Ian's Choice (Wolves' Heat)

by Lynne, Odessa

The wolf guarding the door didn’t take his eyes off Ian during their approach, not as Craig assisted him up the front steps, not as they crossed the boards that creaked with their every step, and not as they stopped in front of him and Craig took hold of the back of Ian’s neck in a possessive manner that made Ian want to shrug and say “what the hell” when he damn well knew better.

  Second and Third were the only other wolves Ian had met, or even seen since Craig had caught him. This one had a smile that showed less teeth than either of those other two, and his bright eyes took careful note of the hand at Ian’s neck.

  “How many?” Craig asked. With one hand, he dragged the strap of the bag he’d collected from Second in the woods off his shoulder and dropped it at his feet. The thump vibrated through the boards and into the soles of Ian’s boots and he knew then that the contents of the bag had to be heavy to make a sound like that.

  “Eight, and six humans.”

  “Wentarki?” Craig said, another name Ian couldn’t make heads or tails of.

  “He survived the walk.”

  Ah, so Wentarki was Third, maybe?

  “Did you bring his heat mate or leave him behind?”

  The wolf shook his head. “Left him. Someone would have tried something with him, and Wentarki didn’t need the trouble. Several of the others kept giving him a look. Would have just led to a fight Wentarki couldn’t win. Not while he’s still healing. It’ll be a few more days.”

  So Devon had been left at the house the wolves had abandoned for the renegades to find? Ian took a deep breath and let his relief flow through him.

  Craig gave him a quick look, and then continued with his questions. “What about you?”

  The wolf smiled again, his lips pulling back to show his sharp teeth. “I’ve got a good one. She likes me. We’re going to mate.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Fate,” the wolf said. “The Diviners said I would find a true mate in a trying time.”

  The Diviners again. Ian knew they existed but no diviner had ever left the ships orbiting Earth.

  “Has everyone checked in?”

  “You were the last.” The wolf looked at Ian again. “Ashikid said his injuries slowed you down. But he looks well.”

  Craig moved his hand to Ian’s waist and squeezed gently. “He needs to rest after the long walk.”

  The wolf nodded and stepped aside, very deliberately turning his head away and tucking his nose in against his shoulder while pulling up the collar of his t-shirt to cover the lower part of his face.

  As Ian hobbled by, he noticed the wolf even held his breath.

  They entered through the door just as the wolf knelt. Ian heard the zip on the bag but by then, he was too far away to see what was inside and he definitely didn’t want to make a big deal about trying to get a glimpse. Curiosity, especially right now, could get him killed.

  Once inside, Craig found one of his wolves and ordered drugs for Ian.

  That consideration led to a drug induced slumber that lasted until Ian woke up in a soft bed, who knew where, because the last thing he remembered was sitting in a chair in a room that had the appearance of a medical lab and having a wolf in a mask poking at his leg, saying, “There’s a minor infection but the medicine should take care of it by tomorrow.”

  Ian pushed the blankets aside, sat up, and realized he was stuffed right in the center of a huge bed with pillows mounded all around him.

  No wonder he was smothering hot and sweaty, and—okay, so he’d just broke a fever, he knew what that felt like. It had been a while since he’d been sick enough for a fever but not so long ago that he couldn’t remember the clammy sweat and the need for cool air on his skin.

  He moved his legs, noticing right away that his wound didn’t ache so much and the scrape of blankets against the bandage didn’t hurt. He was naked, but he couldn’t say the discovery surprised him.

  “You’re awake finally.”

  Ian cleared the sleep from his voice. “So.”

  Craig leaned forward in the chair beside the bed, his elbows on his knees, his eyes glassy and intent. “How do you feel?”

  “Good enough,” Ian said. “Come here.”

  Craig shoved himself across the short distance between them, his hands taking his weight on the mattress and sinking the edge enough to jostle Ian closer. “Are you sure you feel okay? You’ve been fighting infection. Do you need food? Drink?”

  “Water would be good.”

  The edge of the bed dipped again and Craig stretched and reached and then there was a glass against his lips.

  Ian drank, carefully, because he still found the idea of someone holding the glass for him awkward and embarrassing despite how Craig had described his reasons for doing it.

  When he’d finished, he nodded, and Craig set the glass aside, and then he crawled up over Ian, brushing his cheeks against the inside of Ian’s thigh, his crotch, his stomach, and his bare chest, where he licked at Ian’s nipples until Ian dug his fingertips into Craig’s shoulders, squirmed to push his cock against Craig’s stomach, because he badly needed more pressure against his cock—more, more, more—and gasped out, “Enough, by God, I can’t take any more.”

  Which was exactly the opposite of reality because he didn’t want the pleasure of Craig’s mouth on him to ever stop.

  But Craig ended up at Ian’s underarm, in a wildly strange but cock hardening maneuver that gave Ian his first inkling that he might have developed a liking for some of the idiosyncrasies that came from Craig’s alien nature.

  “I need you. I didn’t think you were ever going to wake up.” Craig scraped his teeth against Ian’s ribcage, too hard to tickle, too gentle to break skin. “I couldn’t have waited much longer.”

  Craig reached between them and started unbuttoning his pants, elbows jutting and fingers working quickly.

  “I’m probably going to hurt you.” And then, broken and thick, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Ian’s stomach twisted up tight, made him think, shit, more than a liking. He craved the need Craig had for him.

  Craig growled against Ian’s skin, his hot breath sending a shiver down Ian’s spine. “Your smell is making me crazy. Every breath, every whiff. I’m going to lose control. I can feel it slipping away.”

  To which Ian said, “It’s fine. Stop worrying and just do me.”

  Craig reared up, the last of his restraint bleeding away in a roar and a hand on his cock, already coming across Ian’s chest.

  A moment later, he leaned in a kissed Ian, propping himself on his hands and knees and then pulled away just long enough to say, “Hold me. As tight as you can.”

  So Ian did. Not because Craig had asked, but because Ian wanted to.

  Chapter 14

  Ian sat on the chair, sensitive to the heat and tenderness in his ass that made it impossible to be comfortable on the hard seat, his leg throbbing just enough to make him grit his teeth.

  “Give me some of that good stuff again,” he said, looking down at the wolf he’d decided to call Doc because his real name was even harder to pronounce than Craig’s and that was saying something.

  Doc crouched in front of him and wore a mask that seemed to be designed to keep out Ian’s human scent. Ian wondered why the hell all the wolves didn’t wear one, but he hadn’t had the chance to ask Craig yet. After their marathon session of fucking, Ian had been so exhausted he’d slept right through Craig’s departure and he hadn’t seen him alone long enough to ask much of anything.

  Even his meal that morning had been in front of company, and hadn’t that been just fantastic, Ian getting dried fruit and sausages shoved in his mouth while Craig carried on a carefully obscure tactical meeting with two other wolves, both sitting on the opposite side of the room as far from Ian as they could possibly get in the small room. They were a mated pair according to Craig, when Ian had asked why they weren’t acting like they were going to freak out the way everyone else seemed to do when they got around him.

>   “As long as they’re together, they’ll resist your scent. If—”

  Craig had said some godawful name Ian couldn’t pronounce two seconds later.

  “—was here without his mate, he would react to you the same as everyone else. The pull of a true mate is stronger than almost anything else during the heat cycle. Even the lust craze caused by a human scent. Those of us who are unmated are the most vulnerable. Although with you now—” Craig had stopped speaking at that point, just studying Ian, and Ian hadn’t been able to get him to finish what he’d been going to say.

  “Ow,” Ian muttered.

  He rubbed his thigh. “Since when did you start giving shots? I liked that nasty tasting stuff just fine, thanks.”

  Ian tried to sit up straighter in the chair, felt himself slip sideways and jerked upright, only to realize at the last moment that the sensation had been nothing more than dizzy disorientation. He blinked, eyelids feeling unusually heavy, and cleared his throat. “What—okay, wait. What did you give me?” He fisted his hands in his lap as a faint tingle spread through his fingertips.

  Doc stared at him over the edge of the mask that covered his nose and mouth and muffled his voice, eyes bright and direct. “What’s your name?”

  Ian licked his bottom lip. “What?”

  “What’s your name?”

  Ian looked up over Doc’s shoulder and saw Craig stop in the doorway to the tiny room.

  Ian frowned. “Craig? What’s going on?”

  Doc turned to look behind him, and then turned back to Ian. “What’s your name?”

  “This is—” Ian paused, unsure what he’d intended to say.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ian.”

  “What’s your full name, Ian?”

  "Marshall Ray Ian Tucker.”

  “Ian. Does anyone ever call you anything else?”

  “What?”

  “Do your friends or acquaintances have another name for you?”

  Ian blinked. Blinking didn’t make the haze go away, though, and he tried to reach up and rub his eyes, but his hands felt funny.

  “Do you have an alias?”

  “Brendan,” Ian said.

  “Some people call you Brendan?”

  “No, Brendan calls me Raider because I used to like to run the raids for—” Ian jerked involuntarily again as another wave of dizziness hit.

  “What kind of raids did you run, Ian? Who did you run raids for?”

  “I…don’t know what you’re talking about. I ran them for me and Brendan.”

  “Do you work with the renegades? Are you one of them? Did they send you to locate our dens?”

  “No, no, no,” Ian said. “You’ve messed up my head. That’s not what I meant.”

  “Tell me about the raids.”

  “Cookies.”

  “What?”

  “He liked my granny’s cookies.” Ian took a breath that felt too shallow and scraped his fingernail over the denim of his jeans. The sound shivered through him.

  “Craig?” he said, not sure what he wanted from Craig. Craig was here. Craig was listening to everything he said. But he was just standing there, watching in silence, as if it was nothing to drug someone and ask questions he hadn’t bothered to ask at any other time.

  “Did you know someone’s been tracking you?”

  “That’s not true. Not now. You broke my phone.” He looked to Craig when he spoke, blinking hard, trying to keep his eyes focused and clear when the haze wanted to give everything a fuzzy glow. The light in the room felt brighter, sounds louder, that of Doc’s soles squeaking on the polished floor, the creak of floorboards and the catch falling into place as Craig stepped inside and shut the door.

  Ian hadn’t slurred his speech, but the disorientation didn’t let up. He felt the drip of sweat at his hairline onto his temple with a precise sharpness at odds with the haziness of his thoughts.

  Craig spoke up for the first time since he’d come into the room. “Not your phone, Ian.”

  “What?”

  Ian closed his eyes. Not because he needed to, but because he didn’t want to fight with his vision any longer. It was a mistake though, because he immediately felt himself slip to the side, and he jerked upright, only to come up short because his back was already to the chair.

  He quickly reopened his eyes.

  Doc looked back over his shoulder at Craig again. “Why is he resisting so hard if he has nothing to hide?”

  He returned his attention to Ian. “Who’s tracking you? Were you the one who led the renegades to our den? Did you—”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ian interrupted.

  “Yes, you do,” Doc said, and Ian could hear the anger even through the mask that interfered with Doc’s words.

  Craig stepped forward and put his hand on the back of Doc’s neck. “Stop. He doesn’t know. If we can’t trust the drug to work, then there’s no reason for us to have used it. Give him the antidote.”

  “There’s still more we can discover.”

  “I’m mating him. I don’t want to take this too far. This was the only question I had to have an answer for.”

  Doc nodded.

  Ian sat in silence as Doc readied another needle and he looked down in surprise when he felt the prick in the upper part of his thigh.

  A few minutes passed, and his head started to hurt and his heartbeat slowed, the calm washing away the remnants of haze from his mind.

  Then he closed his eyes and drifted away.

  When Ian first opened his eyes, he wasn’t sure what to make of Craig at his back and pillows at his front and sunlight falling on the corner of the bed that he could see from where he lay.

  He jerked his arm loose from beneath Craig’s weight and shoved himself forward in the bed toward the edge, his heart racing with adrenaline and his mind trying to reconcile memories and dreams and the places between.

  Craig came awake, his hand reaching for Ian. Ian shrugged off the touch and rolled off the edge of the bed onto his feet, grunting faintly when his injured leg took his weight. But the leg held, and he realized he would be able to limp around a lot better now, even go to the bathroom on his own again.

  He twisted around at the sound of Craig moving.

  “You drugged me,” he said.

  Craig scratched lightly at his jaw. “I have a lot of people to protect.”

  Ian glared, angry despite the part of him that understood why Craig would do what he’d done. “You could have asked me the questions without resorting to drugs first.”

  “I had a situation and it had to be dealt with.”

  “What situation? Why now? If you’d wanted to ask me these kinds of questions, if you thought I was working for the renegades why didn’t you ask them as soon as you discovered my phone? We both know it was well before you let on to me that you knew about it. Why wait until—” Ian crossed his arms over his chest. “Why wait until I started to like you?”

  Ian saw the skin around Craig’s mouth go tight, his eyes unwavering. Ian shifted his weight, careful not to put too much on his injured leg. His nerves tingled at Craig’s look, accusation clear in every flicker of his gaze across Ian’s face.

  Craig sat up.

  “Because we found the other tracker,” Craig said. His hands rested easily on the sheets beneath him and Ian found himself staring at those dark fingernails, using them to gauge Craig’s emotional control. “Still sending out your location to someone, giving us away. We have breeding females here. I’m not the only wolf who thinks we’ve given humans enough time to stop the killing, and yet they don’t. They act as if it’s out of their control. As if these renegades can’t be stopped.”

  His dark fingernails no longer hid the very tips of his claws. Ian glanced up at Craig’s face, but then couldn’t stop himself from returning his gaze to Craig’s hands when Craig continued to speak.

  “But we both know that’s not true. Your human governments don’t try very hard to stamp o
ut the renegades, preferring to let them run wild and murder as many wolves as we allow them to get away with murdering. But no more, Ian. We have reached our limit. When my people found the tracking signal you’ve been sending, I needed answers and I needed them immediately.”

  Ian nodded. “Okay. I get that. I do.”

  Craig’s fingers flexed and curled, his claws extending further. “I don’t think you do.”

  Ian frowned, his eyebrows drawing together. “You’ll have to move again and you don’t want to. I’m sorry, but I didn’t know.”

  “We’re not moving this time. We can’t risk moving our children and our breeding females every single time we think your renegades have discovered our new dens. You don’t understand. If that tracker belongs to the renegades, then your presence here has probably started a war.”

  Ian jerked his gaze up, his heart suddenly pounding too hard and too fast as the implications of Craig’s statement sank in. “Okay, wait a minute. That’s crazy. What’s this other tracker? Where’d I supposedly have it? Because I never—”

  “Your belt, Ian. The ornament that holds together the ends of your belt.”

  Ian looked at Craig, thinking hard. “No,” he said. “No way. That’s doesn’t make any sense. That’s my grandfather’s buckle. It’s old. Too fucking old to have a tracker built into it.”

  Craig watched him silently. Ian wished he wasn’t standing completely naked in front of Craig. He felt too exposed, too vulnerable, too conscious of what Craig wanted from him and why he was still here despite his obvious status as a security risk.

  Craig leaned back on his elbows, the thick muscle of his biceps bulging, the column of his neck a strong line to his broad chest, his cock, half hard and on full display, and it took Ian a moment to drag his thoughts back from cock to belt buckle as Craig said, “Nevertheless, there was a micro-beacon attached to the inside plate. It was hidden very well.”

  “I didn’t know.” Ian pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. Brendan. Dammit. Too many years between them but Ian accepted that Brendan would have had the time and skill to place a tracker on him without him noticing. “I wear that damn thing everywhere.”