Page 74 of The CEO Alpha’s Substitute Mate

Ariela shoves off my chest hard enough to push me back, and I grind my teeth, annoyed at my son. I watch Ariela swim away until she reaches the shallow water, Luca beside her.

Her hair is off her neck. She’s pushed it over the far shoulder to wring it out, and the line from behind her ear down to the top of that shoulder is bare, with lake water running off it.

Everything else disappears from my sight except one patch of skin at the base of her neck, and the wolf locks on to it. I’m moving through the water before I decide to move. My fingers spread over that skin with my thumb under her jaw.

She startles under my hand. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

I take my hand back. She rubs the place where my fingers were, then turns back to Luca while my body feels cold in a lake that’s running hot. A mating mark goes exactly there, on that patch of skin, and my wolf just walked me through open water toward it with my teeth already down.

“Stay in the water, both of you.” My voice comes out with the wolf still in it. “I’m going to walk the perimeter. I’ll be back.”

“You’re going now?” She shades her eyes. “You only just got in.”

“Stay where I can hear you,” I order before shifting, not even caring about preserving my clothes. My wolf needs out.

I run the north line first, then swing wide along the ridge where the old boundary stones sit under the moss. My paws are marking as I go, dragging pack scent along the line, which is a job I haven’t done myself since my father died. Any of my men could do it. I want the work today because I need my head somewhere other than the base of that woman’s throat.

A wolf gets one fated mate.

It’s how we’re built, and every shifter alive learns it before he learns to read. Elena was mine. We ran the pack together, we burned in bed, and we sat at opposite ends of a very long table for five years without either of us wanting to know the other one better. When she was killed, my wolf went silent for four months, and what was left afterward was a hollow in my chest that I stopped noticing after the first year. I slow to a trot at the top of the ridge.

The hollow isn’t there.

I go looking for it deliberately, pushing at the place where it should be, and there’s nothing to find. The ache is long gone, replaced by something else, a deliberate pulsing, a warmth that I’ve never felt before.

Something moves in the brush to my left. I turn with my hackles up as two wolves come out of the tree line at a walk. The gray one with the pale ruff is Isabella. Behind her, keeping half a length back out of old habit, comes Damien. All three of us shift.

“What are you doing here?” I look between the two.

“Don’t look at me like that.” Isabella shakes her hair out of her face. “I came out to see you and Luca. Neither of you were at the estate. Then I ran into Damien on the drive, and he said let’s go for a run, so here I am. What are you doing out here?”

“I brought Ariela and Luca out here for a swim.”

Isabella looks at me and laughs. “How very domestic of you.”

“I was just looking after my son.”

“I’m sure. And it’s got nothing to do with his mother.” She turns her head toward Damien without dropping her voice at all. “He’s a goner for her. I’m not seeing things, right?”

Damien laughs, which he’ll regret later. “I’d say you’re right about that.”

I’m drawing breath to end this when the scream comes up through the trees. It’s short and cuts off in the middle. I don’t know how I know, but my wolf knows who the voice belongs to. I’ve already shifted, my heart pounding viciously. The run back is a dead sprint the whole way, brush tearing along my flank, with Damien and Isabella losing ground behind me at every stride. Two hundred yards out, the wind turns, and I get blood, two kinds of it, hers mixed with my son’s.

I come through the alders into the open. Four rogues are on the shore. One is circling wide toward the water. Three are pushing in on a woman who has put herself between them and a six-year-old. Ariela’s got a fallen alder branch up in both hands, holding it out at the nearest muzzle, keeping her weight off a left leg that’s opened from mid-thigh to the knee. The stones underneath her have gone dark for three feet in every direction. Luca is behind her with blood down one arm and both fists in the back of her swimsuit.

“Get back!” she’s shouting at them hoarsely. “Stay away from him!”

She swings the branch and connects. The rogue doesn’t even turn its head.

I take that one at the shoulder and put it into the stones. It never sees me, and my jaws close over the back of its neck while it’s still trying to get its legs under it. The neck breaks. I drop it, then reach the second before the body has finished sliding.

Isabella comes past me low, taking the one at the waterline. Damien meets the fourth in the air, and the two of them go over together into the shallows, thrashing white.

The second rogue is bigger than the others, and it comes at my throat, so I give it my shoulder instead and let it bite down. Then I drive it backward off its feet into the alders, holding it there while it opens my foreleg to the bone. Its ribcage is under my chest. I put every pound I have through it until whatever’s underneath me stops moving.

Behind me, Ariela has gone down with Luca wrapped up inside both arms, her body curled over him. She hasn’t made a sound since her yell. Damien’s rogue breaks and runs. Isabella chases after it. I shift back on the stones with blood running off my arm.