THE FINAL
After lying with Trace at the forest clearing, Crystal ran back into the house and did not stop to say anything to her parents, her mother being in the kitchen and her father sitting in the living room. She ran upstairs and hurriedly got herself into the shower, then put her clothes in the washer. She was not ashamed of what she had done or what she had allowed Trace to do. Far from being ashamed, she had loved it and felt her entire being aglow from it. Her only trepidation was at what it could mean.
Trace had expressed his desire to call her to be his mate. She was not yet ready to deal with that possibility, nor was she prepared for her parents to know that she had cast off, however joyously, her virginity with him. For the moment, she was hungry for dinner almost as much as she was for Trace Blackwood. So, she showered thoroughly and washed her clothes to wash the sex from everything but her inner self. From there it would never go away, and now she’d had Trace, she only wanted more of him. When would she see him next? When would she be under him and have him inside her again?
_______________
That night, Trace texted Crystal, she called his number, and they talked. They relived, in talking, all the things they’d done in the forest and how they’d felt doing them. Trace told her he wanted to see her again. He would arrange a room for them at a hotel on the highway just outside of town. Crystal did not care for the sound of meeting him that way; it struck her as sneaky and sordid and dirty.
But he reminded her that he could not take her to bed at home nor at her house, and told her that not taking her to bed was out of the question; he had to be inside her. He needed her sex, and Crystal relented, knowing without a doubt that she needed his. She longed to take Trace into her mouth and have him devour and penetrate her again.
She still wondered what they would do when the week was up and he was honor bound to send his bouquet to the one he had chosen. He told her not to worry about that now, to think only of how perfect and awesome it would be when they were rolling naked together and he was humping her in bed. Crystal could not shed her misgivings entirely, but she put them on a shelf in the back of her mind and kept his soul-melting sex at the forefront of her thoughts.
Back at school, Crystal saw Johnny McKinnon again and covered up the awful guilt she felt when he spoke of how much he looked forward to taking her to the prom and the Revel. Just the thought of the Revel made Crystal feel as if she were the lowest, most contemptible and faithless creature in the world: for she had already been to the place of the Revel and had already known the things that Johnny so looked forward to doing there.
She wanted to confess to him, to tell him what she’d done and what she’d let Trace do. But she could not bear the thought of his reaction, his hurt and betrayal and anger. So, she kept it all to herself and concealed her guilt. And she sat with him at lunch and talked and laughed with him. And when he told her that he wanted to see her before the prom, she evaded him by telling him that she had to work at the tavern this week and would not be free until the weekend.
Johnny wanted to take her out for a burger and a movie on the weekend, and Crystal accepted, knowing that by the weekend Trace would have sent his fateful bouquet. If—or rather, as she expected, when—the bouquet came to her, she would then have a completely different set of problems. But at least she might avoid Johnny knowing how she had given up her prize before he ever came near it.
Trace arranged to pick Crystal up in the black Stingray at the mall on the far side of town, away from both the lodge and her street. She would meet him there, he would drive them to the hotel, and for at least a few hot and torrid hours Trace would screw her with abandon in bed.
Crystal made an excuse to her parents that she would be at the library after school, and met Trace as planned. He booked them a suite. A simple room would have been ample, but Trace was accustomed to the best. They had the Do Not Disturb sign on the door and their clothes strewn across the carpet in what seemed as little time as it took to say it, and in less time than that, he was all over her on the king-size bed. The eating, sucking, and banging on and under the sheets left them as breathless and sated as their time in the grass.
On Monday night, Trace and Crystal lay curled up together in bed, their bodies turned to warm embers of after-sex from Trace mounting and ejaculating three times inside her, and Crystal rested her head on his chest and played with his limp but still large piece. It was still moist and slippery from their combined wetness, and she slid her fingers along his length until she came to the tip; then she squeezed the tender, pink mushroom head of it, not enough to hurt him, but just enough to send an electric jolt through his body.
His reaction startled her into laughing, and he laughed back and slapped her on her naked bottom. “Damn, girl,” he said with a mock growl, “if you’re gonna be naughty like that, I’m gonna have to show you again what that thing is really for.”
“Oh, you will?” Crystal asked playfully.
“Damn right I will,” he mock-snarled again at her. “You know I will.”
She looked up from his chest into his bedroom eyes and said, “Yes. I know you will.”
“You’d better know it,” he said. “I mean to spend every second I can sticking that in you. Every second. When I’m not in you, I want to be in you so much I think it’ll kill me. I want you, Crystal, more and more.”
“Oh, Trace…,” she sighed.
Crystal felt a hot surge from the thing in her hand that had given her such limitless pleasure. She felt it start to stiffen again, the flow of blood into the shaft making it ready for her one more time. She let him pull her into another fiery kiss and wrestle her onto her back. And once again, Crystal surrendered to his body crushing her onto the mattress and the wood beneath his thighs moving deep into her. With every stroke, she belonged to Trace more and more. She was helpless against the feeling, even as she knew the days were now counting down to Friday and the sending of the bouquet.
_______________
Tuesday was the same as Monday, except with Crystal making the excuse to her parents that she was going to the mall with some of the other girls. Again, the perfection of Trace’s body and the power of his sex completely took her over. His humping and coming and making her come left her almost weeping in his arms. How was it even possible for him to be so good?
A werewolf’s body, even in human form, worked differently from that of a common human. Things could happen much faster in the body of a werewolf than they could in that of a non-shifting man or woman. So, it was that on Wednesday morning, as Crystal was in her room, just dressed and getting ready for school, that her mother passed by her door to remind her that her father expected her to work this evening—and no sooner was Adele Shaw in the threshold of Crystal’s room than she stopped in her tracks and her voice halted in her throat. She stood like a statue, watching Crystal, and as she watched her daughter, Adele’s eyes narrowed, and her nostrils flared.
Crystal, brushing her hair at her mirror, first had the sensation of being watched, then noticed the reflection of her mother behind her own. Curious, she put down her brush and turned around into Adele’s unreadable expression. “Mom?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”
“You tell me,” Adele said. “Is something wrong? Is there anything I need to know about?”
A strange, tingly, prickly feeling came over Crystal, the kind of feeling that makes the hair stand up on the back of the neck. The beginnings of panic raked inside her like her inner wolf clawing to get out. Did Adele suspect something? Had she noticed something in Crystal’s behavior since the weekend? Had someone in town seen her with Trace and mentioned something to Adele? Her heart fluttered, and not at all in the same way it did when she saw Trace naked and erect. “Mom? she repeated.
“Crystal,’ said Adele in the most serious tone that Crystal had ever heard from her, “if there’s something you need to tell me, you’d better tell me right now.”
More worried than ever, Crystal asked, “What are you talking about, Mom?”
Adele stepped all the way into the room. “Honey, your father isn’t here now. He went on an errand into the city this morning. It’s just you and me now. You can talk to me. You can tell me anything. You have to tell me.”
Crystal trembled inside and desperately hoped it was not showing outside. “Mom, I don’t know what you mean.”
“I know Johnny McKinnon asked you to the prom, and I know you said yes. Honey…has something happened already?”
Crystal’s eyes widened. For a second, she was truly speechless. For another second, she felt like leaping out the window. “Mom, no!” she blurted. “Mom, nothing happened! Nothing even like that happened! Why would you even think that?”
Looking at Crystal as if she had X-ray eyes and could look right into her, Adele said, “If nothing happened with Johnny…what is that scent?”
Now Crystal felt herself turn pale and clammy. She could not believe what she was hearing. She had a scent? An unusual scent that would attract her mother’s attention the way it was doing? That implied only one thing—and the implication truly terrified her.
“What scent?” she half-whimpered.
“The one I smell right now,” said Adele.
It was another fact of lycanthrope life that a female gave off a particular scent when she was in a particular condition. It was something that a common human could not detect, but another lycan even in human form could pick it up if he or she were paying attention—and a mother’s instinct was always to pay attention.
Seriously, Adele asked, “Crystal, if it wasn’t Johnny, then who? You have to tell me.”
And at this, Crystal put a hand over her mouth and dissolved into tears. Taking down her hand, she began to sob. “Oh, Mom, I didn’t mean it. I didn’t want it. I wasn’t trying to…I only wanted… Oh, Mom…”
Adele’s heart broke with fear and concern for her little girl—or what was once her little girl. She threw her arms around Crystal and let her daughter cry at her bosom. “I didn’t mean it, Mom,” Crystal wept. “I didn’t mean it…”
Crystal and Adele made it across the room to the bed to sit down, and in the midst of sobs and tears, Crystal told her mother everything. Everything.
Adele could not hide her sorrow at what she knew was now happening to Crystal. She looked almost as tearful as Crystal did, sitting beside her and squeezing her hand, saying with her warmth that mother was here and always would be, no matter what.
“Oh, Mom, it can’t be true. I can’t be… Trace couldn’t have… Mom, we have to be sure. We have to find out for sure…”
“I think it’s already for sure, darling,” said Adele, stroking the tears from Crystal’s face. “We’ll call school and tell them you’re not coming in this morning; we’ll tell them something. Then, we’ll go to the drugstore, if you want, and find something to help us make sure.”
“Mom, it can’t be true,” Crystal repeated, her voice cracking on the verge of new tears.
“Honey,” said Adele with another squeeze of her hand, “this is a real thing, and it’s something we’re going to have to face, all of us—together.”
Crystal was aghast at the import of that. “Oh, Mom, no…”
Adele nodded, tenderly but surely. “Yes, darling.” And after a beat, she put her full meaning into words: “We’re going to have to tell your father.”
Crystal collapsed onto her mother’s bosom and began to cry again.
_______________
Another of the amenities of the Blackwood lodge was that it had its own sauna. It was here that Trace whiled away a part of the afternoon, looking forward to picking up Crystal again for another shag—or three—at the hotel. He cursed the fact that she would be working for her father and he couldn’t have her that evening. His prong, stiffening at the thought, cursed it as well. He was going to miss a night banging her. He would have to do it to her all the harder when she was free Thursday night.
He looked forward as well to a time when he would have her all to himself. One day, one day soon, he promised himself, she would be his and his alone. He might even have her right there in the sauna, getting very hot and very bothered, then move from the sauna to a shower that would cool off only their skin.
The shower was big enough that he could put her on the floor and hump her within an inch of her pretty little honey-blonde life right there. Shutting his eyes and leaning his head back, he smiled at the thought of all the times and all the places and all the ways he would do it to Crystal Shaw, and how they would feel together and how she would sound when he did. He would show his little former virgin everything that sex was and everything that it could be. Trace chuckled lustily. He couldn’t wait.
A loud, hard rapping on the sauna door shocked him out of his sex-drenched daydreams. He snapped his head back up and his eyes back open at the sound of the voice that followed the rapping.
“Trace! Trace, are you in there?”
He knew who it was before the door cracked open and his cousin poked his head into the sauna. “Trace?” Glen called again, more softly. “Trace, are you there?”
Trace leaned forward, curious at the urgency in the sound of his cousin’s voice. “Glen, what’s the matter?”
Finding Trace sitting in the clouds of vapor, Glen said, “Trace, you’d better get out here. It’s your Dad. I’ve never seen him like this. He looks fit to go wolf and rip up all the furniture.”
Now, Trace was not curious; he was worried. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Crystal Shaw and her parents are here, and they are pissed off as hell. You need to get dressed and get yourself out here, man; I’m telling you, the fangs are gonna come out.”
Alarmed, Trace stood up and whipped his towel around himself, stepping down from the sauna bleacher to meet Glen. “The Shaws are here? Crystal? What’s going on? What’s everyone so mad about?” He had a very good idea what had gotten them so worked up, and it was making him very nervous. He wondered how Crystal’s parents had found out. Had she actually told them? Well, she was eighteen, after all. Why were her parents here? She was grown and legal.
That was when Glen told him.
“Trace, buddy,” said Glen gravely, “you got Crystal pregnant!”
His mouth dropping open, Trace staggered back, feeling disbelief crash into him like a hammer into his chest. The word was like a crack of doom.
Pregnant.
Like a deer fleeing from one of his wild wolf kin, Trace sped up to his bedroom and threw on the first clothes he could grab from his drawers and closet. When he dashed down to the library, where he sensed everyone was, he found Roman, Glen, Uncle Harmon, and the Shaws all gathered there. Crystal was sitting in the chair by the fireplace where Trace himself had sat when he told his father of his mating interests. She was hugging herself, and her parents were standing by her. Glen and Harmon were standing off to the side, in front of the fire. Roman was at the bar. The tension in the room was as thick as the steam in the sauna.
At once, Grady Shaw clapped his eyes on Trace. “You!” he shouted. “Do you know what you did to my daughter? How the hell could you do that?”
A pained look passed between Trace and Crystal. All that Trace could say, holding out an arm to her, was, “Crystal, are you okay?”
Before either of her parents could stop her, Crystal bounded up and out of the chair, across the space between her and Trace, and into his arms. She buried her head on his chest. “Oh, Trace,” she said desperately.
Trace held her, comforted her as best he could. “It’s okay, Crystal. It’ll be all right, I promise.”
Grady snapped and burned, “How the hell can you stand there and tell my daughter it’s going to be all right after what you’ve done, you rutting son of a bitch?”
Roman snapped back, “I’ll thank you to take better care how you address my son in our home, Shaw!”
Pointing a finger at Roman as if he’d turn his human hand to a clawed wolf’s paw at any second, Grady growled, “I’ll ‘address’ this son of yours as I see fit after what he’s done! Maybe if you’d ‘addressed’ him a little better, he’d know better than to go taking advantage of my little girl and getting her in trouble!”
Indignantly, with a boiling fury of his own, Roman shot back, “Are you implying that your daughter’s condition is only my son’s doing? That she had no part in it? Are you that much of a fool?”
“Don't you call it ‘my daughter’s condition’!” Grady raged. “It’s what this rutting animal did to her!”
“If he did, it’s no more than she let him do!” Roman snarled.
“Like she could resist!” Grady balked. “The looks, the money, the fancy lodge, the car—he’s used to getting everything he wants with women, isn’t he? He sure as hell got what he wanted with Crystal, and to hell with whatever happened to her!”
“Listen, you two,” Trace protested, “Crystal and I are here in the room, you know?”
“Oh, you’re ‘in the room’!” Grady said sarcastically. “The room is the least of what you’ve been ‘in’ lately!”
With a gasp, Adele grasped her husband’s shoulder. “Grady!” she cried.
Crystal tearfully took her head from Trace’s chest and looked back at her father. “Daddy, please,” she sobbed.
“I don’t think there’s any need for crudities,” said Roman, keeping the boil of his own anger barely in check. Trace could sense the way his father was shaking. This confrontation was like a lit fuse that might go off on all of them at any moment. Roman continued with a measured calm, “We have a situation. We can discuss now what we’re going to do about it.”
Grady scowled at the old Alpha standing at the bar. “So now it’s a ‘situation.’ My daughter’s ruined life is a ‘situation.’”
“How exactly has Crystal’s life been ‘ruined’?” Roman asked. “She’s pregnant with my son’s pup; that’s understood. She still has her entire life ahead of her.”
“As a mother, when she hasn’t even started college yet,” said Adele.
“If I may point out,” Roman said, “Crystal still has choices—choices, I might add, that many young women, our kind or humans, in her position do not have.” And this he addressed to Crystal herself: “There are things we can do, Crystal. We Blackwoods are a proud pack. We have our honor. We wouldn’t think of abandoning you at a time like this. We live up to our responsibilities. Trace’s…indiscretion…has given us a responsibility to you, and I’m prepared to honor it.”
Crystal looked anxious from Roman to Trace and back again. “How?” she asked.
“If you’re suggesting he makes her his mate…,” Grady began, angrily.
“That’s what I said I wanted the night of the ball, and my father wouldn’t listen,” Trace cut in firmly, keeping his arms around Crystal.
“We needn’t go that far,” said Roman. To the Shaws, he said, “We talked—argued—the night of the ball about how young and…unprepared…Crystal is to be Trace’s mate.” To Crystal, he said as an aside, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean any offense, but it’s true. Your mother is right; you haven’t even started college yet. You haven’t had a life, and you’re certainly unprepared to be in the position my son has put you in.”
He paused and frowned at that, wishing there were a better way for him to have said it. “You’re still a young girl, and you’re not ready for any of this. You haven’t been out in the world. You haven’t experienced life fully. This isn’t the time for you to become a mother. But the reality is that this is the position that you and all of us are now in, and thankfully there are things we can do about it.”
“What ‘things,’ Dad?” Trace asked suspiciously.
“Crystal,” said Roman, “we could make arrangements for you. We could provide for both you and the pup. All your needs and the pup’s needs would be taken care of. We can provide the best care for the pup, and the best education for you and him or her. I assure you the two of you would want for nothing. You could have the pup and raise it, and with our help, you could both have the best life. We could see to that.”
His suspicion deepening by the second, Trace cut in: “Wait a minute, Dad. You’re saying Crystal and the pup would have everything they need. They’d have the best life. Where would I be in this? What about Crystal and me?”
“What I’m saying, Trace, is that you and Crystal can both have the kind of lives you were meant to have. I would be willing to help.”
“But Crystal and I wouldn’t be together, is that it?” Trace said, his eyebrows arching, understanding the real meaning and import of what his father was saying.
Roman explained, “You would be free to take a proper mate—and Crystal would be free to live her life and raise the pup in comfort.”
Crystal and Trace looked at each other and at Roman, shocked at what he was suggesting. Crystal said, disbelieving, “You’d…pay for me to raise the pup by myself…”
Trace finished, now starting an angry boil of his own, “…and meanwhile, I’d mate myself up with someone more suitable and acceptable to you, right?”
“It would be the best thing for the pack, Trace. I told you before, the pack needs you as Alpha with a more mature female at your side. And Crystal needs to be able to give the pup the kind of life that it most needs and deserves.”
Teeth clenching and voice seething, Trace summed up: “And she’d raise my pup away from this pack, away from his father. Away from me. My pup would be separated from me and separated from its birthright. Would he even get to know me? Would he even get to know the pack that he came from? What part of our lives would he be? Tell me that.”
“Trace,” said Roman, “there would have to be…limits to the pup’s relationship with us. It would be necessary to have limits—boundaries.”
“Why?” Trace growled.
“Because you will be the Alpha male of the Blackwood Pack, and your heir must belong to you and your mate!”
“Then let Crystal be my mate!” Trace growled more loudly.
“She cannot be your mate!” Roman’s voice raised sharply. “We’ve been through this, Trace! You cannot have her as Alpha with you! We will provide for her, but she cannot join this pack with you!”
Grady stepped forward, his every glance and gesture posing a challenge. “Now you just wait a damn minute, Blackwood! I’ve been listening to this idea of yours. You’ve been being a proper gentleman about it, but what you’re saying is you want to buy off my daughter! You want to buy her way out of Trace’s life!”
“I want to do the right thing for everyone concerned, including your daughter,” Roman said, meeting Grady’s challenge with a stiff resolve.
“‘The right thing’,” Grady challenged further, “meaning you get the inconvenient pregnant girl out of the way and let your son mate with someone you think is better, and cut Crystal and the pup out! Who the hell do you think you are? Who the hell do you think we are, that you can just move us around to whatever you think our place is? You think your money gives you the right to do that to other people?”
“If you think about it, Mr. Shaw,” Harmon cut in, “what my brother is really trying to do is set Crystal free to live her life. He’s offering her advantages that she wouldn’t have with someone else. This is an opportunity that you shouldn’t just reject so blindly.”
“No, Uncle Harmon,” Trace said. “Crystal’s father is right. Dad is trying to buy her out of my life. And it’s wrong.” To his father, he said pointedly, “This is our pup. Crystal’s and mine. We’re the ones responsible for it. And I’m going to be a part of its life. My pup isn’t going to be some dirty little secret I keep in my closet. I am going to be its father.”
“And be the Alpha of this pack?” Roman said sternly. “No. No, Trace. I did not work all these years to keep our pack and our empire going, to have it come to this. I said before and I say again, you will step up to lead this pack with a proper mate.”
Trace looked at his father with eyes of fire. “And you’re the one to tell me who’s a proper mate? You’re the one to say who I spend the rest of my life with, and raise an heir with? You?” And now the fire was in his voice as well as in his eyes. “Hell no! I’ll leave this pack first! It’s my call—mine! Or I just walk the hell out on all this and leave!”
Roman was stricken with horror. “You would leave your pack? You would leave us and everything you were born for? You talk about birthrights. What about your birthright? You would just abandon everything that was meant for you, all of it? For her?”
Crystal flinched in Trace’s arms, stung by Roman’s contempt. Grady saw Trace’s father’s reaction and was livid. “You listen here, Mister, don’t you stand in front of my daughter, and me, and her mother, and talk about her as if she’s nothing! My daughter is worth ten Blackwoods! She’s sure as hell better than some rutting rich boy who thinks of nothing but himself and gets her in trouble!”
“Daddy!” Crystal cried, as stung by her father’s words as she was by Roman’s. “Trace isn’t like that!”
“Then what are you doing in this mess?” Grady demanded.
“She’s not in it alone, Mr. Shaw,” said Trace. “I meant what I said. I’ll leave this pack, and Crystal and I will be together and start one of our own.”
“NO!” Roman bellowed.
“I’ll do it!” Trace bellowed back, making Crystal flinch in his arms again.
Glen, who had been listening to all of the preceding with a growing concern for Trace, finally spoke up, directly to his cousin. “Trace,” he said, “do you hear what you’re saying? Think about that, will you? If you take Crystal and go and leave us when you’re supposed to be the next Alpha, what do you think happens to the rest of us?”
“Just what we talked about before, Glen,” Trace answered.
Glen was dumbfounded. Until this moment, it had been a casual conversation, an idea, an abstraction. He eyed Trace, then Roman, then Harmon. In particular, he searched for his father’s reaction. Harmon did nothing but look from Glen to Roman with a complete loss for a reaction in his eyes.
Finally, Glen fumbled out, “Trace…no, man, listen, this isn’t for me. Remember we were talking about Dominic leaving, and you were saying how this wasn’t supposed to be for you? Well, it’s not supposed to be for me either. You’re the next in line for it. Dad, tell him.” He looked to his father for support. Harmon just shook his head.
“If I were gone, you’d be the next in line for it. Are you telling me you’ve never given it any kind of serious thought? You’ve never thought about how it’d be to lead the pack and run the business, be the boss, control where the money went and who got it? Are you telling me you actually wouldn’t like that?”
Glen nervously said, “Anybody would like it, Trace. But it was meant for you. Buddy, would you really hate it that much?”
“I wouldn’t mind it—if I could have a mate that I chose, someone I wanted. If it went to you, you’d have the chance to choose someone for yourself, someone that you wanted. That’s all I’m asking for.”
“And all that I am saying, Trace,” Roman insisted, “is that there are so many others you could want.”
“And only one I do want,” Trace insisted back. “So why not let me step aside like Dominic did, and let Glen have it?”
“Absolutely not!” Roman shouted. “You understand this, son: This pack has been led by an Alpha of our direct line since the first Blackwood came to this valley. This is who we are. We are the leaders of this pack! That is the way it has always been, and that is the way it will always be! You are my son, and you will lead us as you were born and raised to do!”
“Then I want Crystal with me. Otherwise,” Trace nodded to Glen, “there’s your next Alpha. Glen, it’s yours. There’s nothing wrong with Uncle Harmon’s line taking over. Maybe it’s time for a change anyway.”
Harmon, who had deferred to his brother Roman all his life, protested, “Glen and I never asked for this. The way I was content to be your second, Roman, Glen was ready to be Trace’s second. We never had any other ambition.”
“Well, now you get to step up,” said Trace.
Glen shook his head. “I never asked for this!”
“Sometimes, we don’t get what we asked for!” Trace argued.
“Damn right, we don’t!” Grady said, rejoining the argument. “My daughter sure as hell didn’t ask for any of this! But thanks to you, boy,” he glared at Trace, “this is what she’s got now!”
Clinging to Trace, Crystal rolled her eyes, wishing to die and have it all be over.
And then the room exploded into shouts, one voice crossing over the other, each one making Crystal cringe as much as the last. The voices of every person in the room—her father, her mother, the four Blackwood males—all hammered at her mind and raked at her heart. She felt brutalized by shouts. She felt mauled by anger, indignation, outrage, as if she herself were not a wolf but a fawn in the forest, set upon by a wolf pack. She shut her eyes as if making the sight of them disappear would shut out the storm of angry argument going on all around her.
Crystal held onto Trace until she could no longer hold on to him or to anything else. Suddenly, shockingly, she flung herself out of her arms and stepped away into the middle of the room, standing between Trace and Grady, her hands knotted into fists, her face contorted with anguish and pain—and for the first time since she learned of her condition, a righteous fury of her own.
Everyone froze around her, shocked into utter, wide-eyed, slack-jawed disbelief, when Crystal screamed in a voice that might almost have shattered the glasses behind the bar: “SHUT UP! SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP! ALL OF YOU, JUST SHUT UP!”
Silence fell on the room like the trunk of some colossal oak falling and crashing in the forest. Every eye was on Crystal now, but every tongue was mute. Trace and everyone just watched her, standing there, red-faced, almost ready to break out into wolf fur. She looked as if she could go for someone’s throat at any moment.
Adele clutched her throat. She had never seen her child this way in all of Crystal’s eighteen years. It was she who tremulously found her voice first. “Crystal… Honey, what is it? What’s the matter?”
Crystal glowered her way across all the stunned and speechless faces surrounding her. “What’s wrong?” she snarled her way from one to the other. “What’s wrong? I can’t stand this. I can’t stand listening to this. I can’t stand watching this. I hate the way you’re talking. I hate what you’re saying to each other.”
This one was meant expressly for Roman: “I hate what you’ve been saying about me. Or trying not to say. I hate how you’re all talking about your future, and my future, and my pup’s future, like you’re playing keep-away with a branch off a tree.” She raised her voice and her fists, looking as if she would go to wolf any second and start snapping and clawing, not caring whom she struck. “I hate all of this! All of it! And right now, I hate all of you!”
Stung to the heart, incredulous, Grady started, “Crystal…all we’re trying to do is…”
“I don’t care what you’re trying to do!” Crystal screamed, actually shaking her fists at her father, making Grady step back and blink. “I don’t care! Everybody’s talking around me. Everybody’s trying to tell me what they think I should do! I don’t even know what I should do! Glen, you say you didn’t ask for this? How do you think I feel? Do you think I asked for it?” She spun around and shot an evil, accusing look at Roman. “You probably think I asked for it, didn’t you? The little gold-digging bitch, getting herself pregnant so she could crawl into your son’s den, right?”
“Now see here, young lady…,” Roman began.
Crystal actually stomped at the Alpha, screaming, halting him in mid-sentence. “I said SHUT UP! I’m tired of listening to you! I’m tired of listening to all of you! I’m tired of this! And no matter what you try to do and no matter what you think and what you decide, I’m the one who has to go through this! I’m the one who has to live with this! IT’S MY DAMN BODY!”
Adele gasped: “Crystal…!”
“I’m sorry, Mom, but it’s true,” she said. “I’m the one who has to carry this pup. I’m the one who has to go through giving birth to this pup. I have to be its mother, and I have to figure out how to do it when I haven’t even figured everything out about myself. I didn’t know what my life was going to be, but I sure didn’t think it was going to be this. I was looking forward to going to school and making new friends and making a career and finding someone to settle down with, and going through all the stuff you go through while you’re going through all that. And maybe some of it would have been bad and maybe some of it would have hurt, but I was looking forward to finding out what it was. And now I don’t know if I’ll ever get to have any of that, because I slept with Trace and now I’m…I’m…”
She began to cry again, but they were tears not of despair but of anger with which she did not know what to do. Trace stepped forward to take her in his arms again, but she shoved him back and watched him look at her as if he had driven a stake into his heart, a thing one would do to a vampire, not a werewolf.
“No!” Crystal cried. “Don’t try to hold me. Don’t even touch me. I don’t want anyone touching me. And I don’t want anyone talking about me anymore. I don’t want to hear it.” She looked past Trace at his father, almost rabidly. “And you, old man! Talking to me like such a gentleman when you don’t think I’m good enough for your son and you’d rather just throw your money at me and sweep me and my pup under the rug like we don’t even exist. Didn’t you think I could figure it out? Did you think the stupid middle-class girl would be so excited about all the money and all the stuff that I wouldn’t know you were just paying to make me disappear or get me out of the way? This is your grandchild I’m having. Does that even matter to you? Do you really not want to own your own grandchild? Do you really want to throw him away because he’s not coming into the world exactly the way you want him to, with the kind of mother you want for him? How do you think he’s going to feel when he’s old enough to understand that? Did you even think about what you’re doing to this pup? Well, did you?”
Roman’s lips quivered; his brow furrowed. That was his only response.
Crystal scanned the room again, her eyes falling in turn on everyone present. “You’re so busy working out my life, and Trace’s life, and my pup’s life, and what happens to your stupid, stuck-up Blackwood empire. Well, work it out for yourselves and leave me the hell alone. I can’t stand any of you.”
Trace tried to say something, tried again to touch her. Crystal swatted his hand away and glared at him as if she could sink her fangs right into his throat. He gulped and backed off. In all his life, he had never seen any female as angry as Crystal was at this moment. She pushed her way past him and charged for the doorway.
Grady started after her. “Crystal! Come back!” he called, sounding more wounded than angry, his heart breaking for his daughter. Adele came up behind him and grabbed him by the shoulder. “No, Grady,” she said. “Let her go.”
Spinning around to face his wife, Grady protested, “My little girl needs me!”
Adele shook her head, sadly. “No, she doesn’t.” And she looked past him to Trace. “She needs him.”
Both of the Shaws now looked at Trace, silently telling him, Go on after her. Please.
Not bothering to look back, Trace turned and made his way out of the library.
Out in the hallway, Crystal saw a couple of female members of the Blackwood Pack who had been standing there in half-wolf form. They had obviously been listening; they had morphed into canine the better to hear what was going on. Fine, let them listen; I’ll bet we gave them a good show. Got a good earful of that, didn’t you, girls?
She rushed past them and out into the entrance hall, breaking into a run. She flung open the door and charged out, slamming it behind her. The last thing she heard before the door slammed was Trace somewhere behind her, calling out her name. She did not listen. She did not care.
She ran out onto the grounds of the lodge. All around her was their land, the Blackwoods’ land, where they had built their fabulous lodge and where they lived a part of their fabulous lives in which Roman had tacitly told her she had no place. Other members of the pack were probably somewhere about in the surrounding forest, probably running and hunting. When they returned, they would no doubt get to hear quite the story of how their future Alpha had gotten a teenager pregnant, and she had snapped on them like a steel trap set by a human.
Well, good, I hope it entertains them. I hope it’s a good story they can pass on to whoever turns out to be the damn Blackwood heir, from a mother that Mr. Blackwood likes better! Let him have his damn heir and his damn empire! He thinks I want any of it? I never wanted any of this! He can go to hell! They can all go to hell!
Crystal wanted to fling off her clothes and leave them strewn in the Blackwoods’ grass as a final reminder of what had happened here. She wanted to go full wolf and run into the forest and never be a human again. She would raise her pup that way, out in the forest, just the two of them, hunting for a living. She would have nothing to do with Trace Blackwood or his pack or anyone else. Just her pup, and to hell with this stupid, worthless werewolf life.
The tears flowed freely down her face as she ran. She realized she was heading down the mountain slope, past the trees covering it, through the thicket, to the stream in the valley. The stream where it had all started, that day when an innocent run turned into something not so innocent. Perhaps when she got there, she would just leap into the water and swim off downstream or let it carry her to where no one would ever see her again.
Her eyesight clouded with tears, no longer seeing where she was going, Crystal stumbled and flew forward and down, tumbling onto the grass. She rolled a bit and came to a stop, curled up, crying. With desperate sobs, she lay there, pounding her fists into the turf. Why did none of them understand? It was her life. Her life. Hers.
She felt the touch of a hand come gently to her shoulder. She didn’t care. She had told them all not to touch her. Was she to be denied even this one simple thing, not to be touched, just to be left alone?
The hand on her shoulder took her more firmly and turned her over so that she faced up, towards the sky—and the face of Trace, crouching over her, heartsick.
“Crystal,” he said softly. “Come here. Come here, sweetheart. I’m sorry. Just come here…” He sat himself down in the grass and pulled her up and into his arms. She was limp from running and crying; her outpouring of feelings had turned her into a living rag doll. She went to Trace without resistance. He wrapped her up in his arms and just held her there, letting her cry. They sat that way for the longest time, saying nothing, Trace just letting her pour out all of her fear and sorrow and anger onto his shoulder.
Neither of them knew how long they had been sitting there when Trace finally said, “I’ll make this better, Crystal. I’ll make it right. I promise. I swear I will.”
Crystal lifted her head from his shoulder, and he looked tenderly into her tear-streaked face. “How? What are you going to do?”
“Just what I said. I’ll leave the pack if I have to. Dad may never forgive me. And Glen will think I’ve put it all on him when he wasn’t asking for it, but he’ll come around when he gets all the perks of leading the pack and everything that goes with it. He’ll have to take a mate, but maybe they’ll be smarter about the whole damn thing and not put him through any of that crap. Maybe he’ll get to choose his mate, his way. It’ll be better for everyone.”
“Not for your father,” said Crystal. “He won’t get to pass on the Alpha rank to his heir like he wanted. His whole world was about that. He won’t get what he wanted. He may never speak to you again.”
“I’ll be hurting Dad’s pride, yeah. But what’s bigger, his hurt pride or our life, and our pup’s life? What’s more important?”
“Trace,” she asked, “can you really give it all up, everything you were meant to have?”
“I was meant to be happy,” he said. “We were meant to be happy.”
“But the pack, and your home, and your family fortune…”
“Look, I won’t be Alpha, that’s true. But I’m a trust-fund pup, born into money. I’ve got a luxury apartment in town, and I made good money in the family business. We won’t starve. I won’t be as rich as I could have been, but I’ll be okay. I can get a job someplace else. And we can take care of the pup, and send you to school. It’ll be good. All that crap back there was about people’s pride and their expectations. They’re gonna have to get over that. And…I’m gonna have to learn how to be someone else now, someone different that I wasn’t before. But we’ll have us.” He touched her stomach. “And we’ll have this little one. We’ll be good.”
“Will we, really?” Crystal asked. “I’m not ready for any of this, Trace. This was supposed to be years from now—years. How am I going to handle all this?”
“With me, that’s how. I’m not worried about any of that. You know why? Think what you did back there just now. You faced up to the Alpha male of one of the richest packs around. You looked him in the eye and told him to shut up. Put him right in his place, told him to shut the hell up and treat you the way you deserve. Let me tell you something: I have never, ever seen anyone put my Dad in his place the way you did. I wish I’d gotten that on my phone. That was classic. After that, I know you’ve got this.” He kissed her on the forehead. “You have, Crystal. You’ve got this.”
Crystal sank her head onto Trace’s shoulder, and he held her tight. Back there, in the lodge, people were likely saying all kinds of things to each other. Neither Crystal nor Trace cared. They just sat in the grass, thinking about tomorrow.
EPILOGUE
What lay immediately before Crystal now was the last weeks of high school. Adele gave her a special perfume that female lycans had been using for longer than anyone could remember, a formula known only to them that could mask the scent of pregnancy. Crystal did not want anyone to know that she was finishing high school and graduating as an expectant mother.
Well, almost no one; of course, she told Lexie, and of course Lexie nearly exploded with shock, and Crystal spent part of an afternoon talking her down. In the end, naturally, Lexie took an oath of silence that Crystal knew her best friend would honor. Lexie would protect her and have her back. It was perhaps the one thing that Crystal most knew she could count on.
Johnny McKinnon was another matter. Telling him that she was not going to the prom and the Revel because Trace had chosen her as his mate was hard. Hiding from him the fact that she had let Trace have sex with her and she was carrying his pup was even harder. As bravely as she told off Roman Blackwood, Crystal faced Johnny’s outpouring of disappointment over his prom and Revel plans being ruined at the eleventh hour, and how he would now have to scramble for another date, and how he had been so looking forward to escorting Crystal and being with her, and how he now might actually have to go “stag” to the big night.
He was crushed, and Crystal was crushed for both of them. If there had been no chance encounter with Trace Blackwood, and if none of what followed had ever happened, Crystal would have gone to the prom with Johnny and slept with him at the Revel. And Johnny would have used condoms, and Crystal would now be facing a future without a pup on the way.
She might even have fallen in love with Johnny. All of that now would be the road not taken. Watching Johnny walking away from her on the school grounds, shoulders slumped, dejected, was one of the saddest moments Crystal had ever known. She wished him happiness and let him go.
The one consolation in all of it was that sex with Trace was better than ever. He was every bit as dominating and passionate as he’d ever been, something that Crystal knew would never change. But there was a different quality to him in bed now, a softer touch. He went more slowly, more tenderly, mindful that he was now humping the mother of his pup. It was everything that Crystal ever hoped sex would be.
On the night of the prom, Trace took her out for a special evening in the city. He dressed again in a tuxedo, she wore again her formal gown, and they dined and danced the night away in the finest places until Trace took her back to his apartment where he had candles everywhere and two bottles of champagne chilling. They made themselves naked and lit the candles, and Trace took her to bed and sexed her in the sweetest way that either of them had ever yet known.
Cuddling under the covers after what was surely only the first of many times that night, Trace and Crystal kissed while fondling each other in all the most arousing places. “That was good,” he said. “So good.”
“It always is with you,” said Crystal.
“It always will be,” he replied.
“Even when we’re both exhausted from taking care of little You Know Who? Things might have to change when it’s not just the two of us. He’ll take a lot of time away from having sex, you know. Things might get to be different between us.”
He kissed her as if to kiss away all her concerns. “Listen, all that’s gonna change is that I’ve got a mate now. One mate, one partner. Screwing one woman instead of screwing around. And there’s never going to be a day or a night when I don’t want what’s going on in this bed right now, so you can just put all that out of your mind. Being a father won’t change me that much.”
“Not even when you’re taking our pup around in an SUV instead of the Stingray? You know, when a guy loses his sportscar for an SUV, that’s supposed to mean his life as he knew it is officially over.”
“The hell with that,” said Trace in a mock frown. “We’ll get an SUV. But I’m keeping the Stingray. Some things a guy’s just got to have.”
Crystal smiled at him, stroking his cheek with a fingertip. “I definitely know that.”
The lust came back into Trace’s irresistibly handsome face. “As a matter of fact, there’s something a guy’s gotta have again right now.” He kissed her, the kiss of a man who means business, and eased her onto her back and put himself on top of her once more. “Oh yeah,” he said, moving the tip of his erection back to Crystal’s opening. “Right now…”
He slid deep into her, and Crystal sighed, accepting her Alpha male and everything the future held for them. All three of them.
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