Page 22 of Alpha's Claim

Fuck. I have to be careful. My bear is wild. Totally uncivilized. Savage.

If he gets control while I’m touching Paloma–if he triesto permanently mark and claim her as ours–she could be in real danger. Not that he would mean to hurt her, but she’s a fragile human. He’s a feral beast. If he tried to mark her, she could die.

I can’t let him free near her. Not ever.

Paloma moans at my words. I need to get control of this situation.

“Here’s what I want you to do, princess.” I use my boardroom voice–the one that makes my employees jump to please me.

“Lean that seat back.”

She obeys, fumbling with the buttons on the side of her seat until she finds the right one.

“Good girl.”

“Now, put your fingers between your legs and close your eyes. Get that pussy nice and wet for me while you think about what your Viking is going to do when he gets you to his keep. Understand?”

Her fingers slide into her satin pajama shorts, and she lays her head back on the reclined seat. “She’s going in protest,” she warns me as she closes her eyes.

“Then I’ll have to force her to obey. How does she like to be forced?”

“She likes to be carried off over his big brawny shoulder. Maybe she needs to be tied up–loosely, of course. And…” –her voice waivers a little– “maybe that other thing you mentioned.“

I hide a smile. “A good, hard spanking, over my knee?”

“Maybe not that hard,” she says in a small voice.

I chuckle. “She’s going to have the night of her dreams.”

Paloma follows my instructions, keeping her eyes closed and her fingers moving between her legs. But eventually, as I hoped, she slides into slumber.

Thank fuck. It’s at least another three hours to the safe house, and my dick was going to explode if we kept up the foreplay.

I speed through Connecticut, keeping an eye out for highway patrol. As I drive, the insanity of my actions sink in.

I let my bear instinct rule when I snatched Paloma from Thompson’s claws.

I’m not sorry–not even remotely. Just having her beside me in the car brings out a wild exhilaration. But I realize there will be drastic consequences. Thompson is a powerful man.

I just picked a war with an eccentric evil billionaire who clearly has no moral compass. Unlike Thompson, I’m not well-connected. I don’t have cronies in every high office whose pockets I’ve lined to be sure they’ll lie, steal, and cheat for me.

I’m a newcomer to Wall Street. I wasn’t born into wealth—I made it from nothing. And I only recently got my company to nine figures. I don’t even have the power of a pack behind me like Brick Blackthroat and the werewolves of Wall Street.

I come from a small, rag-tag adoptive family in the rural mountains of New Mexico. Sure, I can call on my brothers back home for protection or fire power, but if anything happened to one of them, it would break our mother’s heart. And I've already broken her heart enough.

My feral bear and his wild rampages in my adolescence wore her out so much that she went into hibernation. My own twin brother won’t speak to me over it.

I could keep it local and call on Brick Blackthroat and his wolf pack to help, but it’s a lot to ask, and he has no obligation to give me his support. They just had a terribleinternal conflict over Brick choosing a human as his luna, and they lost hundreds of members due to the infighting.

Either way, if I can’t prevail against Thompson, this could end not only with my own financial and professional ruin, but, as Paloma has warned, in both of our deaths.

I can’t even think beyond the immediate dilemma of keeping Paloma safe. My bear wants to claim her. Even if she were willing, I can’t mate a human. My bear is way too volatile. Human females are far too fragile.

No.

I’ll just have to figure out how to free Paloma from her evil foster father and then let her go.

My bear snarls–not a snarl echo beneath the surface, but an actual ferocious roar that comes out of my mouth and rattles the car.

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