Wolf and Prejudice (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 2) (21 page)

She regarded him through the bars for a moment with soft eyes. And then she kissed him. Soft but firm, like a punctuation mark.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. She kissed him again, this time letting her tongue flicker across his lips. She tasted like tangerines, one of their mothers must have brought a few of them to her before dinner. “I’m sorry. Just tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you. Anything…”

Rafe groaned. “Anything,” he repeated, capturing her lips with his. He pressed against the bars, cursing himself for putting them between him and his queen.

“Anything,” she promised, kissing him as furtively as he was kissing her. “Just let me out. Please.”

And the spell was broken. Rafe pulled back and he could see what this scene was missing. Arousal on her part. She held his gaze in a way that should have made her seem trustworthy, but instead he could almost feel the calculation going on in her head. “You’re playing me.”

“No,” she said. But she balled her knuckles against her temples, the same way she always did when she was trying to come up with a new plan. “I just… I’m a mom, Rafe, and I need to see the boys. I will apologize however you want me to apologize and do whatever you want me to do and act however you want me to act, and I promise I will marry you and toe the line from now on. But please let me see them.” She fell to her knees. “Please, Rafe. Anything you want. Just let me see them.”

So apparently the new plan was begging. He pushed away from the cage, his heart icing over.

“PLEASE, RAFE,” she screamed behind him as he walked up the stairs. “You can’t keep me down here! You can’t…!”

Then her voice dissolved into tears.

The sound of her crying followed him all the way out of the house, making it harder than he would have liked to stay angry with her. As he walked down the main road back to the kingdom house, he found himself swiping at his own tears, ones he couldn’t stop despite the newly refreshed anger beating inside of chest. She had tried to use sex to get him to let her out of the cell. And it would have worked, too, if he hadn’t had the good sense not to trust himself with the cage’s key earlier in the week. If he’d still had it when she initiated a kiss with him, for the first time ever, he would have had her on that bed before he could even stop to think about it.

He would have taken her so hard, and in so many ways that little cot would have broken under the weight of his passion, and he wouldn’t have had any choice but to let her out of the cage.

He swiped at more tears. It felt like his chest was breaking apart, the sadness was so overwhelming. What the hell was wrong with him?

“Hey, man, stop crying,” a voice called out in front of him. “That’s not a good look for an alpha.”

Rafe wiped more tears out of his eyes to unblur the image of the man walking toward him.

It was Mag. His former friend. Here in the flesh, smiling at him despite the animosity of their last face-to-face, which would have ended in punches if Rafe hadn’t decided at the last second to call off the friendship rather than lower himself to Mag’s level.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. The surprise of Mag’s unexpected appearance momentarily eclipsed the sadness he’d been battling to suppress.

Mag shrugged. “Time travelling sister-in-law finally reappears five years later with triplets. You know the aunties are going to want to get in on that action. The only reason it took us this long to fly out here is because we only found out yesterday through the gossip grapevine, and Janelle’s pissed your mom didn’t tell her. They’re in there having it out right now, which is why I’m out here.”

Rafe shook his head. The Janelle he used to know never would have argued with her mother and had been docile to a fault. But he guessed the Janelle who had refused to tell him where Alisha had gone, despite his many threats, had decided to stick around.

“That bad, huh?”

“Like Wolf War III. I would not go in there if I were you.”

“How about the boys? You didn’t leave them in there with Janelle and her mom, did you?” A sliver of guilt went through Rafe as he realized he hadn’t exactly been doing his part as far as they were concerned.

A good father would have done what he could to ease his sons’ transition into their new world. His instincts told him that was what Alisha would have done, reassured the boys and shielded them from the worse of the drama going down in the kingdom house. Their refusal to come out of wolf form had thrown him, but his latest blowup with Alisha had not so gently reminded him if he wasn’t going to let them see her, then he had to start being both a father and a mother to them.

“Don’t worry, Tu took them out of there as soon as Janelle and her mom started going at it. They’re all playing in the side yard with my girls.” He smiled. “The girls are loving their wolf cousins, by the way. Closest they’ll ever get to having a dog, I guess.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Rafe said. Unlike humans, most werewolves didn’t keep dogs as pets. They considered it weird, demeaning, and unnatural in the same way most humans wouldn’t ever keep an ape as a pet. But children were children in both species, and most werewolves had memories of begging their parents for a pet like the ones humans had on TV and then having it explained to them why they would never, ever get a dog.

“So they’re not wolf-trained yet?” Mag asked. He seemed determined to keep the conversation going, as if they were still the best of friends and their multi-year estrangement after Janelle had helped Alisha go back in time had never happened.

And maybe Rafe was sick of only having his disapproving beta sheriff to talk to, because he let Mag keep the pretense going. "I guess they did things different in Old Norway. All the village children were in wolf form when I came to pick up Alisha, including the boys. From what I could tell, they were actually encouraged to walk around as wolves. But they’re in our time now, so…”

Mag nodded. Keeping children from morphing into wolf form whenever they pleased was one of the first milestones of raising wolf children, like potty training. And it was rare to see boys in wolf form on non-full moon nights after the age of three.

“Tu might be able to help you with that,” Mag said. “She had both girls trained by the time they turned two. She could work with the boys.”

“Don’t know about that. She can stay until the wedding, but any longer than that would be disrespectful to Grady.” He’d meant for this to come out as a kingly proclamation, but his voice cracked at the end as another wave of sadness crashed over him. And tears once again began to spill from his eyes.

Rafe wiped them away viciously. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve never cried in my life, not even when Alisha disappeared. Now…”

Mag frowned. “Did you get in an argument with Alisha? One that ended with her crying?”

“Yes,” Rafe admitted. “She tried to play me and then got upset when her plan didn’t work. How did you know?”

Mag rubbed a hand over his chest. “It’s the mate bond. It’s not just the words, but the emotions that are telepathic. When she’s sad, you’re sad. It drove me crazy when Janelle and me went through our rough time. And that’s another reason I got out of there. Janelle can get mad with her mom and it’s no problem, but add the mate bond to the mix, and I’m in there cursing out my in-laws. So I left to keep Christmas from getting too awkward.”

Rafe wanted to deny he and Alisha had the same kind of emotional telepathy, but more tears came to his eyes. “So, she’s basically hijacked my emotions?” he said.

Mag nodded. “Yep. It sucks, and the bond only gets worse over time. So it’s probably feeling pretty intense for you now, because it’s like almost five years of mateship and you haven’t had time to get used to it.”

Rafe cursed. Yet another thing he had to be angry at Alisha about.

“But on the flip side, when she’s happy, you’re happy, too.” Mag threw him a knowing grin. “And when she’s really happy, you’re real, real happy. Know what I’m saying?”

No, he didn’t. He hadn’t been happy since the day Alisha had left him, and he found it hard to imagine he ever would be again.

“I better get home,” he said. “The less people see me like this, the better.”

He started walking and Mag fell in beside him. “You know, this emotional telepathy thing, it’s a two-way street. If she’s crying so hard it’s making you cry, you can help her by calming down. Like if you’re carrying around a lot of anger and stuff, that’s just going to make it worst.”

“I can’t stop being angry. I’m never going to stop being angry about this,” Rafe informed him.

“I get it,” Mag said. “Janelle and me were having problems when Alisha left, too. If Janelle had gone with her back in time, I doubt I ever would have forgiven her. But five years, man. This bond between me and Janelle, it’s strong, stronger than both of us and we’re not even fated mates as far as I know—”

Rafe could already see where Mag was going with this, and it only made him walk faster.

“So maybe if you could do something to make yourself less mad, something you know she’d like, too. It would help with the water works.”

Fuck that, Rafe thought to himself. Like hell he was going to let go of his anger in order to make the she-wolf who betrayed him feel better. With abrupt and brutal force, he shoved himself into her mind for the first time in five years. “
Alisha, stop crying. It’s affecting me and I’m going to talk to my sons now
.”

Less than a moment later, the urge to sob was slowly replaced with an iron determination not to cry. And eventually the crying urge abated.

Rafe let out a tired sigh when it felt like his emotions were his own again. “I don’t know how my parents put up with this shit.”

Mag shook his head in commiseration. “A few months mated to Janelle was all it took to understand why my parents went out the way they did.”

The mention of Mag’s parents caused the conversation to fizzle out. Another sad story that neither of them wanted to dredge up.

They stayed quiet for the rest of the walk.

“So…” Mag said, when they got to the front door of the kingdom house. “It's not something Tikaani and Wilma like to talk about, but you know Janelle's got a law degree now, right?”

No, Rafe hadn't known and he threw Mag a none-too-pleased look. “Seriously? You let her get a law degree?”

Mag rubbed a hand over his shortly fuzzed head. “Actually I was the one who suggested it. You were so mad and she was worried about Alisha. I said, 'Baby, why don't you make sure your sis has some good representation when she gets back?' Plus, I knew how hot she'd look in one of them suits with the pencil skirts, and let me tell you…” Mag grinned with obvious appreciation for his wife's professional appearance, “I was one hundred percent right. Law and Order looks good on her, yeah?”

Rafe shook his head. “I didn't think it was possible to hate you any more than I already did, man…”

Mag just chuckled. “So yeah, you probably have maybe a couple of days tops before Janelle files a wrongful imprisonment motion or whatever they call it when a king locks his future wife up in his ex-girlfriend's changing cage. But how about this? I go in there and make sure Janelle doesn't run you down with her threats yet. Give you enough time to go fetch your boys and maybe get upstairs before she knows you're back. I do that, and you and me call what happened in Wyoming even. Cool?”

Rafe thought about Mag's proposal that he put aside five years of estrangement in exchange for Mag running interference with Alisha's sister for a few minutes. Then he shrugged and said, “All right. That's cool.”

Mag grinned and slapped him on the shoulder like they'd just closed a lucrative business deal, before disappearing into the house. And Rafe didn't feel like he'd made a bad bargain. After a day of dealing with the Alaska queen, he did not relish getting into and even uglier confrontation with the Queen of Wyoming. And as least he managed to untangle one of his relationships today. At this point, Rafe was willing to take what he could get, and he made his way around the side of the house, following the sound of laughter to the side yard.

But when he arrived in the large expanse of snow-covered yard that sat to the side of the kingdom mansion and guesthouse, the laughter came to a stop. Three puppies, two little girls, and Tu all turned to look at him, like the devil himself had entered their midst.

Only one of them, the taller—and therefore he assumed the oldest—of the two girls, spoke. “Is it true, you put Auntie ‘Lisha in jail?”

She should have been chastised for speaking out of turn to a king, but Tu, who was dressed in head to toe black, like a Goth version of a widow, just stood there, hugging her arms around herself like his presence was the equivalent of a unwelcome chill.

He ignored the small Wyoming princess’s question and said, “I’m here for my sons.” His eyes fell on Rafesson, but he gave the command to all three of the little wolves standing before him. “Follow me back to your room.”

He didn’t wait for their acquiescence before heading toward the sliding glass side doors that led back into the house. And, as it turned out, he didn’t need to. They quietly followed him into the house and up the back stairs without needing to be told twice.

When they reached the bedroom, he closed the door behind him and said, “As your father and your alpha, I command you to change back into human form—”

The words were barely out of his mouth before three little brown boys appeared before him naked.

It was immediately apparent that they weren’t identical, though they all had light brown skin and similar nests of long, glossy black curls on their heads. Knud was the tallest of the three by a few inches. Skinny and long of limb, whereas Nago was the shortest with a bit of pudge that spoke to his enjoyment of the sweets Erylace had been stuffing him with ever since he’d gotten here. And Rafesson—well, looking at his oldest son was like looking at a picture of himself at that age. Like he had spit him out with nothing but a hairstyle change.

Rafesson gave his brothers a command in Old Norse and they all proceeded to get dressed in the clothes Erylace had left for them on the back of a chair when she’d thought it would only take a request to get them to change back to their human forms. Rafe watched in fascination as they puzzled over the zippers in their old language, only to have Knud figure it out faster than Rafe himself might have if he had only days ago been thrust forward to a time and place he’d never known.