Seven mates for seven brothers

5- What is eating you?

As Alex sat in the chair outside Cassy’s room, he tried very hard to figure out how his near perfect world had just come tumbling down around him.  He had his life all mapped out in front of him: get his brothers all sorted out; and if that meant them finding their ‘mates’, he was OK with that.  Once his brothers had been organized, he had to make a plan with his so called ‘pack’.  He did not know how precisely to go about it, but he had a few options that he was thinking about and the time he spent talking to and learning from Timothy had already convinced him to eliminate a few of those. 

The last person on his priority list had been himself.  When everything else had been put in place and things were running smoothly, he would have taken the time to find himself a female that could produce a son to take over from him and carry on the line.  And on the long run; even that was not a huge concern in his life.  If he was unable to find a suitable female he would be content to tolerate, he still had six brothers to produce nephews, and he could pick the best candidate from one of them.

But oh no!  No such bloody luck!  Fate had decreed he be mated to Cassy.  And she was no ordinary female!  He had never met a woman like her before; she was one of a kind.  He knew for a fact that any other werewolf male would have killed to be mated to her.  This lot had told him so often enough during the past two weeks, and he was sure if any of them thought they had an inkling of a chance they would have challenged him to get her.  The only two things that counted in his favor, was his reputation as a first class fighter during the war with the rogues; and the fact that he was her true mate.  Everybody knew that no male shifter would allow another to take his mate from him without fighting to the death for her.  Even the humans got that part right in all their bloody fantasy stories!

His usually neat and tidy future, although somewhat obscure, now lay in heaps at his feet.  And Cassy was to blame for all of it!  Women!  Trust them to put an end to his orderly life.

Alex sent his fist crashing down on the arm rest of the chair and winced when he heard the faint crack of the wood.  A quick inspection revealed only a slight hairline crack; so he folded his arms across his chest to stop himself from doing further damage.

He was no stranger to women.  And with him being a werewolf, it meant that there were certain parts of his human nature that were strengthened by his animal nature; the physical need for a woman being one of them.  But all the woman he had chosen to ease his need with, had been carefully selected; no clingy females in search of relationships, no scheming gold diggers and no sluts!  He had always made it clear to them that he had no interest in any kind of relationship.  And if he had any suspicion that they might have agreed to his condition while thinking he was just playing hard to get, he had walked away.  Since his mother had run off during a rogue attack when he was only twelve years old, he had not been able to trust any female.  If a mother could abandon her children during an attack, they were not to be trusted!  And no other female he had met since then has proved to him that he was wrong!  On the contrary, they had only proven that they were shallow, completely brainless and opportunists, all of them.

From the room he was guarding, he heard a soft sigh and the sound of her tossing with the linen, and the unbidden hopeful thought that it was the memory of his caress causing her sighs; had him ball his fists as he fought to reign in his imagination.  But like with so many parts of his life right now, he found he was no longer master there either.  He could remember the taste of her on his lips, the way she shivered with delight at his touch as his hands slid slowly along her silky soft body.  An answering sigh on the other side of the door had his body responding and hardening in such a way that it was almost painful.  With a shock he found himself imagining what it would feel like to move inside her, feel the velvet warmth of her folding around him.  To drive her to the brink of insanity and back again just to hear her call out his name.