Tara
Five Days Earlier
“I hoped I’d run into you again.”
Magnus appeared like a shadow at my secret changing place several miles outside of Edinburgh. Less than an hour before moonrise.
I opened my mouth to demand to know how he’d come to be in the dense woods near the Scottish/English border. But then a shiver of foreboding ran down my back.
“Magnus can be … temperamental.”
That’s what Magnus’s brother Iain told me two full moons ago when he’d warned me to watch out for the star rugby player who also happened to be the alpha king of the Scottish Wolves. According to Iain, Magnus took his secret role “verrae seriously.”
“And you did punch him in the face,” Iain pointed out when he convinced me to move into his heavily secured apartment while he and my formerly human best friend, Milly traipsed around the world on an extended babymoon.
I had merely rolled my eyes at Iain’s warning. I’d had good reason to hit Magnus and would do so again if given the chance. Plus, I could take care of myself.
But Iain had insisted and I did have a taste for nice things—like luxury flats in New Town. So I moved into the apartment like he and Milly wanted me to do.
And then …nothing happened. I hadn’t heard a peep from Magnus for nearly three months.
I’d been planning to call Iain and tell him as much with more than a little “I told you so” in my tone. But now …
Well, here Magnus was, approaching my private space with a lazy lope that put me in mind of the wolf he’d become once the full moon rose in an hour or so.
He stopped just a few inches away, towering over me by a good foot and filling my nose with his particular scent of pine trees, stone, lake water, and pitch.
He wore a full-on cape with a fur collar over a thick cable sweater and kilt. The cape smelled ancient, and I could all but hear the roar of the poor bear that was killed to make this Jon Snow cosplay moment happen.
The whole outfit was, in a word, ridiculous.
Even so, my wolf … well, it almost felt like she was standing up inside of me.
“I tell you with my whole chest, my wolf stood up when I saw your mother.” That was how my Ghanaian father described what his wolf did the first time he laid eyes on my Canadian mother.
But my mother was wonderful at first sight. Beloved by everyone in the small town where I’d grown up.
I despised the wolf who had just strode into my secret changing place like he owned it.
So this sensation inside of me couldn’t be that. Could it?
“You alright there, Tara?” Magnus asked, his thick Scottish brogue rolling into my ears like fog. He smirked down at me as if he could sense or maybe even smell my wolf’s reaction to him.
But I would have tied my own noose and hung myself with it before ever acknowledging what he was doing to my inner wolf.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded instead of answering his question.
Another smirk. “Ye ken, most lasses—human and wolf—would be chuffed for me to show up like this. And on a full moon night, no less.”
“You should know by now I am not most women. Or even most shifters,” I shot back, ignoring the way my wolf rolled inside of me at the sound of his voice. “And I prefer to shift alone, so …”
I made a shooing action with my hands.
One that Magnus ignored as he inspected my small, chosen dell with a frown. “Not much cover out here. What will you do if some daft humans break down on the road just beyond?”
“Not a problem. I tie myself to a tree before I shift,” I answered smugly. “It’s an old First Nations trick.”
“Clever. Though as I understand it, much of North America is overrun with wolves these days—the descendants of those turned by your Indigenous lot. I wouldnae be so quick to trust their methods if it were myself out here in the woods alone without mate or clan.”
I squinted up at him, bristling at his arrogance. “Yeah, and according to the humans here, wolves are supposedly extinct in Scotland. So, I think it’s safe to say Indigenous methods have some obvious advantages over yours.”
A perverse pleasure stole over my human when Magnus’s jaw tightened and ticked underneath his rugged beard. He wasn’t so cocky now.
I might have felt triumphant if my wolf wasn’t blatantly ogling the alpha.
Real Talk: Magnus was stupidly handsome. He sported hair just as wavy and dark as the Game of Thrones actor who actually played Jon Snow—but with an even nicer beard. And don’t even get me started on those magnetic stone-gray eyes of his. Ugh!
Even though my human out-and-out hated the alpha king disguised as a popular rugby player, my wolf could not stop inhaling his scent …
He smells soooo good, she panted.
It was an unsettling combination of emotions, and I had no idea how to manage them all. The thing was, I had no real adult wolf experience.
After I left my Canadian pack, I chose to live as the humans did.
I shopped like them—way too much and with more money sitting on my shoe shelves and hangers than in my savings account.
I worked an eight-to-five job. I went out for after-work drinks with my co-workers.
And I was probably one of the few shifters in Scotland with a human roommate-slash-best friend—at least I was before Milly got turned.
But as glamorous as my co-workers believed me to be, I was still a she-wolf at heart.
I didn’t easily turn down men because I was haughty with sky-high expectations as I’d let my human friends believe. I turned them down because I was biologically incapable of feeling sexual desire for them. At least not until my first heat …
But Magnus wasn’t just any male. He was a wolf.
An extremely sexy wolf—with broad shoulders and a gray-eyed gaze that made me feel, despite his arrogance, that his attention … every single ounce of it … was completely focused on me.
And nothing but me.
“Look …” I swallowed heavily. “I don’t like you. And you don’t like me. So, if you’re here to give me a hard time about hitting you, can we just not and agree to be enemies? From, like, really far away?”
Magnus stilled.
And I braced for a display of that temper Iain warned me about.
But then he said, “I dinnae come here to argue with you, Tara. I came to offer you the hospitality of my village.”
“The hospitality of your village,” I repeated, not understanding.
“Aye. It is not safe for a wolf to shift, as you North American lot call it, in unprotected woods. Next moon-tide you will come to my kingdom. You can make the change there. And after, you can come ‘round to my castle and we’ll get to know each other as we break our full moon fast.”
His brogue was so much thicker than that of my Scottish co-workers in Edinburgh that it took me a few moments to register exactly what he was proposing. “Hold on. Are you asking me out on, like, a post-shift breakfast date?”
Magnus’s jaw ticked again as if I had somehow dishonored him with my blunt summation of his invitation—which I probably had.
My pack in Canada had barely registered the existence of the Ontario alpha king. But if Iain was any example, the Scottish Wolves took their alpha just as “verrae seriously” as he did himself.
Magnus flared his nostrils like he was about to blow.
But then his expression softened. “Aye, we got off to a bad start, you and me—ach, we did. I do fancy ye though, and I’d er …
like us to come to know each other better.
You see, I have found myself thinking of you since our first encounter.
More than I like, truth be told. And I’m keen to ah … explore that.”
As he spoke, Magnus seemed to become less sure of himself and even stumbled over his words.
Wait, was his wolf standing up inside of him, just like mine? My heart beat faster at the prospect.
But then I remembered the other things Iain had told Milly and me on the ride home from Magnus’s highland castle.
According to Iain, their kingdom village of Faoiltiarn had been struggling with record-high infertility rates for a few decades now.
A baby hadn’t been born in the village for nearly twenty years, which was why the Faoiltiarn pack considered it a miracle when Milly became pregnant by Iain, their second-in-line prince.
However, according to Scottish pack law, because the second prince had an heir on the way, Magnus was at risk of losing his crown completely unless he got a she-wolf pregnant before his brother’s baby was born.
That was why Iain agreed to take off from work and go on an extended babymoon with Milly—because when he returned, there was a pretty good chance the tech billionaire who’d left his old-fashioned kingdom village behind on purpose would be forced to take over as King of the Highland and Eastern Scottish Wolves.
I held up a hand. “Hold on a sec. Is this about you needing to knock someone up before Milly and your brother have their baby? You know, so you can hang on to your crown?”
Magnus faltered. Just for a second. But it was all I needed to know I hit the bullseye.
“Wow.” I huff out a huge breath. “Let me get this straight … your brother goes outside your inbred village and manages to knock up a Black woman and now you’re thinking, ‘Hey, if it worked for him, it could work for me!’”
“This has nothing to do with ye being Black—” he spluttered. His face reddened, but then he seemed to recall who he was—Magnus Scotswolf, King of the Highland and Eastern Scottish Wolves—and quickly reset.
“I was not lying about being compelled by ye,” he insisted, taking a step forward.
“And I was not lying about not liking you,” I answered, taking a step back.
“I haven’t liked you from the moment we met—you know, when you pointed that gun at my pregnant best friend?
Also, if I wanted to be an incubator for some wolf, I wouldn’t have chosen to live in Edinburgh surrounded by humans. ”
“I am not ‘some wolf,’” Magnus answered. His voice took on an imperious growl. “I am the most powerful king in Scotland. Your king so long as you live in my lands.”