The Hunter's Daughter (Sample Chapters)

Chapter 3

Dominic let her go, startling her in with the steely determination she often saw in her father’s eyes when he was bagging a kill—a supernatural, most assuredly. It was the look that said, this was for your own good.

She stepped back, away from the large man that loomed before her. “Did you just lick and f*****g bite me?” She didn’t recognize her own tone as the words came out shrilly and loudly.

“You’re my mate and traveling with a man who is a known hunter,” he told her. “If I didn’t claim you now as mine, that man over there with the red hair would have put you in the cells before I could get a word in edgewise about our…our circumstances.”

Nothing made sense anymore. Mate? Luna? Chloe knew she should have listened more intently when her father was speaking to her about wolves. Maybe then she would have had some basis for understanding whatever strange situation she had erroneously stepped into.

Taking another miniscule step away from him, she acted as if he had been the one to say he wanted to put her in a jail cell. She flinched when Dom’s head whipped back to her when he caught her slight movements. He’d been looking over at the new intruders, the ones who were swiftly moving in behind the man with red hair.

She took a larger step back and began to fall over a tree root. Dominic caught her under her arms, but she cowered away. She didn’t know what being a mate meant and why the man with the red hair was looking so angry as he hurried over to them.

“Dominic, what the f**k?” Red growled at the man who had called her his mate. “You f*****g claimed her?”

Dominic looked unapologetic, even going so far as to raise his head in defiance of the other man’s words. “She’s my mate, Gareth. You should know me well enough by now that I wouldn’t just mark just any female.”

“But she’s obviously with that man over there.” Gareth pointed to Peter McAvoy, who was fighting with the net and cussing so loudly the birds in the trees had all scattered. “And he’s a hunter. You can’t be mated to a human, Dom.”

“Smell her,” Dominic dared. “Does she smell human to you? And furthermore, does she smell like that hunter over there?”

Chloe rubbed up and down her arms. The day was still warm, but everything was so confusing and alarming that she felt a bitter chill right down to her soul. Nothing made sense. That morning she’d left the house as nothing more than a hunter, and now…now she was a mate and whatever a Luna was. It sounded idiotic, like some made-up language, and she wondered if she’d bumped her head on that last fall and this was all a very vivid concussion-induced dream.

Gareth moved in, and Chloe attempted to step back behind Dominic’s wide body. The man who was her supposed mate held her still, and Gareth took a deep whiff, his nostrils flaring.

“Not human, and—”

“But I am human.” Chloe felt she had to butt in. What they were saying was ludicrous. “I don’t turn into a wolf, and I don’t howl at the moon. I’ve never growled, snarled, or even gotten furry. This is f*****g insane.” She started to panic a little, her eyes growing wider with each passing second. “That man over there is my father, and yes, he is a hunter, but I’ve never killed any of your kind befo—”

“—our kind,” Dominic corrected hastily.

“No,” she refuted. “I’m not a shifter. I would swear it on my life.”

The two men looked at her as if she had spoken some long-dead foreign language. The faces were quizzical, almost as if they didn’t believe her or thought her mad. When the man named Gareth spoke, it was with a hesitance neither of them liked.

“Smells familiar somehow,” he muttered. “Definitely not human, and her scent is almost as strong as my own mate’s is to my nose.”

Chloe let out an exasperated huff of air, throwing her hands up in an I give up gesture.

Dominic just growled in response to his words.

“Relax, Dom,” Gareth tossed back, amiably enough. “I’m not saying she smells as strong as my mate or holds that same allure, but her scent is quite powerful. It’s strange, really.”

Dominic looked over at Cole, who was struggling to use some of the net to secure Peter’s hands behind his back. The man was quieter now, almost as if winded and too tired to fight back anymore.

“Take him back to the cells, Cole,” he ordered before looking over at Chloe. His gaze was daunting, as if he could see straight through her, into the very depths of her soul. “You, little Luna…we will have to figure out why you’ve never shifted, and why you don’t feel the tingles I feel when I touch your pretty skin.”

A layer of trepidation sloughed off her like the skin of a snake, the gentle smile he gave her giving comfort before he pulled her into his side as if daring Gareth to come back again with a sassy rejoinder.

Gareth, in turn, nodded back, taking a deep breath and starting to walk away. On his way back to the two men he’d come onto the scene with, he turned around as he walked, giving Dominic and Chloe a smile before calling back to them. “Your funeral, my friend. I have a feeling this one won’t be so easily tamed.”

She had no idea what the man meant, and her pride puffed up her chest before she opened her mouth to give him what-for.

“Hush, love. He’s an ass if there ever was one, but he’s a decent Alpha and a good friend of mine. We go way back, and though he can difficult at times, he will not hurt you now that I have marked your lovely skin with my claim.”

Her hand immediately went up to her neck, and she winced at the bruised flesh when she gave it even the slightest brush of her fingers. Dominic pulled her hand away, and surprised her by bringing it up to his mouth and kissing the back of each of her knuckles.

“As I said before, you, Chloe McAvoy, are my mate and Luna, and it will be a pleasure to finally teach you the ways of our people—the ways of the wolf shifter.”

Standing back a few paces, he looked her up and down as if expecting her to kneel to his dominance. He seemed to gather strength, and his eyes darkened in hue before his mouth thinned into a determined line across his face.

“Now, shift!”

The boom of his voice almost knocked her back with its suddenness, and she rocked on her heels before planting her feet wider. Again, defiantly.

“No.” Her voice was stern and stark. “I can’t change into something I’m not, and no amount of useless bellowing is going to make me do otherwise.”

Dominic was surprised, and he tried to think what could keep a she-wolf from shifting by his Alpha Command. There wasn’t much, and he decided that after he got Chloe settled in his home, he would have a talk with Felicia Danvers, one of the doctors back at the pack clinic, and try to figure out what would keep her from shifting on command.

He rarely had to use his Command, but when he did, every one of his pack members heeled without question. If not, they would suffer excruciating pain, torment of the worst kind. He was quite glad it usually never came down to that.

Chloe swayed on her feet, a hand coming up to her temple and her brow creasing as if in pain.

“I…I don’t feel well,” she muttered. “I need…need to sit down. My head, it…it hurts.”

She almost collapsed against the nearest tree, and Dom hurried over to her, relinquishing the hold he had on her through the tenuous Alpha Command. He had almost felt her submit, but whatever was blocking her was not allowing her body to acquiesce on its own. It was strange.

Dominic followed her down to the ground next to her and canted his head to study her.

With her head tilted back, he studied the delicate line of her jaw and felt a stiffening between his legs. In order to hide his fast-growing erection as he watched her neck roll with a swallow, he tucked his legs up to his chest and settled his elbows on his knees. The whole time he stared, her eyes were closed, and he wondered if she was suffering from a migraine. It would have made sense since he had used his Alpha Command on her with seemingly no visible effect.

He watched her eyelashes flutter and was glad he knew what her eyes looked like already. A deep emerald. He too had green eyes, but they were lighter, like grass. As she continued to keep them shuttered to him, he thought now he could study her. He did, slowly and quietly, liking what he saw.

Her vibrant red hair had fallen out of her beanie at some point, and the straight locks curled into messy waves after being subdued by her hat for so long. Her skin was pale, but she showed no signs of freckles from being out in the sun. He assumed she either didn’t have them, or used a significant amount of sunblock to maintain the delicate alabaster of her flesh.

Her nose was a button, and her face was heart-shaped with a delicate curve of jaw. She wasn’t skin and bones, he was glad to see, for he liked a healthier, more vital look in his female. Dominic thought he’d been blessed by the Goddess indeed for his good fortune.

Or at least in the looks department. She was sassy, he had to give her that, but then again, he had just detained what the woman had called a father and sent him to the cells. Such an act would never ingratiate him to her, though it was necessary.

He needed to know more, and—let’s face it, his d**k needed to go down as well—so he started to ask a few questions.

“How old are you, little mate?”

“Why do you keep calling me that? And I’m 20 years old. 21 in another six months or so.”

“I’m 24. My birthday was last month,” he told her. “And I call you mate, because that’s what you are. My mate.”

“Okay, so you’ve said, but what is that exactly? And what’s Luna?”

Dominic sighed. He truly was starting from scratch with his intended, and he didn’t want to scare her off in the process. As she didn’t feel the pull to be with him, he was touch and go on how much he could share with her at this stage in the game.

Honesty won over in his mind, for he would never be able to lie outright to his other half.

“A mate, for our kind, is our one true other half. We are simply meant to be from birth, and it comes with a lot of extra abilities between the two once they have marked each other.”

“Marked… Is that what you did when you bit me?”

“Yes. I claimed you as mine, for better or for worse.” God, he didn’t want to bring up her heat at a time like this when she was feeling so overwhelmed, so he decided to hash it out with her later and try to move slowly into getting her acclimated with their way of life. “The bond between mates is strong, stronger than any human with their stupid pieces of papers and wedding ceremonies. When we mark each other, it is forever. Our souls would be one, but that’s only after you decided if you wanted to mark me as well.”

“So, a soulmate? And why don’t I feel the bond as your mate? Why do I feel nothing?” Though she was starting to come around and ask the important questions, it still pained Dominic that he couldn’t answer that for her.

And worse, that she felt nothing toward him at all.

“I…I don’t know that answer. It’s the first I’ve ever heard of such a thing happening. I assume it’s the same reason your wolf is bl0cked, and why you couldn’t shift when I ordered you to.” He looked closer at her. The crease in her brow seemed looser, almost depleted. “Does your head feel any better?”

“Much, but I still don’t think I’m a wolf. Wouldn’t I have shifted by now? Or is it like drinking, and I can only do it after I’m 21?”

Dominic had to laugh at that, and even Chloe gave a small smile. “Your first shift would come not long after puberty. Many times in the female, it happens right before or after the first onset of your menses. Did you ever feel any different around that time?”

She made a face. Her mouth twisted down as if thinking some pretty unpleasant thoughts. “Besides cramping and feeling so bloated I could float downriver like a life raft, not much else. I was bleeding from a place I didn’t ever think I’d see that color coming from, so I was too distressed about that to think any further.”

Dominic lifted his head. It was quite a canine gesture, as if his ears had perked upward at a new sound. “You didn’t know what a period was before that, did you?”

“Nope,” she quipped with a laugh. “My father didn’t exactly sit me down for a chat about the birds and the bees either. I was homeschooled, but Health wasn’t part of the curriculum.”

Christ, he’d probably want to wait to tell her about being his Luna. If she wasn’t even educated on things like periods, he doubted her father had broached the subject of s*x with her.

Dominic knew then he had his work cut out for him.

This book is available for purchase in full on Kin dle Vel la through the Ama zon k****e app! I am slowly uploaded all the chapters over the next few days.