Big Bad Wolf

by Christine Warren

  Leaning forward, he closed his teeth over her shoulder, pinning her in place the way his beast demanded, barely refraining from marking her. He ground his hips hard against her cushioning bottom, pushing so deeply into her he could feel her womb at the bottom of each hard glide. The echo of her scream had died, fading into the gasps and pleading murmurs that drove him deeper into his possessive frenzy. His beast may have agreed to remain under his skin, but it hadn’t promised not to control his actions.

  Growling low in his chest, he closed his teeth harder against her skin, warning her, commanding her to stay still for his pleasure. His hands lifted and hovered for a moment, waiting to slam hers back into place, but she never moved them. She simply locked her elbows and used the leverage to thrust harder back against him.

  Greedily his hands took advantage of their freedom, sliding up to squeeze her breasts and tease the firm nipples with twisting pinches. Missy moaned and trembled beneath him. Her arms collapsed under her, and she landed on her elbows with a gasping cry. The position thrust her hips higher into the air, canted her pelvis to a new angle, and allowed him to slide even deeper with every pounding thrust. Rearing back from her, he grabbed her hips in his hands, careful not to pierce her skin with the claws he couldn’t keep from emerging. His firm grip held her in place and held her up when her knees, too, would have slid out from under her.

  Pinning her in place, he took her with hard, ruthless digs. His beast gloried in the tight clasp of her moisture-slicked muscles, in the whimpers and yelps that tore from her throat and echoed in the empty hall. Her noises sounded like mate cries in his ears. They made his muscles tighten, made his spine tingle and his fingers clench until they bruised her soft flesh. He rammed his pelvis against her gorgeous ass and listened to the sound of his mate approaching orgasm. He felt her body tensing and trembling, felt her temperature soar, felt the rippling of her inner muscles grow more intense. He inhaled deeply, and her hot vanilla scent exploded in his head just as a scream exploded from her lips.

  Bucking beneath him, she ground her hips against his as her body clenched hard around his, milking it with powerful, ecstatic ripples. Graham threw back his head and howled, driving into her with even greater force. He felt himself scraping the mouth of her womb as she pulsed down to meet him. The rich fragrance of her musk advertised her ripe fertility, and he burst apart, pouring her full of his seed while the image of his child making her stomach jut out before her flashed behind his eyes.

  With a satisfied growl, he relaxed and let his weight carry them both to the carpet. She sprawled bonelessly beneath him, panting for air even as her body continued to shiver around his softening length. He growled, a soft, satisfied sound, and laid his hands over hers, lacing their fingers together in an intimate knot. She murmured something unintelligible and shifted beneath him, rubbing her skin along his as if savoring the sensation.

  Graham hummed his approval and nuzzled her neck, licking her salty-sweet skin and nipping gently at her earlobe.

  “Mine,” he whispered, squeezing her hands gently in his.

  Her muscles tensed briefly against his, and he rolled his hips against her, emphasizing the connection of his semi-erect shaft still clasped tight inside her. He felt the shiver that raced down her spine, and nipped again, a little harder this time.

  “Mine.” And this time it was more growl than whisper.

  She turned her head and opened her eyes to meet his, which he knew were probably glowing green and possessive above her. She licked her dry lips.

  “Yours.” She agreed so softly it barely qualified as a whisper.

  “Damn it. He always gets the good ones.”

  Graham didn’t think he’d ever seen a human move so fast. Logan’s words had brought Missy’s head up like a deer scenting gunpowder, and it hadn’t taken a mind reader to pick up on her horror at being caught in flagrante delicto on his hallway carpet. A quick bark had sent Logan back behind the door to the club long enough for Graham’s mate to scramble out from beneath him, grab her clothes, and sprint for the stairs as if the hounds of hell nipped at her heels.

  Swallowing a curse, Graham reached for his jeans and tugged them back over his hips. Not that he hadn’t appreciated the view of his mate’s retreating derriere, but he’d have appreciated it more if he’d been following her up the stairs in anticipation of another round of the passion they’d just shared.

  “Is it safe to come out now?”

  Graham looked from the door to his discarded shoe and back. He considered scooping the thing up and letting it fly at the wall or Logan’s head, whichever got in the way, but dismissed the temptation. With his luck, he’d knock his beta unconscious and have to haul his sorry ass to the sofa and let him stay until he regained consciousness. Instead, he jerked the door open and glared at his former friend.

  “What the hell do you want now?”

  The beta stepped into the hall with an innocent shrug. “Well, a minute ago, I wanted to tell you about an interesting piece of news I got this morning. But now I’m thinking I want one of what you just had. With a cherry on top.”

  Graham’s lip curled. “Come within six feet of my woman and I’ll strangle you with your own intestines.”

  Through a foggy red film the alpha saw his oldest friend’s eyebrows shoot up, followed by a pair of hands raised in a universal gesture of surrender.

  “I meant no disrespect, Alpha,” Logan offered, carefully dropping his gaze and turning his head to the side. “Only a compliment on your choice of mate. Of course, I would never think to touch your woman.”

  Intense effort drew a lungful of air into Graham’s chest, followed by another, then another. By his fifth breath, the red haze covering his vision had faded to a soft pink and he could no longer feel his heart beating in the vein at his left temple. He grasped shakily at the thin strands of his self-control and fixed Logan with a baleful glare. It took another few breaths before Graham finally regained the ability to form words rather than the howl of a death challenge, and even he could hear the remnants of rage floating below the surface.

  “In the interest of our continued friendship and your continued heartbeat, Hunter,” Graham snarled, “I suggest you not make any other stupid comments along that line in the future.”

  “No, Alpha.”

  Logan’s respectful tone and deferent posture finally had their desired effect, signaling to Graham’s wolfish subconscious that no challenge would be offered to his authority. Considering how long the two men had known each other (since about five hours after Logan’s birth) and how rarely the beta deferred to anyone (never), the message sank through the alpha’s thick skull and smoothed his hackles back into place. Graham’s mate was safe and his sanity could once again take its rightful place in guiding his actions.

  Shaking off the lingering hostility like a retriever shaking off the salt water, Graham blew out a deep breath and focused on his beta without a film of violence clouding his vision. “Right. Now, I think you’d better share what it was you came here to tell me.”

  Logan kept his gaze fixed on a point just below and to the left of Graham’s shoulder. “My apologies for interrupting you, Alpha, but I tried to page you. You didn’t answer your intercom. If I had known why you failed to pick up—”

  “Oh, cut the crap and look at me,” Graham growled. “I already feel like an idiot for jumping down your throat. You don’t need to make me feel like the damned Lupine Hitler with the subservient routine.”

  The beta lifted one eyebrow and shifted his gaze cautiously to Graham’s. “You sure? Because to be honest, I think if I were you, I’d have been pretty POed by my interruption, too.”

  Graham snorted and lifted a hand to rub at the lingering muscle tenseness at the back of his neck. “You could do with a lesson or two in timing.”

  “Honestly, I had no idea she was still here. I figured you’d have packed her off home by now.”

  “Did we not have a conversation about this in my kitchen last night?”
Graham frowned. “Did I dream that?”

  “No, we had it. I just didn’t get how much you meant it, I guess. I figured, you know, heat of the moment. It is kind of a big decision.”

  “Since when has a Lupine ‘decided’ anything having to do with a mate-bond?”

  Logan heard the sardonic tone and grimaced. “Right. Fate just smacks us upside the head, and we get in line with her plans like good little wolves. Doesn’t that ever kind of piss you off?”

  “You saw what she has planned for me,” Graham said, his grin sudden and wide and wolfish. “How hard would you fight it?”

  “You may have a point.”

  “Right. And since I’d really rather be spending the next three or four hours with my Fate, as opposed to with you, no offense—”

  “None taken.”

  “—how about you spill your big news so I can get back to spilling something of my own.”

  Logan rolled his eyes. “Charming. No wonder the human fell for you and your smooth-talking ways.”

  Graham just waited.

  “You’ve received an invitation,” the beta continued. “For this evening.”

  “I think I’m going to be busy tonight. Tell whoever it is that I’m washing my hair.”

  “It’s from the elders.”

  A curse, long and comprehensive and equally foul in both English and Lupine, colored the air of the hallway. Logan didn’t even blink. Which hardly surprised Graham. If he was ever called upon to appear before the Silverback Clan’s oldest and most well-respected—and well-feared—members, the beta would likely have much the same reaction.

  While technically the elders were expected to function as counsel to the sitting alpha of the pack, in reality Graham hardly ever acknowledged them. He’d never been the sort of leader to question his own abilities or his own decisions, and the idea of weighing three extra opinions before he did whatever he’d originally planned to do anyway had always seemed to him to be nothing more than a colossal waste of time.

  So far, his strategy had worked out well. He’d pretty much ignored the elders, and they had blessed his tenure as alpha with the tacit approval that came from staying out of his face. Why they would want to stick their noses into things now could only have one explanation.

  “Curtis,” Graham ground out with all the elocution of a wolf spitting nails.

  “That would be my guess.”

  The only reason either Lupine could come up with to explain why the elders would choose now to begin giving Graham the advice he’d never before needed or wanted had to be linked to his troublemaking cousin. Anything else was just too big a coincidence to be believed.

  “What the hell did he say to them to make them interfere now?”

  Logan pursed his lips. “You want me to tell you what I think?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “No shit.”

  The beta shrugged. “I think he’s stirred them up over the subject of you being mateless. If he does really mean to challenge you on the basis of Breeder’s Rights, it can’t hurt him to have the elders on his side.”

  “Maybe, but how much can it really help him? They’re advisors, but no one has to take their advice. They don’t have any real power.”

  “No, but they do have a significant amount of influence. Ninety percent of the pack is related to them, one way or the other.”

  Graham made an impatient sound and began to pace down the long hallway. “My cousin has the timing of a defective jack-in-the-box.”

  “He always has. Remember his first change?”

  “Remember? It was right in the middle of my high school graduation speech. At four in the afternoon. Our mothers had to cover him in my dad’s suit jacket and Aunt Vivian’s sun hat and hustle him out of the bleachers with some story about seizures brought on by photosensitivity. By the time they got him turned over to Uncle Glenn, Mom had missed half my graduation party.”

  “Exactly. And think of all the years he’s had since then to plan this little inconvenience.”

  Graham rolled his eyes. “I suppose I should consider myself lucky he didn’t catch me twenty minutes ago. Like some people.”

  “Hey, if you’re going to mate in the hallway in the middle of the day, it’s not like an interruption should come as all that big a surprise.”

  The alpha sighed. “I guess I wasn’t thinking all that clearly.”

  “Not from what I saw,” Logan agreed. “Didn’t look to me like much thinking was involved at all.”

  “I can’t help it. I take one look at her and my palms start to itch.” Graham made the admission with a sheepish expression and a clenching of his fists. Actually, all he had to do was think about Missy and his hands ached for the feel of her soft, warm skin. “It’s the damnedest thing. She’s the only woman who’s ever gotten to me this way.”

  “Maybe you should tell that to the elders,” Logan said. “You’d put a hell of a hole in Curtis’s strategy if they knew you had found a mate. Even if she is human.”

  “I thought about that, but it’s just a bad idea.”

  “Why?”

  “The human thing.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a big problem. Not an insurmountable one, anyway. There have been one or two human mates in the clan before. Yours wouldn’t be the first. A few of the pack might grumble, but none of them would be stupid enough to do it to your face.”

  “Sure, there have been a couple of human mates before in the pack. But how many of them have been Luna?”

  “None.”

  “Right. And in the past, how long has it taken to convince a human that they were the Fated mate of a Lupine?”

  Logan winced. “A while.”

  “Which is time I don’t have.” Graham swore again. “I’ve barely got her convinced to spend the weekend with me. What happens if I tell the elders I’ve found a mate and it turns out that I end up having to chase that mate across three state lines when she tries to make a break for it?”

  “You think she will?”

  “I think it’s too early for me to be taking for granted that she won’t.”

  “Have you considered filling her in on the situation? Maybe if you explained about Curtis, she’d be willing to work with you. At least put up a united front until the challenge thing blows over.”

  “First, ‘the challenge thing’ isn’t going to blow over as long as Curtis is alive,” Graham said. “And second, Missy is currently about as skittish as a November turkey. She’d hear the words ‘mate’ and ‘breeders’ and ‘challenge’ and go to ground so fast I’d need a were-terrier to find her again.”

  Logan stared at his friend for a moment in silence. Then he shook his head. “Wow. I guess you’re just screwed then.”

  Graham growled. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” The beta shifted and turned back toward the door to the club. “What do you want me to tell the elders, though? I’m thinking they expect you to treat their invitation as a summons. They seem to look at it that way.”

  Graham thought about the woman upstairs who had last seen him as she scrambled out from under him in embarrassment, glowing the color of cherry syrup and making small noises of distress, and then about the three pack elders who were likely to give him a hard time about something he wouldn’t change just because they thought they could. Both situations smacked of duty, but there was only one of them that he really cared about.

  He turned toward the stairs. “Find out when the elders want to meet and then let me know. And call before you come over. I’ll keep an eye out for voice mail if I don’t pick up.”

  Logan nodded. “All right. I’ll ask them when they can come back, and I’ll let you know.”

  Graham made it up three stairs before the words registered. He spun to face his beta’s retreating back. “What did you say?”

  “I’ll go ask the elders if they can come back to talk to you at another time.”

  “You mean they’re
here now?”

  “In your office.”

  Closing his eyes, Graham prayed for patience, but the Moon offered no answers. She probably thought this whole thing was funny. Judging by the scent wafting down the stairs from his bedroom, though, his mate currently wasn’t seeing the humor in anything. At all.

  “Wait,” Graham sighed. He turned and stepped back down into the hall. “I’ll see them now. If they’ve come here without sending any warning, they must be worked up. In that case, it would be a bad idea to let them stew over it.”

  And his decision had nothing to do with wanting to let Missy calm down before he faced her again, he assured himself.

  Nothing at all.

  “Right. Of course.” A grin kicked up one corner of Logan’s mouth in an expression far too knowing for Graham’s taste.

  “Shut up.” He scowled and stomped through the door to the sound of his beta’s echoing chuckle.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Graham knew the instant he saw Samantha’s worried expression that something far worse than the pack elders was waiting in his office. And if that wasn’t the frosting on the cake . . .

  “What?” he barked.

  “I’m sorry, Alpha, but he said the elders were expecting him to join you.” Samantha frowned, her skin giving off the distinct odor of nerves.

  To her credit, she looked directly at him, despite her unease, her eyes averted only slightly toward his temple as a mark of her respect. His pretty, sensible assistant had never lacked for balls.

  “Him, who?”

  “Curtis MacAlpin.”

  Graham was the one who averted his eyes at that, raising them to the ceiling while he counted to ten and attempted to rein in his temper. Then he counted to twenty.

  When he reached ninety-seven with no improvement, he looked back down at Samantha and breathed very evenly. “He’s in with the others?”

  She nodded. “Grey, Hawkins, and Fleet.”

  The most well-respected elders of the clan, each of the three men Samantha named had reached his seventieth year, an age not unheard of but considerably less common in Lupines than in the human population. The pack’s lifestyle, system of social advancement, and feeling of invincibility among young male Lupines all conspired to make the average life span of Graham’s peers somewhere around sixty-five.