Seduction (The Journal of the Wolves of Spruce Hollow) (8 page)

“Sorcha! Sorcha!” I screamed at the top of my lungs before Roan had the chance to pull me through the front door.

“Fuck! If you think this temporary little detour is enough to stop me, you don’t know me half as well as you think you do,” Roan said as he pulled me close and whispered darkly into my ear, “This isn’t over, Aspen. We have a lot to talk about, little girl.” As he pulled away, our eyes locked and the air between us crackled with tension. As much as I hated to acknowledge it, it was sexual tension and I felt its pull from deep in my belly.

His gaze sent shivers down my entire spine. Then he abruptly he let me go and unceremoniously dumped me on the front doorstep.

“Aspen, hey! I’ve been trying to call you. Don’t you ever check your phone?” Sorcha called out from the front, passenger seat of the car

I ran towards their vehicle in a daze, anxiously looking back to see if Roan was still outside watching me. He was and his eyes followed me intently as I sprinted across the lawn.
 

“I haven’t seen you since the funeral. Are you okay, hun?” She said as she reached out and squeezed my hand. “My parents wanted you to come over tonight. My dad’s making your favorite, his famous baby back ribs,” she teased, like I needed any convincing right now.

“Yes, oh, my god, I would love to. In fact, I’ll come with you guys right now, I just need to get my purse from the car” I said breathlessly as I ran over to my car and shoveled the spilled contents from the passenger seat back into my purse.
 

“Oh, okay, we were just going out to pick up a few things for supper. But you’re welcome to come along if you want,” Sorcha’s mom called out.
 

I didn’t care that I was horning in on their grocery shopping trip, there was no way I could stay at my mother’s house with Roan right now. Things had gotten a whole lot more confusing since I’d first woken up and tried to escape. What the hell had just happened between us on the front steps? Sexual tension?
What the hell?

“Perfect, hey do you guys think they sell shoes there? Like flip flops or something?” I asked as we pulled away from the curb and drove towards freedom.
 

I looked out the back window and saw Roan watching us as we drove away. His arms were crossed in front of his chest and he wore an irritated look on his face.

“Hm, I’m not sure. Hey, was that Roan?” Sorcha asked. As she turned around in her seat and looked at me.

“Yeah, apparently he’s out of the military and lives at my mom’s house again,” I replied, careful not to reveal a hint of emotion in my tone. The last thing I needed was an entire pack of Were’s coming after me for bringing undue attention their way. Having one Were after me was bad enough.

“Wow, he’s really handsome. I thought that he was good looking when we were kids but he’s super hot now. He was staring at you really intensely. Was he ticked or something?”

“Oh, really?” I said as my mind raced to come up with a reasonable explanation. “Naw, he was probably just mad because I left the kitchen a mess but I’ll clean it up when I get back home.”
 

But there was no way that I was
ever
going back to my mother’s house.

Chapter 9

~Aspen~

Dinner with Sorcha’s family was the first normal thing I’d done since I’d come back to this god-awful place. Spruce Hollow was full of raw and agonizing memories for me and it was nice to sit down and talk about normal things, with normal people for a change.
 

Besides, I felt safe here as I knew Roan wouldn’t try and come for me, at least I hoped he wouldn’t.
 

Sorcha’s family lived on a farm right outside the “human” section of town. And they, like every other human in town, were blissfully unaware that a pack of Were’s lived among them on an acreage right outside the town limits of Spruce Hollow. It was just as well, as it would have been catastrophic to the pack if anyone had ever gotten wind that they were living in plain sight right.

Sorcha’s brother had come home for the weekend and brought a friend with him, so the mood was jovial and energetic with so many of us over for supper. I had met this friend several times before and groaned inwardly when I found out that he was going to be there for dinner tonight as well. It’s not that I disliked this friend. On the contrary, I was kind of attracted to him.
 

I’d met him for the first time, five years ago, at a New Years Eve party at Sorcha’s parents house, but back then he had been a friend of Sorcha’s cousin, Taylor. A year later Sorcha’s brother had enrolled at the same college and pledged to the same fraternity and the two of them had struck up a friendship.
 

His name was Jude.

Jude had dark hair and light eyes and, physically, he reminded me quite a bit of Roan. Of course, Roan was a larger version of Jude, in both height and muscle mass. But it was those physical similarities to Roan that had drawn my attention to Jude in the first place.
 

But the similarities ended with the physical characteristics, as Jude and Roan were nothing alike personality wise. Where Roan was gruff and bossy, Jude was smooth and silky. Roan was a dominant control freak, full of bravado and swagger and Jude was cunning, smooth and a calculating slickster. And it was this sweet talking exterior of his that made me leery of him.
 

At least with Roan, you knew what you were getting into from the get go. Roan knew exactly who he was and made no excuses for it. But with Jude, I suspected that there was something far darker beneath the perfect exterior that he presented to the world. There was something about Jude that seemed not quite right, like you needed to watch out for him and question his motives. He had a reputation as a notorious “lady’s man” but in my head, that was just another word for “liar and a cheater”.

Even though I didn’t trust him and had made my disinterest in him quite known, it didn’t stop Jude and every time that we had met up in the past five years, he had tried to sweet talk me into going out with him.

And it had worked.
 

Once.

I had been living in Springbay for almost a year, when Sorcha had driven up for a visit for the Spring Break weekend, accompanied by her brother and Jude. I was overjoyed to see them all, even Jude, as I was lonely and hadn’t really made any friends in Springbay.
 

Even though I had been there for quite some time, Springbay was kind of like Spruce Hollow, in the sense that if you weren’t born there and hadn’t lived there since birth, you were kind of considered an
outsider.
And outsiders were regarded with a wary eye.

It had been a great week with all four of us staying in my tiny, one bedroom apartment. Sorcha and I shared my tiny double bed, while her brother and Jude took turns sleeping on the couch and the floor in the living room. I really wasn’t prepared for company but was so grateful to have them there, that I tried to make it up to them by cooking a full breakfast every morning. Sorcha’s brother and Jude were both still living the lives of poor college students, so they didn’t seem to mind. To them, sleeping on the couch and floor was more than a fair trade off for bacon and eggs every day.

The four of us spent all day at the beach and then would spend the evening drinking at my apartment, courtesy of Jude, as he was the only one old enough to go to the liquor store and buy alcohol. Then we would go out and mingle with the other college-aged Spring breakers at the various all-night street parties.
 

For the entire week, Jude was funny, charming and paid attention to me. He laid it on pretty thick and for a moment I felt like I was the only girl in the entire world. But, I had seen him in action with women before and that was his inherent charm.
Making you believe that you were somehow special.

I knew his MO and yet I supposed that I was feeling particularly vulnerable and kind of lonely one night. I hadn’t seriously dated a boy since Justin Meyers, back in high school and Jude and I were both pretty drunk. We were dancing together at one of the street parties, when he finally made a move and pulled me into his arms. When he kissed me full on the lips, it was nice. He was a good kisser. Actually, it was better than nice, as I hadn’t been kissed in a really long time. Roan had been the last guy that I had kissed
and really meant it
.
 

Jude and I left Sorcha and her brother at the street party, and then kissed and drunkenly groped one another all the way back to my apartment, where we both ended up half naked on top of my bed.

Thank god for Sorcha’s though, because I was a few sloppy kisses away from giving Jude my virginity, when she came stumbling in, turned on the light and promptly threw up all over my bedroom floor.
 

The smell of barf and Sorcha’s crying put the brakes on the whole thing and Jude was pretty angry once he figured out that he wasn’t going to get laid. Actually, he’d completely flipped out, tore a strip off Sorcha and then he’d stormed from the room.
 

It was an angry, seething, dark version of him that I hadn’t seen before and one that I didn’t particularly care to see ever again.
 

I supposed that incident should have served as my “warning flag”, in regards to Jude but after a day and a half of giving me the cold shoulder, he turned on the charm again and weaseled his way back into my good graces by the end of their stay.
 

Unfortunately, the rest of their visit was kind of awkward as there was now this new sexual tension between Jude and I that wasn’t present before.
 

But I was glad that I hadn’t gone through with it and slept with him that night. I knew in my heart that he wasn’t
the one
, as Sorcha liked to say.
 

Over time, Jude seemed to get over it and things went back to the way they had always been between us, with his halfhearted attempts to pick me up and me turning him down.
 

Over the years, meeting up with Jude would invariably involve me trying to steer the conversation away from the topic of “picking up where we left off that night” and I would try to engage him in polite conversation but he was one of those people who would usually answer a question with another question while he wore a condescending smirk on his handsome face. I supposed he
was
working on his masters degree in philosophy, maybe that explained his quirkiness.
 

Sorcha, however, was no help at all and she thought the whole situation was hilarious. She would tease me relentlessly about my “stalker Romeo” due to the many sexually charged texts and emails that Jude had sent me over the years. When things spiraled out of control like that between us, I normally told him to stop. Or I would just ignore him entirely and then he would either switch back to friend mode or sometimes he would get really ticked off and accuse me of being a “cocktease”.
 

Sorcha’s brother had once told her that Jude liked me. But come on, I’d known him for five years now, you’d think that he would have gotten the hint that I wasn’t interested in taking it any further with him. The whole situation was weird and uncomfortable.

Supper was winding down when my phone went off, indicating that I’d received a text. I pulled my phone out of my jean’s pocket and read it as discretely as possible under the table.

 
Aspen, come home by nine pm or I’m coming to get you. Don’t even try and run from me, the world isn’t big enough.

 
~R.

Roan, what the hell?
Couldn’t he take a hint? I felt panicked and quickly checked my watch. It was almost six. I could still make the last bus out of Spruce Hollow at six thirty if I hurried.

I wondered if I would be able to convince Sorcha to drive me there without it appearing too obvious that something weird was going on? It would probably seem pretty strange to her that I had arrived in Spruce Hollow with a car but wanted to leave by bus.
 

“Think brain, think!” I thought to myself as I quickly responded to Roan’s text:
 

Leave me alone Roan, you’re not the boss of my universe anymore. I make my own decisions now.

Chapter 10

~Aspen~

It wasn’t the best story that I’d ever come up with but it was pretty darn good as far as fake stories went.
 

I’d told Sorcha and her family that I needed a drive to the bus station because I was taking the bus to visit my mother’s sister in nearby Shawfield. I told them that I didn’t feel well enough, under the tragic circumstances of my mother’s death, to make the drive myself. It was such a solid story that they didn’t even question why I wasn’t taking my car.
 

I was relieved because I wasn’t really sure if I had chosen a place that was far enough away that they wouldn’t offer to drive me themselves but not that far that they felt weird about dropping me off at the bus stop by myself with no luggage.
 

I lied and said that my aunt had invited me to come and stay with her for a while and was expecting me, so I had to leave tonight.
I felt like an evil mastermind.