Kukunniwi Woods

Knud watched his new mate wake with a start late that afternoon. She sat up in bed as if she’d just had a nightmare, then looked around until she found him in one of the guest bedroom’s dark leather barrel chairs.

“Hello,” she said carefully.

He wondered what she was thinking about, and that made him realize they might not share a telepathic bond, one of the many things that could go “wrong” when wolves mated with humans.

“How are you feeling?” He pushed the thought into her head, testing.

But she continued to stare at him expectantly, obviously waiting for him to answer her greeting.

No psychic bond then. To tell the truth, he wasn’t sure if that was necessarily a bad thing. He wouldn’t be able to get into her head, but that also meant she wouldn’t be able to get into his.

“Hey,” he answered out loud.

She smiled, raised her hands to push the curls off her face, then snatched her hand back when she found a nest of knotted hair. “I didn’t put my hair in braids before I fell asleep?” she asked, as if this was the most alarming thing that had happened to her in the past twelve hours.

“Nope,” he answered.

She shook her head as if trying to clear a fog, and rubbed her temple, “I just had the strangest dream…”

Knud made a considering noise and went over to the window, remembering from some textbook or other that she-wolves could be sensitive to light after going into heat. He closed the curtains on the aggressive summer sun and said, “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“I asked you to marry me, and you said yes—crazy right? But things got even crazier afterwards. We decided to go back to Wichita with your parents after I was done supervising Jandro’s visit with Qim, but then I started feeling…truly abnormal. A fever came over me very suddenly, and a strange smell appeared in the air. For some reason, my clothes began to feel unbearable and I had to take them off, even though I was in the middle of an assessment! However, Qim seemed to understand. He quickly removed Jandro from the room and then…”

She blinked up at him as if trying to reconcile his presence in the dream and his presence in the room, as he came to stand beside the bed. “…then you came in and we had extremely intense sex, during which you kept talking about impregnating me—why are you looking at me like that?”

Knud stroked his knuckles over her cheek, before deciding it was best to just rip the band-aid off. “Because it wasn’t a dream.”

She laughed.

He didn’t.

Which made her quickly sober as she said, “It had to be a dream…”

He shook his head. “But it wasn’t.”

He suspected if not for the melanin, all the color would have drained out of her face right then. “No…. no… tell me I did not start tearing my clothes off during an assessment!!!”

Knud was torn because he wanted to alleviate her embarrassment, but didn’t know how to without violating quite a few long-held wolf laws. “Qim understood. Everyone did,” Knud assured her, hoping it would be enough.

Of course, it wasn’t.

“Exactly how did everyone come to understand that in the middle of an assessment, I stripped down in Qim Wulfkonig’s study, then had…oh my gosh…extremely loud sex with his cousin on the floor?” She stopped, her eyes widening with a new thought. “Did I… did I faint while you were still inside me.”

“I wouldn’t call it fainting. More like a passing out,” he answered.

“Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!” she said, scraping both hands through her unusually messy hair. “What am I going to do? How am I going to explain this to them? I’m no longer under my parent’s media protection. If this gets out, my father will…”

Knud had no idea who her father was, but if the look that crossed her face when she spoke of him was any indication, it wouldn’t be good.

“It won’t get out,” he told her, bringing her to her feet so he could look her in the eyes as he made his next promise: “You don’t have to explain anything to anyone. I promise you that, baby. You’re all good with everyone in my family.”

She looked at him like he’d just told her there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. “Are you seriously telling me no one in your family is judging me?”

“Yeah, I am.”

She didn’t believe him. He could see the disbelief in her expression, which in turn made Knud wish he could just tell her everything, straight up. But thanks to his old black ops job, he was more than familiar with all the rules that surrounded mating with humans. And he knew he could only spill all the details on the day of her first full month shift or three months into a viable heat pregnancy.

As it turned out, he’d have to wait the three months since neither a pregnant she-wolf nor her partner could shift for a year after a successful heat mating—nature’s way of ensuring the she-wolf didn’t accidentally terminate her pregnancy, and also had protection while she was at her most vulnerable.

Normally he’d risk it and just break the law. Like most people who’d spent a little too much time in the grey moral ground that was black-ops, he often considered himself above the law. And at this point his besotted wolf was willing to do almost anything to relieve the stark worry on Layla’s face. However, in this case, he couldn’t risk it. As pissed as Rafes was at him right now, he’d lock Knud up in one of their secret werewolf penitentiaries just to make an example of him to their people.

And Knud getting locked away from Layla would be a one-way ticket to Crazy Town. Lupine fathers-to-be were notoriously protective of their she-wolves. And he was not going to be the exception.

He’d only mated her a few hours ago, but he spent nearly the entire time she was asleep making arrangements that included taking next week off from work. He needed to go check out some gated properties. And that walking everywhere thing Layla liked to do was done, son. He’d be driving her to work from now on…

“Knud?” she said, interrupting his plan spiral with a soft look.

“Yeah?”

“Even if I end up in the news because of this, I’m glad it wasn’t a dream…and I finally told you how I feel.”

Another burst of sunshine lit up his tired, grey heart. Because if that wasn’t the main point, he didn’t know what was. “Me too.”

The moment would have been perfect if she hadn’t added, “Now I’m going to hop in the shower, and then go downstairs to make profuse apologies.”

Fuck! He had been so busy planning for the future that it hadn’t occurred to him he might need to come up with a plausible reason why they’d need to stay the night. Or why Jandro would be MIA until tomorrow morning.

“Any ideas about where my clothes might have gone?” she asked—only to groan with a sudden memory. “The part where I rip apart my vintage Mary Quant wasn’t a dream either, was it?”

No, it wasn’t. He walked over to the guestroom’s other chair where he’d placed the clothes he’d gathered for her. “I’ve already got some new clothes for you from the other rooms. Shorts and a t-shirt and some hiking boots—my mom’s about the same shoe size as you.”

He felt kind of bad handing over the ensemble he’d pulled together for her. It was so the opposite of anything she’d ever wear. But she thanked him as graciously as if he’d offered her the evening gown of her dreams, before disappearing into the room’s ensuite bathroom.

He was going to enjoy the hell out of spending the rest of his life with her, he thought as he watched her disappear through the door. But first he was going to have to lie to her. A lot. And that’s how he found out the hard way that he made a full transition from his former black ops life. Because though he came up with a story that would be pretty easy for her to believe after what happened downstairs, he hated that he’d have to play psychological games that she hadn’t agreed to or asked for.

Never again, he vowed when he heard the shower turn off a few minutes later. They just had to get through tonight and the next three months, and then he’d never lie to her again.

“Tina Turner!” he yelled out, taking another stab at figuring out who Layla really was. “My mom loves Tina Turner.”

“So do I. But I’m pretty sure she’s old enough to be my grandmother. Not to mention dead!” she called back.

The shower switched off a few minutes later. And then she emerged from the bathroom faster than he expected, dressed in the clothes he’d given her, face scrubbed of her usual sophisticated makeup, and hair pulled back with a curly ponytail. She looked like a teenager…and somehow more familiar to him because of it. Something tickled in the back of his mind. Where had he seen her before?

“You okay?” she asked, crooking her head at him.

No. No, he wasn’t. The feeling he knew her from somewhere scratched at his brain. Also, he could practically feel his wolf stalking back and forth inside his gut. Itchy at the closeness of the moon.

With everything going on with Jandro he hadn’t bothered to check the report. But summer moons were infamously tricky. Rising at the same time as its winter brethren, not caring whether or not it was dark out.

“You’re that kid Angelina Jolie adopted, aren’t you?” he asked, to cover up how off he was suddenly feeling.

She laughed, shaking her head at him. “No, I’m definitely not.”

Knud snapped his fingers. “Wait, what’s the name of that hot singer from back in the day? The one who turned out to have a secret twin sister? Rocky Road?”

Her head jerked back a little, startled by his guess. “Roxxy Roxx is actually a really good friend of my family. You’re definitely getting warmer because I am named after Roxxy’s secret twin sister. But she’s not my mother.”

That stopped Knud in his tracks because he suddenly realized, “I still don’t know your last name.”

She clamped her lips and seemed to make a decision. “I usually use my mother’s maiden name on official documents, so it’s Layla St. James. But technically, my full name is Layla Rus—”

She abruptly stopped speaking. And Knud wondered why….until he realized his perspective had changed. By a lot.

For some reason, Layla was taller than him. Much taller than him. And her expression had change from one of soft amusement to pure terror.

But why would she be scared of him?

And that’s when he realized. Or rather, that’s when he remembered why his mother had told the story of the Wolf Prince around the Viking fires, as opposed to coldly documenting it, like she had the many stories of wolves who’d turned humans by scratching or biting them.

The spontaneous heats were stories not History, because of the fantastical things that happened to the couples.

Like a nightmare unfolding, he remembered his mother holding him and all the other English-speaking wolves in their long house in thrall as she told the story of the Wolf Prince around the Viking fire. In what sounded like a classic fairytale, a wolf prince agreed to marry a human maiden after “filling her belly with pup,” with the caveat that she not look at him whenever there was a full moon. Why? Because as it turned out he was secretly a werewolf. But could not let his still-human wife know until she delivered their baby for fear of repercussions from his wolf tribe.

Knud had loved that story. Had asked for it often, even after they left the Viking Era. But it had turned out tragically, and there was one thing he’d failed to glean. As his mother preached, most stories were warnings, passed down through the generations to teach vital lessons.

Especially the ones told by wolves.

If this story was still being told to this day, there was a reason for it. Yes, spontaneous heats happened but they often came at an unusual price.

Even though his mate was pregnant, he would not remain human on full moon nights. Just as the wolf prince couldn’t stay human for his new bride.

“Fuck!” he cursed. But his curse came out as a low growl.

As did his, “No, Layla, don’t run! It’s not safe outside!” when she started backing away toward the door.

But his warning only made the inevitable happen faster. Before he could stop her, his mate was off. Running away. Running away just as she vowed not to do earlier. From the man who’d just turned into an overlarge wolf in front of her.