Page 15

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

logan

I took a deep breath as she moved past me, relishing the scent of her. The essence of her had filled my mind since she’d disappeared from my truck on Friday. Blueberries and sage. Every molecule of her remained as enticing as it had been before her first shift, but now…

Now her attraction had been amplified, as though her body screamed at me through a megaphone that every inch of her pled to be lovingly adored. By me . If the rest of her was as sexy as the rainbow tattoo…

My inner wolf whined in the back of my mind, begging to be allowed to the fore.

Refusing my instincts wasn’t something I was used to, and it was going to become a problem, at least where Emma was concerned.

Dwelling on the inconvenient reality of my sex drive didn’t make it go away, so I mentally pushed it to the corner of my mind where I stored the incessant whining of the canine who wanted to be let loose .

The floor creaked with each halting step she took into her new life. The muted sounds of voices filtered up the grand stairwell. Glasses clinked, and silverware scraped against plates. The guard trailed after us.

She glanced at me. “How many are down there?”

“How many do you hear?”

Her eyebrows dropped low over her eyes, and she shoved a strand of her disheveled hair behind her ear. “I can’t tell that.”

“You sure about that?”

I thought she muttered fuck you , but I didn’t ask her to repeat it, knowing she probably already regretting leaving the soft bed.

None of what I’d said made sense to her, and she didn’t trust her senses yet.

The newly shifted were much like newborns as they sorted out how to deal with the rush of new information pouring into their brains.

If history proved true, Emma would be hungry and tired every few hours for as long as it took for her to adjust.

As we made our way downstairs, Emma clutched the banister, keeping her head high as though she’d refuse any help I might offer. Her squared shoulders led to her rigid spine. Everything about her body language screamed her independence, but my gaze dropped to the soft curve of her hips and her ass.

Holy shit. Emma was a firecracker with a body I hadn’t been able to get out of my head since Friday night, and now she was within reach. Too much closeness fanned the flames of a need I hadn’t been able to fill.

Get it together, Logan. Too much depended on keeping Emma safe, and the next days would be an endless denial of her.

Whether she believed it or not, she was the prophesied shifter, the one who would unify all the clans against an evil we had to band together to beat.

I’d always assumed the threat would come from Acheron, and with her emergence, that seemed more likely than ever.

At the bottom of the stairs, I reached for her elbow, intending to point her toward the formal dining room in the rear right quadrant of the house where the breakfast buffet was be assembled on the sideboards.

My fingertips grazed her skin, and static sparks jumped between us.

She yanked her arm away, nearly losing her balance.

“I’m fine,” she snapped.

“You’re not fine. You’re not meant to be fine. Shifting is hard on the human body, and it takes practice to get used to the change,” I murmured.

I wouldn’t push her. I wasn’t Olivia, willing to bully her into accepting my help. Emma had to learn to trust us... to trust me.

She turned her head to the right and then to the left before aiming toward the room with the most noise spilling out of it. Her steps halted before she moved into view, and she glanced back at me, her insecurity apparent. “Do I look okay?”

“Nobody cares. Clothes are human, and they hide the truth of who we really are.” I lightly touched her shoulder and then dropped my hand.

She turned toward me. “Are they all naked?”

I chuckled. “No, they’re all dressed. We don’t make it a habit of eating meals together in the buff. Standard rules for the Alpha Manor.”

“Alpha Manor?” she echoed.

I gestured to the building around us. “This is Alpha Manor. It’s the headquarters of the pack leader and the home of the alpha.”

“Alpha? You didn’t explain that.”

“The Alpha is the leader of the pack, and every pack has an alpha. In our pack, they aren’t so much elected as they win the position, though I was raised by an Alpha, so there’s some genetic tendency in my family to be strong enough to lead.”

“Oh.” All the overwhelm of the night and morning summed up in one syllable. “So, you’re the alpha?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you had a construction company.”

“I do. Six-Mile Construction. Most of my employees live here on the grounds because they’re members of my pack.”

She chewed her bottom lip. Her mind had to be racing. Every word I used wasn’t applicable to humans. As a vet, she understood the terms from a human perspective better than most.

Around the corner, the dining room had gone silent.

“Might as well go in,” I said. “They know we’re out here. They all have excellent hearing. Not to mention they probably smelled you easing closer.”

She gasped. “Do I stink?”

In the dining room, somebody snickered. Probably Olivia .

“No, not like that. It’s just you. Nothing bad about it.” Fucking hell, Emma. If she knew how not bad it was, she’d bolt out the front door and into her car in a heartbeat.

“Okay.” She didn’t add anything else, but she stepped into view of the dining room.

In two strides, I joined her on the threshold, making it clear by my proximity to her that she was under my protection. They’d all assume I’d taken her as a mate, and that was the safest thing for them to believe until we could present her as the newly emerged multimorph.

Every shifter in the dining room stood to face me. Chairs grated against the flooring, and each one made eye contact with me before dropping their chin slightly in the sign of deference.

When I turned to Emma, her eyebrows had climbed to her hairline, and she studied me through eyes so wide the morning sunlight illuminated the emerald tones in her irises. “There’s a seat for you at the end.”

“Great,” she breathed. “Okay.”

Olivia pulled out the seat I mentioned, and Emma settled in it.

I nodded to the room, and the shifters returned to their seats at the long table or resumed filling their plates. Business as usual.

Emma stared at the surface of the mahogany table. She had so much to learn, and I had so much to teach her, but the swell of feelings in my chest was already nearly too strong to ignore.

My gaze cut to Olivia. Whether my beta liked it or not, she was going to have to be responsible for training Emma, and I would be breaking it to Olivia before breakfast concluded.

It was the only way I was going to get through this without dragging the rainbow vet into my bed and binging nonstop on the animal doctor elixir only she had.

Olivia placed a plate, nearly filled to overflowing in front of Emma, and another shifter brought her a set of silverware. “I didn’t know what you liked, so you’ve got some of everything.”

Emma’s chin lifted. “Yeah, thanks.” She considered the large white plate. “Not sure I can eat all that.”

Olivia studied her. “You have to. You need it.”

Emma looked dubious but filled her fork almost immediately.

A glance at the shifter in the seat beside Emma sent him scurrying away, and I settled beside my new charge rather than my usual place at the head of the table.

Another plate of food appeared in front of me, accompanied by silverware.

The pack needed to understand how serious my tie to her was.

As the alpha, the pack would follow my lead, and I needed all of them to keep her from becoming a target for our rivals.

Olivia thumped the shoulder of the she-wolf across from me, one of the shifters who’d always made her eagerness to mate me clear, and the woman growled before she moved to another location.

Emma flinched at the disgruntled sound of the growl, but she kept shoveling food into her mouth. Hierarchy of the pack would be the hardest thing to get used to at first.

I leaned closer to her. “Olivia’s gruff, but she means well. She’s a bully and doesn’t do anything halfway. Subtlety isn’t in her nature.”

Several of the pack guffawed in agreement.

Unbothered by my evaluation, Olivia gestured to Emma with her fork. “Have you tried shifting again?”

“Not yet.” Emma grinned, showing her teeth. “I mean, I’m still not sure I believe it’s true.”

Every sound in the dining room stopped as each pair of eyes turned to her.

She scanned the room, and her smile faded. She whispered, “Did I say something wrong?”

“No, nothing wrong,” I whispered. “They’ll show you.”

Olivia wagged her eyebrows, stood, and immediately disrobed. “Now watch.”

Emma’s cheeks flamed, and she stared every place other than the voluptuous, naturally blonde Olivia.

A gust of wind slammed into the side of the house and burst inside, making the old timbers complain.

Colors danced around Olivia as she reared back, contorting in inhuman convulsions, and Emma’s face twisted into a mask of horror.

The shifters threw back their heads in long, howling wails.

The magic inside them flared any time a shifter morphed nearby, and the howls were like the vent whistle on a heating tea kettle.

The reaction was always stronger when a shifter of their same kind morphed nearby.

My reaction to Emma had been muted by her bear-change and her fox-change.

Things might get interesting if Emma ever shifted into a wolf.

Pressed against the back of her chair, Emma made no sound.

She placed her hands, palm down, on the table as though bracing herself for an explosion.

Her chin quivered, but nothing could drag her eyes away now.

Her face stretched into the rapturous look roller-coaster addicts always got right before the first drop. She had no idea.

Olivia dropped to all fours, fully formed in a shaggy blond wolf with steely gray eyes. She peered at Emma a moment before nuzzling the vet’s hand, a toothy smile stretched on her jaws.

Emma whimpered, but she didn’t pull away. “She-She… shifted.”

“Yes, that’s what it looks like. That’s why you’re exhausted. That’s why you’re hungry. That’s why it’s so hard on your body until you get used to it. The shift is literally rearranging your cells into something else, held together by magic and willpower.”

She studied the people in the room. “You can all do that?”

Each attendee nodded.

“And I can do that?”

“Yes, after some practice,” I said. “They all shift into wolves. Our pack is all wolf shifters. As wolf shifters, we have animal-specific skills, like a great sense of smell, night vision, pack hierarchy, and so on.”

The corners of her mouth turned down, and she swallowed. “But… I… Didn’t I…”

Olivia loped around the table, and her furred ears swiveled back and forth. She darted out of the dining room, her claws clicking on the floor as she circled the house and returned.

Gently, I laid my hand on Emma’s arm and jerked my head toward the room which was emptying out. “That’s the other big thing we need to talk about. There’s more to what happened to you, but we should talk about it in private.”

“Okay.” She tugged her cell phone from the pocket of her shorts and studied the screen. Her eyes turned glassy with unshed tears. “I’d like to tell my mother. Is that acceptable to the pack?”

I pushed my plate away and crossed my arms on top of the table. “Don’t you think she’d believe you? You must have shifters in your family.”

Her chin quivered, and when she blinked, tears fell over her cheeks, but she dashed them away with more force than necessary. “My mother wouldn’t know.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m adopted, and I never knew my birth mom.”

“Ah.” The news surprised me.

“So, I-I don’t know anything about my birth parents, and neither does she, but I’ve never kept anything important from her. She’s been there for me through a lot of shit, and this qualifies as a lot of shit.”

“The pack won’t have any say in whether you tell your mother. However, the general population of humans doesn’t know about shifters, but all of us probably have one or two trustworthy people who know about our abilities.” The chair squeaked as I leaned back. “In fact, you’ve met one of mine.”

She quirked an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Sheila. She’s my cousin.”

Olivia sat back on her haunches and observed our conversation.

Emma’s expression turned thoughtful. “Callie’s mom?”

“Only one of her parents was a shifter, and she didn’t wind up with the genetics for it, though we all like to drink at Vixen’s when we’re in Willow Creek,” I said.

“Your cousin can’t shift?” Emma asked.

“So far as we know,” I answered. “Shifting usually happens sometime after puberty, but it can happen at any time. The stronger the shifter magic, the sooner the first shift… usually.”

“Does that mean my magic isn’t strong?” she asked.

“No. In your case, that’s clearly not what that means,” I said. “There’s much more going on with you, and we’ll figure it out together. It’s likely that you suppressed your ability until your life depended on it.”

Another burst of wind flooded the room as Olivia morphed back into a human who was wearing nothing but a gigantic smile. She redressed herself and took a seat at the table once more.

Olivia’s eyebrow arched. “Believe shifting is a thing now?”

“Yeah,” Emma said, “but I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”

Before I could comfort Emma, Olivia frowned and darted from the room, her face ashen. That was when I smelled the sharp scent of concern in the air. Pounding on the front door followed. Moments later, Olivia led a trio of shifters into the dining room. They’d been the source of the concern.

“Logan, we have a problem,” Olivia said.

I waited for her next words. Which threat had decided to show itself now?

“It’s Marcus Steele, and he’s demanding a meeting with you.” She paused. “To discuss recent developments.”

“Put him off,” I said. “We’ll see him in a month at the annual gathering beneath the Hunter’s Moon. I have no interest in seeing him until we all meet in the non-aggression tract of land.”

“No can do. He’s setting up camp at the border between our territories, and he’s adamant he’s not going home until he meets with you.”

“Did he say anything else?”

Her shoulders drooped. “He says he’ll only talk to you.”

Well, shit . Secrets never kept.