PRINCE OF WOLVES By Susan Krinard

The wolf set his forepaws on the porch and heaved his body up, struggling to lift himself to the low platform. Alex watched his efforts with a last grasp at objectivity.

Now. Dart him now, and there will still be time to contact the ADC. She clawed at the dart gun and pulled it from her waistband.

But Shadow looked up at her in that precise moment, and she was lost. “I can’t,” she whispered. She let her arm go slack. The dart gun fell from her nerveless fingers, landing in the snow. She stared at it blindly.

Teeth that could rend and tear so efficiently closed with utmost gentleness around her empty hand. Shadow tugged until she had no choice but to look at him again.

She knew what he wanted. She hesitated only a moment before opening the door. Shadow padded into the cabin and found the place she had made for him by the stove, stretching out full length on the old braided rug, chin on paws.

“You’ve made it easy for me, haven’t you?” she asked him, closing the door behind her. “You’re trapped, and I can keep you here until… until I can figure out what to do with you.”

The wolf gazed at her so steadily that she was almost certain that he’d known exactly what he was doing. She wanted to go to him and huddle close, feel the warmth of his great body and the sumptuous texture of his fur. But she had risked too much already. In the morning she’d have to reach a decision about him, and she knew how this would end—how it must end—sooner or later.

Shadow would be gone, and she’d be alone.

Feeling decades older than her twenty-seven years Alex took her journal from the kitchen and retreated into the darkness of her bedroom. She paused at the door, her hand on the knob, and closed it with firm and deliberate pressure.

She stripped off her clothes and hung them neatly in the tiny closet, retrieving a clean pair of long underwear. The journal lay open on the old wooden bed table, waiting for the night’s final entry.

It’s ironic, Mother. I thought I’d become strong. Objective. I can’t even succeed in this.

Her flannel bedsheets were cold; she drew the blankets up high around her chin, an old childhood habit she’d never shaken. Once it had made her feel safe, as if her mother’s own hands had tucked her in. Now it only made her remember how false a comfort it truly was.

* * *

It was a long time before she slept. The sun was streaming through the curtains when she woke again. She lay very still, cherishing the ephemeral happiness that came to her at the very edge of waking.

She wasn’t alone. There was warmth behind her on the bed, a familiar weight at her back that pulled down the mattress. The pressure of another body, masculine and solid.

Peter. She kept her eyes closed. It wasn’t often that Peter slept the night through and was still beside her when she woke. And when he was…

His hand brushed her hip, hot through the knit fabric of her long underwear. When Peter was with her in the morning, it was because he wanted to make love. She gasped silently as his palm moved down to the upper edge of her thigh and then back up again, drawing the hem of her top up and up until he found skin.

Alex shuddered. It had been so long. Her belly tightened in anticipation. Peter wanted her. He wanted her. His fingers stroked along her ribs with delicate tenderness. They brushed the lower edge of her breast. Her nipples hardened almost painfully.

The arousal was a release, running hot in her blood. In a moment she would roll over and into his arms. In a moment she’d give herself up to the sex, to the searing intensity of physical closeness, seizing it for as long as it lasted.

But for now Peter was caressing her gently, without his usual impatience—taking time to make her ready, to feed her excitement—and she savored it. She wouldn’t ruin the moment with words. Peter wasn’t usually so silent. He liked talking before and after making love. About his plans, his ambitions. Their future.

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