Bride of the Alpha

By Georgette St. Clair

The Timber Valley pack has a terrible reputation. Word is their males are dominant, kinky, and possessive – and Josephine’s best friend from college is being forced to marry one? No way!

Curvy wolf shifter Josephine Southpaw’s got the perfect solution. Using a magic charm, she’ll disguise herself as the slender, beautiful Camille on her wedding day – while Camille hightails it out of town with the wolf she really loves. Of course, the Alpha will ditch Josephine the second he gets her back to the wedding suite and sees what his chubby bride really looks like. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for starters, Alpha Maxwell Battle is smokin’ hot. And he takes one look at Josephine and vows to never let her go – but he’s going to punish her for her trickery in deliciously sexy ways. And finally, Josephine’s friends keep staging well-intentioned rescue attempts, but she’s no longer sure she wants to be rescued.

But Josephine’s not the only one with secrets. It soon becomes very clear that Maxwell’s hiding something big, a secret that puts not only Josephine’s heart but her life at risk.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Georgette St. Clair
• Release date: Aug 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781370664504

Georgette St. Clair

Hello, I am Georgette St. Clair, writer of hot, sexy romances which star all Alpha heroes, all the time. The road to love may be rocky and fraught with peril, (and humor and scorchtastic sex and healthy heapings of snark) but my shifters will stop at nothing to claim their fated mate.A little about me: I live in Florida. My checkered career involved stints as a newspaper reporter, EMT, internet marketer, cocktail waitress, temp, nurse’s aide (but not all at the same time...)Now I’m living my perfect life, spending my days in a fantasy universe where I nudge my smart-mouthed, take-no-guff heroines onto the path that will set them on a collision course with true love.

Book preview

1

Josephine Southpaw. You did not just make a date for Sunday. My best friend Bess stared at me in complete and utter horror as I tucked my cell phone back in my purse.

Blind date. It’s a cousin of a friend kind of thing. Sunday evening. Why do you ask? I said innocently, checking my reflection in the mirror of my antique Victorian vanity. I looked nothing like myself, which was exactly the way it should be. I flicked the new charm that dangled on my charm bracelet. It looked like a cute little bluebird, but unlike the other charms, this one was magic; it came with the power of disguise.

Um, oh, I don’t know, how about because you’re getting married on Saturday morning? And Alphas are not known for being willing to share their brides?

Fake married, I said with exasperation. Faux married. The wedding is a sham. We’ve been over this a million times. The second that obnoxious a-hole of an Alpha gets me back to the wedding suite, I will take off this charm and turn back into my real self. He will take one look at me, dump my fat ass, get the wedding annulled, and I will be single and ready to mingle again.

And my old college room-mate Camille, who had been forced to agree to an arranged marriage with the aforementioned a-hole, would be long gone. That was the whole point. While I was walking down the aisle, she’d flee the state with the shifter she really loved, with fake ID, and start a new life with him on the other side of the country.

You think he can really get an annulment that fast? Bess’s fiancé, Corwin, asked skeptically.

Um, sure, of course. I think. I frowned. Actually, I don’t know how long annulments take. Maybe I should have made the date for next week. It was Friday. I was getting married tomorrow morning, much to the dismay of my two besties.

I looked in the mirror again, patting at my hair. It was really disconcerting; my hair felt the same, but it looked as if I were patting shining gold ringlets, instead of my thick waves of chocolate brown hair. This was some damned fine magic. I winked at myself with my big blue eyes, which in real life are big brown eyes. My reflection winked back at me.

The illusion was so complete, I even smelled like Camille.

I looked up at Corwin and shrugged. It’ll be fine. He’ll at least boot me out of there and I’ll be headed back home by Saturday afternoon at the latest. What’s the worst that could happen?

Don’t say that! Bess and Corwin yelled at the same time.

You two are so superstitious. Also you’re ridiculous worrywarts.

He might actually want you to stay married to him, Corwin suggested kindly. What then?

Ha. Corwin was very sweet, but seriously, what were the odds? Although Maxwell Battle, the jerkoff Alpha, had never met Camille, he knew what she looked like: a slim pre-Raphaelite beauty with a waterfall of blonde curls, whose pack was very wealthy and powerful. That’s why he’d wanted her; she’d look good on his arm, and his pack would form a powerful alliance with Camille’s pack.

As for me, I was a chubby, round-faced girl who, I’d been told, laughed too loudly, spoke my mind far more than was considered ladylike, and came from a small, poor pack with no political clout. When he saw me, he would bounce me out on my butt so fast…. Well, it’s a good thing that I’m well padded.

Not gonna happen, I informed him.

Call us right after the wedding, Bess said. You’ll probably need us to come pick you up. When he finds out you faked him out, he is gonna be one hacked-off Alpha.

I appreciate it, I said. Please stay by the phone on Saturday waiting for my SOS call.

I had to admit to myself, I wasn’t looking forward to that bit. The Timber Valley pack had a very scary reputation. Dominant, arrogant, deadly in a fight… not that I thought Maxwell Battle would hurt me, but I suspected that unpleasant words would be hurled at my rapidly retreating rear.

I didn’t feel badly about tricking him, though. He totally deserved it.

Maxwell looked at marriage as a business transaction. He couldn’t care less what Camille wanted—he hadn’t even bothered to meet her before the wedding, didn’t find out if she wanted to marry him. Instead, he just demanded that she be delivered to the Timber Valley property the morning of the wedding.

Dick.

Camille had called me up literally sobbing a few days earlier. She’d had to sneak out of her house to call me so she wouldn’t be busted by her step-uncle, the pack’s Alpha, and an über-jerk from what I’d heard.

I had barely heard from Camille since she was forced to drop out of college a year and a half ago, after the death of her parents in a landslide on their property. Their house had been buried, half a dozen people had been killed. Her step-uncle, Kray Renker, had taken over as the new Alpha of the Iron Claw pack after her father died, and she’d had to go home to help take care of her young cousins, who had also been orphaned.

Camille had called me to beg for help. She was in love with a nice young coyote shifter named Freddy, but she didn’t dare tell Kray about it because he’d never approve.

Kray had just informed her she’d be getting married at the week’s end. Maxwell, an Alpha, was at the age where he needed to leave the family compound and start his own pack on his family’s property, and he also wanted to form an alliance with the Iron Claw pack now that Kray was a powerful Alpha who’d successfully expanded his territory.

She was desperate to get out of this marriage, and get out of Colorado altogether. That sounded like the best thing all around; every time I’d talked to her since she’d left college, she’d sounded more and more depressed. The bright, bubbly girl I’d known was turning into a shadow of her former self. I got the impression that things were miserable at the Iron Claw pack’s compound.

So when she called me for help, I’d sprung into action right away. I happened to know a powerful shaman who specialized in disguise spells. I sacrificed most of my savings to pay for that charm, but it was worth it. She managed to convince her uncle to let her meet me at a coffee shop near her compound, to say goodbye to me—with two guards standing nearby, glowering at us. I’d clasped her hand and slipped the charm into her palm so it could touch her skin and absorb her essence before I took it back.

The switch would be pretty easy, I figured. Saturday morning would be chaos at the Timber Valley pack property. Tons of people pouring in, catering, family from all over, as well as other packs coming to celebrate the Alpha’s wedding, and, if their pack was anything like mine had been, probably shifters from other species coming to pay their respects. An Alpha wedding was a big deal, and also an excuse to throw a wild party that lasted for days.

I knew exactly what building she would be staying in. I’d shift to wolf form, run onto the property, and nobody would even notice me, because of all the confusion. What was one more wolf running around when there were hundreds of shifters milling about? I’d sneak into her building, change into her form, she’d shift to wolf form, and make a run for it. Frederick would be waiting for her about ten miles down the road.

I would stay looking like Camille, and go through with the wedding to buy her time. There would be ceremonies, a reception, speeches, blah blah. At least that was how my pack did things, and all the packs that I knew of in California.

I figured the groom and I would head back to the wedding suite by midafternoon. By then, I’d have bought her enough time; she and Frederick would be long gone, headed off to start a new life as far away from Colorado as possible, with new IDs.

They’d need those new IDs, because God help them if Kray found them. Kray had an even worse reputation than the Timber Valley wolves, if that were possible.

Are you worried about what Camille’s uncle will do when he finds out? Corwin asked, as if reading my mind.

Kind of, but it should be okay. He wouldn’t want to take on the White Blaze pack, I said. The way our small, wimpy pack survived in California was by being under the protection of a very large, very strong pack called the White Blaze pack. The Southpaw pack paid the White Blaze pack tribute, in the form of crops from our farms and a set financial fee, and they protected us. The usual stuff.

I don’t know, Bess said anxiously. He’s been on a tear lately. He’s swallowed up three smaller packs in the past year. With two of them he challenged the Alpha and killed him, and made the whole pack move on to his land, and with the third pack the Alpha submitted when challenged and left the state, and his pack had to move on to the Renker’s property too. He doesn’t sound like he’d back down from a fight.

The White Blaze Alpha has been in more death matches that I can count. He is undefeated, I said firmly. Kray would not want to challenge someone with that kind of reputation.

She’ll be fine, Corwin said to Bess reassuringly. He didn’t sound all that convinced.

In the mirror, I saw Corwin throw his arms around Bess’s shoulder, and then he saw the look of wistfulness on my face and withdrew it.

Don’t do that on my account, I said.

Bess, me, and Corwin had all been best friends in college, and then in our senior year, Corwin proposed to Bess. Corwin was a sweet, thoughtful, handsome guy, soft-spoken, a perfect gentleman. I’d had a mild crush on Corwin for a while there, but it wasn’t full-on raging lust. I was happy for Bess, most of the time anyway. She was a full-figured gal like me; she gave me hope that maybe someday, even though I wasn’t model material, I could find my perfect man.

Who knows, maybe Maxwell Battle will be totally hot. Want me to ask around? she asked. Or I could google it.

His picture likely wouldn’t be online, because shifters tried very hard not to have an online presence—we liked to keep a low profile in general, since humans didn’t know we existed—but it was a small world out there among us supernatural folk, so we probably had mutual acquaintances. There were only a couple hundred packs in all of the US, all of us living in rural areas so we could shift when we wanted to without fear of discovery.

I made a face. Nope. I couldn’t care less what he looks like, I said. He’s the caveman who was going to grab my friend by the hair and drag her off to the wedding chamber. Screw him.

I turned back to the mirror and pulled a comb out of my purse, humming Here Comes the Bride as I combed my hair.

2

Oh my fur and whiskers. My future soon-to-be ex-husband was hot. So, so hot. He was standing outside the lodge, talking to a few very handsome shifters who looked as if they were related to him, but I could barely see them because he was so hot.

I was even willing to forgive them for having come to pick me up in a pickup truck on my wedding day.

Maxwell was tall, about six four. I was five six, not exactly short, but he would tower over me. He had broad shoulders and big burly arms, and mighty thighs. I could tell because his jeans fit him quite nicely.

Jeans. Was that what he was going to marry me in? My illusion spell made it look as if I wore a flowing white silk wedding dress trimmed in lace, and a massive gauzy veil covering my face and flowing down