by Viola Rivard
Of course, that was with human men. And just like she could slow her roll when she found out that a man was married, she could stifle the instinct when it came to Shan. For all she knew, he already had a mate, and better that he did. Alpha wolves mated for life and were known to take one sexual encounter with a human and construe it as a promise to accept their bond. God forbid one got you pregnant, then you were pretty much saddled with him forever.
Harper accepted that his scent and his attractiveness would be a distraction. There was no way she could ignore them, but she could control herself because the alternative would be, to use Jo's language, fantastically disasteriffic.
After starting the fire, she warmed her hands and looked around the room. It was smaller than she'd assumed while in the dark. It had been carved to fit the root pattern of the tree, with thick roots lining the walls and ceiling. Opposite to her was a medium-sized leather chest near to the wall. Behind her, there was a slight curve in the tunnel-like room. Peeking around the bend, she could see a large pallet of furs. She resisted the urge to go curl up in them and fall asleep. There was an implicit invitation that would be put forth if he returned to find her in his bed.
Instead, she turned her attention to the chest. She went to it, finding no discernible lock. She ran her fingers along the seam, and then lifted.
She wasn't sure what she'd expected to find inside, but it wasn't books. She picked one up, her brow scrunching as she read the cover.
A Tale of Two Cities.
Perplexed, she began rummaging through the titles, finding a mix of classic tomes and modern novels, from Shakespeare to David Mitchell. She examined a few of the books, finding their spines to be well-worn, but their pages to be crisp and unblemished.
Something else in the box caught her eyes, and she set aside a copy of Middlemarch to pick up a twine-wrapped bundle of folded paper. The paper had an unusual texture, and as she brought it into the light, she saw that it was vellum. Carefully, she untied the knot and pulled the strings loose.
She unfolded the vellum once, twice, and then a third time, finding that there were actually two sheets, each an arm's length in diameter. The first was a map, drawn in elegant black script. A few key land formations were marked, but the primary purpose of the map was the detail the various packs and the boundaries of their territories. There were symbols next to each pack name, but no key to define them. In several places, pieces of territory had been redrawn in red ink, the old names crossed out.
She took it all in, and then pulled back the map to reveal the second page. It was a drawing of a massive tree, with names along the trunk, striations leading up to branches, and then to leaves, each element labeled with a different name. Though the tree was a trove of knowledge, Harper found herself more taken with the artistry of it all, the meticulous care given to every detail. Art was one thing she'd never been good at, no matter how hard she'd tried.
She didn't hear Shan coming, but she felt him. The hairs on the back of her neck stood, and she had to suppress the urge to shiver. It was too late to pretend she hadn't been snooping, she took her time folding up the genealogy tree. She regretted not looking more closely at it. While her mind could still draw up a distinct image of the map, when she tried to summon the image of the tree, she saw only a handful of the names.
“You should keep a lock on this,” she said as she secured the twine back onto the folded pages.
Shan spoke at an unhurried pace. “There is not a member in my pack who would dare to go through my things.”
Damn, but the man had a sexy voice.
“If you believe that, then you're not as smart as everyone says.”
She closed the chest, took a second to brace herself, and then turned to glance at him over her shoulder. He leaned in the entrance to the den, watching her through hooded eyes. He was no longer wearing his pelt. It was flung over his shoulder, leaving his broad chest on full display. To her relief—and modest disappointment—he wore pants.
“I'm not accustomed to my captives questioning my intelligence.”
She searched his eyes, looking for any sign that she should tread carefully. He seemed calm, and she could still see that small spark of attraction.
On some level, it fascinated her that he could be attracted to her. It shouldn't have. Every heterosexual male that came within a quarter mile radius had to at least do a double take when they saw her, and it had nothing to do with her height. She wasn't cute, pretty, or any other pithy adjective used to describe average women with great personalities. There were two types of beautiful women, those who feigned ignorance and acted surprised when they managed to skate through life on their looks, and those who recognized their beauty and used it to their advantage whenever possible. Harper was firmly in the latter caste. Some people—every guy she'd ever dated—might call her vain, but with a face like hers, modesty would have been disingenuous.
“Does that mean I'm your captive?” she asked, matching his placidity.
“You are tonight. Now, who are these people who speak so highly of my intelligence?”
Remembering what West had told her, Harper decided to take a different approach to their conversation. If she couldn't lie or lie by omission, the only option remaining was to refuse to answer.
“Are you asking me to reveal my sources?”
“I'm asking how a human I've never met knows about me and my pack.”
Shan stepped into the room. He had to duck down until he reached the center, where the ceiling elevated. She remembered calculating the entrance to be only a foot above her head, which put him at well over seven feet tall. Not unexpected, considering what she'd heard, but still a sight to behold in person.
She assumed he was going to loom over her until she answered, but instead he took a seat by the fire, stretching his long legs and bracing himself up with his arm.
Harper said, “Anyone researching the Appalachian packs that's done even a little field work knows about you. Though, to be frank, you're still something of a footnote in academic literature. Most anthropologists assume that you're some sort of myth.”
Shan stared at her with unconcealed interest, his eyes making a slow perusal of her body.
“But you didn't.”
Harper wet her lips. “There was too much empirical evidence in favor of your existence. There's the stability of the northern packs and the rise of agriculture among wolves for the first time in recorded history. I figured that there had to be some unifying force, and every stone I turned over, your name came up. Hey, is that my iPad?”
“Yes. How did you know know where to find me?”
He wasn't easily redirected. She'd expected that, but it was still annoying.
“If you give me my iPad, I can show you.”
He took the tablet from under his arm and offered it to her. Harper reached out to try to take it, but when she did, she found that he wouldn't release it to her. She arched a brow at him.
“Come and sit beside me,” he said, and Harper began moving toward him without a thought.
His voice had a rumbling, seductive cadence that had to be intentional. No one sounded like that without trying. Even pop culture vampires had to turn up the glowy eyes or get all whispery to sap the willpower of their victims.
As soon as Harper recognized what he was doing, she stopped mid-scoot and fixed him with a hard stare.
“Why?” Her mouth had gone dry.
“So I can see what you're doing.”
Reluctantly, she scooted closer to him and to the fire. The air was warmer in the center of the room, and the fire had heated his skin, strengthening the lure of his scent. Trying not to become aroused was like entering a room filled with freshly baked cookies and trying not to salivate. There were two ways to handle her arousal. She could try to suppress it, depleting what little mental energy and willpower she had left, or she could simply accept that he turned her on, while refusing to be embarrassed.
It was what most wolf shifters would do. Bein
g able to smell arousal, as well as other pheromone-releasing emotional states, meant that shifters took a more cavalier approach to sexual interest than their human counterparts. Harper had no doubt that Shan was confronted with similar scents from his female pack mates on a daily basis. He might have even been suspicious if she wasn't attracted to him.
He handed her the iPad. She turned it on, the image of her, Ian, and Jo in Schwarze Traube with beers in hand flashed across the screen. She felt a stab of longing. For all she had wanted to be precisely where she was, if she had the choice to jump back three years and into that bar, she wouldn't have thought twice about it.
You're tired. You're stressed. This is the hard part, just get through it. Tomorrow will be easier.
It was her brother's voice, not her own, that comforted her. Her own inner-narrator was never so kind to her.
Harper unlocked the screen, knowing full well that he had seen her password. She didn't very much care. This tablet was specifically for work. Given that she wouldn't have been able to get signal on the reservation, it wasn't linked to any cloud accounts that might have held personal documents or photos.
“Where was the picture taken?” Shan asked.
“A bar in Berlin,” she said. “We went backpacking for Ian's 21st birthday.”
“Berlin... That is in Germany?”
Harper blinked at him. “Yeah.”
Many shifters didn't even know they lived on a reservation, and only those that had been raised outside of the reservation had any clue about human states or countries. Theirs was a selective ignorance, as knowledge of the human world was of no benefit to them.
She had heard that Shan had a human education, but she still had some cognitive dissonance about it. He looked perfectly at home in his furs and tribal tattoos, a necklace of strung canines around his neck. She couldn't imagine him being in a classroom, in jeans and a t-shirt.
“Where else did you go?”he asked, seeming genuinely interested.
She couldn't help but smile at the memory. “Not very far. I had this really ambitious itinerary planned, but it all fell apart when we were on our way to Budapest.”
She paused, smile freezing on her face as she realized what he was doing. She did the exact same thing whenever she bought something off Craigslist. She would make casual conversation with the seller, asking them engaging questions wherein they had no incentive to lie. As they spoke, she would scrutinize their body language, focusing primarily on hand gestures, the mouth, and the eyes.
It was a common misconception that lies looked the same on every person. Sometimes a twitch was just a twitch. Sometimes, someone rubbed their hands together when they thought they were going to get something out of you, and sometimes they were just cold. By engaging a person in casual conversation, she could get a read on how they told the truth, and then look for the same cues when asking more pertinent questions, such as, “does the car have any problems?” or “has it ever been in an accident?”
Shan wasn't a mind reader. He was a people reader.
Harper knew exactly how to deal with him.
“We'd just left Prague and were in Vienna when Ian got sick,” she said after a beat. “Then, Jo met this Hungarian musician who was on holiday. The two of them had something of a summer romance while Ian convalesced. After that, we ended up just going home.”
That was mostly true, except they had never left Prague. While Ian had been laid up with a nasty strain of the flu, it had been Harper, not Jo, who'd been shacked up with a hot Polish street musician. He'd known exactly three words of English: yes, no, and fuck. After two weeks together, Harper had done very little to expand his vocabulary.
By keeping the broad points of her story in place, but changing minor details, she was ensuring that it would take him a long time to get a read on her, and even when he thought he had one, she'd probably still be able to get some things past him. She'd learned this technique the hard way, when she'd dated a compulsive liar. The man had been so habituated to lying, that he would lie about inconsequential things. Once, at the movies, he'd told her he'd ordered a Coke, when he'd actually gotten Dr. Pepper. Little shit like that. It had taken her weeks to figure out his deal.
“Here, look,” she said, having pulled up her map app. “The shifters I spoke to were vague on where your territory was, but my best estimates put it somewhere around here.”
She pointed to the broad swath of land that was about a hundred miles north of their current location, near to the old border between Virginia and West Virginia. She had shaded the region in purple.
“Finding you this soon was just luck. I figured we'd travel in that direction and either find your pack, or another pack that could point us in the right direction.”
“To what end?”
There was the pertinent question. Thankfully, she didn't have to lie about this.
“We have a lot of reasons for wanting to study your pack. I imagine if you asked any one of us, you'd get a different answer. We all have different concentrations, which means each of us has a different aim. Jo's more interested in the agricultural angle, Ian's interested in the politics of your pack, and I'm most intrigued to learn about your laws. I'd like to know what they are and how you implement and enforce them.”
“I take it this is not to satisfy your curiosity.”
“No. I'm hoping to use the dynamics of your pack as a model for cultural integration. I believe that our two cultures—humans and shifters—are reaching a sort of tipping point, where we can no longer remain isolated from one another. I want to facilitate the process, and I think the best way to do that is to show my kind that shifters can live and abide by laws, same as—if not better than—humans.”
“You're quite the visionary,” he said, as if tossing her a bone. “But you're wasting your time. Humans and shifters can not coexist. It is necessary that we remain separate from them.”
Harper had not expected that. She'd assumed that the man who had single-handedly brought about a revolution using human knowledge and technologies would be pro-integration.
She said, “Shifters have no problem co-habitating with human mates.”
Shan was ready with his counterpoint. “A pack can adjust around a few humans, just as humans adjust around a handful of shifters living among them. But to pursue a full integration, attempting to hold both of the races to the same standards without accommodations, which is what humans will expect, would be impossible. Take the US civil rights movement of the sixties. Yes, black Americans were integrated into white society, but no allowances were made for socio-economic disparities. They integrated schools while ignoring the fact that most black children performed better with their black teachers, and that is just one example.
“After half a century of asinine policies, they've done little to address the disparity and racial tensions can be felt in almost every aspect of human society.
“And frankly, that is a loose metaphor. The differences between black and white Americans are superficial at best. Integration, for us, would require not just a moral shift in perspective, but many concessions on the parts of both species. Can you imagine sending pups to a human school? Not only would the human model of education be unsuited for them, given that they develop faster, but like most children they have difficulties with impulsivity. Only, when a human child reacts impulsively, they may curse or smack. When a pup reacts to the same internal mechanisms, they claw and bite. And who would be overseeing these behaviors? One of their own kind, or a human teacher who has no concept of how to cope with their differences?
“I admire your idealism. I, too, wished for integration when I was your age, but it is pure fantasy. In practice, it would never work.”
He had spoken so quickly that he countered her points before they could fully form in her mind. He'd unknowingly taken the very thesis on which her work was based—that the societal shift of the civil rights movement was a positive indication that shifter integration was both possible and imminent—and turned it
inside out. While doing so, he'd spoken with an articulateness that even many of her peers lacked. When shifters spoke of other shifters having a “human education,” what they really meant was that their pack mate had gone through primary school. Few shifters lasted that long in the educational system, and those that could hang through grade school tended to be able to keep up the ruse throughout their lives, never setting foot on a reservation.
Shan didn't merely have a “human education.” He was highly educated, on a level comparable with Harper, herself.
He watched her grapple with this realization, a small smile teasing his sensuous lips.
“What is your name?”
For some reason, the question gave her a start.
“Harper. Harper Smith.”
“And how is it you've come by such interests, Harper Smith? Are you a student?”
She didn't want to cede control of the conversation to him. She wanted to go back, take every point he'd made, and turn it inside out until he recognized that he was wrong and she was right, but her brain was stalling out.
“I'm a sociocultural anthropologist with Harvard University.”
Technically, she wasn't with Harvard, but it sounded slightly less haughty than saying she was a “Harvard-educated sociocultural anthropologist.”
Shan looked her up and down once more. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-six.”
“And you have a PhD?”
“A masters. I didn't see any point in getting a PhD. I didn't really want the masters either, but it tends to make people take me more seriously.”
He nodded, as if understanding. With everything he'd said, Harper suspected he did.
“Most beautiful women don't bother with honing their intellect.”
“Was that a question?”
She made no effort to sound offended, as her quickening pulse would have betrayed her.
Shan gave a slight shrug. “It was an invitation to explain.”
“Fine. I was about thirteen when I first realized that I was attractive. I had the benefit of cultivating a halfway decent personality beforehand, as well as a level of awareness that led me to the conclusion that beauty was a currency exhausted not by use, but by time. I figured I had a few decades before it stopped getting me the things that I wanted, so I decided to invest in the more stable currency of education.”