Rescued & Ravished: An Alpha's Conquest (A Paranormal Ménage Romance) (2 page)

Hopefully.

It’d been a long flight and a long drive from Chicago, and after a night passed out in a motel room, she was ready to lose herself in the mountains. To leave everything that hurt her somewhere out there in the woods.

She shrugged the pack half-off and stashed the map in the front pocket. Then she shouldered it again fully, fastened its straps across her chest and waist, picked up her hiking stick, and set off.

Just because the Season was starting didn’t mean Chance could stay inside all day. The elders and the Alpha wanted to speak with him—and a few others—about this year’s mating.

So he threw on a field jacket and some boots and started off through the woods. The sun was cresting, and the air was getting bright and warm. Flowers were blooming all around, with bees droning over them. Spring in the mountains was always intoxicating. People who lived in the cities were missing out.

“Hey, Yarrow! How’s your morning?” he called, catching sight of her lounging in a patch of cinquefoil. She was chewing what looked like a stalk of wild strawberry.

“Hey, Chance! Mine’s good, feeling a bit frisky already, though. How’re you?” Yarrow was a lovely young woman, relaxed and sensible, with a spray of freckles on her face. He’d coupled with her during last year’s Season, thankfully to no cubs. Not that she would be a bad mother. “Season got you yet?”

“Not yet. Not quite, anyways.” He paused on the footpath, but didn’t get any closer to her: there was a solid twenty-five feet between them. If he didn’t keep his distance, he might find himself tangled up with her, squeezing her soft, sweatered breasts, kissing her strawberry-tasting mouth.

“Jason wants something with you?” she asked, staying where she was as well. Yarrow was smarter and cooler-headed than Briar. She wouldn’t try to rush him.

“Mm-hmm. He wants to talk about the Season. I don’t expect it will take long. This year’s no different than last.”

“It’ll be a messy week, like always, but we’ll all come out fine on the other side,” Yarrow agreed. “You have your heart set on any woman in particular this year?”

The woman I dreamed about.
“No. You got your eyes on a man?”

“Nah.” She shrugged, spitting out the stalk. “I don’t feel too fussed about it. I’ll let my heat decide for me.”

“I’m feeling likewise.”

“Maybe you should find some other clan,” Yarrow said, stretching out in the flowers and laying on her side. She looked half-melted in the spring sunshine. “If you don’t like the women in this one, that is. …Or you should have Jason get another clan to send a few of its daughters along, two girls at least. I mean, Hudson doesn’t like anyone here either, does he?”

“You’d have to ask Hudson,” Chance dodged, although he knew it was true. Hudson wasn’t sweet on any of the Banff women. “Don’t talk like that, though. I love the clan, and so does he.”

“I know.” Yarrow yawned. The Season was not an industrious time, and everyone was free to set aside their washing and chopping and foraging for the week while instinct took them. “It’s a shame no one’s got your eye, Chance. You’d be happier.”

He knew Yarrow didn’t want his eye, she’d made that clear last year when she told him so.
You’re going to be Alpha, Chance, and everyone knows it
, she’d whispered in the sweaty dark after they’d finished another round.
I don’t want to be the Alpha’s woman. That’s just not for me. I’m only saying this so’s there’s no confusion between you and me.
It had been alright with him.

“I’m happy enough.”

“Enough,” she repeated, dozily. A bee danced over her face, then moved on. “I worry about you.”

“Don’t.” He checked the angle of the sun; it was almost nine. He had to go. “You’ve known me long enough to know I’m fine. And now I’ve gotta get a move on, darlin’. Jason’s waiting.”

“Take care. I saw Briar go sniffing around by your cabin.”

“Oh, she came by already. I sent her home.”

Yarrow smiled, her eyes closed. “This time.”

Harper had left the trail to follow the sound of running water. She’d needed to refill her canteen and she’d wanted to see the stream, so she simply stepped off the track. It was a mistake.

She’d found a lovely narrow waterway, a mountain rill that ran over mossy slabs of rocks in little waterfalls, but it hadn’t been worth it. She couldn’t find the trail again.

This was dangerous, and she knew it. Hikers
needed
trails.

But it couldn’t be far. She hadn’t walked more than ten minutes to find the water. If she just circled around, she was sure to find the track.

Right?

Jason was Alpha, but his cabin wasn’t fancier than anyone else’s. It was simple and rectangular, made of stacked, hand-hewn timber logs. A couple of crows were sunning themselves on the cold-rolled steel roof.

Despite the pleasant weather, it looked like there was a woodstove fire going inside. That made sense because Jason’s mate’s ancient mother, Hazel, lived with them there. She complained of the cold into July. Chance had no idea how old she actually was. Cubs joked she was older than the hills.

“Mornin’, Chance. How’re you feeling?”

“Hey! Mornin’ yourself, Ivy. I’m alright... definitely going to be in Season tomorrow, though. You?”

“Mm-hmm, me too.” Ivy was the clan’s healer. She wore a satchel, hung crosswise across her chest, which was full of natural treatments for any ailment imaginable. She was a little young for her role—only twenty-eight—but last winter their proper healer, Yerba, had died in an avalanche further up the slopes and her apprentice Ivy had had to step up. “Are you expecting anything important from this meeting today?”

“Nah, I’m not. There’s nothing special about this year, Ivy. It’s gonna be the same as always.” They were climbing the slight hill up to Jason’s porch stairs. His were in better condition than Chance’s. “Unless you know something I don’t?”

“No,” she said, smiling. “I’m sure you’re right. Might be in a few months I’ll find myself delivering a litter or two, though. Then we’ll have some excitement.”

“Maybe so, girl.” Not one of his, he hoped. He didn’t want cubs off any of these women, lovely though they might be. Holding open the cabin door for her, he said, “After you.”

“Thanks, Chance.” She smelled like wild onion as she brushed past him, intentionally, he knew. She would have rubbed the scent all over herself to keep the men at this meeting from putting their hands on her on account of the Season. He stepped in after her.

The interior of the cabin smelled like dried wild vegetables, wood ash, and must. They wouldn’t be able to properly air it out from the winter until midsummer when Hazel could tolerate the open windows.

Seated around the main room’s table were Jason, his mate Gorse, Gorse’s mother Hazel, as well as the other elders Galangal and Stonecrop, and Chance’s closest friend, Hudson Farris. He was a transplant from the States who’d wandered his way up the Rockies into Canada almost ten years ago. He and Chance had been thick as thieves ever since, despite some marked differences in personality.

“Chance, Ivy,” Jason said from his high-backed, hand-carved seat at the table’s head. The chair was old enough that its wood was worn down to a natural gloss. The acting Alpha always used it at clan meetings. “Sit. Looks like we’ll have fine weather for the Season this year, eh?”

“Very fine,” Ivy agreed. “There’s rock jasmine sprouting everywhere behind my cabin.”

“How lovely,” Gorse said, lifting a kettle off the woodstove. “Do either of you want tea? I picked and soaked it myself. It’s yellow birch.”

“Yes, please,” Ivy said, but Chance begged off. Gorse always made her birch tea with leaves—not just softened twigs—and that made it too astringent for his taste.

“Now that we’re all here, I’d like to ask the table if they have any concerns about, or have noticed anything different about, this year’s Season,” Jason said, threading his big, thick-knuckled fingers together. He was a true bear of a man, broad and bearded with animal-brown eyes. “Anything?”

No one spoke. They had this meeting every year, and not once had there ever been anything worrying to discuss. Sometimes there were minor things, true—someone newly come of age who was acting skittish, someone ill who was concerned about their ability to fulfill their instincts—but never anything major.

Chance caught Hudson’s eye. Another couple of minutes, they knew, and Jason would declare the meeting over and let them all go off to enjoy the Season in their own ways. He and Gorse, like most mated pairs, would stay inside their cabin, while younger, unattached people would go wild in the woods. The elders tended to take it easy, watching the proceedings with a jaundiced eye as they sat on this or that porch together and drank wild coffee.

“There is something,” Hazel said abruptly. Everyone looked at her. “I’ve been having a dream.”

“A dream?” Galangal asked, in his gruff, thin voice. “What dream?”

“I’ve dreamed about a young woman,” Hazel said with certainty. “The clan will be gaining a new daughter this Season.”

“Oh. Someone will be having a daughter, Mother?” asked Gorse. “Is that what you mean?”

“No. I mean a young woman will be arriving here. Soon.”

The other two elders nodded, convinced. But Hudson flashed Chance a skeptical look.

“Maybe so,” said Jason, diplomatically. “We’ll soon know.”

“Hazel has never dreamed false,” Galangal insisted. “I say we prepare for this stranger girl. She’s coming if Hazel saw her.”

The elders
did
sometimes see things before they happened, but Chance had to admit that he found this particular prediction a little far-fetched. Usually they foresaw the weather, or the gender of a baby, or somebody breaking a foot, simple things like that.

Although, hadn’t he dreamed about a woman, himself? They said Hazel had seen Hudson in a dream before he came to them, so maybe she could see someone else before they arrived, too.

“Respect your elders, Alpha,” Galangal chided abrasively. “Listen to Hazel. She has the sight.”

“I do respect my elders, and I am listening,” Jason answered coolly, with a slight rumble in his chest. “Don’t suggest otherwise. We’ll prepare for this girl Hazel’s seen. Chance, you know that old shed, in back of Gentian’s house? Replace the lock, and clear out anything that could be used as a weapon. Shovels and hoes and that sort of thing. Just in case this new girl proves quarrelsome.

“Ivy, tell Gentian to make up the spare room in the cabin, just in case she proves sweet. Hudson, find Dove and run the range with her, see if you can find this girl out there. Is all that planning to your liking, Galangal?”

“Yes,” the old man said, satisfied. Then he added, more diffidently, “Alpha.”

“Quarrelsome first,” Hazel murmured, warming her hands over her mug of birch tea. “Sweet later.”

“Is there anything else? A fear? A worry?” Jason asked. No one said anything. “Alright. Then this Season’s meeting is over. Let’s all get to our business.”

There was a scraping of chairs as everyone but Gorse and Hazel stood.

“Chance, hold back a minute,” Jason said, his hand suddenly on Chance’s shoulder. “Walk with me.”

It was autumn. The range’s deciduous trees were flaming out in hot colors, while the changeless pines stayed green. She was in a cabin that smelled like cold wood and stove ash, in a bed made up with a quilt and cotton covers. There was a man on top of her, a handsome man, with gold-bright eyes, blonde, thick stubble, and a granite-hard, muscular body shaded in short hair. He was inside her and, instinctively, she knew that was where he belonged.

Another cabin. Another season: winter. It smelled different here, like kindling and copper distilling and bow grease. She was in another bed, with another man, a tanned man with dark hair and brass-gold eyes, whose body was strong, hairy, and cut like steel. He tasted saltier and wilder, and he was deeper inside her, too.

Summer. A meadow. Both men at once, touching her, kissing her, nipping her shoulders—

Harper sat up with a start, sweating and panting. She’d been dreaming.

It was morning, it was spring, and she was still lost.

Jason walked Chance toward Gentian’s cabin to clear out the shed. The morning had only gotten prettier and warmer. The spruce and pines around them were echoing with birdsong.

“Chance, I’m getting older,” Jason said, straightforward. “You know that.”

“Not by much,” Chance countered bracingly.

“Yes, I am. I’ll be sixty-three soon.” Jason paused to pick a few early huckleberries. “It’s about time the clan had a new Alpha.”

“Is it?” Chance asked, uneasily. It was true that the wild, powerful young bull in him longed to demonstrate its strength—that it longed to dominate a rival. But his human side was well aware of who that rival was.

“There are only two men here strong enough to fight for Alpha,” Jason said, popping the tart berries into his mouth. “You know who they are. Hudson is your friend, but he’s the only other young man with the raw power and presence of mind to lead us.”

“I know.” Chance couldn’t say it without a sigh.

“If you both survive the fight, you can still be friends. Men have done it before. But if one of you kills the other. I just want you to understand, Chance. The clan
needs
an Alpha, and it can’t be me. Not for much longer. Whatever you two end up having to do to each other, know that you did it for the clan.”

“I do understand. I’m not as young as you think, Jason.” Chance was thirty-one this year, more than old enough to accept adult, animal realities. “But I wish things could be different.”

“I know. I know it’s a hard way to go. But it could be worse, Chance. I fought my own brother to be Alpha, and even though he lived, he left us.” The old pain of it was plain on Jason’s face. “At least you’re not blood with Hudson.”

“Might as well be,” Chance said, grimly. “Honestly, I might as well be.”

“We have to live as what we are,” Jason said lowly, gripping Chance’s shoulder. “Bears. Animals. We need an Alpha, Chance, and I hope you can be that Alpha. I’ll admit I’m biased, boy. You’re my favorite. Ever since you lost your pa as a cub, I…” he trailed off.