Owned By The Alphas: Part Two (5 page)

R
ed shifted
to his human form. He watched her even as his bones cracked and reshaped, wanting her to watch his change. When she ran and glanced behind her, she saw the look in his eyes and stopped. Respect shone from her and her hand fell down to her side, the poppy held loosely in it.

“You’re amazing!” she breathed.

He flexed his fingers as they completed their transformation. “No human has ever seen me do that before, save one. And that is not the reaction I got.” Ali walked to him, the steaming, sunlit hot springs a mystical backdrop that highlighted her mahogany hair. The animal pelt fell to just above her knee, and he thought she looked beautiful and wild, her skin flushed pink.

“Thank you for sharing that with me.
I’m honored.
” She reached up and touched his cheek and he felt his heart struggle under the enormity and rush of feelings he was not at all used to, and of words he had not expected, but had always yearned for.

“Don’t you want to see how warm that water is?”

She let him change the subject, and eagerly flipped around and ran to the springs, bending to rip off her sneakers and toss them to the side. She dipped a foot in and moaned as the water touched her skin. “Oh man! That is amazing. This is exactly what I needed. It’s perfect.”

He smiled and watched her pull that foot out to dip the other in, pushing her hair away from her face with one sweeping motion as she threw him a smile.

It was a secret place he’d found months ago when he had been hunting on his own, and while he was sure he hadn’t been the first to discover it by any means, he knew it was not widely known about. There were never footprints in the grass, no evidence anyone had been there in the times he’d come back since the first discovery. He’d felt confident when he’d waited for her, hoping she’d come out while the pack was sleeping, that if he took her here they would be alone. He wanted that desperately and for so many reasons.

She glanced over her shoulder as she went to remove her pelt, her eyelashes shyly floating down to the grass. “I’m self-conscious all of a sudden.”

“Don’t be,” he told her, his voice huskier.

She laughed. “Easy for you to say, but you’re hard. Don’t think I can’t see it…and I just…”

“Had sex with
him
?” His eyebrows rose as he walked to join her. “I know. I do not judge you for this.”

She stared at him. “Really? I so wish I could say the same.”

“Because you want me just as I want you?” He touched his toes to the water and splashed her.

Making her hair fall around her cheeks in the most appealing way, she shook her head and grinned. He’d always noticed Ali when they were kids; she had a sparkle to her, an aura around her that drew him to watch her when she didn’t know it. She’d only ever caught him looking once, that he remembered. She’d held his gaze the last day of school, and he hadn’t had the nerve to go and talk to her. That she was wholly unaware of her appeal made her all the more appealing. Like now, she was not trying to egg him on, but the way she kept glancing away was so unaggressive and so feminine that his cock pulled upward, wanting to know more.

“Look, you!” she said on a laugh. “Put that gorgeous thing away! You promised me details and a bath…and maybe, just maybe, friendship. So could we put the brakes on? I’m not ready for…”

“I can smell your arousal, Ali,” he whispered, interrupting, and moving her hair back on one side so he could see her blush.

“Well, I would say
that’s not fair
except I can clearly see yours, but still!” She straightened her spine and looked imploringly at him. “Please? I just can’t. No matter what you can sense about me, I’m not ready.”

He nodded, but his lips tightened and his teeth gritted together. The jealous part of his ego wanted to own her simply to show that other alpha he could. Her stopping him made him realize this, and he took a step back from her and lowered himself into the water. “I will not take you until you are ready, but you should know that I plan to. I will not give up.”

She stood with dripping feet in the boggy grass, staring at him, but she didn’t argue. When the water hit his waist, he smiled and waved her in. Shaking her head a little, she opened up her pelt and let it fall to the ground. She was more beautiful than he had expected, her curves full and womanly, the v of her sex shaved in an intriguing way, and her breasts tumbling forward as she bent to lower her body into the steaming water one inch at a time made his cock fill even more. He could not stop staring at their great size and as her nipples dipped below the clear surface, he had to look away.

She laughed. “Are you trying to control yourself?”

He was not amused. “I am.”

He felt her fingers touch his back and he turned to face her. Her body was fully immersed now and her shoulders peeked above the surface, the long strands of her hair floated in the water. Her eyes sparkled and he lowered himself to be at her level.

“What is it you’d like to know, Ali?”

“Everything!” she breathed, steam rising up around and between them.

He took her chin in hand and planted a soft kiss on her lips. She closed her eyes, but he did not. As he released her, he pulled away and sat on a large rock that was sunken below the surface. “There’s room,” he beckoned.

She waded over and sat down, running wet fingers through her hair as she pushed it back and off her forehead. Droplets stayed in places, lit by the sun. “Where did you go after junior high?”

He stared into the memory. “I hated those days. I was lost. I felt out of sync with society. I felt strongly there must be more to life than what I saw, but when I tried to talk about it with friends they looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language, or they laughed and took another hit off their joints.” He chuckled and looked up to the sky. “I felt different and I was different. Even at home, they couldn’t get through to me. The only times I felt truly at peace were when I was in nature.” He stopped and looked at her to see if she really wanted to hear all of this. The look in her eyes said she did, so he smiled and continued, “We had a cabin, or my grandfather did. It was on one of the many lakes in Minnesota and we’d go there every summer since I was born. That was the only place where I was truly me. My grandfather saw it. He taught me to hunt, he taught me to fish, and when I caught my first trout with my bare hands–” Red demonstrated. “by leaning over the side of the boat and just grabbing one, like this! You should have seen my grandpa’s face! But then he nodded as if to himself, and said something I didn’t understand at the time.
Jared, there have been men who decided not to be of this world. They have left it in the way we live it, completely. If this happens to you, I will not be surprised
. Then he threw out the line and grabbed a beer. I asked him what he meant, but he didn’t talk about it anymore.”

Ali whispered in awe, “He was a werewolf, too? He was warning you what the family was, what would happen to you?”

Red shook his head, staring off. He could tell by her question that she didn’t know, that they hadn’t told her yet. He felt grateful that he would be the one to tell his secret. It was what he’d wanted to do since the first moment he saw it was her riding the other alpha to safety. It was what made him continue the chase. He had to know where she was going, where he was taking her, and if she was safe or their dinner.

He turned to face her on the rock, bending his legs to adjust, with easy grace and self-assuredness. “Ali, you should know that this is supposed to be happening.”

“What do you mean?”

“It is no accident that you’re here. That the one girl I ever liked, who I admired but could never talk to, she just happens to appear out of nowhere? Were you lost yesterday, when he found you?” She nodded. “Did you come alone and then just happened to walk into my territory?”

“I was in their territory, I thought?”

“You were in mine first. You only crossed the line into theirs where you met him. I smelled your scent all over the place before I crossed the border, and found the two of you. Had I awakened earlier, Ali, or had he slept in, it would have been
me
who would have found you! Do you think that is a coincidence?”

Her eyes were round. “Oh my God! I don’t know what to say. And it’s kind of hard to believe, because you said you could never talk to me? I mean, why? You were such a man! You were so confident.”

He grabbed her face with both hands. “I was a boy. And I had no idea how to talk to girls, especially you. You made my tongue swell up. You were already developing, your skin looked like snow, you didn’t giggle with the other girls. You were different. And then this happened.”

Ali stared at him as he released her. She glanced around, overwhelmed. “Did your family help you through it? Did they teach you the ways? Tell me everything!”

Red let out an ugly laugh. “They did no such thing. They aren’t like me. They aren’t werewolves. None of them were or are.”

He met her eyes and waited for her to catch on, but she frowned, lost. “How can that be?”

“Do you see my eyes?” She nodded. “What color are they?”

Frowning and confused, Ali answered, “Blue! Why?”

Red laughed again, the same anger lying just below the surface. “If you see an adult wolf with blue eyes, they are a cross breed, which is always considered beneath pure. They’re either half, or they’re like me.” He paused and licked his lips, raking a hand through his hair to find the words. “There are no werewolves in my ancestry. And yet here I am. I was born human and when I couldn’t take humanity anymore, something shifted in me. I became something greater. I connected to the wild part of me and transformed into a supernatural creature, never to be human again.”

Ali blinked, trying to grasp what he was telling her. “Is that
possible
?”

He smiled, pointing to himself with a nail that extended and sharpened before her eyes. “I think so.”

Her eyelashes fluttered as he drew it back to normal. “Your grandfather guessed?”

Red nodded. “I believe so. This must be what he meant. I’ll never know because it was his death that brought this on, at least partly. He died before I was supposed to fly out to spend the summer with him. It was right after eighth grade ended. I had my plane ticket. I was packed. Then we got the call, the local sheriff had been having lunch with him in town, they were friends, and my grandpa had a heart attack right there in the parking lot as they said goodbye. They couldn’t revive him. He was gone within seconds.”

“I’m so sorry!” Ali reached over and touched Red’s shoulder.

He paused and licked his lips, blinking away the memory, and enjoying her gentle touch. “He was the one member of my family who understood me, and here he was, gone. I was in so much grief that I howled with pain. I howled and howled and howled…and then my body began to shift. It was terrifying, but something clicked in me and said
Don’t fight it.
When it was done, I crashed out of my bedroom window and raced as fast as I could away from the grief. When I came home two days later, I showed my father. I arrived wolf and changed into his son.”

“Oh my God!”

“Yeah. It was pretty awful. I thought maybe he was like me, that he just hadn’t told me. I didn’t understand.”

“What did he do?”

Red let out a sad chuckle. “He got his shotgun out and told me never to come back. I got away, but this scar?” He rose up to show her a gash forever embedded in his side. “My father did this. I never went back.”

Ali gasped and touched the pale, reformed patch of skin. “Where did you go?!”

Lowering himself back in the water, Red held her hand and continued, “I followed clues that there might be others like me in Canada. But then my eyes gave me away, that I wasn’t pure blood, and that didn’t rest well with them, at least most of them. I didn’t know why they wanted to fight me, or that my eyes told them something I didn’t yet understand. It was a bloody time for me. A lot of fights. A lot of pain. And then I found them.”

“Who?”

Red smiled and dipped under the water, swimming away from her and releasing the weight of the past. He rose up and threw his head back, his hair matting down tightly around his head as he smiled. “I can’t believe you’re listening to all of this. You’re not scared, are you? Not of me…not of any of us?”

Ali left the rock and swam down to meet him. “You’re joking right? I want to know everything about you. I think you’re all incredible!”

He pulled her closer until their skin pressed together. He could touch the bottom where she could not, and he held her up. “Then I found my pack. They took me in and saw something in me I hadn’t seen in myself.”

“That you were alpha,” Ali said, quietly, beginning to understand.

“An older wolf taught me how to trust myself, how to hunt without a gun, how to run faster than I ever had, how to fight. The scars you see on this body, they all came before I met him, not after.” On her look, he said, “Yes, he’s died since then. Two years ago.”

She traced every line in his face with her searching gaze. “What you are is so beautiful. I envy you!”

He laughed, and the sound grew. “God! Do you know how good it feels to be honest with another human being, to not have you run screaming with fear, in your eyes and in your scent?”

She wrapped her arms around his neck and shook her head. “I can only imagine.”

“You envy me?”

She nodded, biting her lip. “I do. I tried to
fit in
, when you didn’t. I always admired that in you. I used to watch you and think, now there’s a guy who’s amazing!”

Red smirked. “I used to watch you, too. That ass of yours, oh man.”

She laughed, her entire body rocking with humor. “I was a kid!”

“So was I!”

“It’s filled out even more since then.”

“Miracles really do exist. There’s evidence when you turn around.”

She cracked up and he grinned at her, but then his grin vanished.