The Alpha's Mate (31 page)

It didn’t at first and then she remembered.
Stay a fool or change your ways.
“It does, indeed.”
Elizabeth nodded soberly. That advice could go either way. She’d
changed her ways. She’d be a fool to refuse Marshall because of a
simple genetic complication, but she’d also be a fool to stay with
a man who didn’t love her.

Max wasn’t exaggerating. The path from Main
Street was uphill, but the path was wide and in the steepest
places, tree roots formed steplike risers where the soil was worn
away. This path was narrow, covered with loose soil and pebbles and
that was where the ground was bare. The rest was covered with slick
grasses that slid her back two steps for every three she took or
overgrown vines that tangled around her ankles no matter how she
tried to avoid them.

A half hour into her climb, her calves ached
and sweat glued her shirt to her back. Her hair was a mess and she
wasn’t sure what had done more damage to her neck; the mosquitos
biting it or her slapping it to drive them away.

On flat ground, Max’s sneakers wouldn’t have
been a problem, but with the constant shifting of her feet back and
forth on her uphill trek, she was sure she had blisters that ran
from pinkie toe to heel.

And worse, she had no idea how far she’d come
or how far she had to go. If these people weren’t wolves, they’d be
mountain goats. They were never out of breath or floundering over
roots that instantly shot up six inches right before you stepped
over them. And they moved at speeds her city legs could never hope
to match. So how far was ‘almost an hour’? Was it ‘up a ways’ or a
‘fur piece’?

She needed to take a break. Breath heaving,
Elizabeth stopped, braced her foot against a rock to keep from
sliding backward and reached out for the nearest tree trunk. She
stopped herself just before she grabbed the narrow clinging strand
of poison ivy. She bent and rested her hands on her knees
instead.

“What the hell were you thinking?” she asked
aloud when her breath returned. “You can’t do this.”

“Sure you can. It’s only about fifty yards
ahead.”

Elizabeth shrieked and shot upright, her arms
flailing. She would have tumbled backwards down the hill if
Marshall hadn’t been behind her. He righted her with a soft
chuckle.

She whirled to face him and punched his chest
with both fists. “Don’t do that!”

“What? Catch you when you fall?”

“I wouldn’t have fallen if you hadn’t scared
the shit out of me,” she huffed.

Marshall sniffed dramatically. “I don’t smell
anything.”

“Smell what?” She looked around and raised
her arms in question.

“The shit I scared out of you,” he
chuckled.

“Grrr!” Elizabeth turned away and marched up
the hill, mumbling to herself. This wasn’t going as she
expected.

“Hey! I’m the one who should be angry. This
place is mine. No one comes here without an invitation.” He caught
up with her easily, so close she could feel the heat from his body
along her back.

“Not even your mate?” she asked and then
winced when she realized how that sounded. “I meant the other one,”
she said, making it worse. “Uh, I mean the first one, uh,
Lisa.”

She felt the chill of air on her sweat soaked
back and knew Marshall had stopped.

“Lisa never came here,” he said quietly.

He said something more, but Elizabeth didn’t
hear the words.

The trees stopped at the brink of a narrow
grassy verge that grew up to the edge four solid stone slabs, each
seven or eight feet long, three irregularly overlapping the one in
the center as if it was a small stage with seating all around. It
almost looked man made, but if it was, those hands had worked a
thousand years ago. The moss and lichen growth was thick and
untouched. Water lapped at the edge of the stage.

The pool was large and crystal clear and not
too deep. She could see the sandy bottom. Water bubbled gently up
from the center of the pool sending tiny rippled rings out across
the surface. To her left, there was a section about ten feet wide
where it looked like the water disappeared into thin air. Elizabeth
walked far enough along the bank to see the shelf of rock on the
other side. This was the source of the sound. This pool emptied
over the shelf into a smaller pool and another, smaller yet, beyond
that. The third pool trickled into a rambling trill that
disappeared into the woods beyond.

A slight breeze ruffled the leaves of the
trees and sent the late afternoon shadows and light dancing across
the ground. The sun was still high enough above tops of the tallest
trees to shed its light on the sparkly water. The combination of
rippling water and sunlight gave some of the pebbles beneath the
water the illusion of diamonds.

“This is paradise,” she whispered. No artist
could do this place justice. It was too alive, too filled with
light and movement that could never be caught on film or
canvas.

Marshall stood beside her. “Lisa wouldn’t
come here. She said it couldn’t be beautiful enough to be worth the
climb.”

Elizabeth didn’t look at him, but reached for
his hand. She felt the tingling surge and ignored it. Now was not
the time.

“She was wrong,” she said.

“So was I.” He squeezed her hand. “I was
never meant to be the Alpha, Lizzie. I wasn’t as strong and bold as
my father. I wasn’t as clever and charming as Charles. I wasn’t
anywhere near as smart as Michael.

“My father never spoke to me about being the
Alpha; never told me about what happens to your body and your mind.
I guess he told it all to Charles. He was the expected heir. By the
time the Alpha realized Charles and Mikey weren’t coming back, the
strokes hadn’t taken his mind, but they’d taken his body and his
speech. It was too late to talk. And then the mantle fell to
me.”

Marshall emptied his lungs on a whistle of
air. Elizabeth wasn’t sure where this was going, but she knew it
was important so she stood silently holding his hand and
waited.

“When the mantle falls on your shoulders,” he
continued, “It’s a physical thing. You can feel its weight. Things
you could never do before suddenly become possible. You don’t need
the full moon to call up the change. You can always feel her, even
when she’s new and you can draw on her magic to call up the change
in the others. And when the pack is over the moon, you can call
them, talk to them in your head. The pack is always in your mind.
You can feel them, each and every one of them. It comes on you all
at once, Lizzie, and at first you think you’ll go mad. You have to
learn how to force them into a corner of your mind and shut out
most of it. You have to train yourself to only let the important
things filter through.

“When you’re the Alpha, everyone turns to you
for decisions and advice, even the older ones who have lived long
enough and are wise enough to do those things on their own. No one,
but another Alpha can understand the overwhelming sense of
responsibility you feel for the wolvers under your care.”

“I was fortunate, no, the pack was fortunate
that my mother lived for two years after the Alpha passed. She
sheltered me from them and them from me while I adjusted. When she
died, the pack was left without a Mate and it was my duty to
provide one.”

“And you found Lisa.” Elizabeth knew it was
foolish but something inside her cried, “
Why couldn’t you have
found me?
”

“How did you meet her?” she asked instead.
A question of curiosity, no more
, she lied to herself.

“In a bar. Me and Henry and a couple of the
boys decided to spend a weekend on the town. I asked her to dance
and as soon as I touched her, I knew what she was and I thought she
was meant for me. She was tall and willowy and blonde and beautiful
and built like any young man’s wet dream. She was twenty years
old.”

“
Everything I’m not
,” Elizabeth
thought sadly. But this is what she’d come to find out and she
would see it through.

“And she was mine,” he went on, “I felt the
buzz, that urge to mate. And of course, being what she was, she
felt it, too. We went at it hot and heavy. I brought her home and
most everyone went out of their way to be good to her. Hell, they
all but bowed to her because she was an Alpha’s Mate and my choice.
A short time passed and she learned what we were and it didn’t seem
to bother her at all. We were married by a Justice of the Peace and
mated on the following full moon. Six years later, she died.” There
was a sadness in his voice as he looked out over the water.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, though she wasn’t
sure who she was most sorry for; Marshall for losing his love or
herself for being such a poor potential replacement. She let go of
his hand.

Marshall turned her to face him. He stroked
his thumbs across her cheeks to wipe away the tears she hadn’t
known were there.

“Lizzie, they told you Lisa died in an
accident. They didn’t tell you that she died running away. The
truth is I wanted to bed her. I didn’t really love her and Lisa
wanted to be the Alpha’s Mate more than she wanted to be my mate.
Only she didn’t understand what that entailed. The Alpha’s Mate
shares the mantle. I told her, but she wasn’t listening. She saw it
as a position, not a responsibility. She grew to hate the pack. And
me. And finally she ran.”

Elizabeth put her hands to Marshall’s face
just as his were on hers. “Oh, Marshall, it wasn’t your fault. You
were young and so was she. You didn’t kill her. It was an
accident.”

He pulled one hand away from her and held it
out where they both could see. “It was my responsibility. I knew I
could control the Alpha’s touch, but I didn’t.”

“Fine,” she said as fiercely as her pounding
heart would allow, “I’ll convict you of being young and horny, but
don’t ask me to condemn you for her death. It was an accident. Not.
Your. Fault.”

He went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “I
promised myself I would never make the same mistake again. I won’t
mate with a woman I don’t love no matter how much I want her, no
matter how much the pack needs her.”

“With age comes wisdom.” She wondered how she
could smile when her heart was breaking into a million pieces

Chapter 33

“She’d have to understand that she’d belong
to the pack as well as to me,” he said looking into her eyes.

A piece of her heart slid back into place.
“That stands to reason. The woman who loved you would have to love
the pack. Even the ones she didn’t particularly like.”

“She’d have to understand about sharing the
mantle. She wouldn’t feel it as strongly as the Alpha, but she’d
still feel their sorrow and their pain.”

Another piece tumbled back. “She’d feel their
joy as well.”

“She’d feel them sicken and die.”

“She’d feel new life being born.”

“She’ll feel their anger and their
pettiness.”

“Or their happiness and kindness.”

“Sometimes you’ll feel their hatred.”

All the pieces of her heart came crashing
together. She could barely speak. “Mostly I’ll feel their
love.”

“They’ll pester you endlessly,” he said. He
was trying very hard to remain serious, but his smile gave him
away. “Your business won’t be your own.”

“That won’t be new. It’s been that way since
I got here,” she laughed.

“They’ll treat your house as if it’s their
own, in and out at all hours.”

“Then you better put a strong lock on the
bedroom door. I have my limits.”

Marshall’s hands slipped under her baggy
shirt as he captured her waist. He lifted and twirled her until she
was dizzy with joy.

“Tell me you’ll be my mate, Lizzie Reynolds,”
he shouted.

“I will not,” she shouted back loud enough to
be heard above his laughter.

Elizabeth had all she could do to keep from
giggling like a silly girl at the shocked look on his face. He
abruptly stopped whirling and set her down. She put her hands on
her hips.

“Don’t know how it works where you come from,
Chief Goodman, but around here, a man usually does the askin’
before the woman begins the tellin’.”

She screeched as she hit the water and thus
got a mouthful before flailing to the surface.

“You didn’t even ask if I could swim!” she
sputtered and shook her wet hair from her face. She popped the
sneakers off and threw them to the shore.

“Not deep enough to be a worry,” Marshall
said.

He’d already stripped off his shirt and shoes
and was working at the buckle of his belt. Elizabeth watched him
strip down to nothing, enjoying the magnificent display. He made a
shallow dive and came up beside her.

She gave him a little shove. “How come you
get to take your clothes off before getting wet?”

“That’s your punishment for scaring the shit
out of me.”

She sniffed loudly. “Funny, I can’t smell
anything,” she mocked.

That earned her another dunking when Marshall
grabbed her legs out from under her. She felt his hands at her
waist and thought he was rescuing her, but pulling her head above
the surface was only a byproduct of removing her shirt.

“Hey!”

“There’s no pleasing the woman,” he laughed
as he threw it onto the rocks. “First she complains about having
her clothes on and now she complains when I’m trying to get them
off.”

The water came to just under her breasts and
they bobbed like apples in a basin. Embarrassed, she ducked down
until the water was up to her neck.

“Too late for modesty,” he laughed and lifted
her up. “Have you forgotten that I’ve already seen all there is to
see of the lovely Miss Lizzie.”

She couldn’t help but think of Lisa, long and
lithe. “That was in the dark,” she whispered. The sun hovered over
the tops of the trees. There was still plenty of light.