Page 52 of Possessive Alpha

I have my fingers deep in the earth when a lanky guy with shoulder length dark brown hair and gray eyes, dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a football jersey, comes into sight.

He immediately halts when he spots me.

I wave. “Hey, Travis!”

He hesitates, clearly weighing up whether he should retreat or pretend he didn’t see me.

“No running off,” Jackson’s gruff voice comes from somewhere behind him.

Travis jumps but still makes no move to approach.

It’s not unusual behavior from him.

I smile warmly at him and gesture him over. “You can help me pick some of these potatoes if you want. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.”

He peers over his shoulder before he approaches, dropping into a crouch on the very edge of the kitchen garden.

I hadn’t met a feral shifter before.

Travis had been a twenty-year-old college freshman, on his way home from a dorm party last year in Arizona, according to Regan, who’d told me his sad history.

A wolf had attacked him, bit him, and changed his life completely.

Travis had no idea about shifters until he changed into a wolf for the first time. He left his home and everything he knew and loved, believing he was a danger to everyone around him.

Along the way, his paths crossed with a female shifter, Eden. At the time, he’d been ruled by instincts. He took one sniff of her and followed her.

Regan explained how his wolf pushed him to pursue Eden to Regan’s pack in Hardin, Colorado, and it was there that he learned what he was. Later, Jackson brought him to Dawley to join his pack and to learn to control his wolf.

Travis has to be one of the sweetest guys I’ve ever met, so I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like for him to have something like that happen to him. The only ferals I’ve ever heard of died from wolf attacks. To have survived at all is a testament to his strength.

Because he’s so afraid he will hurt someone, he usually takes one look at a female shifter and runs in the opposite direction. Even now, he still doesn’t believe he’s safe to be around. He was missing from the movie the other evening, and no matter how much Elin and Mia would have worked to convince him to join us, he would have refused.

“Regan was saying that you’re going to go see your parents soon.”

He shrugs. “Jackson thinks I can, but I don’t know.”

“Jackson wouldn’t have suggested it if he didn’t think you were in control of your wolf. If he thinks it’s safe, then there’s no reason not to believe him,” I say.

As long as Travis doesn’t tell them what he is now, there’s no reason he can’t see them whenever he wants.

“I don’t want to risk it,” he says after a lengthy pause.

“But don’t you miss them?”

His silence tells me everything I need to know, and I feel sorry for Travis all over again. I wish there was something I could say or do to ease his fears.

For the next several seconds, we quietly dig potatoes from the soil. As I inhale the rich, earthy scent, it grounds me, the way it always does.

“You never join us for the pack runs.” I’m careful not to make it sound like a demand or a question. An observation only.

Travis shrugs, head down, long hair obscuring most of his face. “Jackson takes me out for a run sometimes. And Regan.”

That is the reason I try never to show any fear around Travis.

When he caught Eden’s scent and followed her, he scared her badly. It wasn’t his fault. He was listening to wolf instincts he didn’t know how to control. Now, even though we reassure him he won’t harm anyone, he still struggles to believe it.

It’s why he stays away from all the women in the house.

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