Winterstoke Wolves Collection : An MM Mpreg Shifter Romance Bundle

by Sasha Silsbury

  Gray shivers at the contact. He doesn’t miss that Jax does too, although he seems to be pretending that he doesn’t.

  “I managed to get liquid forms for you,” Jax says. He’s looking at the bottles, not at Gray or where their hands touched. He seems to be doing anything but looking Gray in the eye. “The yellow one is an antibiotic. That will stop the arm from getting infected. The blue is a painkiller. You don’t need to take that but it’s a good idea. Your body will heal faster when you’re not so exhausted from fighting pain.”

  Gray nods. His arm is really starting to hurt. Painkillers seem like a good idea.

  “This is the important bit,” Jax says. “The right amount of medicine is good, but too much medicine can be bad. You mustn’t have more than I tell you, or it can hurt you. Do you understand?”

  Gray nods again so Jax continues. He demonstrates how to open the bottles, and makes sure that Gray can do it himself, then he gets Gray to tip a little of the liquid out onto a spoon, and asks him to repeat the instructions so he’s sure that Gray understands.

  The medicine tastes surprisingly good. It’s sweet but there’s an odd under taste to it, like fruit that has been on the tree too long.

  “I’ll go and see if I can find you something to eat,” Jax says, standing up and with an amused tone to his voice. “Try to get some rest. I won’t be long. Do you have any preferences?” He doesn’t wait for Gray to answer before he says, almost to himself, “Probably not.”

  Gray watches him leave, and despite everything that’s happened, he feels happier than he has in a very long time.

  JAX

  sharp white teeth and scents on the wind

  Jax changes into his jogging gear and runs home from the clinic the way he usually does. He likes the combination of fresh air and time to clear his head of the thoughts of the day. Boy, does he need it today.

  Gray is finally sleeping. The night nurse will be keeping an eye on him, but the painkillers he took should knock him out for the night. Jax can go home with a clear conscience.

  He’s had a single text from Gregor telling that they still haven’t found the wild wolf pack and his brothers are still out patrolling the mating run borders along with the alphas from the Warwick and Foster packs. He’s looking forward to getting home and having a long quiet bath.

  It feels weird to run through town emptied of alphas but he quite likes it. It makes the world feel quieter and he doesn’t have to watch his back.

  He needs the exercise too. His body is carrying out some insane combination of aching, tingling and nervous energy, and he needs to spend that energy somehow.

  He’s exhausted. If he doesn’t get some space away from the man, he just knows he’s going to do something stupid like let Gray bite him in some lust-filled frenzy.

  The thought fills his mind: sharp white teeth and those gray eyes filled with lust, chestnut hair bending over Jax’s neck followed by pain and ecstasy exploding together as the wild wolf claims him for his own.

  Stop it. God, he needs to get some sleep.

  Thinking of which, the aches he’s feeling aren’t bad either. They feel kind of good and he doesn’t know how he feels about that either.

  It’s full dark and over a full twenty-four hours since Gregor first rumbled up to the clinic with Gray in the back of his truck. Jax has got exactly zero hours sleep in that time.

  He’s going to go home, get into bed and sleep until everything makes sense.

  Gray. Gray.

  The journey back from the hospital had been a nightmare: a weird, incredibly erotic nightmare but a nightmare, nonetheless.

  He turns onto main street, running fast enough that his calves are beginning to ache.

  Most of the stores are closed and dark, but the restaurants are still open. Smiling couples sit at the tables, bending their heads closer to each other, and Jax feels an unexpected and unfamiliar pang of loneliness.

  Suddenly, he wants that: wants it with Gray.

  He wants it with a wolf who doesn’t know what a knife and fork is. It’s a reasonable assumption. He’d had to show him how the medicine spoon worked.

  Gray probably wouldn’t even be interested in finding out either. He’s a wolf. Wolves have zero interest in cutlery.

  Or romance for that matter. All Gray’s talk of mating means one thing: he wants Jax out in the mountains, pushing out pup after pup, eating raw rabbit and sleeping in a cave.

  Jax can’t do it. He has a life here.

  Imprints can break. They’re nothing more than a pain-in-the-ass medical condition. He’s going to have to heal it no matter how hard it hurts.

  It doesn’t help that he hasn’t had a heat in months either, and he’s seriously overdue one. He’s always used heat blockers to make sure they only happened at carefully scheduled time, but you didn’t need to be a doctor to know what happened if you put them off for too long or if your body was unexpectedly flooded with pheromones. He’s got a heat armageddon targeted right at his head... or more accurately, at his dick.

  He’d always known an imprint might happen to him one day, but he just wasn’t prepared for how physical it was.

  He’d thought it was mostly about being desperately horny, and that was a big part of it, but it isn’t the biggest at all.

  The hardest part is the overwhelming need for physical contact.

  Nothing has prepared him for the constant urge to touch Gray.

  All he’s wanted to do since Gray first opened his eyes, is to drape himself all over the wild wolf, skin to skin, and stay there forever.

  His hands have been in constant movement for hours. He’s been shoving them into his pockets or behind his back, and then finding himself reaching for contact, only to pull back again. It’s exhausting.

  He’s quite proud of his restraint, probably deserves some kind of medal actually, even if he has to admit that much of that was due to Gray’s injury and lack of understanding about the human world. Only a real jerk would take advantage of someone displaying that much pain and confusion.

  He feels a little bad about leaving the fellow at the clinic. He can’t even begin to imagine how strange everything must be to a man who has spent his entire life as a wolf, but he can’t keep holding himself back, and Gray should sleep until morning.

  Gray is also going to have to learn that Jax isn’t going to stay. Breaking the imprint is going to hit them both hard.

  A pang of pain hits Jax right in the solar plexus as hard as if he were punched. The thought of hurting Gray...Jax’s mind shies away from it.

  He turns off the main street and starts up the road to the packhouse, huffing a little as he starts the steep incline.

  It’s dark here. There are no streetlights, and the holiday cabins that dot the sides of the road are still and dark.

  Aylewood’s main attraction for vacationers is the mountains, and that disappears entirely during the mating run. No one wants to hike through a mountain full of horny alphas jostling for a mate.

  He can scent them on the air, both the omegas and alphas.

  They’re not allowed near the town—the mating run territory is clearly defined—but the sheer amount of hormones in the air contaminates everything, and drifts down from the mountains, changing the nature of the town’s scent.

  At least it had been quiet at the clinic. Since he’d got back, they’d had one omega coming in due to a laceration on her arm caused by slipping over a rock.

  The injury hadn’t been that bad, but the woman was clearly using it as an excuse to get out of the run, so he’d patched her up and given her a doctor’s note saying that he wasn’t giving her permission to go back up into the mountains due to risk of infection. She was in the clinic now, waiting for her pack to collect her in the morning.

  Jax hoped she was okay. There were always a few of them every year: omegas who didn’t want to be there but were coerced into it by their packs.

  Stupid mating run. Stupid alpha-run world.

  He can smell their
horniness from here. What does that say about them?

  Jax stops suddenly. Their scent shouldn’t be that strong.

  He stands on the side of the dark road, completely still and scents the air.

  His skin turns ice-cold. The alpha scent isn’t far away. It’s close.

  He should have taken the truck. What was he thinking? Jogging during the mating run?

  Just because alphas aren’t allowed into the town during it doesn’t mean they’re not going to break the rules.

  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

  He’s too far from the packhouse for his brothers to hear him if he screams. He’s not sure if they’re even home.

  Jax stands stock still, scenting the air, desperately trying to work out where the scent is coming from.

  There’s a slight breeze from the left into the trees. It seems the mostly likely place, but his brain is racing so fast that he can’t think straight.

  Whoever it is, isn’t moving. There’s no rustling. The scent doesn’t seem to be changing.

  His limbs are frozen in place. He couldn’t move if he wanted to. All he can do is listen for the sound of movement and scent the air.

  Nothing happens. The alpha doesn’t move.

  Jax stays still anyway. He’s not sure how long it is before he starts second-guessing himself.

  Maybe he’s just an omega standing on a dark road thinking he smells something he shouldn’t.

  He moves tentatively. Nothing happens, so he keeps going, taking long, determined strides in his eagerness to get to the safety of the packhouse.

  He’s just about convinced he imagined the whole thing when he scents alpha again, this time stronger, and accompanied with the soft crackling of leaves underfoot.

  Oh shit.

  He’s not frozen in place this time. Jax takes flight. He races, hardly thinking of anything except making his legs move faster.

  There’s a sound behind him, four legs running through leaves and over branches.

  Jax hadn’t thought it as possible to move even faster, but the sound sends adrenaline straight to his feet and it feels like he’s flying as he races across the tarmac and up the road.

  Any moment, he expects to feel heavy paws knocking into his back, pushing him to the ground.

  It doesn’t happen.

  The packhouse draws closer, and Jax keeps running, his muscles and lungs burning with effort.

  He doesn’t look back. He pulls the door open, and slams it shut behind him, then falls to the floor in painful ball of screaming muscles, gasping for breath.

  The light is on in the common room, but the packhouse is empty and silent.

  It’s the one time of year that the packhouse stays empty. The alphas tend to be out patrolling, and the omegas stay home with the cubs away from the scents of strange alphas.

  The betas are too busy keeping the town running and shaking their head at the insanity of it all to hang about socializing.

  Jax feels another shiver of fear. A strange alpha wouldn’t be stupid enough to risk angering an entire pack by forcing his way into a strange packhouse, would he?

  But then, alphas on a mating run aren’t exactly known for their logic.

  Jax gets to his feet, calves still trembling from the effort of the run. He sidles to the window and pulls the curtain to the side.

  It’s almost pitch dark, but the shape of a giant wolf is clear. He’s standing at the gates to the parking area, staring intently at the packhouse. He shouldn’t be able to see Jax from where he is, but Jax ducks back anyway.

  He stands back up against the wall, trying to figure out what to do.

  Phone. There’s a reason his brothers are on speed dial.

  He fishes the phone out of his pocket, but before he has a chance to dial, headlights light up the wall opposite as a vehicle pulls up to the packhouse.

  Jax risks another look out of the window and sees the distinctive shape of Adam’s truck pulling to a stop.

  The wolf is gone.

  GRAY

  blood and ash

  The gray-eyed wolf is half-asleep, half-awake and both worlds are nightmares.

  In some corner of his brain, he’s aware that he’ll be able to make sense of it if he could just wake up, but the moment that the thought begins to take shape, the nightmare drags him back down again.

  In his dreams, he’s asleep too. It starts out happy. He’s dozing in the cool den with his pack, comfortable away from the midday heat. The secure scents of his family are all around, comforting him with their proximity.

  The only sour note is the foul smell of his father whose body is corrupted and riddled with foul-smelling lumps that make his movements stiff and his mind bad-tempered.

  Even the scents of the humans from the town down below are not a concern. They’re stronger than usual. It’s that time of year when the humans race through the woods in wolf form, chasing each other, and pretending to be proper wolves. The scents of the omegas are tantalizing but the wolves know better than to approach.

  It’s the first year they’ve stayed this close to the human territories, the first year that the old wolf isn’t strong enough to make the jumps and leaps needed to make the journey through the rocky ledges and passageways to the higher ground.

  The old wolf is in a bad way, but the gray-eyed wolf has never spent much time wondering how things might be different. Everything is what it is.

  The sleeping man is trying to scream at the wolf, telling him to wake up, to see what is coming and stop it, but no sound is coming out of his mouth. All he can do is watch with an increasing sense of dread and hopelessness.

  Images start flashing through his head, even as he tosses and turns, unable to find the surface, in the unfamiliar surroundings of the clinic.

  And then the man is gone, and there is nothing but the memory of sudden pain in his neck accompanied by the reek of blood, fear and ash.

  Jaws grip his neck, tight enough that he’s choking and his nostrils fill with the scent of blood. Suddenly, he knows what it’s felt like at the end for every deer he’s ever hunted.

  His eyes fly open, and that only makes things worse. The blood scent isn’t his. It belongs to a soft belly dripping red slippery entrails, smelling not that different to the wounded deer, but thick with the scent of that all-consuming rot.

  His father’s dying eyes stare back at him, dull with acceptance.

  It’s enough to turn terror to fury. Red hot rage courses through his veins.

  He twists under the jaws pinning him down and pain rips through his neck as his flesh tears.

  He crouches, growling loud and low, hot blood flowing freely into his fur. Part of his brain recognizes that he doesn’t have long before blood loss makes him weak.

  He needs to end this now, even as his mind is still trying to make sense of what this even is.

  He’s half-aware that the den has become a snarling, small space filled with the stink of panicked wolves trying to get out of their way, but he can’t worry about that now. He can’t look at them. He can’t think about the body of his father, spilling blood onto the sandy floor of the cave.

  He can’t pay attention to anything other than the wolf in front of him.

  His brother, the ash-scented wolf, is a big wolf, bigger than any in the pack with the exception of the gray-eyed wolf and his father. But their father is dead, and the gray-eyed wolf is trembling and weak on his feet.

  His brother’s bright blue eyes fix on the gray-eyed wolf. There is no emotion in them. No sense of family. Nothing but determination to get the job done.

  The ash-scented wolf’s jaws are dark with blood and his shoulders are hunched, ready to spring.

  The gray-eyed wolf doesn’t think about it. Thinking has never been his strong suit. He just reacts.

  He leaps, snarling. There is nothing in his brain but pin and rip.

  The ash-scented wolf feints to one side and catches the gray-eyed wolf’s front leg in his jaw.

  Teeth pierce the gray-ey
ed wolf’s shin. He screams, and twists, pulling the leg away instinctively. He feels when the bone breaks and his flesh rips.

  The wolf lands heavily on a stone outcrop, twisting the injured leg right under him. His vision flashes white, then goes dark.

  When he blinks again, his brother is bearing down on him, and all he can see is bared teeth and snarling wolf.

  He tries to get to his paws but his legs don’t want to obey him. His muscles are too hot and weak.

  The knowledge rips through him that he is not going to win. He’s not even going to live. He can see it in the ash-scented wolf’s eyes. As long as he lives, the new pack leader is going to have a potential challenger.

  The gray-eyed wolf gathers the last of his strength and forces himself to his feet. He doesn’t submit or offer his belly.

  He turns and he runs, or rather limps, as fast as his three working legs allow him. His brother lets him go.

  In the clinic in the human town below, the gray-eyed man wakes with a start and lets out a howl.

  JAX

  mud and pack politics

  Adam’s clothes are clean, but the rest of him is filthy. His hair is greased with sweat, and mud is smeared wherever his skin is visible.

  Jax’s oldest brother is leaning heavily on the stick he’s needed ever since Mason Reed tore out the ligaments in his thigh a year ago. The corners of his eyes are tight with pain.

  Nevertheless, he picks up Jax’s panicked scent the moment that he limps through the door. The exhaustion drops and the suffocating scent of alpha fury floods the air.

  The stick drops with a clatter.

  “Where?” Adam growls, eyes darting from hallway to reception desk to the left towards the common room.

  “Outside, but—”

  Adam is gone before Jax has the chance to tell him that the alpha is no longer there.

  Jax waits with the door locked and his back against the wall. Adam looked like he’d been through hell, and he likely has.