Taking the Beta Male

"Quiet!" came a harsh whisper, and a strong hand grabbed his arm warningly.

Then it started.

With an ugly, coughing snarl, Tate leaped across the clearing, aiming for that vulnerable left side. His tactics were brutally clear. He would knock Laura to the ground with his superior size and strength. Once she was down, he would be able to pin her and finish her off at his leisure.

Instead, Laura spun, blindingly quick. As Tate barreled past her, she leaped for his hindquarters, her teeth ripping into his hamstring, her claws tearing deep into his back. The larger wolf gave a scream of pain, turning and snapping, but he could not reach her with his jaws.

"That's it," came a deep growl to his right. "Finish him."

Cal looked over, then quickly away. Clark's face was feral, full of blood-lust.

With Laura's teeth and claws savaging him, Tate, in desperation, shifted, his hands reaching out to grab a fallen branch. He raised it high in the air, clubbing her over the back. If it had been sound, he might have killed her, snapping her spine. As it was, it broke on the second blow, falling into rotten, termite-eaten fragments. Still, Laura gave a pained whine and bounded away, shaking her head dazedly.

Tate staggered to his feet. His back was scored with claw marks, and his right hamstring was a bloody ruin. Rivulets of dark blood trickled out and down the back of his leg. Barely able to stand, he looked desperately around the clearing.

"Oh, that was stupid. He should have shifted back. But maybe's he's too bad hurt. It takes concentration, you know. What a pity." The voice was amazingly unsympathetic. "It's all over now."

Laura bobbed and weaved, her eyes pitiless, forcing Tate to turn to face her, every step exacerbating his agony. Every time he moved towards his knife, she blocked his path. His face was pale, streaked with sweat and blood. She charged and ducked away, well out of reach of his flailing hands, which were curled into impotent fists.

The end, when it came, was quick. Off-balance following another charge, Tate fell to his knees. In a flash, Laura was on him, her jaws closing around his throat. He sprawled helplessly under her charge. Her hind legs, tipped with vicious claws, dug into the skin of his stomach, prepared to spill his intestines across the dusty ground. She paused for moment, and Cal half-imagined he could hear her demanding his surrender. Then she shook her head, as if in emphasis, her teeth biting deep into the muscles of Tate's neck.

"All right!" The voice was a choked half-scream, full of fear. "I yield, dammit. I yield!"

A shocked murmur, rising to a shout, ran across the clearing. Many of the women, Cal could see, were cheering, their eyes brimming with tears, and he wondered how terrible their lives had been under Tate's rule as alpha.

Laura backed away, her body shimmering as she shifted back into human form. Her glorious eyes, rising to meet his, were incandescent with triumph.

He saw a flicker of movement behind her. It was too late to warn her, too late to scream-

Too late to do anything put yank the revolver out of its holster and pull the trigger. The sound of the gunshot was as loud as thunder in the clearing.

His face slack and surprised, Tate fell to the ground, the knife he had been preparing to plunge into Laura's back slipping from his loosening fingers. A neat round hole was in the middle of his forehead.

"Be warned," Calvin Horace Smith said, putting the revolver away. "Some sheep have guns."

*****

I should never have left her up there, he thought.

It was three nights later. He was sitting at his kitchen table, picking at a dinner he didn't want and could barely taste.

After he had killed Tate, Laura had first asked, then demanded, and had finally pleaded for him to leave. The other three alphas had backed her up. The situation had looked like it was about to spiral out of control when he finally, grudgingly, got in his truck and headed back down the mountain. As he drove away he had looked behind him and shivered, the stares of the shifters following him before they were lost from sight.

A dozen times in the last three days, he had made up his mind to head back up Lupe Mountain. A dozen times, better sense had reasserted control before it was too late, although sometimes it was a near thing. Yesterday evening he had been halfway out of town before he had pulled over to the side of the road, silently swearing to himself. He had argued the issue back and forth for nearly half an hour before he had turned around and gone back home. Once there, he had stayed on the back deck as the spring evening slowly turned into a chilly night, hoping to see a familiar, golden-furred form come bounding out of the brush at the edge of his property.

What made it worse was that he had no way of contacting her. There were no land lines up on the mountain, and Laura had not had time to replace her cell phone before her showdown with Tate. And he, damn it, had not been smart enough to get the numbers from the three alphas who had gone up there with her. So he was forced into a limbo which was slowly driving him insane with worry. What if the members of the pack had attacked Laura after he had left? Despite her bravery and skill, he was under no illusions about what her fate would be if that happened. Four shifters would be no match for the combined ferocity of the pack.

He sat back in his chair, dropping his fork onto his plate with a clatter, and stared dispiritedly out the window at the meager traffic passing by. He had always thought of himself as a patient man, but this nagging, twisting tension was unbearable. If something had happened to Laura, would anyone even bother to tell him? Or would hope slowly dwindle and die, like the autumn wind pulling the last leaves from a tree?

An old Pontiac coupe slowly made its way up the street, then turned into his driveway. That better not be someone asking me to look at their dog, he thought petulantly. Work hours are over. And if it's those damn Mormons, coming here to save my immortal soul, I'm going to tell them I've spent the last week making passionate love to a werewolf. That should keep them out of my hair for a few months.

His jaw fell open when the door opened. A familiar form climbed out of the car, pausing only to pull a duffel bag out the trunk. He slowly stood, numb with a mixture of joy and anger, as Laura walked through the front door.

"Hey," she said hesitantly.

"Hey," he replied.

"Got all my stuff," she said. "Looks like Tate didn't have time to sell my car or throw my art supplies away."

An awkward silence filled the room. Calvin sorted through his emotions. Joy at her return. Rage, that she had not bothered to contact him. A shameful fear, that his comfortable lifestyle would be well and truly altered for the rest of his life.

Lastly and most strongly, love, blazing pure.

He took a deep breath. "Never," he said, his voice flat. "Never do that to me again, Laura. I love who you are. But you can't ask..." He blinked as his eyes filled with tears. They trickled down his cheeks, and he didn't bother to wipe them away. "You can't ask me to stay down here, not knowing if you're alive or dead. I can't do that. I won't do that. Call me. Write me. Send up a fucking smoke signal. But never put me through that again."

She cocked her head, visibly confused. "Why would I be dead?"

"Oh, I don't know," he said, his voice rising. "Maybe because I killed the fucking alpha of the fucking Lupe Mountain pack? Remember that, how your lover put a bullet in his brain in front of God and everyone? Christ, I've been locking my door every night. I can't sleep, I can barely eat. I'm worried about my family, about Lisa at my practice, about my neighbors. What the hell am I supposed to do if the pack comes down the mountain, looking for revenge?"

Understanding dawned in her eyes. And with it, a suppressed glint of humor. "Oh," she said. She dropped the duffel to the floor and crossed the space between them in three quick steps, hugging him hard. "I'm sorry. Cal, I am so fucking sorry. I forgot. You don't understand."

"I don't understand what?" he asked, his patience dangling by a thread.

"You didn't kill the alpha of the pack. Remember? I had already won. And when he attacked me, after he had already yielded and admitted defeat, he was attacking the alpha. In that moment, he became a renegade. So when you killed him, you were dispensing justice. As my mate, you had every right to do it. Hell, it was your responsibility.

"What you did was cement your position. There is not a single thing you could have done which would have done more to earn their respect."

"So...they're not going to come down here and disembowel me some night?"

She smiled at him. "They're more likely to come and pin a medal on you."

He shook his head. "I don't understand your people, Laura. I really don't. They were content to live under a madman like Tate, but the instant you beat him, he's fair game?"

Laura nodded. "It's an odd system. Very hierarchical. But it works, mostly. When it doesn't...well, you've seen the results. But never think they were content. Most of them were terrified. We've spent the last four days thrashing things out up there." Her nose wrinkled as she took in the half-eaten pot pie and the tater tots on his plate. "Is that your supper?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I've got something much nicer you can eat," she said, snapping open the button on her jeans. "Why don't you take off those silly clothes, make me come two or three times, and I'll tell you all about what happened?" She moved the plate to the side, sitting on the table.

He goggled at her. "Here?"

She grinned at him. "Why not? You're here. I'm here. I'm horny." She sniffed the air. "You're horny."

"You're unbelievable," he said, but his hands moved forward to slide her pink panties down off her hips and to the floor. He bent down, inhaling her female scent. The sight and smell of her naked body made him harden in his pants, and he moved forward, his hands parting her lips, licking her pussy fondly. "So what happened after I left?" he asked between licks.

"Oh, that's nice, honey," she sighed. "Well, the first thing that happened is that the other alphas jumped in and made sure no one went off half-cocked and did something stupid. The last thing we needed was for half the...ohhh...pack fighting the other half.

"Then Alex and Howard came up." Her voice grew pensive. "I'm going to have to have a long talk with those two sometime soon. There's no way they could have got here this quick unless they were warned something was up. I think if we hadn't suggested it, we would have been maneuvered into doing what we did, regardless. My money's on Pine Ridge. He's a clever old fuck.

"We buried Tate, which was more than he deserved, but shit. He had been alpha." Her voice quavered suddenly. "And we did the same with Graham. Poor old bastard. We kept Alex away from that. He was fond of his grandpa."

Her voice grew hard. "The next two days were the trials."

"Trials?" he asked, looking up.

She wove her fingers into his hair. "Get back down there. Yeah, trials. For some of Tate's cronies. We ended up with five banishments. And two death sentences. Blaze and Channing. We gave them to the women they had...abused. Wasn't much left of them to bury, when they were done."

He looked up at her from where he was working. Her eyes were closed, her hands on her breasts, gently kneading. Her chest rose and fell, her breath beginning to come short and quick. He dove back in to the junction of her thighs, his tongue finding the engorged nub of her clitoris, peeping out from under its hood.

"Alex and Garrett finally...kicked me out...this afternoon. Said I was only getting in their way, and besides, if I kept running around...oh, fuck Cal, right there, you're eating me so nice...

"Stupid pups. Think they know everything," she panted. "I'll show them." Her grip on his scalp became almost painful. "Oh, yeah." Her thighs locked around his head, her groin rolling up to meet his tongue as her climax crashed through her.

When her legs at last released his head from their death-grip, his mouth and lips were sticky with her female nectar. "More?" he asked, blowing a stream of warm air across her cleft.

She jumped, then laughed shakily. "No. Not right now, at least."

"So Alex and Garrett got tired of you and kicked you out?" he asked, frowning.

"Well, not really," she admitted, smiling. "I think it was because I was complaining about how much I missed you. And trust me, Cal. When a female shifter misses her mate, everyone knows it. So they sent me down the mountain to, as Garrett put it, 'get myself good and laid.'"

She slid off the table, landing in his lap, which he didn't mind at all. "So what now?" he asked, around the armful of delightfully curvy female.

"Why do you still have your clothes on?" she asked reasonably.

"Because if I take them off, I'm not going to get an answer to my question."

She pouted. "Sometimes, Cal, I'm not really sure what I see in you. You're no fun at all. Oh, all right," she said, as he scowled at her. Her voice became suddenly tentative, as if she feared his reaction.

"Garrett and Alex need me to back them up. I know these people. They don't.

"But we have to move them off the mountain. It's too isolated. And it makes us, makes shifters," she amended, "too insular. We can't relate to normal humans. We start to see them as prey. And that's no good for anyone.

"We're going to move into Larkspur. A few at a time, over the next couple years. Hopefully so slowly no one will notice. We'll get jobs and blend in, just like the Lodge Creek and Medicine Bow packs. Pine Ridge is different. They're on that big damn reservation over in South Dakota. They've never had to worry about hiding. People over there are used to them.

"We'll be able to support each other without drawing attention. And there's more than enough wild country up here to satisfy anyone who needs to run and hunt. I've laid down the law, though. We're staying the hell away from the farms and ranches. Anyone who wants to prove what an awesome hunter they are can go bring down an elk or something. We don't need to go after livestock. It's more trouble than it's worth. I don't want anyone else to end up like Lowell."

"What happened to him, by the way?" he asked, nuzzling her breasts.

"That damn fool." She sighed, but whether it was because of his caresses or disgust with the young man he could not tell. "He's on probation. If he doesn't pull another stupid stunt, he's got the makings of a pretty good man. He was just young and dumb. Hell, I was the same way once. Had to prove myself to everyone." She stood for a moment, pulling off his clothes, until he was as naked as she.

"By the way, how did you get to be a such a good shot?" she asked, sitting back on his lap and kissing him deeply. Her bare hand stroked his cock slowly, readying him for pleasures to come.

His lips twisted wryly. "I never told you about Mom, did I? She was Jackson County pistol champion four years in a row back before I was born. She taught Craig and me how to shoot when we were kids. Never thought I'd kill anyone, though."

He looked deep into her eyes. "Now. What about us?"

She bit her lip. "Well. I've thought about it a lot. Before we close up the camp up on the mountain, I'm going to have to spend time up there. Maybe a week or so every month. Hopefully not too much more than that. I'm really impressed with Alex. He's going to be a tremendous alpha.

"Do you think," she said quietly, "that if your girlfriend moved in with you, an artist girlfriend who was sometimes out of town doing work for her shows, you could deal with it? That your family and friends would understand? I could get a place downtown," she said in a rush. "A little art gallery where I can sell my work. I don't want people to think I'm sponging off you.

"And maybe, after a year or two, if we...if we still feel the same way about each other, you might like to marry me?"

In answer, he lifted her in his arms, his hands cupped around the taut golden curves of her rear. Slowly, gently, he moved her, so that when he lowered her, his erection slipped into her silky depths, making the two of them one.

"I think," he said quietly, his heart pounding with passion and joy, "that you've got a deal."

Her eyes kindled as they met. Looping her arms around his neck, she began to bounce on his cock.

"Good. That's what I expected you to say."

He smiled as he kissed her, then jumped, startled. Through the window came haunting howls, seemingly from no more than a few yards away. "What?"

"Relax." Her eyes were distant as she loved him, her inner channel squeezing his shaft sweetly. "They're just...celebrating. It's not every day an alpha takes a mate.

"Especially when she takes a beta male."

The End