Page 4 of Alpha's Touch

But he wrecked my plans by turning his body to the side and managed to deflect a little, catching some of my charge on his hip, but missing the brunt of it. I turned back for him, and he jabbed his elbow into my midsection. Both of us grunted in pain, as I wrapped my arms around him and took him down to his back. I turned my body at the last second to take most of the weight so he wouldn’t be hurt. And since when had I started trying to protect my recruits? What the fuck was I doing?

I straddled him as he lay on his back, reached down and grabbed his arm and pulled it around the front of his neck. From here, I could spin him on his side, and the idea of that smooth white ass turned up for me was so tempting, I had to let him go. I jumped up to my feet and backed away. “If I’d wanted to, I could have had you right there,” I told him softly. “If I got you flat on your stomach, it would have been over. You should have resisted me by extending your leg and trying to raise your shoulders.”

Vandercliff nodded and sprang back to his feet. “Do that again,” he said, a little out of breath. “Let me try it.”

Reluctantly, I took him down again and got on top of him, pulling his arm forward, but he took way too long to follow my instructions. After far too many seconds passed, he tried to defend himself by doing as I’d told him. He stuck out his leg, but just lay there not doing anything else, so I spun him around and pushed his face to the ground. This was so typical of Vandercliff. It was his fatal flaw—he thought about things way too long and too hard before he acted, instead of just following his instincts. In seconds, he wasn’t moving anymore.

I leaned in and spoke in his ear. “You have to be quicker than that, Vandercliff. What have I told you over and over again? Don’t think so much. Just react.” I released him, surprised at how difficult it was to let him go, and how tempting it was to bury my face in his curls and just take in his sweet scent. Alarmed by the idea, I rolled away and sprang up to my feet. He struggled back up and made another slow, abortive move toward me, but I held up a hand to stop him.

“No. Enough. You were late, and I have too many things to do today to waste any more time here.” One of those things would be to clear my damn head. I felt like I was falling into a heat lust, yet there were no omegas anywhere around as far as I could tell. I resisted the urge to pull Vandercliff over to me to see if the omega scent might be coming from him or from his clothes. Come to think of it, Vandercliff would make a fine substitute if no omega was available. I actually reached for him before I caught myself and turned away.

“You’ve improved some,” I told him, forcing myself to speak as calmly as I could. “But remember what I told you and try to get in some extra practice. And for the gods’ sake, wash your clothes and go take a shower, or I’ll-I’ll have to put you on report.”

I turned on my heel and got out of there and away from that omega scent that was turning my brain into complete mush.

Chapter Two

Darcy

It was later that evening as I sat in the tavern outside the front gates, that I closed my eyes and let the sounds of people talking and laughing wash over me and around me, carrying me away to someplace peaceful and calm. A place that had no studying, and no training sessions, and absolutely no Alphas. I was so damn tired and aching all over from my pummeling that morning that I could hardly breathe without pain. Never, not even in my worst nightmares or my wildest imaginings, had I expected training for the army to be so hard.

It had seemed like the answer to my prayers when I’d allowed myself to be talked into all this by my aunt and uncle, Sir Roscoe and Lady Rudmilla.

Lady Rudmilla was my mother’s twin sister, or she had been, before my mother died three days after having me, some nineteen years earlier. My aunt was still quite a beautiful woman at forty years old, with silver blonde hair and warm brown eyes, and she had Sir Roscoe wrapped firmly around her little finger. She and her husband had no children of their own and had taken me in after my mother’s passing, my own father having displayed very little interest in me. He was an Alpha and not known for having an even temper, but he’d never so much as blinked an eye when Lady Rudmilla pulled up in her luxurious landau carriage outside his manor home to retrieve me.

I didn’t remember a bit of it, having been only a couple of weeks old at the time, but Aunt Rudmilla had often told me the story. She had come in response to a letter my mother had written on her death bed, imploring her to please come for me as quickly as she could arrange it. She had dropped everything and come, of course, and marched into the huge manor house of my father and told him she was taking her sister’s child home with her.

As he had already installed his mistress in my mother’s old bedroom, barely waiting for her corpse to be removed first and stored in the barn until her burial the next day, he wasn’t bothered at all by my aunt’s announcement, and waved a dismissive hand in Rudmilla’s face.

“Do as you will,” he told her. “I need a real heir, and not some brainless omega like your sister. I should have realized that anyone who looked like her couldn’t possibly have much intelligence. She couldn’t even manage to give me an heir. All she produced was another worthless omega like herself.”

Somehow, my hot-tempered aunt managed not to kill him, and instead, she bundled both me and my wet nurse up and took us home with her the next morning, after my mother’s funeral. My uncle plus the three of us had been the only mourners present, she had told me later.

My life after that was never boring, and it was mostly due to my aunt. She was what was called in those days “a free spirit,” and whiled away her days drawing or practicing archery or taking long rides in the countryside with her five dogs, all wolfhounds and huge, sweet-tempered, patient beasts. At night, she would take me outside to look up at the stars, and she pointed out what she thought were the planets and the constellations. I learned later that she was quite wrong in her identifications, but the stories she made up about them were so entrancing that the minor, and sometimes not so minor, aberrations from the facts didn’t really matter.

I’d sit with the dogs piled around me for warmth and listen to her spin her old stories about them—aboutHyades, and the daughters of the Titan, and about Orion, the Hunter, and the five sisters of the Pleiades who nursed the infant wine god, Dionysus. So many stories I couldn’t remember them all. It didn’t matter really, because her voice became the music of my nights, lulling us both to sleep under the stars. I woke up many a frosty morning, buried beside her underneath a pile of dogs, who led us home for breakfast, shivering, but happy.

My education was unique, I think, and never followed any particular pattern. She would sit me in the library some mornings and instruct me to read from one of the books from what she called the Philosopher’s Section, and then the next day or so, she’d set me on Shakespeare or perhaps one of the Romantic poets. Other days, it would be scientific books or astronomy or sometimes biology. Most of them were well over my head, but I read them because she asked me to, and I adored her.

Other times we would go on long walks through the fields together, and she’d tell me about the marigolds and their use on skin ailments, and a plant called lady’s mantle to treat a range of conditions from “women’s ailments” to muscle spasms. She told me about stinging nettle for allergies, and primroses for pain. Rudmilla fancied herself a hedge witch and spent some of her free time as a healer, gathering herbs and remedies from plants we encountered on our walks in the woods and in the fields and—you guessed it—in the hedges. I believe she may have had a bit of magic after all, because I could gather the same plants, mix them exactly according to her instructions and use them on the dogs and horses and pretty much on anyone else I could convince to stand still long enough to be my guinea pigs, and nothing ever got healed or helped very much as far as I could tell.

As I neared the age of eight or so, my uncle, Sir Roscoe, who had always been exceedingly kind to me, took Rudmilla aside and told her she really needed to cut my hair and make me start wearing pants.

At that point, my hair reached down all the way to my waist in a tangle of curls, so he had a point. As for the clothing, I got up each morning and happily just threw on one of the footmen’s old shirts with the sleeves cut off, because it was so much “easier,” as Rudmilla always said, for rambling through the forests. I think the habit also stemmed from her hatred of the nappies my nurse put on me as a baby. My aunt said they were smelly and unsanitary, so when I got a little older and started trailing around after her, she didn’t like the idea of either changing me or leaving me as I was, so she hit on the idea of the footmen’s old shirts. I didn’t get the hang of using the chamber pot until I was almost four, so my aunt got the idea of letting me just squat down wherever I happened to be on our walks outside. It was ever so much easier for both of us, and anyway, I was pretty feral in those days.

Since she always listened carefully to what my uncle had to say, however, my halcyon days of frolicking about half naked, with my hair full of brambles and cobwebs and twigs or whatever else might have caught on it were alas, at an end. My hair was properly cut by my uncle’s valet to just above my shoulders, and I was taught how to brush it and tie it back with a leather cord. I was given breeches and a shirt that I actually had to button up and tuck inside a waistband. And—worst of all—I was made to wear shoes.

Then when I was seventeen years old, I awoke one morning to find the bed wet underneath my hips. A thin, clear slickness covered my entire backside, and ran down between my thighs when I stood up. And I felt—well, there were hardly any words to explain how I felt. My stomach ached and I desperately wanted someone to cuddle me. I wanted to hide away in a dark corner somewhere, and I felt a yearning for…something I didn’t have the words to describe. But it was so strong that it damn near stopped my heart. I wanted…no I needed things I couldn’t even begin to describe. The feelings were merciless in their power and tried to tear me apart with the strength of an earthquake. I was in agony, and incredibly, I burst into tears and hid in my closet, pulling my blanket around me for warmth. I remained there, until hours later, when my aunt came looking for me and found me in my little nest. I told her I was probably dying and asked her how long she thought it might take.

That’s the day she crawled in beside me and explained to me that I was an omega, like my mother had been. I wasn’t dying, and the feelings I was having—though excruciating—would eventually pass. They would return though, again and again, until I had my very own Alpha to relieve me and take care of me.

I had no idea what she was talking about at the time. I was aware of Alphas, as one was vaguely aware of volcanic eruptions and hurricanes and earthquakes and other forces of nature. I had seen them occasionally when they had business with my uncle and they’d come to visit him, but I always hid until they left again. I knew only that they were powerful beings who ran our whole world, but I didn’t see how they had anything to do with me.

Once when I’d been playing outside around the age of twelve or so, I’d heard loud shouting and laughter coming from the woods nearby. I climbed up into a tree and sat on a big limb, watching from my perch as four or five big boys rode into the clearing below me. They were all about sixteen or seventeen, so a little older than I was, but still young. I knew right away they were Alphas. I wasn’t even sure how I knew. Maybe it was their wild nature or that dangerous look in their eyes.

They were all tall and loud and the smallest among them outweighed me by forty pounds or so of pure muscle. They had guns slung over the saddles of their horses, so I knew they were hunting for game in the woods.

One of them, the biggest and most handsome of all, I thought, suddenly drew back on his reins, lifted his head and made a sniffing sound. “Do you smell that?” he asked the others.

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