Read Online Lonely Alpha by Ranae Rose - Free Book Online Page B

to go. They flat out left, knowing they
couldn’t contend with the three larger packs. Went out west
somewhere to find a new place to settle.”
    “What about the others?”
    Jack grimaced. “There was a lot of fighting,
a lot of territorial disputes. Things got pretty ugly, and one pack
was hunted to near extinction. Only women and children were left,
and most of them went away, though some did choose to join one of
the remaining packs.”
    “And the last two?”
    “My pack was one of the last two. Of course,
this all happened long before I was born, but long story short,
there were years of ugly fights, and the other pack dwindled. There
were deaths, though some members got out while they could, and a
few even gave up and joined the Half Moon Pack. Then just the Half
Moons were left, kings and queens of the mountains.”
    “But now it’s just you?”
    Jack nodded. “By the time I came around, the
pack was pretty small. Decades had passed since the only other pack
in the Smokies had been destroyed, which left my family without
another pack to seek mates from. So mates were hard to come by,
which meant that there weren’t many babies being born into our
family. Some of the Half Moons mated into other packs faraway, and
some just left, hoping to find someone somewhere. Others gave up on
trying to find a shifter mate and married humans.” He smiled wryly.
“I have an aunt whose husband has no idea that she’s a
shifter.”
    “What about your parents?”
    “My parents passed away years ago in an
accident. Eventually it was down to just me and a couple of my
cousins, and then they packed up and left for Alaska.” He frowned.
“Last I heard from them, they were doing just fine out there on the
tundra.”
    “Why didn’t you leave?”
    Jack’s mouth twisted stubbornly, his jaw
jutting out. “An alpha doesn’t leave his pack.”
    Alpha. Well, now that he said it, she could
believe it. She studied his strong jaw, remembering how good he was
at tilting it arrogantly, as he had when she’d first arrived on his
property, lost. “Even if his pack leaves him?”
    Jack nodded. “Even then. It’s not like I
could join another pack. My father was an alpha, and his father
before him, and so on and so on, back through the generations. When
you’re born an alpha, you either live as an alpha or a loner.
There’s no in between.”
    “Jack.” She reached out and touched him,
laying her unhurt hand inside his. The idea of him living his days
out alone on the mountain, longing for a family that had crumbled
around him, was unexpectedly agonizing. He was too young for such a
depressing existence – not that she would have wished it on a
person of any age. “It must be awfully lonely out here. How do you
stand it?”
    He shrugged. “I guess a part of me has been
hoping all this time that some of my family – maybe my cousins –
would come back, and that they might even bring fresh blood to
build up the pack again.”
    “What about you? Did you ever think you might
find a mate?”
    He shrugged again. “You spend enough time out
here by yourself in the mountains and sometimes you start to think
you might never see another person again, let alone be lucky enough
to run into a pretty female shifter.” His eyes bored into hers as
he said it, and Mandy felt alarmingly as if she were melting under
his gaze.
    Maybe she shouldn’t have asked. Clearing her
throat, she searched her mind for something to say to dispel the
tension that was mounting between them. When he looked at her that
way, she felt like all her bones had disappeared. If he didn’t
stop, she wasn’t going to be able to get up off the bed.
    The sound of busting glass cut through the
silence, startling them both. Mandy rolled reflexively, shielding
her face from a shower of glass shards that had constituted the
windowpane just a moment ago. “Jack!” She bumped her hand on the
edge of the bed and pain caused her throat to tighten as nausea
threatened to