She knew better. Perfect meant making sure the wolf kind got a fair break. Although the way Leidolf was touching her made her desire something more.

His fingers continued their leisurely caress against her skin, heating her blood. She didn't want to feel anything for him, but already he was hot-wiring her pheromones, triggering her need to have him, to stay with him, to fulfill her s.e.xual fantasies. But more than that. She still envisioned seeing the pups with Felicity, and that triggered Ca.s.sie's own mothering needs. She stifled a sigh. Everything and everyone were ganging up on her, trying to coerce her to take another path.

"How is your shoulder?" Leidolf asked, breaking into the dreamlike state she was still enjoying.

"It's really bad." She lied, knowing just where this dialogue was going.

His fingers stilled at her waist. Then he began the slow, methodical stroking again. "So being on top like you are now is less comfortable?"

"For what?" She knew what he was getting at. The alpha leader had a job to do. Take a mate. Create his offspring. Secure the future of his lupus garou pack. Similar to the wolf packs' existence, only the human element did come into play. He seemed to be leaving that part out.

He sighed heavily and then moved his hands up her waist, his thumbs touching the curve of the undersides of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "You know what we both need. What we both want. We're right for each other. You'd make a capable pack-leader's mate."

At first, she didn't say anything in response, her ire instantly stoked. h.e.l.l, of course she would make a capable pack-leader's mate. What happened to: I want you... I need you... I can't live without you? The human element, buster?

Then again, alpha males didn't wear their feelings on their sleeves, and if she had to guess what this was all about, she'd say he couldn't reveal his feelings until she said I do in a werewolf way. Or maybe it was all about s.e.x with him. That and the possessiveness. Conquering a mate who seemed unconquerable. Laying claim to a female when there were fewer of them to be had. Maybe he would never be able to say he truly loved her.

Still, she felt as if she was sliding down a slippery mountain of negative responses, and when she reached the bottom, she'd ultimately end up saying yes.

Despite her mind saying he was wrong, that she didn't need to have a mate, her body kept telling her that, in one aspect, he was so right and she had to reconsider. She'd been a loner for too long. And she had a job to do. It's what made her whole. Not the idea of running some pack with an alpha male. Even if he was as delicious as Leidolf.

Leidolf moved his hands to either side of her head and turned it so she was resting her chin on his chest, his green eyes challenging her to be honest with him. "Tell me the truth, Ca.s.sie. You don't belong to a pack."

She turned her head away and laid it back down on his chest again. "So what gave me away?"

He chuckled lightly. "Every inch of your skin blushed when I looked at you--from your cheeks to your toes. You were embarra.s.sed. Which told me you weren't with a pack and haven't been for a very long time. How long ago did you lose your family, Ca.s.sie?" His voice was soothing, like she envisioned a psychiatrist's voice would be as he made her lie down on a couch and reveal the guilt she felt that she alone had survived the humans' brutality to her family.

She swallowed hard and blinked away tears. She could live another two hundred years, but the images--the smoke, the blazing heat, the fires reaching for the sun as if to join it in one unholy blaze--would never fade completely from her mind.

"Ca.s.sie, how long ago?"

"Since I was a teen. Thirteen. I lost them when I was thirteen."

"Mother, father?"

"My parents, sister, three uncles, two aunts, and a cousin. It was a pretty summer day, and I'd been searching for a lupus pack in a forest near a river where I'd discovered them the previous spring. My father kept warning me to stay away from them, counseling me that we weren't like them. That without our human disposition, they could be dangerous. But I didn't believe it.

"They played like we play, hunted, and protected each other, just like we did. They even let me get close to the alpha female's pups and play with them. When I smelled the pack's scent in the area again, I was curious how different they would be from our own kind and if they'd accept me like a pack member, even if they hadn't seen me for over a year. Just for fun." She let out her breath in a sigh of frustration.

Leidolf stroked her hair, his fingers gently caressing the strands, making her feel wanted again, which terrified her. What if she got too close to him and he was killed also?

"Ca.s.sie?"

She ground her teeth, wishing she had done something more, wishing she'd taken revenge. "We were hunters, traders, sold skins. Not farmers, sheepherders, or ranchers like our neighbors. We never had anything to do with any of them. They didn't care for us, and we didn't want them to learn what we truly were. So we stayed clear of them and all was fine. But that day, I smelled fires burning from the direction where our homes were, the three cabins not far from each other in the woods. I worried the forest was on fire. I raced home in my wolf suit to reach our homes more quickly. That's when I saw the men, a ranch family, the father, two of his brothers, and a couple of his nephews watching the houses burning."

She took another deep breath and could smell the acrid smoke, the heated air burning her lungs as if it were happening now, saw the flames stretching upward as she watched the fire in the fireplace.

Leidolf kissed the top of her head.

"I thought they'd come to rescue my family. I thought they'd arrived too late, the fire crackling, the heat from the flame like Hades as the houses crumbled and fell. I'd hoped my family had made it out in time. Then one of the men said something to the effect of, 'Their deaths won't bring my sons or nephew back, but at least I won't have to know they're living while my own kinfolk are dead.'"

Leidolf rubbed Ca.s.sie's arm. "Sounds like a revenge killing."

"But for what, Leidolf? My dad never liked Wheeler or his family. None of my family did. The boys were always stealing from the mercantile or other farms around. Half the time, the old man was at the local saloon gambling and drinking. Whoring, too, when he had the money. More than likely, his sons got into trouble over something and somebody killed them. But not my family. They wouldn't have had anything to do with murder."

Leidolf remained silent, but she didn't care if he didn't believe her. She knew the truth.

"I hated the Wheelers, stalked them for months, one by one. I wanted to kill every last one of them like they had killed my family."

"But you didn't, did you, Ca.s.sie?"

She swallowed hard. "I was too much of a coward."

He let out his breath. "You couldn't have killed them in cold blood."

She gave a haughty laugh. "After losing my whole family, you bet I could have."

Again, he didn't respond.

"I could have," she reiterated, wishing she hadn't let them live. Then she sighed deeply again. "I couldn't live on my own. Not that young. Not as a girl. My choices were limited. Either I had to move to the nearest California town and live as a human, attempting to hide the wolf side of me, and hope that someone I didn't know would take me in as a maid or something. I could have ended up with some really bad sorts. I just couldn't imagine life like that. Or I could live with..." Her eyes grew misty. "... the wolves. They didn't mind that I was half human. They accepted me as one of the pack."

"A wolf pack. That's why you study them? h.e.l.l, it's a good thing the alpha leader didn't try to take you as his mate."

Ca.s.sie cast him a tearful smile. "He had a mate. I just had to make sure I wasn't treated as the omega, lowest wolf on the totem pole."

"You'll be the highest one on the totem pole in my pack."

She stroked his muscular arm. "Hmm, well, I'm not joining a lupus garou pack. Not anytime soon. I have a job to do. And as soon as I take care of it, I'll have another, and another. The wolves need me as their advocate."

"I need you. Our kind needs you." He renewed his sensual strokes, every action designed to get her to capitulate.

And if she wasn't so dead set on not joining a pack, she might have given in. His declaration that he needed her might have done it, but that was followed too closely by "our kind needs you," and that's what brought her back to her senses. For the good of their kind. But what of the good of the lupus kind? They weren't as important in the scheme of things, as far as lupus garous were concerned. But they were to Ca.s.sie.

She sighed and closed her eyes, loving the way he touched her, wanting what he was offering, but not about to go there. From the way he spoke, he would have no interest in the regular lupus and her pups. Only in the one lupus garou he wanted to make his mate.

"The truth is that my shoulder's feeling much better." She looked up at him. "And I need to get back to work."

He wrapped his arms around her and frowned. "You can't go anywhere right now. Not dressed as you are. And not until nightfall in your wolf coat."

"You have to let me go," Ca.s.sie said, her voice verging on a growl. She would risk anything to locate the mother and her pups and ensure they were fed and protected.

"Why? What's so important about your research that you had gambled running as a wolf and getting shot over it?"

She could hear his attempt at keeping his voice even, but the testiness gave him away.

She had no choice but to tell him. h.e.l.l, he might even be reasonable about it. She doubted it. "What's important is the survival of a she-wolf and her pups. They have no one to protect them. No alpha male. No pack."

He didn't say anything for quite a while. Anything would be better than the silence. Then as though he knew she was still lying to him, he quietly said, "The wolf is a lupus garou."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "I heard the pups. She's strictly a lupus, not a lupus garou. A lupus garou wouldn't have pups in the wild."

"She behaved like one of our kind. I found her trail and followed it to a creek, but then she lost me. And believe me, no female wolf that had been in the area that recently would have evaded me. Except for a lupus garou like you. It was as though she had human thought processes, that she knew just how I'd look for her, and she did the unexpected."

An odd sensation tingled through her spine. Long ago, her sister and her cousin would evade each other using the water trick. Not that the ploy would be exclusively known to work for them, but still it gave her a ghostly chill of recognition. That she and her sister, Rhoda, and cousin, Aimee, had used the same device in games of escape and evasion.

Trying to ignore the eerie sensation slipping through her bones, Ca.s.sie thought about the times they had chased each other across the river, had made up spooky stories, and--she took a deep breath--talked about the kind of mate they wanted when they were older.

It didn't feel right that she would be the only one of the three girls to ever have a mate. She clenched and unclenched her teeth, then reiterated, "The female I encountered has pups."

"All right," he said, but he didn't sound like he agreed with her. "What if two of them are out there? One, a lupus with pups, and the other, a lupus garou."

Despite hating herself for it, tears collected in her eyes. She quickly blinked them away, but he took notice, like he seemed to about everything she did or said. "Maybe." She didn't think it could be possible that another lupus garou was running around the woods who wasn't part of Leidolf's pack already.

"Unless you're brand new at this business, you have to know that protecting our own kind takes priority over taking care of a feral wolf." His voice had an edge to it, and he was back to being his domineering, rather than his accommodating self.

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Not just a feral wolf, d.a.m.n it." She was unable to see how he couldn't realize how important this was to her. "A mother and her pups."

"Feral wolves still. What were you thinking?"

She fisted her hands against his chest. "Of saving them! What do you think?"

Leidolf let out his breath in exasperation. She laughed at herself. Here she was thinking that being with one of her kind, with his pack, too, might even be vaguely viable, if he agreed to her conditions. Now she figured he'd just laugh at what she'd propose, and so she wasn't about to mention it.

And then he said the unexpected. "You do realize that your need to save the wolf and her pups has to do with a deeper desire to have babies of your own."

Surprised as h.e.l.l that he would think that, she sat back for a second. Sure, she'd thought about having her own babies. All of which she attributed to spring and the she-wolf and her litter and Leidolf's pheromones triggering her own, but she didn't need some alpha male reminding her of it, d.a.m.n it. She didn't even want to think along those lines. Ever. Babies meant settling down permanently. And she really wasn't ready for that.

She rose, her knees on the pine-needle bed, straddling him in a provocative way, her head above the king's, and if she had been sporting a tail about now, she'd have it raised high, too, showing her dominance rather than subordination to the mighty pack leader.

He took his fill of her, his gaze settling on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the way she had her legs spread over him as if inviting him in, and she felt her skin blush again. He smiled and then folded his arms behind his head. "Another problem though that I wasn't thinking of. No moon for a while."

"New moon," she said under her breath. h.e.l.l, if he saw her shift when the new moon was out, he'd realize at once she was a royal since only they could shift during that phase of the moon. Then he would want her all the more.

She never paid any attention to the cycles of the moon--since, as a royal, she wasn't affected by them one way or another--so she hadn't realized it was that time already. "Fine. Then you look for the lupus garou and mate with her. I'll take care of the other wolf and her pups in the meantime."

"Without any clothes to wear?" He shook his head.

"Okay, then I'll stay here while you find the wolves. Just remember to come back for me within a reasonable amount of time with a set of clothes for me."

"As tenacious as you are, I wouldn't put it past you to run off as a naked woman in search of the wolf and her pups." He reached forward and put his hands on her thighs and stroked her skin.

His touch made her wet for him, and she fought lining herself up over his erection and just plain giving in to her s.e.xual needs. "If the other wolf is a lupus garou, she's going to be changing back to her human form, too. I mean, she probably already has. Then she will be freezing and need our help."

"If she's not a royal." His hands stopped at the juncture of her thighs, his thumbs seductively caressing her inner thighs.

"See? If she is, your problem is solved. She'd be a royal. You're one, too. Perfect match." Then she thought of another sticking point. "Oh, except for one problem. You already have another female red lined up." She shrugged, attempting at nonchalance when it really ticked her off in a jealous sort of way. "If this new one you're going to search for doesn't work out, you'll have the other choice."

She meant to climb off him, but he grabbed her wrist and frowned. "What other female?"

"The romance writer? Julia Wildthorn?" Ca.s.sie rolled her eyes. "Don't tell me you've already forgotten your date with her."

"Julia..." Leidolf's brows lifted in recognition. "h.e.l.l, that's Laney and Elgin's doing. Matchmakers, the both of them. How would you..." He gave an evil little grin. "You were snooping at my desk?"

She felt her face heat with embarra.s.sment and tried to recover without showing too much annoyance. "I had to go by your desk when I escaped your bedroom and just happened to see her book open to her very photogenic picture and the note on your calendar. And you had no other books in sight. So what do you think I made of it?"

As soon as she spoke the words, she was mad at herself for explaining any of her actions to him, even if what she said was in part a fabrication. Then she asked the question she was dying to know the answer to and immediately could have kicked herself for asking. "What do you think of her romance books?" She sure as h.e.l.l didn't want him thinking she cared. Even if she did.

A brief flash of amus.e.m.e.nt crossed his face.

Then he grew serious. "I don't agree with her that she should be writing them. Too easy to accidentally give real clues about us away. And you never know when people might think she's basing them on real lupus garous. That we truly exist."

Ca.s.sie smiled, glad he didn't think much of Julia's occupation. Then she frowned. He probably didn't think much of hers, either. "Let me go, Leidolf. I'm not in your pack, and I'm not looking for a mate."

"I'm not searching for any other woman. Not when I've already found my mate." Then he released her, and she quickly moved off him.

He was on his feet so swiftly that he reminded her of a wolf getting ready to take down its prey. "You know what I like about you, Ca.s.sie?"

"No, but I suspect you're going to tell me," she said, stepping away from him as he stalked toward her. She suddenly realized he was backing her into a corner of the cabin.

"You're quick on your feet, compa.s.sionate about a cause--despite my not agreeing with it, sensitive to my needs..." He smiled when she did.

He was sooo arrogant.

"I love how you challenge me with those sensual green eyes of yours, never backing down, not even when you're embarra.s.sed, not even when you know you'll lose."

"You think I'll lose if I become your mate?" she asked, as her back b.u.mped against the wall.

He smiled slyly. "We'll both be winners then." He caged her in, his hands against the wall beside her head, his gaze focused on hers, his body close, the woodsy outdoors smell of him tantalizing her, the feel of his body heat welcome. "No, I'm talking about losing... as in arguments. I'll always win."

"Always?"

He threaded his fingers through her hair and then grabbed handfuls as he lowered his face to meet hers. "Always," he whispered, and she thought she would melt right under him, agreeing to anything.

He was going to kiss her, and even as much as she knew she shouldn't allow it, that nothing good would come of it, she closed her eyes and tilted her head up, antic.i.p.ating his kiss, the hunger, the drive, the fierceness of it. When nothing happened, she looked up at him, a little surprised and a lot disappointed.

He wore the same bigheaded smirk he'd worn before, and she shoved the palms of her hands flat against his chest, meaning to push him out of her way. As muscular as he was, she couldn't budge him. He smiled a little more, though. Was he amused that she had revealed how much she wanted him when she had been saying no all along?

And then he cradled her face between his hands and kissed her. A whisper of a kiss, so light it was like the feathery touch of b.u.t.terfly wings fluttering against her sensitive lips, but it was enough to start a slow burn building inside her. Making her want so much more.

That's when she curled her hands around his muscular arms and reached up to kiss him harder. Not really hard, but just enough to remember him by until she had a chance to meet a cute human guy and have a fling for a night. Because after being with Mister Totally Hot and Tempting, she'd have to have her needs met somehow or she was going to burst into flames with unfulfilled desire.

Her kiss against his lips went unanswered. And she felt a little more than disappointment again. Although she figured he was holding back unless she agreed to be his mate. Ransoming his affection. Still, she only wanted a kiss. So she reached her hands up quickly and rested them at the back of his head, holding him just where she wanted him. This time, she kissed him. Only he responded way too much, slipping his arms behind her back between her and the wall, and pressing her against his arousal, throbbing with need.

His lips were still noncommittal, even if the rest of him advocated wanting a whole lot more. And then as she touched her tongue to his lips, he devoured her as if the dam holding back the storm waters broke. Fierce and determined, hot and demanding. And she shamelessly responded, falling under the alpha leader's spell, her tongue tasting, touching, and teasing his, her fingers winding through his satiny hair, her body melting against his--awakened, alive, wanting.

But suddenly Leidolf pulled away, his eyes darkened and clouded with l.u.s.t. "h.e.l.l, woman. If you're not ready to accept me as a mate, don't kiss me like that."

She nearly groaned when he gave her up. "I just wondered what it would feel like to be kissed by someone like you."