Free Wolf and Soul (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 3) by Theodora Taylor Page A

animal noises, like a bull in pain. And she marveled at his strength. It took all of Luke’s buddies to hold him back, two on each appendage, and they were still having a hard time keeping him restrained.
    And then there was Luke, standing in front of her, apologizing for his brother, telling her he was here now, like he’d saved her from something terrible. Luke smiled down at her as the winter wind blew and Grady bellowed and Tu—she had never felt so cold in her life.
    Well, she thought she’d never felt so cold in her life. Lying naked under a tree in the middle of blizzard five years later, she realized the real meaning of cold.
    After getting rejected by Grady, she’d thought she could make it on her own to the main road. It was only a mile or two from the cabin and she could hitchhike once she got there. When she’d left, she’d been confident her plan would work. And perhaps more importantly, she was damn well determined not to let Grady keep her here a minute longer, as if she were a rat trapped in a log cabin cage. The joke would be on him when he woke up and found her gone, despite his taking her keys and phone away like she was a child, like she wasn’t a grown she-wolf capable of making her own damn decisions.
    But the joke wasn’t on him. It was on her. The main road which had been so easy to see in the distance when she was up on the cabin’s bluff had now disappeared behind a haze of snow that made it hard to see ten feet in front of her, much less all the way to the road. And though the trees lining either side of the wide trail that led to the main road should have been enough to get her there, the sky threw flurries at her so furiously, she eventually lost all sense of direction.
    In windy conditions like this, she couldn’t catch the smell of vehicles on the main road, if anyone was even out in this mess. And she also could no longer smell the fire burning in the cabin she’d left. Or Grady.
    Grady…
    The heat had taken her as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had the last time she’d been in the same vicinity as him for more than a few hours. And if she had thought it had been inconvenient when it happened outside a hick rave in back country Oklahoma, the angry wolf gods had really outdone themselves for her second heat. Because this time, it came on right after she’d stripped out of her clothes, having made her first reasonable decision of the night, to shift into wolf form in order to ride out the storm.
    It was one of the first survival methods any wolf living in a cold weather state was taught from childhood. Human bodies were found frozen to death in mountain ranges across America every single year, but wolves couldn’t die of hypothermia. If you got caught in a snowstorm, shift, she’d been told, with an added pre-emptive admonishment from her mother that she was a princess, so there was no reason for her to ever get caught out in a snowstorm in the first place.
    However, proving even further she was not a good princess, she’d gotten caught in a snowstorm. And when she’d tried to shift into her grey-and-black wolf, nothing happened. That was when the tingling started—not in her back, like it did when she was about to change, but in her sex. And soon her whole body was suffused in heat, as hot sexual need stole its way like a heady aphrodisiac through her entire body.
    Tu fell to the ground, the overwhelming desire rendering her body unable to stand up on its own two feet. No, in this state, her wolf wanted her on the ground, exposed and open to a rutting male. So she lay there, her wolf on fire with primordial desire, her human shivering as hypothermia began to set in. She couldn’t help but laugh, her fucked up sense of humor rearing its long-buried head. How ironic. She’d set out, planning to hitchhike back to Wolf Springs, but instead she’d found a solution to her original problem. As it turned out there was a sure fire way for a she-wolf to kill herself without a gun,