Thrown to her Wolves by Margo Collins (best motivational novels txt) 📗

has to come through us. By it has also created a couple of issues. Issues that wolf tradition and hierarchy doesn’t really have any way to deal with.”

“What kind of problem?” I leaned on my elbows, put my chin into one hand, and pushed the remainder of my meal—what little there was left of it—away from me with the other hand.

“Usually,” Dean drawled, slumping down a little in his seat and stretching one leg out straight next to the booth, “when an alpha female runs a pack—and it doesn’t happen very often, mind you—then she mates with her second. In this case, you have three seconds.”

“Which is fine as long as we all agree—and mostly we do,” Liam interjected.

“But not always.” Dean shot Liam a slightly irritated glance.

I looked around the table and suddenly realized exactly what kind of problem we had created. “So basically, you’re telling me that there’s some question about how to deal with it if my second-in-command needs to make a decision and you three can’t agree on how to proceed. That about it?”

“That’s it exactly,” Liam said.

“So even though you didn’t have to choose among us to decide which one you wanted,” Owen continued, “you do have to rank us for the pack.”

It was all I could do to keep from wailing. “But each of you brings something different to my—what? Leadership? Rulership? Whatever it is, I need all of you. I can’t do this by myself. I can’t even do it with just one of you.”

“You know that, and we know it, but the rest of the pack doesn’t really get it. And the happier we can keep them, the less likely they are to challenge you.”

“And if I refuse?” I felt like I was getting boxed into another situation I had not created and did not want to have to sort out.

Then again, maybe that was just the life of an alpha.

“If you refuse,” Owen said, “the pack is going to assume that the order in which you sleep with us is the order of hierarchy.”

“So we don’t tell them,” I said.

“It doesn’t work that way,” Owen told me. “There’s an entire bedding ceremony that goes with an alpha taking a mate. And in our case, the pack has decided as a whole that we should do a three-night ceremony. Or rather, three night’s worth of ceremonies. One for each of us. You have to decide what order to do the ceremonies in.”

He paused. “What order are you going to have sex with us in, Sienna?”

Chapter 3

I’d heard the phrase “thrown to the wolves” all my life.

This was the first time I truly felt like I understood what it meant.

Or at least how it felt.

“So when do these ceremonies begin?”

Dean shoved the giant fight of hamburger into his mouth and spoke around it. “Tonight,” I managed to make out, despite the muffling effect of burger-bite.

“Tonight?”

I still have twigs in my hair from waking up in the woods.

I was supposed to have some weird wedding night ceremony—part one of three, no less—with no more planning than this?

“I have things to do before we can start,” I said.

“Yeah,” Owen said. “You have to decide how to rank us.”

“There’s more than that,” I insisted. There were things I had to do. Like, go lingerie shopping. I wasn’t a virginal bride, but if I was going to have three separate wedding nights, I needed to have something to make each of them special. Lingerie seemed as good a place to start as anything else.

We hadn’t talked about any of this. I had no idea how my three wolves might react differently depending on what happened in the bedroom.

I didn’t know what any of them liked.

I barely knew any of them.

This was insane.

It was also a little too late to back out now.

Okay. There were two things I needed to discuss.

“Before I decide how to rank you, there’s something I want to talk to you guys about.”

They waited for me to continue.

This was kind of an uncomfortable conversation to be having with the three guys I was about to sleep with, but it had to be done.

I blew out a breath and then steeled myself against possible embarrassment. “What about birth control?”

They all three stared at me like I was speaking a foreign language.

“Yeah. You know. Like…to make sure I don’t get pregnant?”

Still, they watched me with wide eyes.

Wasn’t this conversation supposed to be easier after marriage?

Marriage. The thought stopped me dead in my tracks for several seconds.

Okay. Maybe it was supposed to be easier. But that assumed that the marriage was a nice, normal one, with only two people involved. Not three werewolves.

Four, I reminded myself. I was a werewolf, too, now.

I tried again. “I’m not on the pill or anything.”

Liam’s mouth fell open. Owen jerked a little, like I’d said something shocking. Dean made a noise kind of like a snort and said, “Why would you be?”

Dean’s words finally clued me in that we were quite possibly having two—or maybe even four—different conversations.

Time to pull up my big-girl panties and say it all straight-out. I almost snickered at the image.

“Let’s start over. I think we’re talking at cross-purposes here.” Three identical frowns. Great. “I am asking about birth control because I don’t want to get pregnant yet. We just met—and even though we’re…mated—” God, I had to get used to that term—“I think we should probably get to know each other a little bit first. Maybe even get me through that challenge you seem to believe is coming my way.”

My three wolves all seemed to relax more the longer I spoke. Which was lovely, except I was getting more and more anxious.

When I paused