Ian's Choice (Wolves' Heat)

by Lynne, Odessa

  Warm breath feathered across his ear, causing a full body shiver to race through Ian, and Craig spoke quietly. “When we get to the back door, I’m going to have to throw you over my shoulder. Don’t talk.”

  Ian nodded, his movement causing his several day’s worth of beard to scratch against Craig’s smooth cheek. He wondered if he would remember Craig’s demand when it mattered.

  He tried to widen his eyes against the disconcerting wave of dreaminess, felt his grip slipping from across Craig’s shoulders. Craig moved the arm around Ian’s waist lower and grabbed his belt, yanking him roughly back into position.

  “Ow,” Ian mumbled against the hand still over his mouth. “You’re smothering me.” Of course, his words came out as nothing more than a muffled hum.

  Second stepped around them and took the lead toward the back door exit to the house. If someone waited on the other side, Second would die first, giving Craig time to escape and regroup.

  Ian sighed. He liked Second. Not just because he’d fingered him in the ass either. He liked him because he didn’t look at him funny, not the way Third did. So, he’d rather Second not die.

  But Ian didn’t want Craig to die either, because Craig had fucked him, and he’d liked it. He’d like Craig to do it again sometime.

  “I don’t want you to die,” Ian said, tilting his head to the side to rest on Craig’s shoulder. He turned his face so he could breathe in Craig’s warm, comfortable smell.

  Craig gave him an indecipherable look just before he bent and grabbed the back of Ian’s thighs below his ass.

  In one swift heave, Craig had levered Ian across his shoulder and Ian’s nose bumped painfully into Craig’s tautly flexing back while Craig’s shoulder drove hard into Ian’s belt buckle.

  The rush of blood to his head stopped all thought for at least a minute as Ian tried to catch his breath and hold onto consciousness against the tide of black behind his eyes. He succeeded but by the time he was able to hold his head up long enough to see where they were, the darkness of the woods had engulfed them, and the glow of the burning house and headlights had already been left behind.

  Chapter 11

  Ian’s fall to the ground could have been gentle. It wasn’t. He grunted when his ass connected with the deadfall scattered across the forest floor. He stared up at the few stars he could see through the canopy of leaves overhead. Oak trees grew tall in the area, their leaves thick and green, their branches stretching for the light. The moon offered the only light tonight, though, and Ian let his legs rest on the ground and curled his fingers around a handful of the broken bits of sticks and dead leaves and watched Craig lean over him.

  “We’ll meet up with the others later. Enjoy the drugs. I didn’t have time to grab more.”

  “That’s okay. I feel better.”

  “Of course you do. You’re intoxicated with the effects of the medicine.”

  “But you said we don’t have any more.”

  “Ian.”

  “I think that’s the first time you’ve said my name.”

  Craig’s sigh seemed excessively tolerant. Ian couldn’t really make out his expression even with the light of the full moon to help him see in the dark.

  “Are you mad at me?” he asked.

  Craig knelt on the ground beside Ian and put his hand to the side of Ian’s face. Ian turned into the touch without thought and rubbed against the warmth of Craig’s broad palm. He wondered if the scrape he felt against his hair line came from Craig’s claws. He thought it might.

  “If we didn’t already have a plan in place to protect us from an attack by your renegades, most of my pack would have died tonight, and a lot of humans too. So yes, I’m mad at you for leading them to us. If you weren’t already injured and in pain, I’m not sure I could have controlled myself when I realized what you had done.”

  Ian laughed.

  Craig’s claws pushed a little harder into Ian’s skin. Ian had to press the heel of his hand into his stomach to stop the hollow pain.

  “I didn’t lead anyone here,” he said. “I couldn’t have. I didn’t even try to get past the signal block. The renegades, I don’t belong with them, I came looking for a guy who went missing in the forest. But you’re right, those guys, they’re spreading stories about you wolves. The kind of stories that makes people want to shoot first and not bother asking questions later, if you know what I mean.”

  “I think I do,” Craig said. He continued to stare down at Ian with his glowing eyes. “I don’t know whether to believe you or not. Your story’s very convenient, as was the timing of the attack.”

  “I don’t care,” Ian said. He yawned, then brought his hand up to rub hard at his eyes. “I’m going to sleep.”

  He closed his eyes.

  Craig gave his shoulder a hard shake. “You don’t actually get to sleep right now. I was going to let you walk for a while before your pain came back.”

  Ian waved in the general direction of his feet. “Sorry. No shoes. Sleeping’s a better idea.”

  “Ashikid grabbed your shoes.”

  “Who? Oh, yeah. Second. Asshole fingering guy.”

  Ian heard a growl coming from Craig, followed by a disbelieving, “What?”

  “He fingered me in the ass. Don’t you remember? You told him to do it.” Seriously, Craig seemed to be taking this entirely the wrong way. He’d been the one demanding Ian and Second submit.

  Craig growled again and dropped forward onto his hands, leaves crackling under his weight, and he loomed over Ian. This close, Ian could actually see his expression. Craig’s nostrils flared as he took a deep breath through his nose. “You’re still filthy with my scent.”

  “I’m filthy,” Ian said and gave an aborted laugh. “You want me to lay around, covered in your spunk, so all the other wolves can smell how many times you’ve come all over me and fucked me and I’m the filthy one.”

  Craig stuck his nose against Ian’s throat, and Ian’s breath caught as Craig’s mouth opened and his teeth scraped over his skin. “We can’t do this here,” Craig said on a rumbling groan. His hips lowered and the bulge of hard cock brushed against Ian’s side. He heard a deeply indrawn sniff right up against his ear and felt Craig’s hot, wet breath against his neck. He shivered.

  “I want to,” Ian said. “Are you sure?”

  Craig hesitated and then shoved himself back and away. “Sit up. We have somewhere to be in a few hours.”

  Ian sat up, groggy and slow.

  “Where’d he go, anyway?”

  “Ashikid?”

  “Yeah. Second.”

  “I sent him on an errand. He’ll catch up with us before we get where we’re going.”

  “And where’s that?”

  Craig didn’t answer him.

  Ian watched as Craig put socks on him and then his boots, tying the knots quickly.

  Ian reached out and brushed his fingers over Craig’s forehead, and Craig drew back.

  “You’re sweating a lot,” Ian said. “It’s not that warm out here.”

  “You know why.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Craig took his hand. With a sharp pull, Craig pulled Ian to his feet. The sudden change of position made Ian stagger and he clutched at the front of Craig’s t-shirt to keep himself upright until the dizzy swirl of the world around him stopped.

  They walked through the woods for a long time. Longer than Ian could track with his mind jumping from thought to thought and the medicated haze keeping him from being able to concentrate for longer than a few minutes at a time. Slowly, though, the haze lifted and the pain crept in, and he blamed the excess activity on the quickening fade of the drug’s effectiveness.

  Morning came, breaking through the trees, faint and gray with predawn light.

  “Stop,” he said, after he stumbled over a limb and nearly pulled both himself and Craig down. “I need a break.”

  “Your leg’s hurting. Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

  “Would it have made
a difference?”

  “I would have carried you again.”

  “Exactly.” Ian pushed at his forehead with his fingers. “I have a headache. I didn’t think it would be a good idea.”

  “We shouldn’t stop. You need to let me carry you.”

  Ian eased his arm off Craig’s shoulders, and then stood carefully on his own two feet, his weight centered on one hip over his uninjured leg. “Is someone chasing us?”

  “No, but we’re on a schedule.”

  “You never said where we were going.”

  “No.”

  Ian eyed Craig. “You don’t trust me.”

  “I have my concerns right now. Better to be cautious.”

  “Well.” Ian straightened. He couldn’t say he was that surprised. He tried not to let Craig’s words bother him. What did he expect? They barely knew each other, and Craig was a wolf, suspicious, domineering, and uncompromising, and Ian had been hiding something from the moment he’d been captured. He rubbed at the tension in the back of his neck. “I’m ready.”

  Twenty, maybe thirty more minutes and Ian had to grit his teeth on every step. Craig stopped, head cocked to the side. A few seconds later, Ian heard the sound that had caught Craig’s attention.

  Common knowledge and personal experience said the wolves had a lot of physical advantages over humans, but they weren’t better at everything. They were excellent trackers, proven when the other wolves and Craig had apparently tracked him through a forest full of scents in the dark of night, but they weren’t faster, despite their greater strength and endurance.

  Having such a strong drive to reproduce every few years wasn’t doing them any favors either.

  “What is it?” Ian whispered.

  “Ashikid. Second,” Craig said, not bothering to lower his voice. “He’s back.”

  The crackle and crunch of leaves intensified and then Second appeared around a tree, much closer than Ian expected. Second had been running, and he still had a bag of gear across his back, the strap thick enough and tight enough over his chest so that it was obvious to Ian he carried a heavy load. Ian couldn’t remember a lot about when they’d left the house, but he didn’t think Second had brought anything with him as bulky as what he seemed to be hauling now.

  “Is it done?” Craig asked Second as he approached.

  Second stopped in front of Craig, taking in a few deep breaths. Second’s gaze strayed to Ian, his eyes hotly fixated. Ian kept his head down, his mouth shut, and his hands at his sides.

  “Yes.”

  “Did they make any effort to follow?”

  “No.” Second’s attention diverted from Ian in a sudden rush of disgust and anger. “They barely set a perimeter once they realized we had abandoned the area. As usual they were more interested in searching for what we might have left behind.”

  People or technology? Ian wasn’t sure what Second meant, but considering the theories he had been constructing since Craig had caught him, he wasn’t as skeptical about the latter as he would have been just a week ago.

  Ian wanted to ask questions, and he thought he would probably get answers from Craig if it weren’t for Second’s presence, but Ian couldn’t shake the feeling that Second was much closer to the kind of behavior Ian had been taught to expect from the wolves during heat season when they came into contact with humans, especially with Ian being in that sweet spot of age and sex that seemed most likely to set off the wolves’ frenzied reactions, so he listened and made every effort not to draw any attention to himself.

  “Did the others follow the plan?”

  “Yes. A few took humans with them. But they’re keeping them far away from the group. The renegades found the ones we left behind.”

  The uncontrolled flicker of Second’s gaze over Ian made him deeply uncomfortable and he realized this was probably the longest he’d been around Second since that first night, when Second had still been under the influence of repression drugs. That didn’t appear to be the case any longer.

  Craig noticed the attention, or Ian’s increasing discomfort, or both. He fisted his hand in the back of Ian’s shirt and pulled him in close to his body. Ian didn’t even think about struggling against the manhandling, not with the way Second couldn’t stop looking at him.

  Craig turned, putting enough of his body in front of Ian to get a reaction from Second. “Stop staring at what’s mine.”

  Second took a deep breath. Ian saw his claws come out, but then Craig lashed out, as fast as any move Ian had seen from him yet, grabbing Second by the throat, claws digging into the soft flesh of Second’s neck, jostling a gasping Second closer and releasing Ian in the same instant.

  Ian stumbled back, made an aborted attempt to put weight on his injured leg, hissed out in pain, and stopped moving as soon as he regained his balance.

  “Stop staring,” Craig repeated, his low-voiced growl crawling across Ian’s skin. “He’s mine.”

  Second started to reach for Craig’s hand but then hesitated and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he seemed to have regained some control over himself.

  “I can’t stay,” Second said, his throat working under the press of Craig’s crushing hold. “I keep catching his scent. I need to get upwind.”

  Craig pulled his claws out of Second’s neck and dark red blood drizzled down from the five clearly visible puncture wounds. Craig shoved Second lightly, not enough to knock him off his feet, but enough so that Second couldn’t help but realize Craig could have done so quite easily if he’d wanted.

  Second started shrugging his bag’s strap over his head, wincing as he had to duck his head and twist his neck to free the strap. Ian could see his hands still shaking. “There were so many humans. I had to leave the one I’d chosen behind. He smelled so—so—” Second’s gaze flickered to the side, but didn’t stray to Ian again. “I shouldn’t have left him.”

  “Probably not,” Craig said. “You aren’t coping well. Leave the bag and go. You’re wasting time. Get out of here.”

  Second dropped the bag at Craig’s feet.

  Ian watched him take off through the forest, weaving between trees until he was out of sight. Ian almost sagged in relief as the tension gripping him finally let up.

  “You guys scare the shit out of me, you know that, right?”

  Craig frowned at Ian, and Ian knew he probably should have just kept his mouth shut about it. Rubbing his hands over his chest, he thought about Craig and how he’d been treated since his capture and he wondered, not for the first time, if Craig’s behavior was normal for a wolf or an exception to the rule.

  “You have a lot more control than I’ve been led to believe you would have while you’re in the middle of your heat season. Is it just you?”

  “There are reasons why I’m Alpha of the pack. I’m stronger than the others. But there are also my ties to you now. Not every human submits as gracefully as you have. Your submission adds to my strength.”

  Ian scowled, not sure he liked what that might say about him. “I’m not a fool. I’m not going to die if I don’t have to.”

  Craig’s mouth parted on a sigh. “It’s more than that. The doubt makes it hard to stay in control. You don’t make me doubt.”

  “But you don’t trust me, so that doesn’t make sense.”

  Craig took Ian’s arm and reached for the bag Second had dropped. “It’s complicated.”

  “Everything’s complicated. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to understand.”

  “You’ll eventually learn what you need to know to understand me. You aren’t going anywhere.”

  “That’s what you keep saying,” Ian muttered. “Not sure I’m ready to be your little woman.”

  He knew Craig heard him when Craig’s hand tightened around his arm. “I have heard of humans who change their sex after they reach adulthood,” Craig said. “You won’t be doing that. I like your dick just the way it is.”

  Ian couldn’t stop his abrupt laugh. “I like my dick too. Thanks. But that really wasn’t wha
t I meant.”

  “I know what you meant.”

  Ian didn’t reply. He hobbled into a better position against Craig’s side and accepted that for the moment, he was stuck with Craig.

  Chapter 12

  Craig fed him again, later that morning, hunkered down in front of Ian, and because Ian’s leg felt like it was on fire, he didn’t mind this time at all. Craig’s fingers on his tongue was a small price to pay for not having to do more than balance himself on a fallen tree branch situated on the incline they’d been traveling up the forested mountain range.

  “I can see why you choose to den in the woods. You aren’t likely to run into a lot of humans out here.”

  “No.” Craig took some of the food he’d been stuffing in Ian’s mouth for the last ten minutes and finally ate something himself. The wolves had adapted quite well to a human diet, with few exceptions. Ian had heard at one time that all wolves were allergic to peanuts, chocolate, and cow’s milk but he didn’t know if it was truth or just another story.

  “Why haven’t you been eating more?”

  “If I didn’t do a good job taking care of you, I wouldn’t be a good example to the rest of my pack.”

  Ian jerked his gaze from Craig’s mouth, having watched those teeth sink into the tough jerky like it wasn’t the rawhide it had felt like to Ian. The sight made him appreciate Craig’s restraint those times his mouth had been on Ian’s cock. “So, what, you have to make sure I’m fed properly before you can eat?”

  Craig nodded. “Yes. It’s my obligation to you since I mated you.”

  Again, Ian wasn’t certain which meaning the word “mated” was supposed to have, but considering food had nothing to do with fucking, he made a wild guess that Craig meant something more—this “we’ll mate” thing he’d mentioned several times that sounded like the wolves’ version of marriage. Only Craig got to choose because he was the strongest and Ian had to accept his fate.

  Yeah. Because that was just the kind of guy Ian had always been. Accepting.

  But what choice did he have but to make the best of the situation he was in until he could extricate himself?