through with them.”
A rustling sound comes from the dark woods to the left of the manmade hiking trail. Our group falls silent, with Grady, Rafe, Mag, and Uncle Tikaani slowly raising their tranq guns as we wait for whoever it is to appear.
My heart constricts. Maybe it’s Alisha’s “you know we might have been specially bred by aliens” story. Or maybe I’m more like my dad than I thought, and feeling nervous about being stuck on a dark mountain, in the snow, with nothing but a few tranquilizer guns standing between us and a wolf who might possibly have been banished from his pack for doing God knows what.
Whatever the reason, my whole body seizes with dread.
Which is why I’m straight up holding my breath when a large, bearded man staggers out of the woods, into the bright light of the gibbous moon. Thanks to my keen night vision, I’m able to make out his tawny brown skin and long red dreadlocks. He is completely naked, and though this should make him appear vulnerable, it doesn’t. Probably because every inch of his body is corded with muscle. I’m talking negative percent body fat, like maybe he’s never eaten a carb in his entire life. In fact, the only thing on him that could remotely be called fat lay flaccid between his legs, so impressive in its thickness that despite the circumstances, I can’t help but wonder what it must look like at full staff.
Wonder and then shiver when his bright eyes collide directly with mine.
And that’s when I find out exactly how his male member looks at full staff.
“Yeah, definitely a Viking,” I hear Tu say somewhere in the distance.
And I feel my own wolf do something it’s never done before inside my unheated body. Rise inside of me and stare at this time traveler with something that feels an awful lot like sexual interest.
9
O lafr knows the she-wolf is his from the moment their eyes meet. Knows by the way his heart expands with awe. His female is dark. Darker than his own mother, and his mother is the darkest woman he has ever seen or heard tale of. His female is also full figured. More so than his Aunt Alisha whose bountiful gifts of which the bards still sing. And his brother thought his sister like a Valkyrie with her bold red curls, but this she-wolf is even more the Valkyrie, with hair cut close and black on one side of her head, while the other is filled with long roped locks, white as snow. But in spite of her white hair, the she-wolf is not in her winter years he senses. No, this mate of his has the hair of a warrior, and the pretty, round face of a young maiden.
From the moment his eyes meet her deep brown ones, wide as a rabbit’s, everything else disappears. The other wolves in the party she has come with. The cold against his naked human skin. The snow beneath his bare, no longer padded, feet. Even the pain of the silver arrow lodged in his upper back.
Everything disappears but her.
But then a familiar voice calls out, “Olafr? Is that you?”
He blinks, and his eyes come to rest on the familiar face of the she-wolf who stands beside his fated mate. A well-remembered face, yet she does not seem much older than when he saw her last, so many winters ago.
Olafr has to work hard to push the words in his mother’s tongue through his human voice box. “Aunt Lisha?” His accent, he discovers then, sounds rather slow and thick in comparison to his brother’s.
Then comes the pain once more, rising up and forcing him to lose his grip on the consciousness he’s been fighting to hold on to since tumbling through the time gate.
“No, no,” he mumbles in his father’s tongue. “Must stay. With her. Must…”
The pain overwhelms him, engulfing him in fire and forcing his eyes closed as his body falls into the snow. But this time, there is no staying awake. Only blackness and the memory of her eyes, staring back at him. She is his.
His. His. His.
10
S o …that happened.
We all stare in the aftershock of the huge Viking crumpling into
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