Last Alpha: A Highland shifter romance

by Ruby Fielding

  “The weather always this good?”

  Carr laughed. “You’ve been lucky,” he said. “They say you can get all four seasons in a day here. Weather like this is a rarity.”

  “So why me?”

  Her sudden change of tack threw him. She let it hang for a few seconds, then elaborated: “Why let me in and give me the VIP treatment when, by all accounts, you don’t like journalists sniffing around, and when it’s journalists that wrecked Lilian’s last research project?”

  She thought he wasn’t going to answer. Her questions didn’t fit in with the tidy PR feed they’d been giving her up to now.

  “And why won’t you let me write anything until I’m back home?” You’re to write nothing in the heat of the moment, Carr’s estate manager had instructed her.

  All of a sudden Jenny was aware of how close he was standing, of his physical presence.

  “That’s easy to answer,” Carr said. “I made that stipulation because I hoped you might choose to stay.”

  §

  “Stay?”

  Her mind raced. What could he possibly mean? Was he some kind of virtual stalker who’d lured her here and hoped he might now seduce her into staying? She’d had all kinds of freaks poking her on Facebook, but this was taking that kind of thing to an extreme.

  “I’ve read your work,” he said. “I’ve seen you on YouTube”

  He was doing nothing to contradict her fears.

  “I’ve seen the power of bad PR.”

  She released the breath she’d been holding, relieved that he was veering away from serial killer territory at last. “What do you mean?”

  “You said it yourself. The press wrecked Lilian’s last project. We’re dealing with lots of potentially inflammatory topics here. Cutting edge medical research. The reintroduction of wolves. The study of werewolves. There’s so much potential for the media circus to cause all kinds of problems if we don’t keep a grip on things.”

  “You need a PR company.”

  Carr shook his head. “Have you met PR companies?” he said. “No, I don’t want that kind of thing. What we need is someone who understands the new media landscape instinctively. Someone who knows how to spot warning signs, and how to make sure that the positive messages get out.”

  “My blog isn’t for sale,” she said. “Nor my YouTube channel.”

  “No, and I wouldn’t expect that. But I rather hoped your skills might be for hire. There’s a difference.”

  Now that her brain was starting to catch up she felt incredibly flattered. But also even more manipulated than she’d already been feeling.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  He looked at her, an eyebrow raised.

  “The Facebook message. The inside information about a wealthy werewolf geek funding Lilian’s research into the mechanisms of cellular transformation and how they might apply to nature. Werewolves. It was you.”

  But he was shaking his head. “No, not me,” he said. “That was Billy Stewart’s idea.”

  7

  Billy Stewart...

  “Billy?” she said. “He’s here?”

  Up to now Carr had only referred to his righthand man as “Stewart” and Jenny had assumed that was a first name, not a surname.

  Billy Stewart.

  That changed everything.

  Carr nodded, his expression hard to read. “You didn’t know?” he said. “I assumed...”

  §

  Billy was the one with the nice smile and the intense, dark eyes. That accent she’d found so hard to place at first but was obvious now: a broader Scots than Carr’s, but not as strong and dialect-heavy as that of someone like the housekeeper, Aileen. Billy was the relatively normal one out of the crowd who’d been following Jackson Taylor’s werewolf trial in Maldon, CT.

  One of the first things he’d said to her was “I’ve read your blog and I’ve seen a few of your pieces on YouTube.” Almost exactly what Jonathan Carr had just said to her. Of course the two knew each other; they must have talked about her at length as they’d plotted to get her over here.

  When she’d first spoken to him in Maldon, Billy had said something about stories like Jackson’s always descending into the mundane, a damaged individual clinging to fantasy – the werewolf psychosis – in order to justify his actions and feel special. But at the end of the day it was just a sad, damaged individual.

  Jenny’s response had been, “There’s nothing mundane about this one for me. I went to school with Jackson Taylor.”

  Billy’s reaction to that was telling. Anyone else following the courtroom circus would have leapt on her revelation, tried to dig and find out more, but Billy just said, “Jeez, how awful. Are you okay?” He had understood straight away: there was no way she could avoid covering this story, no matter how much she might long not to be a part of it.

  They’d gone to a small coffee shop a couple of blocks from the courthouse and talked about anything but the trial.

  She’d told him about life in New York, about getting her breaks with some of the heavyweight publications. “Huffington Post today, the New Yorker tomorrow,” she’d joked, even though, in all honesty, she thought the Huff Post was far more her kind of place.

  He’d told her about his travels around the world, tracking down werewolf stories, and they’d shared the fellow feeling that they weren’t the only werewolf geeks in the world who did this.

  It had been an easy friendship, at first. A diversion from the intensity of the trial. A distraction from the fact that she was back in Maldon for the first time in years. It was a respite friendship.

  One day, same coffee shop, same window table, she’d caught him staring off into the distance, miles away. She studied his profile, the strong line of his jaw. “So why werewolves?” she asked. “When there are a million and one other weird things to get hooked up on?”

  He looked at her with those daydreaming, dark eyes. Slowly, he shrugged. “It’s a bit like asking a trainspotter ‘Why trains?’ isn’t it?” he said. “I’m sure they’d have an answer – no doubt a very long and detailed answer – but at the end of the day it’s just trains. That’s what does it for them, gets them excited, occupies their thoughts. For me, it’s just werewolves. A fascination.”

  “There must be something that inspired that interest,” said Jenny, simultaneously wondering what her own answer would be to that question: was it really just the chance observation that wacky science posts got more of an online buzz than pretty much anything else she posted, and then following that through?

  That shrug again. “I guess,” he said.

  He had a way of drawing his vowels out. No became noo, guess became gehhhss.

  “When I was a lad,” he went on. “Barely into my teens. There was... an incident.” Everything about his body language was hesitant, awkward now. “I’ve never really talked about it, apart from at the time, when I had to, to the police. It’s not a night I like to revisit.”

  She wanted to stop him then, but, somewhat cruelly, she held back, also wanting him to continue.

  “A lad and his da were attacked by a man and his dog – a bull mastiff, I think it was. I happened to be nearby. I’d been poaching on the river. I was the first on the scene and I scared them off.”

  The power of understatement. Jenny had met braggarts and, far less frequently, she’d met real heroes. She didn’t know any more than Billy had just told her, but his story had all the hallmarks of a man trying to play things down rather than talk them up.

  She imagined what it must have been like, hearing the commotion, confronting a scene like that. Whatever the cause of the initial assault, young Billy must have faced the moment when he feared the man and dog would turn on him, too. Had he merely stumbled onto the scene, startled them and scared them off, as he described? Or had he been more active in saving the boy and his father? Either way, this was clearly the kind of incident that marks you for life.

  “So what happened? Why should that lead to this?”


  That awkward shrug again. “The lad was quite badly hurt,” he said. “His da... well, his da was beyond help.” Billy fell silent, looking down into his half-empty cup. Then he went on: “I had to walk the lad back down to the village to get help and he was blethering on all the way about a wolf. Poor lad was in shock. He wisnae the only one, I tell you.”

  “A man and a dog... he thought it was a werewolf?”

  Billy nodded. “Aye. Even though I know what I saw with my own two eyes, he insisted.” He straightened. “So I guess ever since then I’ve been intrigued by the tricks of the mind, the way a traumatized mind can play games with memory and interpretation of events.”

  “The werewolf psychosis thing you mentioned?”

  “Aye.”

  “So you don’t think there’s any truth to the werewolf legend?”

  “I keep traveling the world to events like this just in case. I guess a part of me is hanging on to the possibility that I’m wrong and that there are real werewolves out there.”

  That intensity... She’d seen a glimmer of it the first time he’d spoken to her and occasionally since. Talking about that childhood incident seemed to bring it to the surface. At the time she had put it down to the horror of that event still gripping him years later, and not down to an aspect of his personality that was... just a bit too intense.

  An intensity that came to the surface later, enough to shock her back into her senses...

  §

  Billy Stewart...

  “Where is he?”

  Carr was studying her closely. So much so that she felt like an insect pinned to a cork block.

  “Who, Billy?” he asked. “Last I saw him he was heading up onto the moor. Beinn Madadh is where he goes.” With an inclination of his head, Carr indicated the hill across the valley from the laboratory and the wolf enclosure. It was a craggy hill, rising up from the forest, its flanks washed with the purple of flowering heather, its peak obscured by a patch of cloud. “If you want to go after him, take one of the quad bikes. I’ll show you the track to follow. He’ll have parked by the bothy, but don’t go wandering too far on your own, you hear? The weather can change in a snap.”

  “That one of your Munros, right?” A mountain, the ones people traveled around Scotland to climb.

  “Aye, it is. You really shouldn’t go up there alone. Why don’t you wait until later? I’ll have Stewart join us for dinner. Give you a chance to catch up.”

  She was torn. She wanted to go after him, confront him. Demand to know what he was up to, why he’d tricked her into coming here – because now she was sure all this was a ruse, whether Carr was in on it or not. But what would she achieve by doing that right now? She’d be chasing him up onto the moors, challenging him on his own territory. And she’d have to ride one of those goddamn ATVs – Carr had called them “quad bikes” – just to get there...

  She forced herself to be professional, not to turn on Carr himself for his part in Billy’s scheming – even if he was as innocent of involvement as his somewhat perplexed manner suggested. She smiled, said, “Thank you for this. I really appreciate it. I think I’ll head back down to the castle now and make a few notes. Can I get the wifi log-in off Aileen?”

  Carr nodded, smiling. It was impossible to read what was behind that smooth exterior.

  She walked with him through the lab building and then set off alone, retracing the route she’d followed earlier with Lilian. Out in the open again, she paused and looked across at the facing slope of the valley, the lower reaches of Carr’s Munro. He’d given it a funny name, but then she’d seen on the map that all the hills round here had strange names: Sgòr Gaoith, Cairn Gorm, Càrn Dearg. Old Gaelic words, she assumed.

  She strained her eyes but couldn’t see any sign of a building – the bothy Carr had referred to, some kind of mountain shack as she understood the term. It really would have been foolish to go after still angry at Billy Stewart’s scheming ways. She tried not to let the church-like calm of the forest steal over her, but it was hard. She’d never been anywhere like this. She could see why Carr had come here when he could.

  She felt the anger seeping away and tried to hang onto it. She hated feeling that she was being manipulated. That she had been so unquestioningly naïve about the sequence of events that had brought her here. The message on Facebook:

  Hey there! Love your blog :) When r u going to write about Jonathan Carr at Craigellen?? The mans breeding werewolves!! Cant say more, I’m too close, but u shd look. :)

  She’d clicked through to the sender’s profile, but it was minimal, mostly unavailable if you weren’t an approved friend. As far as she could see the profile had been created recently, probably just to send this message, and when she checked again a few days later it had gone.

  She’d assumed at first that the message had either come from another werewolf geek, probably one of the fanboys who followed her online and maybe had a bit of a thing for her, or from someone who worked for Carr or otherwise knew him, and had some concerns over his activities.

  More recently she’d started to think the message had come from Carr himself, just to get her here, part of his plan to hire her in some kind of PR role.

  But no.

  Billy Stewart.

  She should have known he wouldn’t give up so easily. And she most certainly should have spotted his efforts to manipulate her far sooner than now.

  §

  Deep in the embrace of a leather-bound sofa in one of Craigellen’s many library rooms, Jenny stared at the laptop screen.

  So close to clicking “Buy now”. Just one tap of the finger away from taking an early flight home. Evening flight from Aberdeen to London Heathrow, then an overnight flight home. She could be at her apartment by this time tomorrow. Put this all behind her.

  Or if she didn’t want to spend all that money on the early flight home, why not just head south and do the tourist thing? She hadn’t seen any of the sights of London, and then what about Stonehenge, Avebury, the white cliffs of Dover? When had she last had a proper vacation? When had she ever had a proper vacation?

  She sensed a presence at the door, the sound of a footfall, perhaps. She glanced up, expecting it to be Aileen, or maybe Carr, back down from the lab to check that she was okay – he seemed sensitive enough to do that kind of thing if it mattered to him.

  It was Billy.

  Tall, square-shouldered, his shape seeming to fill the doorway. He held his head angled to one side, giving his stance a hesitant, apologetic air. That was his way, though. His thing. His knack for making you feel sympathetic towards him even when it was the last thing he deserved.

  “Bastard,” she said, almost too softly to hear.

  8

  He stood in the doorway, surprising even himself with the intensity of his feelings as he saw Jenny for the first time since the spring.

  She sat twisted sideways, her back against the sofa’s armrest, a slim laptop balanced precariously on her lap. The way she sat emphasized the curves, the generous sweep of her legs. She’d kicked her boots off, her feet just in thin socks now on the sofa. She seemed to be studying something on the screen, staring intently.

  She looked up. Blue eyes, golden hair catching the sunlight angling in through the leaded windows. Full lips almost twitching into a smile – or was he kidding himself? – before settling into something far closer to a snarl.

  “Bastard.”

  He didn’t know what he’d expected, what he’d hoped for. He spread his hands. “I’m sorry.” For being himself. For exposing his feelings. For falling. She knew it was a lie, he could see it in her face.

  That day... So much had happened. Too much... He shouldn’t have plunged in like that. He should have been sensitive to her feelings, and not bullishly obsessed with his own.

  “I really am,” he said. Not for falling, but for getting it so wrong.

  §

  It had been a day when everything came along at once.

  Sitting with Jenny in
the courtroom in Maldon. He should have realized how traumatic a day this would be for her. The trial coming to a close, all the issues she had tied up with the case. He should have been sensitive to all that.

  He shouldn’t have been so focused on himself.

  Did she know how he felt about her? Did she even have the vaguest inkling?

  They’d spent these two weeks in an easy friendship, no hint of anything more. She seemed to enjoy his company, and their escapes to the coffee shop had almost been a mischievous thing, as if they were bunking off classes like naughty school kids. But she’d shown no signs that she wanted anything more than that. He’d even wondered at times if she had some kind of mental and emotional block: if she just didn’t do the whole relationship thing. She certainly didn’t seem to consider the possibility of doing it with him.

  But now... His reason for this trip was ending today, his flight left tomorrow. And all he knew was how distracted he had become. How every minute in Jenny Layne’s company was something to treasure, and how the thought that this time tomorrow this would all be over was the most awful thing.

  He’d traveled the world following strange stories, digging down to the truth, trying to find any real evidence that werewolves persisted into the modern age, but the last thing he’d ever expected to find was his soul-mate.

  That day. Glancing across at her. Leaning in to whisper something into her ear – anything, the words didn’t matter so long as he could lean in, breathe in her scent, brush against her hair. This close to her, he was alive to everything. That scent, the gentle, intimate press of their legs as they sat together on the hard courtroom bench, the subtle intonations of her voice as she whispered back to him, the touch of her breath on his ear.

  But, that day, so distracted from what was actually in her mind.

  The verdict came in, unanimous as it was always going to be. Jackson Taylor was unhinged, a serious threat to society, and he was destined to spend the rest of his life in a secure mental institution. There would be an investigation to see why the plethora of careworkers who had contributed their testimony to the trial had each failed to spot those warning signs before he had cracked, before that poor wee girl had been stalked, ambushed, and had her face torn off her head in one of the most brutal assaults Billy had encountered.