The Alpha's Captive (2 page)

She had been even more awkward when she was younger, when cruel bullying had sent her from what was supposed to be her birthday party up to the attic, where she took refuge among the old boxes and rusty trunks that represented the last of her family’s glory. She could still remember finding the book. It had been hidden at the base of a trunk full of old clothes, wrapped in linen. A very unassuming package, but it had called to her. As a girl with little in the way of friends and a great deal in the way of imagination, she had been thrilled to discover that the package contained a handwritten diary chronicling the adventures of a woman named Honoraria who had seemed to be everything Hannah was not. Where Hannah was shy, Honoraria was bold. Where Hannah was afraid to go too far from the house, Honoraria had traveled the world. Through the eyes and words of her ancestor, Hannah had been swept out of the mundane shackles of ordinary life and taken back to a time where there was still true adventure to be had in the world. Honoraria had been braver than Hannah thought she could be, a role model who had not only been a guiding voice through rough teenage years, but a guide who had led her to this pub in the middle of nowhere, where Hannah was sure her adventures would begin.

Putting the book away for the moment, Hannah settled into her pint and the exotic though earthy atmosphere of the Rusty Shank.

Lorcan Wallace walked down the street, his nearly seven-foot frame drawing attention and admiration from passersby if they happened to be female, and fear and occasional interest from males. A thick, neatly trimmed beard covered the lower part of his face, and dark hair sprouted from his head in voluminous waves that were cut near the hard line of his jaw. Pale brown eyes looked out under dark brows. When they caught the light, they seemed to almost glow yellowish amber.

There was not a lot of light that evening; the moon was nearly full, stirring his blood, but it was hidden behind thick clouds. The only hint of its presence was a faint silvery glow that cast a faint shine on the windows and the slate rooves of the village houses.

He pushed his way into the pub that had been the watering hole and meeting place of his father and his father’s father, and his father’s father before that. Darkwood Heath was not just Lorcan’s territory, it belonged to those of his blood, and he walked it with an authority that came from the very marrow of his bones.

The moment he entered the Rusty Shank, he knew something was different. It smelled…
wrong
.

Scent. It always started with scent. The heat of a woman, the flowering of her loins releasing a delicious flavor that Lorcan could taste. The alpha was hungry, lustful, and yet he could not unleash any of his baser instincts thanks to the fact that the pack was severely lacking female blood and mating outside the pack, well, that was… troublesome.

His eyes went to the woman in the corner of the room, clutching a pint of beer with two hands. She was foreign. He could taste her scent even at a distance. She was a striking female, in spite of the fact that she was trying to hide, the hood of her oversized black sweater up over her head.

If her scent had not caught his attention, her behavior would have. Her eyes were scanning the room even as she tried to sink into the shadows. She was not terribly adept at either spying or hiding. The three pint glasses stacked up on her table suggested a reason as to why she might have lost any subtlety she had ever been possessed with.

Lorcan drummed his fingers against the bar thoughtfully. What to do. She was an interloper in his territory. A cute one, but he could smell the trouble on her through the rest of the thick meat-ridden human sweat and grime surrounding them.

Instinct began to rise through his body, the primal desire of a dominant male who finds a wayward young female in his territory. His impulse was to go to her and make her acquaintance, but the better, smarter part of him decided to instead remain an observer for the moment. If his gut feeling was correct, they would be closely acquainted with one another sooner rather than later.

* * *

Hannah felt eyes on her from across the room. She shifted her gaze and made eye contact with what struck her as the most handsome man she had ever set eyes on. It felt as though a bolt of force had struck her in the stomach as she found herself trapped in an amber gaze that was somehow almost glowing through the low light and haze of the pub. The intensity of his stare held her, his features hard and powerful even though they were in part covered by a trimmed dark beard.

How could someone possibly be that raw and masculine at a distance? The other figures in the room seemed to fade to shades and shadows of themselves. For a moment, there was only him. The stranger with his eyes locked on hers.

She blinked and the moment was gone. The noise swelled to fill the sensory void that had opened up around her and the crowd shifted to hide the stranger from her view. She was left with a swirling excitement in her belly, a sense that Darkwood Heath truly did hold mysteries beyond the natural realm.

Aunt Honoraria had been certain of it, and reading her journal as a teenager, Hannah had become certain of it too. The book still clutched in her hands had been a window to another world, a place of possibility that made her pedestrian life seem somehow exciting for being linked to it.

Hannah’s mother was a teacher, her father an accountant. They had lived a very comfortable, very safe life, and always they had despaired of Hannah. Hannah who liked to sneak out at night and visit the local cemetery to see if any dead people were clawing their way out of the ground (they never were); Hannah, who had eschewed prom in favor of a sky clad Wiccan ceremony held on the hill near the local mall. It had been fun until the football team had shown up with water balloons filled with substances other than water and sent the coven screaming for their cars.

But this place, this place was different. It was older. There was a history to the very walls. And there was something she could almost call magic in the air. Not in the Disney, fanciful sense, but in the deep, earthy, somehow real sense.

Excited by all she was experiencing, Hannah ordered another beer. Was she drunk? No. Surely not. There wasn’t that much alcohol in beer. The fourth one went down as smoothly as the third, and then the fifth went down as smoothly as any of the four before it. Perhaps she was overindulging, but the freedom to imbibe was running through her veins like fire. After what felt like waiting forever for her adventures to begin she wanted to experience everything all at once.

As night further fell and the bar became increasingly crowded, she felt the mood begin to change. It had been casual at the outset, but as a plethora of young men entered, something shifted in the air. The comfortably round older patrons seemed to have filtered out at an undetermined point and quite suddenly Hannah found herself one of the very few women in a pub now brimming with what seemed to her to be virile men from her age to later middle age.

Hannah was not sure precisely how much beer she had drunk. The funny English currency was almost meaningless to her. Shiny coins went this way and that, and beer after beer arrived. Not overly familiar with the effects of alcohol, Hannah felt herself becoming increasingly warm and cheerful.

“More, pleashe!” She smiled happily at the bar maiden who had been very helpful and accommodating about bringing her fresh pints all evening.

“We’re closing up, luv,” the woman informed her. “You’ll have to be on your way.”

Hannah looked around the bar with a small frown of confusion. “But everyone elshe is here?”

“They’re, uhm, members,” the lady said in the sort of way that made Hannah think they weren’t really members at all. The mystery was finally afoot! Something was going to happen that they did not want an outsider to see. Alcohol and excitement combined to create a cackling squeal of excitement as Hannah resisted the woman’s efforts to coax her out from her seat.

“You can tell me your sechresh,” she said in a whisper almost louder than a shout. “I won’t tell.”

“You’ve had too much to drink,” the woman said. “We can’t serve you anymore. It’s against the law.”

“Is it againsh the law if I sherve myshelf?”

“Yes.” The lady was becoming terse and grim, her worthy broad features clamping down against one another after the manner of a stern toad. “I’m sorry, but this is a members’ club and you’ll have to be leaving now.”

“I could be a member,” Hannah suggested.

“No, little girl, you really couldn’t.” The woman’s heavy hand descended on her arm. “Come on, let’s get you… oh, God.”

As Hannah swayed to her feet, she became suddenly and irrevocably aware of the fact that her brain was swimming in alcohol. Her limbs did not seem willing to function as they usually did and her stomach was suddenly seeming incredibly overactive.

“Ish okay,” she slurred. “I’m oka…”

* * *

Lorcan felt the disturbance almost before he heard it.

“No! I don’t wanna go!”

The girl was standing, swaying back and forth with a half-empty pint of beer in her hand. He had seen enough bar brawls to know that if she fell down with that still in her hand, she’d make a hell of a mess of herself and possibly someone else when it shattered under her.

Nelly the barkeep was doing her best to try to eject the troublemaker gently, but it wasn’t working. The young lady was avoiding all attempts to remove her without touching her, swaying around like an inebriated cobra.

“No! I came all the way here… and I came all the way here… and I’m here, becaushe I came all this way,” she declared. “And I’m here! And you can’t make me not here, because I came all the way.” She finished the sentence with a defiant albeit unfocused glare at the world in general.

Before Lorcan could move through the crowd, she swung out with the hand she seemed to have forgotten contained the glass. Her hand hit the wall, the glass exploded into shards and managed to cut the girl and shower the floor in sharp pieces.

A howl went up as the scent of blood flooded the air. There was only a small trickle, but it was enough to make eyes go glassy all around her, noses rise, and hackles lift as animal instincts began to rise in the patrons. If he didn’t get to her now, she was going to find herself in real trouble, and Darkwood was going to be the final resting place of yet another wayward traveler.

“Time to go, pup.”

She squealed incoherently as he bent down, wrapped an arm around the back of her thighs, and hauled her up over his shoulder. “Trouble,” he muttered to himself. “I knew she’d be trouble.”

Hannah woke up with a pounding headache in a bed that was certainly on the hard side. She felt as though each part of her insides had been run over by very small bulldozers, and her brain trammeled by tiny moles. She felt about as rough as she had ever felt, a fact that expressed itself in a long, low groan of despair.

“Good morning.” A hand pushed a cup of coffee under her nose. She jolted away from it with a grunt of surprise.

“Easy,” the deep voice soothed, putting the coffee down somewhere out of Hannah’s narrow line of sight as she did her best to keep her eyes as closed as possible. Light hurt. Even though the room was dim, the small amount creeping around the shutters was enough to make her head pound.

Hannah looked up to see someone who looked vaguely familiar and yet she was sure she did not know him. It clicked the moment she looked in his eyes. The shadowy room did not diminish the brilliance of his gaze, and even through the hangover she recognized him instantly. The man from the bar, much taller when he was up close.

He was more handsome than she had first thought, if that were even possible. His stunning amber eyes were set under dark brows, his face broad and strong with the kind of jaw that made Hannah’s tummy quiver. There was something about him that reminded her of a beast in its prime, a male who reigned over a territory with little more than his sheer physical prowess. The dark beard was close trimmed enough not to hide his features, which truly belonged more to the hyper-masculine ideal than the average man.

She found herself staring at him completely awestruck. It was hard to tell his age, though he was probably in his early thirties. He had more gravitas than would denote a younger man, and the breadth of his shoulders and the fullness of his features suggested that he had reached his full prime—and what a prime that was.

“Uhm,” she said not very eloquently. Trying to force her addled brain to work, she sat up in bed. The moment she did that the sheets fell down, revealing her bare breasts. Hannah realized with blanket-grasping panic that she was naked. A quick glance under the blanket revealed that she was entirely naked. Not a scrap of clothing separated her from the bedding.

“Oh, my God, did I sleep with you?” She sounded almost excited at the prospect to her own ears, though the expression was supposed to be one of shock.

He smirked at her as if the notion of sleeping with her had never so much as crossed his mind. “You were sick all over yourself. Repeatedly. That’s why you’re not wearing anything.”

“Oh, my God,” Hannah squealed again, her voice reaching an even higher pitch. “You stripped me?”

“Sacha and I did.”

“Who the hell is Sacha?

“My sister,” he said, still with that broad smirk of amusement tempered with just a hint of indulgent chastisement. “So don’t worry, your honor is very much still intact.”

Hannah promptly bounced from that crisis to the next one. “My stuff? Where’s my book? Where’s my necklace?”

“It’s all next to you,” he soothed her as she burst into a fresh round of panic. “We took care of you, it’s okay.”

“Oh,” she said, spying the book and locket placed on the bedside table next to her. “Uhm… thank you, for that. I don’t usually drink that much…”

“I don’t need to hear your excuses, pup,” he said with a smile. “You’re not the first young lady to make a mess of herself in the Rusty Shank, and I’ll wager you won’t be the last either.”