Taken by Wolves [Call of the Wolf 4] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting)
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Call of the Wolf 4
Taken by Wolves
Wolf-dog shape-shifter triplets Sully, Nate, and Ben Anderson came to Harmony to investigate hate crimes against shifters and plan to check out their sister’s new Mates while they are in town. They are not looking for a Mate, but it’s love at first sight when they meet their sister’s best friend, Ginger West.
Real estate agent Ginger had long since given up on finding the wolves of her dreams and stuck to dating humans until meeting the hunky Anderson brothers.
Their courtship is interrupted by the hunt for the arsonist who just may be based in Harmony, possibly even someone Ginger knows. She wants to assist with the investigation, but her when her wolves turn down her help, she strikes out on her own, turning to an ex-boyfriend who works in the police department. But things aren’t like they seem, and when Ginger is kidnapped it’s up to her wolves to rescue her. Or is it?
Genre: Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Paranormal, Shape-shifter
Length: 43,799 words
TAKEN BY WOLVES
Call of the Wolf 4
Diane Leyne
MENAGE EVERLASTING
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Ménage Everlasting
TAKEN BY WOLVES
Copyright © 2013 by Diane Leyne
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62740-956-8
First E-book Publication: December 2013
Cover design by Harris Channing
All art and logo copyright © 2013 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
PUBLISHER
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
Letter to Readers
Dear Readers,
If you have purchased this copy of Taken by Wolves by Diane Leyne from BookStrand.com or its official distributors, thank you. Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book.
Regarding E-book Piracy
This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.
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This is Diane Leyne’s livelihood. It’s fair and simple. Please respect Ms. Leyne’s right to earn a living from her work.
Amanda Hilton, Publisher
www.SirenPublishing.com
www.BookStrand.com
DEDICATION
When I decided to write my first shifter book, I wasn’t sure if I would like writing about shifters. In some ways, I thought of it almost as a writing exercise, but I found that I love shifters, with all their complexities and challenges. And I love creating my own little town of Harmony.
Thanks to everyone who gave Harmony a chance. I hope to bring you many more stories of the Wolves of Harmony.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
About the Author
TAKEN BY WOLVES
Call of the Wolf 4
DIANE LEYNE
Copyright © 2013
Chapter One
Ginger West sat in her car, checking her phone for messages. It was the latest Prius, four doors, brand new, and she hated it. But she was a real estate agent, and she spent a lot of time in that car and a lot of time with clients, and the Prius told her customers she was successful, but not so successful that she didn’t want or need their business, she was current, and she was environmentally conscious. It also had four doors for when she was schlepping her clients out to different properties, and it had great gas mileage. Ginger sighed for the thousandth time since she’d bought the car. She’d rather have a Mustang convertible or a shiny new Porsche, but besides the fact that they weren’t practical for more than two people, neither of them screamed savvy real estate agent, trust me.
Ginger was one of the top three agents in the tri-county area, and it had nothing to do with the fact that Ginger, herself, had shifter blood. Wolf-dog shape-shifter blood to be accurate, not that it mattered in any way since the female of the bloodline did not shift. She did get all the shifter business, not that there was a lot of it.
Ginger frowned. The Harmony Pack was formed by a bunch of returning WWII veterans and had revitalized a dying town. Since then, the shifter population was small and rarely increased because all shifter men of a specific bloodline Mated for life with a single female, so shifters barely kept their numbers steady, which made the non-shifters happy. In the past few years, though, some new shifters had moved to town, including Oliver, who was a doctor who specialized in shifters and was Mated to Ginger’s friend Penelope, and Samantha who was now Mated with Ginger’s cousins.
It was possible to turn a human into a shifter, but it was rarely done, regardless of what Hollywood would have people think. Of course, if a human female Mated with wolves, she underwent certain changes, but like ninety-nine percent of females of a wolf-dog shifter bloodline, she wasn’t actually able to shift. As far as deliberately changing a human male into a shifter, that was very rarely done and something that required a great deal of deliberation and could only be carried out by the pack Alpha. For Harmony, the pack Alpha was Rory McAllister, the leader of the WWII vets who formed the Harmony Pack. They had been changed to save their lives during the war. In her own lifetime, she only knew of one human who’d been changed, and that was Oliver.
&nb
sp; Dr. Oliver McKay was cousin to shifters, and when it came to Mating, he was considered the Alpha as he was the oldest of the five cousins. However, he was human. In order to form the Mating Bond, he had to become wolf. It had been agonizingly tough decision. Ginger knew from Oliver’s Mate Penelope that he’d agonized over the idea of changing for years. His adoptive parents were wolf and they offered him the gift but he turned it down. It was only when he fell in love with Penelope and realized that he, she, and his cousins were destined to form their own family pack that he went to Rory and made the change. She watched him with Penelope and his cousins. She knew they were happy, but she sometimes saw a sadness in his eyes. It wasn’t easy to make that kind of change at almost forty years of age, and it showed the depth of his love for his Mate.
As a result of all these factors, shifter numbers rarely changed. They often had big families with three to five children, but since most of the kids were male and they Mated with a single female, total numbers were pretty constant, and small in the grand scheme of things. That made it easy to prevent their existence from becoming general knowledge, although in some places like Harmony, they lived there in an open-secret kind of way. The town had been dying before the WWII vets had shown up. The town owed them its life and knew it, at least the older generation did.
It wasn’t easy, sometimes, being a minority, even a silent, hidden one. It would have been nice to be openly wolf, but Ginger knew that wasn’t possible. Even in Harmony, not everyone was happy about the silent minority, so most people just pretended not to notice that there were sometimes packs of wolf-dogs running in the hills, and for their part, the shifters did their running far from the center of town, in the area mostly populated by other shifters.
Sometimes she wondered what it would be like if, instead of being a small minority, shifters had grown in number and maybe even became a majority. With the pack elders retiring to New Harmony, New Mexico, their numbers would always remain low in Harmony, unless shifters continued to move to town. Certainly with Oliver now setting up a practice here, the town was becoming more attractive to other shifters. Oliver wasn’t a general practitioner. He was an orthopedist. He and Lena, the local shifter vet, were planning a joint practice. Oh, to the casual observer, it would look like they only had offices in the same building, but they’d planned renovations so the clinics were secretly joined to facilitate the treatment of shifters in either form. Most of his patients were human, though, just as most of the animals that Lena treated were just that, animals.
They’d had some inquiries from other doctors and even a dentist, all shifter-friendly professionals. This wasn’t common knowledge, yet. Hell, even most of the people in her own office weren’t aware that Lena and Oliver were currently debating whether to create a full-service medical facility and had asked Ginger to make some discreet inquiries about purchasing the entire building that Lena’s clinic was located in. It was three stories tall and located in downtown Harmony right on the main square. Lena had a first-floor office, and the neighboring office had been empty until Oliver leased it. But now, they were considering more than just setting up interconnected offices. They were thinking about full-service medical offices, with shifter-friendly equipment.
The clinic would, of course, treat humans. There weren’t enough shifters in the area to support a shifter-only clinic, and even if there were, they would never discriminate like that. Besides, when they were in human form, shifters were exactly the same as humans except in terms of strength, endurance, and keenness of senses. Even the non-shifting females performed better than human females in these regards, but not as noticeably as the men.
And then the fire struck, burning down Lena’s clinic and making the whole building unusable. It was almost one hundred years old and had gone up in flames quickly. Luckily, no person or animal had been injured in the fire. It had also given impetus to Lena and Oliver’s plans. Instead of trying to renovate an old building, they’d be able to build something new and specialized, assuming they could buy it and control the renovations. This way, they could make sure that they had the specialized equipment they’d need if a shifter needed help. They’d also have a built-in sprinkler system and top-notch security, which was important because the fire had been declared arson, but there were no suspects and the case was growing cold.
Ginger was relieved no one was hurt but had mixed feelings about the clinic being expanded. She loved the thought of having a specialist nearby. And she knew that most people understood and accepted Oliver moving to town. His long-lost cousins John and Jack Stephens and Kent and Tucker O’Mara lived here, and the five of them were now Mated to Penelope Levinson, who owned the Sunshine Café, but more shifter-friendly doctors would attract more shifters to town, some permanently, she imagined, and she worried that wouldn’t sit well with certain people in town if shifter numbers grew too large. That was the problem with being a minority. When there are only a few of them, they are non-threatening. Grow in number, and suddenly things changed, no matter how much they helped the community. In her job as a real estate agent, maybe she was more aware of this than others were.
Even in the office where she worked, she’d become aware of an undercurrent. Since shifter numbers were stable, there weren’t often many requests to buy or sell shifter properties. More often, it was leasing inquiries, but all shifter-related business had been shunted to her, at least as far as existing properties went. She’d noticed that the odd time that a shifter had come in looking for a place to buy or rent, if one of the other agents had taken care of them, they ensured that they only looked at properties in the shifter area of town or even in another town entirely. It had bothered her, but she didn’t speak up. What could she say? When discrimination was subtle, the person who spoke up was often seen as a troublemaker. Besides, she worked for the only real estate company in Harmony and liked her job.
Griffin Homes was a private company, not affiliated with any of the big companies, and had had a firm grip on Harmony real estate for generations. It was now run by Octavia Griffin-Ramsay, granddaughter of the founder. Octavia was a decade older than Lena. They’d known each other all of their lives as her younger sister Cleo was the same age as Ginger and they’d gone to school together. Tav was a bit pretentious and could be overbearing, but she was also hardworking and good at her job. Ginger liked her and had no problem working for her. Hell, Octavia had hired and trained her and Ginger owed her loyalty, so she didn’t make waves.
Besides, when it came to human rights protections, shifters were, by definition, excluded. Just ask the chief of police. Chief Roger Ramsay, Octavia’s husband, did have a problem with shifters, although his son Tim, from his first marriage, seemingly did not since he and Lena used to date. Chief Ramsay had no shifters on his police force, and whenever there was a problem between shifters and humans, he consistently came down on the side of the humans.
Ginger drummed her fingers on the steering wheel of the car. These clients were going to drive her crazy. They weren’t even buying. They just wanted to lease a vacation place in the northwest with a view to potentially purchase at the end of the lease. They wanted something that was not too far from Seattle or Tacoma, but far enough away that they were out of the hustle and bustle of the big cities. She’d shown them places in all the neighboring towns, but nothing had pleased them. She’d finally decided to show them a place on the outskirts of Harmony.
She almost hoped they didn’t like the place she was showing them. It was kind of close to the wolf-shifter side of town, and she hoped they wouldn’t be spooked by the goings-on at night because that was when the wolves liked to run. Although unlike in popular fiction, little of the running happened during the full moon. That was when Mating Lust was at its peak, and Mated packs were all happily, uncontrollably humping away all during the three nights of the full moon. They didn’t have the time or inclination to run wild.
Ginger’s best friends were all Mated in the capital M sense. That is, they’d all gone through the Ma
ting Ceremony, which bound the female to her wolves permanently and vice versa. No one really understood how it worked, but once the Ceremony was complete, it couldn’t be undone, not that anyone ever wanted to be Unmated, or at least no one she’d ever heard of. Once complete, the individuals involved developed an unrelenting lust for each other, especially the nights of the full moon. That was why people were so very careful before entering into the state of Mated bliss.
Ginger’s cousins were Mated to Samantha, who’d just recently moved to Harmony. It had all happened pretty quickly, but when wolves scented their Mates, they generally moved pretty quickly to get the Ceremony carried out to seal the deal. Sam hadn’t been raised around wolves, even though she was descended from one, so she wasn’t all that keen at first when five brothers declared she was theirs. Ginger still giggled at the thought of Sam leashing her Alpha cousin Gabe and parading him through town to teach him a lesson. Yes, Sam and Ginger’s cousins were well matched. But they’d worked things out and Mated and formed their own family pack.
Her best friend Lena, who was town vet, on the other hand, had known all her life that she was meant to be with the three James brothers, but they’d only just Mated a few months ago due to the actions of the hardheaded Alpha Alex that had torn them apart for years. But they, too, had worked it out and Mated.
And now her other best friend, Penelope, was Mated. Like Lena, she’d known for years she was meant to be with two sets of cousins, but no matter what they tried, Mating had never worked. It had gone on to the point that they’d almost broken up over it. Penelope couldn’t handle the needs and demands of four wolf-shifter Mates and needed the Mating Ceremony to transform her so she was able to match their lust. It wasn’t until their long-lost cousin Oliver had shown up that they realized the problem was that none of them was the Alpha. He was, but he wasn’t a shifter, which led to a new set of complications, but that had all been dealt with. Now they were happily Mated and enthusiastically working on puppy making.