“What’s the rush?” He was jogging next to her now.
“No rush,” she lied. “I want to stop by and say hi to my cousin and your old packmates before we go. I miss my cousin. Haven’t seen Katrina in ages. We should just go see her right now.” She was babbling in her panic.
Her family’s station wagon was heading down the road that led to the casino. She didn’t want to tell Carver, because he’d feel like he had to stay there and fight. She was positive that her father and all her brothers were in that car, come to take her home, by force if necessary. Carver would refuse. It would end badly.
She was very, very angry with Carver, but she didn’t want him to die.
She broke into a run and practically leaped into the driver’s seat. Carver slid into the passenger seat, a puzzled look on his face.
“We can send someone to pick up your car from here later,” she said, taking the back road away from the casino.
“What’s this all about?” he asked with a frown, as she stepped on the gas.
“My family just pulled in.” She glanced over her shoulder. They weren’t following her yet. Hopefully they’d go to her room first, looking for her, and that would buy her some time. “How did they know I was here?”
“Maybe Sally told them.”
“Nah, they fired her last week.” She slowed down a bit to steer around a curve, then sped up as soon as the road straightened out.
“Well then, they probably just called around. I mean, this place may be an hour away, but your father does have considerable pull with shifters all over Colorado.”
“I checked in under a false name!” she protested.
He shrugged. “You’re a healer – you stand out because of your eye color. If they called the front desk at the motel they’d have remembered you.” All healers had one green and one blue eye. It made it very hard to go incognito.
Note to self; buy contact lenses, she thought.
Carver glanced behind him.
“Do you see them?” she cried, panicked.
“No, but you don’t need to worry about them. Virginia, I’m your husband. It’s my job to stand up for you. I won’t let them make you do anything you don’t want to do.”
She didn’t even bother answering that they obviously weren’t really married. She was too busy concentrating on staying on the road and driving a hundred miles an hour at the same time.
She knew he’d be at least an even match for her father, but her oldest brother Maxwell was also an Alpha, and add in her other three brothers…that wouldn’t be a fair fight. Somebody might get injured beyond her ability to heal. She couldn’t actually bring people back from the dead.
She whipped around the curves, foot pressed flat on the accelerator. The casino was only an hour from the Killingworth pack’s lands, so at least they had that going for them.
She didn’t relax until they’d pulled up in front of the Killingworth pack’s main building, where shifters were already coming outside to see who’d just roared through their property at jet speed.
“Do not tell anyone we’re married,” she said severely. Carver just grinned at her.
“They’ll be able to tell, honey. You’ve just got that glow about you.” He was positively smirking. “Also the wedding ring.”
“I absolutely hate you,” she snarled, flinging the car door open. She could have sworn she heard Carver say, “Hate sex is the best,” before he climbed out and walked with her up to the front steps.
The Killingworth’s main house was huge, a structure with dozens of rooms where many of the pack’s single males lived until they got married. Maddox Killingworth, Alpha of the pack, strode up to them, smiling, followed by a dozen of his men.
“Welcome back, brother!” he said, giving Carver a big manly kind of hug that involved some hard back-slapping.
Virginia’s cousin Katrina, Maddox’s wife, ran up and hugged her.
“Congrats!” she cried, stepping back. “Jeez, I thought you two would have been married ages ago. What took him so long to pop the question?” Then her eyes lit on Katrina’s ring.
“Man, did you cheap out on that wedding ring,” she said to Carver disapprovingly. “I’m not sure I give this marriage my blessing.”
Virginia burst out laughing. “Oh, Katrina, don’t ever change.”
“We got married at the casino last night,” Carver said, looking dismayed. “I assure you, I am going to buy her a proper ring.”
“I’ll hold you to that.” Katrina fixed him with a narrow-eyed stare. “This is my favorite cousin we’re talking about here. Treat her nice; you know what a bitch I can be.”
“And how,” Carver agreed, which drew a low growl from Maddox. It was true, though; when Maddox had kidnapped Katrina to hold her hostage during a negotiation with her pack, Katrina had given all the men in the Killingworth pack major grief.
“Hey!” Virginia spoke up quickly before the Alphas could start doing their macho thing and snarling at each other. “We have a small problem. My family is probably following us here, wanting to drag me back home by force. And possibly eviscerate Carver.”
Maddox let out another growl, but this time he was defending his former packmate. “Not gonna happen. And yes, your family is almost here; one of my men in town called me.”
“Should we go inside?” Virginia asked nervously.
“Nah, might as well just get this over with.” Carver folded his arms across his broad chest as Virginia’s family roared down the road.
They pulled up in front of the house and screeched to a halt, raising a cloud of dust.
Her father piled out of the car, along with her brothers Maxwell, Pierce, Lance and Troy. Virginia’s stomach was tied in knots and she clenched her fists, rigid with tension. Please don’t fight, she prayed silently.
“It’ll be fine,” Katrina whispered reassuringly to her, rubbing her shoulder.
Her father stormed up to them, fur rippling on his face and hands and rage blazing in his eyes. “That is my daughter. You will release her at once,” he growled, not even looking at Virginia. Her brothers followed, looking ready to shift and rip out some throats.
Oh, the hell with it, she thought. She wasn’t going to tell her parents the marriage was fake.
She’d been working up the courage to tell them she was moving off the pack property whether they liked it or not. This would give her an excuse, and she’d figure out how to tell them she wasn’t really married in a month or two when they’d calmed down.
She waved her ring finger at her family. “Hello,” she called. “I’m here of my own free will; nobody kidnapped me. I am twenty-one years old, and I’m married. This is my husband. We will be starting our own pack.” She almost strangled on the words, they felt so foreign in her mouth.
Carver stood between her family and her, growling. His ears had gone wolf and the bones in his face flowed and shifted. His arms were hairy as his pelt rolled over his skin.
“You took advantage of her!” her brother Lance snarled, his fangs descending.
“I did no such thing.” Carver’s eyes glowed with rage. “She’s an intelligent woman of legal age, and she wanted to marry me.”
“Virginia, this is childish. Get in that car now.” Vince pointed at his car.
“She’s an adult, and she’s married,” Maddox said to Vince. “I always thought the Battle pack respected the rights of their females.”
“Don’t you dare turn this around on me,” Vince growled. “This is my daughter we’re talking about. Any man who wants to marry her is expected to get my permission to court her first, and if he has my approval, then he may start—”
“Oh, shut the hell up!” Virginia yelled at the top of her lungs. Everyone turned to stare at her in astonishment. Virginia had gotten angry and had heated words with her father over the years, but she’d never gone this far before.
“I am sick to death of this!” she screamed at him. “You never would have approved of anyone I wanted to date anyway
! You have literally scared off every single man who’s ever been interested in me! I am married to Carver, and you have absolutely no legal right to stop it! Shall we take it up with the Council of Elders?”
“You didn’t even have a traditional wedding!” her brother Lance protested.
“Well, he doesn’t have a full pack of his own yet. We’ll probably do it again with a real ceremony sometime after the honeymoon.”
“This marriage is a sham. You hated him last week!” her brother Pierce argued.
“That was what we had to do to get away with going out on dates,” Virginia said quickly. “We’ve been dating ever since he came to town. In fact, that’s why he came to town. We had to put on this big charade of me hating him, because you all are ridiculous and you think I’m still twelve. My husband I are leaving for our honeymoon, and I will talk to you in two weeks when we come back – if you can be civil to him.”
And before her father could argue, she quickly stepped behind the Killingworth pack members.
She heard growls and snarls of anger.
“Listen up!” Maddox shouted, his voice ringing through the air. “She is an adult. Carver is one of the best men I know, a wolf of honor, an Alpha, and he will protect her and treat her like gold. If you want to issue a Death Challenge to him right now, then do it, but know that either outcome will ruin her life. If you kill her husband, the man she loves, she will hate you forever. If her husband kills you, it will destroy her marriage and she’ll have lost both her father and her husband, because she’d never forgive him.”
Carver stepped closer to her father and boldly met his gaze. Virginia drew in a sharp breath and clenched her cousin’s arm.
“What he says is true,” Carver said. “I will protect her and treat her like a queen. I would lay down my life for her – and that includes fighting to the death for the right to claim her as my mate. Now, either issue that Death Challenge or go home, because we’ve got a honeymoon to plan.”
There was a long, long pause. Vince was still furious, but he couldn’t argue with what Maddox Killingworth had just said. A Death Challenge would hurt Virginia one way or the other.
“Virginia. Is this what you really want?” he said, finally looking at her.
“It is. I truly want to be married to this man. We’ve dated for months and I know this is what I want, and we are going to form our own pack.” She hated lying to him, but it was the only way to avoid an all-out pack war. “You know how it is with shifters; when you meet the right one, you know. We’ll give you more details when we get back from the honeymoon.”
He nodded abruptly, then directed a final cold stare at Carver. “I do not like how this went down, and we will talk about that when you return. And if you ever hurt my daughter, rest assured, I will kill you.” He looked at Virginia again. “You can come home at any time.”
She managed a shaky smile. “I do love you, Dad, even though you’re also the world’s most overprotective pain-in-the-tail parent. Tell Mom I love her and I’ll see her soon. And you know I would never be with a man who mistreated me. You did raise me to respect myself.”
Vince gave a short, sharp nod, turned and walked back to his car, his back stiff and straight. Her brothers followed him reluctantly, casting angry glares back at Carver.
She didn’t fully relax until their car was out of sight, and then she was so relieved that she actually let herself sag into Carver’s arms.
That was a mistake, because his arms closed around her in a tight embrace, and it felt so deliciously right that she never wanted him to let go.
After a minute she forced herself to push him away.
“Thank you,” she said to Maddox. “I’m sorry to bring that to your doorstep.”
He waved a hand in dismissal. “Carver was my packmate for a long time. I’ll always have his back, as he would have mine.”
After they’d gone inside and eaten breakfast with the pack, and Carver had had a chance to say hello to his former packmates, she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him aside.
“So we’re in the clear,” she said. “We just need to figure out where I should I go for the next few weeks so my family doesn’t see through this sham.”
Carver looked puzzled. “Uh…on your honeymoon? I’ve got someone calling and making the arrangements right now. We leave in the morning.”
“Our honeymoon? Carver, seriously, you know we’re not married, right?”
“I’ve got a wedding certificate that says we are married. So you might as well stop pretending you don’t want me just as badly as I want you.”
“Carver…” She blew out a breath of frustration. She couldn’t deny her physical reaction to him. He could always tell. “All right, listen, I’m not going to deny that I might be a little bit attracted to you. But – quit laughing!”
“A little?” He threw his head back and roared with laughter. “Last night I literally had to fight you off. You begged me to fuck you till you screamed.”
“You turned me down a second time?” She was stricken.
“Sweetheart, I already told you, I do not want you when you’re drunk and completely unaware of what you’re doing. I want you to come to me. I want you to want it.”
“Whatever.” She blushed, mortified. She was sure he was telling the truth about her begging him. “The point is…I have been raised by a loving but incredibly overprotective, domineering, bossy family. I feel like I’m suffocating. I feel like the only person who has any faith in my independence and ability to live on my own is me. I can’t be married to an Alpha.”
“Does your father boss your mother around? Is she downtrodden and submissive?”
“Of course not!” Virginia cried, horrified. “I mean, they each have their roles in the pack. He obviously takes care of pack security and pack alliances and settles matters with pack members, and she oversees a lot of the social stuff and family matters and a lot of the business end as well. She’s got a great head for numbers.” Then she looked at him indignantly.
“That doesn’t mean that’s how you’ll be when I’m your wife. I mean…damn it! If I was your wife, not when.”
“Have I ever tried to force you to do anything you didn’t want to do?”
She was about to say, how about getting married, but he had her there. She’d been the one to propose.
“We have a honeymoon booked for the next couple of weeks,” he said. “It’s as good a place to hide out from your pack as any. You can decide what you want to do when that time is up, and I assure you, I won’t make a move on you unless you ask me to.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen,” she muttered, flushing. She hoped she could hold out for two entire weeks.
“Good. Then your virtue is safe.” He grinned at her and headed for the pack lands.
“Carver, you don’t know everything about me,” she protested as she followed him. There were things she didn’t dare tell him, and the new part of her life wasn’t going away. That alone was likely to be a dealbreaker.
Carver didn’t look the least bit concerned about whatever secrets she might be keeping. In fact, he looked downright cheerful. “I look forward to finding out.”
Chapter Six
She spent her wedding night hanging out with Katrina and catching up on old times. Katrina, infuriatingly, refused to believe that Virginia’s marriage was fake. Virginia had confided the entire story to her, making her swear not to tell Virginia’s family. Katrina had just shrugged and gone on talking about where Virginia and Carver should start their new pack and wondering whether Virginia’s cubs would be healers like her. Apparently whatever madness had infected Carver was catching; neither of them could hear a word Virginia said when she insisted that her drunken marriage was a sham.
“I thought you hated Carver,” she protested, settling into her bed, a comfy four-poster with a down mattress. “Why do you want me to be married to him?”
“I did hate him when I first met him. I mean, his Alpha, my darling husband, h
ad just kidnapped me. And Carver was an ass to me when I first got here. But in fairness to him, he knew about some horrible things that my pack was doing, and he assumed that I knew about their abuses and was okay with it.”
Katrina flopped onto Virginia’s bed next to her and lay down, spreading her arms out. “Whee, comfy bed! I shouldn’t be here,” she added. “You really should be spending your wedding night with your husband. That’s kind of a traditional thing.”
Virginia ignored her suggestion. “Okay, so you don’t hate him. That doesn’t mean that I should be married to him.”
“You guys have had incredible chemistry from the time you first met him. He’s meant to be your mate. You’re just such a stubborn donkey that you haven’t admitted it until now. This honeymoon will change your mind.”
Virginia let out an unladylike snort of contempt. “The first time I met him, I dumped a pitcher of beer on his head. Because his pack had kidnapped you.”
“Exactly! Sparks flew!” Katrina insisted happily.
“Ugh. You’re still in that honeymoon bliss phase where you think everyone is meant to find their one true love. Excuse me while I barf.” Virginia settled into bed and rolled over with her back to Katrina. “I appreciate your pack saving our butts, but I assure you, once we leave Honeymoon Mountain, I will get the marriage annulled and find an apartment far away from him and far away from my family.”
“All righty then, coughcough noyouwon’t coughcough whosaidthat? Well, I’m off. I actually do have a husband I want to have sex with, because it’s been at least a few hours since he mauled me and I’m feeling rejected.”
“Ew. You’re my cousin. Too much detail.”
“So I shouldn’t tell you that men from the Killingworth Pack are particularly well known for their skill in oral matters?”
“Aaaah! Get out!” Virginia sat up and threw a pillow at Katrina, who dodged it, laughing, and left the room.
Virginia spent the rest of the night cursing her cousin for putting those unwelcome thoughts in her head. She couldn’t stop thinking of Carver parting her thighs with his strong hands, kissing her hungrily, tasting her, thrusting his tongue inside her…
The Alpha Won't Be Denied Page 4