Temptation (Journal of the Wolves of Spruce Hollow) (2 page)

I wanted to kiss that mouth. Badly. I had pictured it in my head repeatedly over the past year.

Physically, she was small, at only five foot three; I towered over her whenever she stood next to me. She was delicately boned and for all intents and purposes, looked like a very breakable human girl.

Fate had chosen her for my mate; but physically, she certainly didn’t look like she could handle me or my wolf.

Not yet, at least.

I hoped she filled out a little more, she was pretty scrawny, and sooner rather than later too. I was getting tired of waiting for her.

Ten years is a really long time to wait for someone.

The most beautiful part of Aspen was her green eyes. I loved them. A lot.

Her eyes were a beautiful shade of light green rimmed by dark green, they reminded me of gently upturned cat eyes. In my dreams, she always appeared to me with her beautiful green eyes begging and pleading with me to take what was, in reality, already mine.

Aspen’s beautiful, hypnotic, jade green cat eyes haunted me. I compared them to the eyes in the faces of every single woman that passed me by on the street. But no one ever had eyes as beautiful as hers.

My dreams about Aspen always left me feeling confused and guilty…and aroused. There was always an urgency to them too, like I needed to get up right away and go do something about it.

However, other than jerk off, I’m not sure what else I was supposed to do in the middle of the night about a sixteen year old mate.

Dreams had always held such deep meaning and importance to my pack. They were prophetic, conveyed messages and could show you a glimpse of the future. The only problem was, there was nothing I could do about my dreams of Aspen, other than sit around and wait for her to grow up, so she could take her place as my mate.

It was frustrating not having all the answers for once.

When Aspen was a little girl, things were so much simpler. I knew my role. I knew what was expected of me. But now, Aspen was quickly turning into a sexy, attractive young woman and the situation between us and the rules that governed our relationship were as clear as mud.

And ever since she’d turned sixteen, staying away from her was getting harder and harder to do.

What I did know was that between the dreams, the lack of sleep, my role as pack Beta and work, I was exhausted.

It had gotten so bad, that I’d even gone to the pack Alpha a few weeks back for advice. Unfortunately, Slade Johnson had just regarded me with calm, cool appraisal and said, “Don’t worry Roan, these things always sort themselves out, one way or another. Aspen won’t be sixteen forever, you know.”

What he should have said was “Look son, I have no clue what to tell you. This is a highly unusual situation for a Were because normally our mates are only sent to us when it’s the right time, not at six years old.”

I was the pack Beta and Slade was the Alpha, or pack leader. I was Beta, which meant that I was the pack enforcer and I made sure everyone followed the rules set out by the pack Alpha. My duties also involved protection of the pack and keeping the peace, as well as learning the role of the Alpha, as one day, I would take the Alpha’s place when he could no longer fulfill his duties to the pack.

“What kind of advice was that, anyway? How were those words of wisdom supposed to help me right now?” I complained irritably into the darkness. 

“The Alpha is right, it will all sort itself out. Stop holding on so tightly. You will drive yourself crazy because you can’t have control here, Roan. Let it go. The situation will right itself eventually and our mate will grow up and take her place by our side,” my wolf agreed optimistically. 

“Yeah, I know she will. It’s just that I’ve been waiting for so long. It makes me question whether she is truly my mate or not?” 

“Only you know the answer to that, Roan. Look inside yourself, the answers are there. Be patient and calm your mind, only then will you gain the insight you seek.”

Deep down something inside my gut told me things that my head just didn’t want to hear. I knew the answers, I just didn’t like them very much, and the truth was that Aspen was without a doubt my mate. She was mine, chosen by destiny to walk by my side through life.

I sighed, resigned to my fate, my chest heaving as I exhaled heavily.

It was already November and the air was cold with the promise of the winter soon to come. I inhaled a deep cleansing breath to try and clear my head from those unwanted thoughts of my mate. I could smell the crisp, clean air of the forest coming in through my nose.

Big breath in, big breath out.

There was something so healing and calming about the forest air of the Caledonia Mountains and I needed it right now because at present, I felt anything but calm.

Confused and guilt ridden maybe. But certainly not calm.

Shivering, I found myself wishing that I had brought my jacket, for the nights were starting to get cold, even for a hot-blooded Were like myself. Unfortunately, I was only wearing worn blue jeans, a black t-shirt and boots. The black leather jacket, that I normally wore, was back home, thrown into the back seat of my truck and I was starting to feel the autumn chill seep in my bones.

I wouldn’t freeze to death though; Weres were gifted with a warmer internal temperature than humans. It was as if we were driven by an internal furnace; a characteristic that I shared with all my pack mates.

An elevated body temperature was one of the first signs that all Weres experienced whenever we underwent the change for the first time.

I still remembered when I had first phased, back when I was twelve years old. I thought I would incinerate from the blistering heat. My skin burned so badly, it felt like I was being consumed by fire. But I survived it, just like every other Were who successfully made it through the change.

My pack family consisted of twenty-two male Weres and eleven females and all our combined extended families. It was a fair sized pack, close to 75 people in its entirety.

We all lived on a highly secluded acreage up near the Caledonian mountain range, on the outskirts of Spruce Hollow.

The land had been bought and held in trust for the pack many years ago and continued to be passed down generation to generation. The tract of land was large, some 70 miles across and gave us ample room to phase and run without exposing who we really were to the nearby human townspeople, who lived in the town of Spruce Hollow

We didn’t attract much attention anyway, as we had quite a number of Were/human families in the pack. A Were’s mate was not always another Were but sometimes a human man or woman.

Mates were never consciously selected by a Were, but were made known to us instinctively. So, you never knew what or who you were waiting for, so that made it that much more difficult to find your mate.

Once your mate appeared though and you laid eyes on them, you just instinctively knew that they were meant only for you. It was like a bolt of lightning streaking out of the sky, and hitting you square in the chest.

Dead on.

There was no mistaking the mating bond, that’s for sure. Once a Were’s mate appeared, that was it. For life.

A Were mating bond was so strong that it could not be broken until death and Weres rarely, if ever, took on another mate after the death of their first mate. A Were with a deceased mate was a depressing, pitiful sight to see.

I rolled over onto my back and looked up towards the ceiling of the forest. My eyesight was excellent in the dark and I could make out the intricate details of the leaves up above. There was something about sleeping outdoors that made me feel wild and feral, just like I was meant to be.

I found that sleeping indoors generally made me feel closed in, like there was a part of me that longed to be outside, always, no matter if I was in my human form or not. You’d think I’d get used to it after all these years, but so far, this was one part of my Were existence that I had not adapted well to.

I was a Mi’kmaq warrior, as my proud Mi’kmaq father liked to remind me, or at least my ancestors were. My mother was of French descent with milky white skin, light eyes and hair. Therefore I didn’t quite fit the typical stereotype of one of the First Nations People.

For one thing, I had light blue eyes, not brown like most of my pack mates.

I had the type of blue eyes that were penetrating and difficult to look away from once you gazed into them because they were so striking and unusual. I attracted a lot of female attention, just from that one feature alone. Women always seemed to gravitate towards a guy with attractive eyes.

My current girlfriend, Andie, said she felt like I was gazing right into her souI whenever I looked at her.

Yup, I know it was a messed up situation, but in addition to my mate, Aspen, I also had a girlfriend named Andie.

Having a girlfriend made me feel like an adulterer sometimes, even though Aspen didn’t even know she was destined to be mine yet.

Andie had been working at the local bar my pack brother’s and I hung out at for the past six months and she had flirted shamelessly with me for the first two. I ignored her at first, but I was lonely and needed someone and she was there. Not very romantic, I know, but that was the truth of it.

Andie was a knockout though, all legs, big boobs and a nice smile. She would have made a great Hooters waitress, that’s for sure.

What man could resist that?

Andie wasn’t the first girl I’d dated over the past ten years since I’d found out Aspen was my mate. I frequently grew lonely, and in the past year, increasingly sexually frustrated waiting for her to mature and usually found myself settling for one of the women that constantly seemed to surrounded my pack brothers and I whenever we went out.

Don’t get me wrong, the women I’ve surrounded myself with over the years, while I’d waited for Aspen to grow up, have always been well treated.

I loved women and they sure seemed to love me.

But I was not that guy. I wasn’t someone that they could build a life with. I was someone who could satisfy their sexual urges and take them out and show them a good time, but that was where it ended. I never let anyone get too close and I guarded myself well from emotional entanglement. As long as everyone understood the rules, then everyone was happy.

“She is not our mate!” Crap. Not this again.

My wolf picked up his ears at the mention of my girlfriend Andie’s name. My wolf vehemently disliked her and not necessarily because she was a bad person, but mostly because she wasn’t Aspen. He and I agreed on a great many things, as was crucial for a symbiotic relationship such as ours to succeed. But this was one area where we did not see eye to eye.

You see, my wolf loved my mate, Aspen, intensely. He had for years. But there really wasn’t anything either of us could do about it. Aspen had been only six years old when I’d first laid eyes on her all those years ago.

But I was not only a wolf, I was a man too. And sometimes men get lonely, or bored or horny waiting around for their mate to get old enough.

Besides, Andie definitely wasn’t for the long term; she and I both understood that. She was saving up until she had enough money to “buy a plane ticket out of here” and was moving out west to pursue her lifelong dream of acting.

I wasn’t sure whether she could act or not but she certainly had the looks for it. She was sex on legs with her long blonde hair, full red lips and killer body. She was the perfect entertainment and distraction from Aspen and was always ready whenever I came looking for relief.

My wolf grumbled, turned away from me and laid his black muzzle on his paws with a chest-heaving sigh.

He was not happy.

Living with a wolf inside you was a difficult thing sometimes because wolves tended to be slaves to their instincts and biological urges. They had a pack mentality and had loyalty, protection and procreation of the pack ingrained into their psyche. Anything that didn’t fit into those select few categories held very little importance to my wolf.

It was not like there was anything wrong with my girlfriend Andie. She was a fun and beautiful girl. But unfortunately, she also had the mental and emotional depth of a Twinkie. She kind of reminded me of a fluffy, blonde Pomeranian dog.

I didn’t mind though. The sex was pretty good, she liked to go out and have a good time and besides, there were fewer problems to deal with living this way. My life was complicated enough as it was with Aspen.

Uncomplicated was good for once.

Pushing my hair off my forehead, I sat back up again and rubbed my hands up and down my arms, trying to warm up.

I had the trademark dark hair of my people and if I had to describe it, I’d say that I wore it in a sort of messy, spiky look. I don’t know, my last girlfriend had been a hairdresser and had begged me to let her do my hair for months until I finally relented and this is what she came up with.

I supposed it didn’t look too bad though, when I was out at the bar, women always seemed to want to touch it and run their fingers through it.

Stretching out my long, muscular legs, I shook out a muscle cramp in my thigh. Sleeping in wolf form for extended periods of time had drawbacks that only appeared once you phased back, namely muscle cramping and stiffness.

I was fairly tall, just over six foot four and well built with lean muscle mass and a well developed, ripped and toned core.

Although my father had also been tall, my physical prowess had little to do with genetics and everything to do with the Were gene that coursed through my blood.

I often wondered what I would look like if I weren’t a full-blooded werewolf? Would I be as tall? Would my body be as hard and muscular?

It was difficult to say. I certainly couldn’t look to any immediate male descendant as any indication. They had all been Weres too.

The genes were strong in my family. Sometimes it stayed dormant and passed over several generations, only to suddenly appear again. But in my family, my father, uncle, grandfather and great grandfather had been affected.

Andie, the fluffy blonde Pomeranian girl, frequently called me a “hot piece of ass”, and although I rarely thought about such things, I supposed it must be partially true, as I’d had my fair share of incredibly physically attractive girlfriends over the years.