Werewolf fairytales

Wanting her

*Fenrir*

“May I assume that you came straight here from London?” she asks.

I nod. I am trying to decide how Margaret will react if I simply pick her up and take her to bed. Enough conversation. She is no virgin, after all. That makes it easier.

“I think we will all be more comfortable if you removed to your father’s manor while we work out this mess.”

“No.” The word comes out like a bullet.

I want this mate of mine. In fact, it comes to me with an incandescent clarity that I want Margaret more than I’ve ever wanted any other she-wolf. She is mine, from the top of her buttery hair to the bottom of her no doubt dainty toes. “I see no grounds to dissolve the marriage.”

“Because...”

I interrupt her. “You have supplied the children that we lack. We will simply pick up where we left off.”

She stares at me, apparently dumbfounded.

Once again the feeling of rightness sweeps over me in a flood. Margaret is my mate, and she will stay that way.

“I don’t care who you slept with. I will accept Colin and the other children as my own and treat them with the same love as if they had been. We bought this house about eight years ago, am I right?”

She nods.

“It’s not entailed, and I have several fortunes… none entailed, for obvious reasons. Money will not be a problem. We can establish all three children in the world.” I narrow my eyes. “Acceptance into the High packs might be more difficult. What has your experience been?”

“What experience?” she asks, knitting her brow.

“In polite society,” I clarify.

Her mouth curls in something like disdain. “I never bothered with that. I have friends. Family.”

“You never bothered with society,” I echo, stunned. “But that’s… that’s what you married me for.”

“You are mistaken,” she replies, chin held high. “That’s what my father bought you for. I disappointed him in that respect. I would never fit into that world, and I wouldn’t want to.”

“Margaret,” I say, schooling my voice to gentleness, “you are my future Luna, for all you wish to deny it.”

She shrugs. “No one I care about is interested in that sort of thing. And please, don’t address me by the title. I don’t consider myself your mate, not after a fourteen-year separation.”

I shift my weight to the other hip. I’ve stopped trying to disguise the pain.

“What happened to you?” she asks. “Was part of your leg eaten by a shark? Or did you lose it in a battle? I can see that it gives you quite a bit of pain. Will that improve, over time?”

“I still have the whole leg, though it took a s***h from a rapier and the wound became infected. But it’s getting stronger every day.”

She shifts too, as if in sympathetic pain. “I am grateful for your forbearance in the matter of my children. But I do not wish to be married to you.”

She says it quietly, but emphatically. As if the outcome of our marital debacle were her decision, and her decision alone.

“You did not buy this house,” she adds. “I did. My father left me a great deal of property. You will find that I have never touched the money that Mr. Pettigrew deposited for my allowance.”

For at least the third time that day, I am struck by the poverty of my vocabulary. What is a man to say upon learning that my mate has taken nothing from me over the years? That she has not only rejected my support but indeed hasn’t needed me at all? Whatever the feeling is, it runs through me like molten steel, taking my breath away. “Why?” I manage.

She meets my eyes with no apology. “I refuse to live on the spoils of piracy.”

“Then you will be happy to know that the spoils of piracy, such as they were, are long gone. The fortune I bring home with me derives partly from privateering… which is not piracy… but primarily from the proceeds of imports and exports.”

“I do not wish to be married to a pirate.”

I start up from my chair. “It’s too late for that, Daisy.”

“My name is Margaret!” she hisses.

I loom over her. “I forgot.” Her head tips back, yet there isn’t a trace of fear in her eyes. For the past decade, grown men have trembled in my presence. They have caught a glimpse of my tattoo and pissed in their breeches.

Not Margaret.

Not my mate.

“Move aside,” she says. “You cannot bully me!”

“I see that.” Joy sweeps up through my veins. With one swift movement, I pick her up and drop her on the bed before the sound of her gasp has left the air.

She puts her hands against my chest and shoves. “Stop it!”

She smells like rose blossoms after a rain, a quintessentially British smell that I hadn’t even remembered until now. I brace my arms on either side of her head, gaze down at her furious face, and declare, “I want to stay married.”

“Not even a pirate gets everything he wants!”

“Why not?” I bend down and nuzzle her neck. I feel the shock of my touch reverberate down her body. “I like you. And you’re damn beautiful. Why not stay married?”

“Because I don’t want to!” she says in a near shriek.

“How can you know until you try it?”

“I don’t want to try it. You don’t understand. I have a life here. I have children; I have friends. There’s no place for… for you.”

Her words puncture the sensual haze that has my hands hovering just below her breasts. No place for me?

There is a faint, hollow ring within my chest every time I hear the word home. I don’t belong in the world of my father, that of titles and High packs.

Nor do I belong on board ship, not anymore. That life is over.

Daisy… no, Margaret… is my home, my new home. Even if she doesn’t want to acknowledge that.

I straighten. Tousled hair spreads around her face. She looks vulnerable and unbearably desirable. My fingers tremble to pet and caress her until she is as aroused as I am.

So much for the impotence of our wedding night. I’ve had an erection from the moment she entered the room.

“Very well,” I say, falling back a step.

She sits up, stark relief on her face. “You’ll be happier in London, Fenrir. People there are more sophisticated than they are here. Why, they probably won’t turn a hair at that mark on your cheek.”

I burst into laughter. She sounds like someone reassuring a merchant awaiting his imports that pirates are far and few between.

“You would be terribly bored here,” she insists.

There is no doubt in my mind but that I will spend the rest of my days in this precise place. Unless Arbor House becomes too small for all the children I hope we’ll have.

“Perhaps I will pay my father a visit now, as we are not far from Walford Court.”

I watch her eyes lighten and add, “But I will return home for dinner, if you wouldn’t mind holding the meal for me. Would it bother you if my father disowned me? I think there’s a reasonable chance that he will.”

“Not at all,” she says, before adding, “but it doesn’t matter what I think.”

“You are my mate. What you think matters.” Our eyes catch for a moment and I put everything in that look, telling her silently that there is no chance I will leave the marriage. Under any circumstances.

I swallow, and I think she probably understands.

“I am your husband, Margaret,” I state. “The marriage may not be a legal one yet, but it will become one tonight.”

“Why would you want me?” she whispers. “You… the children… I’m not a ranked she-wolf, Fenrir. I’d make a wretched Luna.”

I can’t help grinning. “Do you imagine I’ll be a suitable Alpha? We can cause our scandals together. I would like children of my own blood, but I don’t mind that Colin will inherit my title. Frankly, inasmuch as your dowry brought my father’s estate back out of debt, you should have the right to choose its successor. And you did.”

“About the children...”

I put a finger over her lips before she can make whatever apology she has in mind. I don’t want to hear about the children’s father, not now. The man is dead.

“I want you, Margaret.” My voice drops to a husky key that speaks for itself.

She responds with a look of panic. Yet the ripple in her slender throat as she swallows sends another s***h of lust through me. I am in bad shape.

“... My mother… I am…” A moment of silence. “All right.”

It feels as if she has accepted my marriage proposal again, not that there’d been a first one. Our marriage has been a business matter settled between our fathers, with talk of jointures and dowries and settlements.

This is a simple matter between a man and a she-wolf.

“It’s a bad bargain for you,” I say, voicing what I’m thinking. “I spent years on the wrong side of the law, I’m lame in one leg, and ferocious to boot. Scarred and tattooed.”

She looks me over. “I don’t care about your scars, but there is one thing that concerns me. I have no doubt that you had something of a harem, Fenrir. I will not tolerate it here. You’ll need to stay on the right side of the law, and out of other she-wolves’s beds.”

My smile threatens to burst out, but I rein it in. Damn, but she is a tough she-wolf. It’s thrilling. “There will never be another she-wolf for me, Margaret. Not even if I finally meet a she-wolf named Daisy. And I don’t find theft interesting in itself.”

She nods, and I hold out my hand to bring her to her feet. It isn’t that I haven’t had she-wolves in the last fourteen years, because I certainly have. But not one of those she-wolves has moved me like Margaret.

It must be some odd thing attached to a marriage license.

“Would you like me to go with you to visit your father? As a buffer, as it were?”

That is rather unexpected. “No need,” I say. “I imagine you have things to do here, with the children.” Clearly, she is nothing like my mother. I had been lucky to see Luna once a fortnight, if that. Not that I had missed her; how can one miss someone of whom one knows nothing?”

“Nanny is more than capable of handling bedtime.”

“I’ll be home for supper,” I repeat.

I shift my stance, and for once it isn’t a response to pain. I am hard as rock, for no good reason other than that my mate is looking at me as if she is worried about me.

“Must we do that tonight?” she asks, swallowing again.

My mind is filled with images of myself tumbling her onto the bed and tearing off floaty layers of clothing. But even as my mind offers a dozen reasons why I should take her with dispatch, like any self-respecting pirate, her eyes stop me.

They are dark with strain. Of course she doesn’t want to fall into bed with a burly stranger who strides into her house and declares himself her husband.

I can wait. We have a lifetime ahead of us.

I want to earn a place here, in this warm, happy house, full of illegitimate children, nursemaids, and one beautiful she-wolf with a stubborn chin. Not to steal it, or force it.

I want that… her… more than I have ever wanted anything in my life.