Tara #2
“With all due respect, King Magnus …” I replied, throwing as much mockery as possible into his title. “I am still not interested in going out with you. So, I guess this conversation is over.”
Magnus didn’t answer this time. Just glowered at me as I pulled my straightened hair into a ponytail.
“Like I said,” I reminded him. “I prefer to shift alone.”
Magnus shot me a cool, calculating look. “I’m afraid that isnae possible.”
“Sure it is!” I insisted. “All you have to do is get in your car and drive back to your village or, you know, somewhere that isn’t here, before moonrise.”
Magnus took a big, noisy sniff of the rapidly cooling air through his long nose.
“You’re wrong about that,” he answered. “The moon will rise early this eve.”
I tilted my head suspiciously.
“You can’t possibly know that …” I began to say—only to trail off when he began to strip.
First went the cape, which he unceremoniously dropped to the ground like it was a cheap costume prop rather than the heirloom I suspected it to be. Then he pulled his cable knit sweater off over this head, revealing a torso slabbed over with heavy muscles.
Are you sure you’re not interested? My wolf whined, straining forward. Because I definitely am.
I ignored my wolf and continued to address Magnus as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on inside of me. “According to my weather app, the moon isn’t due to rise for another hour.”
“Aye, those humans do love their predictions.” Though I kept my eyes averted from his body, I could hear the condescending smirk in his voice. “But we wolves are a part of nature, as we say in my village.”
He looked me up and down, seeming to take note of every curve on my body. “If I were you, Tara, I’d remove that shiny frock, or else the moon will shred it to pieces.”
I glanced down at my Ted Baker jacquard dress.
Milly used to say it was my “compliments” dress because it never failed to garner positive attention from women and men when I wore it out.
I had barely been able to pay my rent the month I bought it.
So, he was right, I definitely did not want to destroy my favorite dress by shifting in it. But …
“Look. I’m not … I am not doing this with you. You will have to find some other place to shift. But not here …not with me … okay?”
Magnus just slid one of his polished Ghillie boots off his foot. “So, did you grow up as one of those city cage changers then?”
He took off the other boot, then disposed of his folded-over cable-knit socks. “Have you never seen an unrelated male wolf naked before, Tara?”
Real talk. No. Not in the flesh …
And especially not one who looked like Magnus. My eyes drifted back to his torso. Seriously, before now I’d assumed muscles like his were a trick of Photoshop.
Yum, my wolf growled.
Then Magnus raised his hands to unfasten his kilt.
“No, wait! Stop!” I squeaked. Only to be silenced by the energy surge of a sudden shift.
And that was the last thing I remembered from that night.
The next morning, I woke up on the hard Scottish ground in a ruined Ted Baker dress.
Waking up outside wasn’t that unusual for me since my move to Scotland. I’d grown to know all too well the feeling of jerking awake in the cold Scottish dell, naked and covered in frosty dew.
But that morning, I wasn’t chilly. Like, at all.
In fact, I almost felt too warm, as if I were sleeping next to a roaring bonfire. A huge bonfire with arms and legs that draped over me like the heaviest of blankets. I glanced down….
And instantly recognized the signet ring on one of the hands circling my waist. Oh no…
Magnus.
I was wrapped in the arms of the Scottish alpha king.
And that wasn’t even the worst part. Shifting burned a lot of calories and like most modern wolves, I didn’t hunt while in wolf form. As a result, I was usually ravenous after a shift, and my first thought when I woke was to fill my empty stomach.
This morning, however, breakfast was the furthest thing from my mind. Because I was already full. Very, very full.
Magnus’s long thick shaft throbbed inside me … stretching me impossibly wide. He was embedded so deep, I could feel every pulse.
No...! No, no, no! We couldn’t have!
But when I attempted to move away from him, I found myself held in place by a hard, unyielding knot. A sharp bolt of pleasure rippled through my womb as if to say, in a dark Scottish accent, “Aye, you most certainly did. Moreover, you enjoyed it.”
Oh, God! Magnus and I … we’d wolf-mated, with my wolf and his going at it like, well, animals while our humans were out cold.
We must have still been going at it when we shifted back with him still embedded inside of me.
And now my core was milking his hard, unyielding knot which meant I was trapped.
I wouldn’t be able to leave until this episode of animal biology completed and I’d squeezed every drop I could from the still-sleeping male wolf behind me.
Dread pooled in my stomach.
Of course, a wolf mating did not mean an automatic gestation. My former Canadian pack used wolf matings as their main method of impregnating unheated she-wolves, but it didn’t always work.
Yes, technically, my oldest sister, Leora, was wolf-mated to a male from Prince Edward Island. And Leora was the product of a wolf mating between our Canadian mother and Ghanaian father. But wolf mating was a crap shoot at best, with no guarantee of a pregnancy.
Therefore, the wolf mating between Magnus and me could very well be fruitless. Totally fruitless, I insisted to myself even as the monster buried deep inside of me continued to shock my formerly virgin sex with pulse after pulse of knotted pleasure.
It wasn’t long before I had to bite my lip to keep from crying out when what can only have been an orgasm shuddered through my body.
Don’t move, I told myself after it finished. If I kept still and ignored the pulsing sensations his staff was producing inside of me, he’d eventually unknot, and I’d be free of him. Then I could sneak back to the car I’d left near the main road and get out of here.
Thankfully, Magnus unknotted a few minutes later. As soon as I felt him deflate, I carefully scooted away, then stood up and took stock of my situation.
My lovely Ted Baker dress was in tatters. Luckily, I kept some spare clothes and a pair of shoes in the trunk of my car.
But instead of beating a hasty retreat, I stared down at the sleeping Scottish king.
He was prone and no longer at “full mast,” but he still looked magnificent.
Mate, my wolf whispered, urging me forward.
But … nope. Not happening.
I shoved my beast down and scrambled back to my car, praying my run-in with Magnus would end here. With only me knowing all the details of what had passed between us.
As soon as I arrived home, I made a beeline for the shower. I turned the temperature to near-scalding and thoroughly washed myself in every nook and cranny.
But his scent wouldn’t come off. Not in the shower or in the several hours that passed after our wolf encounter.
In fact, his scent only became more pronounced in the days that followed. With an undercurrent of hCG.
By Sunday night, I had no choice but to acknowledge that I was not one of those she-wolves who could wolf mate and not get pregnant.
And I cursed myself for spending all my leftover wages on after-work drinks and a business-to-evening wear wardrobe to match my human cosmopolitan twenty-something lifestyle.
Neither Ted Baker nor Jimmy Choo could help me out of this jam.
Okay, okay, Tara, think!
The good thing was I wouldn’t have to worry about shifting during the next full moon, or any other, for a whole year. Nine wolf-free months to gestate and three additional months to adjust to motherhood afterwards was the shifter version of she-wolf maternity leave.
Lord knew I wouldn’t mind not having to max out my sick days to recover from shifting like I’ve had to do ever since I took the job at RSB.
No … my biggest problem was that wolf fathers also stopped shifting for twelve months.
Which meant even if Magnus didn’t yet realize he had a kid on the way, he’d definitely figure it out when he didn’t change with the next full moon.
And considering his crown hung in the balance, who knew what he’d do when he found out I was pregnant with his pup.
Or what he’d make me do …
In the end, I didn’t really have any choice but to pull out my laptop and type out an urgent email to my boss.