Royal Wolf Box Set by Haley Weir

Chapter Four

The middle of the night was always the hardest. It shouldn’t have been—wolf shifters loved the overnight hours and usually found it to be both their most powerful and peaceful time. But for Aeron, it was when he missed Cassandra, the most, on the nights that she wasn’t there. He laid in bed with his hands clasped above his muscular, bare chest and sighed. Tonight felt different than the other nights. Tonight his thoughts were split in two.

He thought about Cassandra running through the woods on four feet and ending up somewhere in the soft dirt, making love to Rubius. But then, instead of dwelling on the thoughts that would usually keep him up all night in a twist of jealousy, he started to think about Samar.

He thought about her beautiful body and wondered what she looked like in her purely shifted form. He had only ever been told stories about Kitsune and never actually had the chance to see what one looked like. He imagined that she would look something like a sleek fox, one with big brown eyes and a pointed snout. The thoughts about Samar seemed to plague him regardless of which form she was in, until at last, he was too restless to lie still on the bed any longer. Aeron got up and went for another walk through the empty hallways of the castle.

He walked and thought about things and never really reached a conclusion on anything that pestered his mind. When he reached the open courtyard in the center of the castle, he stopped.

Samar was sitting in the middle of the courtyard in her nightgown, staring up at the stars in the sky above her. Aeron wasn’t sure whether to disturb her peace simply because he wanted to sit with her, or whether to turn and walk away without ever letting her know that he was there. As he was thinking it over, his feet seemed to make the decision for him and walked into the courtyard and toward Samar. When he got close enough for her to hear his footsteps, she turned quickly to see who was approaching.

“I’m sorry,” Aeron said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s okay,” Samar smiled. A veil of hesitation hung behind her eyes.

Was it fear? Restraint?

He couldn’t seem to read Samar the way that he could read other shifters. Apparently, his alpha skills only got him so far when dealing with a Kitsune.

“What are you doing out here?” he asked as he sat beside her.

“It’s not really out is it?” she chuckled as she corrected him. “I mean, technically, we’re still inside the castle.”

“True,” Aeron said. “But still, it’s an odd place to be in the middle of the night.”

“Is it, though?” she said. “Is it odd for us to be out here under the open sky? I feel like it is more strange for shifters to spend so much time in their human form inside of the constructs of buildings.”

She wasn’t wrong. Aeron frequently felt stifled by the castle and the city and found himself wanting to run free like Cassandra sometimes did. But he rarely allowed himself the luxury to do so, unless he was going into the forest on pack matters as the alpha and not in his capacity as king.

“You’re right,” he agreed. “It is strange. Tell me, what do you do when you’re shifted? Do you run through the woods like the wolves do? Or do you do other things?”

“What kind of other things do you think I might do?” she asked with a grin.

Aeron got the feeling that Samar was entertained by his lack of knowledge about her.

“I don’t know,” he said teasingly. “Fox things?”

Samar threw her head back and laughed. It was the first laughter from her that had sounded completely uninhibited, and it coated Aeron’s ears with delight.

“Well, I’m not really sure what is classified as fox things,” she said with a playful smile. “But yes, I do miss running in the woods. I used to do it all of the time with my mother. When she died, I stopped.”

“I can take you,” Aeron blurted out before he thought about it. Once the words were out, he didn’t really have much of a choice but to complete his thought. “I can take you for a run through the forest.”

Samar looked at him with a hopeful reluctance.

“What about the others?” she asked.

“What others?”

“The other shifters in the forest.”

“They are all loyal to me,” Aeron said. For once, he felt as if he could use his alpha status for something fun instead of something laden with responsibility. “No one will bother you in the woods tonight as long as you stay beside me. I give you my word.”

Samar’s reluctance instantly turned into eagerness. She stood up and was practically bouncing on her feet to go.

“Okay,” she said. “If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure,” Aeron said as he smiled and stood up beside her.

“Would you like to see some of my Kitsune abilities?” she asked him.

She was starting to let down her guard a little bit more now, trusting him with select pieces of what she was willing to share.

As a matter of fact, Aeron thought with surprise, he was letting his own walls down around her – almost eagerly. What did that mean?

For now, he had been dying to see her Kitsune form.

“Yes,” Aeron said. “But not here. Not inside the castle. Come, I’ll show you a secret way out of the castle and into the forest. As soon as we get there, you can show me.”

He held out his hand for her to take, and after a momentary pause, she took it.

Aeron didn’t expect such a small thing as the feeling of holding her hand to induce such a strong reaction. It felt as if her touch was saturated with an electrical heat that surged into his skin and rose up through his veins all the way to his chest. He looked at her, realizing that they hadn’t stood this close together before, and the heaviness of sexual tension surged through the air between them. Aeron tightened his grip on her hand and led her out of the courtyard and toward the secret corridors that led out of the castle and into the tree line at the edge of the forest.

“What about our clothes?” Samar asked once they were walking through the underground corridor.

“What about them?” Aeron said. “No one is going to see that we are in our nightclothes. No one will see us leaving here at all. And the wolves won’t care.”

“But when we shift—”

Samar’s voice stopped mid-sentence, and Aeron then realized what she was trying to say. Clothing had a tendency to get torn to shreds during a shift. He had pairs of pants tucked away throughout the forest, but she did not.

“We’ll take them off when we reach the end of the corridor and leave them here. No one uses these secret passageways except for my family. We can take them off, shift to go into the forest, and then they will be right here waiting for us to put back on when we return.”

That meant there would be a moment, just a split second prior to their shift, in which they would both be completely naked in front of each other. And although he didn’t want to make Samar feel uncomfortable, he was enthralled by the thought of seeing her beautiful body again, in both forms.

When they got to the end of the corridor, Samar stared out into the openness of the forest ahead and smiled. Within moments, she was pulling her nightgown over her head and stepping her foot out onto the grass. Aeron followed suit without hesitation, and soon the two of them were naked beneath the moonlight as their eyes trailed down each other’s bodies. One momentary glance was enough to send Aeron into a visceral reaction, and he heard Samar’s breathing become ragged in response to seeing the growing cock hanging between his legs. If one of them hadn’t shifted, they likely wouldn’t have made it out of the corridor at all. But just before Aeron couldn’t take the yearning anymore, Samar shifted into her Kitsune form. Her shift was so elegant, so powerfully beautiful, that it didn’t lessen Aeron’s desire for her at all.

Now, before him, stood a gorgeous fox, her fur shimmering beneath the luminous night and her dark ebony eyes looking up at him. Her tails swished behind her, and Aeron thought he glimpsed a residual imprint of a magical energy in the air on their path.

He shifted, howled as loudly as his canine voice could carry the sound, and the two of them raced off into the forest together.