33. Sneak Peek of Book 4 Fated to the Reluctant Alpha
He'd caught the trace for the first time yesterday.
It had come to him on the afternoon loop somewhere along the eastern ridge, faint and gone before he could put weight on it. Sunscreen. Fabric that had been through too many city dryers. Equipment leather. Strange. He'd circled half the afternoon trying to find it again. He hadn't.
Last night he'd brought what he had to the war room.
Jace, his older brother and the alpha of Blackridge, had studied the markings Cade laid on the table. Tree blazes in field shorthand he didn't read. A torn scrap of paper with hand-sketched map fragments. Tire tracks too narrow for a logging rig.
Kira, the pack's combat trainer, had frowned at the sketch of the blazes. “These are placement marks. Whoever drew them is plotting a survey grid.”
Sage, Declan's mate and the pack's investigator, had asked if he'd caught a scent off the truck. Cade had told her no, not on the wind he'd had.
“Run it again at first light,” Jace had said.
Cade had nodded. They'd known each other long enough that the rest of the conversation hadn't needed to happen out loud.
He'd been on his ridge since dawn.
He'd been restless about it since he'd shifted at the cabin door. Three times before sunrise the animal had wanted out, wanted back to the eastern trail, wanted whatever had been on the wind yesterday and was no longer there.
The morning had given him snow on the trail and a wind that kept changing its mind. He was circling back toward the juniper stand on the north slope when the wind turned and brought it to him again.
Stronger.
Closer.
Recent.
His wolf was already moving, and Cade let him.
The trace from yesterday had been too thin to put a name to.
The new wind brought him the same notes, sharper.
Sunscreen. City fabric. Camera leather. And underneath all of it, something he hadn't picked up yesterday.
Something the animal in him went very still around.
He didn't know what he was after. His wolf did.
He came up the trail downwind, moving light through the frozen ground, ears swiveling for any sound that didn't belong. Crows working a kill below the ridge. A small bird sounding off on a dead pine. Wind in the tops. No human breath, no boot.
The wolf dropped to the brush at the edge of the juniper stand and held.
She was forty yards out at a spotting blind in the sun-side gap.
Younger than he'd expected. Thirty, give or take.
Fresh-faced. A scatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
Brown hair tied back tight at the nape, a few strands gone loose around her ears.
Wire-frame glasses that gave her face the look his pack would have called sexy librarian if Theo had been the one to spot her first.
Her mouth was set in the focused way of someone about to make a hard call. Her eyes, fixed on the camera screen at her side, were intense in a way that made him think she'd been tracking something for a long time and was about to finally see it.
She wore a weathered jacket that had been bought somewhere serious. Heavy snow pants. Boots that walked miles in country rougher than this. Binoculars hung from her neck. A long-lens camera sat propped on a low tripod by her left hand. A notebook rested open on her knee as she made field notes.
He could see the square block of her handwriting from where he stood. The marks at the head of the page were the same field shorthand he'd found pinned to the juniper trunks yesterday. The same shape Sage had spread on the war-room table last night.
It was her.
He'd been chasing this woman's shadow since yesterday afternoon.
She hadn't moved in four full minutes. She wasn't waiting for prey. She was waiting for the light. He'd seen Sage do this once. The kind of stillness that knew the camera would tell her when to shoot.
He wondered what she was photographing.
Then the wind shifted.
Her scent hit him full and the trace from yesterday resolved into something his wolf knew immediately. There was no word for it in his human head.
Mine!
The word ran through every cell. His chest seized on it. His ribs, his spine, his teeth, his paws. All of him.
Mine!
He hadn't wanted this. Hadn't been a man who was going to want this. Twenty years of patrol and never once had he asked it for anything. He'd watched Jace fall into Maren and decided, privately, that he was the one in his line who didn't have to.
Now he was hit. Hard. The kind of hit a man didn't get up from.
The wolf was moving again.
Cade caught him by the scruff of his own consciousness and held on as hard as he'd ever gripped anything. Wait!
The wolf strained against the hold. Didn't like it. Didn't understand it.
Mate! Now!
The words rang through Cade's mind so fierce he couldn't tell if it was the wolf's voice or his own.
His wolf wanted to claim her. So did Cade. The two had always been one thing in his blood, and the thing they were one of now was a man and an animal both bent toward the same woman.
She doesn't know what we are, Cade said inside the place where they shared a body. She'd be afraid of us.
The wolf paused. Briefly. He didn't like that either. But he had never wanted to scare a mate.
If we go to her right now, Cade pressed, we frighten her. We hurt her.
His wolf didn't answer, but Cade could feel him gathering for the next surge. Cade pressed harder, the two of them braced against each other on the thinnest sliver of control he'd ever had to walk.
We don't want to hurt her. We don't.
Slowly, with a sound that came from low in his chest and stayed there, his wolf agreed. Not to leaving. Not to that. But to not-now. To holding. For now.
It was the hardest thing Cade had ever asked of him.
His mate lifted her head.
Not at him. Just at the wind.
She set the pen down slowly. Lifted the camera off the tripod. Brought it to her eye in one steady motion that said she'd done this in worse weather and rougher country.
She turned, slow, in his direction.
She didn't flinch. She didn't lower the camera. Her finger didn't jerk on the shutter.
She framed.
Click.
The shutter opened a clean small slot in the air. His wolf's ears tracked it before either of them could think.
Click.
His wolf surged.
Cade braced him. Hard. Hard enough that something in his back teeth hurt with the effort. No! Hold!
Click.
Three pictures of him stood inside her camera now, and a part of him he hadn't known he had was pleased about it. She would have him. She would be able to look at him later. The thought felt like warmth against a cold he hadn't known he was carrying.
Just as he felt his wolf bunch the muscle of his shoulders to move, Cade yelled at him inside their shared body:
Stop! If you do this, we're just like him.
His wolf froze.
Cade flashed him images. His father at the kitchen counter on the morning Cade had been seven years old. His mother in her coat. The way her face had said one thing and her mouth had said all right.
The way his father's hand had come down on a decision his mother had been about to make for herself, and the way she'd never quite finished the sentence she'd been starting. Years of those mornings. Years of his mother doing what his father had decided.
His seven-year-old self at the top of the stairs trying to understand why one of them got to choose and the other got to do.
We vowed we wouldn't be like him, Cade said. We swore it.
His wolf made a sound that wasn't an answer. Then, slowly, he backed off the bunched shoulder.
Click.
Fourth shot.
They turned and bolted for the trees.
The wolf went six lengths and stopped. Stopped hard. Refused the next stride.
Cade pressed against him for two strides of lost ground before he understood. His wolf had agreed not to take her now. He hadn't agreed to lose her sight line.
Cade hadn't agreed to lose her sight line either. The man wanted to keep her in view as much as the wolf did.
The compromise was one they could both live with. They settled in deep cover where the juniper made a dark wall, where the wind stayed in their favor, where they could see her through the trunks.
They stayed there and watched.
She'd lowered the camera. She was looking at the place where he'd been. Then at the brush, careful, scanning. He didn't move. The trees and his stillness kept him hidden from where she was looking.
She didn't find him.
She let out a long, steady breath. The kind of breath a person let out when they'd just gotten what they came for. She sat back down on her stool.
Her hands were shaking a little now. Just at the wrists. Not much, but he saw.
The wolf preened. Mate is shaken. Shaken because of us. The animal, who had never had a use for human pride, was vibrating with something close to it.
She wrote in her notebook a while. Watching her write felt like watching her stay. Cade couldn't take his eyes off the way her hand moved across the page.
Something in him went taut every time her shoulder turned. Every time she paged forward in the book. Every time she set the pen down to look at the camera screen. It had no off switch.
She worked another half hour. Walked the trail twice, took more frames of terrain and middle distance, made more notes. He moved with her along the inside line of the trees. Always cover. Always with the wind in his favor. Always within reach of her.
He didn't get closer. He wanted to. So did his wolf. They both held.
The light was strong and clean. Late winter, an hour and a half before the sun would start to dip. She broke camp the way she did everything else. Efficient. Practiced. Tripod down. Notebook into her daypack. She hefted the strap and started down the trail toward the truck pullout.
He shadowed her through the trees.
She didn't know.
The pullout was where the patrol road opened into a wide turnaround at the foot of the ridge.
Two big pines marked the edges. Her truck sat in the shade of the bigger one.
A banged-up mid-sized rig with enough mud on it to suggest it had been her work vehicle for a while. She loaded gear into the cab.