Wolf and Prejudice (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 2) (7 page)

Alisha pulled a USB drive out of her purse and downloaded all the desktop’s files onto it before opening up a video that, according to the computer’s hard drive, had been uploaded to Chloe’s computer the day before her first disappearance. Chloe blinked onto the monitor screen with a man sitting behind her on the bathroom counter. Alisha leaned forward. Was this the Viking wolf? He wore only a towel wrapped around his waist, but he was freaking huge. Well over six feet and built like a truck.

After a happy greeting to her audience, Chloe introduced him as “Fenris.”

Since Fenrir was the wolf god that the Norse wolves used to pray to before the majority of them converted to Christianity, this had to be Chloe’s mate, and he looked nothing like the clean-cut Rafe. His tousled red hair fell in long waves over his broad shoulders and he was sporting some serious beard action.

His eyes stayed on Chloe throughout her entire explanation about testing out an old-fashioned straight blade she’d found at the flea market on her special guest. She threw him an affectionate smile when she said, “special guest,” which confused Chloe, because the tape was uploaded less than twelve hours before her friend was caught attempting to leave town without the Viking by Wolf Springs’ newly retired sheriff. But in this video, the two came off as rather chummy, even though only Chloe talked the entire time she was scraping his beard off.

However, Chloe stopped talking to the audience mid-sentence when the last of the shaving cream came off and she saw the Viking’s naked face for the very first time. Alisha could easily see why Chloe had been struck speechless. The Viking had been hiding a movie star-level handsome face under that rough beard.

Chloe smiled up at the Viking, but then averted her face when he tried to kiss her. He rubbed his nose against the side of her face, and suddenly she laughed. At first Alisha was confused, but then she figured they must have been communicating through mental telepathy.

Fascinating, because most likely the Viking spoke Old Norse, so this was probably the only way the two could communicate, with the telepathy acting as a translator when they shared their thoughts—thoughts that were obviously taking a sexy turn. The Viking pulled her hands up and laid them on his chest before kissing her once, then twice, then he was slipping his hands underneath her robe…

They eventually paused, coming to what looked like telepathically relayed mutual agreement, and moved out of frame. But the camera was still trained on the bathroom’s mirror, so Alisha could see they had decided to run a bath for the Viking. One Chloe would be joining him for. Her friend went out of the camera’s frame and then came back into it, laughing and naked as she lowered herself into the bath behind him.

Alisha watched Chloe wash the Viking’s hair, which seemed to give him a great deal of pleasure. The Viking smiled over his shoulder at his new mate with approval in his eyes before flipping over to cover Chloe’s body with his own. They began kissing again, and this time they didn’t stop… and that was when Alisha began to feel more like a voyeur than a historian.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Alisha inwardly cursed, and she quickly pocketed the USB drive, before swiveling her chair around to face Rafe.

He was standing with a muscle-bound blond guy, who she assumed must be the new town sheriff/beta since he was wearing a brown uniform. But even in uniform with a gun holstered to his side, he didn’t come off anywhere near as intimidating as Rafe, who looked like he was ready to strangle her

Behind her, the sound of Chloe’s pleasure-filled screams erupted from the desktop. And kept on going. Seriously, Chloe sounded like a porn star, she was screaming so loud.

“So…” Alisha said. “How about them Broncos?”

6

“
W
hat are you doing here?
”
Rafe asked after his future wife pushed pause on the video of his ex-fiancée having sex with another wolf.

“Well,” Alisha answered carefully. “I just happened to be passing by, and the door was unlocked.”

“You just happened to be passing by?” he repeated.

He could almost see her making the decision not to tell him about his father’s part in this before she said, “Yes, the new year’s right around the corner, so I’m getting a head start on all my resolutions. Eat better, exercise more, you know. So I decided to take a walk through the residential part of town and this house still looked so cute and quaint from the outside, I wondered who might be renting it now that Chloe’s gone. But then no one was here when I knocked on the door, so I decided to take a little peek around—“

Unable to stand this obviously made up a story any longer, he said, “My father told me he sent you here.”

Alisha let out a huge sigh of relief. “Good, I didn’t know how much longer I could keep that going. Why didn’t you open with that?” she asked with an accusatory look.

“Because I wanted to see if you would lie.” He gave her a sharp look of his own. “You did. I expected better of a princess.”

“Well, I consider myself an academic first, and an academic never reveals her sources—at least not until it’s time to write the bibliography.” She chuckled at her own joke. “A little educational humor for you—free of charge.”

Rafe stared at her, clearly not amused. “So let me get this straight. You came into
my
kingdom town. Asked
my
pack a bunch of intrusive questions about
my
life. Let yourself into
my
house. And now you’re making jokes about lying straight to
my
face?”

Alisha sighed, as if he were a pesky nuisance instead of the Alpha King of Colorado. “Look Rafe, I get you’re all hurt or whatever about Chloe. That must have been a really huge blow to your ego. I understand, seriously I do. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to just put away my research. I mean my specialty is American she-wolves, and Chloe is a black shifter who went
back in time
to the
Viking Age
. Who knows how she’s influenced wolf culture? She could be the reason the Norse Vikings stopped praying to the Fenrir wolf and converted to Christianity. She could have—”

“She betrayed me!” Rafe’s wolf came alive inside of him, threatening to transform him again, he was so angry. “She was my fiancée and
she betrayed me
.”

If Alisha sensed how enraged she’d made him, how close to the surface his wolf hovered now, it wasn’t apparent when she twisted up one side of her mouth and said, “Yeah, but…”

“Yeah, but
what?”
he said, his voice low and dangerous.

“I mean, you’re acting like this was a Queen Guinevere betraying King Arthur with Sir Lancelot kind of situation, and it was more like…” she appeared to search her memory for the right reference. “Gaston and Belle.”

“Gaston and Belle,” he repeated.

“You know, from the Disney version of
Beauty and the Beast?”
Taking his non-answer as an invitation to keep on talking, she explained, “You see, Gaston only wants to marry Belle because she’s the most beautiful girl in town, not necessarily because he appreciates how awesome she is, which she is—especially when you consider how few literate women there were in small French villages back then. He should have appreciated her for the entertainment value of having someone to read to him at night alone. But he didn’t. His basic premise was, ‘I want her because she’s hot.’ And, maybe it’s time to admit that’s where you were with Chloe.”

Rafe cut her off right there. “I’m the
alpha
of Colorado, and you’ve insulted me, Princess.
Grievously.
The correct course of action at this point would be to apologize.”

Alisha pointed to herself, her face a pantomime of confusion. “You want
me
to apologize for conducting my research? You’re seriously telling me that?”

“I want you to apologize for overstepping your boundaries when it comes to a situation that has nothing to do with you, one I’ve made clear isn’t to be researched any further.”

“Fine, Rafe, I’ll apologize,” she said. Then she let her face go stony. “Just as soon as you apologize for being an idiot and not being able to see pass your own ego to the part in history Chloe might have played.”

Grady stepped forward then, releasing a low menacing growl in the back of his throat.

But Rafe stilled his beta with a shake of his head. And he quite deliberately pushed his wolf down, so he could speak to Alisha as a man. “I am the Alpha of Colorado,” he said.

Alisha rolled not just her eyes, but her entire head. “I know who you are, Rafe. Believe me, I’ve been told quite a few times since I got here.”

Rafe’s wolf went very still then. Alpha princes weren’t raised like most male wolves. They didn’t fight just for the hell of it, they didn’t spend a lot of time in shifter bars, and they didn’t stir up drama just to have something to do. They were raised better. They were taught to fight only to defend their title or loved ones, to never lose their tempers, and to treat princesses with gentle respect.

But when Rafe stepped up to Alisha, there was nothing gentle inside of him, “This situation you’ve created—at first it was just annoying, but now you’ve pissed me off.” His eyes met hers then, and he did nothing to hide the wolf inside of him, the wolf crouched down and ready to spring at her again the way it had the last time they had seen each other at the Alaska dinner party.

A certain scent entered the air then, acrid and bright. It made his nose tingle and even though he’d never experienced it before, he knew it instantly for what it was—the smell of Alisha’s fear. His wolf cheered. Finally, she was taking him seriously, as she should have from the start.

But then she squared her shoulders and met his eyes despite her initial fear. “I’m not going to apologize for being one of the few academics in the entire world who gives a shit about she-wolves in our history. And I’m certainly not going to apologize for the entire book I plan to write on the subject of Chloe Adams when this is all said and done. Because she wasn’t just your fiancée. She was my friend. And she was a good person. And she’s an important part of history just like all the dumb alpha kings we still tell stories about around our campfires, the ones that dominate nearly all of our wolf texts. Chloe is my campfire story, and I’m not going to let you take her away from me.”

Rafe’s wolf thrashed inside of him, demanding that he conquer Alisha once and for all.
“Fuck her!”
it screamed at him.
“Fuck her hard.”

However, Rafe’s human found himself admiring the Alaska princess for standing up to him like this, despite the fear scent rolling off of her in waves. Almost no one else would have dared. But his Alisha… she was a she-wolf,
a real she-wolf
, one with teeth, one who would have to be brought to heel if he wanted to call her his mate.

“I’m going to enjoy this,” he said with a slow smile, imagining what that big, soft body would feel like under his.

His no doubt feral smile seemed to unnerve her, and Rafe admired the way she forced her chin into the air when she said, “Enjoy what?”

“Taming you.”

He motioned his beta sheriff forward. “Take her to the airport and put her on a plane back to Fairbanks.” Then he addressed his future queen: “Alisha Ataneq, you are no longer welcome in the state of Colorado by decree of its king.”

Grady forcibly removed her from the house with Alisha comparing Rafe to all manner of despots from several different ages in history as the beta escorted her out. Apparently getting banned from Colorado had taught her nothing about the importance of showing proper respect to her alpha.

But she would learn, he vowed as he watched Grady drag her out.
She would learn.

7

T
his past February a Viking alpha king showed up in the shifter town of Wolf Springs and claimed Chloe Adams, the she-wolf then engaged to Colorado’s alpha prince, as his fated mate. She reportedly did not want to honor the claim and still planned to mate with the alpha prince as soon as she went into heat. But then she unexpectedly went into heat on the night of a full moon, which kept her in human form. For reasons still not understood, the Viking alpha king also didn’t shift and he somehow found his way to her.

By sunrise the next morning, the entire town knew by the sounds coming from the house that the alpha prince’s fiancée was now mated to another. The alpha prince left town, and once the she-wolf came out of her mating frenzy, she also attempted to leave town and the Viking behind. No one is quite sure where she was planning to go, but the sheriff caught her and dragged her back for a reason that still hasn’t been fully explained—this historian is also fairly sure it wasn’t legal. The Viking was permitted to visit her, but when they came back to the clinic’s cage to fetch him, both the Viking king and the she-wolf had disappeared.

This was thought to be the end of it, but then seven months later, the she-wolf came back through the portal, wounded and in labor with a son who was delivered by the Colorado alpha king and his queen. The woman stayed on for two months, waiting to be reunited with her mate. Then she left her newborn with the royals in order to visit one Professor Henley. It is not known what they talked about, as the professor refuses to meet with me, but according to other sources, during their visit a flash was seen in Wolf Springs and reportedly the Viking came back through the gate.

He spent a mere forty-eight hours in Wolf Springs. During which he recovered from an undisclosed illness and met his son for the first time. An eyewitness, who happened to be in the room at the time, said it was a very touching scene to see the Viking meet his son for the first time.

Then, reportedly, Chloe Adams drove into Denver to pick up two period costumes, one for an adult and one for an infant, which she paid for in cash. Shortly after that, all three family members disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.