Red Hot Alphas: 11 Novels of Sexy, Bad Boy, Alpha Males (Red Hot Boxed Sets Book 2)

by Jo Raven

  She clutched at the car door, terror gripping her. She was trying to see if she understood what this was all about. Ryder had said first blood, hadn’t he, which meant that all one of them had to was to make the other bleed.

  She struggled to see if Enoch’s teeth were in Ryder.

  Now it seemed that Ryder’s skin was far too fragile for such a stupid trial. How dare he risk everything this way? What if he lost? What would happen to all of them? What would Enoch do?

  Calla’s heart thudded in her chest.

  She was terrified, but she was also angry. She couldn’t believe that Ryder would take a chance like this.

  And she couldn’t see anything.

  The two wolves were still scuffling, rolling around in the light of the car’s headlights, kicking up dust. They were obscured by a cloud of dirt in the air, and the dust reflected the headlights back, making it impossible to see either of them.

  All she could do was hear the noises—the growls and snarls and yips and whines.

  It was too much. She was shaking. Her skin felt damp, as if a sheen of sweat had popped up everywhere. She didn’t think her heart could beat any faster. She felt it pounding everywhere—in her wrists, in her temple. It was almost painful the way it pulsed against her skin.

  She stole a glance at Jasper, who was white-faced, standing on the other side of the car, his hands clenched in fists.

  And underneath all the anger that was forming, and the fear for her own well-being, Calla was also worried for Ryder himself. What if the dust cleared and they saw him lying there, motionless and dead, like her parents all those years ago? What if he got himself killed?

  Was Enoch ruthless enough to do it?

  Calla was fairly sure that he was.

  She didn’t want Ryder dead. She didn’t even want him hurt. Even if he was a monstrous wolf, she still felt a bit of tenderness towards him.

  If he was dead… She felt the loss of it invade her soul, ripping through her and making her feel despondent. No, please don’t let him be dead. Please, please.

  She pictured his body all torn to pieces, bloody and destroyed. For some reason, in her imagination, he was in human form again, and he looked so vulnerable and sad.

  She shut her eyes, trying to drive the image away, but it only became stronger in her mind’s eye. She shook herself.

  And there was noise all around her—the men all bellowing in loud voices.

  Her eyes snapped open.

  Ryder was standing up in front of the car, naked and out of breath.

  The dust swam in the light of the headlights, but she could see Enoch, still in wolf form, licking a wound on his flank.

  “First blood!” Ryder called out, his voice seeming to echo off the trees.

  Enoch’s body twisted back into human form. He stood up to face Ryder, his expression fierce. “If you think—”

  “You won’t go back on your word, will you?” Ryder’s eyes flashed.

  Enoch sneered.

  It was tense, no one saying anything, all the men around staring at them. The light of the headlights seemed cold, and everyone seemed frozen.

  Then Enoch stalked over and picked up his discarded pants. He pulled them back on. “Fine, then. The cause doesn’t need someone like you.”

  Ryder lifted his chin.

  Enoch turned to the other men. “We wouldn’t take someone who wasn’t loyal, would we, boys?”

  The men seemed confused for a moment, but then they all roared out a rousing negative chorus.

  Enoch spat on the ground. “Get the hell out of here, scum. I never want to see your face again.”

  Ryder snatched up his jeans. “My pleasure.”

  Calla backed into the car as Ryder returned.

  Ryder yanked open the back seat and slid inside.

  Jasper got in the car too. He looked at Ryder in the rear view mirror.

  Ryder pulled the door shut.

  Jasper turned the key in the ignition.

  The car surged forward, past all of Enoch’s men.

  Calla peered out the back window, watching them grow further and further away, almost like her red balloon.

  “I can’t believe you risked that,” said Jasper.

  Ryder laughed. “It worked out, didn’t it?”

  “You had no way of knowing—”

  “I knew I could take Enoch in wolf form. I was a wolf for a long time. I’m just glad he actually went for it.”

  Jasper shook his head.

  Calla slumped in her seat.

  The car picked up speed, and they left it all behind.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Ryder found Calla sitting outside Jasper’s RV, staring off into the distance. He thought that she looked beautiful but sad. They’d been back at the carnival for several hours, and he wanted to make sure that she got taken care of. He’d been working on that. But he had to admit that he wished she wouldn’t leave. He didn’t know much about her, but he sensed that she was a good person. And, of course, she was sexy as hell.

  He’d never much cared for incredibly thin women. He liked them to look like Calla, curvy and luscious. She was gorgeous.

  But beyond that, he was drawn to her in a different way. He knew that she’d cared for him when he hadn’t been himself, and he sensed her sensitivity toward him. He felt tenderly towards her as well.

  He sat down next to her. “Hey there.”

  She gave him a small smile.

  “Look, I’ve been on the phone, and your car’s been in the city impound back at your home. I’ve got enough money to pay for you to get it out, and to get you bus fare back to where you belong.” He dug it out of his pocket. “Jasper helped too. He’s sorry about capturing you like that.”

  She took the money, riffling through it. “Well, I’m glad that you’re better, so tell Jasper that I’ll get over it. Probably the most exciting thing that’ll ever happen to me anyway.” She laughed a little.

  Ryder watched her, looking at the tiny lines around her eyes that formed when she smiled, the way her hair fell around her shoulders. He tried to summon up what he wanted to say to her, but he didn’t know how. “Uh…”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “You don’t have to go right away if you…” He cleared his throat. “That is, if you wanted, I wouldn’t mind the chance to get to know you a little better. You know, now that I’m myself again.”

  Her eyes widened. “Oh.” She sounded truly surprised. “I thought that you…” She shook her head. “But it doesn’t matter. I couldn’t do that.”

  He nodded. “You probably have a lot of people worrying about you. Your family.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t really have a family. I lost my parents when I was young. They were, um, killed by a werewolf.”

  He swallowed.

  She turned away, no longer looking at him. “My grandparents raised me, but they’re both gone. And I think I told you that my husband left me after we couldn’t have any children. So, there’s no one worrying about me, I don’t think. Not really. And I have to admit that after we… made love, I thought I felt… but then I saw you shift into that wolf. And it reminded me of the day that my parents…”

  He hung his head. Man, that was rough.

  “I saw it, you know,” she said. “I was right there. The wolf would have killed me too, but someone had heard the screams and called for help. I was rescued just in time. I’m afraid that you’re just too… brutal. I don’t think I want to get to know you better. I think I just want to go home and forget about all of this.”

  He was quiet.

  She twisted her hands together. She still didn’t look at him.

  He stood up, jamming his hands into his pockets. “I guess I can see that.”

  She did look up at him, then. “I know that Enoch wasn’t a good person. I know you had to fight him. But just knowing that inside you’re…” She let out a shuddering breath.

  This woman had been terrorized. Jasper had kidnapped her and held her ag
ainst her will. Leroy had frightened her. And he’d had sex with her. Hell, in her state of mind, it was a wonder she wasn’t pressing charges against all of them. Ryder had been stupid to think that there could be anything between him and her.

  He nodded slowly. “We’ll get you home. Don’t worry.”

  “Thanks.”

  He gazed into her eyes, and he wished things could be different. But he knew that they wouldn’t be. Couldn’t be.

  * * *

  The first full moon after leaving the carnival, Calla went into a panic. She felt like a complete idiot, especially remembering that conversation in the tent with Ryder.

  Werewolves don’t get STDs, he’d said.

  How could she possibly be so stupid? She’d had to give numerous presentations in the classroom, in which the dangers of the lupine virus were enumerated. One of the things that was always stressed was the fact that it was sexually transmittable!

  She was terrified that she’d somehow caught it from Ryder, and that she was going to turn into a wolf that night.

  She locked herself up in her house, totally afraid of the possibility. She didn’t want to be like the man who’d killed her parents, overtaken by instinct and violence. She didn’t want to hurt anyone.

  But the night came and went, and nothing happened.

  And then the days went by.

  When she’d first gotten home, she’d felt the crush of relief at being away from all of that danger. It was good to have her life back, and she enjoyed sleeping in her own bed and taking hot showers and feeling like a human being again.

  But after a few days, she got, well, bored.

  She tried to go out and see some friends, but she had trouble scheduling anything. Most people were busy with their children or vacations or their jobs. So, she ventured out alone. At the beginning of the summer, she’d been terrified of going out to a bar alone, but she went out by herself more than once now.

  It wasn’t as bad as she’d thought it might be. Drunk people were easy enough to strike up conversations with. She had a nice time. But she still felt bored. She felt like something was missing.

  She was beginning to wonder if it made any sense to associate Ryder with the werewolf who had killed her parents. She’d been doing a lot of research on werewolves after getting back. It was something to fill the boredom with. And she now knew that most werewolves weren’t the out-of-control monsters like the man on the street. That man had been newly changed, and he probably hadn’t known what was going to happen to him. That kind of thing only happened to werewolves that were bitten or changed. It didn’t happen to werewolves that were born that way, which was what Ryder was.

  And Ryder hadn’t killed anyone.

  He’d only wounded Enoch, which was better than he deserved.

  She shouldn’t have been so harsh with him.

  One night she was out at the bar, discussing werewolf rights with some kids in their twenties. The kids were in favor of abolishing the list of registered werewolves, because they said it wasn’t fair to mark and ostracize those people.

  The bartender was flipping through channels on the TV, and one of the kids shouted out for him to stop.

  The bartender obeyed, giving the kid a funny look. He’d settled on a news break on one of the networks.

  …this senseless bloodbath at the western regional SF headquarters. Werewolf workers at the Sullivan Foundation have all been massacred by an unknown assailant. Some are speculating this act was perpetrated by an anti-werewolf group, but there is no evidence one way or the other at this point.

  Calla was alarmed.

  She knew exactly what this meant.

  Enoch.

  Hadn’t Leroy said they were going to attack the SF? Hadn’t he said that the cause couldn’t be stopped? He wanted to allow werewolves to kill regular people. He was horrible, and she couldn’t believe she’d ever faulted Ryder for wanting to hurt a man like that.

  Hell, she wished he had killed him.

  She left the bar without saying goodbye to anyone. She’d had about three beers, and she normally wouldn’t have driven much farther than simply back to her own house. But she was seized with a certainty that she’d made an enormous mistake, and so she got in her car, and she drove for quite some time.

  She was glad she’d paid attention on the bus drive. She had noted that it was a straight shot up the interstate from that town to hers.

  She was going back to find Ryder, back to the last place that she’d seen him. She just needed to take the highway, and she’d get back to the carnival. She thought of the lights and the sights and the smells. And then she thought of Ryder. She had to see him. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was going to say when she did. She tried to think of ideas, but every time she practiced, it came out jumbled.

  She tried, hands gripping the steering wheel tightly, gazing out into the night. “Ryder, I think I might have been too hasty. I should never have blamed you—No, that’s stupid.”

  She took a deep breath. “Listen, Ryder, I do want to get to know you. I want to be near you. Maybe it’s crazy, but I think there might be something really powerful between us, and I think it would be a big mistake not to try to… to… What? Damn it.”

  Because this was crazy. How the hell was she supposed to get to know Ryder, anyway? He worked for a carnival, and she was a high school teacher. He would traveling all the time. She had the summer, but she had to go back to work now in less than a month, and there was no way that…

  She drove on anyway.

  But when she got to the place where the carnival had been, it was already gone. There was nothing there but a bare lot, empty buildings standing in the darkness, a chain link fence enclosing all that nothingness. They’d already moved on.

  Of course they had. Why would she have thought that he’d still be in one place?

  * * *

  The drive home took an interminable period of time, and she felt stupid and dejected. She was never going to see Ryder again, she realized. She’d had this chance to change her life, to do something crazy, and to find passion and maybe even love, and she’d thrown it all away because of some childhood trauma. She felt awful.

  When she got home, she threw herself into bed, and only then did she start crying. She sobbed into her pillow for quite a long time. She kept hoping that she’d just cry herself to sleep, but apparently that only happened in books, because she stayed wide awake.

  She rolled over onto her back, stared at the ceiling, and let the sobs subside. She hated her life. She didn’t want to go back to school and teach in a few months. There was nothing for her there anymore. She’d dreamed of a life that she couldn’t have—a husband and children. She was old now, old and fat, and it was all over. She was going to end up one of those bitter old teachers who wasn’t married. Those ladies who grumbled their way through all the faculty meetings, angry husks who hated everything—from their jobs to the students. She’d probably end up teaching forever—trapped in a miserable job, unable to find a way to get free. And she could only imagine that the students would get worse and worse and—

  There was a knock on her door.

  She sat straight up in bed.

  No one ever knocked on her door.

  She tossed aside the covers, got up, and pulled her robe on over her pajamas. Then she padded out to the front door.

  Another knock.

  She opened the door.

  “Ryder?” she whispered.

  He was standing in her doorway wearing a tight t-shirt and jeans. He looked at her with his big, dark eyes, and she felt like he was staring into her soul.

  “How did you find me?” she said.

  “I, um… the Internet?” He coughed. “Look, I know it’s really late, and you weren’t expecting me, but I found something out, and I thought of you, so I had to… I guess I could have called or something, I just—”

  She snatched up a handful of his shirt and yanked him into the house. She tugged his face down to hers, and then they
were kissing.

  Ryder didn’t seem to need much more encouragement. He was on her immediately, mouth hot against her own, hands roaming over her body, cupping her ass and pulling her close to him, smashing their bodies together.

  She ran her fingers over his shoulders, feeling his solid, wide strength. He felt wonderful.

  They stumbled backwards, away from the door, into her kitchen.

  Ryder shoved her into the refrigerator. He kissed her neck. He kissed her below her ear.

  She gasped, her eyes rolling back in her head.

  He turned her body. Now she was facing the refrigerator, her cheek pressed into its smooth surface. His hands roved over her curves. He caressed her back, her waist, her hips. He ran a finger down her spine, all the way down…

  “You have got to be the sexiest woman on earth,” he said in a labored voice.

  She clenched all over. “I want you,” she whispered. She had been wanting him for weeks, whether she’d admitted it to herself or not. Now that he was here, that he was touching her, she couldn’t help but feel overwhelming arousal.

  He kissed the back of her neck. He peeled away her robe, tossing it on the floor.

  She sighed. And then she helped him get her pajamas off, unbuttoning the top, shimmying out of the pants.

  He caressed her bare back, her bare ass, her legs.

  She knew that she should be self-conscious, naked in her kitchen. She should be worried about the imperfections of her body, should be worried that she was displaying something unpleasant to him. But she didn’t care about any of that. She felt free and happy and turned on, and he seemed to like her body, so what did she know, anyway?

  He backed away. His voice was gruff. “Turn around.”

  She shut her eyes.

  “Show me,” he murmured.

  She did. She turned against the refrigerator, head down, shy.

  But then, it was almost as if she felt his gaze on her, and it gave her strength. Slowly, confidently, she lifted her face. She stared him down. She squared her shoulders, arched her back. She presented her nude body to him.