Chapter 16
JESS
"By the authority vested in me by the state of Montana, I now pronounce you husband and wife."
Even though the words were uttered in the confines of a dingy registry office instead of ringing out over the entire congregation in a church, they seemed momentous to me. It was done. Standing beside me, his hands firmly clasping mine, was Cade Derringer. Stranger. Alpha. Husband.
"You may kiss the bride."
I’d forgotten that part. I felt him lean toward me. I tilted my face up to meet his. Our kiss was brief, but when his firm mouth pressed against mine, my body came alive. I think because I’d been grieving, my sex drive had been suppressed for the past few days, but it roared back to life there in the registry office.
I couldn’t wait to get my new husband home.
I saw it in his expression too: an intense flare of desire. The tingling inside me increased. He must have read my response in the way my body softened for him, because the look in those cocky blue eyes of his turned smug.
Damn him! He’d already won, and he knew it. He’d be giving me orders again soon.
I stepped back. The wedding had seemed so cold-blooded—marrying because of a condition in a dead man's will. There were no real feelings involved, or so I’d been trying to convince myself.
But that wasn’t true. There was lust beating between us, and it wasn’t just his. We stared at each other, a silent duel of wills, until the justice of the peace cleared his throat. Cade backed off, grinning. I guess he considered me easy prey.
When we left the registry office, exiting into the bright sunshine, my emotions took another flip. "I wish Grandpa could have been here on my wedding day," I explained as he helped me into his Jeep. At least he hadn’t shown up on his motorbike. “My mother too, if she weren’t living in Scotland now.”
"My mom wanted to have a big shifter wedding ceremony, but I managed to talk her down.”
“I’m sorry…should we have invited her today?” I felt a stab of guilt. I hadn’t been in much of a state for socializing at the funeral, but his mother Lorna and I had chatted a bit and I’d liked her.
I remembered when his family had been bigger. His dad, the pack alpha, his mom, the alpha’s tough and beautiful mate, his brother Aaron, the golden boy of the family, and Cade, the youthful trouble-maker. He had lost a lot over the years, too.
"Where are we going?" I asked as he put the engine into gear.
"Back to your place to change into something more comfortable. After that, a surprise."
"What sort of surprise? I really ought to work today."
"No way, babe. This is our wedding day. It's a lovely September morning, and we're going to enjoy it. Winter comes early in the high country of Montana. Are you game for an adventure?"
His voice was so vibrant that I got caught up in spite of myself. "Sure, why not?"
His right hand moved from the gearshift to briefly squeeze my left thigh. It was gone before I could outwardly react, but the afterglow from his kiss flared again.
After we’d both changed into jeans, he took me for a motorcycle ride into the wilderness. He drove us up a narrow dirt-packed, pine-scented road that led into the hills that stretched away beyond Grandpa’s ranch.
The countryside was lovely—wooded hillsides rising in the distance toward the majesty of the Rocky Mountains. There was a rolling quality to the land all over Montana that was unlike anything I’d seen elsewhere. It was even more dramatic than the Highlands. The vast blue dome seemed to hover close to the ground in a true melding of earth and sky.
The air was clean and fragrant with the scents of autumn. The trees were bursting into the color that would glorify their last few weeks in leaf before the starkness of winter set in. All around us, I could hear the sounds of small animals scurrying to stock their nests with enough food to last them through the long, harsh winter that loomed ahead.
Because I was hanging on behind him, I could enjoy the feel of his body while he had to concentrate on the road.
He shed his leather jacket as the day grew warmer, revealing a thin T-shirt that molded over the smooth planes and valleys of his shoulders. The straddling position of his thighs pulled his jeans tight over hind-quarters that were definitely worthy of appreciation.
"We're near the top," he said a little later. "Let's take a break.”
We’d been climbing steadily for half an hour or so, zigzagging up the steep side of a hill on a road that had grown increasingly narrow. I’d been looking askance at the ground falling away beside us. Rounding a rocky crag, we broke out of the woods onto a high, spacious plateau. "Oh, wow, how lovely.”
We had a magnificent view of the surrounding countryside. Behind us stretched forest and scrub land, and ahead the mountains jutted toward the sky. The sun was at its zenith, its light brilliant and golden, and the air was clear and dry, with just the slightest edge that hinted of the coming fall. The plateau itself was a gigantic meadow, dotted with wildflowers.
"This is amazing. I’d love to come up here with my easel and my paints."
"I thought you’d like it," he agreed as we both dismounted.
I bent over to jerk off my boots and socks. Barefoot, I walked into the field of flowers.
“Careful. Wouldn't want you to cut up those pretty feet of yours.”
"The soles of my feet are tough." I tossed him a smile over my shoulder. "Just like the rest of me."
He chuckled. "So you paint landscapes, right?"
"Yup." He’d been moving closer to me, and he was at my side now, our shoulders nearly touching.
"I’m not very good at portraits. I paint nature."
"Yeah?" There was a slight smile on his mouth—it gave an expression to his face that I found appealing. “And imaginary wolves?”
A low tangle of weeds caught my foot and I stumbled. Cade's hand shot out, gripping my upper arm. His fingers were full of sunlight.
"I’d like you to paint me." He turned me around to face him. He was so close.
I could feel the wildflowers tickling my bare feet and ankles. "As you pointed out the other day, I’ve never even seen your wolf."
Damn. Why had I said that?
“My wolf wants to meet yours, too.” His arms slid around me, imprisoning me. His mouth came down on mine. Unlike the brief kiss in the registry office, this one was deep and rough.
I remembered the feeling of his cock in my mouth. I wanted it again.
As he jerked me closer, I felt that lovely dick through his denim jeans. My own clothing seemed paper-thin as one of his arms tightened around my waist. His other hand cradled the nape of my neck, slipping beneath the long fall of my hair to caress my bare skin.
I squirmed, needing to feel his flesh against mine. My spine arched as he pulled me closer and tongued me deeper.
He lifted his head and raised his palms to my face, cupping my cheeks. "You good?"
“Yes.” As usual when he was around, my body had responded instantly and powerfully. Must be chemical attraction. Or maybe it was simply deprivation. As Cam had put it so crudely, I needed to get fucked more often.
"Not trying to rush you. Well,” he laughed low in his throat, “That’s a lie. I want to get inside you, woman.”
He said the words clearly, with an edge to his voice that made my belly flip.
"But first, how ‘bout you get to know my wolf? And me yours? This is a great place for it. Shift with me, Jess.”
I felt the old anxiety rise up and grip me. “I don’t shift often.”
“You must have shifted the night we met. Or you’d never have escaped that car in time.”
What had he seen that night? He’d never said anything. Never indicated by his treatment of me that he wondered what I was. Or that he knew.
I’d never meant to shift that night. It had been a survival reflex. I didn’t think he’d seen my darkling because it had been foggy. Besides, it was a property of darklings that we carried our own aura of shadow, which helped to hide us, even from other shifters like Cade.
“Why don’t you shift?”
The question was out there. Bald and clear. He was my husband now. We’d be living together. How long could I keep this secret from him?
He was the alpha. The leader. What would he do to me if he ever found out?
“These Americans, they don’t understand us,” my mother always said. “They are related to us. Descended from us. But when shifters dispersed all over the world, they lost something. Our wisdom, culture, and traditions. So many of them don’t even know the old ways.”
Even so, my mother had married an American. She’d rebelled against her traditional family in Scotland and lived in Montana with my dad. It hadn’t been until after his death that she had taken me back with her to Scotland.
I’d tried to live there. A beautiful country, full of intriguing people. There were lots of shifters in Scotland. In the Highlands in particular. I’d spent time with my cousins at Mallochbirn. Ross Malloch, the current laird, was married to an American woman, Kate. She wasn't even a shifter, but she was the wife and mother of shifters. If that wasn’t defiance of tradition, what was?
I thought of Cam, Ross’s identical twin. I hadn’t told him I was getting married. My mother didn’t know yet, either.
It was so ironic that I’d fled Scotland in part to escape my mother’s machinations about an arranged marriage. Yet here I was, trapped in one.
There ought to be a Greek chorus singing in the shadows about the impossibility of escaping my fate.
“I prefer to live my life in human form.”
“Don’t you feel the need to leave your human form sometimes? I know I do.”
“You’re the alpha.”
“Yeah, but that’s not why. It has nothing to do with that. That role was kinda thrust upon me. My father had it. My grandfather. My older brother would have taken on the job, if he hadn’t died young.”
“I never figured you’d end up being the one in charge of things.”
He laughed. “I don’t think anybody did. There are still folks who think the pack made a serious error when they chose me.”
“Like who?”
But he shrugged off my question. “We were speaking of shifting, which is something I need on a regular basis. Like food. Or sex. Surely you need it, too. Come with me now. Shift. We’re in the wilderness. Let’s run together as the wolves we are.”
He rose to his feet and started stripping.