Five Days Earlier

“I hoped I’d run into you again.”

That’s what Magnus said when he showed up out of the blue at her secret changing place an hour before moonrise.

At first, Tara wanted to ask him how he’d come to be in the dense woods near the Scottish/English border. But then she recalled what his brother Iain told her two full moons ago: Magnus can be…temperamental.

Iain explained that despite his brother’s rugby superstar image, Magnus took his role as alpha king of the Highland and Eastern Scottish Wolves seriously. Very seriously. “And,” Iain helpfully pointed out, “you did punch him in the face…”

Tara had merely rolled her eyes at Iain’s warning. After all, she had good reason to hit Magnus and would do it again if given the chance. Moreover, she could take care of herself. She explained all that Iain and his fiancée, Milly (her formerly human best friend). But Iain was so certain Magnus would seek retaliation against her, he’d insisted she move into his heavily secured apartment in New Town while he and Milly traipsed around the world on an extended babymoon.

And then…nothing happened. Tara hadn’t heard a peep from Magnus. And she’d been planning to call Iain and tell him as much with more than a little “I told you so” in her voice. Now she was glad she hadn’t. Because Iain had been right about his brother. Here he was, smelling of pine trees, moss, stone, and lake water. And he was steadily approaching her private space with a lazy lope that put her in mind of the wolf he’d become once the full moon rose in an hour or so.

Magnus stopped just a few inches in front of her…and it was way too close for comfort. He towered a good foot above her and wore a full-on cape with a fur collar over his usual sweater-and-kilt combo. The cape smelled ancient and Tara could all but hear the roar of the bear that was killed to make this Jon Snow-cosplay moment happen.

The whole outfit was, in a word, ridiculous. Even so, her wolf did that same weird flip-flop just like it had the first time Tara met Magnus. It stood up, as her father described the feeling whenever he told his daughters the story of when he first laid eyes on their mother.

Yet unlike her father, Tara despised the wolf who had just strode into her secret changing place like he owned it. And she would have tied her own noose and hung herself with it before ever acknowledging her wolf’s reaction to him in any way.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

Magnus smirked. “Ye ken, most lasses—human and wolf—would be chuffed for me to show up like this. And on a full moon night, no less.”

“You should know by now I am not most women. Or even most shifters,” she shot back, ignoring the way her wolf rolled inside her at the sound of his voice. “And I prefer to shift alone, so…” Tara made a shooing action with her hands.

But Magnus ignored her and continued to inspect her small dell with a frown. “Not much cover out here,” he noted. “What will you do if s0me dumb humans break down on the road just beyond?”

“Not a problem. I tie myself to a tree before I shift,” Tara answered smugly. “It’s an old Native American trick.”

“Aye, I’ve heard tale of that lot. Clever. Though as I understand it, most of North America is now run over with the descendants of wolves from my side of the pond. So perhaps I wouldnae be so quick to trust their methods if it were myself out here in the woods alone without mate or clan.”

She squinted up at him, unable to believe his arrogance. The male wolf standing before her was the opposite of the Canadian ones she’d grown up with. Vain as a rooster and more entitled than a cat. “Yeah, and according to the humans, wolves are supposedly extinct here in Scotland,” she shot back, “which means unlike in Canada, you all have to hide out like punk-ass sheep in your villages. So…I think it’s safe to say native methods have some obvious advantages over yours.”

Tara’s human took perverse pleasure in watching Magnus’s jaw tighten and tick in response to her sass. She might have even felt triumphant if her wolf wasn’t blatantly ogling the Scot, more than a little curious about the male with the strong, clean-shaven jaw, dark hair, and stone-gray eyes. He smells soooo good, her wolf panted, and Tara was suddenly aware of the strength and power hidden beneath Magnus’s sweater and over-the-top cape. Even though her human out-and-out hated the alpha king disguised as a popular rugby player, her wolf could not stop inhaling his scent…

It was an unsettling combination of emotions and Tara had no idea how to manage them all. After she left her pack she chose to live as the humans did. She shopped like them—way too much and with more money sitting on her shoe shelves and hangers than in her savings account. She worked an eight-to-five job. She went out for after-work drinks with her co-workers. And when Milly was still human, Tara was probably one of the few shifters in Scotland with a human roommate-slash-best friend.

But as glamourous as her co-workers believed her to be, Tara was still a she-wolf at heart. She didn’t easily turn down men because she was a hard-ass as she’d let her human friends believe. She turned them down because she was biologically incapable of feeling sexual desire for them. At least not until her first heat…

And indeed, her human didn’t feel much more than disdain for the cocky rugby player king, and a strong urge to throw another punch at his overly smug face—her usual modus operandi for overly aggressive males.

But Magnus wasn’t just any male. He was a wolf.

An extremely sexy wolf—with broad shoulders and a gray-eyed gaze that made her feel, despite his arrogance, that his attention…every single ounce of it…was completely focused on her. And nothing but her.

“Look,” she said, after taking a deep breath. “I don’t like you. And you don’t like me. If you’re here to give me a hard time about hitting you, you need to know I really don’t care about your royal butt hurt. So can we just agree to be enemies from, like, far away?”

Magnus stilled and she could sense him fighting to hold on to his notorious temper.

Which made the next words out of his mouth even more surprising. “Tara, I dinnae come here to argue with you. I came to offer you the hospitality of my village.”

“The hospitality of your village,” she repeated, not understanding.

“Aye. It is not altogether safe for a wolf to shift, as your folk call it, in unprotected woods. I want to invite you back to my village next moon-tide. You can make the change there, and after, you can come ‘round to my castle and we can get to know each other as we break our full moon fast.”

His brogue was so much thicker than that of her Scottish co-workers in Edinburgh that it took her a few moments to register exactly what he was proposing. “Hold on. Are you asking me out on, like, a post-shift breakfast date?”

Magnus’s jaw ticked again as if Tara had somehow dishonored him with her blunt assessment of his invitation—which she probably had. Her pack in Canada had barely registered the existence of the Ontario alpha king, and they definitely didn’t acknowledge the human Queen of England. But according to Iain, the Scottish wolves took their monarchy way more seriously than their North American counterparts.

For a split second, it looked to Tara like that temper of his might blow. But then his expression softened, and his stone eyes found hers as he said, “Aye, we got off to a bad start, you and I. But I do fancy ye…and I’d like us to come to know each other better. You see…I have found myself thinking of you since our first encounter. And I’m keen to…explore that.”

As he spoke, Magnus seemed less sure of himself and even stumbled over his words. Tara’s heart beat faster. Could he be as nervous around her as she was around him…?

But then she remembered the other things Iain had told her and Milly on the ride home from Magnus’s highland castle. According to Iain, their kingdom village of Faoltiarn had been struggling with record high infertility rates for a few decades now. A baby hadn’t been born in the village for nearly twenty years, which was why the Faoltiarn pack considered it a minor miracle of sorts when Milly became pregnant by their second-in-line prince.

However, according to Scottish pack law, because the second prince had an heir on the way, Magnus was at risk of losing his crown completely unless he got a she-wolf pregnant before his brother’s baby was born. This was why Iain agreed to take an extended babymoon with Milly. Because when he returned, there was a pretty good chance the tech billionaire who’d left his old-fashioned kingdom village behind would be forced to take over as King of the Highland and Eastern Scottish Wolves.

Tara held up a hand. “Hold on a sec. Is this about you needing to knock someone up before Milly and your brother have their baby? You know, so you can hang on to your crown?” she asked him flat out.

Magnus faltered. Just for a second. But it was all Tara needed to know she hit the bullseye. “Wow,” she said. “Let me get this straight…your brother goes outside your inbred village and manages to knock up a black woman and now you’re thinking, ‘Hey, if it worked for him, it could work for me!’”

“Wait! This has nothing to do with ye being black—” he spluttered, his face reddening. Then he seemed to recall who he was—Magnus Scotswolf, King of the Highland and Eastern Scottish Wolves—and he quickly reset.

“I was not lying about being compelled by ye,” he insisted, taking a step forward.

“And I was not lying about not liking you,” Tara answered, taking a step back. “I haven’t liked you from the moment we met—you know, when you pointed that gun at my pregnant best friend? Also, if I wanted to be an incubator for some wolf, I would not have chosen to live in Edinburgh surrounded by humans.”

“I am not ‘some wolf,’” Magnus reminded her, his voice taking on a slight growl. “I am the most powerful king in Scotland. Your king so long as you live in my lands.”

“With all due respect, King Magnus…” Tara replied, throwing as much mockery as possible into his title. “I am still not interested.”

This time, Magnus didn’t argue with her. But Tara couldn’t help but notice as she pulled her straightened dark brown hair into a ponytail, that he wasn’t leaving either.

“Like I said,” she reminded him. “I prefer to shift alone.”

Magnus shot her a cool, calculating look. “I’m afraid that isnae possible.”

“Sure it is!” she insisted. “All you have to do is get in your car and drive back to your village or, you know, somewhere that isn’t here, before moonrise.”

Magnus inhaled the rapidly cooling air through his long nose. “You’re wrong about that,” he answered. “The moon will rise early this eve.”

Tara tilted her head suspiciously. “You can’t possibly know that…”

Her words trailed off because he’d begun to strip. First went the cape, which he unceremoniously dropped to the ground like it was a cheap costume prop rather than the heirloom she suspected it to be. Then he unzipped his cable knit sweater and pulled it off, revealing a strong, naked torso consisting of muscles slabbed on top of pecs that eventually rippled into a truly impressive set of abs.

Are you sure you are not interested? her wolf whined, straining forward. Because I definitely am.

Tara ignored her wolf and continued to address Magnus as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. “According to my weather app, the moon isn’t due to rise for another hour or so.”

Though she kept her eyes averted from his body, Tara could clearly see the condescending smirk reappear on his face. “Aye, those humans do love their predictions. But we wolves are a part of nature, as we say in my village.” His stone-gray eyes looked her up and down, seeming to note every curve. “If I were you, Tara, I’d remove that shiny dress or else the moon will shred it to pieces.”

She glanced down at her Ted Baker jacquard dress. Milly used to say it was Tara’s “compliments” dress because it never failed to garner positive attention from women and men when she wore it out. Tara had barely been able to pay her rent the month that she bought it. So, yeah, she definitely did not want to destroy her favorite dress by shifting in it. But…

“Look. I’m not…I am not doing this with you. You will have to find some other place to shift. But not here…not with me…okay?”

Magnus didn’t reply. Just slid his feet out of his polished Ghillie boots. “So did you grow up as one of those city cage changers then? Have you never seen an unrelated male wolf naked before, Tara?” he asked as he began to pull off his folded-over cable-knit socks.

Real talk. No. Not in the flesh…

And especially not one that looked like Magnus. Her eyes drifted back to his torso. Seriously, before now she’d assumed muscles like his were a trick of Photoshop.

Yum, her wolf growled, even as her human shivered.

Then Magnus began to unfasten his kilt.

“No, wait! Stop!” Tara squeaked. Only to be silenced by the energy surge of a sudden shift.

And that was the last thing she remembered from that night.

But the next morning…

Tara would never forget waking up the next morning. On the hard Scottish ground in a ruined Ted Baker dress.

It wasn’t that unusual for her to wake up outside. Unlike most of the official Canadian packs, her town in Ontario was nowhere near a mountain, so her pack cage changed. But after she distanced herself from her pack and refused to align with any other packs during college and here in Scotland, Tara became accustomed to shifting outdoors on her own. She knew all too well the feeling of waking up outside on the cold, damp Scottish ground in the frigid air.

But that morning, she wasn’t cold. Like, at all.

In fact, she almost felt too warm, as if she were sleeping next to a roaring bonfire. A huge bonfire with arms and legs that draped over her like the heaviest of blankets. She glanced down and instantly recognized the signet ring on one of the hands circling her waist. Magnus. She was wrapped in the arms of the Scottish alpha king.

And that wasn’t even the worst part. Shifting burned a lot of calories and like most modern wolves, Tara didn’t hunt while in wolf form. As a result, she was usually ravenous after a shift and the first thing on her mind when she woke was to fill her empty stomach.

This morning, however, breakfast was the furthest thing from her mind. Because she was already full. Very, very full. But nowhere near where she should be.

Magnus’s long thick shaft was inside her…stretching her impossibly wide. He was embedded so deep, she could feel every pulse.

No...! No, no, no! They could not have!

But when Tara attempted to move away from him, she found herself held in place by a hard, unyielding knot. A sharp bolt of pleasure rippled through her womb as if to say, in a dark Scottish accent, “Aye, you most certainly did. Moreover, you enjoyed it.”

Oh, God! They’d wolf-mated, with her wolf and his going at it like, well, animals while their humans were out cold. They’d obviously shifted back with him still embedded inside her. And now her core was milking his hard, unyielding knot which meant she was trapped. Tara wouldn’t be able to leave until this episode of animal biology completed and she’d squeezed every drop she could from the still sleeping male wolf behind her.

All she could do was curse. And even that had to be done quietly so as not to wake Magnus. Female wolves typically woke earlier from a shift than males, which was why she-wolves were usually put in charge of tending to the young ones and elderly after a full moon night.

Of course, a wolf mating did not mean an automatic pregnancy. Her former Canadian pack used wolf matings as their main method of impregnating unheated she-wolves, but it didn’t always work.

Yes, technically, her oldest sister, Leora, was wolf-mated to a male from Prince Edward Island. And Leora was the product of a wolf mating between their white mother and Ghanaian father. But wolf mating was a crap shoot as best, with no guarantee of a pregnancy.

Therefore, the wolf mating between Tara and Magnus could very well be fruitless. Totally fruitless, she insisted to herself even as the monster buried deep inside her continued to shock her formerly virgin sex with pulse after pulse of knotted pleasure.

It wasn’t long before Tara had to bite her lip to keep from crying out when what can only have been an orgasm shuddered through her. Don’t move, she told herself after it finished. If she kept still and ignored the pulsing sensations inside her, he’d eventually unknot and she’d be free of him. Then she could sneak back to her car near the main road and get out of here.

Thankfully, Magnus unknotted a few minutes later. Tara carefully moved away as soon as she felt him deflate. She stood and took stock of her situation. Her lovely Ted Baker dress was in tatters and she would need to change ASAP. Of course, like any good shifter, Tara kept some spare clothes and a pair of shoes in the trunk of her car. But instead of beating a hasty retreat, she paused to stare down at the sleeping Magnus.

He was prone and no longer at “full mast,” but he still looked magnificent.

Mate, her wolf whispered.

Nope. Not happening, Tara answered, shoving her beast down and scrambled back to her car, praying her run-in with Magnus would end here. With only her knowing all the details of what had passed between them.

As soon as she arrived home, Tara made a beeline for the shower. She turned the temperature to near-scalding and thoroughly washed herself in every nook and cranny. But his scent would not come off. Nor did it fade in the hours after. In fact, it became more and more prominent with an undercurrent of hCG until finally, Tara had no choice but to acknowledge she was not one of those she-wolves who could wolf mate and not get pregnant.

That’s when she really started cursing herself for spending all her leftover wages on after-work drinks and a business-to-evening wear wardrobe to match. Because neither Ted Baker nor Kate Spade could help her out of this jam.

Tara assessed the situation. First off, she wouldn’t shift during the next full moon, or any other, for a year—nine months to gestate and three additional months for nature’s version of she-wolf maternity leave. That wouldn’t be so bad. Lord knew she wouldn’t mind not having to max out her sick days to recover from shifting like she’d had to do ever since she took the job at RSB. No…her biggest problem was that wolf fathers also stopped shifting for 12 months. Which meant even if Magnus didn’t yet realize he had a kid on the way, he’d definitely figure it out when he didn’t change with the next full moon.

And considering his crown hung in the balance, who knew what he’d do when he found out she was pregnant with his pup. Or what he’d make her do…