scullamy, back to hell, under the thumb of an alpha who treated her as if her child were a loan for which she must make endless payments, then she had only one choice. Within the hour, the sun would crest the horizon and she would have to run—run as she had never run before—and she would have to be caught. Whatever else happened, she had to make sure she was caught by someone without ties to Scullamy. Someone strong, from a pack aggressive enough to stand up to Deacon and refuse to yield her back again. She had to be caught by someone—anyone—other than Wayman.
“You’d better be worth the run,” he repeated, closing his eyes as he scratched his chest.
She still wasn’t, and she still didn’t tell him so. Pushing past Elda, she simply walked away.
* * * * *
If he had to guess, Gabe would have put the number of volka crowded around the males’ end of the field at about six hundred. The Patoka, White Water, Soho and indeed, most of the packs kept to themselves in clique-ish groups within the accumulative whole, with very little intermingling going on. The only exception to that rule seemed to be the Kennewick, but then, rumor had it they were one desperate Hunt away from ending up in the Scruff. This Hunt, according to Royo the elephant ear vendor (made from real elephants, he kept telling people; the pups loved him). Gabe made a mental note to feel sorry for them later. For now though, he couldn’t afford the distraction.
The love of his life was at one end of the field; Gabe was on the other, sandwiched in between his Alpha and Marcus, Hollow Hills’ first and only new recruit from the Scruff. For the last hour, they’d been corralled like cattle in a pen of partially whitewashed wood and pennant-laden ropes. To ease the Shift, they were naked. But then, all the participating males were. So were the females for that matter, every one of those nubile young ladies packed into a similar-looking corral, except that it was all the way across the field where all they could do was look at them. The ultimate eye candy.
Sometime during the night, several last minute contestants had trickled in, swelling the number of potential Brides to thirty. Three times that many males were stuffed into the same corral as Gabe. It was the sort of turnout any hosting pack would be proud of. No willing Bride would go unClaimed today. With thirty to choose from, that increased the odds that one would be Claimed by them. Two would be better, Gabe knew, but one was absolutely essential. Because no volka ever had tried to take an alphaship with only one lieutenant and no soldiers to back him…until Colton. It had been over a year, but Gabe still remembered that conversation as clearly as if it were still happening.
“McQueen just died,” Colton had said, standing on Gabe’s front porch, water dripping off his nose onto the welcome mat, clothes drenched from the monsoon-style rains the Pacific Northwest was known for. “I’m going for it.”
“You’re crazy,” Gabe had told him, winning one of those infamous crooked Lauren smiles.
“Probably. Will you follow me?”
Apparently, they were two peas in the same kind of crazy pod. And here they were one year later, naked in a pen filled with warriors from nine different packs—ten if one considered the sleepy tourist-oriented volka of Hollow Hills ‘warriors’— with adrenaline building in their veins as they prepared to help their Alpha win his first big political achievement: Colton Lauren had to bag a Bride.
Tradition. Everything came down to tradition. Hunts had probably outlived their usefulness a good hundred years ago, but Brides still meant pups and pups meant permanence in the minds of a people reluctant to take a chance on a thirty-something bachelor with only one lieutenant (two now that they had Marcus) and no reason not to split should Deacon decide he wanted to invade again. Plus, it helped keep the bloodlines diverse and remote places like Hollow Hills from becoming real live re-enactments of, say, ‘Wrong Turn’. Or, if one knew the McQueens, ‘Deliverance’.
“I swear,” Marcus suddenly growled to the young man standing just behind him. “You brush that thing up against my leg one more time, I’m going to break both of yours.”
The young man tried to step back, but too many males were packed into too small a corral. He bumped into the youngest McQueen, who fell into his massive, hairy, bear of a brother, Angus. Both turned and shoved the man, knocking him face-first into the wooden fence.
“First blood,” Gabe commented, while the young man clutched his nose and tried to make himself as narrow as possible.
Marcus rolled his shoulders, gritting his teeth in irritation, and just behind all of them, the eldest McQueen brother, Colton’s only serious competition for the alpha position, cracked the smallest of smiles.
“It’s just a little blood,” Sebastian drawled. “The boy can still run. If he’s stupid enough to try.”
“I’ll run,” the young man shot back, spitting tiny drops of blood off his lips. “I’ll hammy all of you and have my Bride on the ground before we reach the trees!”
Everybody looked at him now. The McQueens, Colton, Marcus, even Gabe lost what little sympathy he had for the foolishness of youth, competing with the big dogs in a grown man’s game.
“Hammy?” Sebastian echoed, all lean muscle and dark-eyed determination, and now a smile that was all teeth and very little humor. “Do you hear that?” he asked his brothers. “The pup just threatened to hamstring us.”
“I heard,” Seth rumbled.
“I’d dearly love to see him try,” Ian rumbled even lower.
And Angus, who had yet to give up on the idea of a beard, despite its growing in so sparse that he looked mange-ridden, didn’t say anything at all. He just
looked at the boy, an ominous glow of amber in the backs of his brown eyes.
Gabe couldn’t help himself. “Nice knowing you,” he told the young man, and then to the McQueens added, “Go easy on him.”
“Don’t fraternize with the competition,” Colton said before turning to Sebastian. “Try not to kill him.”
“Is that an order?” Sebastian returned, his smile turning mocking. “Because we both know I’ll do anything my Alpha commands.”
The would-be alpha held Colton’s gaze without blinking, and neither looked away. Son of the late Alpha McQueen with a ready-made squad of lieutenants at his back, all Sebastian had to do was announce his intention and he could steal the alphaship right out from under Colton. Why he didn’t, Gabe hadn’t yet figured out. He’d never pegged them as the political sort, and yet here they were. All four of them competing to Claim a Bride. If just one McQueen managed it and Colton failed, it would tip the balance of public support. Nobody could afford to let that happen.
His gaze stole back across the field to Maya and the corral where the women waited, anticipation heightening in steady time with the rising of the morning sun. Every one of them was painted in the age-old markings of their maternal line. Every one sported a secret scent passed down from mother to daughter, each one deliberately created to get into the nose of a male and bring him running. The stink was so palpable, his eyes were burning, but as he tilted his face into the wind, he found hers. God bless Maya’s matchmaking mama. It had taken most of a weekend, but he’d repaired her garbage disposal and reshingled her back porch, and it didn’t hurt any that Lelia had always liked him. Before it was over, she’d allowed him a sneak whiff of the scent she intended to douse her daughter in. He’d sneezed for three days, but it had been worth it. As he dissected his way through a dissonance of perfumes, he found a familiar one.
As if sensing his scrutiny, Maya looked around. From so far away, it was impossible to tell what specific thing drew her gaze, but Gabe liked to think it was her anticipation for him making it impossible for her to ignore him.