Taken by the Alphas Read online

  “So, uh, where are we going?” She asked the question to distract herself more than out of real curiosity.

  “My place isn’t too far away,” Armel said. “Adam and I share a… boundary.”

  “Oh,” Addie nodded. “Wow, this whole area is really settled, isn’t it.”

  “Not really,” Armel smiled. “There’s a few of us out here, but the territories are massive. Mine can take more than a week to cross.”

  “I hope it won’t take a week to get to your place!”

  “Oh, no,” Armel shook his head. “It’s not far at all.”

  “Good,” Addie said, breathing a sigh of relief. “How far is it?”

  “About two days’ trek.”

  “Two days!” Addie’s voice rose to a pitch of disappointment. “I don’t think I can walk for two days.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I can carry you.”

  “You can carry me?” A flash of the memory of riding on the back of the dream wolf came back to her. “You can’t carry me. I’m heavy.”

  “You’re not heavy,” he laughed, extending an arm. “Here, grab my forearm, that’s right…”

  Addie let out a little squeal as Armel swung her around and up onto his back, making her feel as light as a baby monkey, and about as big as she first tried clinging around his shoulders and then had to wrap her arms over them and under his neck.

  * * *

  Armel’s triumph was complete—as long as it lasted, which was approximately an hour. For an hour he enjoyed the warm weight of Addie at his back, her chatter about this and that. He was feeling very fortunate and very proud… and then fate’s great paw dealt him another blow. He was walking through what was usually a sheltered valley when the weather changed swiftly. A sudden squall came down the valley, little slivers of ice shooting through the air like millions of sharp blades beating against him. The temperature plummeted from cold but bearable to dangerously low. The vista of mountains and plains that had drawn so many complimentary comments from Addie turned into a haze of sleet dashing against his face, forming crystals on his eyelashes, and pulling the heat from their bodies even through their winter attire. It was relentless, this cold. Usually he would have dealt with it by taking his ursine form, but he couldn’t do that with Addie there.

  Through the howling of the wind, he heard her voice, thin and weak in his ear.

  “Armel… I’m a little… cold…”

  Even inside the furs, Addie would likely freeze before they reached his den. He could feel her shivering on his back and knew that pushing on to his den was foolish. He would have to turn back. And he would have to do it in bear form. He’d wanted to protect her from his secret, but that was no longer an option.

  He eased her from his back and turned so that he was protecting her from the worst of the icy wind with his body. She was pale and there were little bits of ice on her lashes. He could hear her teeth chattering as he put his hands on her arms and held her steady as the ice lashed against his back.

  “You’re about to see something very strange,” he shouted to overcome the howling that seemed near omnipresent. “I want you to know that you’re safe, okay? I’m going to look very different in a minute. I want you to climb up on my back.”

  She nodded, too cold to ask any questions, though her eyes widened as he removed his outer furs and she began to shout warnings at him, thinking that he was giving into hypothermia.

  “Remember, Addie!” He yelled the words into the wind as the cold tore at his human nakedness. “Get back on my back after this. Don’t be scared. I won’t hurt you.”

  She looked utterly terrified, but there was nothing for it. He let the change flow through him, his body growing broader and larger, thick fur coming in over his bare skin, warming him instantly.

  He turned to Addie and offered her his back, half afraid that she’d be too terrified to do as he had told her. It took a moment or two, but he felt her hands tentatively curling in his fur as she clambered atop him. He was reminded of how she had curled up next to him on that first night, how the small, trusting ball of her smaller body had made his heart swell with a protective urge.

  “You came to me!” she yelled through the howling gale. “You were the bear in the cave! The one that fought the wolf! That means Adam… he is a wolf!”

  Armel could hear the relief in her voice at the revelation, more likely coming from the fact she’d been questioning her sanity since he’d first appeared to her. Though he could not tell her so, he admired her reaction. She was such a curious little thing, putting her desire for life and truth ahead of the fear and the cold.

  Once she had a firm grasp on the fur of his shoulders he began the run to Adam’s village. The journey was much quicker in his bear form, though still far too long for any mere human to be out in the cold. Addie was holding on, but just barely.

  He barreled past the lupine guards and slipped back into his human form outside Adam’s doors, picking Addie up into his arms. She was fading in and out of consciousness, and if she did not reach a warm place soon, he was worried that she might fade completely. He had been worried he wouldn’t be able to get her to safety, or that Adam would turn them away. He needn’t have worried about either thing.

  Adam was waiting, almost as if he had anticipated their arrival. He was leaning back against the wall, next to an outdoor gas lamp putting out enough heat to melt the snow as it fell toward the ground.

  “Well, hello, bear,” Adam said, his eyes like chips of ice. “What are you doing here?”

  “It’s too cold for her,” Armel said, clenching his teeth so that they would not chatter. Standing nude before Adam was humbling in the extreme. Having to admit that he was wrong was worse.

  “Too cold for you too, I’ll warrant,” Adam noted. “Looks like you both need my hospitality.”

  Armel gritted his teeth. He had never, in all his life, been beholden to anyone. To have to come to Adam, now, with the woman he was sure was intended to be his mate, was galling. He wanted to tell Adam to go to hell, but Addie’s life came before his pride.

  “Come in,” Adam said with a smirk, holding the door to his home open.

  “Thank you,” Armel replied. He stepped indoors, eager to get Addie back into the warmth.

  “She was a fool to leave,” Adam said. “And you were a fool to take her. You must have smelled the snow coming again.” Adam’s censure followed Armel as he carried Addie up the stairs toward the main bedroom. He didn’t need to ask where it was. He knew Adam’s place almost as well as he knew his own, though it had been a long time since he’d been there.

  “I thought we would make better time before the wind changed,” Armel replied as he laid Addie down on the bed—Adam’s bed. She was feverish and chilled, moaning incoherently about bears and wolves and men.

  “She wasn’t well enough to leave here,” Adam said, stating the obvious with barely restrained anger. “She’d hardly recovered from her first bout of exhaustion.”

  “Yes,” Armel gritted in response. “I can see that now.”

  “You should have seen it before,” Adam growled. “You’re almost as bad as she is, but without the excuse of being an ignorant human.”

  “Shut up and help me,” Armel said. He started pulling off her boots and socks and the outer layers of her clothing. She needed to be warmed up as quickly as possible and now the same clothes that had kept the cold out were keeping it in.

  To his credit, Adam did manage to shut up long enough to peel Addie’s sweater over her head and do the same to her t-shirt and bra. They hesitated briefly before pulling her panties down and unsnapping the bra to make her completely naked. It wasn’t about being lustful, it was about getting her dry as quickly as possible. Together, they got her into the bed, wrapped up warm under the blankets. Armel never thought he’d be the one tucking her into Adam’s bed, but it was the best place for her in that moment.

  “Hello, Armel dear.”

  Marnie came bustling into the room,
carrying a pile of blankets and a box full of tinctures and other remedies. Armel was pleased to see her. If anyone was capable of looking after Addie’s medical needs, it was Marnie.

  “Hello, ma’am,” Armel said gruffly, sweeping an extra blanket from the pile she was carrying. He wrapped it around his naked frame for a bit of modesty, not that Marnie seemed to care. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “Call me Marnie,” she laughed, sitting next to Addie. She took the young woman’s wrist in her hand and measured her pulse.

  “You can go now,” Adam said to Armel. “I’ll take care of her.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Armel replied. “She didn’t want to stay here in the first place.”

  The tension in the room was rising quickly as Armel and Adam squared off, nose to nose. Armel was taller and broader, but he knew that didn’t make Adam any less dangerous. Adam was powerful, wiry, and had a pack who would do his bidding at a single word. Armel looked into the flinty blue eyes of his rival and did not see a way that the situation would be ended without further bloodshed.

  It was Marnie who broke the tension with a sharp tutting sound. The stare-down ended with Armel and Adam glancing over at the woman tending to Addie.

  “You boys,” she said in cross tones. “Fighting over this poor girl is doing no good. If you were whelps, I’d take you by the ears and put you both in corners until you learned to share.”

  There was a silence following her statement that was mostly due to the respect each of them accorded the older woman. Armel had known Marnie a very long time. She was the only healer in hundreds of miles, and the only one in thousands of miles who knew how to tend to shifters. He remembered being taken to see her when he was but a boy with a badly infected cut on his leg, and he recalled vividly how nice she had been then, how she had given him a boiled sweet and tended to his wound.

  All her hair had gone silver now, but she was still just as adept at caring for those in need. He watched as she warmed Addie’s hands and observed her carefully. “I don’t think she’s got hypothermia,” Marnie concluded. “Her pulse is good and she’s not too cold. I think she’s simply too exhausted to be out in this weather.”

  “As I said,” Adam snorted, looking at Armel.

  “She wanted to leave,” Armel rejoined. “Perhaps if you didn’t try to hold her prisoner, she wouldn’t have been so eager to go with me.”

  “And if you hadn’t run here and lured her away, she’d be safe.”

  “If you’re going to argue, you can both leave the room,” Marnie snapped severely. “She needs her rest.”

  Adam and Armel scowled furiously at one another. “Leave,” Adam growled.

  “You can both leave! I mean it!” Marnie’s tone had taken on a matronly icy note, which Adam and Armel instinctively respected. Reluctantly, they both left the bedroom and took their argument to the lounge.

  It was a large room, designed for a sizable family. There was a fireplace against the wall, and long leather couches arranged around it in a horseshoe shape. They had a hand-hewn appearance to them, and were liberally festooned in blankets. The floor was covered in hand-woven rugs, made by generations of Adam’s family. Armel was aware that he was in the very heart of Adam’s life. This was where the pack had lived and loved for hundreds of years. It felt oddly empty with just the two of them in it.

  They sat on opposite sides of the room, both bristling with protective, possessive anger. Marnie’s intervention would not hold long, but they both knew she was right. Fighting while Addie laid there sick was a bad idea.

  “This is your fault,” Adam growled yet again.

  “So you’ve said,” Armel replied. He had no intention of rising to Adam’s bait. If he lost his temper, it would give Adam a reason to call the pack down on him and run him out of the village. Not that Adam really needed a reason to do that, but Adam liked to think of himself as being an honorable man. There was a connection between them, tenuous now, stretched perhaps to breaking point, but it was there. It was the reason there had not been more serious injury when they first fought, and it was the reason Adam was tolerating him now.

  The silence settled over them for almost another hour before Adam let out a long sigh, stood up and went across to a sideboard where a decanter of whiskey stood.

  “Can I get you a drink?”

  “Thanks,” Armel nodded. He extended his arm from inside the blanket to take the tumbler from Adam.

  “Can’t say I expected to be hosting a naked man tonight,” Adam snorted as he passed it over.

  “Life’s full of surprises,” Armel said with a smile. The tension was starting to melt a little.

  Adam walked to the mantelpiece next to the fire and leaned against it, sipping his whiskey thoughtfully. He seemed to be looking for words, and sure enough, he soon spoke.

  “She’s special, Armel.”

  “I know,” Armel said, his eyes meeting Adam’s in a serious gaze. They had both sensed something in Addie. A capacity beyond the normal limits of a human. The thing that had pushed her out into the wild, made her comfortable alone in territory most people would never set foot in.

  “I’m not going to give her up,” Adam said.

  “But you let her go with me.”

  “I smelled the snow, Armel,” Adam said, shaking his head. “I knew you wouldn’t get far. Why do you think this fire is burning so late? Why do you think the guards didn’t challenge you? We knew you would be back.”

  “And if I hadn’t come back here?”

  Adam’s blue eyes took on a merciless cast. “We would have come for her.”

  Armel tossed the whiskey down his throat. It burned in the best way all the way down to his stomach. “I’m not giving her up either.”

  “Where does that leave us?” Adam swirled the remnants of the drink in the glass, the liquid glowing amber in the firelight.

  “We could…” Armel’s lips quirked before he got the word out; it was such a silly proposition, “…share her.”

  “Share,” Adam guffawed. “My mother did not mean that literally, I am certain.”

  “What’s the alternative? Settle it like beasts? Fight until one of us is dead? Make her a captive in one of our homes?”

  “She already thinks I’m holding her captive,” Adam said with a wicked grin. “I think she likes it.”

  “She likes escaping your captivity more,” Armel pointed out. “She likes me, Adam.”

  “She likes me too,” Adam said pointedly. “She likes being full of my seed…”

  Armel let out a growl and stood up, the blanket falling to the floor.

  “That’s right, Smokey,” Adam said in mocking tones. “She begged for it. She might have run off with you, but that’s because spirited girls like to make their men angry sometimes. She wanted me to hunt her down. She knew she’d end up here with me again. You’re nothing more than a useful idiot.”

  “At least I am useful,” Armel let out a throaty growl. “How about you come outside and we settle this the old way.”

  “How about I let my pack deal with you,” Adam replied, his teeth flashing.

  “How about you both suck and I don’t want to be with either of you,” Addie scowled.

  Armel and Adam turned to see the woman they were fighting over standing in the doorway, wrapped in a blanket and looking faint and angry. She turned her glower on Armel. “You’re a bear,” she said. “You. Can. Turn. Into. A. Fucking. Bear.”

  It was an accusation, not an expression of wonder. She seemed genuinely pissed at the discovery.

  “She’s grumpy,” Adam noted.

  “Yes, she is,” Armel agreed. “And she needs to go back to bed. What are you doing up, Addie?”

  “I’m allowed up,” Addie said, slumping against the door frame. “I. Am allowed. To do whatever I want. Because I am not a bear. Or a wolf. I am a woman. I am a human.”

  She was slurring her words slightly, probably because she was running on sheer anger and adrenaline. Marnie must
have left her to sleep, not realizing that Addie ran on pure contrariness and irritation.

  “You are going to bed,” Armel said, taking the lead. He stepped forward, swept her up into his arms, and carried her back into Adam’s bedroom. Putting her back into Adam’s bed was even more galling than it had been the first time after the argument they’d been having, but Addie needed her rest.

  “You’re a bear,” she repeated as he tucked her in and brushed a few stray blond strands from her forehead.

  “Mhm, sometimes,” he acknowledged.

  “I need to study you,” she said, curling up on her side under the blankets and closing her eyes. “But I’m not mating with you. You’re a bear, but you’re also a jerk.”

  With that she fell asleep.

  * * *

  “Mouthy, isn’t she?” Adam observed from the doorway.

  “She’s spirited,” Armel agreed as Addie started to breathe slower as she fell into deeper stages of sleep. He didn’t want to leave her side. He wanted to curl up with her. So he did. She was in the middle of the large bed, and he dropped the blanket that had been all the clothing he had and laid down on the left hand side, letting the soft mattress take his weight.

  “Please,” Adam said dryly. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  “You invaded my territory,” Armel said. “It’s only fair I enter yours.”

  There was a moment in which the angry tension could have sparked again, but it faded as Adam shook his head with a dark chuckle. “You’re almost as stubborn as she is,” he said, crossing over to the bed. He pulled off his sweater and shirt, and removed his jeans. He was naked underneath those layers aside from a pair of boxer shorts, which he kept on as he slid into bed on the other side of Addie.

  It was late and they were all exhausted in their own ways. Armel’s exertions had left him physically drained, and Adam didn’t seem to have any trouble dropping off to sleep either. In spite of their enmity, their instincts told them it was safe to sleep, and the act of slumber was a greater act of trust than any pacts or promises could have been.