The Wolf's Mate Book 2: Linus & The Angel (2 page)

He slept for hours, waking often as she
warmed up and started to move, making small whimpering sounds of
pain. He checked her fingers and toes, secretly delighted to see
they were painted cherry red, and they were miraculously safe from
frostbite thanks to her insulated gloves and socks. He wondered how
she’d ended up on her side in the snow with that dead dog, but
hadn’t found any injuries on her.

He woke up with a soft leg sliding over his
and drawing him close. His cock had been hard for hours, ever since
it had thawed, but he’d pushed aside his thoughts of the
unconscious woman in his arms as much as possible.

But this – was an interesting
development.

Her short nails abraded his back and she drew
him close to her heat with her foot on his lower back.

He wasn’t sure if he was still dreaming, or
if she was dreaming, but he sure liked the scent of her arousal,
the way her mouth moved across his shoulder and the soft panting of
her breath. She smelled incredible, like vanilla and heat, woman
and nature combined. Seeing her in the daylight had revealed an
incredible beauty, and his body had not missed the opportunity to
respond, even as inappropriate as the circumstances were.

“It’s okay, sweet; let me get you something
to drink.” He whispered for no reason other than he didn’t want to
freak her out if she was still asleep.

She hummed in her throat and it went straight
to his cock. “No, don’t go. You smell so good.” She slid one hand
from around his back between them and grasped his cock at the base,
spreading her legs further apart and attempting to draw him inside
her. Which is exactly where he wanted to be. For like eternity.

“You’re still asleep.” He cautioned, but
couldn’t bring himself to extract his cock from her grip and his
words sounded almost pleading in their tone.

Her eyes flashed open and he was greeted with
the warmest brown eyes he’d ever seen in his life, surrounded by
thick lashes like lacey fringe. “Make love to me, please, I want
you to.”

Angling herself slightly closer, his cock
brushed the wetness of her body and he would have been helpless to
stop himself if he’d had a brain cell actively working in his head
at that moment. She moved her hand back around to his lower back,
pulled him towards her, and tilted her face up for a kiss. He gave
it to her, sliding his tongue into her hot mouth as his cock slid
into her more than ready body.

Groaning at the tight heat of her flesh as it
fought him with delicious pressure, he thrust in completely and
stopped, her gasp of pleasure into his mouth a chanting prayer of
thanks and pleasure. Cradling her against him, he took her mouth
while his body staked a claim to hers in the most primal of ways
until her whimpers of pleasure and thrashing head drew his wolf to
the front of his brain.

Never a presence like this before, his beast
seemed captivated with the beauty in his arms, and the desire to
mark her rose so heavily in his mind that he growled and the sound
spilled out of his throat while he licked her neck and bit down
gently, enough to bruise but not enough to bleed and mark
permanently.

“Oh, yes, yes!” She cried, digging her nails
into his shoulder and drawing blood, the actions making him thrust
into her harder, faster, and she met his frantic movements with her
own, her hips in perfect sync with his . All thought was gone,
there was only feeling, only heat, only her.

Mine. Mine. Mine.

For the first time, his thoughts were not his
own, but his wolf’s as well, feral and needy with the desire to
keep her forever.
I will kill anyone that touches her
, he
vowed to himself and his wolf growled in agreement.

Chapter 2

Karly groaned. Everything ached. Like fucking
ached bad. She tried to get up, but there was something heavy
across her stomach. Lifting her head, she took in a quick breath at
the sight in front of her. A very naked man was cuddled just under
her breasts with one of his legs thrown over hers. And she was also
naked.

Seemed like this was a situation that should
make her freak out, but she was feeling pretty content. So what
happened? She chewed on her lip and tried to remember the last
thing she could.

Oh hell.

She’d chased her neighbor’s little rat
terrier out into the snow because she was worried he’d die. She’d
chased him forever. Stupid little dog.

And something happened?

Right. She fell and was overwhelmed by the
cold and snow.

Her brain whirled and images crashed around.
She had vague notions of being nudged by something furry and then
carried and then gradually warm and safe. She knew that feeling.
This man, who had obviously saved her life and according to her
aching pussy, had allowed her to ravage him in thanks, was a
werewolf.

Her breath caught in her chest and she could
have cried. She’d found her mate! Her 15 months of searching and
apparent near death had brought him to her. What the hell were the
odds of that happening? Fate’s a funny thing, for sure.

Incredibly warm under his weight, she let
herself go into the sweet heaviness of him and listened to the
sound of his breathing. She wished his face was turned up so she
could see him, but knew it wouldn’t matter. Her nature had picked
him and he would be perfect for her, and she would be perfect for
him. An instant connection as old as time, wolves and their
mates.

She closed her eyes and her mind drifted back
to when she found out what she was, at age 12. Raised in a wolf
pack by her human mother and werewolf father, who was second in
rank, she was taught everything there was to know about wolf packs
even though she wasn’t a wolf. At that time their pack, the Soualit
Pack from West Virginia, had 45 wolves who lived and worked mostly
in the small town of Brink’s Pond. On her twelfth birthday, her
mother told her to sit down at the kitchen table and take off her
shirt. There was a woman there she didn’t know who had drawings all
over her arms and neck, what Karly came to find out were called
tattoos. She had a tray of little jars and instruments and was
snapping blue surgical gloves on her hands.

“This is Caledonia. She is going to give you
the mark of our heritage, my daughter. You must accept this burden
of pain in order to begin your journey.” She turned and pulled off
her own shirt, and when she swept her hair to the side, on her
right shoulder blade were three black tattooed symbols. One sort of
looked like a tree with two branches, one like a house with an
antenna, and one like an upside down v. The tree and house were
together and there was a small space and then the v. The tattoo
couldn’t have been more than two inches wide and about that high,
but it stood out starkly on her skin. Karly couldn’t remember if
she’d ever seen it before.

Her mother’s delicately long fingers touched
her shoulder. “This is the symbol of our people, our kind. It is
the mark of the Angel family line, the Ancient Greek symbol for
Soul Mate. That is what the women in our family are born to be.
Mates for werewolves.”

She sat down in front of her and took Karly’s
hands in hers. “Do you accept the mark of our people? Do you accept
that you are an Angel, a human woman born to find your one true
werewolf mate?” Her eyes were sincere, her sweet smile warm and
patient. Karly had always expected she would marry a wolf someday,
it’s all she’d ever known after all, but to know that she was
somehow made to be one particular werewolf’s mate was an incredible
knowledge and it filled her with warmth.

“Yes, Mom.”

Her eyes shone. “Then do not cry, daughter.
The pain will last for only a little while, and then you will bear
the mark for the rest of your life. Let me tell you all about our
family so that you can begin to prepare.” She sat down in the chair
next to Karly and Caledonia had taken up the needle after prepping
her skin and asked her to tell her when she was ready. Karly took a
deep breath and said she was ready, and Caledonia touched the
needle to her skin. Karly thought it would hurt badly, it was a
handful of needles moving very fast and pushing black ink into her
skin, after all. But it was more of an annoying sort of mild pain,
and when she relaxed enough after the first pass of needles into
the design she had sketched, then she could focus on her mother and
their history.

Her mother’s middle name was Angel and so was
Karly’s. The reason was so that no one forgot what they were. When
the creator made the first werewolf, he was a ravening thing, more
animal than man. So the creator made a woman for the wolf, who was
sensitive to the wolf’s nature and could soothe him like no other
woman alive could. He made a perfect mate for him. The legend went
that the wolf had been in his shift, cutting a path of destruction
through civilization like a thresher through wheat, when he spied
the woman. Intent on killing her, he looked into her eyes and felt
his heart beating for the first time and shifted back into his
human form and took her for his mate. He called her his angel, his
salvation, and that was what she called herself from then on. When
they had children, the boys all became werewolves and the girls all
became soul mates, ready at age 21 to find their mate-for-life.
Entirely human but supernaturally genetic, the girls had the
ability to soothe their mates. Supercharged by the gene pool of
their ancestors, any male children they had were almost always
powerful wolves and the females became the next generation of angel
mates.

She knew this was true: her three brothers
were all alphas of packs in North America. Bren in Ontario, Rico in
Washington, and Graise in southern Florida. She was the only
girl.

When the tattoo was done she had learned so
much about her ancestors and was thrilled to know that in nine
short years she might be able to find her mate. No one knew if the
journey would be easy or difficult, but it was always perfect. The
joining of the angel and the wolf was almost instantaneous, even if
they were strangers, because his beast recognized what she was
immediately, even if the human part of the man didn’t.

Karly worked hard to graduate early from high
school and finished her bachelor’s degree just a month before she
turned 21. She had hoped on some level that her mate would be found
within her father’s pack, but it didn’t happen. When she turned
of-age, none of the unmated males that she had grown up with were
her mate, which meant she had to start her journey.

After turning 21, she took a month to prepare
herself to leave home, and thanks to her father’s personal wealth
she never wanted these months for anything except her mate. Armed
with a new car, a map of the known wolf packs within North America,
and a fully stuffed bank account, she left her home pack and began
a journey. All she needed to do was find the place where the wolves
hung out and settle down for a few weeks. If her mate was in the
town, she’d be drawn to him and him to her, and if not she moved
on.

The first few months were most difficult,
because she missed her family and grew discouraged very quickly.
She talked to her mom every night and she bolstered her hopes that
she’d find him eventually, but she had to take on the search and
keep going.

As the first year of her travels began to
draw to a close, she started to grow weary of being alone. It
wasn’t just her mate that she was missing and hoping every day she
would meet, it was the constant moving. Every two or three weeks,
she would have to pack up her life and go somewhere else and start
all over again. She went north first, while it was still summer,
moving steadily up the coastline until the cold drove her south.
The map was full of red x’s from packs she’d tried. There were just
so many. Smaller states had usually two or three packs, larger
states could have a half dozen or more. It varied, depending a lot
on the packs themselves, whether they were friendly or not.

She dated as she moved around, she was no
prude and it wasn’t as if she was trying to save herself or
anything. Hell, she hadn’t been a virgin since she was 15, and
although she’d rather not think about The Prick, at one time he’d
been her best friend since they were children and part of the pack.
Sometimes you think you know someone and then they go nuttier than
a squirrel. Life was sucky like that sometimes.

Now, fifteen months later, she wasn’t even
sure how she wound up in this part of nothing Kentucky and she’d
been unable to find a place to rent short term in the town of Allen
where the pack resided, so she’d had to go to the next town over,
North Paddock. Not the nicest place she’d ever lived, but it was
clean and relatively safe. And in the south, most of the packs
stayed away from the very big cities, so you tended to get the odd
rental room in a grandmotherly sort’s home or sometimes, small
complexes like hers. But that would change now. She could call her
mom and share the news and then she could put down roots finally.
At age 22, this angel was going to spread her wings for the first
time and start her life fresh.

All her internalizing had woken her up enough
that she really needed to pee. She looked out the large windows of
what looked like a family room and the sky was dark. She wasn’t
sure what that meant and couldn’t see a clock anywhere. But nature
called and you gotta answer that for sure.

She tried to slide out from underneath him so
she didn’t wake him up, but he was like a very hot dead weight on
top of her. She tickled her nails down his ribcage as far as she
could reach and he gave a snorting laugh and jerked off her,
surprise coloring his face.

My, my.
“Hello handsome.” She smiled,
not bothering to try to cover herself. He’d gotten the whole show
after all.

He smiled, like he hadn’t smiled in a very
long time and wasn’t sure how, and finally after staring at her for
a long moment cleared his throat and said, “Hello.”