“I’M SORRY, CARTER. This just isn’t working. We’ve tried. You know we have. I can’t waste my life like this.”

Alpha of Silver Creek Pack, Carter Reed, put out a hand to try to placate her. “Just one more cycle. Please. You never know.”

Kimberly exhaled a deep sigh. “I’m not getting any younger, and neither are you, for that matter. You’re almost thirty years old, and if this was going to happen, it would have by now.”

“We don’t know that.” He hated the pleading tone in his voice—he wasn’t a man who begged—but he couldn’t help it. Desperation was starting to set in. As her alpha, he could have commanded her to stay, but he’d never had to force a woman into staying with him, and he wasn’t about to start now. “These things take time.”

She shook her head. “Not for an alpha male and alpha female, they don’t. This obviously isn’t right. I’m sorry. I can’t give this any more of my time.”

Carter watched as she turned from him, her tiny waist flaring into wide hips—child-bearing hips, he’d thought when he’d first seen her—and she sashayed away without even a backward glance, her shiny dark hair swinging down her slender back.

He grabbed the edge of his front door and slammed it shut with a bang that rattled through the rest of the house. He balled his fist and punched the wood. “Goddamn it!”

His anger wasn’t heartbreak. He’d enjoyed the time he’d spent with Kimberly, but they’d both known why they were together. It was a mutual, unspoken agreement—with her wanting something from him, the opportunity to be alpha female, and him needing the one thing that would secure his place as pack leader. That wasn’t saying he wouldn’t miss her. She’d been filthy in bed, and he’d enjoyed having her willingly spread her legs for him at any moment. But as the months went by, and there had still been no sign of anything happening, they’d both started to get frustrated. Sex had never quite become a chore, but it was certainly heading in that direction, and he knew she’d been able to sense it, too. They’d been sniping at each other about ridiculous things, and the passionate sex had turned into angry sex. Not that he was complaining too much, but they’d both known it wasn’t working.

Shit.

Kimberly had been the latest in a line of failed relationships. Hell, they could hardly be called relationships. They were arrangements. Agreements. He hadn’t found his mate yet. In fact, he was starting to think such a thing didn’t even exist. Everyone talked about a mythical mate, a bonding, but he thought it was as likely as love at first sight. You didn’t need to find a bonded mate in order to have pups. His mother and father had been an arranged bonding, and they’d produced him just fine.

Before Kimberly had been Sara, and before Sara was Lizbeth. There had been at least a few before Lizbeth, but both their names and faces were starting to blend together now. With each arrangement, he’d done his best to get the female pregnant, but nothing had worked. His first mating, Allison, had left him because of it when he was twenty-three. They’d tried for two years to get her pregnant, doing ridiculous things before and after sex to try to get something to stick—him keeping his balls at a certain temperature, which wasn’t easy as a hot-blooded shifter, and her lying with her legs up in the air. Nothing had worked, and in the end Allison had announced she wasn’t wasting her life in this way, and had mated with another wolf in his pack. That had hurt. He’d actually cared about that girl.

Now, six years later, he was running out of nubile young women in the pack. He could have any of them for the taking—he only had to say the word—but he’d known some of the girls only just turning eighteen since they were small pups, and he couldn’t bring himself to think of them in that way.

He’d never liked the idea of a single mate for the rest of his life, anyway. Who the hell would want that? It would be like spending every day surrounded by the most sumptuous buffet, but being told you could only eat one item on the table every day forever. It didn’t matter how much he liked the one dish, he was going to get sick of it eventually and start longing for all the other delicious things on offer.

But his time was running out. He needed to provide a child—male or female, didn’t matter—to continue his family’s hold on the position of alpha. He could sense other males in the pack already sniffing around, knowing the chance to challenge his place was coming up soon. What the fuck was wrong with him?

Carter couldn’t stand to spend the rest of the day holed up inside the walls of his home. He’d smash the place apart before the end of the day. He wasn’t someone who coped with emotions well, preferring a physical outlet to anything that was troubling him. A run through the forest in wolf form would soon put any worries out of his head. Problem was, even after the run, he still had to come home and face things. The pack would hear of Kimberly leaving soon enough, and then he was going to have some questions to answer. The pack couldn’t continue with him at its head if he was unable to provide them with an heir to take on his role of alpha or female alpha when the pup came of age.

No, he preferred to be as wolf when he was feeling like this. Hell, he preferred to be as wolf, full stop. Life was easier as a beast. Fighting, fucking, feeding. That was all it came down to when he was in animal form. At times, he could see the appeal to becoming a lone wolf and living his life that way, not needing to worry about pack hierarchy and expectations. But the truth was, he loved his pack. Yes, it was frustrating at times, but his family had been alphas for generations now, and he wanted to remain as head of the pack. The thought of being forced to step down because of something that was completely out of his control filled him with shame. He was the biggest man and wolf in the entire pack, and he could fight off any of the other wolves sniffing around his position as alpha, but if they could get a female pregnant and produce the pack’s next generation of alphas, and he couldn’t... well, then, he’d have no choice but to willingly step down.

Carter left his house—the largest in town, and another thing he’d be forced to relinquish if he didn’t produce the next generation of alpha—and crossed the compound. The house had always been a place filled with family. Cubs, aunts, uncles, and of course the alpha and alpha female, looking down on what they’d played such a huge part in creating. That was how he remembered his family, but fate hadn’t been kind. He’d lost his mother when he was sixteen, and his father two years later, which was when he’d taken over as alpha.

The small town which housed the Silver Creek pack consisted of Main Street and a couple of blocks behind on both sides. It was barely a town, really, but there weren’t enough pack members to make the place any larger. Other supernaturals, like the vampires, preferred to be alone, and tended to blend with the humans, but shifters were different. They liked to form communities of their own and stuck to their own kind. Outsiders weren’t welcomed, and the idea of a human or vampire attempting to move into a place run by a pack was laughable.

Carter’s motorcycle sat on the street outside. He didn’t need to worry about a helmet or leathers. Not only did he have supernatural agility and senses, he also healed faster than humans, so if he were to come off, it was unlikely that he’d do himself any permanent damage. He swung his leg over the seat. It wouldn’t take him long to get out of town, but he didn’t want to walk. All he wanted to do was escape and put as much space between him and Kimberly as possible.

About to kick the bike into gear, someone jogged toward him, his hand lifted to catch Carter’s attention. Carter groaned inwardly. This was exactly the thing he’d been hoping to avoid by getting out of town quickly. Perhaps he should have stayed in the house and locked the door instead.

Liam Goodman was only a couple of years younger than Carter. Good-looking, with a muscular frame and a natural charm, he was most likely going to be the one after Carter’s position as alpha if things didn’t work out.

“Hey, Carter. I just passed Kimberly. She said things hadn’t worked out between you.”

Carter scowled. “You’re not sniffing around my leftovers again, are you, Liam?”

Liam laughed, and then threw Carter a wink. “How do you know I hadn’t already been there first?”

Carter’s fists tightened around the handles of his bike. “You know who you’re speaking to? Don’t be so fucking disrespectful of your alpha.”

“Might not be for long, though, huh? Everyone is talking, Carter. It’s not even like you can hand over to your beta. Everyone knows James wouldn’t be cut out for the job.”

It was true. James Salter wasn’t alpha material. Carter had chosen him as beta because the other man was so different from him. James was a gentler soul, who was happily mated to his childhood sweetheart, Anna. He liked his books and handled the pack’s finances, plus James never made any noises about wishing he was able to take the next step up in the pack. James was the brains, while Carter supplied the brawn.

Carter wished he had a younger brother, or hell, a cousin, even, so he’d have someone he could hand over the role of alpha to, and hope they’d do a better job at maintaining their family’s bloodline, but he didn’t. Carter was too proud a man to ever admit that he was lonely in his world. He was surrounded by other pack members, but they each had families of their own. He, of all wolves, should be confident in his place within the pack, but often he experienced a pang of envy toward the subordinate wolves, with their big families and content lives. At least he assumed they were content. It wasn’t as though he’d ever taken the time to ask one of them.

He remembered Liam still standing there, smirking at him. Carter hated that the other shifter knew exactly what was going on in his personal life.

He roared the bike to life. “I’ve got places to be. Now, stop wasting my time.”

Not giving the other shifter time to reply, he released the throttle and got the big bike moving. He glanced in the wing mirror and exhaled a breath as Liam grew smaller in the glass.