Puppy Love: A Reverse Harem Werewolf Romance (Her Secret Menagerie Book 1) Read online

  What kind of an alpha lost his son during the fucking full moon celebrations with his pack?

  I'd known it was a bad idea, but I hadn't been able to find a sitter for the evening. The change would have placed me too close to typical humans, the temptation too great. Humans were scavengers that had risen beyond their natural order with tools and minds ever so impressive. Yet, their flesh yielded with little difficulty.

  That was forbidden. An accident with a human had cost my pack most of its members long before I was born. No matter what else, it was the most dangerous incident known to wolf kind.

  "Still nothing?"

  I whirled on the alpha who had walked in on me. So much like me, he was tall with olive skin and dark eyes. His hair was longer than my own stiff, severe cut. His brushed his shoulders. Had I been in my true form, I would have wrinkled my muzzle at him. As it was, I settled for a sneer. "It's not like I can tell the cops."

  "And you're stuck here because of meetings all day, so you can't go back out into the country and see what you can find?"

  A pair of donuts and a cup of coffee blacker than night had appeared upon my desk. It was what family did for one another. I walked back to my chair, spun it around, and sat. Then I looked up at my assistant. "I can't go back out into the country because we killed those sheep last night and if I smell their blood again, I'll-"

  He shook his head. "Eat your donuts and drink your coffee. I'll call their local animal control, see if he's turned up. It's not like he's going to shift back."

  "But what if he does, Gabe?"

  If my son revealed what we were, showed the world that we'd only gone underground instead of falling away to the distant memories of humankind, it would be a hellstorm. The government would test the boy, at best, and find out he was related to me. They'd hunt down my pack, perhaps use us to find the other packs spread around the United States. We'd be in for it, and it would be all my fault.

  Just because I was a worthless father who couldn't keep an eye on his boy.

  And that was to say nothing of what our own community would do to us for violating the Supernatural Secrecy Pact.

  To his credit, Gabe rolled his eyes at me. "If he does, we'll pay the PR guys to explain it away. We're already all over those rags with Elvis sightings, anyway."

  "Not us, personally. That was the Little River pack down in Louisiana and-"

  He cut me off. "I know not us personally, but it could be in no time. All it takes is a game cam in the right neck of the woods, you know that. We bought all that property out there, but a few gates and no trespassing signs don't stop determined poachers."

  My nails dug into the glossy wood of my desk, my jaw clenching. The idea of poachers on my land, my pack's soil, hunting our animals and befouling our earth? Fluffy white fur sprouted across the back of my left hand, creeping up my wrist and into the sleeve of a suit that-

  Gabe slapped the spot beside the coffee and shoved it at me. I caught a whiff of his frustration, like burnt toast and mud, and wrinkled my too-human nose at him. Did he want a fight? In the middle of the office? Because if so, I was certainly in the mood to oblige him.

  "Drink," he ordered. "Drink or I pour it down your throat when I call Leo and Xav in here. You're all worried about the kid and here you are, practically snarling at me in broad daylight."

  I growled at him, but I took the coffee and swallowed half in one gulp. It scorched its way down my throat and into my guts, promising a revolt. The second sip was much more befitting a man of my dignity, a human who worked a comfortable couple-billion-a-year job and owned a few too many cars. I sat the mug down and let out a slow, healing sigh.

  "Better?"

  "Get fucked."

  "All the time," Gabe promised. "Once I find a girl that can handle this."

  He emphasized the last word with a thrust of his hips and the motion of his hands down his body. I snorted at him and picked up one of the donuts. "You got me strawberry-filled."

  " 'Course I did."

  "I hate strawberries," I said, trying to hide my amusement.

  Gabe flashed me a smile and glanced at my now-bare left hand. Satisfied that I wasn’t going to ruin the secretive world of werewolves to the general public, he swished his tail out of my office and left me to work.

  ...Alone.

  As much as the work paid, as much as I found satisfaction in it, I had to admit that my office was more of a cage than anything else. But Gabe had promised to look into the matter and I had no doubt that he would do his best to hunt him down.

  When we'd started making dog food, it'd been easy. Hell, we hadn't even needed to have dogs in the kitchen to test it. One of us transformed, shoved a few bites in our mouths, and told the rest if it was a decent meal or not. More often than not, we'd spent only a few days on each formula.

  We were a smash hit. Dogs ate our food like it was prime rib. There had been reviews that dogs had torn into cabinets and refrigerators to get to our kibble and our canned mush. I wasn't the biggest fan of the kibble; it left you feeling a little dry no matter how much water you drank afterward. But some pet owners just couldn't keep up with the demands of wet food, and those nutrients were important regardless of how the pet set got them.

  I spent the next few hours screwing around on the computer. I checked a variety of social media sites, hoping that someone would post my son. Maybe they'd given him a bath, shoved some food in his mouth, and snuggled him up in a pile of cozy blankets. I was supposed to be browsing over the monthly fiscal reports, but my boy was out in the wilderness and who knew if he was safe or not?

  He stood a better chance than most kids who got lost outdoors. His fur was plenty warm for the colder evenings so I wasn't particularly worried about freezing or frostbite. Better, he knew his way around the property we owned out in the unincorporated portion of Clareton County. But he was still vulnerable. Predators didn't usually toy with a werewolf, even a pup, but owls and hawks took a chance now and then.

  The idea of Tommy in pain or injured set me on edge again. I took another stiff hit from the coffee and killed the donuts in a single go. The sticky strawberry mess looked enough like blood to soothe the animal inside of me.

  What I really needed was a steak and, after the shareholders meeting that afternoon, I'd have one. Even if I had to rip it off a big, buck deer with my own teeth.

  Just before lunch, I forced myself to look through the reports. The numbers swam together on the screen but I made myself work through them. Profits were up. Expenses were down. Everyone would be pleased and the meet shouldn't take terribly long, then. Hopefully, no one would want to push a point of trying to lower expenses even further. We'd made good deals with the farmers who supplied our various protein sources and kept them afloat in a world where meat came from the grocery store.

  Too often, humans had forgotten that their meat had to moo and wander a field at some point. We visited every farm we signed. We looked for those who were on the verge of losing their property due to taxes or disaster; floods were hell on a beef farm and we'd had plenty of them over the past few years.

  More so, we tried to support the farms we felt were doing the right thing. Slaughter day was never a happy sight, but we preferred the animals who had only one bad day. When you run on four paws, you come to have a sense of companionship with the rest of the fur and fang club. Ethics mattered.

  We'd turned those ethics into a multi-billion dollar company in only six years. No matter if people thought that their beef came pre-packaged from day one or not, they cared that we looked into the backgrounds of the farmers. They cared that their pets were getting only the finest meals we could produce.

  They cared that our pet accessories were made from products that we would use ourselves. Hell, the labels on the first bags had been pictures of us as wolves. I'd been slapped on the beef and amaranth bag. My eyes were still part of the logo.

  Of course, no one knew that other than the pack. ...And perhaps the other rare werewolf who kept pets.
There is something about stark, golden eyes that, when authentic, catches another werewolf and holds them. We know our own kind even when it's a static picture on a bag of dog food.

  I'd seen it happen once when I'd been touring a new facility. We'd hired without checking too deeply into those who would be working there. One worker, a young woman, had stopped when she saw the bag. Her hackles had gone up, her eyes had widened. Female alphas were rare, but not entirely unheard of. And she'd seen the challenge in the photo of my gaze.

  Lillian Webster, said a ghostly voice. That's my name. Is there a problem?

  There had been so many problems after that introduction. I ran the tips of my fingers over the keyboard one last time, then locked the program and stood up. I stretched and tried not to think of the alpha bitch that danced across my thoughts. Lunch was ready, and that meant meeting with the rest of the pack.

  Our hallway was cut off from the rest of the building. Sixteen floors, all of them filled with our workers, we kept our stature small to keep spending limited. There was no reason for a skyscraper when we didn't need it, though finance constantly seemed like they were bouncing at the idea of expanding.

  "Hudson! You joined us! Here I thought you'd gotten lost."

  Leo was the sort of family you chose, not the type you were born with. I shook my head at him and he mocked me, shaking his shaggy blond hair back at me. He was five years my senior, in his middling 30s, and built like a fortress. But those wild, forest green eyes brought the ladies to him every time we walked into a... ...hell, take your pick. Parties, bars, even promotional venues had him with three, four, even five girls clinging to him at any given time.

  It was ridiculous.

  "Where's Xav?" I asked, walking to the buffet that catering had been so kind as to provide us with.

  Mostly? I concentrated on the beef. The bloodiest steaks, the thickest cuts. They knew that we were passionate about our protein and they delivered every single day. I really needed to give our catering crew a raise. They did such an incredible job. I made a mental note to do so when I got back to the office.

  Gabe came up to refill his plate as Leo ignored me. "He's stuck talking to one of our vendors. You know how hands-on he is."

  "Little too much. That's what he's got his assistants for. Is it that big of an issue?" I asked

  He rolled his shoulders in a not-quite shrug. "He says it is. But he promised he'd show up. No dice on Tommy, by the way. But nobody's complaining about chewed up chickens or anything like that, either."

  I nodded, because it was all I could do. Gabe kissed me on the cheek and I followed him back to the table, tearing into my steak as I sat there. It would do me no good to starve myself. Tommy wouldn't appear just because I was hungry, and if anything? It might distract me when I did have a chance to go pound some dirt and look for him that evening.

  "If we had a bigger pack, we could have people out there right now," Leo said.

  I swallowed the hunk of meat in my mouth and gave him a look. "We had a bigger pack at one point. What happened?"

  "They got dead."

  I snorted and sliced through another thick cut of meat. Leo spoke up again. "Because of your dad."

  "I know what happened. We all do. There's no reason to talk about it here," I said, my tone telling him the conversation was finished.

  He didn't take the hint. "Look, I'm not saying it was entirely his fault. But you have to admit-"

  "Drop it," I growled, facing him fully.

  Leo toyed with his fork and knife, letting them flop back and forth between his fingers. His gaze narrowed and I readied myself for an attack. The fur didn't pop out quite yet, but it was a very near thing. Gabe rolled his eyes and continued with his ridiculously overloaded cheesesteak sandwich. Nothing would stop him from having a satisfactory lunch.

  The tension broke when I fell to the ground, convulsing once, twice. Pain, terrible pain, tore its way through my psyche and found an exit through my feet. I moaned, rolling on the ground and tearing at the low pile office carpet. Whatever had passed between Leo and I wasn't important, he was there to grab my head and keep me from knocking into the lunch table until Gabe had it moved out of the way.

  Only once before had I felt agony like that. I tried to force air into my lungs. Just breathing had helped last time but this? No, this was the sort of thing nightmares were made of. It was like every nerve in my body had suddenly decided to have a fucking parade, zapping and sparking in ways that I didn't fully understand.

  "Easy," Leo said above me. "Come back to us. Talk to me. There's nothing for you to worry about, just me."

  I gasped through the agony. "There's plenty for me to worry about. Fucking christ that hurts."

  "What's up?" Gabe asked, as though we'd all just met in a goddamned mall food court. There were times when he was a bit too relaxed for my nature.

  "Maybe something happened to Mom?" I said, confused. "The only time I've ever felt like that was when Dad bit her, turned her back when I was a kid."

  Leo withdrew and sat back on his feet, his brows raised. "The last time you felt like that was because someone forcibly entered your Lineage and you got a link established with an omega. Your mom's an omega, right?"

  "Yeah," I said, because that was all I could do. Confirmation.

  He traded glances with Gabe and my stomach sank. Unless my father had decided to crawl out of his grave and add a few more ladies to the family, that only left one possibility. My omega mother certainly wasn't going to turn people; it was beyond an omega's powers to do that. Only alphas could give the gift, the bite, that would eventually turn a human from one of those soft, ape-like bodies into the sleek, lithe hunter that worshipped the moonlit sky.

  I'd mated with an omega and she had given birth to an alpha. If I dared to say it, that was probably why the kid was such a handful. Alphas had a mind of their own from a very young age, often wandering off when they were only a few months old. We did our best, as parents, to keep them with us but what Tommy had done was absolutely normal in our society. It was why it was so important to teach them young, and to teach them early, to hunt and nest in the wilderness.

  And, most importantly, to avoid humans.

  Because despite all their soft and gentle natures, humans were terrifying. They had tried to end our race throughout history, hunting us to the brink of extinction because of the actions of a wolf who couldn't control their bloodlust or one who wanted revenge. We only turned those who were pre-approved by the rest of the supernatural community, because doing otherwise was forbidden. It was suicide. And it was wrong, stealing a simpler life from the human and forcing them to learn to be something they weren't.

  Of all the different beliefs and belief systems among the packs, flights, prides, and such of the world, it was the one truth we all held. It was a law beyond all others. We were never meant to turn those with no understanding of the supernatural world.

  And if my hypothesis held true, my son had just broken that law.

  Chapter 3

  Sadie

  I pried the pup off of my shoulder and held him at arm's length. He wagged his tail at me, bloody tongue lolling out of his mouth as if he were proud that he'd nailed me. It wasn't the first time I'd been bitten by an animal and it certainly wouldn't be the last. Once, an opossum had managed to get me and the county hospital had demanded I get rabies shots.

  Everything you've read about them? Absolutely true.

  God, I hoped this little rascal had a rabies license.

  He squirmed out of my grip and I had to dodge another playful snap of his jaws, this aimed at my legs. I got up as quick as I could and backed my way out of the room. Thankfully, he didn't seem to understand stairs. He whined at the bottom of them, scratching at the last step with his tiny, needle-sharp claws.

  One of the first things they teach you during puppy training classes is to ignore a whining, screaming puppy when they're in their comfort zone. Not knowing how long I would have him under my guardianship, I th
ought it best to start crate training in a positive way. I tossed a handful of treats into one of the grassy squares and shut the door behind me. He'd have to use his nose to find the snacks and, as young as he looked, it might take him a little while to figure it out.

  As for me, I went to the nearby bathroom and pulled my shirt away to examine the bite. He'd certainly broken the skin, the injury far deeper than I'd ever had a puppy hurt me before. There'd been a fox who had come close, though, and I hadn't told anyone about him. Sometimes local vets were a little too enthusiastic, wanting to test the brain for rabies rather than wait ten days for signs of the disease. I wasn't about to let that happen to a fox who had simply been defending himself, so I'd put him in the rabbit hutch out back for ten days, provided food and water, and let him go when I was satisfied he hadn't killed me.

  That had been years ago, so I was pretty certain he hadn't been rabid. I still had the scar on my hand, I noted, as I flinched at the oozing wound on my shoulder. It didn't look bad enough to require stitches, so that was a plus for the pup. I cleaned it, winced my way through smearing antibiotic ointment on it, and plopped a gauze pad over it. Then, using some roll gauze, I wrapped the wound from armpit to clavicle. Stretching and flexing my arm didn't move the hack job I'd done, but it did make me have a certain Revolutionary War motif that I couldn't shake.