Seduction (The Journal of the Wolves of Spruce Hollow)
Read Seduction (The Journal of the Wolves of Spruce Hollow) Online
Authors: Tarrah Betts
Seduction: Journal of the
Wolves of Spruce Hollow
Tarrah Betts
Copyright © 2014 by Tarrah Betts
Published 2014 by The Fairy Factory
Library and Archives Canada
Betts, Tarrah.
Seduction: Journal of the wolves of Spruce Hollow
/Tarrah Betts
ISBN 978-0-9936146-1-3
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission, except for brief quotations to books and critical reviews. This story is a work of fiction. Characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
First, I would like to dedicate this book to
you
. Thank you, dear reader, for taking a chance on an Indie writer with
Temptation (Journal of the Wolves of Spruce Hollow) Book 1
and then coming back for more! You could have read any one of the millions of eBooks on Amazon.com and yet, you chose mine. I am sincerely humbled and so grateful.
Thank you
!
I would also like to thank British rugby player and fitness model,
Stuart Reardon.
Stu, you’re a miracle to me. You helped point me in the right direction when I was so very lost. Thank you beautiful boy.
And lastly, I would like to thank
Lynda Throsby
. Lovely lady, there just aren’t enough words in the dictionary when I think of you. So I will pick two: Grateful and Trust. You’re an angel, Lynda. You were a friend to me when I desperately needed one. Thank you for being such a beautiful human being inside and out. Love ya girl!
Chapter 1
~Aspen~
5 Years later
My mother was dead.
And for the second time in my young existence, I found myself alone and without a parental figure in my life. The first to leave me had been my drug addicted, biological mother and now my hardworking, adoptive mother, Valerie, had lost her battle with an aggressive form of thyroid cancer.
But unlike the first time I lost a mother, this time was different because for the first time ever, I was
completely
alone.
I mean it’s not like some random family was going to take me under their wing and adopt me like Valerie had. I wasn’t a six-year-old girl anymore. I was now a twenty-one year old woman and a grown adult.
A grown adult with no family.
Life just didn’t seem fair sometimes.
Ha! What the hell was I even talking about? What did I know about “fair”?
What the heck did that even mean
? I had certainly never seen my share of “Fair” in my life.
Valerie was buried in the pack cemetery, in a clearing at the foot of the Caledonia Mountains. Although we never spoke of such things during her illness, I knew she would have wanted to be laid to rest there.
Oddly enough, she used to take me to the pack cemetery quite often as a kid quite and I’d always found that there was a peaceful beauty to the surrounding woods and bordering stream. I remembered how we would hold hands and pick wildflowers along the way and then lay them on her mate’s grave.
My mother would stand at the foot of his grave and cry.
Every single time.
I can still hear the echo of the sharp keening sound of her grief in my head. It used to make me feel scared and uncomfortable inside my child’s heart. I didn’t understand why we had to go to such a place if it made her so sad inside.
But those were the thoughts of a child.
As a bonafide adult of twenty-one years old, I now realized that my mother was sad
all the time
. Her heart was broken every minute of every day, but she only let that sadness out when we laid the flowers on her mate’s grave. I supposed it was an act that reminded her that he was truly gone.
It had rained, the day we laid Valerie to rest, poured actually. I half wondered if it was her way of trying to tell me something. Maybe it was a sign to stop standing at her grave in bereft silence while clutching the handful of wildflowers that I’d gathered in her honor.
Who knows, my mother was funny like that.
I had made sure that she was laid to rest right next to her mate, as it only seemed fitting to reunite them. I hoped that she was finally at peace now that they were together again.
Her passing had numbed me to the core, so much so that I didn’t even try to brush away the rain that ran down my face as I stood at her grave. I felt like the cold rivulets served as a replacement for the tears that would not come.
I was alone.
There was no one left but me. No brothers, no sisters, no father
and now no mother.
Stunned, I stood and stared at her grave long after the last co-worker, business associate and friend had offered up their heartfelt condolences. It seemed like there were so many people that had come to pay their respects, which translated into a hundred different variations of
“Your mother was a good woman”
or
“I’m so sorry for your loss”.
I was sorry too but for completely different reasons that I suspected most of them were sorry for.
I was sorry that my mother and I had never developed the type of mother-daughter relationship that I had so fiercely longed to cultivate with her. But the truth was once Roan had deserted us, it was as if I had no parent left at all.
I had needed a mother so desperately but she’d been unable to provide that caring for me. We had no foundation from which to build on and once Roan was gone, it was almost like she didn’t know what to do with me.
As I grew older I came to see that it was really Roan who’d been my parent all along, not Valerie. She had been my mother in name only.
Still, I loved her; in the way that one would love a trusted friend or older sister. And now, I didn’t even have that. I had no one. I was really and truly on my own.
The entire Were pack had come out in full force for my mother’s funeral. But of course they would,
they came for her
, their fellow pack sister. They certainly didn’t come for my sake, that’s for sure. I had ceased to exist for any of them a long time ago.
The truth was, I had never belonged here in Spruce Hollow. I was the proverbial cuckoo in the nest and had not seen nor spoken to any of them since I had run from Spruce Hollow as fast as my little feet could carry me the minute I graduated from high school.
And I hadn’t looked back since.
As I stood in the living room of my mother’s house, two days later, I still couldn’t believe that my mother was gone. Even thought it was the same house where I too had once lived as a child. I didn’t really consider this my home anymore. I hadn’t thought of it in that way in quite some time. Now it was simply the home where my mother had lived.
And I was okay with that.
Sort of.
It had taken me years to bury the disappointment and rejection that were synonymous in my mind with Spruce Hollow. Some days I wondered if I would ever truly get over it.
The house hadn’t changed much in the few years since I’d lived here. Some of the walls were a different color but the furniture was the exact same as the day I’d left.
My bedroom hadn’t changed one bit, right down to the posters of Linkin Park, Fall Out Boy and Coldplay that plastered the Cotton Candy pink walls.
Valerie, the woman whom I’d called Mom since I was six years old was my one last remaining tie to this place.
And now she was gone.
I knew deep down that once the house sold and I settled up the remainder of my mother’s estate with the lawyer, I would never set foot in Spruce Hollow again.
The house was quiet as I sat in the darkness of the living room. I supposed that I could have turned on the lights and maybe chased away some of the darkness that I felt inside of me. But I didn’t want anyone in the pack to know that I was still in Spruce Hollow for several more days until I met with my mother’s lawyer. I couldn’t bear any more of their pitying looks or unwanted condolences.
Fuck the pack members.
They could all go to hell for all I cared.
I didn’t want anything from them, not their dried out casseroles nor their sympathy cards and certainly not their feigned pity. Harsh, I know but they’d certainly displayed no pity for me when Roan had left us five years ago.
Roan.
The name cut right through me like a hot knife in the gut. It bled me out and spilled my insides on the ground.
Pain. Loss. Sorrow.
That’s all I ever felt whenever Roan’s name flittered across my mind.
The problem was that I let people in and gave myself fully to loving them. And then when they left, they took parts of me away with them.
It never failed.
Therefore, I was never whole. I just wandered around empty and missing pieces of myself. Why was it that thoughts of Roan always turned me into a weeping mess?
I hope you are happy wherever you are Roan, you bastard. Because I am not. I am sad and lonely and empty. I am hurting so bad.
I supposed the pain was better than the overwhelming, soul-searing rage that had taken up residence inside me when he’d suddenly dropped his entire life and everything that he’d had in Spruce Hollow and enlisted in the military.
The sting of his betrayal wasn’t as sharp five years later but I still carried it with me wherever I went. Because no matter how many ways I looked at it and how many excuses that I’d made for him over the years, the truth always came back and stared me right in the face:
Roan had abandoned me.
Although I’d never uttered my darkest fears aloud to anyone, part of me was tormented because deep down inside, I’d blamed myself for him leaving.
In my head, I guess I’d figured that he’d grown tired of my increasingly rebellious behavior and general mouthiness and decided that he’d had enough of living with us.