Tuesday Teaser 12/9/14 Daughter of the Wolf Clan
In spite of my evil computer chewing up nearly all of chapter 14 in Wolf’s Princess, I’m making good progress. I’m shooting for the rough draft to be done by December 31. With all the holiday get togethers I might not make it, but I’m going to give it my best shot. Rose is easing away from her sarcasm and Sky is beginning to open up to her. At this very moment, Rose is just waking up from a nightmare and Sky is about to comfort her. Please excuse me so Sky can get on with the comforting… meanwhile, enjoy this next tidbit from Olivia’s story. 😉
Yermade roared and fastened a hand around her throat, and by either luck or care on his part, his claws didn’t touch her skin. “No dokdim! You mine! Mah madte.”
“Okay.” Olivia hated the tremble in her voice. “Just don’t hurt me. Okay? Don’t hurt me.”
The hand on her throat became caressing and he made that purring noise again. “Naherchu, Yermadte naherchu.”
Your mate not hurt you. Yermade wasn’t his name. Olivia forced herself to look into his eyes. “What’s your name?”
“Kih.” It seemed he struggled to make the right sound. “Kihdt.”
“Kit?” she guessed. Wasn’t that what the other man had called him? Those monstrous fangs must make it hard for him to pronounce Ts. “Kit, my family will be looking for me. I need to go home.”
The lion man roared and this time his claws pricked her neck when his hand tightened. The other man spoke soothingly, and Olivia was able to follow most of what he said.
“Kit, you’re scaring her. You don’t want to hurt your mate. Let me talk to her so she’ll understand. I won’t try to take her away from you. Kit, I smell blood. You’re hurting her.”
Kit growled something completed unintelligible to Olivia but the other man seemed to get it right away. Kit was tense as he moved a few inches, enough for her to see the other man, but although he retracted his claws, his hand remained circling her throat. “Dok nahluk,” he growled.
“Lady, we can talk, but don’t look at me,” the other man said quietly, in perfectly enunciated English, his eyes cast to a point past her left shoulder. “And don’t stare at him either. Don’t do anything to make him think you’re challenging him. He’s pretty emotional now. He doesn’t mean to hurt you, but he doesn’t have good control right now.”
Kit turned to cover her with his body. He pressed closer to her and Olivia found her nose buried against his chest. He had an earthy scent, but not unpleasant, and she could feel the vibrations of his quiet snarls against her cheek.
“His name is Kit?”
“Yeah, Christopher. I’m Devlin.”
“What is he?”
Kit’s growls rose in volume and his hand tightened.
“Sorry,” she whispered hastily. “I’ve just never seen anyone like you.”
Devlin’s voice was cold. “He’s a person, same as you are, and he can hear and understand everything you say. After he calms down he’ll go back to his human form.”
Olivia wondered what he looked like in his human form. “Sorry,” she said again.
“Kit’s chosen you to be his mate. It might be a little rough at first, but you’ll adjust.”
Were Devlin and Kit lions like her brothers and cousins were wolves? Those men in the Wolf Clan who had wolves didn’t marry. They waited for the wolves within them to choose a mate for them. If that was how Kit’s lion worked, then he should be courting her in an effort to get her to accept their mating. If this was courting she’d hate to see how he treated someone he didn’t like. Her back ached and her throat hurt from being crushed and the multiple small claw marks. Those injuries, plus his feral roaring and snarling, didn’t make her see him in a lover-like light. But if his lion had chosen her for a mate, she should be polite. She had seen her cousins’ pain when their mates rejected them. Olivia aimed a smile up at Kit’s lion face.
“If Kit and I are mates, then Kit needs to come and meet my parents,” she said brightly. Once home her father and brothers would protect her while Kit courted her. They could also teach him the correct way to court a prospective mate.
Kit roared.
“Stop that,” she told him, annoyed. On the other hand, the roars were loud enough that if her brothers were anywhere near they’d hear them and come investigate. “It’s only polite for you to meet my family. If I accept you, they’ll be your family, too.”
“You come wih me,” Kit returned, speaking very carefully, with more than a hint of a growl.
“I can’t. My brothers would worry and if I’m not home soon they and my dad’ll start looking for me.”
“Nah find you.”
“Yes they will! My father’s the greatest tracker alive. And if he doesn’t find me, he’ll send for the Clan to come help. That would be three hundred men! You can’t hide me from that many people who love me.”
His shrill scream sent shudders down her spine. “Kit –“
“Quieh!” he snarled, squeezing her throat so tightly she choked. “You come me now.”
He hauled her up into his arms and began running.
Tuesday Teaser 11/18/14- Daughter of the Wolf Clan
First, a quick writing update: I am mostly done with edits on Wolf’s Lady, which will be a free read released on December 5. And I’m plugging along with Wolf’s Princess. I estimate Sky and Rose’s book will be around 85,000 words long, and I’m at 58,000 words now, so I’m 2/3 done. I’m working hard, I promise, but there is a lot of story left to write. I suspect it will be over 85,000. We’ll see.
The next Tuesday Teaser will be Daughter of the Wolf Clan, which is a story about Tami and Tracker’s daughter and the odd stranger who steals her to be his bride. Hint: he is distantly related to Eddie Madison. Here we go. As always, this hasn’t been edited, so there will be typos and weirdness.
Daughter of the Wolf Clan (working title)
By Maddy Barone
Rocking C Ranch, Colorado
October, 2088
Chapter One
Olivia Stensrud rubbed her sore rear end while she watched her spooked horse flee, taking her rifle and canteen with him. Stupid animal, leaving her stranded here alone, miles from the ranch. What had scared him? Olivia looked around the mountain trail but saw nothing. It was silent, no noise that might have scared him, only the sound of the wind in the aspens and the burbling water in the ice cold stream cutting through the meadow below. She sniffed the air, trying to catch the scent of an animal that might have spooked her horse, but she didn’t have her father’s sense of smell.
Her brothers would never let her hear the end of this. She hadn’t been bucked off her horse in years. They loved nothing more than teasing their baby sister, except, possibly, scaring off any boy brave enough to smile at her. They were still teasing her about being sweet on Rob Russell down in Kearney. If they knew just how far she and Rob had gone in the stall in his father’s smithy her brothers wouldn’t have teased her about it; they would have beaten Rob to a pulp.
But that was months ago and what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Right? She was almost twenty years old, practically an old maid, and Rob was one of the few men brave enough to court her. He was tall, and strong, and handsome. And he was a really nice guy, with a good job in his father’s blacksmithing business. Rob said he loved her, and he would speak to her father about marriage, but dad had packed them up and got back to the ranch for the winter earlier than usual this year, so Rob never got the chance to ask. When she got back home she would write Rob a letter.
Olivia shrugged her shoulders to loosen the tight muscles and looked down the trail, hoping her horse would stop so she could catch him. She whistled for him, but he didn’t come. He was probably a mile away by now, heading for his stall back at the ranch. She was going to have to hoof it home. Unless her brothers saw her riderless horse? They might tease her to death about it, but they would come find her. Overprotective idiots. If she were very lucky, they wouldn’t mention it to dad. She knew the rules about riding too far from the house alone, and she was well past his one mile limit. Her father was a reasonable man, but he was also a wolf, and wolves tended to go overboard in protecting their families.
Olivia brushed herself off one more time, touched a hand to the hilt of the knife in her belt for reassurance, and headed down the trail after her horse. It was a pretty day for a walk, a perfect October day in Colorado, with the aspens gold against the deep blue of the sky, contrasting with the green of the scrubby pines. Yes, a lovely day for a walk, and she would stress that to her brothers when— if they found her before she got back to the ranch.
The path was rocky, so she walked carefully in her high-heeled cowboy boots. There was a sheer rock wall soaring toward the sky a yard to her left, and a grassy slope started about ten yards away on her right, spreading out into a grassy mountain meadow cut in half by a stream. In the meadow, tumbled rock lined the edges of the stream. This is one of her favorite places to come to be alone and think. Her mom had shown it to her when she was little.
As she had been taught, Olivia kept her eyes moving to and fro to find any trouble before it found her. She hadn’t forgotten that something had scared her horse. Everything might look serene and calm, but a horse didn’t shy and buck for no reason at all.
All her caution didn’t keep her from being surprised by the thing that dropped from the rock wall twenty feet above.
