Arielle and the Three Wolves (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour)
Arielle and the Three Wolves
Arielle Banks is a veterinarian living alone in the small town of Wolf Creek. One night she hits a wolf with her car and takes it home to nurse it back to health. The wolf is tame and becomes her only company, a comfort for which she is grateful. A month after the accident, she wakes to find a handsome man has taken the place of the wolf.
Jason Wildback is a shape-shifter. After fate brings him to Arielle’s house, he fills the void that’s been in her life for so long. Their passion for each other grows. There is one catch, though. Jason has two brothers, easygoing Kyle and troubled, chivalrous Luke. Jason wants Arielle to take them on as her mates as well.
She can give her body to all three men, but can she give them her heart?
Note: There is no sexual relationship or touching for titillation between or among siblings.
Genre: Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Paranormal, Vampires/Werewolves
Length: 70,376 words
ARIELLE AND THE THREE WOLVES
Dani April
MENAGE AMOUR
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Ménage Amour
ARIELLE AND THE THREE WOLVES
Copyright © 2012 by Dani April
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62241-407-9
First E-book Publication: September 2012
Cover design by Christine Kirchoff
All cover art and logo copyright © 2012 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
PUBLISHER
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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DEDICATION
Once again for my mother Catherine and my aunt Margaret.
ARIELLE AND THE THREE WOLVES
DANI APRIL
Copyright © 2012
Chapter One
A huge form ran out in front of the Suburban. Arielle Banks applied the brakes. It was too late. A thud sounded off the driver’s side front. It made her feel sick, and she felt like the SUV ran over a heavy object. It was too dark outside to tell for certain.
Arielle continued to force the brake. The pavement was wet from a flash thunderstorm. For a moment she lost control of the vehicle, and it skidded and it came to a stop at an angle on the shoulder.
“Shit!” Arielle screamed. She was such a misfit and had such bad luck. Why did things like this always happen to her?
She looked over her seat. It was dark, and the rain still poured down against the roof. When lightning illuminated the sky, she saw the black thing she had struck lying in the center of the road about thirty yards behind. The thing, whatever it was, wasn’t moving.
She didn’t want to open the door. If she hadn’t loved animals, she would simply have put the Chevy in drive and gone on. She took a heavy breath and clutched the door handle. The rainfall was so heavy she could barely hear herself think.
Where in the hell was that umbrella? She thought she had stored it in the glove compartment. When she reached inside, it was not there. “Oh, shit!” she cursed under her breath again. Instead she saw the flashlight the car dealership had mailed her as a present when she bought the Suburban. She settled for it and scooped it up. A burst of courage hit her, and she pulled open the door.
The storm buffeted her as soon as she took her first foot down from the interior. Fortunately she had worn her jacket and got the hood over her head at once, but too late to keep her hair from getting drenched. A flick of her thumb sent the beam of the flashlight down the dark road. She was too far out in the country for there to be any street light or building light, and at this late hour there were no other drivers on the road with her. She was all alone. The flashlight paved the way ahead through the rain.
The big black creature lay on the road where she had hit it. At first she thought it was a dog. There were plenty of farm houses around here, in fact she had just been returning from one. The dog could have belonged to one of them.
She slowed as she got closer to the animal. She crouched low and shined the light directly on it while she kept a few feet of safety distance away. That wasn’t a dog. “Oh, my God!” she whispered to herself and got up a little closer to examine it. It was a huge wolf. The biggest one she had ever seen. Though she had not seen many wolves in her life.
At first, she thought it was dead. She must have hit it on the head and killed it. More courage was gained from this thought. She walked all the way up to it and bent down to check.
The wolf opened its eyes. It stared at her as if in accusation. She was a veterinarian and knew animals well. She could read the pained expression out of its noble face. When it raised its head, she crawled back a step. The animals she saw in her office were house pets or farm animals. This creature was different. It was a wild animal, and she had injured it. It would be very angry at her.
She loved animals, but not well enough to do something dumb like let this wolf take a bite out of her.
She was ready to get up off the ground and bolt back to the safety of her Chevy SUV. However, she saw she didn’t have to worry. The wolf couldn’t move. For all she knew it could be dying. She had hurt it badly. At the very least she had broken its right hind leg. She knew this from the awkward angle it was bent on
top of the asphalt. There could be internal bleeding. The poor wolf was probably in critical condition.
The wolf looked back at her over its shoulder. It tried to make eye contact with her. Humans were never supposed to make eye contact with animals. They saw it as a sign of aggression. Animals only made eye contact with each other when they were about to attack, or warn off a potential predator. Often, if an animal tried to make eye contact with a human, it meant it was sick or even rabid. As a vet, Arielle instructed first-time pet owners to never make direct eye contact with their pets. This was one way a person could turn even a nice dog vicious.
The wolf looked her square in the eye. It was like it wanted to communicate with her. Those eyes were intelligent. They weren’t malicious. In spite of her fear, she got to her knees and went another step closer to the stricken animal. She was careful to stay out of range of those huge incisors. She didn’t want to get bitten.
The wolf was obviously in a lot of pain. She imagined it made a heroic effort not to cry out. It wasn’t in attack mode, and it didn’t seem to be angry that she had almost killed it. Instead it seemed to ask her for help with that forlorn stare. Since it didn’t have a voice, that was the best it could do.
Could she leave and abandon it here? She felt responsible for it, and she was a veterinarian. She had the skills to try and save this animal. Isn’t this the reason she had become a vet in the first place?
She let herself move all the way up to it.
If she miscalculated its intentions now, it likely had enough strength left in it to take a good chunk of her skin off between its huge jaws.
“Hey, boy, I’m sorry I hurt you,” she spoke to it. Timidly she reached out a hand. She felt like a fool when she did this. Her love of animals would get her in a lot of trouble some time. She just hoped this wasn’t the night. “You won’t bite me will you, boy?”
As if in answer the wolf whined and lowered its head back to the pavement. Wow, this was one smart wolf.
“I want to help you,” she whispered to it. Every muscle in her body was tensed as she touched its coat for the first time. Her fingers trembled. Each split second she expected it to rise up its head and bite her.
To her surprise and great relief, this didn’t happen. It didn’t move and allowed her to pet it. Her heart pounded in her chest so hard it almost hurt. Slowly her adrenaline level came back down, and her heart rate slowed. She tarried way too long over the wolf, but needed the time to convince herself that it wouldn’t attack her. The rain still poured down, and her clothes were soaked.
When she allowed herself to breathe again, she realized she was in an untenable position out there in the middle of a thunderstorm on the rural county route hunched over a hundred-and-fifty-pound wolf. She had to act quickly if she was to accomplish any good at all on the wolf’s behalf.
She gained her composure and started to think with the veterinary-trained part of her mind. She examined her patient. He was indeed bad off. Her vehicle had struck it in the shoulder or possibly even the midsection. After knocking it to the pavement, her left front tire had driven over its hind leg and shattered the bone. There was a large open wound back there. Blood seeped from it and wetted the blacktop and mixed with the rain water in a puddle. On closer inspection she saw the bone protruded from the wound.
The animal took labored breaths. This was a noble animal, and she knew she had to save it. It was a wild animal, but somehow after it gave her that stare that seemed to search her soul out of its deep-brown eyes, she knew she didn’t have to fear it.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you, boy,” she told it. She got back to her feet and ran through the rain. When she got back to her Suburban, she put it in reverse and drove the distance back to the side of the wolf, where the rear door was parked by the side of the stricken animal.
She worked quickly to get the supplies she needed from her backseat. Fortunately she had just left her last appointment of the day and had her vet’s bag with her. She rifled through the bag and hoped to find the muzzle she often used on some of the larger dogs she treated. Her last appointment had been at a farm on the outskirts of the county to deliver a foal that had become stuck in the mother’s birth canal. She had not brought the muzzle with her. She would have to make do without it.
She took out a needle and syringe and filled it with a strong tranquilizer. Her heart started to race again, and her body went tense when she approached the wolf. It probably wouldn’t like to get a shot. Already it was in a lot of pain, and to jab a needle in it might push it over the edge and make it go crazy. The tranquilizer would put it out, but not before it could reach up and do her some serious damage if it wanted to.
She looked back into those gentle eyes. They were watching her, and she didn’t think she had anything to fear.
On her hands and knees, she approached the wolf. “I’m not going to hurt you, boy. Please don’t hurt me either. Okay?” She gritted her teeth and plunged the needle into the wolf’s hip. All the while it just stared at her. It still held her eyes. This was a remarkable animal. She would have to puzzle over it later when she had more time. Right now she had to get it off the road and into her car.
The wolf was too heavy for her to lift, but she had a tarp in her back seat that she sometimes used to reposition the larger barn yard animals. She got it beneath the wolf’s prone body. It took her about five minutes to get it secured. At the end of this time she looked down at the wolf. It slept. The tranquilizer had done its job.
She used the tarp to move the wolf to her SUV. It was a difficult struggle to lift this much weight. The back of her vehicle was equipped with an automatic pulley she used to lift larger barnyard animals. She used this to get the wolf in the back. When she got back behind the wheel of the Suburban and was ready to drive off, her clothes were running with rain water and soaked the carpet inside.
She turned the wipers on once more and started forward. Briefly she considered where to take the wolf. Perhaps she should take it into her animal clinic in town. She had a kennel there and cages to house sick animals. However, none of those cages would be large enough to hold the wolf, and the clinic was too far away to try and make the drive tonight in this storm. Her home was less than five miles from here. When the accident occurred she had almost been safely back there.
Unfortunately she was left with only one choice, and that was to take the wolf back home with her. She had most of the necessary supplies there to treat it and those she didn’t have she could get from the clinic in the morning.
“I’m crazy,” she said to herself and wiped rain water away from her eyes. “You have positively lost your mind this time, girl. You’re about to take a wolf inside your house.”
* * * *
The key fit snugly into the lock. Arielle opened the front door. She had left a light on in the living room because she knew she wouldn’t be home until after dark. Everything was just as she had left it and looked warm and comfortable. When she stepped over the threshold, the rainwater still dripped off her clothes.
She took off her jacket with the hood. It was awkward. Her arms didn’t want to fit through the sleeves because they had become so wet. After it was off she hung it neatly in the closet by the door. Her shoulder-length hair was a tangled mess. She had to flip it back a couple of times as it was an annoyance and fell into her eyes. She was glad she didn’t have a living room mirror because she knew she looked haggard and foolish after the storm had buffeted her for the last half hour. She probably looked more like the Wicked Witch of the East than a small-town vet.
She went quickly through the house to the den in back that she had set up as an office. Occasionally she would treat animals at her home. It was a small town, and people liked to bring their sick pets by the house. Technically it was against the state health codes, and the insurance company would have had a fit if they’d known, but things were casual in a small town, more old-fashioned and traditional.
She would need to make a quick decision
as to where she wanted to put the injured wolf. It had been five hours ago that she had left the house when she got the call from the Clarkson farm. They asked her to come out immediately because they didn’t think they could coax the foal out of the mother’s birth canal.
The steamy romance novel she had just started still lay on the coffee table right where she had left it. A fast glance down the hall showed her bath robe on top of the bed where she had discarded it to change into her work clothes. When she walked through the dining room, she remembered she had just set the table with the single place mat. Fortunately she hadn’t forgotten to put the food back in the refrigerator out in the kitchen. If she hadn’t, the chicken and broccoli would have spoiled by now.
She was a vet and loved all animals, yet she didn’t have any pets of her own. In fact, she had never owned any. She always guessed it was because she saw so many during the course of a routine work day that when she came home she liked to escape and be by herself. Recently she had thought about adopting a dog or a cat at the local pound. They would make good pets, but she never got around to it. Now she was happy she had not made that decision. Another animal in the house would have made it impossible to take the wolf inside.
She stood in the center of the living room carpet and debated where the best place in her house was to put the wolf once she got it inside. All of her veterinary supplies were in her office, but it was too small. The living room, the dining room, and the kitchen were out because she needed those for her own life. The front porch would have been great because it was the summer and warm out most of the time. However it had a leak in the roof, one she had kept obstinately reminding herself to fix. Perhaps tomorrow after it stopped raining and had a chance to dry out a little, she could keep the wolf out there, but for the moment she would to have to make room in her one-bedroom house for the animal.