Page 50 of The Wild Wolf's Rejected Mate

There is a great deal of scratching among the furrier ones. A few who are fully shifted have padded to the front and plopped on their sides to watch. This pack isn’t waiting for orders; they’re waiting to be entertained.

“Well, did you take out Killian Kelly before you took her?” the redhead asks.

I turn to see Justus’s reaction, and my heart jumps into my throat. The crowd behind me is five deep. I am well and truly surrounded.

Justus shrugs like the idea of taking Killian Kelly out isn’t ridiculous—or out of the question—and says, “It wasn’t exactly planned.”

The one called Khalil snorts again.

“Well, what are you going to do, Alpha?” the redhead’s voice rises, color creeping up his neck from his pale chest. “He’ll come after her, mate or not.”

“I’m not the alpha,” Justus replies. He says it offhandedly, as if by rote. Isn’t he, though? He seemed to be during the Byrnes fiasco. “And I laid a false trail.”

“And how long will that delay the inevitable?” Khalil asks.

“Long enough,” Justus answers. They share a speaking look and then Khalil shakes his head and backs off.

The redhead keeps pressing. “We don’t need the trouble. She’s favored by Kelly’s mate. You saw that. We all did.” The redhead’s face has flushed almost as bright as his hair. “Can’t you just mount her somewhere else?”

The murmuring, muttering, scratching pack instantly falls silent. The redhead takes a huge step back, knocking the males behind him aside, and bares his neck.

“Apologies, Justus,” he says. He’s able to hold his tongue for about two seconds before he mumbles, “But what’s wrong with high valley camp?”

“Black bears,” the male with the drumstick calls out. “Can’t fuck there until you clear out the bears.”

Khalil snorts.

The redhead glares and continues muttering, “Why not take her to the red clay camp then? Killian Kelly isn’t as stupid as he looks; he won’t fall for a false trail for long. If we steal a female, we have to hold her at another camp until we’re sure we got away clean. But I guess the rules don’t apply to alphas.”

He goes on and on, but he keeps his head bent, and the pack’s attention is drifting away from him. There’s movement coming from the caves in the terraces. Figures emerge and join together in a train that makes their way down a switchback path to the clearing. As they pass a tent near a tall sycamore tree, several more join them.

When they reach the gathering, the crowd shifts to make a path. My wolf’s pulse picks up. Whoever is coming, they make the males nervous. There’s a general shuffling of feet. The younger males posture, puffing their chests and throwing their shoulders back. The pitch of the entire crowd’s muttering drops an octave.

The males gathered closest to us part, revealing a phalanx of females led by a black she-wolf, a gray-haired female in her skin, and another female, maybe in her late thirties or early forties, who is somehow both furry and all woman at the same time. She looks like the NSFW character art that Kennedy downloads on her phone—so much butt and boobs and hips.

My wolf draws herself up. She cowered like a pup in front of the males, but for some reason, she doesn’t want to show these females her neck. She’s trembling visibly, but she’s holding her head high.

The voice is too freaked out to make any coherent warnings. All she can do is screech the kind of wordless, elongated, high-pitched “ahh” a person makes when they knock something over and it rocks back and forth, and back and forth, right on the verge of tipping. She’s panicking, but I’m not.

Why aren’t I?

By all rights, my wolf should be panicking, too. These females have the numbers, and most of them have a size advantage as well. Her best move is submission, and my wolf understands that, but she has no intention of giving an inch.

She’s defending Justus.

But not because he’s vulnerable.

Because he’s hers.

“What’s her name?” the gray-haired female interrupts my mental meltdown. I leap on the distraction, inspecting her as closely as she’s inspecting me.

She has a North Border accent, and unlike the males, she’s dressed. A skirt is wrapped around her waist and draped over her bare shoulder, somewhat like a sari or sarong. The blue fabric is clearly homespun and hand-dyed, but it looks as fine and soft as machine-made.

“Annie,” Justus answers, lowering his voice respectfully like he’s been called to speak at an elders’ meeting. “Annie, this is Elspeth.”

My wolf inclines her head. It’s an acknowledgment, not a show of submission.

The black she-wolf prowls forward, leaving a good distance as she anxiously sniffs in my direction. My wolf tenses, but she doesn’t blink.

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