Free Wolfen by Madelaine Montague Page A

settle it ... tonight.

      * * * *

     

    Danika's preoccupation nearly ruined her goal in going into the woods to start with. She'd already crossed the bisecting path where she'd seen the tracks before she thought to check her pedometer again. She spotted the tracks the moment she looked down.

     

      "Well shit!"

     

      Turning, she retraced her steps, further disgusted when she saw she'd already trampled all over the tracks. Focused now, she moved to the edge of the trail, staring at the ground until she found a wider area where the ground was soft enough to make a better mold of the prints. Crouching down, she pulled a small measuring tape from her bag and her note pad and pen and began trying to sort the tracks. When her knees and thighs began to feel the strain of her position, she got on her knees and crawled around in the dirt, straightening from time to time to relieve the strain on her back and neck.

     

      She counted fifteen. A little surprised to discover such a large pack, she carefully studied the tracks again. Definitely fifteen, she decided, making note of it in her notepad, although she would've been much happier if she could have seen the pack. She still needed to. The variation in the size of the tracks just wasn't conclusive enough, especially when the wolves crossed and recrossed each other's tracks and it was an unusually large pack from what she could tell.

     

      The alpha male was easier to discern. His tracks were noticeably bigger than the others.

     

      And the same size as the tracks she'd found outside her cabin.

     

      A shiver of uneasiness went through her as the memory arose, unbidden, of Balin's comment about the hunter becoming the hunted.

     

      Why would the alpha male have been at her cabin? If, indeed, it was the same wolf, and she saw no reason to doubt it. There might've been some room for doubt if not for the fact that this was the only wolf pack in this area.

     

      Undoubtedly, he'd tracked her from her observation post, but aside from understanding how he'd found her that still didn't explain why he'd hunted her to start with.

     

      Abruptly, she recalled Balin's comment about her being an alpha female. She'd thought at the time that it was a strange observation for him to make, aside from the fact that she'd never thought of herself as an alpha female. She wasn't a leader. She wasn't even a follower. She knew men tended to fall, roughly, into either the category of alpha or beta, but that was because of their hormones. Women's hormones might effect them that way to a lesser degree, but it wasn't even as evident, to her way of thinking, as it was with the men and that paled significantly compared to the male in the wild.

     

      What had Balin meant by the comment, she wondered abruptly? She'd been too distracted by everything else at the time to do more than barely register it. Now, it seemed that it must have had some significance just from the way he'd said it.

     

      Was she reading something into nothing, she wondered?

     

      She shook her head to shake the thought. They just had her completely addled, she thought with disgust. She wasn't used to any male attention. Finding herself surrounded by five damned fine looking young men who'd shown a flattering interest in fucking her brains out was enough to shake up even a practical minded woman. Not that she wasn't old enough to know better than to be too flattered that they wanted to get into her pants. They were men after all—young men. Their dicks probably still did most of their thinking for them and there were a lot more men inclined to stick their dicks in any available hole than there were that didn't have that mentality.

     

      If she had any sense at all, she'd be deeply suspicious of their supposed interest, not flattered. Maybe if she was young and hot it would be more likely all of them would be interested, though she still found that doubtful—a couple of them, maybe, but not