Free Lover Claimed by A.M. Griffin Page A

call on
speaker. While he pushed the clerk to act normal and ask the caller
how the car was working out for him, Lajos counted the raucous
voices in the background. He’d heard two. If Alexei was on the run,
that’s where he would go.
    He’d called Andras and told him about the
lead. Andras agreed with his assessment that Lajos had no other
choice but to head to Miami and get all the information he could on
the shifter pack.
    Lajos kept his hopes up about Kristof. He
wasn’t in Miami—Lajos would feel Kristof if he was this close to
him—but he was alive, somewhere out there. If Kristof was taken
prisoner, it was just a matter of time before whoever had him
contacted Andras with the demands. And when they did, Lajos planned
to have all the information about the other shifters to bring them
down and get his brother and brother’s mate back.
    That’s where his thoughts had trailed to
Meisha. Lajos had never wanted a mate before. He understood that a
part of mating meant some compromise and give and take, like being
married. But Lajos wanted to run free; he didn’t need anyone
holding him back. Wolf or human. He didn’t want to mate with a wolf
and definitely not with a human as Kristof had done. There was a
reason why there weren’t many shifter-human bonds. During the
imprinting process the life-forces of the pair joined.
    While Trudy’s life span would be extended as
a result of the bond, she would still die before Kristof. A wolf
who lost their mate was little more than a walking corpse. They
would lose the will to live and slowly degenerate. Not only would
Trudy’s death have a negative impact on Kristof, but her death
would also affect the pact as a collective.
    That was a good enough reason to get Meisha
out of his head. If he mated with her he could expect her to die
first, leaving him to slowly wither away. No, he didn’t want his
life tied to another.
    But…
    But if he had a choice, he didn’t think
Meisha would be a bad one. That’s if she were a wolf and if he had a choice, but neither was the case.
    He couldn’t bring Meisha into his world,
exposing her to all the dangers that shifters faced. While they
were busy remaining unnoticed by the humans, packs were known to
fight against each other. Some fights were so brutal that the males
of an entire pack could be wiped out by a rival one. That practice
hadn’t happened in quite some time, but it wasn’t unheard of. And
on top of that, he also shared a world with other dangerous
paranormal beings. The werewolves were brutal monsters, Faes were
self-centered and egotistical, and the soulless vampires were
ruthless and conceited.
    But the main reason he couldn’t bring her
into his world was because he hadn’t imprinted on her.
    His wolf was always interested in Meisha, but
he’d been interested in others as well. But always, in the end, it
remained just him and his wolf. Whenever he thought he was getting
close to someone his wolf would send pictures of being in wolf
form, running through the woods. He was by himself—always by
himself.
    Never with another wolf and of course, never
with a human.
    Lajos went back to the king size bed and
switched on the television, immediately turning to an international
news channel. It was one of the best ways to learn what the
paranormal community was up to.
    Mass kidnappings meant the vamps had a rogue
group on the hunt for humans. Deadly virus outbreaks meant the
werewolves had accidently infected a human with the disease that
the werewolves carried it had spread. Unlike the folklore,
werewolves weren’t able to bite someone and turn them into one of
them. If they had that kind of power the werewolves would’ve turned
the entire human population a long time ago, in hopes of upping
their status in the paranormal world. The vamps were the only ones
with that power, and they made sure every one of the paranormals
knew it. They didn’t make a lot of new vamps, mainly because they
didn’t think many humans were