The Alpha Wolf's Secret Baby (Wolves of Anchorage 3)

Violet

Each morning when she woke up, she could hardly believe she’d made it. She’d escaped her pack.

She’d only been gone for three months, but her life had improved drastically.

She no longer woke up petrified. She didn’t spend the entire day squeezing her hands together, just waiting for her father to erupt. She didn’t watch her father’s mood constantly, ready to shield her younger brothers and sisters from his wrath.

She didn’t have to mate with a male who would only treat her like his property. She didn’t have to bring a child into the world that would have the same fate as she had. That was the biggest relief.

She did feel quite a bit of guilt for leaving her siblings, but there was nothing she could do about that. Her mother wouldn’t join her and neither would her sister. Her brothers were at least treated somewhat fairly by her father.

She’d left home in her wolf form, with a single bag of clothing looped around her neck. She’d run hard and fast, and she’d made her way across the Northwest Territories, then gone south toward New Brunswick. Some days she worked enough to earn a bus ticket. Once she even took a train. When she’d reached the ocean, she finally stopped, making her new home in Nova Scotia, Canada. The journey took her one full month.

She figured 5,000 miles was far enough away from her pack. Her father would never bother to try and look for her. He might search in a fifty-mile radius, just because he’d be humiliated that she left before he could marry her off, which meant he’d have to find a new mate for the despicable Jeremiah.

Once she’d arrived in Nova Scotia, she’d had no idea what to do. She’d found a town called Wolfville, which made her smile. There, she’d stumbled into a witch, a young female named Onyx who worked at a campground.

Onyx’s main task was leading beginner hiking groups through the woods. She got Violet a job there too, even getting her in touch with someone who could fake her paperwork.

At the campground, Onyx and Violet had met Angelina, a wolf shifter whose former pack sounded even worse than Violet’s.

Violet loved her job. One of Violet’s tasks each evening was to make sure all of the campfires were extinguished. Nova Scotia did not have as many wildflowers as other parts of the world, but with their thick forests, a campfire could start a fire anywhere.

One particular evening, Violet made her rounds, checking off her list. The humans had done a pretty good job handling their fires. Of course, the campground threatened hefty fines if they did not, so they had a lot of incentive to comply with the rules. Also, the campground would ban them for life if they committed too big of an infraction.

As she reached the south side of the campground, she caught the scent of a male shifter.

Immediately, she was on alert. Of course, there were many shifters in Canada. It was a perfect place for them to live, featuring lots of wilderness and lots of wide-open spaces. But not many came this close to a human campground.

Angelina had told her about several, and according to her, for the most part, the wolf shifters in the Nova Scotia area were quite reclusive. Occasionally, there were a few in town that were not associated with a pack. A few even lived human lives and worked in Halifax and a few attended Acadia University, which was close by.

This male shifter was young, but not as young as a university student might be.

Shifters didn't harm humans. But it still made her uneasy to have one of them around. She would have to stay overnight at the campground and try to find out what was going on.

She sat down on a rock, but she wasn't good at waiting. She got up and started trying to track him. She was good at figuring out where shifters were, but she wasn’t the best at tracking.

Then, she spotted him. She sucked in a breath. The male was gorgeous. She didn’t even have the words to describe him.

She'd never found males particularly attractive. Or even if she had, that inclination had been stamped out in her mind. Males equaled misery in her world.

She was unwilling to ever become someone's pawn like her mother had been. That was no way to live life, at the whim of someone else. She wasn't going to live according to an Alpha's rules, and she sure wasn't going to live according to some random male’s, even if he claimed he was her mate. So it was best for everyone if she just stayed away from any male shifter at all. The risk wasn't worth it.

Not that she thought she'd be swept off her feet and fall helplessly in love if she let herself look. But attraction made people do crazy things, and so did hormones and biology and instinct. She was rational; she knew those things were a factor. But she would not be controlled by them. After watching her mother and the rest of the females in the pack suffer, it was amazing to her that any female would allow her biology to dictate her life.

But that was a problem for another day. Right then, figuring out what this shifter was doing was her problem. He was dressed like a human. He had on jeans and hiking boots and a long-sleeved t-shirt that said University of Acadia.

Most shifters like her family kept human clothing for times when it was unavoidable, but they certainly didn't wear them with ease. This shifter was comfortable in his clothing. She hated to admit it, but he wasn’t just gorgeous, he was hot, as the humans said.

He went beyond just good looking. He was tall, with dark hair that curled at the ends. It wasn't styled, but the messy hair looked good on him. She couldn't see his eyes clearly, but she assumed they were dark, because his skin was a deep tan, sort of a bronze color. And he was smiling, showing off perfectly straight teeth. His jaw was sharp and so were his cheekbones. They became even more prominent the more he grinned.

The male shifters in her pack almost never smiled. When they did, they were cruel, self-satisfied smiles, usually at someone else's expense.

"Hey!" the male called out. He was still smiling and now he was walking toward her.

Oh shit. He had spotted her. She had done a crap job of hiding.

Now look at what you've done! You were staring at him, and now you've been found.