Wolf and Prejudice (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 2)

by Taylor, Theodora

  “Don’t know about that. She can stay until the wedding, but any longer than that would be disrespectful to Grady.” He’d meant for this to come out as a kingly proclamation, but his voice cracked at the end as another wave of sadness crashed over him. And tears once again began to spill from his eyes.

  Rafe wiped them away viciously. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve never cried in my life, not even when Alisha disappeared. Now…”

  Mag frowned. “Did you get in an argument with Alisha? One that ended with her crying?”

  “Yes,” Rafe admitted. “She tried to play me and then got upset when her plan didn’t work. How did you know?”

  Mag rubbed a hand over his chest. “It’s the mate bond. It’s not just the words, but the emotions that are telepathic. When she’s sad, you’re sad. It drove me crazy when Janelle and me went through our rough time. And that’s another reason I got out of there. Janelle can get mad with her mom and it’s no problem, but add the mate bond to the mix, and I’m in there cursing out my in-laws. So I left to keep Christmas from getting too awkward.”

  Rafe wanted to deny he and Alisha had the same kind of emotional telepathy, but more tears came to his eyes. “So, she’s basically hijacked my emotions?” he said.

  Mag nodded. “Yep. It sucks, and the bond only gets worse over time. So it’s probably feeling pretty intense for you now, because it’s like almost five years of mateship and you haven’t had time to get used to it.”

  Rafe cursed. Yet another thing he had to be angry at Alisha about.

  “But on the flip side, when she’s happy, you’re happy, too.” Mag threw him a knowing grin. “And when she’s really happy, you’re real, real happy. Know what I’m saying?”

  No, he didn’t. He hadn’t been happy since the day Alisha had left him, and he found it hard to imagine he ever would be again.

  “I better get home,” he said. “The less people see me like this, the better.”

  He started walking and Mag fell in beside him. “You know, this emotional telepathy thing, it’s a two-way street. If she’s crying so hard it’s making you cry, you can help her by calming down. Like if you’re carrying around a lot of anger and stuff, that’s just going to make it worst.”

  “I can’t stop being angry. I’m never going to stop being angry about this,” Rafe informed him.

  “I get it,” Mag said. “Janelle and me were having problems when Alisha left, too. If Janelle had gone with her back in time, I doubt I ever would have forgiven her. But five years, man. This bond between me and Janelle, it’s strong, stronger than both of us and we’re not even fated mates as far as I know—”

  Rafe could already see where Mag was going with this, and it only made him walk faster.

  “So maybe if you could do something to make yourself less mad, something you know she’d like, too. It would help with the water works.”

  Fuck that, Rafe thought to himself. Like hell he was going to let go of his anger in order to make the she-wolf who betrayed him feel better. With abrupt and brutal force, he shoved himself into her mind for the first time in five years. “Alisha, stop crying. It’s affecting me and I’m going to talk to my sons now.”

  Less than a moment later, the urge to sob was slowly replaced with an iron determination not to cry. And eventually the crying urge abated.

  Rafe let out a tired sigh when it felt like his emotions were his own again. “I don’t know how my parents put up with this shit.”

  Mag shook his head in commiseration. “A few months mated to Janelle was all it took to understand why my parents went out the way they did.”

  The mention of Mag’s parents caused the conversation to fizzle out. Another sad story that neither of them wanted to dredge up.

  They stayed quiet for the rest of the walk.

  “So…” Mag said, when they got to the front door of the kingdom house. “It's not something Tikaani and Wilma like to talk about, but you know Janelle's got a law degree now, right?”

  No, Rafe hadn't known and he threw Mag a none-too-pleased look. “Seriously? You let her get a law degree?”

  Mag rubbed a hand over his shortly fuzzed head. “Actually I was the one who suggested it. You were so mad and she was worried about Alisha. I said, 'Baby, why don't you make sure your sis has some good representation when she gets back?' Plus, I knew how hot she'd look in one of them suits with the pencil skirts, and let me tell you…” Mag grinned with obvious appreciation for his wife's professional appearance, “I was one hundred percent right. Law and Order looks good on her, yeah?”

  Rafe shook his head. “I didn't think it was possible to hate you any more than I already did, man…”

  Mag just chuckled. “So yeah, you probably have maybe a couple of days tops before Janelle files a wrongful imprisonment motion or whatever they call it when a king locks his future wife up in his ex-girlfriend's changing cage. But how about this? I go in there and make sure Janelle doesn't run you down with her threats yet. Give you enough time to go fetch your boys and maybe get upstairs before she knows you're back. I do that, and you and me call what happened in Wyoming even. Cool?”

  Rafe thought about Mag's proposal that he put aside five years of estrangement in exchange for Mag running interference with Alisha's sister for a few minutes. Then he shrugged and said, “All right. That's cool.”

  Mag grinned and slapped him on the shoulder like they'd just closed a lucrative business deal, before disappearing into the house. And Rafe didn't feel like he'd made a bad bargain. After a day of dealing with the Alaska queen, he did not relish getting into and even uglier confrontation with the Queen of Wyoming. And as least he managed to untangle one of his relationships today. At this point, Rafe was willing to take what he could get, and he made his way around the side of the house, following the sound of laughter to the side yard.

  But when he arrived in the large expanse of snow-covered yard that sat to the side of the kingdom mansion and guesthouse, the laughter came to a stop. Three puppies, two little girls, and Tu all turned to look at him, like the devil himself had entered their midst.

  Only one of them, the taller—and therefore he assumed the oldest—of the two girls, spoke. “Is it true, you put Auntie ‘Lisha in jail?”

  She should have been chastised for speaking out of turn to a king, but Tu, who was dressed in head to toe black, like a Goth version of a widow, just stood there, hugging her arms around herself like his presence was the equivalent of a unwelcome chill.

  He ignored the small Wyoming princess’s question and said, “I’m here for my sons.” His eyes fell on Rafesson, but he gave the command to all three of the little wolves standing before him. “Follow me back to your room.”

  He didn’t wait for their acquiescence before heading toward the sliding glass side doors that led back into the house. And, as it turned out, he didn’t need to. They quietly followed him into the house and up the back stairs without needing to be told twice.

  When they reached the bedroom, he closed the door behind him and said, “As your father and your alpha, I command you to change back into human form—”

  The words were barely out of his mouth before three little brown boys appeared before him naked.

  It was immediately apparent that they weren’t identical, though they all had light brown skin and similar nests of long, glossy black curls on their heads. Knud was the tallest of the three by a few inches. Skinny and long of limb, whereas Nago was the shortest with a bit of pudge that spoke to his enjoyment of the sweets Erylace had been stuffing him with ever since he’d gotten here. And Rafesson—well, looking at his oldest son was like looking at a picture of himself at that age. Like he had spit him out with nothing but a hairstyle change.

  Rafesson gave his brothers a command in Old Norse and they all proceeded to get dressed in the clothes Erylace had left for them on the back of a chair when she’d thought it would only take a request to get them to change back to their human forms. Rafe watched in fascination
as they puzzled over the zippers in their old language, only to have Knud figure it out faster than Rafe himself might have if he had only days ago been thrust forward to a time and place he’d never known.

  After they were dressed, Rafesson gave more commands. They went over to the duffle bag Alisha brought back with them, the one Rafe discarded without thought in a corner of the room. Rafesson rifled through the bag, before coming up with two child-sized iron swords, one of which he hand to Knud, and a small axe, which he handed to Nago.

  Then they turned to him with weapons raised.

  “Now wait a minute,” Rafe said. The last thing he needed to put the cap on this hellish week was having to fight off his three weapon-wielding sons.

  But Rafesson dropped to his knee and lay his head against the sword’s hilt. “Father,” he said, in heavily accented English. “I do honor you.”

  His other two brothers quickly dropped to their knees behind Rafesson and said in stereo, “Father, I do honor you.”

  And then all three boys dropped their weapons and swarmed him, each wrapping their arms around as much of his waist as they could.

  “We are happy to know you.” Rafesson said. His voice cracked and he buried his head in his father’s stomach, so perhaps he wouldn’t be able to see the tears that were obviously in his eyes.

  “We are very happy to know you,” Nago and Knud said, their own glistening eyes speaking to how much they had missed him in their lives, even if they had never known him.

  And suddenly the tears that sprang to his eyes weren’t due to the mate on the other side of town. “I’m happy to know you, too,” he told his sons. “I’m happy to know you, too.”

  21

  Less than a half hour after she forced herself to stop crying, a wave of profound happiness passed over Alisha, so intense she nearly started crying again, but this time with joy. It was so completely the opposite of the constant anger she’d been feeling over the past week that she knew in an instant Rafe must have finally met the boys, because that’s how she felt whenever they came home after any time away.

  And despite the fact that she was in here and they were out there, she felt happy for the boys. It hadn’t been easy growing up in a village where fathers were considered the most important figures in a boy’s life. And though they’d never rebuked her for taking them away from Rafe, toward the end of their stay in Old Norway, they’d begun asking about their father more and more and not necessarily accepting the extremely vague answers she’d offered in reply.

  But how to explain to the boys that their father was both living and yet to be born; that he would love them, but would ruthlessly use them to make alliances and serve his ongoing legacy? How could she explain to them that a prince’s life was not his own?

  They might not have had a father, but they’d made friends who liked them for themselves and not for their titles. They had childhoods that didn’t consist of adults telling them to stay quiet at state dinners, to act at least three years above their current ages, to perpetually be on their best behavior—even at school because they represented the state crown and we’re always being watched.

  In the village, Rafesson, Knud, and Nago had been untitled boys, free to grow into whatever they wanted. Here that would be decided for them. She wondered if they’d ever understand her reasons for keeping them from their father, or understand why she’d done what she’d done.

  “The boys are great.”

  The words we’re so close to what she’d been thinking about, it took her a moment to realize they weren’t her own thoughts, but a voice being pushed into her head. Rafe’s voice.

  She sat up in bed, as if he were actually in the room with her.

  “I know,” she said, pushing words into his mind for the first time since she’d left him in Alaska. Re-establishing the connection on her end felt both intimate and relieving, like finally getting to pee after holding it for too long. An almost heady rush overtook Alisha as she said, “I know they’re great. Really great.”

  “Strong and disciplined and smart—they speak two languages.”

  “Old Norse way better than me.”

  “They asked me to show them the books. They said you promised them more books than they could read in one day when they came to this land.”

  She smiled. “I did. The village only had one book, handwritten by Fenris’s Aunt Bera, and no one but her and her daughter were allowed to touch it. And I didn’t want to unduly influence history, so I had to make up stories for them off the top of my head. But historians are better recounters than authors, so my stories weren’t that great. I told them when we got back here, there would be more books than they’d know what to do with.”

  “I’ll take them to the bookstore tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” she said, but then the old anger she’d come to recognize as Rafe’s flared up.

  “You’re angry again.”

  “Fatherhood. I didn’t know it would feel like this.”

  “Same for me and motherhood or I never would have…” She stopped.

  “What?” he said. “Say it.”

  “I never would have left with the boys. If I had known what it was to be a parent, to love somebody else more than you love anything: your work, your pride, even your own life, I…” She took a deep breath and admitted. “I never would have denied you that opportunity. You lied to me and you hurt me, and after five days in this cage, I still can’t say I’m one hundred percent sure you’re not a sociopath. But I shouldn’t have done what I did. And I’m sorry.”

  There was silence then, in both her cell and in her head. And though she’d braced herself for another wave of anger, it never came. Instead there was an absence of strong emotion, one so blank, it felt like a metaphysical reserve, like he was purposefully not feeling anything at that moment.

  His lack of words or emotion made her strangely despondent, and she reached out to him with her mind before she could stop herself. “Rafe? Are you still there?”

  But there was no answer, and though she waited for one, she eventually drifted off to sleep, in the same clothes she’d worn all day, her head full of silence.

  Only to be woken up a few hours later by Grady, rattling the cage. She lifted her tired head to see him opening up the cage door.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. She looked over at the digital clock on top of the microwave. Its red numbers blared 2:36 AM into the darkness.

  Grady didn’t answer, just swung the cage door open wide and headed back up the stairs.

  That action alone woke Alisha all the way up. She got out of bed and followed his trail, taking tentative steps, and wondering if this was some kind of cruel trick. Would he reappear and throw her right back into the cage?

  But no, she found the sheriff beta in the kitchen unpacking a bag of groceries into Chloe’s refrigerator and cabinets.

  “He’s letting me go?” she asked when Grady didn’t immediately grab her by the arm and escort her back down to the basement.

  He tapped out words onto his smart phone and turned it to face her. “King says you can have the run of the house now, sleep in either of the bedrooms. But you’re not allowed to leave the premises.”

  Alisha’s heart sank a little. So she wasn’t free, she’d just been upgraded to a bigger cage. Still, it was better than nothing, and the thought of bathing herself in a way that didn’t consist of a couple of hand towels and a bucket of water sheepishly delivered by Rafe’s mother, made her skin prickle with joy as she followed Grady up the stairs.

  “How about my boys?” she asked him. “Did he say anything about letting me see them?”

  Grady shook his head and made a beeline for the front door. The mute equivalent of “conversation over.”

  Alisha didn’t try to follow him. Grady seemed less than enthused to let her out at this time of night, and she doubted he’d be willing to speculate with her about Rafe’s mindset in expanding her prison to all of Chloe’s house. His hand was already on the front door
knob.

  But then he surprised her by turning around and typing a new note out on his phone: “Your sister… Tu. How long is she planning to stay in town?”

  Alisha’s forehead scrunched up. “Since this is the first I’m hearing of Tu even being in town, I’ll have to go with I have no idea. Why?”

  A look rife with disgust and frustration passed over his face. But then he merely pointed toward a leopard-print suitcase, sitting upright in the middle of the living room. Then he pushed his hand palm-forward toward her as if to say, “yours.”

  Hers? Alisha frowned at the suitcase. From the leopard print alone, she was able to put together the situation. Her mother had arrived this morning with exercise clothes from her own wardrobe for Alisha to wear. She’d harassed Alisha into passing all the sweats Rafe had left for her in the chest of drawers through the bars, and claimed she was going to burn them for crimes against femininity. Then she’d promised to return with a “get out of jail free” wardrobe that would “bring that stubborn king of yours to his knees.”

  “Thanks, I guess,” she said to Grady, eyeing the suitcase with a mix of curiosity and trepidation.

  Grady just left without even a signed goodbye.

  In the wake of his departure, Alisha carefully opened the suitcase like someone opening a cage with a rattlesnake inside. She’d been right to be afraid. There were a couple of lightweight cardigans and a pair of fashionable hidden wedge sneakers in the bag, but the rest of the suitcase consisted of clothing more suited to going out for a night on the town than being kept prisoner. Saucy little numbers with low necklines and high skirt lines that would cling to every curve she had, and heels that wouldn’t be out of place at a strip club. Plus, a bag full of makeup and enough high-end lingerie to clad an army of escorts.

  “Oh, Mama,” Alisha said out loud with a tired laugh.

  She took a shower, and put on the least revealing piece of lingerie in the bag—a lace one-piece that at least covered up her nipples and crotch unlike many of the other nearly see-through options in the suitcase—and crawled into the bed in the guest room.