Sleeping With the Wolf by Maddy Barone Page A

cushions with his head in her lap. He held her hand and rubbed it against his cheek.
    “My mother was the daughter of a human. Her name was Naomi Burnett. She grew up in Odessa, the same farming settlement you found just southwest of town. My father was hunting with friends when they came to Odessa. My mother was working in the fields and as soon as he saw her, his wolf chose her to be his mate. He went to talk to her, but she was scared when he turned from wolf to human in front of her. She tried to run away. It’s not good to run away from a wolf, especially a young one without enough experience to have learned self control. Carla, never run away from a wolf. Promise me.”
    A feeling of dread trickled over her. “Okay. So what happened? Did your dad hurt her?”
    Taye was rubbing the back of her hand back and forth over his lips. “He chased her.
    Wolves run fast even when they’re human. When he caught her he threw her down and marked her. He bit her here.” His fingers brushed over the place where her neck joined her shoulder. “Hard enough to draw blood. Wolves sometimes do that when they are agitated and unsure of their mate’s acceptance. He had been hunting in his fur, and when he changed to human to talk to her he was naked. My mother was terrified. She thought he would hurt her.” He fell silent, a troubled frown on his face. “No wolf would intentionally hurt his mate, but my father was young, only sixteen—”
    “Sixteen?” gasped Carla.
    “—and my mother was fighting.”
    “Oh, God, he raped her?”
    “No. He might have, but when he saw that she was crying and smelled her fear, he let her go. She ran back to her settlement and he didn’t stop her. Instead, he thought he would try to court her the human way. Do you understand about wolves choosing a mate?
    Human men can marry where they like or where their families decide, but wolves don’t have that choice. Our wolves choose a mate for us. Some men give up on waiting for their wolves to choose a mate. They just marry a woman the human way. But a wife’s not fully accepted by the Pack the way mate is. Once a mate has been chosen, we can never have another woman.”
    “Your wolf chose me. I remember you saying that. But how did you know?”
    His shoulders moved in a shrug. “I just did. My father knew the same way. It’s like the wolf whispers in our hearts, ‘That’s the one I want.’ He went back a few days later, wearing his best clothes, with a string of horses to give her family for her bride price. Her brother, Mart Burnett, tried to kill him before he was even inside the gates. So my father ran away. He came back later with friends and watched the settlement for days for his chance to take his mate. My mother and some other girls and men came out to work in the fields again, and my father’s friends attacked them. He stole my mother and took her to the Clan.”
    “Your poor mother,” Carla said. The Bride Fight didn’t seem quite so scary compared to that. Since Taye had been born his parents had obviously been intimate. Had it been rape? Had his mother submitted passively to his father out of fear? Or had she fallen in love with her kidnapper? “How old was she?”
    “A little older. About nineteen, I think. She had been promised to a neighbor, and she had loved him until he rejected her for being pawed by a ‘filthy wolf.’” Taye smiled a crooked smile. “My father spent three years courting her while she lived with the Clan’s grandmother. He was successful. I remember how much they loved each other. But she missed her human family. About a year after I was born they went to her family to try to reconcile. Her family wouldn’t even see them. It broke my mother’s heart, and anything that hurt her hurt my father.”
    Carla combed her fingers through his soft short hair. “Where are your parents now?”
    “They’re both dead. My father died when I was fourteen. My mother wanted to be with humans so she brought me