Desired by Wolves [Call of the Wolf 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting)

by Diane Leyne

  And it would tie him to Harmony, too. If he was completely honest, he wasn’t ready for that either. He was the Alpha, but even with the mating ceremony, he could do as he pleased, but they’d be tied to him and wait as long as they had to, and he wasn’t that much of an asshole. He had things he needed to do away from Harmony, and he couldn’t leave Joe and Will in some kind of limbo and Lena mated to an absent Alpha.

  So he’d gone back. It wasn’t because he loved war, but he had men who depended on him. He was a good soldier, and he knew he could make a difference. He was fearless in battle and a good leader. There was one soldier in particular who drew him back. Craig had joined the unit six months before Alex went on leave. Craig wasn’t well suited to being a soldier. But he was a good kid, and Alex worried about him. Craig’s was the oldest in his family, and his salary was what let his widowed mother stay home to raise his younger sisters. He was determined to provide for them, but he had to stay alive to do that. He died while Alex was back home, but Alex didn’t find out until he was back overseas and had Lena and his brothers hating his guts for sneaking off while they were sleeping.

  Maybe he really was a coward. He’d wanted to make memories that could comfort him when he was in far-off war zones and give him inspiration to survive and come home, but that had been more selfishness on his part.

  He’d planned to tell them all this before he left, but when he saw them all sleeping so peacefully, he’d rationalized that it was easier to leave a note and just go without any messy scenes. He could face the enemy and guns and bombs and bullets, but he wasn’t man enough to face her expression when she found out that he wouldn’t mate her while he was a soldier and faced possible death on the field of battle.

  Some brave warrior he was. He felt like a fraud when he had to dress up and wear his medals. When he learned of Craig’s death, he’d accepted an offer from the Rangers and had thrown himself into his new training. The military called him a hero, but he knew that he was a coward and didn’t deserve a woman like Lena. And now, with his injuries, he didn’t even have the military to fall back on. They’d have given him a desk job, but he didn’t want that, so he came home to lick his wounds and figure out what to do with the rest of his life.

  Part of him wished he’d died. If he had, the three of them would have mourned him, but then his brothers would be able to have a full moon mating ceremony with Lena, and then the three of them could be happy together. But here Alex was fucking up everyone’s lives again. Maybe if he left town again, Lena, Joe and Will could have a happy life together, even if they could never truly be mated.

  But then he remembered what she looked like standing the lighted doorway of the clinic, holding Otis tight, and he knew he could never leave Harmony again, not while she was there. Even if he could never be with her again, he liked just being close to her and maybe, in time, he’d be able to see her again and not just lurk from a distance. He didn’t have any realistic hope that she’d ever want him again like she did before, but just to be near her again, in the same town, made him happier than he’d been in years. Maybe it could be enough?

  Chapter Three

  Lena lived about ten minutes outside town in an old house built by her grandfathers right after they’d returned from WWII and settled in Harmony with the other surviving members of their unit. It was a comfortable home with a huge master bedroom and bath that she greatly enjoyed. It had a large front yard and was set quite a ways back from the road. It also backed onto a conservation area as did most of the “original seven” families’ homes. The eight men from the unit had all built on this side of the town so that all the wolf-dog shape-shifters lived near each other and away from the humans. She actually had two grandfathers in that unit, so they built one house together and jointly mated and married Annie O’Day.

  She was the third generation to live in the house. Her parents had retired to New Harmony a few years ago along with the rest of the second generation. As much as she loved her mother and dads, she was glad they did. She would never have been able to take over the clinic if they’d been around looking over her shoulder and giving her “advice.” The six months that they’d used to transition the clinic to her had been the longest six months of her life. She lived at home and went to work with her dads and was ready to get in her SUV some nights and drive away as far and as fast as she could as they sometimes forgot and treated her like she was still six and “helping” them at work instead of a fully qualified vet in her own right who’d trained at the best veterinary college in the country and had worked at a cutting-edge clinic in Seattle for more than three years.

  Luckily her mother totally understood and made sure that the move was not postponed even though her dads had made noises about taking an extra six months just to be sure she was okay. It had been more than two years now, and sometimes she missed them, but mostly she loved what she did and being in charge. She had more business than she could handle and had hired two vet techs and was seriously considering getting a partner. A second vet on staff would give her free time and would also let her open the clinic on weekends.

  She pulled into her driveway. She looked down at Otis. He wagged his stumpy tail and looked up at her. It was like he knew he was home. She tucked him under one arm and grabbed her bag and walked up to the front door. It took three more trips to bring everything in because Otis insisted on accompanying her, and since he couldn’t put his weight on his injured leg, she had to carry him, leaving only a single hand free to carry his supplies.

  Finally she was done. She gave Otis a chance to do his business in her garden and then carried him upstairs. It was three a.m., and she was exhausted. Luckily it was a Friday night and the clinic was only open for three hours on Saturday after lunch and closed on Sunday.

  She paused in the doorway before shutting the door and locking it. She felt that shiver again. Otis looked at her and barked once. She didn’t know whether he was reacting to her mood or to the same thing that was affecting her. She found herself double-checking the locks and then checking the back door and the windows. She’d never done that before, but tonight, it made her feel better.

  * * * *

  The morning dawned bright and clear, or at least she assumed it did. It was ten before she woke up, and she probably would have slept later, but Otis whined and finally started barking. When he was healthy and able to get himself down the stairs, she’d have one of the McAllister brothers repair the dog door so he could come and go when he needed to, but for now, she was on stair duty. She had no close neighbours, so she went down in the clothes she’d worn to bed, a tank top and panties, and carried Otis outside, and then she made them both breakfast. Her nerves from the previous night were forgotten in the bright light of day. She was just being silly. No one was spying on her. She was just being a nervous Nellie.

  And the little guy was definitely perkier today. She debated bringing Otis with her, but she had three intense hours at the clinic scheduled and then a trip to the grocery store on the way home. Luckily her parents had always owned dogs. The veranda had a gate that some folks thought was for kids but worked just as well for dogs. He’d be able to sit on the veranda and enjoy the warmth or the shade. She’d bring out his bed, some toys, and water and food bowls, and he should be fine for a few hours.

  He was going to have to get used to being alone some times. She had to work, and she couldn’t always bring him with her. And sometimes she went out with friends. Maybe she wasn’t cut out to be a pet parent. Maybe she should let one of the volunteers adopt him.

  She looked down at him as she fastened the gate. She could have sworn he smiled at her as he curled up on his bed for a nap. He’d made such a fuss at the office whenever she’d left, but it was like he now knew he was home and she’d be coming back.

  Lena chuckled to herself. She was probably going to have worse separation anxiety than he was. She’d bring him back a nice treat so she’d feel better about leaving him.

  * * * *

  The
weekend passed quickly, and soon it was Monday and Otis’s next test. This was a full day away from the little guy, and Lena was a wreck. She was tempted to set up a couple of nanny cams to keep an eye on him and make sure he wasn’t in distress when she was gone. She should have bought them when she was out on Saturday running errands.

  Sheesh. If she was this nervous to leave a grown dog alone, what would she be like if she ever had kids? She’d probably wrap them in bubble wrap and never let them out of her sight. She sighed. She never wanted to be one of those parents, even if she was just a pet parent. Otis looked happy every time she came home, but he showed no sign of the separation anxiety she’d worried about. Maybe she’d have felt better if he looked more like he missed her.

  But she had to accept the fact that she was the one with the problem, not Otis, but it wouldn’t hurt to install a few nanny cams. Things did happen. She’d just install a few, maybe one at the front door, one trained on Otis’s dog bed on the porch, and one at the foot of the stairs. That should be enough. And really, they had a security purpose, too. One never knew if a burglar might come along.

  She laughed at her own self-rationalization. Otis had been just fine when she got home Monday, but he also didn’t seem very hungry and just picked at his food. She worried that now his anxiety was expressing itself.

  The phone message light flashed at her when she walked in the door. It was Will and Joe as expected. She had half expected them to call on the weekend after she ducked out of Lupo’s, but they knew better than to approach her on a full moon night, even if she did break her own rule to meet the girls on Friday. She wouldn’t do that again. She paused to wonder. Maybe that was what had been causing her kind of generalized anxiety and the shiver she’d been feeling. It wasn’t someone watching her. It was her own guilty conscience, perhaps?

  But first she had to decide what to do about Will and Joe. Since she was trying to be self-analytical, she could admit to herself that she loved them, but she’d learned years ago that loving someone wasn’t enough to make a relationship work. If it had been, Alex wouldn’t have left her twice, once when she was eighteen and heading off to university and again when she was twenty-one and getting ready for vet school.

  But Alex wasn’t around and his brothers were. Maybe it was Penelope and her absurd notion that Alex was back in town that had her out of sorts. If he were back, Will and Joe would be shouting it from the rooftops. He wasn’t just their big brother, he was their Alpha, and they would always feel like a piece of them was missing when he was gone, much like she did. He was her Alpha, too. She hadn’t been happy when he’d enlisted, but she understood his need to serve. She’d been eighteen to his twenty-two and not ready for a commitment. He’d finished university and she was just starting, and she had his brothers. She wouldn’t be seeing much of him during her four years of higher education, so whether he was in Harmony or overseas didn’t have much direct bearing on her life.

  Of course, she was young and selfish and hadn’t properly appreciated the danger he’d face. Four years later when they were both back in Harmony, she understood things better. She thought they’d all be mated and be together forever. She was even going to give up her place at the Veterinary College at Cornell, the number one school in the country, to be with her wolves. She was ready for the mating commitment, and so were Will and Joe. She’d thought Alex wanted it, too. When he’d persuaded them that the first two nights of the full moon they should just do a mating bite and not a mating ceremony, she’d gone along with it to make him happy. It was a bit like having the honeymoon before the wedding, but she’d been so confident that they would be having the ceremony she hadn’t argued.

  It had been the most sexually satisfying two days of her life. The three of them had taken her in every way a man could take a woman and a few ways that she, in her youth and naivety, hadn’t known could be done. They filled her up singly and as a group, time after time. As shifters, they had a sexual stamina that no human could match. From the setting of the sun when Alex had put his mark on her, biting into her shoulder, until the dawn, for two days, she hadn’t had a moment that one of them hadn’t been inside her. More often it had been two of them and occasionally all three.

  The bite of a wolf during the full moon was a powerful aphrodisiac. She had felt herself consumed by the need to mate with them over and over and over. The lightest touch from any of them seemed to go straight to her clit, causing it to throb with need. Her pussy would pulse with emptiness and drive her to have it filled by one of her wolves.

  The need only faded with the rising sun, and it was only then that she rested, her body and senses recovering from the onslaught. She remembered after the second night, held in Alex’s arms while his brothers slept, how she dreamed of what it would be like after the actual mating ceremony. Once that was complete, this raging desire she felt wouldn’t fade after the rising of the sun. She’d be tied body and soul to them forever. A single touch from them would set the desire raging in her that only they could quench. It was no small commitment to make. Once wolves mated, it was for life. She wouldn’t be able to change her mind.

  It would make school impossible. There were no veterinary schools close enough for her to commute to, and once mated, she would have to be with her mates nightly. There was a local community college where she could study to become a vet tech. It wasn’t her ideal, but she was willing to make the sacrifice for her mates.

  In the morning, her decision was moot. Alex had gone back to war, leaving her and his brothers to what felt almost like mourning. The sexual thrall had worn off, and she just felt self-conscious with them. She’d dressed quickly and gone home. Her parents had anticipated a mating announcement. They liked the James brothers. When Lena saw their hopeful faces, the tears she’d been holding back came bursting out. She’d sobbed in her mother’s arms and her dads paced and threatened Alex with all kinds of bodily harm.

  In the end, they’d all calmed down and accepted the fact that there was nothing to be done but move on. Her dads put her to work in their animal clinic to keep her busy until school started. She avoided Will and Joe, and she was pretty sure they were avoiding her, too. She wasn’t the only one whose dreams had been shattered. Someone outside the community might have wondered why the three of them didn’t try to make a go of it, but they could never be complete without Alex. Ironically, it was only the Alpha’s death which would result in the next oldest taking that role, which would free the three of them to have their own mating ceremony, and with Alex in a war zone, it was a possibility she tried not to contemplate.

  Then she threw herself into school, which was, luckily, more than two thousand miles away from home, so she didn’t come back a lot. She took summer jobs near school and only came home for Christmas. When she graduated, she took a job in Seattle, which was close enough to visit but far enough away that she wouldn’t be expected to drop by for dinner, and it was also a place she wouldn’t accidentally run into Joe or Will.

  Finally, about three years ago, her mother brought up the notion that her dads were looking to retire and encouraged Lena to come home. She’d been away almost seven years and was ready to return. For six months, she lived with her folks as they planned the transition and then while she took the reins. And then she was alone again, her parents in New Harmony and her in their house. She redecorated, particularly the master bedroom, and she threw herself into the clinic. She also reconnected with her two best friends, Penelope and Ginger. And then she reconnected with Joe and Will.

  While it was like no time had passed for her, Pen, and Ginger, re-establishing a relationship with Will and Joe had taken more time. All three of them were wary about what it would be like without their Alpha, but, in time, they started to feel comfortable together. And about a year earlier, they’d made love again. It wasn’t the wild, out-of-control lovemaking they’d experienced from Alex’s mating bite, but it was warm and loving, and they felt good together. They usually spent a couple of nights a week as a thr
eesome and then one night each one-on-one with Lena. The rest of the time she slept alone. She didn’t date any other men, although she’d had plenty of opportunities.

  Lena’s only rule was that she wouldn’t be with them during the full moon. She knew that they thought she was worried about one of them trying to mate her, and she let them think that, but she knew neither of them could cause the craving in her that Alex did. During the nights of the full moon, she was actually dreaming of what they'd missed out on. She couldn’t face them during those nights and needed to be alone with her dark thoughts which took her over every month. It had been like that ever since the mating bites. Maybe it was a residual effect or maybe she was just sad, but she wouldn’t go near them during that time of month.

  Until this past weekend. She’d let herself be talked into going to Lupo’s with Pen, Ginger and Sam, and she’d greatly enjoyed the whole Gabe on a leash stories, but she’d felt uncomfortable, too. Maybe that was the source of her discomfort and that strange shiver she kept getting down her spine. Maybe it wasn’t because she could feel someone watching her. Maybe she just felt out of sorts because she saw Will and Joe and her senses mourned what might have been.

  But now the full moon had passed, and she had to get her life back to normal, including calling Will and Joe. She’d run out on them Friday and they'd left her alone during the full moon cycle, but now it had passed and she knew they were worried about her.

  She also had to integrate Otis into her routine. She thought about it some more and decided to check out the camera on the way home from work on Tuesday. It couldn’t hurt to just get some more information and maybe a quote. They were out of stock, but the store owner promised they’d be in by Thursday at the latest. Apparently they were extremely popular. She asked about installation, and the stop keeper assured her that not only could she do it herself, but she could easily set up a live feed to her computer at home and then link to the feed at work.