The Alpha's Unwanted Mate: (BWWM) Paranormal Romance Standalone (8 page)

His sons? Where were his
sons
?

A high scream from far off in the trees caught his attention. His home. Leaving the limp body of an enemy where it lay, Clyde raced off down the path towards his own cabin. He found the back door standing open before bounding through the woods. Not thirty meters away, he was greeted by a scene from his worst nightmare.

Angeline stood between the huge, rippling canine form of Tirion Reef and Clyde’s own two sons. Her entire form trembled, yet she still spread her arms protectively, ensuring that the brute would have to go through her to get to the boys.  Her bravery touched a strong, protective cord in him. His sons had been nothing but difficult for her – to her. Their grief made them hard to deal with, even he himself oftentimes found himself exasperated with their  behavior. Everything had changed when Leila had died.

But this girl had placed herself protectively in front of his children with no less valor than his deceased mate would have. She was frightened, and she was cowed, but she was not yet beaten.

With a snarl, Clyde leaped  at Tirion. He was a good hundred pounds lighter than the hulking monster, but his fury gave him strength. He caught the male unawares by slamming into is right flank to tear into the muscle he found there. Tirion uttered an enraged howl, turning on the smaller wolf as he foamed at the mouth.

“The little bitch is
lovely
, Clyde. Is she yours? I think I’ll enjoy her after I’m done devouring your worthless pups.”

Clyde roared, launching himself at the rival Alpha again. This time, however, Tirion caught him by the shoulder and threw him back, his teeth sinking deep. Clyde whined in pain, shaking it off as he paced back and forth, planning his next angle of attack. He couldn’t beat Tirion one-on-one. That was certain. The wolf had much more mass, and much more power. His mind was racing over alternative options when a high, shrieking howl split the air.

Liara. The sound let him know that the main body of the settlement had been retaken. A moment later, a deeper howl ensued, this one touched with rage. His brother. Within moments, no less than five wolves skidded to a halt at Clyde’s side. Closest to him was Lex, whose muzzle had been bloodied while his side dripped crimson. His expression was absolutely livid as he stared Tirion down.

“You’ve gone
too
fucking far, Tirion.” The Alpha growled threateningly.

“You went too far when you killed my father! Consider this payback, Lex!” Tirion’s tone was deep and scathing. However, even he couldn’t hope to stand against five pissed off males. Turning tail, he launched into a sprint in the opposite direction, tossing a shrieked threat back in their direction. “This isn’t over!”

“After him!” Lex barked, incensed. “Bring him down!”

Clyde made to follow his Alpha’s order, only to have Lex bar his way, his silver gaze softening slightly.  “Not you, Clyde.” He nodded his massive, narrow head in the direction of Angeline, Elias and Ian. “You tend to them…and to Alicia and my pups as well.”

“They’re alright, then?”

“Fine.” Lex answered his question quickly. “I wish I could say the same of others.” With those words, he disappeared after the other males with a flick of his tail, hot on Tirion’s tail. Clyde turned to face his sons and a shell-shocked Angeline, who was still staring at him warily.

He lumbered through them, profound relief coursing through his body. Ian looked up from where his hands were clasped around Angeline’s neck and immediately squirmed wildly to escape her grip. The moment she set him down, he raced toward the large form of his father’s canine body, throwing small arms around his neck. “Daddy!”

Clyde rumbled low in his throat, nuzzling a small cheek wet with tears. Within seconds, he had shifted back into his human form to pull the boy into his arms and hold him tightly against his chest. “I’m here, Ian. I’m here!” He scooped the child up to cross the few feet to Elias.

The teenager was looking up at him with eyes that were oddly bright. When he spoke, his voice cracked with emotion. “
Dad
…” Clyde knelt to draw him forward and into his embrace.

Both of his sons were safe. They might have been easily stripped of their lives, but they hadn’t…and he owed that, in part, to Angeline. Instead of leaving them behind, she had tried to run with them; boys with special needs, to whom she had owed nothing, and she had thought to save them.

Slowly, he straightened to place Ian in his brother’s lap before turning to face Angeline. She was eying him with a mixture of awe and disbelief. “Angeline…” His voice was soft. “I don’t know how I can ever thank you…for keeping my sons safe.”

“I…” She cleared her hoarse throat. “I couldn’t just leave them. Everyone was screaming and he…that wolf…he would have killed them. He would have killed all of us.” She exhaled a shuddering breath. “How many others are dead?”

The emotion in her eyes shocked him. Here was a woman who’d been hiding herself from him for a month, and now, suddenly, he could see her more clearly than he ever had. She was scared – scared and overwhelmed, and completely caught up in the morning’s events. While her relief at being rescued from a gruesome fate was palpable, he could see lingering protectiveness in her eyes.

She had truly been willing to die had it come down to it. The revelation was both humbling and breathtaking.

“Angeline, you can ask anything of me.” The last thing he wanted at that moment was to regale her was with tales of the dead and those who grieved for them, “Anything at all, and it’s yours. Just tell me what you want.”

But Clyde already knew. He was certain the young woman would ask him to return to Atlanta, and to her relatively simple life, to leave this place and all the danger and strangeness it contained.

However, when Angeline next spoke, she shocked him. “Let me help.”

Clyde’s silver eyes widened in disbelief, “What?”

“Let me help. With the wounded and the survivors. You asked what I wanted, and I want to help.”

For a moment, he just stared at her, at a loss for words. This was a side of Angeline he’d never known. He was beginning to discover that he’d sorely underestimated the girl. “Of course.” The words left his mouth before he could stop them. He turned to his sons, who were both looking up at their father reverently. “Let’s get the boys inside, and then we can go find Alicia.”

He bent, intending to lift Ian from Elias’ lap, but to his surprise, the small boy, slipped from his grasp, running around him to cling to Angeline’s legs. The young woman looked down at him with her own shocked expression. After a moment, however, she reached down without a word to lift him into her arms. He held to her tightly as she shifted him to her hip, his face buried in her neck.

Clyde tried hard not to gape. He took hold of Elias’ wheelchair handles and began to push the boy back towards the house. Mercifully, his cabin was one of the few that hadn’t been burned, and so it took them relatively little time to settle the boys inside. However, it took an additional five minutes to get Ian to release Angeline, after which he clung to his brother, watching her go with wide eyes.

Then, he led the young woman out into the fray. The sight was gruesome, this no one could argue. There were eight dead bodies, two of them children, and more than ten males had been seriously wounded.  He was taken aback when Angeline gave a cry, falling to her knees besides the body of a woman who looked to have been about six or seven months pregnant.

Tears sprung to her cheeks as she took the woman’s limp hand. “Oh God, Samantha. I’m so sorry.”

So she had known her. Clyde couldn’t do more than watch as the woman silently grieved, rocking back and forth as she cradled  the deceased woman’s arm to her bosom. There were many other members of the pack who had lost loved ones, and the mere thought of the families torn apart made Clyde’s blood boil. Tirion had overstepped his boundaries too far this time. He couldn’t just pick them off by one, he had to enter their settlement and kill women and children…

Clyde hoped to god Lex found the bastard and ripped him limb from limb. The lust in his voice when he’d spoken about Angeline had been sickening. Clyde wanted the monster nowhere near her, ever again. The protectiveness that welled in him was strong and sudden. Angeline was
his
woman, and any male that wanted her would have to go through him, first. The instinct was so strong he had to swallow a growl, even as he knelt beside the woman to help her to her feet.

They spent the rest of the day cleaning up Reef Pack’s mess. The wails and cries of those who had lost loved ones colored the air. Though he could hear Angeline’s stomach turn as she silently helped Liara with the dead bodies, she uttered not a single complaint. Indeed, she kept herself astoundingly busy with activity, bounding from the hospital building to the cinders of the Alpha’s cabin and back again.

Where she had shied away from wolves before, she now helped them find their loved ones and tend to their wounds. In the hospital, she even helped to treat Niall, who’d had both his nose and arm broken. The humbled wolf couldn’t even meet her gaze, but Angeline treated him cordially.

When Clyde left her, it was to find Alicia. The Alpha’s mate was in the care tent with her three daughters who, apart from minor scratches and scrapes, were none worse for the wear. She, too, seethed at the audacity of the Reef pack even as her eyes filled with tears for those they’d lost.

The day was exhausting.

By the time Clyde hauled himself into the house, the boys were long asleep. Ian had curled up beside his brother in the twin bed with his thumb in his mouth, a throwback to his days as a tiny pup. Elias snored peacefully; his arm around the smaller boy, and Clyde thought there might be no more beautiful sight than his slumbering brood.

He made his way to the master bedroom, intending to take as thorough a shower as he could manage under the circumstances before slipping into bed. His left arm was wrapped in bandages from where Tirion had torn at it and ached something fierce. He wanted nothing more than to collapse into bed and pass out, at least until he entered his bedroom.

Clyde froze in the doorway, all the blood in his veins immediately rushing downward. Angeline sat on his bed, freshly showered, clad in the flimsy white nightgown that had plagued his dreams. She straightened when she saw him, exposing a long neck and the ample mounds of her cleavage. Clyde’s mouth dried as her cheeks colored and she rose to her feet, gazing shyly at the floor.

“Clyde…” Her words were soft. “I owe you an apology. What I thought about this place…your people…it was all wrong.”

Within seconds, he swept across the room to take her into his arms as hunger suffused him. Cupping the young woman’s face, he tipped it up to take in her hooded eyes, full, parted lips and the gorgeous hue of her caramel-colored skin.

“We were both wrong.” He breathed the words against her mouth before he kissed her deeply, his tongue sliding sinuously against her own.

She tasted even better than he remembered – hot, and sweet, consuming him as her fingers slid into his hair; Angeline’s body arched against his, soft and yielding where he was hard, and drawing a groan from deep in his solar plexus. Wordlessly, he lifted the woman from the floor to carry back to the expanse of his bed. When he lay her down, she looked up at him, breathless, her lips swollen from his kisses.

Yes
. That was how his mate should look.

A low growl welled in his throat as he leaned over her, laving a path of moisture from her ear to her clavicle. Gasping, Angeline slid her hands down to the hem of his soiled shirt, tugging upwards urgently. Nipping at her bare shoulder, Clyde straightened for just long enough to whip the garment over his head before flinging it off into the room blindly.

“I’m dirty.” He murmured against her sweet-smelling skin, inching the thin fabric up over her nightgown to expose a pair of panties that were “brief” by their very definition. His mouth found the flat expanse of her stomach as he pressed heated kisses over it, moving steadily upwards. “I had to help put out fires. There’s soot and dusty everywhere—“

He was cut off by Angeline’s firm hold on his scalp. The young woman drew his head upwards to hover above her own, her smile the most wicked and breathtaking thing he’d ever beheld. “How dirty?” Her tongue slid over the words in a way that drew a soft, tortured sound of arousal. “
Show
me.”

Wordlessly, Clyde flipped her over onto her stomach, eliciting a gasp from the dark-skinned woman as he broke her hold on him. Jerking her onto all fours, he lowered his mouth to the curve of her behind, licking and biting reverently as she squirmed, soft moans escaping her. Reaching down, Clyde found the heat of her between her legs and cupped it brusquely. Her scent already marked her more than ready for him, but he wanted his mate to cry his name when he took her. His fingers hooked in the hem of her panties, drawing them down her legs and off to join his shirt on the floor.

The glistening, exposed folds of her womanhood winked at him in the low light, and Clyde slid his thumb along the cleft of her, delighted by her low keen of pleasure. He repeated the motion, drawing index finger up to circle her clit deftly so she squirmed beneath him. Growling, he nipped at her shoulder in warning.

God, the smell of her was intoxicating. As Clyde plied his fingers against her sweet, slick femininity, Angeline whimpered and gasped, her hips jerking when he finally slid two fingers within her. She was tight. Her inner muscles engulfed his digits greedily as he moved them sinuously within her. It only took him a moment to find the spot that made her body undulate in his grip and a short cry escaped her. Slowly, Clyde exploited that spot, curling his fingers up against it, stroking it as the woman beneath him gasped and thrashed, her breath coming in short bursts.