The Mating Game

Rutledge Werewolves:

The Mating Game

Elizabeth Lapthorne

For my very own Mar, who loved Dom first

Liz

Chapter One

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]
;
[email protected]
;
[email protected]

Subject: Our brother—the budding writer!

Attach: (Untitled doc.)

Hey there, brothers mine.

Seems the youngest of us is trying to become a budding writer. I found this, left ever-so-stupidly, on an unsecured part of the computer while I was doing the routine security check on the work files.

See you tonight, wolf boy. Can’t wait to start ribbing you about this. Just had to share with our loving family.

Samuel

I feel her pull on me as She shines on my face through the open curtains. Even though it’s the night before She is Full, She retains this immense hold over me. After all these years, I still can’t figure out if Her hold on me is good or bad. She calls to me no matter how hard I try to hide. When I finally give in to Her embrace I receive indescribable joy, passion, and freedom. I wonder again why I resist her call. Is it simply my desire to rule my own destiny? Or do I fight Her so hard each month simply from my own stubbornness? If so, then why would I always give in as She rises at dusk, full and rounded and far more beautiful than any woman I have ever come across?

Maybe my melancholy is from my weariness of the constant fucking. Seeing Artemais and William so sickeningly happy makes me wonder if there is more to women than simply bedding and shedding them the next morning. Yet the few times I tried forging deeper relationships they ended with female tears and recriminations. It makes one wonder what really does go on in the female mind.

The Mistress of the Moon I can understand. One night a month She compels my siblings and I, along with our pack, for her devotion, to worship her. Merely sitting here and thinking of the freedom, the scents, the hunt, and wild runs in the forest is enough to make my meat stand up at attention. While I might fuck in my other form occasionally, this boner isn’t a sexual one, it’s more standing to attention in respect for the One whom I must follow, the One whom I can’t resist. Why can’t I meet a woman like that? One I truly can’t resist.

Goddess knows I enjoy women. I love their hair, their scent, a million small things about them from their taste to their texture. Yet when I look at my mated brothers, have I ever truly felt that level of devotion, of adoration to anyone except the moon? It must be thoughts like this that make me wake restless and frustrated next to forgettable women each and every night. The eternal question, “Would I be upset if I never saw this woman again?” rocks around my head.

Both Art and Wills have told me separately that they would die a million deaths if anything happened to their mates. The fact I can wallow and momentarily forget my frustration in my casual women doesn’t answer the fact that they are all the same to me. All forgettable.

I care about them; I care that they reach their pleasure and enjoy their short time with me. But there have been so very many that they blur, much like those few seconds when I change from man to wolf.

I’m waiting for the punch line—when I wake up one morning beside a woman I realize I couldn’t possibly leave or let go of. Much like, resist as I do the desirable, full moon, I feel a constant ache in my heart when She finally falls beyond the horizon and dawn breaks, and I am once again left alone, to my endless fucking and searching. Tending to my rampant cock alone merely exasperates this loneliness, this frustration. As I pump myself to a heady release, the loss and frustration levels inside me mount.

I can tell it is the night before the full moon because I feel so melancholy tonight. My desire, even after spending three hours with the lusty brunette in my bed,
Sha
wna I think her name is…even now, minutes after the attention of my own hand, my rampant cock is aroused again merely from the thoughts of tomorrow night, when I can run wild and free. Maybe I should go back to
Sha
wna and—

Mary snapped back to attention. She turned quickly to double-check her young cousin, Matthew, still paced on the other side of the room by the large window, and wasn’t reading the incredibly sexy, erotic, private thoughts she had stumbled onto over her shoulder.

Noting her attention on him, he halted a moment. “Have you untangled me yet?”

Typing a few quick keystrokes, Mary closed the email she had accidentally opened. Thinking it one of the portal exits she was searching for, she had at first been surprised to realize it was a saved email. Initially confused, she had quickly begun to scan the email. The depth of feeling in the email’s words, the true and uncensored thoughts of the man who had written them had instantly snared her attention, capturing her as securely as her young cousin had been caught in the tricky trap laid out by the Security Company.

Thankfully, before she invaded Dominic Rutledge’s privacy too much, she had been recalled to her surroundings. She was not in some decadent bedroom, listening to that man whisper his secrets in her ear. She was here in her home office, trying to untangle her wretched cousin from his idiocy.

“Nearly. What the hell were you doing, hacking into a
security
company of all things, Matthew?
Honestly
. How many times do I have to tell you this isn’t some stupid game with no repercussions?”

Mary returned her attention back to the computer. Despite the hot feeling thrumming through her body, she forced her mind back to the task at hand. She must extract her eighteen-year-old cousin from the quagmire he’d created.

Matthew resumed his restless pacing, and Mary entered a few more keystrokes, silently cursing her overenthusiastic cousin. The virus scan finished ten minutes later and she switched off the computer. She leaned back in her chair with a sigh.

“I swear, next time you use my computer, it had better be for those blasted killing games of yours, not this dumb hacker joke your friends keep on goading you into. It won’t be
them
sitting in the jail cell I’ll have to bail out.” She held up her hand as Matthew opened his mouth to protest.

“And no, the nice police officers aren’t going to care for the excuse ‘But they dared me!’ Matthew, you’re eighteen. I know you kick ass in the computer industry, but frankly a jail record will kill any hopes you have for
ever
getting a decent job.”

Matthew scuffed one foot into her carpet, much like he had when caught stealing cookies from the jar when he was eight.

“I’m sorry, Mary. I’ll try not to let them goad me again. I proved I wasn’t good enough to get out. I could tell they were tracking me, though. Show me how you got us out.”

“What’s this ‘us’ business, buddy? You got yourself in; you can learn next time to get yourself out.” At Matthew’s pleading look, Mary relented.

Matthew and his older sister, Chloe, might technically be her cousins, but they were as close as siblings. Having been raised together, even annoyed as she was at Matthew’s delve into hacking, she knew she would eventually show him how she escaped the fierce clutches of the Rutledge Security Company. Flashing his most charming grin, Matthew sent her a cheerfully pleading look.

“Later, buddy. But no more hacking. You want to test out your skills, you wait for your college course to start, or better yet, get a
job
.”

“Tonight, then?” At Mary’s raised eyebrow Matthew grumbled his assent. “Oh, all right. Thanks again.”

Mary returned his kiss on the cheek, and sat back in her chair as Matthew left her small home office. She thought back to the email she’d discovered accidentally.

Surely it was some sort of joke? It had to be some idiotic male prank? Switching her computer back on, she logged on the Internet and did a quick search.

Well shit, there really is a Rutledge Security company! And in
Montana
of all places!

She lived on the border between
Montana
and
North Dakota
. From the look of things, Rutledge Security was situated up the northwest corner of
Montana
.

Mary searched a little deeper, and found the founders of the company were a group of four brothers. Artemais, William, Samuel, and Dominic Rutledge.
Not good, not good at all for my peace of mind.

It seemed as if Artemais, the eldest, pretty much ran the company, with a bit of help from his brothers. The picture under the “About Us” link showed four drop-dead gorgeous men. The men shown as Artemais and William appeared happily married with a number of kids between them. There were a lot of happy family snaps showing the beaming men with strong arms wrapped around very satisfied looking women.

Other photos showed the same men and women with happy, healthy-looking kids. Samuel and Dominic, while shown playing with the kids, still cheekily winked out from the pictures, obviously single.

Surely if they were werewolves they couldn’t be happily married? Mary thought back to Dominic’s comments about Art and Wills being “happily mated” and “dying a thousand deaths if anything happened to their mates”.

For what felt like the first time ever, Mary had no idea what she wanted to do. Her initial impulse was to jump in her car and drive over to their company, beat down their door, and ask if her conclusions were accurate.

Sanity, however, remained to question that impulse. She couldn’t possibly appear on their doorstep and demand they tell her the “truth” purely to sate her curiosity.

Mary switched the screen of her computer off, to not distract her, and picked up her phone. She pressed the memory one button, and waited for Chloe to pick up.

Just as she started to wonder if her cousin had stepped out, Chloe answered. “Hello?”

Mary frowned, her cousin sounded distracted. “Hey, it’s me. Am I interrupting?”

“You’re welcome to. I’m trying my hand at painting, and—”

“Painting? I thought you had that job as a mechanic down at the garage?”

“Oh, I do. It’s just so unfeminine I wanted to try something else today. So I started this picture. It’s supposed to be a seascape—but it looks like a four-year-old’s finger-painting session. I was just trying to think of what I’m missing when you called. What’s up?”

Briefly, Mary explained about Matthew’s foray into the world of hacking, and her subsequent rescue.

“Thank goodness he asked you to help. You know how terrible I am with computers. I would have made the mess worse. Are you hoping to get me to yell at him? I could, but I doubt he’d listen to me.”

“No, no. It’s something totally different. I accidentally opened an email. Matthew was stuck in a web and I mistook it for something else.”