Prodigal (Outcast Sons Book 1) Read online

  Jon couldn’t help himself. He tilted back his head and parted hips lips, letting Cae plunder his mouth. Their tongues met and tangled, a soft and intimate caress, and Jon heard himself moan. Despite the many times they’d made love over the past month, he was desperate for… for something.

  After long moments of hot, wet kisses, Cae lifted his head, and his nostrils flared. “You smell like sex,” he said hoarsely.

  Jon chuckled. “You say that a lot. It’s not just you, either. Everyone says omegas smell like sex.”

  “No. This is something else. You smell like—I don’t know. So sweet and hot and spicy.”

  Something in Jon’s lower abdomen seemed to melt at the words. “I want you,” he whispered. “I want you so much, Cae.”

  Cae lowered his head and brushed kisses over his throat. “I don’t mean to sound egotistical here, but you always want me.”

  “Not like this. I want—I want—I want something different.”

  Cae laughed softly into his throat. “I don’t think there’s anything left we haven’t tried.”

  “Yes. There is. I need—I need all of you, Cae, I need you so much, I can’t stand it—”

  “Hey.” Cae lifted his head and studied him, looking alarmed. “What’s this all about, Jon?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I just feel so—so hot. My skin itches, and I want—I need—Lupus, Cae, please. Please take me, now.”

  Cae’s nostrils flared again, and he sniffed, carefully. “Jon,” he said, very slowly but with an edge of excitement beneath the words, “I’m almost sure you’re going into full heat. I think you’ve been in the beginnings of heat for a while, actually, but now…”

  “No.” Jon gasped. “Can’t be—omegas only go into heat with—with betas and other omegas—when they actually mate—”

  “Yes, because omegas and alphas never life-bond. But if they did… then the omega would go into heat for his mate. Right?”

  Jon heard himself panting frantically. “Lupus. Stop talking, Cae.”

  “You probably don’t know this,” Cae said, very softly, running a hand up and down the bare skin of Jon’s abdomen, “but there’s a ton of erotic romance written for alphas about fucking an omega in full heat.”

  “Ahhh. God. There’s… there’s a ton of romances for omegas about having an alpha knot them, too. But it’s impossible. That’s why—that’s why people like to read it.”

  “Is it impossible?” Cae stroked a hand down over his cock, and Jon heard himself wail aloud. “Is it really? I’m starting to wonder. God, the scent of you, Jon…”

  The thought of being in heat for Cae, the thought of Cae knotting him, almost pushed Jon into a climax. He gasped and shuddered at the gentle touch of Cae’s big hand.

  “Please,” he begged, lost in a desperate aching need he’d never known before. “Please fuck me, Cae, please please please—”

  “Shhhhh. Take it easy, Jon. I’ll give you what you want. I promise. But if you’re really in heat, then you won’t come till I’m inside you, no matter what I do to you.”

  He wrapped a hand around Jon’s rigid cock and started jacking him, slowly, deliberately. Jon wailed again, his hips thrusting upward. Precome surged out of his cock, and he felt himself growing slick and wet with the moisture that would allow Cae to take him easily, but he didn’t come.

  He sobbed in desperation, and Cae lowered his mouth to his ear and spoke in a bare whisper.

  “Do you want my cock inside you, Jon?”

  Jon whimpered and nodded frantically.

  “Do you want me to fuck you?”

  “Yes. Lupus, yes. Please.”

  Cae moved so that he was over him, and looked down at him. In the dappled moonlight, his eyes shone like suns. “Look at my cock,” he said softly. “Look at it, Jon. Look how swollen it is.”

  Jon could hardly bear to look away from him, the beautiful planes of his face, the brilliance of his eyes, but he couldn’t disobey his alpha, either. He looked down and saw that Cae’s cock was in fact huger than he’d ever seen it. It was inhumanly enormous, and he whimpered with the need that racked him.

  “I think,” Cae said, very softly, “I think I’m going to knot you, Jon.”

  Jon shuddered at the words. He ached for that huge cock, ached for it to swell even more inside him, until the two of them were locked together, until they were completely life-bonded. He wanted to give Cae everything he’d ever wanted.

  Well, except cubs. That was beyond his capabilities, unfortunately. But if Cae could achieve the knot—then they’d be bonded, beyond any question.

  “Please,” he whispered again.

  Cae knelt between his legs. Jon lifted his thighs, eager, desperate, and Cae moved forward. He felt the blunt head against his tender flesh, and he groaned in desperate need.

  “Is it too big?” Cae whispered. “I don’t want to hurt you, Jon, I never want to hurt you…”

  “It’s fine,” Jon murmured, though he wasn’t entirely sure that it was. Cae felt like a battering ram against him, solid, massive, almost frighteningly huge.

  Cae’s hips jerked, pushing the head of it past the sensitive opening, and Jon heard himself crying out with pleasure. Despite his fears, there was no pain, only the ecstasy of being stretched beyond anything he’d ever known before. His body was made to be fucked… but he’d never been fucked like this.

  Cae slipped in, slowly, carefully, plunging deeper with each thrust, then pulling out almost to the rim. At last he was balls-deep in Jon, and Jon almost sobbed with disappointment, because enormous though Cae’s cock might be, there was no knot, and a knot was what he craved more than anything in the world.

  “It’s all right.” Cae pressed adoring kisses to his forehead, his cheeks, his nose. “It doesn’t matter, Jon—I love you—it doesn’t matter—”

  It does matter, Jon thought, it matters so much, because I want to give you everything, everything that a beta could, and I’m not enough—I’m just not enough for you—

  But he couldn’t say any of that, because he was too lost in the pleasure of Cae’s body moving in his. All he could whisper was, “I love you too.”

  Cae was fucking him hard now, and something close to ecstasy washed through him with every thrust, driving him higher and higher. He could smell his own scent now, the warm, sweet scent of his heat, mingling with the raw, wild scent of power and strength that emanated from Cae.

  Inside him, he could feel that Cae was still swelling, and the feel of his cock, hot and hard and enormous, sent him reeling toward the edge. He knew he was only seconds away from an orgasm, and at that moment, he felt the incredible pressure of Cae’s knot forming inside of him, linking their bodies together as one. He felt the hot, wet spurts of Cae’s come inside him, and he exploded, writhing with pleasure as his own come burst out of his overstimulated cock in long spasms, painting both their abdomens with white stripes.

  Afterward, Cae rolled over, barely avoiding the edge of the too-narrow bed, and pressed his face into Jon’s hair. There was no sound but for their panting. Their bodies were linked, and would remain so for several hours.

  “That was amazing,” Cae mumbled. His voice was slurred with exhaustion, and Jon suspected he’d be asleep within seconds.

  “Yeah,” he answered. “It was.”

  “Wonder why… wonder why… not till now…”

  He drifted off into sleep, but Jon lay awake for a moment, pondering the question. He wasn’t sure why the two of them hadn’t been able to knot till now. Maybe, he thought, it was just that it took a while, sometimes a month or more, for a life-bond to be completely achieved. Maybe it was because Cae’s messed-up hormones hadn’t allowed it till now.

  Or maybe, just maybe, it was because neither of them had said I love you until today. Intimate though they’d been, in a way the two of them been holding back—and so had their bodies.

  He didn’t know for sure. It occurred to him he could ask Rich, but he decided against it. The way he
saw it, the reasons didn’t matter that much, not really.

  All that mattered was that now, at long last, he and Cae were knotted together as one.

  Chapter 23

  “Laws,” the Alpha complained a month later, uttering the word with as much disgust as if he were talking about manure or sewage. “I still don’t know why you thought this was necessary. The Alpha has been the lawgiver for hundreds of years.”

  Cae sighed. They’d been over this about a hundred times already, but his father still didn’t quite get it. Cae appreciated the fact that he was trying, though. “As things currently stand,” he said, as patiently as he was able, “the Alpha has too much power. No one wolf should be able to kill another, for any reason or no reason. Not even the Alpha. What if something went wrong, and I went off the rails again? A psychopathic Alpha could slaughter half the town before he was stopped. If he was ever stopped.”

  “I take your point. Still. Laws.” The Alpha’s nose wrinkled in distaste. “They’re so… human.”

  Cae chuckled. There were lawyers in the Pack, of course, but up till now they’d mostly been employed to make certain the Pack didn’t run afoul of human laws, and that the town ran without interference from the outside world as much as possible. They’d performed services like keeping the local school system legal, so as to minimize intrusion from outsiders. But now every lawyer in the Pack was busily working away at devising a new system of laws, which would be voted on by the Pack.

  And that was another thing the Pack didn’t really understand yet—voting. Oh, sure, they voted in national elections, because everyone understood that what the humans did impacted them as well. But among themselves, they’d never voted on anything. They’d never needed to. The Alpha’s word had always been law.

  Caeden intended for that to change.

  “Don’t worry about it today, Dad,” he said, clapping his father on the shoulder. “Everyone will get used to it eventually, even you. But today— today isn’t about laws. Today’s just about me and Jon.”

  ✽✽✽

  Half an hour later, he and Jon stood in front of the Alpha. They were in their wolf forms, which meant that when they shifted to human form, they would necessarily be naked. Caeden knew from watching television that the human wedding ceremony included a lot of fancy, expensive clothing, but when wolves life-bonded, they stood before their Pack clad in nothing but their pelts.

  Caeden didn’t see the point in fancy clothes, anyway. He knew that human brides were supposed to look their most lovely on their wedding day, but as far as he was concerned, Jon didn’t need to wear a tuxedo to look awesome. He stood shoulder to shoulder to Caeden, in his brownish wolf form. As a wolf, he was small, scruffy, and none too impressive— but to Caeden’s eyes he was the most beautiful sight in the world.

  They stood in the gazebo in the park at the center of town. Around them gathered thousands of wolves—in human form, because in these days of satellite imagery, if someone happened to notice a town full of wolves, questions would be asked. The government did its best to keep the existence of shapeshifters secret, and a photo showing thousands of wolves massed together would only complicate matters.

  But Caeden and Jon were in their wolf form, as tradition demanded. The elder Alpha stood before them, clad in a dark suit, and spoke.

  “Since the days of the First Wolf,” he said, his deep voice resonant, “it has been the privilege of every wolf to choose his or her mate. Until now, those choices have always been constrained by tradition and cultural mores, but as a wise man said to me recently, just because something is tradition doesn’t make it right. My son, Alpha Caeden Wolf, has broken with tradition and chosen the omega Jonathan MacArthur as his mate—and it is my firm belief that he has chosen well.”

  Next to Caeden, Jon stood a little taller. Caeden turned his head slightly, and licked his ear.

  “We are here today,” the Alpha said, “to solemnize that life-bond which has already formed between these men, and which can never be broken. Our community shares their happiness, and we pledge to support them in their joy and in their sorrow.” He paused for a moment. “Caeden Wolf and Jonathan MacArthur will forever be as one.”

  There was a great burst of applause. Caeden and Jon turned to face the crowd, their tails waving. And then they shifted into human form as one, and reached for one another’s hands.

  They were life-bonded, Cae thought with satisfaction. Both biologically, and in the eyes of Pack law. They were mates, for all time.

  And nothing could ever change that.

  Epilogue

  Two months later

  “Ugh. I feel terrible.”

  “You’ll be all right,” Caeden said, gently stroking Jon’s hair. His mate was seated in a room at the clinic, groaning. He’d gotten out of bed this morning and promptly puked all over the carpet. Their kind didn’t get stomach viruses often, and food poisoning was rare as well. Concerned, Caeden had insisted they come to the clinic immediately. Dr. Rich had had Jon pee in a cup and had taken a blood sample, and now they were waiting.

  After what seemed like hours, but was probably no more than a few minutes, Rich walked back into the room. Jon looked up at him with dull eyes.

  “Am I dying?”

  “Hardly.” Dr. Rich seemed amused about something. “In fact, you’re perfectly healthy.”

  “I don’t feel perfectly healthy. I feel like my stomach is trying to crawl its way out of my mouth.”

  “Yes, well…” Rich’s smile grew broader. “That happens with morning sickness.”

  Caeden felt his jaw drop, and Jon’s eyes went huge with shock.

  “What?” they said together.

  “Morning sickness, I said.” Rich laughed. “I didn’t want to tell you guys it was a possibility till I had a reason to, but… well. The medical literature made me fairly certain it might happen.”

  “How?” Caeden demanded. “Men don’t have wombs. Do they?”

  “Some men do,” Rich said mildly. “But in this case, no, Jonny doesn’t have a uterus, per se. But alpha hormones are strange and powerful things, and they can wreak peculiar effects on the body of an alpha’s mate. Particularly an omega, who happens to be more susceptible to the influence of pheromones than any other sort of wolf. When my colleagues and I looked back in the medical records of every wolf town we could find, we discovered that this sort of thing had happened surprisingly often in the distant past. In fact, the reason alpha males face so much intense societal pressure to not marry other males isn’t homophobia, as the humans call it. Instead it’s probably because—well, the pregnancies generally led to their mate’s death.”

  Caeden’s head jerked up, but Rich was already holding out a calming hand and going on.

  “That was in the past,” he emphasized in reassuring tones. “A structure analogous to a womb develops inside a pregnant male omega, and even occasionally in a male beta, but the problem is that there is no channel to the outside large enough to allow a cub to emerge, thus causing the parent to die in labor. However, we can easily deal with that problem with modern medicine. It’s rarely performed among our people, because it’s almost never necessary, but the humans have a very common procedure called a caesarean section. Trust me when I tell you that this will allow us to safely remove the cub when the time comes, with no danger whatsoever to Jon. Unlike a human, he won’t even have a scar afterwards.”

  “So he’ll be all right?” Caeden demanded.

  “He’ll be fine. And your cub will be fine, too. Trust me.”

  “Ohhhh.” Jon’s eyes were wide with wonder, and he clutched at Caeden’s hand. “We’re going to have a cub, Cae. A cub.”

  Caeden wrapped an arm around Jon and held him close, kissing the top of his head. “Yes,” he agreed, feeling dazed, but not in the least unhappy about it. The thought that both of them would be fathers made him want to leap up and dance around the room, but Jon still looked woozy and in need of support, so he firmly suppressed the desire to dance for
now. “Yeah, it looks like we are.”

  Rich looked at them with warm affection in his dark eyes, and chuckled softly. “The two of you are really something else,” he said. “You’re just determined to keep on breaking the rules, aren’t you?”

  Caeden gazed down at his mate—his pregnant mate—and smiled softly.

  “Some rules were simply meant to be broken,” he said.

  Look for Dragon at Sunset, a shapeshifter romance set in this universe, in April 2020.

  Return to Wolf Green in June 2020 with Wolf Alone.

  OTHER BOOKS BY GEM FROST

  Wild Life

  Dominance

  Vivid

  Frozen Heart

  Billionaire’s Valentine

  Our First Christmas

  Teaching Dallas

  My Christmas Wish

  Unwrapped

  COMING SOON

  Dragon at Sunset

  Wild Leap

  Wolf Alone