Chapter 127: Wet, Dirty & Dripping (bonus)
Tera had been aware of Calis’ face since she first saw him. Even in profile, the sharp jawline and crimson eyes were hard to ignore.
But his face was not the problem right now.
Some of the wolves had shed their fur coat coverings halfway through the digging. The wolves in this pack seemed to cover themselves more than the males in the Dow clan, which Tera had guessed was because of the cooler climate or maybe because wolves just had more hides and fur.
But now that several of them were stripped to the waist, Tera was noticing things she had no business noticing in the middle of a construction project.
Calis was stacked.
He wasn’t as large as Xavi. No one was as large as Xavi. But he had considerably more muscle than Ermin’s lean frame, and every stroke of the hoe made that abundantly clear.
His shoulders were broad, his arms corded with strength, and sweat glistened deliciously on his skin. They traced paths down the hard planes of his side before disappearing beneath the hide at his waist.
His back also flexed with every strike of the hoe, the muscles shifting and bunching in a rhythm that Tera’s brain had decided to catalogue in exhaustive, traitorous detail.
The way those dark tattoos also curved along his body...
Why was he so hot?
Tera caught herself staring and immediately looked away, but her eyes drifted back within seconds like they had a mind of their own.
This was bad. This was very bad.
It reminded her of her first year on the job. She had developed a stupid, raging crush on one of the site foremen. He’d had this way of rolling up his sleeves while reviewing blueprints that had made her forget how to read floor plans.
The crush had died a swift and embarrassing death when she found out he was married. She hadn’t noticed because nobody wore their wedding bands on site due to the equipment being handled, and she had been too busy lusting over the fine hands holding the blueprints to actually read the worker reports her supervisor had given her.
If she had spent less time drooling and more time reviewing paperwork, she would have seen his marital status right there on the form.
The memory made her wince.
But Tera stopped short as a new thought hit her.
Calis was the leader of this pack. Did he already have a mate? Tera hadn’t seen any female making pining looks at him, and he hadn’t directed any particular attention toward any of the other three females.
But then again, she had barely been here a day and had been too preoccupied with meat and water crises to notice romantic dynamics.
It would suck if he had one.
If there was one thing Tera loved about this world, it was the freedom to amass a lovely harem without any of the legal complications of her previous life. And it was a common thing here, apparently.
But even so, she pouted, feeling picky and annoyed.
Why couldn’t Calis have just come straight to her clan like some lost puppy instead of kidnapping her and dragging her all the way out here? She could have shown him the settlement, the farm, the water channels, and the nursery. He would have seen her greatness firsthand without anyone needing to get knocked unconscious.
But noooo, this wolf had to do things the hard way.
’Stupid alpha and his stupid muscles and his stupid kidnapping.’
Calis paused mid-swing and looked at Tera while he wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his forearm.
Their eyes met, and Tera’s pussy throbbed with that familiar pulse of heat that bloomed. Soon, she felt herself getting wet.
She forced a smile at him that she prayed looked casual, fighting the urge not to clench her thighs together.
Especially not while he was staring.
Calis held her gaze for a beat, then turned back to his digging.
Tera exhaled.
’That was close.’
[What was close?]
[(◕‿◕)]
’Nothing!’
Calis drove the hoe into the earth with more force than necessary.
His heart was pounding, and it had nothing to do with the digging.
The work was strenuous, but his body was built for far worse. His heart was pounding because he had just caught the shiftless female staring at him with an expression that had made his blood run hot.
He dug harder.
What had he been thinking, bringing this female here?
If any of his wolves had brought a shiftless female to the pack and shown interest in her, Calis would have been against it. The bloodline had to be protected. The pack needed pure wolf blood. Every mating needed to produce wolf cubs, strong and full-blooded, to ensure their species survived.
Mingling with other beast types was a gamble. The cub could turn out to be either parent’s type, and even if it emerged as a wolf, it wouldn’t be a purebred from two wolf parents.
His father had drilled that into him since he was a pup, and the elders had taught him that too whenever they encountered other tribes of different beast types.
And yet...
He remembered the sight of her in the water. Her nice soft stomach, her full breasts and how her skin had been soft when he had caught her.
His cock twitched, and Calis flinched before controlling himself.
Even shiftless, she was very pleasing to the eye. And it had been so long since he had felt a female’s touch. Years of self-imposed discipline and sacrifice, giving his pack’s females to his males so they could breed, denying himself so others could fulfil their duties...
But this wasn’t about relieving his desire. That would be manageable. What terrified him was the knowledge that this female could get pregnant.
A female of another beast type was one thing, but a shiftless female?
He could not afford to lay with one. Mating was for producing cubs, and such a thing would create not just a weak wolf but very possibly another shiftless cub. And now that he knew this particular female could get pregnant, the danger was even greater.
He would not do it!
Calis moved ahead of the others, putting distance between himself and the female whose gaze he could still feel on his skin.