Luke couldn’t strip fast enough.
With the sun setting and the moon rising, no pack leader would allow a human to linger in his territory if that pack leader hadn’t allied with the human. Giddy triumph zinged through Luke’s bloodstream, his breath locking inside his chest with a bubble of laughter Luke didn’t dare release at his success. Dean hadn’t made him leave. For now, for this night at least, Luke had been accepted.
He kicked off his shoes. His fingers shook as he peeled out of his khakis. He neatly folded his pants and placed the bundle on his leather loafers. He jerked his shirt overhead next. Arranging his Henley into another tidy pile, he set it atop the rest. Luke hadn’t bothered with socks or underwear, which left only his wire-rimmed glasses, but lycans wouldn’t demand removing those. For the pack, all of whom could see perfectly day or night, corrective lenses were a billboard sign: human, proceed with caution.
Happy and for once at ease, Luke knelt on the ground, sat on his heels, and waited for his pack leader to tell him what to do. He didn’t mind when Dean walked away with a scarcely muffled grunt of approval. Luke had a leader to look to again, one who hadn’t sneered in contempt or rejected him. The hunger gnawing his belly and his chilled shivers as night fell in earnest couldn’t compete with Luke’s thrill of satisfaction. Any discomfort paled beside his sense of belonging and protection. If only for this night and this moment, he wasn’t alone.
From his many months studying the pack, Luke had come to know Dean as a careful and compassionate head of his family. Luke wasn’t surprised when he called for the teenagers to build the central fire higher. Dean might not like humans, but he knew his enemy, including their lower body temperature. He hadn’t said a word, but the certainty Dean had noted Luke’s shivering and responded to best see to his welfare warmed Luke as much as the intensifying heat from the bonfire.
Dean returned to Luke with a plate piled with meat. He crouched. “Open,” he said, offering a tender chunk to Luke between two fingers.
Luke gladly parted his lips and took the food into his mouth. He stared at the ground between Dean’s feet as he chewed boar, roasted with garlic and thyme unless Luke missed his guess. Like his mom’s. Homesickness fought with his excitement at sharing a full moon meal with his pack, but his euphoria won. He missed his family, but he’d found where he fit and with whom.
“Thank you, sir,” he said after he’d swallowed.
“My name is Dean,” he corrected, pushing another bite of meat at Luke’s mouth.
“Dean,” Luke complied before taking the meat and working his sly tongue out to lick juices from Dean’s fingers, perhaps stealing a taste of Dean too.
The pack leader snorted a laugh. “Eat.”
Luke ate. Dean wasn’t stingy with the pack’s meal. He fed Luke steadily but plentifully from the hastily filled plate, not just the boar, which tasted amazing, but also sliced potatoes dripping with real butter, wedges of fresh crisp apple, and chunks of bread dense with seeds and grains. Dean occasionally alternated bites of dinner with sips of water from a stainless steel cup.
Lycans used camping utensils. More durable.
Other than those first two commands to strip and to eat, Dean didn’t talk to him, and with his mouth busy chewing, Luke didn’t try either. Dean spoke instead to his family. “Stay close,” he told Nate and Vince, with a nod at Luke. To a male and a female who must be this pack’s breeding pair unless Luke’s lengthy reconnaissance was mistaken, he said, “Stick to the mountain ridges,” and to the teens, a gruffly growled, “Avoid the border with town.” Luke wasn’t introduced, nor he to them. Because Dean’s family was tightknit, only Nate glanced at him, Luke’s friend risking a wink before he too drifted into the darkness outside the roaring campfire’s circle of light. As the backyard emptied, the fields and woods surrounding them began to sing with snarls, glad barks, and yips. The newly shifted lycans wandered away to hunt. To patrol their grounds. To play.
Attentive as any pack leader should be, Dean slowed feeding morsels of meat and vegetables to Luke as Luke’s stomach filled, his appetite appeased. When the others had gone, Dean stood and marched away, hands empty of the plate and cup at his return moments later.
He crouched again. “Don’t move,” he said and leaned closer, brushing his body against Luke. Dean sniffed Luke’s throat, his chest vibrating with an approving rumble as Luke tilted his chin to allow Dean better access to his vulnerable throat. Dean ignored the sudden tremors that shook Luke and lifted his head higher. Dean’s smooth cheek scraped Luke’s jaw line. “Don’t move,” he said again, as though the warning bore repeating when Luke’s ecstatic trembling indicated his eagerness to be scent-marked.
Luke didn’t swear his obedience. His throat tight with relief and longing, he couldn’t make a sound, but he didn’t need to say it. With a lycan’s heightened senses, Dean could scent Luke’s submission and must have, because he retreated. Luke shuddered at the whisper of cool night air where Dean’s warmth had pressed against his bare skin. When Luke peered beneath his lashes, Dean strode into the dark. Away. Luke’s heart fell at the loss. He didn’t move, though.
Moments later, a massive black wolf returned.
Studying the pack for the last two years, Luke had seen Dean in his wolf form before. Many times. The binoculars he’d invested a considerable amount of money in purchasing hadn’t hinted at the rusty streaks in the thick black fur covering Dean’s animal form, though, and the cautious distance Luke had maintained, because intruding wasn’t smart, hadn’t permitted Luke to properly judge Dean’s size. Luke had frequently wondered at the wanton stupidity of humans who confused lycans for non-shifting wolves. How could they mistake it, when lycans grew twice as large? And larger? Dean’s wolf stood tall and proud, truly magnificent even for a lycan. He padded in a straight line to Luke, towering over Luke kneeling in the scrubby backyard. If he stood, Luke would be taller than the shifted wolf, but only then. Luke was thicker through the middle for a human with a lycan parent. Luke’s shoulders weren’t as expansive as other humans born into his old pack, nor his chest as wide. By appearances, Luke had inherited almost all of his physical traits from his human mother, although for a human, he was pretty short too. He wasn’t scrawny, though. The stature of Dean’s wolf made him feel dainty in comparison, the breadth of Dean’s beast far surpassing Luke’s shoulder span. Judging by the muscle Dean’s fur blanketed, Luke wouldn’t be surprised if Dean’s wolf outweighed him by fifty pounds.
Luke was used to being the runt of any pack, but for once, his comparative physical weakness didn’t bother him. He didn’t feel he had something to prove, like he had struggled to do inside his birth pack alongside his brothers. He needn’t show anyone he could be as tough, resourceful, and resilient as his littermates. He didn’t feel useless, inferior, and afraid either, as he had with his ex-lover during his disastrous time trying and failing to join the pack in New York.
When Dean stood over him, lycan chest expanding as he huffed in Luke’s scent, Luke felt... safe.
Which was crazy. Yeah, he’d studied Dean and his pack for two solid years, but they didn’t know him. Nate and Vince, whom Luke had befriended months ago in town, hardly knew him as more than a casual acquaintance. The pack might still reject him. Dean could.
Still, Luke couldn’t smother the sense building in his heart that, after fourteen years wandering lost and lonely, he’d finally come home. He didn’t move when Dean inched forward or flinch from the brush of Dean’s fur against his skin. Dean’s coat was soft and drenched in Dean’s musky smell, especially the wiry tufts of hair identifying extra scent glands at the base of his elongated nose. Dean wasted no time shoving his snout into the pooch of Luke’s naked belly. He rubbed his face into Luke’s abdomen and in sweeps across Luke’s unprotected chest. He marked Luke’s shoulders next. The careful grip of Dean’s sharp teeth held his larynx as soon as Luke lifted his chin in submission. A trill of fear zinged up Luke’s spine at his defenselessness. If Dean wanted, if his wolf wanted, the problem of a pesky human at his home during the full moon could be eliminated in one easy jerk. Dean’s powerful jaws could rip Luke’s throat out. He’d bleed to death in minutes.
Dean didn’t rip or tear. His canines released Luke, and instead, Dean scent-marked Luke’s bared throat by brushing his furry face over Luke repeatedly, with enough force to rock Luke back on his heels. Luke would’ve loved to string his arms around Dean, dig his fingers into thick fur, and hold on, but he didn’t dare. He anchored his fingers into the patchy grass and dirt of the backyard to steady him, a whine escaping his lips at the first scrape of Dean’s teeth. Not mauling him. A teasing glance. Then a sharp nip provoked Luke’s wince, though Dean’s teeth didn’t break the skin. The playful bite released, Dean’s snout moving to find another tender spot to nibble.
Luke truly was welcome here. He was home.
His eyes burned with tears he would not shed as he basked in Dean’s affectionate if sometimes overenthusiastic bites from shoulder to jawline. He didn’t cringe from the shove of Dean’s nose into Luke’s face or the scrub of Dean’s fur over every single inch of his torso. Ticklish, he chuckled when Dean rooted to sniff both of Luke’s armpits. As wonderful as Dean’s greeting might be, no matter how the sniffs and nips settled the jangle of Luke’s anxiety, the attention was also embarrassingly thorough. Luke sucked in a shuddering breath when Dean moved lower to smell Luke’s groin, the tension that had clenched Luke’s muscles vanishing at Dean’s first long and noisy sniff of Luke’s dick. Luke’s shoulders slumped. A whispery squeak escaped his lips.
Busy with the bountiful treasure of scents to identify, memorize, and enjoy in the cradle of Luke’s hips, Dean paid no heed to Luke’s jitters or his burgeoning arousal. Luke’s awkwardness was expected. Part of submitting to Dean as pack leader and patriarch required leaving himself vulnerable to Dean. In so doing, he proved his trust, and no one, human or lycan, could demonstrate his confidence as readily as submitting to sharp teeth that could maim the weakest part of him. Therefore, Dean’s incisors scraping Luke’s cock didn’t shock Luke in the slightest.
His dick hardening in response was more problematic. And worrying. Lycans tended to be more tolerant than humans about sexual orientation, and in the years since Luke had left his birth pack, he’d received scathing condemnation for being gay from countless humans, though only one pack. Most lycans didn’t care, not like humans did. Not like the pack in New York had. The abuse Luke had tolerated there for the twin sins of being both gay and human hadn’t left physical scars, but the emotional wounds still hurt.
Dean didn’t punish Luke for his wayward desire. Razor teeth threatened his thickening cock, but those teeth didn’t bite. Dean’s claws didn’t gut him. The growls rumbling from Dean’s chest warned Luke to be still, to accept whatever Dean wanted to do to him. Not to squirm. Especially when Dean licked. Dean gave one swipe of his tongue, a brief moment of wet and slick curling around Luke’s balls that rocked Luke to his core, and just as quickly, the questing tongue vanished. The taste Dean stole told Luke that not only would Dean and his pack accept a gay human into their extended family, Dean might want to fuck Luke too.
Fear and hope twined inside Luke in chaotic abandon at the desperate fantasy building inside his head of Dean pushing Luke to his hands and knees, then lifting his hips from the ground to take Luke’s ass. The want blazed through him, so intense Luke could almost feel the pricks of Dean’s clawed fingers on his skin. Humans, including the human instincts Luke had inherited from his mother, weren’t equipped to understand much less accept a lycan’s lust for sexual submission. Any unmated lycan unrelated by blood who had a more secure position in a pack could demand sex... and those demands were generally received with gratitude. Since most packs were composed of extended families, the few who’d fostered into the group might feel like outsiders, disconnected from the bonds the rest of the pack shared. Sex cemented those ties. Sex confirmed intimacy, caring, affection. Fostered lycans craved that.
Humans didn’t see sex the same way and had created an omega myth reflecting their misunderstanding and confusion. To them, lycans fostered into a family group were picked on, repeatedly raped, and abused. Such omegas ate last at communal meals, if allowed to eat at all. Until and unless they mated inside the family to gain better housing, theirs were the roughest quarters because they benefited last and from the stingiest of the pack’s material resources. The pack’s unmated lycans fucked them often. Fought them too. Packs regularly drove off fosterlings.
The lycan instincts inside Luke understood this behavior as a necessary mating dance. Lycans fought fostered pack members to give unmated lycans an opportunity to either improve or show off their strength. The ones humans called omegas didn’t eat at communal meals because hunting skills impressed potential mates too and how else would unmated lycans demonstrate their ability to provide fresh game? Rough accommodations, similarly, displayed a fosterling’s toughness and resiliency. The purpose of leaving a birth pack to foster in another, as Luke had done the past many years, was to court and win a mate. Lycans did not believe in wasting time in the endeavor. Instinct fueled mating. The most efficient and effective means of forging pair bonds involved giving lycans plentiful opportunity to exhibit their strengths to lure a partner. If no ties developed, the pack forced the fostered lycan to search for another family elsewhere where he or she might lure a mate. In the meantime, unmated members of the pack ensured the fostered lycan felt valued rather than despised, included instead of rejected, and cared for... with sex. Lots of it.
If Luke’s lycan heritage from his father had been dominant, he bet he would’ve been getting deliciously fucked by now. Dean’s curious sniffs and lick at Luke’s cock and balls stirred a strange mixture of arousal and terror inside him. He wanted Dean. He burned with his desire, his blood running thick and hot in his veins with the warm puff of breath bathing his crotch. The jut of his hard dick also embarrassed him, though, and shame flooded Luke over eagerly allowing someone who was a stranger—despite years of meticulous study—such liberties.
Humans were easy. They believed lycans were uncivilized beasts to be avoided if possible and approached with wary caution otherwise.
Lycans were easy. They believed humans weak and ignorant, though their overwhelming numbers made humans dangerous. Humans, therefore, should be avoided if possible and approached with wary caution otherwise.
The constant turmoil of both lycan and human instincts warring inside a single body wasn’t easy at all. At times, like now with Dean’s nose exploring his groin, Luke embraced his lycan drives and urges. Yet, when his thoughts flew to Dean fucking him, shame swamped Luke. Damn his human impulses! Luke had decided. Long ago. He didn’t belong with humans, couldn’t be comfortable or feel completely safe among them no matter how he’d tried. He could pass for human. Wholly human. He looked the part, had learned their ways, but the brutal fact was he wasn’t entirely human. Someday, his ruse would slip. As paranoid as he’d been, Luke wouldn’t be able to prevent it forever. When Luke’s non-human urges gained the upper hand, humans might guess the secret of his lycan father. What would happen to Luke then?
No, kneeling naked in the yard with a lycan pack leader sniffing his dick while, at the same time, spreading his own scent all over him, was exactly where Luke should be. If Dean wanted to fuck him, Luke would be fucked. Gladly.
If Nate wanted his ass—or more accurately, if Nate wanted Luke to feel more secure in the pack—Luke would submit to him. Vince too. To any of the lycans whose names Luke didn’t know yet. He wasn’t fully lycan, but human ally or not, he would be accounted as a fosterling by the pack until and unless they adopted him as one of theirs. If the human in him shied from the idea he might be gangbanged by a bunch of horny lycans when the moon fled at dawn, the human inside Luke could get the fuck over it. Luke was finished suppressing what the lycan in him needed.
To belong.
By whatever means necessary.
When Dean finally shifted his muzzle from Luke’s happy dick to lick the sensitive skin of Luke’s inner thigh, Luke didn’t bother to suppress his greedy tremble. He basked in the brush of Dean’s fur, the wetness of his tongue, the glide of his teeth, all of it proving his importance to Dean. Luke turned from his humanity and the errant impulses triggering the blush burning his face, the same inclination that urged him to cover his nakedness and race back to town while he still could. Before the lycans returned, once again in their human forms, and fucked him like the omega pack bitch he had volunteered to become.
He wasn’t their omega, though. There was no such thing. He wasn’t their bitch, either. That kind of thinking was wrong, wrong, wrong. Luke knew such contempt and disdain intimately, had experienced it in New York, with another pack and a different man leading it. Dean’s attention was nothing like Neil’s. Dean had proved his caring by feeding Luke and building the fire to warm him. Dean paraded his regard now, by canvasing every inch of Luke’s body to learn his scent and mark Luke with Dean’s own, including Dean circling Luke to rub scent over Luke’s ass and back. By the time Dean finished, Luke reeked of the pack leader. Luke couldn’t smell the lycan’s scent with his duller human senses, but he knew it to be true just the same. Dean had designated Luke as his property, his family. While Luke wore Dean’s scent, other lycans would steer a wide path rather than chance enraging the one who had thoroughly marked Luke.
Disappointment didn’t crush him when Dean eventually stared, the command to stay unspoken but no less understood by Luke, before the lycan pivoted and bounded into the darkness. Dean was pack leader—patriarch of the family he’d gathered around him. He had more responsibilities than one new human. Borders must be monitored, prey hunted. Reassurances given.
Kneeling in the backyard, Luke stared into the flickering bonfire. He mustered a vast supply of patience to ignore the ache in his knees, doomed to intensify as he held his position until dawn. Coping with the dull throb paled in comparison with struggling against his uncertainty, anxieties, and fears. Dean had accepted him, but Dean alone knew what came next, the role Luke would play inside the pack and what Luke’s status might be. The rising sun would bring answers, with every returning lycan once again in human form that slipped from the surrounding woodlands and back to their homestead.
Luke waited.