Wolf and Soul (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 3)

by Taylor, Theodora

He didn’t understand. “You don’t love him?” And this time he raised his eyebrows, making it no doubt it was a question.

  She seemed to think about his question for a long time before answering, “Love F-R-E-E-D-O-M. Holding long time I can. In future husband boring.”

  Her syntax was atrocious, but he understood. She was trying to tell him she was having fun with Luke, holding on to her freedom as long as she could before her parents mated her off to a guy with money and a title like they had both her sisters.

  He understood what she was saying. In more ways than one. And he stood there at a loss for signs, suddenly in the weird position of feeling sorry for the princess who had everything: brains, looks, title, fortune—but would eventually have to pay the price by sacrificing the things she cherished most: freedom and fun.

  Her laughing smile went a little awkward then, like she was forcing the twinkle to stay in her eyes.

  “Can’t remember sign for M-A-K-E-O-U-T?”

  He went totally still.

  She was here for his brother. She had come here to spend her last weekend of freedom with Luke. He knew that. Knew it and understood it. But his body—the erection came on so suddenly, it caused him pain and he had to fight the instinct to fold over. Getting in wolf position would be a disaster. Especially with her down here and the tingling in his lower back… like his beast was walking up and down the bottom of his spine.

  “Wait…” she signed, wiggling her fingers in the air. “Remember: want MAKEOUT?”

  He wasn’t prepared for what happened next. He’d had this dream a thousand times before, both sleeping and awake, and it always ended the same way. Him signing for her to get out, repeatedly and so emphatically it sent her scrambling up the ladder—albeit still laughing. Him watching her go, his beast pulsating inside of him, his heart on cold fire with the feeling that she was warm water slipping through his hands. That was how it had gone down in real life five years ago and in all of the dreams that followed.

  But not tonight. Tonight he took her invitation, pulling her into his arms for a makeout session more intense than the one she’d been taunting him with. Aggressive, angry kisses, right on the mouth, like she must have grown multiple inches in the moments it took to pull her to him and they were now the same height.

  She must have grown in strength, too, because she laid him down on his dog beds and fell on top of him, the hot folds of her now naked pussy fitting over the cock throbbing inside his sweat pants. She ground herself against him, creating a torture chamber of friction, because she was right there. Everything he wanted was right there, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t take himself out or even touch her because… because…

  Grady came awake, his eyes popping open. And that was when he realized why the dream had taken the sudden erotic turn that it hadn’t in real life.

  Tu, she was on top of him, naked and kissing him. Not happily like that first time, but angrily, like she was trying to punish him for something.

  And he let her. Red hot need pumping through every vessel in his body as he kissed her back like a man caught in the thrall of a succubus. Not caring why she was in his bed, naked. Only liking that she was.

  He could smell her arousal scent as her hips humped against him, and his heart nearly exploded with joy, because she wanted him. Wanted him like he’d wanted her from the beginning, and though his beast was tingling, Grady sensed it would let him have her, let this dream finally come true. But something was off. Something he couldn’t ignore, no matter how much he liked how aggressively she was kissing him. Why was she here now, kissing him after what had happened earlier that day?

  He grabbed her hips and stopped her grinding against him. She tried to kiss him again, but he shook his head, mouthing, “Stop” against her lips, and then finally lifting her all the way off of him and setting her aside.

  He fumbled in the dark and turned on the nearby lamp.

  “Why?” he signed as soon as the lights came on.

  She was fully naked, and the sight of her, yeah, it did something to him. Made his cock pulse and his beast tingle with frustration. But she might as well have been wearing a suit of armor, her expression was so impenetrable.

  “You want sex with me,” she signed. “Why you take purse? My mating scent gone. Hot

  widow now. I let you fuck me. You let me leave.”

  He shook his head. Hot widow. Anyone who’d grown up in a pack town knew the term, what male wolves called a she-wolf who’d gone through first heat, but no longer had a mating scent—even if she was divorced. Hot widow had the same connotation as MILF in their community, used to refer to someone a lot of wolves would want to fuck, mostly because it was actually legal to do so under Lupine law. Male wolves weren’t allowed to sleep with unheated females no matter their age, but the ones who’d already gone through their first heat were fair game.

  Back when he’d been a sheriff, he’d followed up on a few texts from bar owners who were worried because a male wolf had gotten drunk and was getting a little too aggressive with a she-wolf who no longer had a mate but didn’t care to sleep with the sloppy drunk propositioning her. And that was only the texts he received. He’d long suspected the hot widows in Wolf Springs were actively harassed by unmated and unhappily mated male wolves in town, even if they never filed official complaints.

  “Who call you ‘hot widow’?” he signed. “Wolf Springs wolves? Who bother you? Tell me!”

  She shook her head.

  “Tell me.”

  Her eyes snapped away, her face so ugly with fury that for a few seconds, she looked twice her age. Fifty instead of twenty-five. Like Luke’s mother after she’d learned what life with the Oklahoma king was really going to be like. For a moment, he’d thought Tu would slap him, like his stepmother had slapped his father a few times in fits of meth-fueled anger. But then she launched into motion, crawling over him and scurrying out of the room faster than a spider in a horror movie.

  He felt the reverberation of the door across the hall slamming just a few seconds later.

  7

  “I‘m taking you home, Tu,” Grady signed. And this time he just held up two fingers for her name sign. No tap on his heart.

  It was the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Tu had thought Grady had already left for the Colorado kingdom town. But no, he’d appeared at Luke’s barn rave and killed all the fun she’d been having dancing while Luke deejayed for the wolves and humans who had shown up to party and buy whatever his crew was selling.

  She’d gone to these types of parties before with her cousin, Vince, and she’d sometimes take a couple of tabs of ecstasy beforehand, which had made dancing even more fun. But tonight, Luke had given her an “early Christmas gift,” a small packet of powder he called “ecstasy on ecstasy.”

  What the hell, she thought, as she snorted the stuff up her nose in his room before heading out to the party. Her parents would eventually make a follow up call about a possible pledge meeting to the King of Nebraska and it would be “say goodbye to all that sweet freedom” by the end of the week. Why not have a little more fun than usual? One last night of being young, wild, and free?

  And was she glad she partook of that early Christmas gift. The euphoria—it was like nothing she’d ever known. The music Luke was spinning didn’t just enter in through her ears, it coursed through her blood stream and made everything from the press of human and wolf bodies around her to the DJ par lights shining overhead, pulse with energy and life. It felt like everyone at the party were newly formed stars in the night sky.

  Time passed by in a whirl of Luke occasionally taking a break from his DJ duties to find her on the dance floor and make out with her for a little bit before disappearing again. She danced for… she didn’t know how long. Probably hours, and it felt like she might not ever come down, she was floating so high in the sky.

  But then a hand tugged at her hard, yanking her like a small vehicle hitched to a tractor-trailer through the crowd of warm bodies. She tried to fight it
, but the hand held on to her no matter how hard she pulled and scratched and kicked at the body it belonged to. And then they were through the sheet metal doors, and dressed as she was in a shimmer red mini-dress and electric blue moon boots, even her higher wolf body temperature wasn’t enough to protect her from the biting cold of the Oklahoma night.

  Her teeth chattered as she signed, “What you doing? Want to dance!”

  Behind Grady, Luke came bursting out of the club with about eight of his crew.

  “What the hell, man?” he yelled at his older brother. “Why’d you pull her out of

  there?”

  Grady might have sensed Luke and his friends behind him, but his eyes never left Tu.

  “I’m taking you home, Tu,” he signed to her, his whole body rigid with barely checked anger. “Returning you to Alaska. Returning you to your people.”

  And that was when Tu got frustrated that she still wasn’t that great at ASL. She didn’t have the language to sign, “Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?” And instead had to settle for, “Want dance. Won’t stop.”

  She tried to walk past him back into the barn, but he got in front of her and pointed to his truck with a harsh shake of his head.

  He wanted to drive her. Where? To the airport? No! her wolf whined. She’d been having so much fun, but she could already feel the euphoria loosing its grip from her, her celestial glow losing the fight with the cold wind and Grady’s disapproving stare.

  Behind him, she could hear Luke and his friends getting riled up, telling Grady to let her past even though they must have known he couldn’t hear them.

  “Who think you?” she signed, feeling angrier than she’d allowed herself to feel in a long time—possibly ever. Who did he think he was?

  Grady just pointed at the truck again.

  And the euphoria lost its battle. It was gone, replaced by something that made her feel… weird… uncomfortable. Like her body was filling up with hot air, swelling up with whatever this was that had suddenly overtaken her.

  She tried to keep arguing,

  “You not my father. I princess. Do what want…” she signed, but her arms were weak. She could barely hold them up. What was wrong with her? It was cold outside but suddenly, she was so hot, not just her skin, but her blood, it was boiling. It felt like her whole nervous system was on fire. Like she was burning up from the inside.

  She swayed and put a hand on Grady’s truck to steady herself.

  “Okay, okay,” she said out loud. “Maybe you should take me somewhere to lie down. I don’t feel so well.”

  She expected Grady to be happy about her giving in, but when she looked up at him the expression on his face wasn’t happy at all. It was terrified, like something unspeakable had just happened. But why?

  She felt a trickle, then the scent ripped through her nose, one she’d smelled before, coming off her sister, Janelle. And though she’d only smelled it once, it wasn’t the kind of thing you forgot. More like a chemical agent than a mere scent. It filled up your nose and overwhelmed your senses, making it impossible to think about anything else.

  Someone was in heat. No, not someone, she realized. Her. She was in heat.

  Everything happened fast after that. She felt Grady’s hands on her once again, but this time they were followed by his lips. She kissed him back, her she-wolf in a panic to have him inside her, even though her human vaguely realized this was not good. Not good at all. She was a princess, not meant to mate with a beta from Oklahoma.

  But tell her wolf that. It was off its leash, and it received this beta’s kisses eagerly, uncaring of his station or title, only focused on what it could feel, hard and unrelenting under Grady’s jeans, straining to get out.

  But just like their first kiss, this one was interrupted too soon. Something—no, no, Luke’s friends pulled Grady away in a scrabble of kicking and punching. She’d thought him completely mute, but it wasn’t true. Noises were coming out of him now. Terrible animal noises, like a bull in pain. And she marveled at his strength. It took all of Luke’s buddies to hold him back, two on each appendage, and they were still having a hard time keeping him restrained.

  And then there was Luke, standing in front of her, apologizing for his brother, telling her he was here now, like he’d saved her from something terrible. Luke smiled down at her as the winter wind blew and Grady bellowed and Tu—she had never felt so cold in her life.

  Well, she thought she’d never felt so cold in her life. Lying naked under a tree in the middle of blizzard five years later, she realized the real meaning of cold.

  After getting rejected by Grady, she’d thought she could make it on her own to the main road. It was only a mile or two from the cabin and she could hitchhike once she got there. When she’d left, she’d been confident her plan would work. And perhaps more importantly, she was damn well determined not to let Grady keep her here a minute longer, as if she were a rat trapped in a log cabin cage. The joke would be on him when he woke up and found her gone, despite his taking her keys and phone away like she was a child, like she wasn’t a grown she-wolf capable of making her own damn decisions.

  But the joke wasn’t on him. It was on her. The main road which had been so easy to see in the distance when she was up on the cabin’s bluff had now disappeared behind a haze of snow that made it hard to see ten feet in front of her, much less all the way to the road. And though the trees lining either side of the wide trail that led to the main road should have been enough to get her there, the sky threw flurries at her so furiously, she eventually lost all sense of direction.

  In windy conditions like this, she couldn’t catch the smell of vehicles on the main road, if anyone was even out in this mess. And she also could no longer smell the fire burning in the cabin she’d left. Or Grady.

  Grady…

  The heat had taken her as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had the last time she’d been in the same vicinity as him for more than a few hours. And if she had thought it had been inconvenient when it happened outside a hick rave in back country Oklahoma, the angry wolf gods had really outdone themselves for her second heat. Because this time, it came on right after she’d stripped out of her clothes, having made her first reasonable decision of the night, to shift into wolf form in order to ride out the storm.

  It was one of the first survival methods any wolf living in a cold weather state was taught from childhood. Human bodies were found frozen to death in mountain ranges across America every single year, but wolves couldn’t die of hypothermia. If you got caught in a snowstorm, shift, she’d been told, with an added pre-emptive admonishment from her mother that she was a princess, so there was no reason for her to ever get caught out in a snowstorm in the first place.

  However, proving even further she was not a good princess, she’d gotten caught in a snowstorm. And when she’d tried to shift into her grey-and-black wolf, nothing happened. That was when the tingling started—not in her back, like it did when she was about to change, but in her sex. And soon her whole body was suffused in heat, as hot sexual need stole its way like a heady aphrodisiac through her entire body.

  Tu fell to the ground, the overwhelming desire rendering her body unable to stand up on its own two feet. No, in this state, her wolf wanted her on the ground, exposed and open to a rutting male. So she lay there, her wolf on fire with primordial desire, her human shivering as hypothermia began to set in. She couldn’t help but laugh, her fucked up sense of humor rearing its long-buried head. How ironic. She’d set out, planning to hitchhike back to Wolf Springs, but instead she’d found a solution to her original problem. As it turned out there was a sure fire way for a she-wolf to kill herself without a gun, and she’d just stumbled upon it.

  8

  At first Grady was just annoyed when he went to check on Tu a little while after she fled from his room, but now he was pissed off. He’d been out looking for her in the fierce storm for over an hour, and he still hadn’t been able to pick up her scent. Which meant she m
ight have made it all the way down to the main road. Either that or she was lost.

  One meant he could go back to the warm protection of the cabin. But the other… he trudged further and further away from the cabin, cursing his wolf who, for whatever reason, always made him go out of his way when it came to Tu. Driving up to the cabin, deciding to keep her here until her urge to do something stupid passed, going after her when she ran into a damn snowstorm…

  His mind went to five years ago. He’d been on his way back to Wolf Springs, but found himself turning around to return to Wolf Haven, the overwhelming need to put her on a plane back to Alaska guiding his actions like a puppet master. He told himself he was doing it for Dale’s sake. He respected the retired king, who’d stepped up when Rafe had gone crazy after Alisha’s departure. And Tu was his best friend’s youngest daughter. His best friend’s stupid youngest daughter, but nonetheless, he owed it to Dale to make sure Tu made it on a plane back to Alaska. At least that had been his original intent. But look how that good deed had turned out…

  ACCORDING TO LUKE, it had taken all eight of his friends to pull Grady off Tu when she’d unexpectedly gone into heat. They’d thrown him into the tornado cellar, and though he hadn’t morphed into wolf form, he also hadn’t been… there. Something else had shown up for the four days Tu was in heat, something that had caused the guys from Luke’s crew to pull up the ladder so he couldn’t climb out of the hole when they threw food down. But that was all conjecture. The truth was, Grady didn’t remember much about those four days. Where his mind had gone or what his body had done during the time when Tu was at the farm house being mated by his brother.

  For Grady, it was like his human had been turned off, and then all at once, it came back on. Like a few minutes had passed, as opposed to four days. And then a few hours after that, Luke was opening the door to the tornado cellar and throwing the rope ladder back down.

  The look on Luke’s face when Grady made it above ground told him the younger prince more than suspected his older brother’s attempt to get at Tu was not just because he was a wolf. Any wolf could lose reason and try to go after a she-wolf in heat—that’s what the smell did to them. Flipped a primordial switch and rendered them into their basest state. The only reason Luke’s crew hadn’t gone after her was because they’d all been in violation of the “never get high on your own supply” rule and had been too altered to access their wolves.