“She betrayed me!” Rafe’s wolf came alive inside of him, threatening to transform him again, he was so angry. “She was my fiancée and she betrayed me.”
If Alisha sensed how enraged she’d made him, how close to the surface his wolf hovered now, it wasn’t apparent when she twisted up one side of her mouth and said, “Yeah, but…”
“Yeah, but what?” he said, his voice low and dangerous.
“I mean, you’re acting like this was a Queen Guinevere betraying King Arthur with Sir Lancelot kind of situation, and it was more like…” she appeared to search her memory for the right reference. “Gaston and Belle.”
“Gaston and Belle,” he repeated.
“You know, from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast?” Taking his non-answer as an invitation to keep on talking, she explained, “You see, Gaston only wants to marry Belle because she’s the most beautiful girl in town, not necessarily because he appreciates how awesome she is, which she is—especially when you consider how few literate women there were in small French villages back then. He should have appreciated her for the entertainment value of having someone to read to him at night alone. But he didn’t. His basic premise was, ‘I want her because she’s hot.’ And, maybe it’s time to admit that’s where you were with Chloe.”
Rafe cut her off right there. “I’m the alpha of Colorado, and you’ve insulted me, Princess. Grievously. The correct course of action at this point would be to apologize.”
Alisha pointed to herself, her face a pantomime of confusion. “You want me to apologize for conducting my research? You’re seriously telling me that?”
“I want you to apologize for overstepping your boundaries when it comes to a situation that has nothing to do with you, one I’ve made clear isn’t to be researched any further.”
“Fine, Rafe, I’ll apologize,” she said. Then she let her face go stony. “Just as soon as you apologize for being an idiot and not being able to see pass your own ego to the part in history Chloe might have played.”
Grady stepped forward then, releasing a low menacing growl in the back of his throat.
But Rafe stilled his beta with a shake of his head. And he quite deliberately pushed his wolf down, so he could speak to Alisha as a man. “I am the Alpha of Colorado,” he said.
Alisha rolled not just her eyes, but her entire head. “I know who you are, Rafe. Believe me, I’ve been told quite a few times since I got here.”
Rafe’s wolf went very still then. Alpha princes weren’t raised like most male wolves. They didn’t fight just for the hell of it, they didn’t spend a lot of time in shifter bars, and they didn’t stir up drama just to have something to do. They were raised better. They were taught to fight only to defend their title or loved ones, to never lose their tempers, and to treat princesses with gentle respect.
But when Rafe stepped up to Alisha, there was nothing gentle inside of him, “This situation you’ve created—at first it was just annoying, but now you’ve pissed me off.” His eyes met hers then, and he did nothing to hide the wolf inside of him, the wolf crouched down and ready to spring at her again the way it had the last time they had seen each other at the Alaska dinner party.
A certain scent entered the air then, acrid and bright. It made his nose tingle and even though he’d never experienced it before, he knew it instantly for what it was—the smell of Alisha’s fear. His wolf cheered. Finally, she was taking him seriously, as she should have from the start.
But then she squared her shoulders and met his eyes despite her initial fear. “I’m not going to apologize for being one of the few academics in the entire world who gives a shit about she-wolves in our history. And I’m certainly not going to apologize for the entire book I plan to write on the subject of Chloe Adams when this is all said and done. Because she wasn’t just your fiancée. She was my friend. And she was a good person. And she’s an important part of history just like all the dumb alpha kings we still tell stories about around our campfires, the ones that dominate nearly all of our wolf texts. Chloe is my campfire story, and I’m not going to let you take her away from me.”
Rafe’s wolf thrashed inside of him, demanding that he conquer Alisha once and for all. “Fuck her!” it screamed at him. “Fuck her hard.”
However, Rafe’s human found himself admiring the Alaska princess for standing up to him like this, despite the fear scent rolling off of her in waves. Almost no one else would have dared. But his Alisha… she was a she-wolf, a real she-wolf, one with teeth, one who would have to be brought to heel if he wanted to call her his mate.
“I’m going to enjoy this,” he said with a slow smile, imagining what that big, soft body would feel like under his.
His no doubt feral smile seemed to unnerve her, and Rafe admired the way she forced her chin into the air when she said, “Enjoy what?”
“Taming you.”
He motioned his beta sheriff forward. “Take her to the airport and put her on a plane back to Fairbanks.” Then he addressed his future queen: “Alisha Ataneq, you are no longer welcome in the state of Colorado by decree of its king.”
Grady forcibly removed her from the house with Alisha comparing Rafe to all manner of despots from several different ages in history as the beta escorted her out. Apparently getting banned from Colorado had taught her nothing about the importance of showing proper respect to her alpha.
But she would learn, he vowed as he watched Grady drag her out. She would learn.
7
This past February a Viking alpha king showed up in the shifter town of Wolf Springs and claimed Chloe Adams, the she-wolf then engaged to Colorado’s alpha prince, as his fated mate. She reportedly did not want to honor the claim and still planned to mate with the alpha prince as soon as she went into heat. But then she unexpectedly went into heat on the night of a full moon, which kept her in human form. For reasons still not understood, the Viking alpha king also didn’t shift and he somehow found his way to her.
By sunrise the next morning, the entire town knew by the sounds coming from the house that the alpha prince’s fiancée was now mated to another. The alpha prince left town, and once the she-wolf came out of her mating frenzy, she also attempted to leave town and the Viking behind. No one is quite sure where she was planning to go, but the sheriff caught her and dragged her back for a reason that still hasn’t been fully explained—this historian is also fairly sure it wasn’t legal. The Viking was permitted to visit her, but when they came back to the clinic’s cage to fetch him, both the Viking king and the she-wolf had disappeared.
This was thought to be the end of it, but then seven months later, the she-wolf came back through the portal, wounded and in labor with a son who was delivered by the Colorado alpha king and his queen. The woman stayed on for two months, waiting to be reunited with her mate. Then she left her newborn with the royals in order to visit one Professor Henley. It is not known what they talked about, as the professor refuses to meet with me, but according to other sources, during their visit a flash was seen in Wolf Springs and reportedly the Viking came back through the gate.
He spent a mere forty-eight hours in Wolf Springs. During which he recovered from an undisclosed illness and met his son for the first time. An eyewitness, who happened to be in the room at the time, said it was a very touching scene to see the Viking meet his son for the first time.
Then, reportedly, Chloe Adams drove into Denver to pick up two period costumes, one for an adult and one for an infant, which she paid for in cash. Shortly after that, all three family members disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.
And this report would be a whole lot longer if Rafe Nightwolf wasn’t such a selfish, entitled, jerky douchebag!!!!!!!
Alisha punched this last sentence in with particular force, before letting her head drop into her hands. Her recent visit to Wolf Springs had been such a bust. She couldn’t believe Rafe kicked her out of Colorado.
And that new sheriff of his was even worse than the one w
ho had prevented Chloe from leaving Wolf Springs. The burly blond had not only handcuffed her, but had also ignored every single one her questions as he drove her to the airport in the back of his gigantic truck like a prisoner.
At least she’d thought he was ignoring her questions. When they’d gotten to the ticket counter, he’d pulled out a smart phone and showed it to the clerk dressed in a smart blue blazer with “Alaska Way Airlines” embroidered across the front pocket.
“One first class ticket to Juneau coming up,” the attendant said, and just a few minutes later, she handed the sheriff an envelope with two paper tickets—a non-stop to Fairbanks and a puddle-jumper to Juneau. She didn’t even ask to see Alisha’s ID.
“Are you deaf?” Alisha asked as he escorted her through security still handcuffed. “Mute?”
But this time he really must have been ignoring her, because he didn’t answer. And he didn’t let her out of the cuffs until he’d deposited her into a seat in the first class section. He handed her the envelope with the tickets in it and typed something into his phone, which he turned around to show to her:
“Don’t come back.” Then he left without so much as a wave good-bye.
If Alisha hadn’t been so furious, it would have been humiliating. But she’d refused to let embarrassment creep in, and had instead used her impotent rage to fuel six hours worth of note taking on her flight back to Alaska. If Rafe thought a little banishment would be enough to make her abandon her book project, he had another thing coming.
Now she was back in her office typing up a very rough draft of what little of Chloe’s story she’d been able to piece together with the help of Rafe’s father. It wasn’t much, she’d discovered upon setting the whole thing down on paper. There were still so many questions left unanswered… but then she thought about the USB copy of the contents of Chloe’s desktop, which she’d managed to swipe and slip into her purse before getting hauled out of Colorado. With whatever notes Chloe left behind and her access to the Alaska Archives, hopefully she’d be able to piece together enough material to write her book.
A knock sounded on her office door, interrupting her book-plotting thoughts. But she smiled when Matt poked his head in.
“You busy?” he asked.
She gave him a friendly smile. “I can make myself un-busy. What’s up?”
He edged himself into one of her guest chairs. “Well, I have some good news and some bad news and some possibly good news.”
Before she could ask to hear the bad news first he said. “The good news is I think I might have found those diaries you asked me to keep a look out for.”
Ever since receiving Professor Henley’s call, she had all but abandoned her research on she-wolves in post-colonial Alaska and started putting most of her time and energy into finding out as much about the Viking wolves as she possibly could. She’d asked Matt to look for a few things for her, including the diaries of an Arab diplomat named Ibn Fadlan.
According to the annals of history, he’d traveled around Norway, meeting a host of Vikings, and journaling his experiences. But many of his diary’s manuscript pages had now “disappeared.” As a Lupine History post-doc, she knew whenever a set of ancient records were found with a few missing pieces, that usually meant the wolves had gotten to them and gone through them first, or some other paranormal force—but in this case, she had her finger crossed for the wolves.
The North American Lupine Council was near fanatical about keeping evidence of their existence out of the human purview, and very few universities even dared keep a secret wolf collection. When they did, it was usually in fairly libertarian places like Alaska, South Dakota, and New Hampshire, states that liked their freedoms and weren’t as scared of the North American Lupine Council as others.
“You found them,” she said to Matt, leaning forward.
“I think so. Or at least a few manuscript pages one of our wolves smuggled out of the secret collection at the University of Baghdad back in the nineties before the first Gulf War. My Arabic isn’t that great, but I scanned it and put it through a translator and this passage caught my eye.”
Matt pulled a few photocopied pages out of a manila folder.
“If the translation program is working right, he talks about coming upon the village of King Fenris the Serious, which he finds puzzling, because the king is actually quite jovial. Fadlan is only received because the villagers think their queen, who he describes as ‘a beauty, dark of skin,’ might be interested in talking with him, because he also has dark skin. She speaks Old Norse, but in a dialect that is often hard for him to understand, and she won’t tell him where she came from. And she is said to have three children, but he only meets two of them, a boy and a younger girl. But he says she also has a rather large wolf puppy that stays crouched at the queen’s feet and seems to be afraid of humans. The king and queen, who he describes as ‘happy with each other in every way’ receive him for three nights. But then the queen tells him though she’s enjoyed his company, it is best he move on before the next full moon. She tells him it is very important he and the Vikings he is with sail in a different direction than they originally planned, saying something to the effect of though they themselves are tame, she cannot be so sure about the village to the north of them that calls no man king. They take her advice, but later on, one of the Vikings manning the ship Ibn is on says he suspects the foreign queen, the king, and their entire village are creatures of legend, ones who transform from human to animal in the light of the full moon.”
Alisha’s eyes widened and she took the translated pages from him. “That’s her. I’m sure of it. I’m getting closer.” But then her excitement dimmed when she remembered what he’d said when he’d sat down. “How could there possibly be any bad news?”
“I was hoping you’d see it that way.” He grimaced. “The bad news is the funding for your fellowship here has just been pulled and as of next semester, you’ll no longer be employed by the University of Alaska.”
“What!?”
He raised his hands defensively. “The only reason I’m here telling you this is because I thought it should come from a friend as opposed to the head of the department, who’s still pissed at you for pissing off the new King of Colorado.”
Alisha’s eyes narrowed. “Tell me this sudden defunding doesn’t have anything to do with Rafe Nightwolf.”
Matt lifted his shoulders up and down. “What did you expect, Chloe? His family is one of the most influential wolf dynasties in the United States. He has a seat on the council and the Nightwolf trust gives millions of dollars to the wolf residency program so shifters can attend state colleges all over the U.S. and enroll in wolf-based classes. He’s not a guy you want to piss off. And you basically announced that you plan to write an entire book about the woman who left him for a Viking.”
She shook her head. “How is no one understanding the impact Chloe Adams might have had on our own history? For all we know, she’s influenced facets of our culture we don’t even know about. How can you all stay so busy bowing and scraping to this jerk that you can be totally okay with not finding out what happened to her? Where’s your curiosity?”
Matt gave her a sad smile. “Believe me, Alisha. I’m not happy about this situation either. It sometimes feels like the Council only funds us so they can keep us in check. But that brings me to the possibly good news. Now that you don’t have a class load next semester, you can dedicate more time to solving the mystery of what happened to your friend.”
She was still fuming, but she realized Matt was right. She would find out what happened to Chloe, she vowed. And she wasn’t going to let anyone, especially not Rafe Nightwolf, stop her.
As if reading her thoughts, Matt leaned forward and looked over both shoulders before saying, “And if you’re thinking of going rogue with your investigation, like travelling to Europe or something, I was thinking I could go with you, help you with your research or whatever else you need.”
Her heart melted at his offe
r. “Really? You’d do that for me? What about your class load? I mean you still have a job.”
“I could take a sabbatical. Tell them it’s for research.”
Alisha nodded, thinking of how much better it would feel to go wherever her research led her if she knew Matt was by her side. Many unheated she-wolves her age, especially princesses, didn’t travel for fear of going into heat somewhere inconvenient and even worse, mating with someone inappropriate.
But if she did go into heat and mate with Matt, she could see herself living a nice boring life with her untitled co-worker, a life of intellectual pursuit, a life free of the Game of Wolves.
“That’s a great idea,” she said to Matt. “I think our first stop should be the wolf collection in Russia…” Her excitement dimmed. “But first, I suppose I better clean out my office.”
Matt stood up and gave her arm a sympathetic rub. “Let me help you with that.”
With Matt’s assistance, she packed up her office with her head held high, ignoring her fellow liberal arts wolf professors and post-docs who just happened to walk by her open office door, shortly after Matt delivered the news. She figured they must have known what had happened and exactly why, because no one stopped in to offer her condolences on losing her job. It was like she had a contagious disease and they were afraid talking to her would call Rafe’s wrath down upon them as well.
“Ignore them,” Matt said, picking up three of her five boxes in his long arms. “I’ll help you get these out to the car.”
“Thanks,” she said. As she bent to pick up the other two boxes, she thought of Rafe, pictured his handsome face with a smug smile on it, because he’d gotten her fired. Well, she’d show him. He thought he’d shut her down, but he had only fueled her determination to get to the bottom of this mystery—
Out of nowhere a tingling sensation overtook her. Like the worst case of static electricity, but all over her body.
She stood back up, frowning.
Wolf and Prejudice (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 2) Page 6