Sought By the Alphas, the Complete Set
Carina Wilder
Contents
Copyright
About the Author
Preface
1. Book One: Encounters
2. Encounters 2
3. Encounters 3
4. Encounters 4
5. Encounters 5
6. Encounters 6
7. Encounters 7
8. Encounters 8
9. Encounters 9
10. Encounters 10
11. Encounters 11
12. Encounters 12
13. Encounters 13
14. Encounters 14
15. Encounters 15
16. Encounters 16
17. Book Two: Rituals
18. Rituals 2
19. Rituals 3
20. Rituals 4
21. Rituals 5
22. Rituals 6
23. Rituals 7
24. Rituals 8
25. Rituals 9
26. Rituals 10
27. Trial By Fire
28. Trial By Fire 2
29. Trial By Fire 3
30. Trial By Fire 4
31. Trial By Fire 5
32. Trial By Fire 6
33. Trial By Fire 7
34. Trial By Fire 8
35. Trial By Fire 9
36. Trial By Fire 10
37. Trial By Fire 11
38. Trial By Fire 12
39. Trial By Fire 13
40. Trial By Fire 14
41. Trial By Fire 15
42. Trial By Fire 16
43. Book Four: Kinship
44. Kinship 2
45. Kinship 3
46. Kinship 4
47. Kinship 5
48. Kinship 6
49. Kinship 7
50. Kinship 8
51. Kinship 9
52. Kinship 10
53. Kinship 11
54. Kinship 12
55. Kinship 13
56. Kinship 14
57. Kinship 15
58. Kinship 16
59. Kinship 17
60. Kinship 18
61. Kinship 19
62. Book Five: Dragon Queen
63. Dragon Queen 2
64. Dragon Queen 3
65. Dragon Queen 4
66. Dragon Queen 5
67. Dragon Queen 6
68. Dragon Queen 7
69. Dragon Queen 8
70. Dragon Queen 9
71. Dragon Queen 10
72. Dragon Queen 11
73. Dragon Queen 12
74. Dragon Queen 13
75. Dragon Queen 14
76. Dragon Queen 15
77. Dragon Queen 16
78. Dragon Queen 17
79. Dragon Queen 18
80. Dragon Queen 19
81. Dragon Queen 20
82. Dragon Queen 21
83. Dragon Queen 22
84. Dragon Queen 23
85. Dragon Queen 24
86. Seeking Her Mates: Book One, Torn: Chapter One
87. More from Bestselling Author Carina Wilder
Copyright © 2015 by Carina Wilder
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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About the Author
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Seeking Her Mates Box Set ( the follow-up to Sought by the Alphas):
Complete Set (Five Books) available on Kindle Unlimited for a limited time!
Individual books:
Torn
Escape
Dragon Flight
Loyalty
Dragon Wars
Coming in September, 2015: Illusions
(The follow-up to Seeking Her Mates): Stand-alone novel, approximately 60,000 words.
Sought by the Alphas individual books, free on Kindle Unlimited:
Encounters
Rituals
Trial by Fire
Kinship
Dragon Queen
Wolf Rock Shifters: these are individual stand-alone books:
Winning the Alpha
Bearing Up In Wolf Rock
The Right to a Bear's Arms
To Lie With Lions
Alpha’s Hunt
Billionaires and Curves:
Billionaires and Curves (Taken With You) Trilogy
Individual Books in Billionaires and Curves:
Taken With You
Crazy About You
The Way to You
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@carinawriter
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Preface
A Short Glossary of Terms
The characters in this series speak in modern English, but occasionally like to use older terms which I thought I’d explain here.
cwen: old English word, used to denote a queen, a female monarch
déor: old English word meaning “animal beast”
útlenda: a stranger, foreigner
Book One: Encounters
October 3, 2014
The figure stood atop the cliff, looking into the distance as though to survey his domain. Anyone observing him might have assumed that he was a statue erected on the edge of a precipice but for the wind whipping his loose clothing over a broad, muscular chest as he stared out over the crashing waves far below. The cresting whitecaps hit the distant shore with a violence that had beaten them back over centuries, carving in them new and ever-evolving coastlines.
Behind the man on the craggy outcropping of stone stood the remnants of one of Cornwall’s ancient castles, its foundations stripped all but bare by the passage of centuries. Only the odd section of a grey stone wall remained, and occasionally a doorway arching high overhead, leading into an endless chamber of grass, wind and sky.
The figure turned away from the ocean far beneath him and walked quietly among the ruins, expectant but not daring to be hopeful, as he had done each day for longer than he could recall. On one such day, he knew in his bones, she would come to this place and he would see her again. Perhaps he would even be able to touch her, to take in her scent as he’d once done. In his mind’s eye she was his, though he had lost her once before. For now he would feed off of the images which congregated in his imagination, which mercifully kept him company and renewed the thrill that he’d felt so long ago when they’d first met not so far from this very site.
As the sky began to signal evening the man resigned himself to the notion that this was not to be the day. He shifted into his animal form, his déor, and walked through a stone doorway, disappearing into the atmosphere as unobtrusively as a mist flitting over moist grasses and dissipating into the air.
* * *
Encounters 2
October 6, 2014
The guy was too handsome. Too perfect.
Gwynne had been watching him from across the pub for half an hour now, or rather he’d been watching her. His pale blue eyes had been fixed on her face, she knew, since she’d walked in. And now because of it her fingers fiddled restlessly with her pint glass, as though she could pull off an invisible label from its damp surface, which seemed to perspire as she did under his gaze.
She told herself tha
t it wasn’t self-consciousness that she felt, reddening under his watchful eye. But maybe it was; she didn’t exactly consider herself a bastion of physical perfection. After all, she was bigger than most girls. More, shall we say, curvaceous; not the sort of six-foot-tall 110-pound supermodel who turned heads in bars. And yet Mr. Movie Star Looks was staring at her as though he was on death row and she was his last supper. If Gwynne didn’t know better she’d have said that insatiable hunger was written all over his gorgeous face.
What was striking wasn’t even so much the forwardness of his glance as his face itself. He was beautiful. Like a celebrity, only better: high cheekbones, intense eyes, slightly wild hair. His lips, Gwynne could see, were full and slightly pouty, though there was something incredibly masculine in them.
After wrestling for far too long in what felt like a very confusing staring contest which she could never win, she looked away. She wasn’t here to admire the wildlife; only to get answers. And in all likelihood, devastatingly handsome men weren’t the source of the information she was seeking.
She was looking for the closure that she’d never secured in her youth; answers to a seemingly infinite number of questions. And a young man couldn’t possibly know anything about the past she was trying to learn about; he would only have been a teenager as she’d been when her life began to unravel ten years earlier.
The Boar’s Head Pub was a typically charming English establishment, warm and welcoming on the outside, and warmer still on the inside; a cosy hearth to all who entered. When Gwynne had first arrived in the small town of Trekilling, it was with no intention of frequenting drinking holes or eyeing beautiful men; her business was far too serious for such frivolity. When she’d passed through in a taxi on her first day in the area, she’d spotted the building with its traditionally carved wooden lettering and craftily painted portrait of a boar that looked suitably displeased at having lost its head. The pub’s façade, punctuated by leaded windows and Tudor features, looked exactly as one might expect and hope a Cornish pub would look, and no doubt contained grizzled locals and dark wooden ceiling beams that were hundreds of years old.
It was a letter left in her mother's belongings that had brought Gwynne to the English coast. The mother who had disappeared over a decade before, leaving a young girl and her father to fend for themselves in their small New England town. She’d deserted them among myriad questions that had gone unanswered for many years, and it was only when Gwynne’s father had died three months back that a box of affairs had been revealed among his things; evidence of the confusing tale that was the woman who’d raised Gwynne until she was ten years old. In addition to the letter, the box had contained a photograph of the family together, a drawing of the coast and some trinkets that seemed meaningless, including a heart-shaped silver pendant that Gwynne now wore, purely for a sentimental value that seemed artificial and intangible at this point.
She pulled the letter out of her bag and focused on the words that she’d read and reread a thousand times already:
One day you will understand, my sweet daughter. Go to Cornwall, to a small town called Trekilling, and your fate will become clear. Seek out your story.
Gwynne’s mother, Yvonne Drake, claimed to have been called away herself, back to the place where her ancestors had lived, and wrote that she was sorry for her departure. For abandoning the husband who had been so good to her in the face of difficult circumstances, and the young daughter she loved.
But she offered no real explanation as to a motive, and no promises of a return.
It was Mary, the proprietor of the small cottage which served as a bed and breakfast where Gwynne was staying, who’d offered the advice of taking a look around the pub.
“If you’ll find any truths about Cornwall, that’s the place to do it. There are families about who’ve drunk their fill there for generations,” she’d said.
“They must be pretty damned intoxicated by now,” had been Gwynne’s reply.
It had always seemed to her a strange tradition to congregate around taps that supplied endless cascades of alcohol. Then again, she did meet up with a lot of very cheerful folks in Cornwall so maybe there was something to the daily tradition. Given that the local historians Gwynne had spoken to were of no help, the pub did seem to her the most logical place to seek information in the small town.
She folded the letter carefully and put it back in her bag, then rose at last to scan the room for clues. Maybe the building itself would provide a hint; a little history to get her started on her search for her family’s past. Walking towards the center of the room, she deftly avoided looking towards the corner where the most handsome man she’d ever seen sat. He’s not there, she told herself, though she could still feel those blue eyes on her, burning into her flesh like a hot brand. He doesn’t matter. And he’s too freaking gorgeous to be anything but a distraction.
At the bar she ordered a lager from the bartender, who was too occupied with another client to make eye contact, and began to wander around the space. She idly held the fresh pint glass without taking advantage of its contents; at this point it was simply a prop to occupy her overactive fingers.
As her imagination had promised, the pub’s ceiling was crossed with heavy-looking dark wooden beams. A large fireplace occupied the center of the main wall, surrounded by tables and chairs of heavy, dark-stained oak against a white stucco backdrop. Gwynne envisioned centuries of drinkers having lively conversations in front of roaring winter fires.
Dim light eased in through the old windows, filtered through a thick covering of clouds which hung heavy over the town, threatening a downpour that never seemed to materialise.
But as she circled around, it was the large portrait above the fireplace that caught her eye, causing her momentarily to forget all of the pub’s charms.
At its center a woman stood, her posture regal, staring ahead at an unseen painter. Her face seemed to look beyond Gwynne and the other patrons, ignoring them as in a sort of snooty haughtiness. She wore a golden gown which looked as though it were made of thick yellow silk. Her long dark hair was loosely tied back, a few locks flowing down over her shoulders, and she appeared proud and richly dressed, likely of noble blood.
But none of that seemed out of the ordinary for an old painting. It was her face that struck Gwynne.
It was as though she were staring into a mirror at her own painted reflection.
* * *
Encounters 3
Everything about the woman resembled Gwynne; the hair, the face. Her eyes the same light green shade as her own, and even her proportions were similar. Rather than being tall and thin, the painting’s subject was curvaceous, which was only made more evident by the corset which pushed her breasts upwards to form some serious cleavage. Gwynne found her eyes veering downwards to her own body as though to compare the two. Yes indeed, those could have been her breasts. The right one even displayed a tiny dark mole similar to one on her own breast. But that must have been coincidence.
The backdrop was a puzzle, however. Instead of standing in an elegant room, surrounded by fancy furnishings as one normally sees in portraits of aristocrats, the woman posed outside, her feet bare, toes poking out just below the hem of her dress. In the background was a castle flanked by three creatures: on one side, two wolves. On the other, a dragon. Another puzzle.
As the initial shock at staring at what appeared to be a perfect rendering of her own face began to wear off, Gwynne approached the barkeep.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Could you tell me who the woman is in that painting? The one over the fireplace, I mean.”
“That’d be Lady Gwendolyn,” said the man, who was in the midst of drying a pint glass. He looked up when he’d finished, his eyes widening in something like astonishment. “Though it could as easily be a painting of you, couldn’t it?”
“I suppose it could. She does bear a resemblance. I thought maybe it was just in my head.”
“No, to be sure it’s not. If I di
dn’t know her to have lived hundreds of years ago I’d swear that she’d just walked into my pub.”
“Well, I assure you, I’m not her. Though we have very similar names. Who is she?”
“That’s a story, to be sure,” the man said. “Have a seat and I’ll tell you.”
Gwynne pulled out an old wooden stool, its varnish peeling off in solidarity with its ancient wooden colleagues, and propped herself up next to the bar.
"This story has to do with a time long ago, love. And with great hounds, controlled by their master, it’s said.”
"Really? This is sounding a lot like a detective book I know."
"No doubt that the author was inspired by it. But this tale goes back to ancient times, almost back to the days of the Pendragon."
Gwynne felt a surge of excitement emanate throughout her body. The old stories of Lancelot, King Arthur and his knights had stuck with her since her childhood. When she'd discovered her family's ties to Cornwall she'd been delighted at the association. To discover an old link to that time and place seemed too good to be true.
"A lord in the old times, it is said, kept the wolves and held power over them. Gigantic hounds, they said. Some called them dire wolves; others said that other beasts lived within his realm as well. Some have told that in fact, this wasn't the case. That instead the lord walked among them, changing with them...and with the moon. That the Cornish air, the magic in it, gave him the power to defy his human form and take on a déor, an animal shape. Whatever the case, the beasts terrified the locals, who offered favours and goods to the lord in order to remain in his good graces.
"But it was not power over the people that he craved. He was lonely, they said, and sought a mate. One day he heard of a beautiful young woman, the young daughter of a local nobleman. She was fair and as lovely as the sea, they said. Her name was Gwendolyn."
"The woman in the painting," said Gwynne.
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