Wolf’s Princess Read online

  Wolf’s Princess

  After the Crash, Book 7

  Maddy Barone

  Published 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62210-240-2

  Published by Liquid Silver Books, imprint of Atlantic Bridge Publishing, 10509 Sedgegrass Dr, Indianapolis, Indiana 46235. Copyright © Published 2015, Maddy Barone. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Liquid Silver Books

  http://LSbooks.com

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

  Blurb

  Rose Turner was only sixteen years old when she was flung fifty years into a post-apocalyptic future and claimed by a teenage wolf shifter. When she refused his claim, Sky Wolfe left the den and moved to Omaha, intending to return when she turned eighteen to renew his courtship. Now, eight years later, in the final installment of the After the Crash series, Rose is an old maid with a pack of wolf shifters guarding her from other men. She wants a husband and children, and since Sky has ignored her all these years she decides to find a man to love on her own.

  Sky has been busy in Omaha, where women are commodities, working to change the laws that oppress them. Victory is at his fingertips when he receives word his mate is husband shopping. Can he free Omaha’s women and woo his mate? Or will he have to choose between them? Read the breathtaking conclusion to this series, in which a group of plane crash survivors learn to live in a future that is nothing like their past.

  Dedication

  For Lyndi Williams

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Jody, the Scarf Princess, for helping me create the character of Katelyn. Paint thanks you too!

  Many thanks also to my beta readers. The book wouldn’t be what it is without you.

  Chapter 1

  The Den outside Kearney, Nebraska

  September, 2072

  Rose Turner wiped her sweaty hands on her pants and raised one hand to knock on the nursery door. Her fist paused in the air while she debated. Maybe she should talk to him later. Taye might not be in this room. He could be in the room he shared with Carla, his mate, next door. She blew out a breath, looking up and down the long, narrow corridor of the den to be sure no one could see her standing out here.

  Why was she so nervous? The alpha of the Pack might be feared by everybody for hundreds of miles, but she wasn’t afraid of him. Most people outside the Pack trembled when he growled. She knew for a fact he had killed men to protect and avenge women under his protection. But she had no reason to be nervous. No one in his Pack had ever treated her badly. In fact, they all teased, protected, and pampered her like she was their kid sister. She drew in her breath and let it out in a controlled sigh. What she wanted to ask would probably tick him off. Wavering, she dropped her hand and turned from the door.

  No! She had put this off long enough. Chin high, she swung back and rapped.

  “Come in, Rose,” Taye called.

  With his wolf’s excellent sense of smell, he probably knew exactly when she arrived in front of his door and how long she had argued with herself before knocking. Rose swallowed and opened the door.

  Taye Wolfe, the fierce alpha wolf who inspired fear everywhere he went, held his two-week-old son against his chest and patted his small back with a gentle, rhythmic hand. The boy obligingly burped and then spit up a good portion of his breakfast all over his father’s bare shoulder. Using a square of thick cotton, Taye deftly wiped the mess from his shoulder, and turned his baby son into the cradle of his elbow to dab the little face clean. Rose was sure the fond, half-awed expression on Taye’s face was one no one outside the Pack had ever seen. Or would ever see.

  He looked up. “What can I do for you?”

  Yearning strengthened Rose’s resolve as she stared at Little Feather. The baby’s silky tuft of hair was brown like his mother’s, not the Native American black of his father, but his eyes were as dark as Taye’s. He was tiny and precious, and Rose ached to have one of her own. She looked around the room that held two small beds, one for Taye’s elder son Colby and the other for his daughter Patia, and saw a three-legged stool pushed under the child-sized desk. She pulled it closer to where Taye sat in the rocking chair and perched on it like a long-legged frog.

  “Is Carla sleeping?” she asked, noticing the door connecting the children’s room to the alpha couple’s room was closed. “I didn’t see her at breakfast.”

  “Yeah, the baby kept her up most of the night. She just finished feeding him and now she’s resting.” Love warmed the alpha’s deep tone. “I’ll look after the kids for a couple of hours. So, what can I do for you?”

  “I’m twenty-four years old now,” she began, and stalled.

  Little Feather kicked his feet into his father’s side with infant vigor which made Taye chuckle. “We should have named you Little Mule,” he told his son proudly. His smile still lingered when he glanced back at Rose. “I know how old you are. We had the party just last week.”

  Yeah, the party had been well attended by the Pack, and many of the members of the Lakota Wolf Clan had traveled to the den to celebrate with her. The Clan was nomadic like their Native American ancestors had been, and the Pack was an offshoot from the Clan that had settled outside Kearney, Nebraska. Their name wasn’t mere symbolism. Rose remembered the dizzy shock zipping through her the first time she saw a member of a Wolf Clan change from man to wolf. Now it was so common she barely noticed. Just as she barely noticed the Pack habitually wore as little clothing as possible. Taye had only a ratty pair of denim shorts on now, which was probably more than he liked to wear. He and the other men pointed out how much it cut down on laundry. It was an unconvincing excuse for going nearly naked, considering the Pack had given her several new outfits for her birthday.

  Her fingers tightened on a fold in the cotton of her pants, one of her birthday gifts designed by Lisa Madison. “I know. What I mean is…I want…” She swallowed, trying to find the right words. “When Ellie was twenty years old, she was a mother. She and Quill have four kids now, including Connor and Tommy. Lisa and Eddie have four. You and Carla have three. Tracker and Tami have three. Shadow and Glory have five! Sand and Amanda, and Stag and Sherry, and Des and Connie, Marissa and Red Wing, and Renee and Hawk, they all have kids. Everyone has kids!”

  Taye nodded at the door connecting this room to the one Carla was sleeping in, a warning to her to keep her voice down. “Yeah,” he said softly. “The Packs are growing.”

  “I want kids too,” she said baldly.

  Taye waited politely for her to go on as he rubbed his son’s head in soothing circles.

  Rose steeled herself. “I want kids, but to have kids I need to have a husband.”

  “You have a mate,” Taye said. His hand kept moving gently over the baby’s head, but his gaze was sharper now. “Blue Sky At Midday.”

  Sky. Taye’s cousin had claimed her as his mate when he was seventeen. She had only just turned sixteen, so Carla had forbidden him to court her until she was eighteen. As the Pack’s Lupa, even budding alphas like Sky obeyed her. “Taye, it’s been eight years since I’ve seen Sky.”

  “Nah, it hasn’t been that long.”

  “Fine. Seven years, ten months, and two weeks.”

  Taye arched one of his eyebrows in an expression of doubt.

  “Yes, almost eight years,” she insisted. “I got on the plane on October
29, 2014. The plane crashed on the same date in 2064. I’m not likely to forget that date, you know.”

  She couldn’t forget any part of that day. She remembered being excited when she boarded the plane that was to take her to San Francisco to attend her dad’s wedding to his boyfriend Jonas. Her mom drove her to the Minneapolis airport, reminded her to mind her manners, and hugged her goodbye. That was the last time she saw her mom. Only an hour into the flight, the plane crashed. The memory of the plane falling in the sky wasn’t as vivid eight years later, but the feeling of shock and terror would never entirely go away. Stranded in the middle of nowhere with dozens of people who were hurt or dead was horrifying. How relieved she’d been when a hunting party of the Clan found the survivors and took them back to their camp!

  She smiled now as she recalled the confusion that blended with her relief. Their rescuers were all dressed like actors in a Native American film, and none of them had had a cell phone or seemed to understand about laptops or tablets.

  Nor would she forget the sick feeling in her stomach when she was convinced she and the other crash survivors had actually jumped forward to a time fifty years after the plane’s take off. Everyone she loved was dead. Her mother, her father, her uncles and aunts, her cousins, her classmates, and her friends were all gone. Even if they had survived the nuclear war and the plagues the terrorists created, she couldn’t possibly find them. The loss of life had been so immense there had been no one to keep up with technology. Without the internet or cell phones or even a reliable postal service, there had been no way to track anyone down. Even if any of them still lived, they’d be fifty years older while she was still young. In the space of one horrible day, her entire world had disappeared. Of course she remembered that date.

  She focused her gaze on Taye. “And it was only a few days later that Sky claimed me for his mate.”

  That brought more memories flashing through her. Her fingers clenched on the fold of cotton at her knee until her knuckles ached. The crash survivors had been found and brought to the camp of the Lakota Wolf Clan. One of the Lakota men had made Rose feel slimy. He stared at her and followed her around until she couldn’t bear it and ran into the healing tent where she knew others would keep her safe, and there she had first set eyes on Sky. Even now, all these years later, she could picture his long black braids falling over a bare chest with amazingly developed musculature for a boy of seventeen. She remembered the vividness of his eyes, so blue in his dark Native American face that even in the dimness of the tent they glowed. She remembered more, in a jumble of confusion and horror, like the way he stared at her, so protectively that she wanted to hide behind him and so domineering that she wanted to punch him.

  “You sent him away,” Taye remarked.

  She remembered to keep her voice down. “No, I didn’t. He left on his own.”

  “Because you rejected him.”

  She felt color rise to her cheeks, the curse of being a blonde with fair skin. “He practically attacked me!”

  From a vantage point of several lonely years, she wondered if she could have handled it better. Her emotions in the weeks after the crash were nothing short of a train wreck. Who wouldn’t be upset to find herself thrown into a world where women were commodities made valuable by their rareness? She had gone from a life where her old-fashioned mom wouldn’t let her date until she was sixteen, to acquiring a bossy, jealous, would-be husband in the blink of an eye. She’d tried refusing Sky, and she’d avoided him as much as possible, but one day he’d leaped on her, shoved her against the wall and kissed her savagely.

  “He scared me.”

  Taye nodded. “I know. I had a talk with him. He was upset because you flirted with that man from Kearney.”

  Outrage nearly sent her to her feet, but she clenched her hands on the edge of the stool’s seat instead. “I did not flirt. Sky overreacted. As usual.”

  “Well, he was young.” Taye shrugged, careful not to jostle the baby in the crook of his arm. “He’s probably better now.”

  Rose took a deep breath. “Taye, he was supposed to come back in a year or two. It’s been eigh—seven years and ten months, and he’s never left Omaha. I write him letters every month. He sends maybe two or three letters a year.” She took another breath and blurted, “I’m done waiting for him.”

  Taye’s long mouth set in an expression of disapproval, but whether it was at her, or at Sky for staying away so long she wasn’t sure. “Rose, I’ve talked to Quill and Paint, and they’ve told me he has good reasons to stay in Omaha for a while longer.”

  She shook her head slowly. “Not good enough. I wrote him a letter in July telling him he had until my birthday to come back, but he didn’t come, and he didn’t even send a letter.”

  Taye frowned a little at that.

  She steeled herself. “Taye, I repudiate Sky’s claim.” There. Her heart thundered in her ears, but it was out. “If this was the Times Before, being unmarried at twenty-four would be normal. I’d probably be working on my doctorate. But I can’t do that here.” She blinked tears back and gestured at the sleeping baby. “Back then I didn’t expect to start my family until I was thirty or so, but here I’m the only woman my age who doesn’t have kids. I’ve never even—” She choked words back. Taye knew she’d never had sex; he and the Pack made sure she was never alone. “I want to hold a baby of my own. I want a family. Sky isn’t here. I don’t think he ever will be. I want to find a husband now.”

  Taye’s brows dove down over his nose. “Did you have anyone in mind?”

  She felt a blush set fire to her cheeks again. “Well, uh, Jasper Packard is nice, and he has a good business breaking and training horses.”

  Taye’s voice was very soft, but not because of the baby sleeping in his arm. It was the tone that made ice slide down the backs of men confronted by an enraged alpha. “Has he done anything to—”

  “Of course not!”

  Little Feather jerked in his father’s arm, letting out a thin wail. He settled again with a fretful whimper under his father’s gentle hand.

  “Sorry,” Rose said, lowering her voice. “Sorry. No, Jasper has barely spoken to me. Probably because the Pack won’t let him within ten feet of me. Do you know anything bad about Jasper?”

  The alpha didn’t look very happy about it, but he shook his head. “He’s a good man, from what I can tell. Raises some of the best horses around, and treats them well too.”

  Rose let out a relieved breath. “All I ask is that you tell the Pack to back off. Let me have a little time with Jasper so we can get to know each other. Maybe we’ll hit it off. Maybe we won’t. I can’t tell if I don’t get to know him, right?”

  “What if Packard doesn’t want you?”

  Rose gave him the incredulous look that remark deserved. There were so few women nowadays that men fought for them. Any single man would jump at the chance to court a woman. “If we don’t hit it off, there’s Doug Grey or Johnny Sommers.”

  Taye shifted the baby to his other arm, looking dissatisfied. “Grey is too old for you.”

  “He’s thirty-five, only a few years older than you. He comes from a big family, so I’d have plenty of people to help me with housework. And his cousin is Ellie, so he already has ties to the Pack.” She lifted a gaze that she forced any hint of pleading from. “Will you tell the Pack to back off?”

  Still looking sour, Taye nodded. “All right. You can talk to men in public places. But you can’t be alone with them.”

  “No, I won’t.” Rose nodded back, long ago having accepted the dangerous position of women in this crazy future world and the lengths the Pack would go to in order to keep their women safe. She couldn’t imagine anyone stupid enough to try to steal her. Everyone in a hundred miles knew she was under the protection of a pack of wolf shifters. Still, women were stolen from time to time, and she didn’t want Taye or any of his men to have to kill someone just because he was an idiot.

  “Thank you, Taye.”

  He poi
nted a finger at her. “But I’m writing one more time to Sky. If we don’t hear from him by Halloween you can be formally courted.”

  “But I can at least talk to men now? Get to know them?”

  A low, unhappy growl rumbled in his throat. “All right.”

  She jumped off the stool to hug him, careful of the baby. “Thank you, Taye!”

  *

  Sky Wolfe sat down to breakfast alone in the dining room of the whorehouse he managed and co-owned. He enjoyed these quiet moments before the rest of the house roused. Katelyn Jones, the new maid, came in with the coffeepot and a folded square of grimy paper in her hand.

  “A letter for you,” she said in her soft mumble, setting it down on the table. “Coffee?”

  “Yes, please.” Sky made it a point to be courteous to all his employees, and something about Miss Jones, with her club foot, perpetually anxious face, and speech difficulties, brought out the pity he never let anyone see. Just two months ago he had arranged for her to leave her former place of employment where she had been beaten and abused, and she still hadn’t learned to believe she was safe here.

  While she lifted his cup to pour coffee, he slathered butter over a slice of toast and bit into it before opening the letter to read. The shock of his wolf screaming inside him almost distracted him from the content of the letter, but not quite. He slammed the paper onto the table and choked on the toast.

  “Fuck!”

  He regretted the outburst the moment he saw the terror that flared in Katelyn’s pale green eyes. The coffee pot hit the table with a thud, sloshing a bit of the hot beverage over the tablecloth. She cringed away from the hand he raised in apology and rushed out of the dining at a limping run. He swore again. He hadn’t lost his temper in years. During those years, the wolf within him had withdrawn into sullen silence. Only this kind of news could drag the stubborn beast back to life after all this time. With his teeth clenched together, Sky took up the letter again.