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

and she’d just stumbled upon it.

8
    A t first Grady was just annoyed when he went to check on Tu a little while after she fled from his room, but now he was pissed off. He’d been out looking for her in the fierce storm for over an hour, and he still hadn’t been able to pick up her scent. Which meant she might have made it all the way down to the main road. Either that or she was lost.
    One meant he could go back to the warm protection of the cabin. But the other… he trudged further and further away from the cabin, cursing his wolf who, for whatever reason, always made him go out of his way when it came to Tu. Driving up to the cabin, deciding to keep her here until her urge to do something stupid passed, going after her when she ran into a damn snowstorm…
    His mind went to five years ago. He’d been on his way back to Wolf Springs, but found himself turning around to return to Wolf Haven, the overwhelming need to put her on a plane back to Alaska guiding his actions like a puppet master. He told himself he was doing it for Dale’s sake. He respected the retired king, who’d stepped up when Rafe had gone crazy after Alisha’s departure. And Tu was his best friend’s youngest daughter. His best friend’s stupid youngest daughter, but nonetheless, he owed it to Dale to make sure Tu made it on a plane back to Alaska. At least that had been his original intent. But look how that good deed had turned out…
     
     
    A CCORDING TO LUKE, it had taken all eight of his friends to pull Grady off Tu when she’d unexpectedly gone into heat. They’d thrown him into the tornado cellar, and though he hadn’t morphed into wolf form, he also hadn’t been… there. Something else had shown up for the four days Tu was in heat, something that had caused the guys from Luke’s crew to pull up the ladder so he couldn’t climb out of the hole when they threw food down. But that was all conjecture. The truth was, Grady didn’t remember much about those four days. Where his mind had gone or what his body had done during the time when Tu was at the farm house being mated by his brother.
    For Grady, it was like his human had been turned off, and then all at once, it came back on. Like a few minutes had passed, as opposed to four days. And then a few hours after that, Luke was opening the door to the tornado cellar and throwing the rope ladder back down.
    The look on Luke’s face when Grady made it above ground told him the younger prince more than suspected his older brother’s attempt to get at Tu was not just because he was a wolf. Any wolf could lose reason and try to go after a she-wolf in heat—that’s what the smell did to them. Flipped a primordial switch and rendered them into their basest state. The only reason Luke’s crew hadn’t gone after her was because they’d all been in violation of the “never get high on your own supply” rule and had been too altered to access their wolves.
    But even wolves in nature didn’t try to go after a wolf with another’s mating scent already fresh on her, and that was apparently what Grady had done, why they had pulled up the ladder. Because every time they opened the door to feed him, he’d get one whiff of Tu’s faint heat smell coming from the kingdom house and he’d try to go after her again, even though the mating scent was supposed to ward other wolves off from trying to claim your she-wolf.
    “Give me phone,” Grady signed after Luke finished telling him what he’d done while checked out for the last four days.
    Luckily “phone,” was one of those common ASL signs everyone knew. Luke pulled a smart phone out of the back pocket of his skinny jeans.
    Grady typed, “ Where is Tu? Is she okay?”
    Luke shook his head, his handsome face screwing up with outrage.
    “She ran. Snuck out a window after the mating was done. Can you believe that!?”
    Knowing what he did of the Ataneq sisters, Grady could very well believe that. After all, Alisha had gone through a time