Christine Warren
Fur Factor
24
Honey and vanilla
.
Graham’s nose twitched, followed closely by his cock, as he slid gradually from sleep to waking. With his eyes still closed, he concentrated on the scent surrounding him, an intoxicating blend of honey and vanilla that reminded him of shortbread and sex and warm, melted ice cream. The thought made his stomach growl.
He nuzzled his face into a soft nest of hair and inhaled deeply to make sure he hadn’t just dreamed up this woman with her mind-blowing scent and her passionate responses. Now that he’d found this woman, he’d be damned if he’d let her get away.
Unless he was very much mistaken, Graham Winters had just found his mate.
Normally, a new mating, especially for a pack alpha, was a cause for celebration.
When your entire culture was based on the pack mentality, anything that lead to the perpetuation of the pack won praise and respect, so he ought to be feeling just terrific at the idea that he’d finally found the one woman he could be happy with for the rest of his life. He just had two problems.
The significance of the first slammed into the back of his head like an iron pipe with a grudge the minute he looked down at her. With her hair soft and rumpled on the pillow, her makeup worn away by time and exercise, she looked completely different from the way he remembered her. Instead of the brazen, blonde sexpot in the too-tight dress, she looked like a little girl, all fair skin and pink cheeks and child-like innocence.
Her thick, brown eyelashes lay in soft arches against her cheeks, and her rosy lips were parted and slightly pouting. She looked like a china doll. A very human china doll.
Interspecies dating wasn’t exactly
verboten
among Lupines, but it hardly represented the norm, either. His kind tended to view humans as amusing and occasionally useful, but hardly the sort of mates you brought home to mother. After all, Lupine instincts still dictated that the strongest, the fastest and the most dominant were the ones most likely to survive and most likely to reproduce. Humans, in contrast, could barely compete with newly whelped pups, let alone with mature wolves.
Graham knew all that, but it didn’t seem to be doing him any good. Every time he tried to picture getting on with his life without Missy, his beast raised its furry head and growled, long and low and menacing. He expected to drool at any minute, but those instincts certainly made it clear that giving this woman up, human or no, was
not
an option.
And that led him neatly to dilemma number two.
Christine Warren
Fur Factor
25
The woman lying unconscious in the middle of his bed wasn’t an anonymous and interchangeable human. She was Missy, Regina McNeill Vidâme’s best friend and pseudo little sister.
He had just fucked Melissa Jane Roper, and the consequences already loomed large in his mind.
First of all, Regina would try to kill him. He’d only known his friend’s new wife for a few weeks, but that was plenty of time for him to learn how protective she felt toward her quiet, wallflower friend. Melissa had been Regina’s maid of honor, and though she’d faded into the background for him until last night, Graham clearly remembered the things Regina had told him about her.
“Missy is a sweetheart. Probably too sweet,” Regina had explained at the rehearsal dinner while he’d sat, politely bored, beside her. “Don’t be offended if she doesn’t talk to you much, even if you are the best man. She’s always been kind of quiet, especially around men. That doesn’t mean she’s some sort of Pollyanna or a nun or anything. It just means she’s more likely to listen than to talk. And she almost never says anything bad about anyone, but I just don’t want you to think she’s ignoring you or anything.” Graham hadn’t noticed the woman enough to know whether she was ignoring him or not. With her hair in a neat, subdued braid, and her body-camouflaging clothes, he’d paid her about as much attention as the flower arrangements on the tables at the restaurant. Even when he’d practiced escorting her away from the altar, he’d barely realized she was with him. Her grip on his sleeve had been so light, and she’d held herself so far away from him, that he might as well have been alone.
“Ava is trying to corrupt her, though,” Regina had continued. “Now that I’m settled down, Missy is Ava’s next project. If she has her way, Ava will turn the poor thing into a maneater.”
Something in him rebelled at the idea of Missy being shaped into some sort of femme fatale and then set loose on unsuspecting males. It had to be the fact that she was his mate, because pack leader or no, he’d never exhibited much of a possessive streak before, especially not when it came to women. To him, they made an interesting diversion, but could be easily exchanged for the flavor of the week. Missy was the first woman he’d ever wanted to possess so completely that no other man would even dare to look at her. That, as much as his obsession with her sugar cookie fragrance, convinced him she really was his mate, no matter how inconvenient that might be.
He sighed, and Missy reacted to the small sound, frowning and shifting in her sleep. She rolled over to face him and buried her face in his chest hair. The tip of her cold nose brushed his nipple, and she nuzzled it sleepily, pressing a small kiss to the tight surface before snuggling back into sleep.
He fought hard against the urge to hook her leg over his hip and slide his cock into her sleepy-soft pussy. After last night, he knew how quickly she could be aroused and readied for him. If only the knowledge didn’t make his mouth water, he wouldn’t be in this predicament.
Christine Warren
Fur Factor
26
That wasn’t precisely true, he admitted grudgingly as he tried to keep his hands from straying down the silky smooth skin of her back to caress her amazing ass.
Graham had the distinct feeling that he’d been doomed from the moment he’d first smelled her. Why could the smell of warm cookies stir him to previously unknown possessiveness when hideously expensive, French perfumes only made him want to sneeze? He’d heard about the sort of instant knowledge other Lupines had when they met their mates, but he’d never expected it to hit him on an air current that smelled like tea biscuits and warm woman.
If he could draw her fragrance permanently inside himself and smell her every time he breathed, he would be a very happy man. As it was, he was a hungry man with a hard-on.
Frowning, he eased his arms from around her and slid off the bed. The loss of his body heat made her shiver. His bed had no blankets on it, because he never used them.
He generated enough body heat to keep warm in anything short of a blizzard, but his human guest didn’t. He dug through his closet and found a spare blanket he kept around for moving furniture. Lucky for him, he’d washed it after the last trip, so it was clean and would serve to keep her warm. He wrapped it around her, trying not to notice the way she curled up into a little ball beneath it, one hand resting under her cheek, the other tucked between her legs just above her knees. The urge to slide his hand in there with it, only higher, gripped him, but he shook it off and pulled on a pair of jeans before he padded barefoot down to his kitchen.
The pitch blackness outside the windows told him it was still the middle of the night, and the clock on the microwave read four-oh-two. A little late for a midnight snack, but it was either food or fucking, and he figured option two had already gotten him in enough trouble. He needed a few minutes to get his equilibrium back. Finding his mate apparently knocked a wolf for a bigger loop than he’d thought.
He rummaged through the refrigerator for a minute, dropping a hunk of roast beef to the counter when he heard a knock. He darted out of the kitchen and down the hall to answer the door before the thumping could wake Missy. Not until he had the door halfway open did he remember she was human and asleep, and likely wouldn’t have heard the knock if it had been on the bedroom door, let alone a floor down and a few rooms away.
“You busy?” Logan asked as he stepped inside and closed the door after him. “I didn’t want to interrupt anything…”
Graham scowled at the other man. “Save the meaningful glances,” he grumbled. “I was just grabbing something to eat.”
He stalked back into the kitchen with Logan prowling after him. He didn’t bother to worry that there was an emergency. When you ran a twenty-four hour nightclub that catered to vampires, lycanthropes and other assorted supernatural types, you got used to working at four in the morning.
Christine Warren
Fur Factor
27
“So what is it?” he asked, slicing off some chunks of raw beef. He dipped one in horseradish before popping it in his mouth. “Did Lourdes get blood on the carpet in the dining room again? I swear, I’m going to make that slob wear a bib next time he wants to eat in.”
Logan shook his head. “It’s not the vamp. The club’s fine. This is pack business.”
“At four a.m.?” Graham couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice, but as his beta, Logan knew the pack almost as well as Graham did. If it was important to his second in command, it better be important to him, too. That philosophy had saved him a lot of trouble over the years. “What’s up?”
Logan snagged a piece of beef and looked around the room. “Are you sure you want to get into this with her still upstairs?” Graham didn’t ask how his friend knew Missy hadn’t left. Her scent permeated the air, too fresh and intense to be just a remnant. It made his balls tighten, and he reminded himself to breathe through his mouth. The urge to force Logan to do the same, by breaking the other man’s nose, surprised him.
“She’s none of your business,” he growled, trying to be civilized, but unable to stifle the instinct to stake a claim. “Forget about her. She’ll stay put. Now what’s going on?” Logan gave him an odd look, but shrugged, licking a smear of horseradish from his thumb. “Curtis.”
“Shit.” Graham’s reaction was pithy, but appropriate, since his cousin and chief headache, Curtis MacAlpin, had a lot in common with the stuff. Both were composed chiefly of waste and bile, both tended to turn up underfoot at the least opportune moments, and both stank to the high heavens. Only in Curtis’ case, the stink was more of a moral one than a physical one. “What’s he done this time?”
“He’s been grumbling for months. You know that, right?”
“Logan, what has he done?”
The beta sighed. “He’s sent up a Howl for the next Moon Night.” Graham cursed, long and creatively, and clenched his fist so hard that beef blood oozed out of the meat and trickled from between his fingers. Howls were the Lupine equivalent of a town meeting. Packs had them occasionally when there was trouble brewing, or when one of the members had big news, like the formation of a new pack or the birth of an alpha’s new pup, to announce.
“And what the hell made him think he had any right to do that?” Graham growled.
“He’s mid-pack. He’s got no right to lead a howl.
I’m
alpha. That’s for me to do.” Logan settled his long frame onto one of the stools that butted against the kitchen counter and raised his eyebrows. “We all know that, Graham. The problem is that Curtis doesn’t care.”
“He’ll start caring once I rip a bloody stripe out of his hide. He needs to learn his place.”
Christine Warren
Fur Factor
28
“I agree. The problem is that Curtis knows his place, and he doesn’t like it. He wants your place instead.”
Graham’s eyes narrowed. “He’s thinking of challenging me? That puny little cub?
He’s barely twenty-five, and scrawny to boot.” Graham’s scowl stretched into a savage grin. “In that case, let him at it. It’ll take me five minutes to knock him back down to size, and we can forget all about this.”
“It’s not going to be that easy.”
Graham raised his brow. “Are you implying he’s strong enough to fight me?” Logan rolled his eyes. “He’s not strong enough to fight most of our infants. But he’s clever, and that could be more dangerous. If Curtis were planning to issue a traditional challenge, he’d have been taken down months ago. Remember he has to go through the entire rank before he gets to you. Even if someone like Bran or Ethan didn’t manage to take him out, he’d never get by me.”
Graham acknowledged that with a nod. Logan had earned his place as beta a long time ago with a combination of intelligence and brute strength. The only pack member he’d never taken down was Graham himself, partly because of the loyalty between the two men, and partly because neither of them could be absolutely positive who would win and weren’t sure they wanted to know.
“True enough,” Graham acknowledged, “but if Curtis isn’t going to challenge me, what are you all worked up about? There’s only one road to alpha, and you just said he’s not taking it.”
“See, that’s where you’re wrong, “ Logan said, his gaze level and intense. “Curtis isn’t going to challenge you because he thinks he won’t have to. He’s going to call for you to step down.”
Graham snorted. “He can call until he’s too hoarse to howl for all the good it’ll do him. I’m alpha of this pack, and I mean to stay that way.” Logan grimaced. “You might not have a choice.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I think Curtis is going to call on Breeder’s Rights.” The term sounded vaguely familiar, but Graham couldn’t place it. Lupine society overflowed with so many old traditions and rights and laws and customs that only an anal-retentive history professor could keep track of them all. As alpha of the Silverback Clan, Graham had more important things to worry about than whether or not someone had forbade the eating of deer meat on Tuesdays in Februaries with blue moons.
“Old Lupine Common Law,” Logan explained when Graham just scowled and shook his head. “It started back in the Dark Ages, as far as I know, when the humans were hunting us down just a little too successfully. In order to ensure our survival as a species, the elders made it a law that the alpha of any pack must be a member of a proven breeding pair. That way, they guaranteed that each pack would produce a next Christine Warren