Wolf and Soul (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 3) (9 page)

8

A
t 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 might 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…

A
CCORDING 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.

But even wolves in nature didn’t try to go after a wolf with another’s mating scent already fresh on her, and that was apparently what Grady had done, why they had pulled up the ladder. Because every time they opened the door to feed him, he’d get one whiff of Tu’s faint heat smell coming from the kingdom house and he’d try to go after her again, even though the mating scent was supposed to ward other wolves off from trying to claim your she-wolf.

“Give me phone,”
Grady signed after Luke finished telling him what he’d done while checked out for the last four days.

Luckily “phone,” was one of those common ASL signs everyone knew. Luke pulled a smart phone out of the back pocket of his skinny jeans.

Grady typed, “
Where is Tu? Is she okay?”

Luke shook his head, his handsome face screwing up with outrage.

“She ran. Snuck out a window after the mating was done. Can you believe that!?”

Knowing what he did of the Ataneq sisters, Grady could very well believe that. After all, Alisha had gone through a time portal to get away from Rafe.

Luke looked up at Grady, his face more somber than Grady had ever seen it, even though he could still smell the chemical scent of a variety of drugs on him. He picked them out like a florist wearing a blindfold: weed, moonshine, MDMA, the same extra potent form of ecstasy he’d smelled on Tu.

No wonder Luke’s eyes were so wired as he said, “She ran and I need you to help me get her back.”

Grady had responded to that request with an elbow thrown across his brother’s face, hard enough to knock the idiot to the ground.

That should have been the end of it.

But now here Grady was, five years later, wandering the forest because Tu had run away again. This time from him. And even though Grady hadn’t ever used drugs, hadn’t ever wanted to touch any of that shit after seeing it ravage his family and pack towns the way it had, he was going after her, just like his brother had—

A scent hit his nose. Faint but potent, very potent. Easy to follow even in a blinding snowstorm it was so potent.

Grady froze.
No, it couldn’t be…

W
HEN TU WOKE UP, everything was on fire. Her body, her head—even her eyes were filled with the sight of orange and red flames roaring in the nearby fireplace. She sat up, and nearly fell right back down again. Her head was blurry with confusion, and her sex… she gripped the grey sweatpants now covering the lower half of her body. She recognized them as her own, but she hadn’t left the house in them. Someone must have put them on her while she’d been unconscious, but she couldn’t bear the feel of them now. She had to get them off, she had to… she pushed and kicked them off her body with do-or-die urgency. Like they were made of fire, not cotton, and would cause her irreparable harm if they were not immediately removed.

But taking off her pants didn’t help at all. The sweltering heat from the roaring fire hit her sex, which was now drenched with her liquid heat. And the smell… this time she really did fall back down into a prone position, her entire core clenching with an almost crippling amount of sexual desire.

She lay there trying to get her bearings, to figure out where she was and what she should do next. The where came to her first. The front room of Rafe’s cabin. All the lights were off, and the only light came from the blazing fire, which someone must have stoked to extra roar because…

She remembered being cold, so cold, but hot at the same time. Certain that her human was going to die of hypothermia, because she couldn’t access her wolf form. Once a she-wolf went into heat, neither she nor the wolf who mated her could turn back into wolf form until three months after her baby was born. Nature’s way of ensuring the best possible outcome for both mother and pup. Her unexpected second heat had been a certain death sentence.

But she hadn’t died. Someone had found her and brought her back to the cabin. Dressed her in sweats and put a bunch of heavy blankets over her to warm up her human. It must have been Grady. But where was he…?

A slapping sound broke through the crackle of the fire, wild and irregular, like whoever was making it was in a panic. Tu sat up, her eyes going to the shadows of the room that sat next to this one. Her night vision clicked on, and she could see him in the sunken den area, near the house’s original wolf shackle.

Rafe’s bloodline had only been in charge of Colorado for a couple of generations, but the summer house had been in the crown’s possession since the beginning of the last millennia. It was a very old structure and though it had been renovated to suit a few different tastes, the original wolf shackle remained in place. An iron shackle, attached to a chain mounted to a rectangle of concrete embedded into the wall for just this purpose.

It’s original intent had been to provide its user with a somewhat safe way to turn if there were humans about outside the house. A shackle meant to be attached at the ankle. It was made so it would stay tight around the wearer’s ankle, even if he shifted into wolf form.

Grady, however, was not using it that way. He’d locked the shackle around one of his wrists, and instead of turning into a wolf, he was furiously fisting his large erection with his free hand, stroking his own shaft up and down with his eyes squeezed shut as if coming were a matter of life and death.

Tu’s eyes went wide. His member was… massive. Thick and tall, as if it had gone out of its way to perfectly match up with the rest of Grady’s body. Tu watched his hand work it, almost in a blur it was moving so fast as the wet slapping sound reached a distraught crescendo.

Grady’s breath hitched and he came, but only a little bit, white liquid reluctantly piddling out despite all the work he’d put in. When he was done, his cock remained standing, its bulbous head swollen, the thick shaft heavily veined with pressing need.

Grady collapsed back against the stone wall, his breath ragged. But then like a lupine Sisyphus with a stone to roll up a hill, he started stroking himself again. Whatever he was trying to do, it wasn’t working and Tu wondered how long he would try before giving up.

But then his eyes popped open and he saw her standing there, watching him…

He mouthed the word fuck and knocked the back of his head twice against the wall.

He let go of his cock and ran his fist around his chest in a circle. “
Sorry.”

“Okay,”
she signed back.

But he shook his head and the wolf shackle’s chain rattled as he signed,
“Your purse in my car. Take blanket and my keys. Hide. When snow stop drive Wolf Springs. Doctor F-I-S-H-E-R give you medicine. Stop heat.”

He kept signing but Tu stopped paying attention. She walked over to him, her eyes stuck on the small amount of cum now drying there. Her human understood why he’d done it, respected the chivalry of him chaining himself to a wall and beating off to keep from attacking her unconscious body, which was dripping heat.

But her wolf… her wolf was furious he’d given his hand what was rightfully hers. His seed. It should be inside her, not dying a useless death. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t…

One moment she was standing above him, and the next she was on her knees, licking up the small amount of cum on his shaft, her mouth closing over the hood of his cock. His huge body bucked underneath her, and she soon felt his fingers tight in her hair, as she licked and sucked. Only when she could no longer taste his seed did she let go of his massive erection. And though the fire was behind her now, she could still feel it blazing in her eyes when she looked at him and pressed her palm to her chest. It was the sign for “mine.”

Then she began removing her clothes.

Grady shook his head.
“Your wolf make you crazy. Your human don’t want me. Must run. Please! Don’t want hurt you. Please run.”

Now naked, she climbed up his body. He was so big, like a flesh covered mountain, yet she found herself comforting him like she would a small, terrified animal.

“It’s okay,” she said in his ear, though she knew he couldn’t hear her. “Ssh, it’s okay.”

She hugged him to her, and she could feel his breath on her bare shoulder, ragged with frustration. She wondered how long he’d been desperately trying to get himself off in order to keep his wolf from going after her.

His hands came up to her waist and he leaned back so she could see him mouth the words, “No, Tu. Don’t. Run. Please, run.”

Tu’s heart went out to him then. Her family always treated her like she was the most fragile piece of glass, but she could see all his cracks now. His deafness, his inability to talk, his humanity—all the things that had made him different throughout his life. She knew what he’d been trying to do by locking himself up like this, but she also knew what he was trying to do went against nature.

Also, there was one very hard fact neither of them could deny. His seed. His cock. His body. It didn’t belong to him. It belonged to her.

She looked him dead in the eye and signed it again,
“Mine.”

And he signed back.
“Mistake. Your wolf… not thinking right. Forget I’m defective.”

That was it. Signing time was over. She raised her hips and took him in her hand, parting her own slick folds with his heavy erection. He’d gone stiff beneath her, and she could tell he was shaking his head just above her sight line, but she kept her eyes on where their bodies joined. Watched herself envelop him, inch by inch, slow and wet as she adjusted to his size. And then he was all the way in.

She could feel him trembling underneath her, and she looked into his eyes as she whispered, “Mine.”

He shook his head, so obviously ashamed of himself and she said it again, “Mine.”

Then she started moving on top of him, setting a rhythm, but he continued to hold himself rigid, unmoving.

And eventually she found herself in the weird position of rubbing her open palm in a circle on her chest. “
Please.
” A plaintive beg.

That, of all things, did the trick. His hips started moving underneath hers, and it was… oh God, it was magnificent. Not a blur of sensations and animal need like it had been with Luke. They were so gentle with each other, rolling in sweet melody, both afraid of hurting the other, even as their emotions burned hotter than anything she ever known. The feeling of being with him like this—it was better than alcohol. Better than drugs. Better than anything she’d ever known.

But it still wasn’t enough.

“I can’t…” she said to him. She began moving even faster, bouncing her hips up and down, hoping that would help her reach the place she was trying to get to, but that didn’t work either. “I can’t…”

A small hopelessness started to set in, as she tried and tried, but couldn’t… quite… make it.

But then Grady brought his legs up, bending them at the knee, so she had no choice but to fall forward across his chest. She heard the chain rattle as his dominant hand disappeared between their bodies…

Dyn-A-Mite. When she came, the orgasm blasted through her, shutting down all her senses like they’d been zapped with an electro-magnetic pulse, then firing them back up again, better and brighter than before. It was like how every drug she’d ever taken was purported to make people feel, but even better.