Wild (38 page)

Martin Wood's official title at the clinic was assistant veterinarian even though he was older and had been there much longer than she. Caroline had inherited him when she'd taken the job at the River Vet Clinic. Olivia had come with the package as well, but she was much more amenable to the shift in power than Martin even tried to be.

“Yes,” Caroline said. “I'm coming.”

“Girl, I would be too if that fine-ass Malec Zenta would put his strong hands on me,” Olivia added, her face now alight with her imagined pleasure.

With a shake of her head Caroline stood from her chair, pulling her sweater closer around her breasts. “I wouldn't know all that. All I know is that something happened to that buck, and I have to go in there and see if I can save it.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Olivia continued with a nod. “And then you can call Mr. Sexy and ask him can you come see him. Because nobody in town has been out to that log fortress they've built in the wilderness. You go out there to report on Bambi and get a look at all those other fine specimens walking around that place. Four of them, tall, dark, and oozing sex and money in equal parts. There's enough for you, me, and two other lucky women in this backward town to hit it big.”

Caroline had left her office with Olivia still chatting and following her toward the operating room, where she presumed Martin had moved the buck. She stopped to stare at the recent college grad who talked much more and even faster than she did anything else in the office.

“You've got that all planned out, huh?” she asked.

“Hell yeah!” Olivia nodded.

Caroline couldn't help but smile.

“Get your mind on business. Fill out an incident report based on the notes I left in the exam room. I like to record my surgical procedures. You can transcribe it later,” she instructed Olivia, who had gone back to frowning.

“So you aren't going to call Mr. So Fine I Almost Went Blind?” Olivia asked with a look of pure disbelief.

With a shake of her head, Caroline opened the operating room door and headed inside. “When I save the buck I'll call him to let him know.”

“And to tell him you'll take one night of hot passionate sex as payment,” Olivia continued as she walked in the opposite direction toward the front of the office.

Not if the devil himself offered to raise her mother from the dead, Caroline thought and proceeded into the room.

 

CHAPTER 2

She was there again.

In his dreams, traipsing her sweet, plump ass around his bedroom as if she owned him and everything in the vicinity. She was naked, of course, just the way he liked her. Pussy waxed, nipples hard, and mouth ready to take his engorged length deep and long.

Malec lay back against the pillows and sheets, now damp with sweat, his heart thumping, chest heaving with the effort of pulling himself out of the seductive clutches of that dream. Why? Because not only had Caroline been there in his mind, teasing and tempting him until he'd had no other recourse but to crook a finger, beckoning her to come closer, but she'd obeyed his every command as if it were what she was born to do.

Crawling on her hands and knees across the mattress until she was between his outstretched legs, pushing his hand away from where he gripped the base of his thick cock. She'd dipped her head, immediately catching the tip of his erection, holding it still right there while her tongue eased in and out of his slit.

Malec had looked around at that moment. He'd watched for the second when Channing usually appeared, standing at the end of the bed, stroking his length while staring at the female's ass, waiting for the moment he could slip seamlessly inside her. That's what Malec's sex life entailed—sharing his females with Channing. It hadn't been that way from the start, but eventually, after life had dealt both of them a raw deal and then thrust them together on the battlefield, the two lycans had found a common link to releasing the darkness that lived inside of them, and they'd held on to it for dear life.

Malec always chose the women, and Channing always agreed. They had a rhythm together—who would touch her first, kiss her, make her moan, and then who would come in second and seal the deal. Channing assured the women were emotionally stable enough for the thought of taking two virile lycans inside of her at one time, while Malec only promised the pleasure. And when he was done seeing to her pleasure, and achieving a modicum of relief for himself, he left. Channing took care of the rest.

But not this time.

This time, with this woman, Malec was alone.

He tried to wake up at that point, but had not succeeded. Caroline continued her assault on his cock, taking him deep, then pulling out until there was a loud popping sound as the head of his erection slipped free of her lips. Not too thick, but just succulent enough, her lips looked absolutely perfect coated in that pink gloss gliding once more over his veined length. Malec had wanted to come at that very moment, to see if she would take every drop of his essence into her hot little mouth.

But that never happened because something was wrong with this scene. There was no denying that fact and no continuing in his mind. This simply was not how it happened for him, ever.

So he'd finally bolted up in the bed, breathing as if he'd just run a marathon in double the time of his normal lightning-fast lycan speed.

For he didn't know how long Malec simply sat in the center of his king-sized bed, staring out to the dark room, listening to the quiet and wondering what the hell was going on in his mind. Eventually he lay back, folding his arms behind his head, unable—or quite possibly unwilling—to ignore the daunting question of what the hell Caroline Douglas was doing in his dreams in the first place.

Not only did Malec not do women alone, he did not do attachments of any kind, especially with humans. Becoming attached to a woman intimately and emotionally was like a death sentence to Malec, the amount of responsibility he would incur in making such a foolish mistake like a noose around his neck. Being intimate with a human might even be a fate worse than death since humans held themselves to what Malec thought was an absurd moral standard where relationships and sex were concerned. There were humans who disapproved of an official ménage relationship, even though they ran around behind their spouses' back, sleeping with whoever they pleased on a daily basis. Taking a ménage to other limits, such as the group sex some of the lycans were accustomed to, would definitely gain more recriminations from the humans.

No, thank you, very much, Malec had made his decision of what type of sexual life he would lead a long time ago. The emotional aspect becoming clear as a direct result of his twin brother's death. Mason had been the other part of Malec, and the void his twin had left had never been filled, not even by Channing or the other lycans in the pack. That part of Malec remained missing, and although the pain had been almost unbearable in the beginning, Malec believed in things happening for a greater purpose. He believed that Mason's death was an act that needed to take place in order to bring Malec to the point where he was today. A member of the Trekas pack and a part in protecting Blaez Trekas, the half-demigod, half-lycan alpha, from the forces that would conspire to take his life.

So rubbing his eyes Malec climbed out of bed and told himself once again to stop thinking about that doctor because they had bigger obstacles to overcome. Besides, it had been two days since he'd dropped the buck off to be treated, and she hadn't called him at all. He supposed that meant the buck had died. That was a shame.

It was still dark, sunrise about an hour or so away, when Malec pulled on sweatpants and a T-shirt. Bending over to tie the tennis shoes he'd also put on he wondered briefly about what could have caused the deer's injuries. As he and the vet had discussed, if it were another animal, why would it not have simply killed its prey and eaten it? Why leave it there, on the trail so that anyone running or walking by could find it?

Malec moved through the house silently as usual. Blaez and his mate, Kira, would be asleep in their wing of the dwelling the pack had redesigned and rebuilt in the last year since they'd come here to Blackbriar. The alpha and his alpha female had their own wing on one side of the residence while Channing and Malec shared the other side—Malec upstairs and Channing down. Phelan had built his own rooms as an addition to the house toward the back side on the first floor, his way of being separate, but still a part of the pack. Punching the code into the keypad at the front door disengaged the inside locks that had been installed, and Malec walked out into the early morning air.

His shoes were quiet as he crossed the wide wood-planked porch and stopped. At the top of the stairs leading down to the walkway Malec looked around. It was still dark, treetops stretching like shadowy arms up toward the sky. In the distance was the mountaintop, its majestic peak a reminder of the powerful forces of nature that surrounded them. Beyond that peak was more power and legend than anyone walking on this earth could ever imagine. The power of the gods that still ruled and wreaked havoc, still manipulated and controlled, blew as blustery as the strongest storms.

That storm was coming, Malec knew. Blaez could not hide forever. They all knew that even though they rarely spoke of it. There were two groups of lycans, the Hunters and the Devoteds. The Hunters believed and craved total dominance, but to gain that they had to be rid of the Devoteds, who would undoubtedly continue to preach their simplistic coexistence with the humans. It was the Hunters' goal to wipe out all the Devoteds so they could become the reigning lycan breed on earth. But to kill a Trekas—a direct full-blood descendent of Nyktimos, their creator—would hit the Devoteds in the very heart of their breed and would certainly be a coup any Hunter would love to brag about.

If that was their only worry Malec knew they could handle it. The Hunters were deadly in their own right, but they were no match for the elite pack that Blaez had assembled. Each of them—Malec, Channing, Phelan, and Blaez—had served in the US Marine Corps, all of them excelling to the point where their team had been called on more times than they could count to perform special covert missions. Even after they'd retired from the corps, contracted missions were being presented to them. Only in the last three years did Blaez take them off the grid.

“They're getting closer,” Blaez told them one night. “Closer to finding out the truth about me and the danger I present to Zeus.”

“We're trained and experienced now,” Channing had spoken up. “We can take them.”

Blaez shook his head. “We're talking about Zeus,
the
god of the gods. If it were not for the power of his vengeance, our breed would not exist at all.”

He was right, Malec recalled thinking. It was Zeus's feud with Lykaon, ruler of Arcadia, that led to Zeus turning Lykaon into a wolf and killing all his sons. Only Nyktimos, Lykaon's youngest son, had managed to escape with Gaia's help. Lykaon, angry and bitter about his fate as a four-legged creature, eventually found his son and bit him. Not possessing the power of a god, Lykaon's bite only turned Nyktimos into a werewolf—a man who would change into a wolf only for the duration of the full moon. It was Nyktimos who fell in love with a human female, biting her and turning her into a lycan—a human breed that could not shift into a full wolf, but could take on a wolf's features—teeth, nails, facial features—and possessed the abilities of a wolf at all times, drawing more power and strength on the night of the full moon. Nyktimos's mate, Aleya, hated the change and despised him for changing her. She eventually took her own life, but only after she'd given him three children. Alex Trekas, Blaez's father, was one of them. Blaez's mother was Kharis, the daughter of Artemis. When Zeus finally learned that Nyktimos was still alive he vowed to track him and any of his descendants down and kill them. Only, just like Nyktimos, Blaez had not been there when Zeus killed his family. Thus leaving Blaez the only pure-blood lycan and demigod in all the world. And number one on Zeus's kill list.

“How long do you think we can hide?” Malec had asked Blaez that night.

“As long as we have to,” had been the alpha's response. “Because I will not let Zeus take me without a fight, and I'm not certain that an all-out battle with him won't destroy this world and the one from which we originated.”

That night, the three lycans had pledged their lives to Blaez and his purpose to live in harmony with the humans just like the other Devoteds. They followed Blaez to this small mountain town without anyone knowing who or what they were and vowed to protect him with everything that they possessed. Initially, their plan was to stay forever, but Malec wasn't sure that was possible, especially not now since Blaez's mate had come from a Hunter pack. Someone was bound to realize who Kira was and wonder about her father's pack that Malec, Channing, and Phelan had killed. And when the other Hunters figured that out, they'd come for them.

Clenching his fists at his sides, Malec relished the moment when that would happen.

But even that wasn't the storm he'd referred to as coming. No, this was something stronger that Malec sensed as he inhaled deeply of the fresh mountain air. This was more powerful than any Hunter could ever be.

With that thought Malec figured he'd best be prepared. To his way of thinking that meant being as physically fit as possible, and so he hurried down the steps, breaking out into a full-speed run the moment his feet hit the walkway. He was heading into the forest, where he ran each morning, and where he'd found that wounded deer two days earlier.

Malec was the fitness buff of the pack, purchasing all the equipment they had in their home gym and giving Channing tips on the healthiest foods to prepare for them—even though Channing rarely listened. And since Kira had stepped in as the alpha female of the house, Malec's healthy obsession had fallen even further, as Kira preferred to come up with her own menus, without any suggestions from health fanatics, as she liked to call him.