Free Two Scents' Worth: A Wolf Rampant spinoff serial (Bloodling Serial Book 3) by Aimee Easterling

Chapter 1
    Delicious .
    I make it a policy not to distinguish between my wolf and human brains, but this time the animal half had gone too far. Our lupine nostrils flared as we sucked in the refreshing scent of the young woman wandering so enticingly alone beneath the leafy canopy. Drool dripped down our shared chin and those classic fairy-tale words popped into our head unbidden: The better to eat you with my dear .
    Don't get me wrong. We didn't want to consume her...well, not precisely. She just smelled so damn good.
    It's the lack of an entourage , I told myself, forcing my nose into the leaf litter in an effort to block out the girl's tantalizing aroma. I had to keep my wits about me because I couldn't really believe that this wasn't a trap. A pack princess alone and unguarded in the woods? Did none of her male relatives care that she smelled like sex on a stick to every male shifter within a hundred-meter radius?
    Apparently not. And, knowing her father as I did, I couldn't blame the girl for giving her male relatives the slip.
    Taking stock of my own body, I found my ears turned backwards with arousal and noticed that I was repetitively licking my front paws as I strove to keep less savory urges in check. The compulsion to spring from my crouched position beneath the spicebush and rush toward the pack princess was so strong, in fact, that I shifted into human form for the sole purpose of clearing my head.
    Branches scratched against my bare bum and I rolled my eyes at my own behavior. I wasn't a teenage human unable to keep my eyes off a pretty girl, for crying out loud. I was a shifter and a pack leader, on a reconnaissance mission for the good of my clan.
    Plus, my bloodling nature made it obvious that four legs were always better than two. So what was wrong with me that I felt the need to declaw myself in the presence of this pack princess?
    Luckily, now that the full depth of her aroma was muffled by my human nose, the woman was no longer quite so attractive. Meaning that the urge to hump every nearby tree was fading. Making progress.
    Instead, I was able to pay attention to the factors I'd come here to discover. Yes, this pack princess was the correct age, her facial structure and coloration in the right ball park to be the werewolf who I'd spent the last three weeks tracking down.
    "I, Wolf Young, swear to obey you, Chief Wilder, once for a favor of your choosing."
    Those words, torn from my lips the previous winter, were the precise reason why I was now hunting pack princesses through a mountain wilderness. Against my better judgment, I'd promised this woman's father an undetermined future service, but I didn't plan to sit on my hands and wait for him to collect at his leisure. Instead, I was spending every spare moment seeking out the chinks in Chief Wilder's armor.
    Chinks like his two estranged daughters, both living a dangerous but independent life style hidden in plain sight within the human world. One daughter down, one daughter to go.
    Because when Chief Wilder called in his debts, I planned to have two aces up my sleeve. For the sake of my own pack, I'd be ready.
     
     

Chapter 2
    Victor: You there or just drooling on your keyboard?
    The words popped onto my screen unbidden and I rolled my eyes. Trust a hacker to think that text messaging and emails were for losers. Instead, my closest cyber buddy Victor considered it a challenge to hack into my private laptop and send write-messages directly to the command line. Never mind that the words' location messed with the coding work that paid my pack's bills.
    Wolf: Here but busy. Gotta make a buck.
    Despite my curt reply, I was actually glad to hear from the unruly hacker. He'd been a staple in my life ever since I'd traded an afternoon of yard work for this ancient laptop last year and entered the twenty-first century.
    From our first virtual meeting, I'd gotten the impression that Victor was lonely. So I'd shrugged and mentally enfolded him into my pack.