Sebastian looked at Charlotte on the couch from where he stood in the kitchen. They had come to an agreement about her work: she had scheduled periods of time when she had access to her phone and to the internet, for the purposes of teleconferencing or making calls to the office. Otherwise, she had internet-free time on her computer to actually work, so that she didn’t have an opportunity to try and contact someone to save her.
It was the only way—at least as far as Sebastian had been able to think—that he could run his own life and also let Charlotte have some measure of independence in terms of her work. Why he valued her having that independence was something he didn’t quite have the nerve to ask himself.
It was Friday, and he smiled slightly to himself as he turned back to the fish he’d been cleaning, thinking about the fact that it had almost been a full week since she’d come into his life. However unwillingly, Charlotte had become a fixture in his daily routine, they had managed to come to some kind of agreement: Charlotte worked for six hours—three in the morning, and three in the afternoon—and Sebastian used those times to take care of his other affairs.
He’d kept a distance from the rest of the Pride, only speaking to Les, Melissa, Brad, Mary, Ben, or Nate; he used those trusted advisors and friends to relay whatever he had to say to the Pride, using the excuse of his ongoing experiment. But it wouldn’t last much longer, and Sebastian knew it; eventually he would have to make an appearance, and when he did, he might as well have Charlotte in tow—because everyone in the Pride would smell her on him.
Sebastian chopped lettuce and rinsed off the vegetables that Melissa had brought him from her garden, putting together a salad that would go with the main course he had in mind. What a difference a week makes, he thought absently as he turned his attention to the rabbit he had started to braise that morning.
Under normal circumstances, before Charlotte had become his houseguest, he’d been in the habit of eating healthily, but not on any real schedule; he’d forage for vegetables and fruit, or absently grab something from the fridge or the pantry from what the members of the Pride gave to him as a remark of respect.
He might go out and hunt for game, and bring it back for dinner—with the leftovers to eat cold the next day or two. If someone in the Pride tracked and took down a deer during the full moon, it was shared—and he’d eat venison jerky, or leftover smoked venison, for a few days without paying much attention.
But he’d learned how to cook, and strangely the idea of providing for the woman who was to carry his child appealed to him. He knew that Charlotte probably wouldn’t enjoy the scattered meals he’d been used to eating, and that she was used to more variety than the woods tended to lend itself to. He also wanted to make sure the meals he served her seemed as human as possible; he could tell that she still hadn’t quite fully reconciled herself to the fact of his existence as both a man and a lion.
“Lunch is almost done,” he called out over his shoulder. He heard Charlotte shift on the couch and turned to see her set her laptop down.
“I’ve just about finished what I wanted to do with the presentation anyway,” she said. She gave him a wry smile. “What’s really shocking is how much more I’m getting done when no one can grab me for ‘a quick meeting’ three times an hour.”
They had concocted a story to cover Charlotte’s absence; some family emergency, requiring her to be available to take care of her grandmother or someone, at any time of the day. It was an ongoing emergency, Charlotte had explained, and she didn’t know how long she would need to be away.
That—they’d agreed—sounded better than giving an actual date. It would only last for so long, but it would give her time to prove her worth, and it would make it possible for her to leave the company under good conditions and maybe—once their agreement had ended—go back to work, or get another job without being blackballed.
It felt strange, being intimate with someone he didn’t really know; it was bizarre to wake up in the mornings with her in bed with him, to feel her body next to his when he went to sleep. Sebastian had hooked up with more than a few women since he’d lost his virginity at sixteen, but he had held back as a rule—he’d known that he wanted to become the Pride’s Alpha, and he’d wanted to be selective about who he took as a mate.
It was a completely different experience to be with a woman on a consistent basis like he’d been with Charlotte, even if it had only been a week, or just under it, so far. It was strange to go to sleep with his arms wrapped around her, even knowing that it would only continue until she got pregnant; they had agreed that as soon as they both confirmed her pregnancy, there would be no more sex. Therefore, there would be no more need to be in the same bed together.
And Sebastian already regretted the fact that there would be no more sex. Who would have thought a one-natured woman would be that good? He’d done his fair share of experimenting with the willing, happy women he’d hooked up with before his efforts to get Charlotte pregnant—but none of them had brought him to such an intense orgasm as she had; that fact alone scared him, though he couldn’t quite admit it even to himself. He could feel the instinct, the urge, to complete their sex with a mating bite, to take her completely, and had to hold off every time—hold himself back from doing it.
There had been a point in the last six days when he’d almost abandoned the project for that very reason; he knew that if they kept having sex every night—and soon, they would be having sex several times a day—the temptation to take her as his mate would only increase, until the animal instincts in him could no longer be suppressed.
That, Sebastian thought, was the real danger: taking a Recessive as a mate could cost him the Alpha of the Pride, and it would throw things into disarray. It would be one thing for one of the other guys in the community to mate a Recessive; even his seconds-in-command could get away with it, for the good of the community and to ensure that there were enough children being born to keep them going.
But for the Alpha of the Pride to take anything other than a full-blooded, fully-functioning werelioness as a mate was a huge gamble. Anyone might challenge him for that, and if one of the women challenged her, she would be at a huge disadvantage.
Sebastian took the braised rabbit out of the oven and set it out to cool while he finished the salad. “I’ve been here almost a week and I still don’t know what to think about this place,” Charlotte said, sitting down in the chair she had chosen each time they had eaten at the table together.
“I’ve lived here all my life and sometimes I’m not sure what to think of it,” Sebastian admitted.
“Have you ever wanted to live somewhere else? Like a city—at least an actual town?”
“I’ve thought about it,” Sebastian replied. “But by the time I was fifteen or sixteen, I had already started thinking about taking over from the previous Alpha male, my uncle.” He set the salad on the table and gestured for Charlotte to serve herself while he worked on the rabbit.
“Why?” Sebastian retrieved a hunk of the tender, fall-from-the-bone meat and onions and potatoes from the Dutch oven and laid it all on a plate, even as Charlotte filled his bowl with salad to go with it.
“Why what?” Sebastian put Charlotte’s serving down next to her salad bowl and served himself, before sitting across from her.
“Why did you want to be the Alpha male? It makes no real sense to me.”
“It’s not something every guy in the Pride wants,” Sebastian conceded. “But there has to be someone to lead the community, and I’d just sort of…” he shrugged. “I wanted it to be me.”
“So, you wanted to be the big man in charge,” Charlotte said, starting in on her salad as she spoke. “But all the things that come along with that?”
“It’s a lot of responsibility,” Sebastian agreed. “I can’t do all the things I want, and I have to make decisions sometimes that I hate—but which are necessary.”
Charlotte raised an eyebrow and said nothing, but Sebastian knew that she was thinking of her abduction roughly a week before.
“Do you know how long I investigated you before the guys grabbed you?”
“I’m not sure if the answer will make me feel better or worse,” Charlotte said drily.
“I knew about you about a month and a half before you were kidnapped,” Sebastian told her. “I’d gone to some of the elders, people who used to lead Prides but who have sort of retired, and they suggested that a Recessive would be a good idea—not the kidnapping part. I might actually get in trouble with them about that if it ever comes out.”
“If I knew who those elders were or how to get in touch with them, I might hold that over your head,” Charlotte admitted.
“In any case, they gave me access to the very small list of people who might work for increasing the Pride’s numbers through reproduction. I decided on you because you weren’t on the other end of the country, and because I liked the way you looked. A different Alpha might very well have picked some woman named Janet Majors who lives about twelve hours in a different direction.”
“Why didn’t you pick her?” Charlotte seemed genuinely curious.
“She had blonde hair and blue eyes,” Sebastian said, grinning wryly. “I wanted as much genetic diversity as I could get.”
“So, because of my dark hair and some quirk of my ancestry, I was the one kidnapped,” Charlotte said. She shook her head and put her half-finished salad aside to sample the rabbit. “Truth is stranger than fiction.”
“After I chose you, I had to find people I could trust to pull off the actual kidnapping,” Sebastian continued. “From the time they left here to the time you arrived, it took them three and a half weeks to track you down and get a good enough handle on your movements to find an opening to grab you without getting themselves in trouble.”
Charlotte shuddered. “Okay that kind of makes me feel worse about this, now that I hear it that way,” Charlotte said.
“Why?”
Charlotte met his gaze levelly. “I had a group of four people stalking me for three weeks,” she pointed out. “That kind of tends to give someone the creeps.”
“On the other hand, your habits are so secure that it took them that long to find an opening,” Sebastian countered.
“At that they found a way to drug me at a bar,” Charlotte said. She shook her head again. “If I hadn’t gone out that night…”
“They would have probably grabbed you outside of your apartment,” Sebastian told her gently. “They’d been following you steadily for a week.”
“And I had no clue at all about it,” Charlotte said. She laughed bitterly. “Yeah, I am... this is not good news for me.”
“Charlotte, they’re lions,” Sebastian said firmly. “They’re very good at stalking a target without letting it know they’re there. It’s the basis of our hunting style.”
“It still doesn’t feel good to know that for three and a half weeks, I had four people stalking me, and zero clue that it was happening.” Charlotte took a bite of rabbit. “This is excellent, I just…” she sighed.
“What’s wrong? Would it have been better if it was a spur-of-the-moment thing?”
“Kind of?” Charlotte shrugged. “It would at least not make me feel like I’m a total idiot.”
“You aren’t a total idiot,” Sebastian said firmly. “You aren’t an idiot at all. If they hadn’t managed to get you that night, they were going to come back within the next two days.”
“A month is all you were willing to have them gone for?” Sebastian nodded.
“They missed a full moon for that mission,” he told her quietly. “That’s not something that anyone wants to do.”
“When’s the next full moon?” Sebastian could hear the alarm in her voice.
“Next week,” Sebastian replied. “Which is why I hope that we can get you pregnant before then.”
“That’s kind of a tall order, don’t you think?” Charlotte chuckled quietly. “I mean, people have sex every day for months, and manage to somehow miss the mark of getting pregnant.”
“If you don’t get pregnant for a month, then we’ll keep trying,” Sebastian said. “But I can hope that I caught you at the right time, and that we have enough sex to make it happen as quickly as possible. It would be nice to only have to keep you away from your life back home for ten months, instead of a year or more.”
“And something tells me that it would help you politically, too.”
Sebastian nodded; the woman he’d chosen was astute—and he’d known that for days. But somehow she was still able to occasionally surprise him with how astute she was.
“There’s pressure on me to take an actual mate,” Sebastian explained. “Before I found out about you and the other Recessives, I’d been coming to an agreement with one of the few women in the Pride who was still able to have children. Neither of us loved the other, but we had respect for each other. We were pretty sure we could make it work.”
“That sounds very political indeed,” Charlotte said, smiling slightly. “More like the marriage between Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII than something from the twenty-first century.”
“It pretty much was,” Sebastian admitted. “We were going to mate, and she was going to carry as many children as she could for me.”
“And now?”
“She died in a skirmish—Melissa might have mentioned it,” Sebastian said. Charlotte nodded.
“And now I’m trying to make a child with you to sort of bolster our numbers and prove it can be done.”
“But if children don’t change until puberty, how would you even know for sure?”
“We can smell it about them shortly after birth,” Sebastian said. He didn’t mention the other possibility: for regular humans attempting to carry shifter babies, there was a higher risk of miscarriage. It generally happened so early on that it was more like a very heavy menstrual period than like the horror of losing a baby, but in some cases the body rejected it later on. “If you carry fully to term, the chances of it not being a shifter child will be very, very low,” Sebastian said again.
Charlotte raised an eyebrow, but didn’t pry any further on that subject. “And then once you have your baby, what are you going to do about a mate?” Charlotte’s cheeks lit with color and Sebastian almost thought he heard jealousy in her voice.
“I’ll probably have to petition the elders to ask someone from another Pride to mate with me,” he said with a shrug.
“Why didn’t you just do that in the first place? It seems like it would have solved two problems at once,” Charlotte pointed out.
“This is actually easier, for the short term,” Sebastian replied. “First, they don’t have to agree to help me find a mate from outside of the Pride. Second, even if I’m an Alpha, the Pride is depleted, so there’s a high chance that no respectable woman from another Pride would want to be with me. And we’re kind of out in the middle of nowhere.”
“So I take it that not all Prides share your love of being isolated from the world?” Sebastian shook his head.
“Some of them are in cities, even,” he said. “Of course, they have to be careful the closer they are to normal, one-natured humans. It’s not as easy to change, and they can’t do it whenever they want—not unless they’re willing to risk being shot by someone who thinks they escaped from a zoo or something.”
Charlotte snorted. “It’s good to know that you’re not all luddites,” she said.
“Hey! I am not a luddite,” Sebastian insisted. “I have solar and gas power, I have internet and electricity and a comfortable home. I just don’t like being outnumbered by one-natured people.”
“I guess all-in-all that’s not surprising,” Charlotte said after a moment. “It would probably be really dangerous.”
“It’s a dangerous life and a really limited one,” Sebastian agreed. “I’d only be able to change a few times a month, instead of whenever I wanted.” He pulled a bone out of his rabbit and ate the meat. “Territory squabbles are also a lot more common in areas where there are more one-natured people. Basically, it’s easier to be who I am out here.”
“You’ve never even thought about living anywhere else?”
Sebastian shrugged. “Not seriously,” he said. “Every once in a while, I think about what it would be like. Whether I’d like it. But from what I’ve heard and seen, it would be a lot of stress and uncomfortable bullshit.”
“I guess it’s the same thing as me thinking about living here,” Charlotte said after a moment. “I’ve never known anything but living in different cities of varying sizes, and I definitely never knew anything about two-natured people until a few days ago.”
For a few moments, they ate in silence, and Sebastian wondered what thoughts were going through the woman’s head. He’d dealt with the one-natured in town, on a superficial basis—buying things he couldn’t make or get for himself any other way, and he’d gone to a school with one-natured humans and other shifters from a neighboring territory. But the idea of living in a city, of constantly having to search through scents to find the ones that were relevant to him, of the assault on his preternaturally acute senses, was not as appealing as he was sure it was to Charlotte.
In the Pride’s territory, he knew where he was, he knew his position in life. It’s just as well that you’ve already decided you need to get rid of her as soon as you can, he thought—a little glumly—as they both ate. Even if you wanted to take her as a mate, and even if you wouldn’t face half a dozen challenges for it, you two aren’t made for each other. You’re too different.
For that matter, he couldn’t imagine the possibility of Charlotte being willing to stay in the Pride’s territory for the rest of her life; she was used to things that he couldn’t provide her there—that no one could provide her in the isolated community.
Sebastian tried to picture Charlotte living with him, going hunting—without the benefit of a lion form, of course—and fishing, doing the things that everyone in the community did. It was impossible to imagine; he wasn’t sure that Charlotte even knew the first thing about growing a kitchen garden, or gutting a fish, or making cloth. No, it’s definitely a good thing that it’s not even an option to have her. Neither of us would be happy.
But in spite of himself, Sebastian couldn’t help but regret, very deep in his mind, very quietly, that the best sex of his life had to be with someone he could never mate.
Even if he could feel something like a connection with her, and even if she smelled like something that should absolutely be his, Sebastian knew that once he managed to get Charlotte pregnant, he would need to turn his sights onto finding a mate.