Midlife cowboy wolf, p.1
Midlife Cowboy Wolf, page 1
© Copyright 2021 by J.L. Wilder- All rights reserved.
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Midlife Cowboy Wolf
Mid Life Shifters
By: J.L. Wilder
Table of Contents
Midlife Cowboy Wolf
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Epilogue
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Midlife Cowboy Wolf
Chapter One
ROSE
“Who the hell are all these people?” Zeke demanded, leaning against the porch rail. “I don’t think they even knew Grandpa.”
Rose Turner looked down at her sullen son. She had hoped that coming back to Texas would take some of the New York City attitude out of him, but so far, there was no sign of the change she’d hoped to see. He was just as caustic as ever.
“I wish you wouldn’t talk to me like that today,” she said. “My father just died, you know. It’s a difficult day for me. I don’t need this from you on top of it.”
“You should be mad about these party crashers, too,” Zeke said. “You should run them off of our land.”
“This is an open visitation,” Rose reminded him. “Everyone who knew Grandpa is welcome to attend. And you and I can’t possibly know who he did and didn’t know because we’ve been living in New York all your life. I’m sure Grandpa had a very full social life. It’s nice to think that he was friends with so many people, isn’t it?”
Zeke shrugged. “I think they’re just here for the free alcohol.”
Rose had to bite her tongue to keep from saying something she would regret. Zeke had been such a sweet little boy just a few years ago, and now he was almost impossible to be around.
She loved him. But he was so challenging.
I suppose that’s how teenagers are. Had she been that way as a teenager? She thought back and recalled that she had been sassy with her parents. Perhaps she had been just as difficult to deal with as her son was now.
She felt a pang, thinking about it. It made her want to talk to her father, to apologize for any difficulty she might have caused him back in those days. But, of course, she could never speak to him again. He was gone now.
He always wanted me to come home. To work the ranch with him. And I never did. Even after Nash left us, I stayed in New York.
It had been her ex-husband’s choice to live in the city in the first place. Nash hadn’t cared for the shifter side of life. He’d wanted to get a job, live in a Manhattan apartment, and do human things. Rose had gone along because she’d been young and in love.
But when he had left her, there had been no reason to stay. And yet she had. Maybe coming home had just felt too much like admitting to failure, like acknowledging that the life she had started to build had blown up in her face.
But it felt like she’d never gotten back on track after that. Even though she had Zeke, whom she adored—despite how difficult he could be—she had never built the life she had once imagined for herself.
She’d never fallen in love.
Now she was in her forties. Her beauty was faded. She had an obnoxious teenage son. Finding love seemed impossible.
I should have just come home to Dad a long time ago.
Zeke let out a heavy sigh.
“You can go in,” she told him. “You don’t have to stay.”
He searched her face, as if trying to ascertain whether this was a real offer, and seemed to decide that it was. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be in my room, then.”
“That’s fine.” This was the first time someone Zeke had known had ever died, and even though he wasn’t opening up to her about it, she was sure he must be shaken. She knew he could be counted on to spend the rest of the evening with his huge headphones on, playing video games and tuning out the world. They would talk over breakfast, and she would try to get at the core of his feelings then.
Zeke turned and disappeared into the house. Rose, feeling that she ought to mingle, descended the porch steps and headed for the crowd that was grouped around the beer keg she’d purchased for the occasion.
Before she got there, though, she heard raised voices. “You get your hands off me, asshole!”
She turned. Just a bit to the left of the keg, a man was crouched low, his shoulders hunched, breathing very quickly.
She froze in her tracks, recognizing the telltale signs.
He was about to shift to his animal form.
A shift brought on by rage could be a very serious problem. Zeke did it sometimes—but Zeke was sixteen years old. He had reached a man’s height, but he was still thin, and his wolf form was still that of a juvenile.
This man in front of her was enormous. Terrifying.
Everyone was backing away slowly, clearly aware of what was about to happen. Rose took two steps backward herself, painfully glad that she had just sent Zeke inside. If things were about to turn violent, she didn’t want him here for it. You never knew who would be collateral damage in a situation like that.
Then another man stepped forward, putting himself mere inches away from the enraged one.
“Let’s not do this here, Jesse,” the newcomer said, placing both his hands on Jesse’s shoulders. “Walk away. Come on. You don’t want to cause a scene at George’s visitation. You’re better than this.”
Jesse’s eyes clouded with confusion.
The newcomer took advantage of the break in his focus. He pressed his shoulder into Jesse’s and forced him back, away from the crowd and toward the open field that surrounded Rose’s ranch. Jesse still looked caught between animal and human, but he must have heard what his friend was saying because he allowed himself to be pushed away.
After the two men were a good distance from Rose’s property, she saw them turn and begin to run. In the distance, she could just make out the changing of their shapes, and as they vanished out of sight, she heard a low, haunting howl.
Chapter Two
ROSE
The gathering dispersed soon after. The drama of the almost-shift seemed to have taken what pleasure there was out of being together, and everyone was ready to go home.
As a consequence, Rose was tied up for the next several minutes saying goodbye to people she hardly knew. Some she remembered from her youth here, but even when a name was familiar to her, twenty years had gone by since she’d last seen the person, and they felt like a stranger.
Finally, the last person was off her land. She planted her hands on her hips and surveyed the lawn. People didn’t seem to have been deliberately disrespectful, leaving trash everywhere, but there was still quite a lot of cleanup to be done. To start with, that keg needed to be moved into the shed—she couldn’t just let it sit out overnight.
She went to the shed for the hand truck. When she emerged, she saw that she was no longer alone.
The man who’d driven Jesse off her property had come back.
“Need a hand?” he asked, reaching out for the hand truck.
Rose held onto it. “You can help me put the keg on this if you want.”
“Sure thing.”
“Thanks,” she said. “For getting that man out of here, I mean. I’m glad it didn’t come to a fight.”
The man nodded. “I’m sorry you had to see the alpha like that.”
“That guy was the alpha?”
“His father was Martin?”
“That’s right,” the man said. “I guess Martin was still pretty young when you left, wasn’t he?”
“I’m sorry,” Rose said. “I don’t think I know you.”
“Cole Ellis,” he said. “We knew each other a little, back in the day.”
“That’s right,” she said. “I think you were two years ahead of me in school.”
“I think that’s right,” Cole agreed.
“You live next door, don’t you? Or at least, you did.”
“I still do,” he said. “I was a friend of your father’s, actually. I helped him around the ranch sometimes.”
They had reached the beer keg now, but neither of them made a move to put it on the hand truck.
She was attracted to him, she realized. Almost painfully so.
It wasn’t a ridiculous attraction. He was big, well-muscled without being bulgy. He had piercing blue eyes and graying hair that had once been the color of straw, which looked soft enough to touch.
And she knew she’d been pushing her feelings down since she’d heard the news of her father’s death. She had expected that, at some point, everything would erupt in some kind of surprising way.
The way he was looking at her wasn’t helping matters, either.
Feeling both apprehensive and confident, somehow, she reached out and took his hand.
“It’s good to see you,” she said quietly.
“You look amazing,” he said.
Then he blushed. “I’m sorry. I know this isn’t the right time for—”
“No,” she murmured. “This is a great time.”
She pulled him close and kissed him.
A part of her was shocked at what she was doing. It was unlike her to be so forward with men. Not that she’d been with any men lately—not since Nash, in fact. In between work and raising Zeke, there just hadn’t been time.
Maybe that was part of why she suddenly wanted Cole so desperately.
He responded as if this was something he had been waiting for, lifting her into his arms. She wrapped her legs around his waist, glad she’d chosen to wear a short cocktail dress for the visitation, glad of how easily it hiked up over her hips now.
“Where?” Cole breathed, breaking the kiss to talk, his lips still moving over the flushed skin of her jaw.
“By the right side of the house.” Zeke’s room was on the left side. He wouldn’t come looking for her, and she wanted to make sure that if he glanced out his bedroom window, he wouldn’t see anything.
Cole walked around the side of the house, still holding Rose in his arms. With every step he took, she could feel just how hard he already was. He wanted her every bit as much as she wanted him—and knowing that just made her want him more.
It was possible she would regret this tomorrow. But she knew that she had already come too far to stop.
He lifted her higher and supported her with one arm while he adjusted his pants. Then they were around his ankles and he was pulling her panties to the side and lowering her slowly onto him, and she closed her eyes and gasped at the sudden feeling of fullness.
God, she had forgotten how good this was. It had been too long.
And had it always been this good? Because this was different from sex with Nash, who’d always made sex feel so impersonal. He had fucked her the way you would fuck a toy, fast and hard and indifferent, chasing his own orgasm, never taking care of her needs.
But Cole...
He was kissing her again now, his hands moving over her body, and he seemed to be paying attention to her responses. Nash had always gripped her tightly, painfully, because he had liked to feel her body in his hands, but Cole’s fingers were soft and gentle. When he reached her nipples—always so sensitive—she gasped into his mouth, arching her back, and he stopped his exploring, knowing that he’d found what he was looking for.
He kissed along her collarbone and rocked his hips into her faster, and then his lips were on her breast and his tongue was massaging her nipple, and Rose felt herself fall apart. She clung to him, trembling and sobbing quietly as waves of pleasure rolled through her.
Cole’s hips stuttered—she felt him come—and with a sigh, he pulled free and eased her down gently onto the ground.
“All right?” he whispered.
She nodded, closing her eyes and feeling the wind on her face. “I needed that. Thank you.”
“I’d better get home,” he said.
She nodded.
Cole turned and disappeared into the night.
Chapter Three
ROSE
Zeke didn’t appear in the kitchen until ten o’clock the following morning. He looked like he was still half-asleep, and Rose suspected he’d been up too late playing video games or watching movies on his computer.
He wouldn’t have had a computer if he’d grown up here, she couldn’t help thinking. Shifter children usually didn’t own things like that. But bringing him up in Manhattan, the computer had been unavoidable. Besides, Nash, who’d been such a presence for the first fourteen years of Zeke’s life, had delighted in buying him gadgets and human things. It was too late for Rose to undo that part of her son’s life now.
He fell into his seat at the breakfast table, and she placed a plate of pancakes in front of him. He grunted and began to eat them.
After a moment, he looked up. “Syrup?”
She handed it to him and took the seat opposite his. “We need to have a talk, Zeke.”
He didn’t say anything. Of course not. Conversing with his mother was probably the worst thing Zeke could imagine.
She pressed on anyway. “You know, we had some problems back in the city.”
“Are we going to keep talking about this forever?” Zeke groaned.
“It was serious, Zeke.”
“It was just a little pot, Mom.”
“No,” she said firmly. “It was not just a little pot. You were hanging out with criminals.”
“Criminals. Jesus Christ. They stole video games from a department store. And I wasn’t even part of that. I wasn’t with them that day.”
“You weren’t with them the day they happened to get caught,” Rose said. “Don’t expect me to believe that you never got into anything with them. I found the bag of pot in your sock drawer, so I know you don’t mind doing illegal things.”
“You’re acting like I killed somebody,” Zeke said. “I wish you’d just get over it. It’s not like I’m going to hang out with those guys anymore. You moved me halfway across the country, to the middle of nowhere, where I have no friends. It’s the worst punishment you could have thought of. We shouldn’t have to keep discussing it too. I get it.”
“I don’t think you do get it,” Rose said. “I don’t think you understand how serious these things are for you. Getting arrested has serious enough consequences for those other boys. But for you, it would be a million times worse.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the fact that you’re a shifter,” Rose said. “You don’t like to recognize that part of yourself, I know. But it’s there, Zeke. You’ve felt it come forward when you’ve gotten angry or upset.”
“I’m not talking about that.”
“You’re going to listen to me,” Rose said. “Imagine being in jail. Being locked in a cage. Sooner or later, the wolf is going to come out. Jail is upsetting and scary, and eventually, something’s going to provoke you and the wolf is going to feel a need to defend itself.”
“So? Big deal. I can take care of myself.”
“It’s a big deal because the prison guards are human, Zeke,” Rose said. “What do you think they’re going to do when there’s suddenly a wolf in your cell? They’re not going to know it’s you. And they’re not going to sit around and wait for you to explain yourself. They’ll see a wild animal, and they’ll kill it. And you won’t be able to run away or fight back because you’ll be behind bars.”
Finally, Zeke was quiet.
“You can’t get in trouble with the law,” she said, wondering if he could possibly understand the horror she had felt when all of his friends had gotten arrested on the one day he’d stayed home, the absolute shock of knowing that a lucky break had saved her baby from a terrible fate. “You need to act right.”
