Fated To The Alpha: A Paranormal Shifter Romance (9 page)

“Great,” I grunted as I pushed myself up to my feet.  “Next time, let’s pack a raft.”

Jeremy pulled my arm across his shoulders and helped me continue forward for a ways.  By the time we’d made it up the hill in front of us, I finally could go no further and told him to let me down.  I fell asleep in his arms shortly after that.

*

    I awoke the next morning to see the sun rising over the tops of the trees, with nothing but the sound of nature around me, the morning breeze on my naked skin, and Jeremy’s body spooned against my back.  Despite everything that had happened, I felt like I hadn’t slept this well in years.

I rolled around in Jeremy’s arms to see his face.  The motion started stirring him, and he grunted and blinked awake, smiling as he slowly recognized my face.  “Morning,” he said.

I propped my head up on my elbow as I studied his face.  “I think this is the first time I’ve seen you in daylight,” I said.  “Every time we’ve been together it’s been dark.”

“You like what you see?” he asked.

I nodded without any hesitation.  “I really do.”

“Me too,” he grinned, looking down over my body, running a hand along my side and over the flare of my hip.  My flesh tingled at his touch, making goose bumps break out across my skin.

I leaned forward to kiss him, bringing my hand up to cup his face.  The kiss was light and tender at first, and then steadily increased in intensity.  We soon parted our lips and allowed our tongues access to each other’s mouths, letting them dance together in a graceful and passionate ballet.  Before long, I was humming softly into the kiss, feeling like I wanted to devour him whole.

I moaned as he rolled me onto my back, his hand roughly pawing at my tit.  I pressed my crotch up against him, feeling his stiff hardness already at attention and available for me to rub my pussy against.  My juices started flowing, spreading wetness along the underside of his cock as ran it through my cleft.

He ducked his head down to kiss along my neck and shoulder while I continued grinding my body against him.  He brought his lips close to my ear, and I heard him whisper, “I think I could get used to waking up like this.”

My first impulse was to wholeheartedly agree.  I definitely wanted to wake up like this more often.

Then I had to go and start thinking about the implications.

“I could too,” I said.  “But what does that mean?”

“Huh?”

“Are we just going to run away and abandon our packs completely?”

Jeremy seemed to balk at the idea.  “I can’t say that’s the most appealing idea in the world.  But I’m willing to do it if it means we can be together.”

He stopped what I would have said next by kissing me.  I wanted to be annoyed with him, but his kiss was too good not to enjoy, and in spite of myself, I started rubbing against him some more.

Eventually, I struggled to break off his kiss, which was not easy, not just in the sense of getting him to stop.  I also had to get myself to stop.  “Wait… stop… I mean… yeah, I want to be with you too.  Those are our friends and family back there.  If we run away, aren’t they just going to keep fighting?  How many of them will end up killing each other if we do nothing?”

Jeremy frowned.  “But what could we do even if we did go back?”

“I don’t know,” I sighed.  “Something.  I just hate the way I left things with Charlene, and with my dad.  I don’t want those to be the last things we said to each other.”

“But you can’t go back there with me,” he said.  “And in fact, didn’t she even threaten you if you ever came back?”

“Charlene’s bark is usually worse than her bite,” I said with a little more confidence than I felt.  “Usually.  I still don’t believe she’d actually hurt me.”

“But what about your father?  Or your alpha?” he said.  “If you go back to them…”

“What about your pack?” I said.  “Do any of them know about me?”

“No, but… we’ve discussed this.  If I just bring a Caldour in…”

“How will they know I’m a Caldour?”

He did not have an answer to that right away.

I stroked his face a little.  “I do want this,” I said.  “I want you, Jeremy.  I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anything.  But I can’t just run away and leave everything else I’ve ever cared about to burn.”

Jeremy gritted his teeth.  “We just came all this way…”

“To make sure
my
alpha didn’t find us,” I finished for him.  “I wasn’t able to convince my pack to change.  Maybe we’ll have better luck with yours.”

“That’s a big maybe,” he said.

“But I want to take the chance,” I said.  “And I’d feel better about it if you were with me.”

Uncertainty clouded his face.  Knowing he needed some persuasion, I reached down between us to grasp his cock, which had started to soften during our conversation, which I began stroking back to its full hardness.  “Want me to convince you?” I smirked.

He sighed with a shake of his head.  “You’re an incorrigible she-wolf,” he said.  “Okay, I’ll think about it.”

“You do that,” I said.  “After you fuck me good and hard.”

“Yes ma’am!” he stated, pressing the head of his cock to my opening.

My legs came up alongside him as he pressed into me, and my fingers clutched at his back.  “Nnnnnhhh…” I groaned as penetrated deep inside me.

As he began to thrust, and I began to moan with the pleasure he gave me, I prayed that nothing would tear us apart again.  What I wanted to do was risky; I knew that.  It would have been the easiest thing in the world to just run away with him and forget about the madness we left behind.

I could never live with myself if I did that.  Going back and trying to put a stop to this feud may be the biggest mistake I ever made, but I knew I had to try.

That could wait.  Right then, I was there in Jeremy’s arms, his cock buried inside me, with no one to stop us.  I wanted to savor that while I could.     

CHAPTER FIVE

The deer thought he was clever. He knew enough to keep ducking back and forth through the trees to try to elude me, and jumped over every possible obstacle that might slow me down. He jumped a high rock, crossed the stream, and even ducked under a giant root that crossed over a gulley.

He led me on a merry chase, that’s for sure, and if I’d been hunting alone, he might have lost me.

Just as the deer cleared an embankment a good five or six paces ahead of me, Jeremy sprang out from where he’d been hiding, taking our quarry by its throat and bringing it down to the ground in a single deadly pounce. In an instant, I closed the distance, locking my jaws onto the animal’s haunches while Jeremy choked the life out of it.

With the animal down, Jeremy and I proceeded to eat our freshly-killed prey, tearing out chunks of meat in our teeth and munching them in our jaws. I was as much a fan of a well-cooked meal as the next girl, but there’s nothing quite like tasting good, raw meat in your mouth, feeling the blood of your kill dripping from your teeth.
There hadn’t been enough occasions,
I thought,
when I’d really taken the time to enjoy the pleasures of being a wolf.

Jeremy and I had spent the last three days this way, living in the woods, hunting for our food. We’d probably spent more time in those three days in our four-legged forms than our two-legged ones, which was something I didn’t think I’d ever done before. It was getting to the point now that it actually was starting to feel weird whenever we did change back to our two-legged forms; I was apparently getting a bit too comfortable in my fur.

We really shouldn’t have been waiting; we knew that. The longer we stayed out here in the woods, the harder it would be for us to come up with a convincing cover story. The only reason we were hesitating at all was because the prospect of going to meet Jeremy’s pack felt a bit too much like going to face a firing squad.

If they found out I was a Caldour…

After we ate our fill, Jeremy and I relaxed together under a tree, next to what was left of our kill. As we basked in our food coma and the closeness of each other, I contemplated our situation. Living like this was nice, yeah. I wasn’t going to pretend that the prospect of running away with Jeremy and leaving both our packs behind wasn’t still tempting. But I stood by what I’d said before, I couldn’t turn my back on the pack that had raised me while they and Jeremy’s pack fought and killed each other.

I eventually sat up and began to shift. My fur receded into my flesh, my front legs extended into human arms, and my muzzle shrank into my face. My tail disappeared, allowing me to sit back against the tree. “I think it’s about time, Jeremy,” I said.

He lifted his head to look up at me, and began shifting to his two-legged form too. “Are you sure you’re ready?”

“We’ve put this off too long already. Our story is gonna start to sound far-fetched if we keep waiting.”

Jeremy sighed. “Yeah, I know. I’m just not ecstatic about having to face other people again. I’m getting used to it being just the two of us.”

“I know; I’m enjoying this too. We hunt, we eat, we fuck, we sleep under the stars, and that’s our day. It’d be nice if we could just pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist and live like that forever, but… you know we can’t.”

Jeremy grimaced, looking up to the sky through the cover of trees. “So when do we do this?”

“It might as well be tonight,” I said, with no more enthusiasm for it than he felt. At least I was giving us a few more hours alone.

We tried to enjoy those hours while we could. We relaxed together for a while longer, and then spent some time just running through the woods on four legs. I never felt freer than when I ran, and having Jeremy beside me made it that much better.

But eventually night came, and we knew it was time to face the music.

We cautiously approached the Morgandorf village in our wolf forms. As we neared the lights and the houses, I started hanging back, growing increasingly nervous. I eventually came to a complete stop, making Jeremy stop and look back at me. In fact, I think I even started backing away.

I knew all the propaganda I’d heard leveled against the Morgandorf pack all my life was just that: propaganda. Jeremy was living proof of that. Still, it was hard for me not to associate this place with the stories of the den of scum and malice that had been spun by my pack. The name Morgandorf was not one I had ever heard spoken in a pleasant context.

And after all, the one and only time I’d been here before, someone had taken a bite out of me. The wound in my shoulder was still healing.

I knew those stories were all exaggerated, colored mostly by hate and hostility, and a need to demonize our enemies. But what was a fact was that I still didn’t know how they would react to me.

As I slowly started to retreat, Jeremy padded over to me and gently nudged the side of my face with his muzzle. I whined softly at him, not wanting to move further. But he nodded his head in the direction of the village, beckoning me on. Then he continued, while I reluctantly followed.

Several members of his pack were milling about the village, walking around the burning bonfire in the circle when we entered. Several of them looked in Jeremy’s direction as he approached, and when they got a good look at him or caught his scent, a lot of their eyes went wide, and they came rushing toward him. “Jeremy?” “Is that you?” “Where have you been?”

Jeremy shifted to his two-legged form as they crowded around him, while I hung back behind a corner. Jeremy tried to calm his pack brothers and sisters surrounding him, holding his hands up and saying, “Please, please, I’ll explain it all later. Can somebody get Ricardo out here?”

A couple of them ran off to go fetch the person he mentioned. And about then was when they noticed me. A couple of them sniffed the air, catching my scent, and craned their necks to see me shrinking back shyly around the corner.

“Who is that?” somebody said.

Jeremy extended a hand to beckon me forward, and slowly, fearfully, I approached. As I neared him, I rose up on my hind legs as I started shifting to my two-legged form, and took his hand. I carefully looked around at the faces around me, full of curiosity and wonder, and not a small amount of suspicion.

The few who ran off before started returning, bringing with them a man in his early forties with salt-and-pepper hair and a short, grizzled beard. The other members of the pack stepped aside to make way for him, giving him the respect that could only be commanded by the pack’s alpha. His attention zeroed on me as he approached, looking me up and down after he stopped in front of us.

He finally turned his attention to Jeremy and put on a brotherly smile, reaching out to clasp his hand. “We wondered what happened to you,” he said, patting Jeremy’s shoulder. “We were just about to send search parties out to the Caldour village to find out what they’d done with you.”

Jeremy and I shared an uncomfortable look. “Sorry about that,” Jeremy said. “The Caldours actually didn’t have anything to do with me leaving.” Then we exchanged another look, as he remembered the cover story we had agreed to present. “Well, not directly anyway.”

The alpha looked to me again. “So who is this now?”

Everyone else in the pack looked at me or at Jeremy, curious to hear the answer to that themselves.

“This is… Elena,” Jeremy said, giving them the fake name we’d decided on. I didn’t dare want to give them my real name. “She’s a stray from up north. I’ve been seeing her in secret for a while now.”

“Why didn’t you tell us about her?” someone said.

“She didn’t want to be found,” he answered. “She wasn’t exactly well-treated by her old pack. Her alpha wanted to force her to marry him.” We’d agreed our story might be more convincing if we threw a nugget of truth into it. “So she’s been avoiding the pack life for a while. She finally decided to come pay us a visit a few nights ago, but… well, her timing was pretty bad. It was the night the Caldours attacked us. As soon as she showed up, she was attacked. So I took her and got her away from here, and we’ve been living off the land for the last few days until I finally convinced her to come give us another chance. It took quite a bit of convincing, too. She was sure you all would try to kill her again as soon as she set paw in the village.”

They all seemed to study me, especially the alpha. I held my breath, waiting to see if they would buy it. My heart crept up into my throat as the alpha leaned in and got a good whiff of my scent. I kept expecting him to snarl at me and say, “She smells like a Caldour!” or something like that.

But finally he leaned back, and a smile spread across his face. “Well then… I think we should prove you right, shouldn’t we?” He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. “Welcome, Elena. My name’s Ricardo, I’m the alpha of this pack.”

“Hi,” I said through a weak smile.

“You want to join our pack?”

I grimaced. “I don’t think I’m ready for that. I just want a place to stay for a while. A place with a roof. And a bed. And cooked food.”

Ricardo laughed. “Well, we can certainly give you that much.” Ricardo turned to one of the she-wolves around us. “Gina, you look like you’re about her size. Maybe you can give Elena some clothes.”

“Uh, sure,” the woman said, uncertainly.

“In the meantime,” Ricardo said, “Jeremy, why don’t you take her to your room. I think you two could use a shower.”

Oh, sweet heaven, yes!  A shower sounded like a godsend right about then.

*

I could have stayed in that shower for hours, luxuriating under the hot spray of water, letting days worth of dirt and debris wash away. Of course, I knew Jeremy would only have so much hot water, so there was a limit to how long I could lollygag.

Jeremy and I had started out the shower together, but he’d eventually decided to get out first, while I wanted to enjoy it a little longer. I don’t know if I should call that a good thing or not, since without Jeremy there I had only my thoughts to accompany me. And when I started to think, I started thinking hard.

I was taking a shower in the Morgandorf village. I was in supposed enemy territory, under their roof, being treated as a guest. If my own pack could see me now…

What if they did? What if they came looking for me here? What if they found me? What then?

I turned off the shower when the water started to get cold, stepped out, toweled off, and wiped the condensation off the mirror, getting a good look at myself. I wasn’t sure what to make of the girl I saw looking back at me. Was that the face of a traitor to her own pack?  In my heart, I didn’t feel like one, but I knew anyone from my pack would call me that now.

I wrapped a towel around myself and stepped out into the bedroom, to find Jeremy standing by his dresser, wearing a light shirt and a pair of pajama pants. I stopped and stared at him for a moment. He looked up and saw me looking at him, and said, “What?”

“I think this is the first time I’ve seen you in your clothes,” I smirked.

He glanced down at himself. “You like it?”

“I think I miss the sight of your naked tush,” I said.

He stepped forward, taking me into his arms. “All you have to do is ask,” he said, and kissed me.

I tried to smile back at him, but it didn’t really take. I slipped away from him and flopped down on his bed. Yeah, it was really good to feel a bed beneath me again, but that wasn’t quite enough to ease my troubled mind. Jeremy sat down beside me and rubbed my back. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Tell me I’m doing the right thing here?” I pleaded with him. “Do I know what I’m doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” I said. “I know this was my idea, but now that we’re here, I’m just going out of my mind with doubts. This whole thing has the potential to go horribly wrong.”

“Only if they find you out,” he said. “And I’ll make sure they don’t. For all they’ll ever know, you’re just a stray.”

“It’s not just your pack I’m worried about,” I said, looking up at him. “It’s also mine. By now they’re probably scouring the woods, looking for me. There’s every chance they might come here. The idea that the Morgandorfs might have kidnapped me… that’s one of the first things my dad might think of. If Leon doesn’t think of it first. And if they do come here, and they find me, what will they do to you? What will they do to
me
?”

Jeremy didn’t have a swift answer to that. He shifted his jaw uncomfortably, and finally said, “If the Caldours did show up here looking for you, I doubt my pack would let them deep enough into the village to find you. I think we can rest easy for now.”

I hoped he was right. I really, really did.

But my ultimate doubt was the thought that we hadn’t really thought this all the way through. We’d come back because we knew we couldn’t abandon our packs to fight and kill each other. But now that we were here, and I had been given lodging in the Morgandorf village, what were we supposed to do now? How were we going to stop more fighting and killing from happening? There were a few dozen wolves in each of our packs respectively, all driven by the prejudice and hate that they’d been taught for generations. We were only two. How much could we really hope to change?