Seduction (The Journal of the Wolves of Spruce Hollow) (24 page)

I sniffed, wiped my tears with the edge of my t-shirt and crawled out of the closet. The bedroom door was unlocked and Roan was no longer in the room with me.
 

Where had he gone?
Perhaps he, too, had gone back to the pack as well and left me here alone? Opening my ears wide, I listened for his movements in the camp. He was still here. I could hear the sound of water running coming from downstairs.
Roan was taking a shower.
Why would he take a shower with only cold water available? It would be freezing!

“Make your way outside, Aspen. Hurry! We need as much of a head start as we can get. Roan’s wolf is powerfully built and very fast. We don’t want him to catch up to us and drag us back here!” my wolf said.

The urgency in her voice spurred me on and I sprinted from the bedroom and quickly flew down the stairs, stepping as lightly as I could.
I was pretty quiet but was I quiet enough to prevent a Were from hearing me?
The water in the shower kept running, so that was a good sign.
 

I didn’t stop until I got to the heavy, wooden front door. Turning the lock ever so quietly, I opened the door and stepped outside into the bitter cold…and my freedom.
 

“Okay, so now what? We’re not going to walk all the way home are we? It’s pretty far and it’s freezing outside!” I said as I wrapped my bare arms around myself and shivered. My warm, winter jacket was still hung up on the wooden peg shelf by the front door and I felt exposed without its cozy warmth wrapped around me.
 

However, I didn’t dare go back inside to get it, for fear of running into Roan.
Damn, why hadn’t I thought to grab it on my mad dash to get outside?
 

“No, we will phase and run home. I am fast and can return you to the pack by instinct alone. Put your trust in me, Aspen. I will never let you down or hurt you like our mate has,” my wolf said solemnly.
 

“I believe in you wolf. Please guide me, I have never phased before. Take me back to the pack. We’ll be safe there.”

Phasing was kind of like that moment right before you sneeze. It was like a moment of torturous anticipation, then finally, reward. I was extremely relieved to discover that there was no physical pain associated with the physical transformation, from human to Were, as I had been worried that there would be. I had only seen Roan phase a couple of times when I was a kid. So, I had grown up with the impression that phasing was a terrible thing and that’s why he never did it in front of me.
 

But I was grossly misinformed because phasing was completely exhilarating and it filled me with a sense of freedom that I’d never dreamed possible.
 

What started off as a small tingle at the base of my spine, spread all the way up to the base of my skull and then branched out into my arms and legs until my entire body was tingling and on fire.
 

Next to having an orgasm with Roan deep inside me, it was the most exciting physical sensation that I’d ever experienced in my entire life.

One minute I was a petite human girl and the next, I was considerably shorter and standing on four furry legs.
 

How I’d wished that I’d had a mirror, so I could see what my wolf looked like. I wanted to gaze upon her with my own wolf eyes and admire her. I wanted to run and chase her furry tail. I wanted to prance daintily through the snow and howl with my muzzle pointed towards the sky.
 

I was completely alive with all five of my senses awakened and humming with life. Roan was still in the shower, I could hear the water droplets hit the tub from outside the camp! There was a squirrel in a pine tree 100ft across the camp clearing! My wolf sniffed the air and I could smell the pine trees like I’ve never smelled them before. My wolf had awakened me to a world my human senses never could have dreamed existed.
 

My wolf was an amazing being!
 

“I’m glad that you’re pleased, Aspen. But we must go now. Roan’s wolf is strong and fast but we are also fast. Let’s go reunite with our pack,” my wolf implored as she jumped off the front steps in one leap.
 

Holy crap! We did that!
We jumped off the steps in one jump!
 

“Let’s go wolf, it’s time to leave this place and everything that’s happened here.
 

Lead us home.”

My wolf may have just arrived to this plane of consciousness but she had been right about one thing, we were fast! We could run like the wind, with the trees whipping past us in a green blur. We jumped over downed trees and skipped over small streams like they were tiny obstacles and not large objects that would have held up a human.
 

My sense of direction was heightened and I was guided by things I never really noticed before, the position of the sun in the sky, the moss on the trees, the magnetic pull of the earth and the smells around me. Human Aspen would have been horribly lost and wandering the woods for days but wolf Aspen was guided by an internal compass. I was a supernatural tracking machine!
 

“Wolf, you are truly magnificent!” I gushed as we stopped at a stream to take a much needed drink.
 

“Thank you, Aspen, but stay on task, we must not be distracted. You haven’t spent as much time in Roan’s head, as I have these past few days. Whether he wants to be our mate or not is irrelevant. Once he finds out that we have left the training camp, he is going to be roaring with fury. He is the pack Beta and has been entrusted with the task of preparing us for pack life. He is a dominant wolf and will chase us down and drag us back to camp to finish his task, Aspen. We must not let that happen, we must be faster and smarter than he is!” my wolf said gravely.
 

“Relax wolf, how is he possibly going to find us now? We’re far from the camp. We’ll be fine. I trust you to get us out of here safely.”
 

“Aspen, you are a new Were and don’t understand the rules that govern our society yet, but Roan was absolutely right about one thing. We started our heat yesterday, which means his wolf will be able to smell us for miles and will be able to track us through the woods on scent alone. We are literally running a race against him and his wolf, as he will chase us down once he discovers we’ve left the training camp. He won’t be able to resist the lure of our mating scent and the biological drive to mate with us. No male Were can resist a female in heat,” my wolf said.
 

“How in the hell can I still be in heat? I feel perfectly fine.”

“It has nothing to do with how you feel Aspen but how you smell-to Roan.”

 
“What the hell? I’ll never understand this Were stuff. But if what you say is true, then you’d better run as fast as your furry little legs will carry us because there is no way I’m going back to that camp with Roan.”
 

My wolf finished her drink, licked her lips and took off sprinting at full speed through the dense woods.
 

This was just great.

I had heard bits and pieces about Were mating over the years and though no one would tell me the entire story because I wasn’t a Were, it seemed that the male Were could not resist the scent of the female in heat. Apparently it was pretty heady stuff and turned a male Were into an aggressive, raging, sexual predator.
 

When I was just a kid, I’d seen two male Weres fighting one another over an unmated female in the parking lot of the local gas station. They had cornered the terrified girl between two parked cars, just like a wolf hunting it’s prey. After paying for our gas and buying some milk, my mom and I were walking back to our car when we heard the girl crying. My mother took one look at the scared girl, shoved the carton of milk at me and screamed for me to get in the car.
 

Terrified, I climbed into our old blue station wagon while my mom rushed over and grabbed the girl while the two males repeatedly threw punches at one other. The two males were so vicious and intent on hurting one another that they barely noticed as my mom shoved the trembling girl into the back seat with me.
 

I kneeled on the bench seat with my face plastered against the window as we drove away. I was scared to death, but fascinated at the same time. How could this young girl have such power over the two snarling and bloody male Weres? My mother had said it was the way that she smelled to them but I was confused, she didn’t smell like anything special to me.
 

We drove the frightened girl home with my mother lecturing her the entire way about how important it was to stay indoors during her heat, lest she stir up the unmated males and drive them crazed with lust.
 

I questioned my mother incessantly after the girl got out of the car and made a beeline for her front door. But my mother wouldn’t tell me anything else about why the girl smelled good. She kept changing the subject repeatedly and then by the time we’d arrived home, Roan was sitting on the steps waiting for us. He was going to take me to the park and suddenly the good smelling girl didn’t seem very important to me anymore.
 

Other than little snippets that I’d heard here and there, over the years, I didn’t know much else about the mating habits of Weres. And I had no intention of finding out how a horny and pissed off male Were chased down and mated with a scared runaway female Were, any time soon.

Chapter 30

~Roan~

I shivered as I turned off the shower faucet and grabbed a thick blue towel to dry myself off. Aspen and her damned scent were overpowering while we’d argued and I had needed to take a cold shower to wash her scent off and to calm myself down. I didn’t think she would have appreciated me chasing her down, ripping her clothes off and mating with her after the words that had passed between us.
 

With everything that had happened over the course of the past two days, Aspen’s heat couldn’t have started at a worse possible time.

 
But it was Were biology and was therefore a far more powerful a force than I. And like all other males faced with a female in heat, I was currently a raging ball of horniness and wanted nothing more than to jump Aspen and do dirty things to her until she screamed out my name.
 

The camp was eerily quiet, as I stepped out of the shower. It was as if all life had suddenly been sucked out of it.
Stop it, you’re just being paranoid
, I thought to myself as I quickly toweled off my hair and wrapped the towel snugly around my waist. My chest and back were still damp with droplets of water clinging to my skin as I opened up the bathroom door.
 

I immediately released my senses and opened up my hearing to listen for Aspen upstairs, but I couldn’t hear her crying anymore. Good, I was glad because I truly felt terrible about the horrible things that I’d said to her.
 

I felt both eagerness and dread at the prospect of telling her that everything that’d happened today was all part of gauging her anger response and nothing more. I hadn’t meant a word that I’d said to her and it hurt me on a really deep, visceral level to see how betrayed she’d looked as each barb spewed forth from my mouth.
 

That was why I had unlocked the bedroom door and left as soon as she started crying, instead of immediately going to the closet and comforting her. In truth, I felt cowardly about it but with her pheromones swimming in my nose and mouth, my main reaction to the situation had been one of possession.
 

I’d wanted to jump her.
 

Every fiber of my being wanted to go to her, rip her pants off and lick and kiss down her stomach until I buried my face in her pussy. I wanted to taste her juices on my tongue while she whimpered and begged for my cock to fill her.
 

The desire to mate with Aspen overtook my sense of reasoning as images of her naked body flashed through my head. My chest was tight as I’d held my breath to try and clear my head.
 

I wasn’t a fool, I’d known that I needed to cool off, which was why I’d ran for the icy shower as soon as I’d unlocked the bedroom door. I’d known that Aspen would reject me and my attempts to mate with her so soon after saying such god-awful things to her.
Not that I blamed her.
 

 
There was no way in hell that she would have believed me if I’d told her that I really did love her. So I’d left the room and had hopefully given her enough time to calm down and cry out all her angry tears before I apologized.

I had searched her mind when I first stepped into the shower and I didn’t like what I saw. She was devastated and curled into a little ball in the bottom of the closet floor and crying her eyes out.

Without warning, tears had sprung to my eyes as the cold water blasted me, my chest so tight with her sorrow that I could barely breathe. Her emotional pain threatened to overwhelm me, so I’d blocked her until I got out of the shower and was ready to go back upstairs and calmly talk to her about everything.
 

 
She would be more likely to listen to me once she cooled down. There was nothing I could do with her when she was an emotional wreck. I knew there would be no reasoning with her whatsoever. She could be very stubborn and pigheaded once she’d made up her mind about something.