Authors: Kari Gregg
Wade’s brow furrowed. “Stubbornness?”
Noah snickered, earning a fiercer scowl from his mate. Noah shrugged off the stiff arms holding him away and moved closer, against the hard line of Wade’s chest. Let the tantalizing aroma of the alpha seep into his bones. “Stop fighting me so hard. And I’ll stop fighting you.”
The hands that had jerked him away fell around his shoulders. “I run a very profitable company employing a dozen construction crews and I’m a damn good alpha. But I’m no good at this. I can’t...No one can be near you until you refresh your bite. It isn’t safe.
I’m
not.” Wade hugged him tight. “I hate not trusting myself.”
Tipping his chin up, Noah smiled at him. “Take your shirt off.”
Wade grimaced. “How romantic.”
Stiff as cement, Wade didn’t budge so Noah took matters into his own hands, slipping his under the hem of Wade’s sweatshirt to slide the fabric up. When the alpha’s skin pebbled with goose bumps under his touch and his nipples hardened to eager nubs even before Noah dropped his mouth to taste, Noah sighed in anticipation.
“Relax,” he said. He darted his tongue to lick. He was rewarded with the tang of salty sweat, reminding Noah that, company owner or not, Wade had nonetheless spent his morning under the hot sun. His mate’s flavor delighted Noah. And enthralled him. He splayed his palms over Wade’s chest, glorying in Wade’s quiver when he curled his fingers into solid muscle. “You’ll be steadier after I bite you. You said so.”
Wade snorted. “You don’t want that. Or me. I can smell when you give in to your excitement. Your wolf’s teeth aren’t even pricking your gums.”
Noah fastened his lips around Wade’s nipples and sucked, hollowing his cheeks as his tongue trilled. He lifted up to softly blow on the wet circle he’d made. The catch in Wade’s breath and the hammering of Wade’s pulse shot straight to Noah’s groin.
“Seduce me then. Lure my wolf. You know how.” He peered up at him, though his lashes. “I want you to.”
Cursing low, Wade grabbed Noah by his arms and pushed him back again, into the porch rail. Flattening the fingers of one hand over Noah’s heart, Wade lifted the other to tear Noah’s shirt away. He stared at Noah with such fire, with both frustration and hunger. Noah wondered why he didn’t incinerate on the spot. Wade tossed the shirt aside and smoothed his palm over the shorts covering Noah’s dick.
That did it. His mouth stung as his wolf’s teeth pushed through. Thrilled exhilaration pumped through him, making Noah feel wild. And free. Like he could do anything,
be
anything, to hell with his crutches, his glasses, migraines, his scars, and red hair. None of that mattered. All the things other shifters would’ve sneered at him for were immaterial as long as Wade wanted him. Wade’s slow strokes at his groin and his restraining hand at Noah’s chest forcing him to be still turned Noah on like nothing else.
“You fight me everywhere, except in bed.” Wade crowded into him, squeezing Noah’s cock behind the thin fabric of his shorts. “There, you can’t melt for me fast enough. Do you know how confusing that is? How frustrating?”
Noah licked his lips and thrust his hips, seating his dick more firmly in his mate’s grasp. “And exciting.”
“Very.”
Noah whined when he leaned forward to make the bite and Wade twisted his shoulder out of reach. Noah could already taste him, copper and salt. Feel the hot splash of Wade’s blood on his tongue. “Stop teasing.”
Wade answered with a sly grin.
Straining against his mate’s restraining hand, Noah snarled. “You are such a dick.” But he groaned as Wade’s caress glided away from his aching groin. Instead, he cupped Noah’s scalp and guided his mouth to the stretch of skin where the pinprick scars of Noah’s mating bite had faded. His firm touch, his smell, the steady thump of his heartbeat bewildered Noah. Enthralled him.
“Bite,” Wade said.
Noah glanced up. “You’ll feel comfortable enough to let me meet other pack members?”
Stare solemn, Wade nodded.
“And talk to me, spend time with me.” Noah wrinkled his nose. “Not just when we’re screwing or to comfort me when I’m sick.”
Again, Wade indicated his assent by dipping his head.
Mouth watering, Noah parted his lips, but paused, remembering one last worry. “What about kids? You must want them right away.”
The alpha snorted, his palm at Noah’s head urging Noah to his shoulder. “No more negotiating, little wolf. Bite.”
Sighing, Noah obeyed his alpha and his mate. He let the animal inside him swim to the surface, starved but jubilant.
This time, Noah didn’t shy or hesitate from marking his mate. That much uncertainty had fled at least.
This time, his teeth sank deep.
Chapter Eight
Shoving up his new glasses, Noah rubbed the bridge of his nose and squinted at the laptop screen despite the sun’s glare. Ordinarily, he would never have worked outdoors, but Wade had relented. Now that his mate bore the marks of Noah’s teeth again, Noah could mingle with other shifters. Not everyone. Wade’s instincts were too raw and territorial for Noah to mix with the entire pack and that likely wouldn’t slacken until the full moon. But the alpha had okayed limited freedom around the pack house, including this private patio tucked inside a garden near the pool.
He could hear the others, at least. Fletcher permitted few beyond his security checkpoint. A stocky shifter named Tanner who was almost as short as Noah brought food and drinks from the kitchen at regular intervals. Like most wolves, he was a gamma occupying no special rank or status in the pack. Tanner flashed shy smiles, urged Noah to eat sweetbreads to mend his wolf, and blinked in mystified curiosity at what Noah did on his laptop. The mates of Wade’s four betas visited, too. Not Grace. She stayed in the trailer in the cornfield outside of town with her children, but the other betas’ mates introduced themselves. The two men and lone female seemed nice. Polite. All deferred to him and spoke respectfully. Where Noah had expected, at best, benevolent disinterest, he experienced wary courtesy.
The pack’s teens saved him.
Believing Noah could be taught to control his shifting, Trudy had ordered him to learn shifter craft as part of his medical therapy. A private tutor could have been obtained. Fletcher had offered to do that, but the healer had insisted. Shifter young learned from one another as much as they learned from their mentors. So every afternoon, the beta escorted Noah to a walled courtyard to practice shifting and exercises that would help him resist instinctive shifts with five of the pack’s youngest teenagers. Noah didn’t mind that none of the kids were older than fourteen. For the first time in his life, all of the shifters were the same size as him. They didn’t glower at his crutches and brace, either. Noah had anticipated mockery, maybe threatening growls. Out of earshot of Fletcher tutoring them, naturally.
He couldn’t have been more wrong. As soon as those whelps saw the laptop bag slung across Noah’s chest when he’d walked from the private garden that had become his new home office, Noah had transformed from inferior, damaged wolf to the coolest shifter alive as far as the teens were concerned. During that first lesson, Noah invested more time showing off his electronics than learning to shift deliberately, faster, and less awkwardly.
And he’d made friends.
Turned out Noah wasn’t the only shifter interested in technology. Older generations might despise working at a desk, but these kids didn’t. Computers enchanted them. Once his tool kit had been retrieved, Noah had cracked open the case of his laptop to show one of the girls the extra RAM card he’d installed to boost system performance while two boys scanned through the music library on Noah’s tablet. The remaining pair of teens drooled over Noah’s new smartphone. That Wade had ordered the factory settings changed to permit phone calls and texts from the in-pack network alone didn’t bother the kids. They were too busy checking out Noah’s apps.
The teenagers were kindred spirits, but raised inside the pack, they lacked the opportunities Noah’s family had provided him. School ended for them with their first shifts between the ages of ten and twelve. No more human teachers, no more books, and most significantly, no more computer labs.
When he’d suggested Wade purchase laptops for each of the teens after that initial lesson in shifter craft had been pre-empted by an impromptu technology expo, Noah became their hero. He’d buttered up his mate first, of course. Noah was supposed to learn how to be a wolf, not sway young and impressionable whelps to the dark side of web browsers, gaming, and the wonder of synced devices. Fletcher had reported Noah’s failure to Wade, but an enthusiastic if inexpertly given blowjob as well as Noah’s sweetly offered ass had circumvented any lectures or lingering disappointments about Noah’s botched attempt to adapt to pack life.
Instead, the whelps adapted to him. With gusto.
Noah guided the teens through the steps of customizing their new machines the next afternoon. After practicing shifter craft, he tutored them on computers every day since.
“I can’t get this,” Dylan bitched, shoving the corner of his laptop away. Seated at a second table that two orgasms had convinced Wade to move to Noah’s garden, the gangly shifter kicked an empty chair across from him. Frustration etched his boyish features. “Piece of shit machine is too slow.”
“Stop cruising porn when you think no one’s watching and dump your temporary memory cache,” Becca said, bent over her own keyboard.
The two other boys seated on either side of her sniggered.
Becca focused on her monitor, the glow casting blue-tinted shadows on her thin but comely face. In a few years, the girl would be a knock-out. Given the proximity of the other two boys, Noah would hazard a guess that some believed she already was. “Don’t curse, either,” she said. She shot a glance at Noah. “Alpha Wade doesn’t like it.”
“Shut up,” Dylan said. “You aren’t my mother.”
“Guys,” Noah said in low warning. So far, none of the five teenagers had assassinated him with foam darts, and out of respect for delicate equipment, they’d limited wrestling to the walled courtyard where they practiced shifting. Didn’t mean the kids didn’t snap at and tease one another, jockeying for position in their small group. They mostly listened to Noah, though, obeyed him when he told them to knock it off. Noah wasn’t sure if the teens respected him as an adult, as the mate of their alpha, or simply as the one who’d maneuvered the pack into providing laptops for them. He didn’t honestly care. They heeded him, and that was all that mattered.
Predictably, Dylan glowered at Becca, but he soon worked at his computer again. Considering Noah had struggled with his animal nature, too, and his frustrated outbursts had handily destroyed technology before Dr. Phares had started aconitum therapy, Noah appreciated the teens’ self-control. A kicked chair and rebellious profanity was nothing compared to an involuntary shift that could damage several thousand dollars’ worth of fragile machinery with one accidental drop of those laptops to the floor.
“Were you able to link workbooks in your equations, Becca?” Noah asked to provide a necessary distraction while Dylan, indeed, dumped his bloated temporary memory.
“I think so. Maggie showed me.”
The girls, both dark and svelte, were more than just pretty faces. They were frighteningly smart, besting the boys in basic skills and at the pace they learned. If Wade believed he could shove these two girls into blue collar jobs, he’d have a fight on his hands. Becca struggled with spreadsheets, but Maggie, sitting quietly at Noah’s table, would one day take over the pack’s accounting. Noah would bet his own equipment on that. “If you have any questions...”
Both girls rolled their eyes.
Truthfully, Noah wasn’t helping the teens much. Accounting wasn’t his area of expertise. His interest in bookkeeping had begun and ended with commercially packaged software that handled invoices sent to his clients, but Maggie had found the system too limiting. She and Becca had launched a project developing customized electronic workbooks that left Noah’s feeble skills in the dust. Dylan manipulated film he shot on his mother’s camera to create movies, something Noah had never even toyed with, while Kenneth and Sam had elected to concentrate on nuts and bolts programming, which was a mystery to Noah. He suspected they were testing the pack’s network firewalls for weaknesses, but was too afraid to ask.
His chest swelled with pride when he glanced at them working at the garden’s tables, though.
He
liked
these kids. Genuinely liked them. None would be satisfied with laying brick, fooling with plumbing, or erecting steel beams for high-rises. Regardless of what Noah had originally guessed, computers weren’t just an amusing diversion to them. They wanted to use their minds to contribute to the pack, and Noah believed they would make it happen now that involuntary shifting hadn’t halted their education and they’d been provided with the proper tools. He recognized their desire to learn and explore areas shifters didn’t typically tread, because he’d felt that once, too. Designing and maintaining websites hadn’t made Noah less of a shifter any more than his bad leg had. A career that included databases and a desk wouldn’t make these kids inferior, either. The teens reminded Noah of a younger version of himself. Just without his limp.
They persuaded him that maybe breeding children for Wade wouldn’t be so bad.
He could be a good father. Probably. The idea didn’t fill him with dread anymore. A miniature version of Wade intrigued him. Dark hair, black eyes, and a stubborn chin jutting with determination. And daughters! After his mother died, Noah had only his sister as a female influence at the farm and Lydia sneered at everything she considered girly. There’d been no dolls, princess themed parties, or hair ribbons like the ones that had decorated Mia’s pigtails. Uh-uh. Lydia had worked the farm alongside her brothers and when she wasn’t busy tending fields she’d leased after marrying Scott, she still did. Frilly dresses? Lydia preferred coveralls.
A little girl with Wade’s lush mouth and Noah’s gift with computers might be nice. Someone like Maggie or Becca he could teach appreciation for arena rock. Strong. Capable. With Wade’s DNA, their babies would be beautiful.