The Widow’s Forbidden Heat (Forbidden Omegaverse #8)

Chapter 1

ONE

VIVIENNE

The man in the casket was my husband, but I felt nothing when I looked at him.

Carter Jamison had been a cold man, and I mean that literally. Every time he touched me his hands were like ice. Just thinking about it made me shiver.

But he was cold in other ways too—cold and aloof, never interested in anything I had to say. I had been sold to him when I was barely twenty—a virgin who had been sequestered for years to keep me that way—and he’d never shown me a single spark of warmth or affection.

I was so innocent on our wedding night, I had no idea what was coming. I was only told I must hold still and submit to my husband and do whatever he told me.

That might not have been a problem if my husband had been a kind man—one who cared about his wife’s pain or the terror I felt when I first saw the crooked shaft of his manhood with its ugly, bloated knot coming towards me.

Closing my eyes, I remembered the sharp feeling inside me—like someone stabbing with a knife—and the way my eyes had filled with tears.

My eyes with the Royal Golden Rim—the thin ring of gold around each iris that proclaimed I had some Royal Were blood in me.

They had marked me as special—as a woman who would bear the man who was lucky enough to mate with her many strong sons.

It was a promise I never fulfilled for Carter, despite the prophecy.

Not that he didn’t try to get me pregnant.

Every month during my Heat Cycle—which was never very strong—he tried.

After a time, I stopped dreading the encounters and got used to the grunting and thrusting on top of me.

For all its ugliness, his shaft wasn’t very big.

After those first few times, it didn’t hurt anymore.

And a year or so after that, I barely noticed it in me.

I was able to close my eyes and imagine myself someplace much more pleasant—the beach maybe, or the mountains.

I have always wanted to travel, but Carter preferred to stay put. He ruled the Blackridge Pack with an iron fist, and he didn’t like leaving his territory in case someone might get out of line. The few times he went to multi-Pack meetings in other states, he refused to take me.

“You’ll only get into trouble,” he’d grunt, when I begged to go with him so I could see someplace new. He called me ungrateful for pleading to go away. After all, hadn’t he given me a mansion to live in?

Wolverton Manor was a grand home, I had to admit.

It has turrets and towers and battlements—just like a castle.

It’s not a “McMansion” as Carter scornfully called the other grand houses in our small town.

Parts of it were brought over from England—they used to be the walls of a monastery before Carter bought them and brought them here.

But the Manor was built long before I was born—back when he was still in his “exploring phase” as he put it, the few times he talked about his adventures in Europe and the Far East. By the time we wed, he was nearly sixty and had had his fill of traveling.

“I just want to stay home by my own fire,” he would growl, when I mentioned how nice it might be to go for a vacation somewhere. “Stop your prattling, girl! I don’t have time for your nonsense!”

Carter had never had time for my “nonsense” or any other part of me, except what was between my legs. As time went on, though, and he failed to get me pregnant, he grew bitter and angry.

He would complain about it often though and curse me for not giving him an heir.

He said the soothsayer who had made the prophecy about the “girl with gold-ringed eyes who would bear many strong heirs to a male of the Jamison line” was nothing but a liar and a thief who had taken his money when he asked for a Truth Saying.

Of course, he sent me to a fertility clinic—though he refused to go himself.

They poked and prodded and studied me and though they admitted that my Heat Cycle was extremely mild, there was nothing actually wrong with my womb.

So there was nothing to be done but bring me home again and try some more.

They even gave me fertility drugs to take—not that they did any good. I just couldn’t seem to conceive, no matter how I tried. Eventually Carter cursed me and called me “barren.”

I didn’t dare to suggest that he get tested too—even though the forbidden internet searches I did explained that the failure to get pregnant might not be my fault.

A man his age might have a low sperm count, after all, but Carter would hear none of that.

He was an Alpha—who ever heard of an Alpha with a low sperm count?

As strange as it might seem, I longed to get pregnant, despite how distasteful I found sex. I would watch the young mothers of the Pack holding their babies and my own arms felt so empty I wanted to weep.

I did weep often, alone in my room at night. Except for the nights of my Heat Cycle, I didn’t sleep with Carter. He said I “bothered him.” He’d been used to sleeping alone long before he acquired me as his wife—he wasn’t about to change for the foolish young girl he’d married.

Not that I was a girl anymore.

I opened my eyes and looked down into the casket again.

That ugly, wrinkled old man had stolen twenty years of my life.

I was forty now and while I still had curves in the right places, I could see faint lines around the corners of my eyes and mouth.

There were a few silver strands in my long, dark hair as well.

Nothing too dramatic—I could pluck them out easily enough.

But there always seemed to be more later.

“Ah, you must be missing him so much. Poor lass.”

I jerked my head up and saw the Pack Chaplain, Father MacKaity, standing at my side.

Quickly, I lowered my head, hiding my tearless eyes behind the black mourning veil I was wearing.

“Yes, Father,” I said softly. I had spent most of my life pretending to be a good and dutiful wife—I could pretend a little more now. If the Pack and the surrounding town knew how I really felt about Carter’s death, they would be shocked and scandalized.

“Such a good husband he was to you, my girl,” Father MacKaity said solemnly. “Always making sure you were well fed and dressed in the finest clothes—no one could doubt you were the wife of the Pack Leader when they saw you.”

No, of course not—Carter always kept up appearances, I almost said. I kept the words behind my teeth, though. It wouldn’t do to let people know that my whole marriage had been nothing but a well-rehearsed performance and that even now I was still performing.

Performing grief, performing the part of the young widow—well, youngish—left behind and grieving after her dear husband is taken far too soon.

Personally, it wouldn’t have bothered me if Carter had decided to shuffle off this mortal coil a good ten years earlier—at least then I might have had a bit of my youth left. If that sounds cold, well I’m sorry—as I said, I lived through a cold, abusive marriage.

Out in public, he would sometimes hold my hand.

And of course, during my Heat Cycle he bred me, whether I wanted him to or not.

Other than those times, my husband never touched me.

I used to watch the other wives with their husbands and yearn to be touched and held and loved.

I saw the way the men held their mates close—the casual drape of an arm around her shoulders…

a kiss on the cheek, or the mouth…the many times I saw a happy couple sneak off into the shadows together because her Heat Cycle was getting to be too much and her husband had to breed her…

I never had any of that. The years when I should have been wed to a warm, loving man who would wrap me in his arms and love me were behind me now. Now I was nothing but a grieving widow and since I had been married to the Pack Leader, I was expected to stay that way the rest of my life.

There was even a law about it in my Pack—The Moon Widow, as the wife of the dead Pack Leader is called—is not allowed to marry again if she’s over a certain age.

She must spend the rest of her life honoring her husband’s memory and bearing witness to his greatness.

The only exception is if the next Pack Leader wants to marry her.

But that wasn’t considered likely, especially at my time of life.

If I had been even a little younger, they might have let me remarry.

But I was past forty now—too old to have any urgent Heat Cycles.

Too old to be given as a wife to another Pack Alpha.

Not that any of them would want a used-up Omega like me—even if I did have the Royal Ringed Eyes.

I still bore my late husband’s crest tattooed on my upper right arm and his was the only Mark I would ever wear.

“It’s a pity you never could bear him any sons.

” There was a hint of reproach in Father MacKaity’s mellow tenor voice, as though I had withheld the sons on purpose.

“I know how desperately he wanted an heir, but alas, now the Pack will have to go through the Alpha Challenge and we’ll likely lose at least two or three good, strong Alphas in the fights. ”

“I’m sorry,” I offered, my words sounding hollow in my own ears. “I tried, Father—truly I did.”

“Yes, of course you did, lass. I never meant to imply otherwise,” he said, though I was pretty sure that was exactly what he had been implying.

He shook his head, looking sorrowful. “Ah, if only the curse could be broken! This is the fifth generation where the Pack Leader has no son. Always before the Leader left behind an heir—a younger brother or a nephew or cousin to take his place. But alas, Alpha Carter had no one.”

“I thought he had a younger brother, though,” I offered hesitantly. I was sure I’d heard Carter speak of him before—though not in very good terms. They had been estranged for longer than I had been alive—Carter held onto a grudge like it was money, as my Nana would have said.