Moments In Time: A Collection of Short Fiction (12 page)

The first thing she’d done was to cut her long brown hair short and dye it blonde. Next was the purchase of colored contacts to make her blue eyes appear brown. She started wearing makeup as well, something she’d never bothered with before.

It was Walter who sought out the connections to provide her with a new identity under the name Lillian Hunter. Using her mother’s middle and maiden name enabled her the freedom to live a relatively normal life. She spent two years in community college and two more in a university in Wyoming, arming herself with a degree in social work before leaving for New York City. After she’d settled down in Brooklyn, securing a good job and an escape plan if need be, she had finally started to relax.

Until her first moon heat started. It had hit her later than purebred shifters and because of that, she’d thought she’d been in the clear.

Shayanne realized then she’d never be able to live fully as a human because she wasn’t one. But she made it work and eventually accepted who and what she was. She was comfortable in her own skin. Gone was the shy and timid teenager. She was a woman now, proud of herself and her accomplishments.

She still kept in constant contact with her grandparents, but she never did speak to her father again. There wasn’t a day that passed that she didn’t think of him, and wonder how he was doing. But she had promised him on that horrible day eight years ago that she wouldn’t try to contact him—would never go back—for her own safety.

“Ready,” she grumbled, pushing open the bathroom door.

“Nice,” Nic drawled, getting up from one of the waiting room’s hard plastic chairs. Brianna was nowhere to be found.

Shayanne shook her head, smiling. What. A. Bitch.

“Who knew you could go from work casual to sexy as hell in . . . oh,” Nic glanced down at his watch, “five minutes.”

Grinning, she rolled her eyes. “I’m just that fabulous.”

He ran his gaze up and down her body. “Yes, you are,” he murmured and Shayanne felt herself responding to his blatant sexuality, momentarily considering rubbing herself against his leg.

Good Lord, she hated moon heat.

She had until the moon rose to find a willing subject and get the hell back to her place. A willing subject who could absolutely not be Nic.

Together they flipped off the lights and locked up for the weekend. Hardware was just a few blocks from the center so they walked, during which Nic surprised her by taking her hand in his. Awareness of his masculinity instantly began to ping-pong through her body as heat gathered low in her belly.

She glanced at Nic, imagining him touching her, taking her, releasing inside of her to ease her body’s need for a child, over and over and over.

Oh God, she had to get a grip on herself. There was no possible way she could spend three days of hot, crazy, full-moon sex with someone she worked with. She wasn’t much into kink unless she was in heat, and when she was in heat .
 . . damn, she always went more than a little crazy, willing to fulfill any sexual fantasy dreamed up by the man she was with. It always ended with complete and utter embarrassment and her absolute refusal to ever see the man again.

Inside the bar, Shayanne went up on her tiptoes to peer over the many heads filling the small bar, and found Brianna standing on her chair, gesturing wildly at them.

“Lil!” she shouted. “Over here!”

“You go,” Nic said, releasing her hand. “I’ll get drinks.”

She was weaving her way through the crowd toward Brianna’s table when a hand caught her elbow and roughly jerked her to the side. Spinning around, ready to give someone a piece of her mind, she froze instead.

Wolf.

Male.

It wasn’t if she hadn’t encountered a single wolf since she’d left her pack. New York City had several packs, but she’d always made a point to avoid them. Especially during mating heat.

“Female,” he growled. His big hands tightened on her arm, making his considerable muscles flex. “Come with me. Now.”

She glanced up into his glaring yellow eyes and flaring nostrils, and her hormones did a happy dance. She was damn tempted; she was in heat, after all, and this was a good-looking wolf. In his early thirties, he had messy black hair and the broad, formidable features that were innate in most male wolves.

The only problem? He was a wolf.

If she mated with him during a full moon, there was a chance that in his excitement he would try to mark her. And if that weren’t bad enough, he would find out she was already marked, something that would confuse him. Marked and mated females, once in heat, couldn’t be scented by anyone but their mate. To be marked, supposedly mated, raging with heat and yet without a mate .
 . . well, that would generate questions, ones she didn’t want to answer.

Despite the primitive appearance of the wolf culture, wolves were constantly in contact with one another, even other packs. If wolf justice had to be dealt with and meted out, then wolves needed to handle it, rather than chance humans discovering them. Accomplishing such tasks sometimes required the aid of another pack, hence outside pack matings. The more connections your pack made, the stronger you were.

The Internet had nothing on wolves when it came to instant communication. This wolf would undoubtedly tell his alpha that he’d found a marked, unmated female gone rogue. That juicy tidbit would travel down the grapevine faster than any sordid story on
Access Hollywood
, spreading through the nation like wildfire and before she knew it, she’d have Careen at her doorstep trying to tear out her throat.

“No!” She twisted in his iron grip. “Let me go!”

His yellow eyes narrowed. “You need me. I can smell it and I’m ready for you. Let me ease you, female.”

Ugh. Stupid wolves. All cock and no brains. Even so, she knew it wasn’t his fault he was being so aggressive. His body was naturally responding to hers. It was just the way of things.

“I’ve got it covered,” she hissed. “Go away!”

He pushed her back up against the wall, immediately pressing his big, hard body up against hers. She felt his erection grind into her stomach and whimpered in response, pushing back against him, damning the moon heat.

“You need to come with me,” he growled. “Or I will take you where you stand.”

Oh God. How could something sound so wonderful and horrible at the same time? It was times like this that she hated being half wolf, forced to succumb to her baser instincts.

“Lillian?”

Glancing over, she found Nic by her side with his mob face on, looking righteously pissed off as he held two beers in his hands. “What the fuck is going on? Do you know this man?”

“No!” she shouted, twisting in the wolf’s grip again, and Nic shoved the beers into the hands of a man standing nearby. Clenching his hands into fists, Nic readied to throw a punch if need be. “Let her go,” he said darkly.

The wolf looked back and forth between Nic and her, and she could tell the exact moment he decided dragging her out of the bar by her hair and forcefully taking her in an alleyway was probably not the best idea. The second he let go, Nic grabbed hold of her and shoved her behind him.

“What’s your family name,” the wolf growled.

“None of your business,” Nic shot back.

If they had been anywhere other than a crowded public place, Nic would have gotten his ass kicked for mouthing off to the wolf. Instead, the wolf nodded once and walked off into the sea of people. Shayanne sighed in relief, yet at the same time felt compelled to run after him, his presence and his touch having spurred her oncoming moon heat into full-blown need, a need so strong she no longer cared who took her home.

“Listen,” she said, grabbing Nic’s hand. “I’m not feeling very social tonight after all. I have beer at my place. Sound good?”

Nic had her out of the bar and into a cab faster than that wolf would have.

• • •

“Was it her?”

At his home on pack land in upstate New York, Grey Nash gripped his cell phone as he sat rigid at his kitchen table. His beta, Dase, was in New York City, following another one of the many leads he’d gotten during his eight-year search for Shayanne Halston.

“Naw. Bitch was unmated and hanging with a human male. I offered myself and she denied me. I hate bitches that choose humans over wolves. But I followed her home, just to be sure.”

“And?”

“Could hear the two of them going at it from three blocks away. Bitch was hot, too. Lucky fucking bastard.”

“FUCK!” Grey roared. He’d stupidly gotten his hopes up again when a rogue female had been spotted by a Brooklyn alpha.

“I still say the bitch left the country,” Dase muttered.

“Not possible,” he growled. “We checked for that. She never left. She’s here, somewhere, and when I find her—because I will fucking find her if it’s the last thing I do—I will rip out her intestines and feed them to her!”

Fucking shit. He was miserable. It was a full moon and he was hard as rock, but if he even so much as touched a female, he went as limp as a dead kitten. Why? Because he was a mated male, he experienced Shayanne’s heat cycles as she did. His body was ready to serve hers, to ease her agony, to plant his seed inside her so she could bear his pups.

This had been going on for eight fucking years. So no, if he found his mate, he wasn’t going to rip out her intestines, he was going to fuck her for a week straight, possibly fuck her to death, and then he would rip out her intestines and shove them down her throat.

He was forty years old. Forty years old without a mate, without pups, and with each year that passed, he lost face in front of his pack because of one little half-breed bitch. Her old alpha, Careen, had been killed for the slight, and Shayanne’s father had been endlessly interrogated for any information he had on her whereabouts.

Only Arthur had continuously refused to give up the name of Shayanne’s human mother, no matter what they had done to him. And because Shayanne’s birth wasn’t on record by wolves or humans, Grey had hit a dead end. Since then he’d moved Arthur to his own pack lands, keeping him under close guard in case Shayanne or Arthur attempted contact with each other. That, too, had proved useless.

“Keep looking,” he growled and hung up. He had to get back to drinking and jerking himself off into oblivion before his unsatisfied mating heat turned into unrestrained violence against anyone within a fifty-mile radius. The only thing that made him feel better during these last eight years was that he knew, once a month, that fucking bitch was in just as much agony as he was.

The walk to his bedroom was hell on earth, the unbearable need to fuck making it nearly impossible to walk. Slamming his bedroom door behind him, Grey slid to the floor, unzipping his pants as he went.

Fuck.

FUCK.

He was so hard it hurt.

Pumping his hand up and down, he closed his eyes and cursed at the image that instantly greeted him. He could only ever think of her. Not that he wanted to. Not that he even had to; he just did. She was the bitch his wolf wanted.

He pictured her lying in the grass, submitting to him. His hands running over her smooth ivory skin, his cock sliding in and out of the tight little body that had yet to finish growing into the beautiful woman he’d known she was going to become. The woman she was now.

He’d wanted a young mate because he’d been thirty-two, and any bitch his age wouldn’t have been fertile long enough to give him the large family he’d wanted. Shayanne would have given him lots of pups.

Shayanne . . .

Damn her. She’d sunk those fucking virginal fangs of hers deep into his shoulder, but she hadn’t been willed by his authority; instead, she’d marked him out of fear and made him hers forever. She’d ruined him.

He should never have chased her. If he’d stood there and let her run, he wouldn’t have gone through eight years of hell. He would have mated another, he’d have his family, and he’d be an even stronger alpha who’d be now grooming his oldest son to take his place when he died.

As it was, his pack was falling apart. Without an heir, Grey was deadweight, no longer viewed as having a strong bloodline. There were rumors of an uprising, and he knew it wouldn’t be long until he was challenged for position of alpha. If he lost, he’d be killed. No alpha wanted a former alpha within their pack. And no former alpha would want to live in shame.

Cursing her even as he pictured her on her knees, her sweet body trembling with need, her pussy swollen and dripping for him, with him, he came hard and sagged sideways against the wall, trying to catch his breath. Too soon, he was hard again.

“Fuck you, Shayanne,” he growled, gripping his cock, wishing instead he was gripping Shayanne’s mass of brown hair while he slammed into her.

Two bottles of whiskey later, he was drenched in sweat, sore, chafed, still hard, and wishing he were dead. Why hadn’t she come back to him when her first mating heat had hit her? He’d watched females go through mating heat, writhing in agony, crying and screaming as they groped themselves, a male’s seed the sole remedy for their ailment. Why would she put herself through eight years of torture when he could have eased her every time?

Unless .
 . . her half-human side allowed her to live as a human, unaffected by her wolf genes and needs. He’d dismissed the idea so many times. It wasn’t plausible that he would go into heat if they weren’t mated, and she wasn’t in heat as well.