Desired - Alisa Woods (most read book in the world .TXT) 📗

quit on the spot. He should have moved her to a different dorm. Something. There were a hundred things he could have done, but instead he rushed her home, thinking if he simply got her safely out of his arms reach that would solve everything, including the strange pull she had on him.

That part he understood least of all.

He paced the length of his office, but his gaze kept wandering back to the forest of glittering steel-and-glass high rises of downtown Seattle and to the distant trees beyond. A year ago, when he lost his mate, he lost a part of himself as well. He hadn't been fit to be alpha for anyone anymore, so he’d left his pack and gone rogue. He even left SparkTech and lived in the wild until he’d almost forgotten what it was to be human. He’d thought he had forgotten, until Lev came looking for him and pulled him out of the dark hole of despair he’d fallen into. There was no fixing what had broken inside him, but Lev convinced him he could still contribute to the family business, even if he wasn’t part of any pack. It was just enough to keep him human, and after a while, he’d begun to believe he could keep the longings at bay with a shit-ton of work, his brothers nearby, and a steady supply of female companionship to ease the pain. Slowly, his wolf quieted. The mournful howling every night, crying his need for a pack of his own, eventually stopped. Lucas thought he’d finally found a way to carry on.

And then… this girl.

Human girls were a distraction, a temporary pleasure to sate his longings. They lasted a night, maybe two. Never more. And he’d found plenty who enjoyed what he had to give. They responded to his inner alpha even if they couldn’t see how broken he really was. Which suited him just fine, until… this strange girl who needed his help. He didn’t understand what pulled him to track her. Or why he went into that alleyway to stop the Reds. She was nothing to his pack, just another human in the half million or so in the Bay area.

His wolf growled at that thought, and it came out as a throaty sound that echoed around his office. The door was closed, so he didn’t even try to rein it in. He knew a lie when he heard one, even when he told it to himself. He might be broken, but no alpha could have stood by and let those sick bastards in the Red pack toy with someone the way they did. Much less a human girl, unprotected, unwary… although it turned out she knew more than he thought. She’d seen shifters before. And yet kept her silence about them.

That was intriguing, but it wasn’t what haunted him. What kept him pacing through the weekend were two simple things: first, her scent had pulled him in, and he’d been tempted to claim her right there in the alley, something that didn’t even make sense. Humans were for pleasure, not mating. But second, and more important, he had inflamed the tensions between his father’s pack and the Reds… and he’d brought the girl deep into the heart of it. The Reds would go after her, track her, hunt her down, now that they knew she was important to him.

And after a weekend of pacing and hunting and shredding the sheets in tumultuous dreams where he fulfilled that wish to claim her in the alleyway, he had finally admitted to himself and his wolf that she was, indeed, important to him.

Thing was, he had no idea why.

A knock at the door dredged his attention out of the depths.

Lev poked his head in the door. “Hey, man, just giving you a heads up.”

Lucas sighed. “Let me guess. My extracurricular activities this weekend found their way to our father’s attention.”

He held his hands up. “Wasn’t me, bro. Dad found out on his own. I just heard the howling.” Lev was his youngest brother and part of his pack, back when he was a true alpha. But even when Lucas went rogue, Lev never really stopped being his beta. Officially, his brother had rejoined their father’s pack. Unofficially, he still had Lucas’s back, in family matters as well as business. There was a reason Lev had been the one to pull him out of the forest again. And why Lucas carried on, staying at SparkTech, making it work for Lev’s sake, even if every day it shoved a hot poker into old wounds.

“I’ll take care of it, Lev,” he said, taking one last glance at the mountains. “Thanks for the warning.”

Lev gave a short nod and disappeared back out the door.

Lucas took a breath, glanced at his neglected work on the tablet, and decided it was better to clear the air with his father than to wait for him to come Lucas’s way. He locked the screen on his tablet, tucked it in his desk, and headed for his father’s office.

SparkTech took up a good fraction of the 32nd floor of the Russell Investments Center in downtown Seattle. His father grew it from a pack-only business, just him and his brothers, to one of the most successful business development companies for technology startups in the Bay area. He liked to say Seattle was on its way to competing with Silicon Valley as a premier ecosystem for tech startups. And the investment opportunities were getting better, with startups these days being spearheaded by people from Google or Amazon as often as not. The industry was maturing, and his father had the vision to take it to the next level. He was the kind of alpha who could see the possibilities and seize them—the kind Lucas had wanted to be—but success breeds competition, and Red Wolf had been nipping at SparkTech’s heels more and more in the last year. The competition was fierce to scoop up the next billion-dollar tech startup. For Lucas to have waded into that mess and possibly mucked it up even further with this business with the girl…

He took a deep breath and steeled himself as he pushed open the door to his father’s office.

As befit the alpha of a company, his father had the finest office, a corner with a view of Mount Rainier, luxurious wood furniture, and glass-and-chrome bookshelves to hold the many trophies and accolades their investments had won. His father waited until Lucas had fully entered his expansive office, and the door had swung shut behind him. Even then, he fussed with something on his tablet.

He was making Lucas wait. Not a good sign.

When his father finally put down the tablet, his expression was cool. “Have you had a chance to look at the numbers for LoopSource?”

“I… um…” Lucas was thrown. He had expected to account for the girl, not the project Lev had tossed to him last week. “Still assessing. Their new platform is interesting, and it seems to be gaining traction, but I’m still checking out the CEO and their execution team. And I’m not sure the market is ready for them.”

His father’s dark eyes drilled into him. “Red Wolf seems to think they’re ready.”

Shit. “They’re making a move to offer?”

His father let out a sigh, then came around his giant glass-and-chrome desk. Framed logos of their previous acquisitions, the ones that made his father millions and put him on Seattle’s 50 Most Influential People list, covered the surface like a small forest of Plexiglas-encased-money. And power. His father stopped in front of the desk, leaning back against it and folding his arms.

He stared at Lucas for a moment longer, then said, “Tell me about the girl.” It was a command, and that tone would have made all of Lucas’s fur stand on end if he was in wolf form. But he wasn’t. And he wouldn’t submit to his father ever again—not to be in his pack, or in any pack, for that matter. He had too much alpha left in him to allow it.

Still, Lucas dropped his head and winced, searching for an explanation that made any sense at all. When he looked up, his father was still waiting. “You know how the Reds are. They would have torn her apart.”

His father’s eyes narrowed. “You know her.”

“No.” Lucas swallowed. “Not really.”

His father’s face was stony, but Lucas could see the confusion flicker across it. His father had mated with his mother early on, before they were even out of college. His mother was a strong wolf from an allied pack, but more than that—they were in love even before they mated for life. Lucas knew his casual sex habits completely baffled his father.

“You’re not in my pack, Lucas.” His father lifted an eyebrow. “That offer still stands, any time you change your mind, son.” Then all tolerance fled his face. “If you were in my pack, we’d be having an entirely different conversation. As it stands, I really don’t care what you do outside this office. Unless it affects the company, and then I care a tremendous amount.”

Lucas flinched. He couldn’t bring himself to say it was a mistake to interfere, but his father was right. He had to fix this. “What is Red Wolf saying?”

“I had a very interesting phone conversation this morning with Crittenden,” he said, his voice rough with an unspoken growl.

Crittenden was the alpha of the Red pack and CEO of Red Wolf. Alpha to alpha. Shit. That had escalated fast. Lucas’s gaze dropped to the floor, trying to get ahead of this.

His father continued, “He says he’s willing to leave your girlfriend alone in exchange for us dropping pursuit of LoopSource.”

“What?” Lucas’s gaze snapped back up to his father’s. “That’s absurd. They can’t possibly expect—”

His father’s steely look silenced the words as they came out of his mouth. “I told them I had no intention of dropping LoopSource. And if they hurt the girl, Crittenden would personally be held responsible by my pack.”

Lucas’s mouth dropped open. Pack protection. For a girl whose name he didn’t even know. His father had gone way, way out on a limb for him, his wayward would-be alpha son. And if the Reds decided to push it, they could have a pack war on their hands.

Lucas shut his gaping mouth and stood straighter. “What can I do to help?”

His father cocked his head in approval of Lucas’s understanding of the situation. “I would find a way to keep your girlfriend safe. I don’t want her tempting some young pup in the Red pack into doing something stupid to make a name for himself.”

“Understood.” Lucas turned away, a calm filling him along with a peculiar shame. Protecting the girl is what he should have done from the start. It’s what his father, a true alpha, would have done, if fate had tossed him into the same circumstance. Before he reached the door of his father’s office, Lucas turned back to face him. “Just so you know, she’s not my girlfriend. She’s just a girl who needed someone’s help.”

His father’s face betrayed no surprise, if he had any. “That doesn’t matter now.”

“I know.” Lucas stared at the carpet by the door. “Just wanted to set the record straight.”

As he headed toward his own office, the heat in his face grew stronger with each step. He’d put a lot in jeopardy to save a girl he didn’t even know. However, he knew the failure wasn’t