Alice Found Something Way Better Than Wonderland!!
Alice’s
Alphas, Wolf Clan Shifters #1
By Ann Gimpel
Dream Shadow Press
41K words
Genre: Shifter Ménage Romance AMAZON US:
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It’s 1936. Thirty-year-old
Alice has given up on finding a husband. Between civil engineering and mountain
climbing, her interests are so masculine, she scares men away. A poor route
choice strands her—lost, hungry, and scared—next to Lon Chaney’s cabin deep in
the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Jed senses a woman stumbling
down the steep, inhospitable mountain behind his borrowed cabin. Her scent
tantalizes and excites him. Mates are scarce these days, and if his nose is
right, she’s his fated one. His and his two pack mates, that is, who are
mercifully gone at the moment. Jed crafts a careful strategy, knowing the mate
bond might not be enough to convince her to stay once she finds out it will
link her to all three of them—forever.
Alice adds Jed to her list of
problems when he melts out of the shadowed darkness. At first she declines his
offer of help, but he keeps talking until she ends up inside the cozy log cabin
in front of a roaring fire. His skilled hands and a shot of whiskey heat her
blood to molten, and her carefully tended world explodes into desperate hunger
to make love with the man rubbing her weary feet.
As caught up in lust as Alice,
Jed takes a chance. A big one. Will mating with her before disclosing
everything turn out to be a huge mistake?
Excerpt from Alice’s
Alphas:
…Her breath whistled loud in
her ears. Brent had told her to hightail it for the car, but she had a feeling
something bad had happened to him. No matter how she felt about him running
off, it wasn’t right to just leave him. It had been dark for hours, and she
wondered how late it was. Even if she stumbled the few miles to her car waiting
next to Glacier Lodge, she was too tired to drive anywhere. The lodge wasn’t
any help. It wouldn’t open for the season for another couple of months. There
might be a phone inside, but she’d have to break in.
Alice considered her options.
If she made the lodge, she’d crawl into her car and fall on her face from
exhaustion. It would easily be mid-morning before she got back up here to even
begin searching for Brent. Survival in the mountains often hung by a thread.
She was the only one who knew where he was.
He may have abandoned her, but
she couldn’t do the same and desert him. Not and live with herself afterward.
Alice moved toward where she
thought the trail was, intent on setting up a fireless camp to wait out the
night. She had enough food and a full water bottle. No tent or sleeping bag,
but she’d survived worse conditions. A fire would’ve been welcome, but she
couldn’t risk—
“Hey there. You. Show yourself,
man,” a deep voice called from behind her. Light flared, illuminating the
forest. Footsteps crunched over rocks and twigs as the person approached.
Alice stiffened. People looked
at her build and assumed she was male. It had happened to her before—and more
than once. She considered running, but burdened with her heavy boots, climbing
hardware, and the moonless night, she didn’t want to chance a headlong flight.
Besides, the man might have a gun.
“Why should I?” She spun to
face him, ready for almost anything.
“What? You’re a woman?”
Alice grasped her ice axe in
both hands. “Leave me alone,” she grunted through clenched teeth. “I’m tired
and my friend is...lost.”
“Whoa.” The man held up both
hands, one of which gripped a flashlight. “Put your axe down, sweetheart. I’m
not going to hurt you.” He was tall, maybe six-feet-four, with straight,
red-blonde hair. Despite his height, he had a slender build. A well-defined jaw
and sharp cheekbones suggested Nordic blood. It was tough to tell in the
reflected light, but his eyes looked blue.
“Go back inside. You can see
I’m not any kind of threat. I’d head down, but I need to be moving at first
light to hunt for my friend.”
The man cocked his head to one
side. “Big guy with red hair?”
Terror gripped her. Her throat
narrowed. Breathing became a struggle. Since she couldn’t manage words, she
nodded and steeled herself to hear the words, he’s dead. Alice bit her lower lip and gazed mutely at the
stranger.
“Look, I think he’ll be okay.
We were out hunting and heard something big falling. Thought it was the deer
we’d shot at. Turned out to be your friend—”
“Awk! You shot Brent!”
The man waved his hands in
front of him. “Calm down, woman. Christ, you’re strung tighter than a fiddle.
Take a couple of deep breaths. No, we didn’t shoot him. Your friend was
unconscious because he hit his head on a rock, so we carried him back here. My
two buddies took the horses and hauled him down to the lodge. We only had three
horses which is why I’m still here. Anyway, they were planning to drive him to
the hospital in Bishop. I don’t expect they’ll be back much before the middle
of tomorrow.”
At
least that explains why there’re no horses here.
Alice shook her head, digesting
the information. “I need to get moving, then. I can drive to the hospital and
meet them.”
The man held out a hand. “I’m
Jed. Jed Starnes. You look beat. There’re mountain cats on the prowl. Shot one
a few hours ago. They get worse at night. More aggressive. You got a gun?”
She shook her head and ignored
his outstretched hand. He looked chagrined and dropped it to his side. “Well,
then, handshake or no, you need to come with me. Got a nice warm fire going
inside. You look wet clear through. Nothing you can do tonight, anyway. Get a
few shots of Irish whiskey in you, a little soup, and some sleep. Come morning,
you can go after your friend.”
It sounded good. Too good. She
kept her ice axe poised. “How’d you get access to Lon Chaney’s cabin?”
Jed threw back his head and
laughed. “That’s easy. Ever since Chaney senior died in nineteen-thirty, his
son’s been letting some of us who work with him have the keys. All we have to
do is ask. Damn shame the old man died right after he got this place built.
It’s a beauty. You really should take a look inside.”
She blew out a breath. “What is
it you do?”
“I’m a production manager for
Paramount.”
“I thought they were in
receivership.”
He laughed again. “We are. But
we’re still making movies.”
Something about Jed put her at
ease. Or maybe she was just too weary to think straight. She slowly dropped her
hands. Tethered to her wrist, the ice axe dangled, not quite hitting the
ground.
“That’s better, sweetheart,” he
crooned. “Follow me. I promise I don’t bite.”
She trailed after him and
climbed the broad steps leading to the cabin’s heavy wooden door. He unlatched
it, took the lantern from its hook, and motioned her through ahead of him.
Alice scanned the large room. One end was an enormous stone fireplace. The
other held a kitchen of sorts with a pump mounted next to a sink. A curtained
alcove probably contained a bedroom. The lower walls were the same large, flat
fieldstones mortared together she’d seen on the outside. The upper walls were
wooden planks. Alice sighed. It was warm. Truly warm. She didn’t realize how
chilled she was. Her face stung from the sudden temperature shift.
She took off her headlamp and
set it on a table. Next she unbuckled her waist belt and dropped her pack in a
corner, followed by her axe. The click of a deadbolt falling into its metal
hole snapped her to attention. She made a grab for her axe, but Jed beat her to
it. “Don’t know about you,” he said, hefting the axe over a shoulder, “but I’m
not fond of weapons inside.”
She’d been right about his
eyes. They were a rich midnight blue. Something about them made her tingle deep
inside. Alice pushed the thought away. She was still a virgin at nearly thirty,
and likely to stay that way at the rate things were going in her life. Almost
as if they’d been listening in on her thoughts, her nipples pebbled into points
of awareness.
What
am I doing?
She shook herself back to
reality. A stranger she’d just met had locked her into this cabin and taken her
only means of defense. Trepidation trumped lust. “Why’d you lock us in?”
Because she tried hard, her voice only shook a little.
He flashed the key in front of
her and dropped it into his pants pocket. “Never know who might wander by. I
wanted to make certain we’re safe is all.” He made a huffing sound. “Most women
appreciate that sort of thing.”
“No one would come up this
trail in the middle of the night.”
“Hey, I’m sort of a city boy.
We believe in locking the bad guys out.” He shrugged. “If you want to hang your
jacket, there’re hooks by the fire. It looks pretty wet to me.”
Alice crossed her arms over her
chest and stared at Jed. He stared back. Tension sizzled in the air between
them. She held out a hand. “My axe.” She gestured to guns on racks along the
walls. “Looks as if there are plenty of weapons in here. Besides, my ice axe
isn’t a weapon, it’s a climbing aid.”
“Let’s just say I’m not
enamored of watching my back. Look—” he balanced her ice axe against a wall,
stepped away from it, and spread his hands in front of him “—you’re
apprehensive because you don’t know me. How about if I’m feeling the same way?”
She sidled past him and tucked
her axe behind her pack where it had been before. “I have no idea how I’m
feeling,” she muttered, “other than tired.”
Jed moved past her to the sink
and pumped water into a glass. Crossing the cabin, he handed it to her. “Drink
this,” he suggested. “Once you’re done, let me hang your jacket near the fire
where it can dry a little. It’s so wet, steam’s rising from it.”…
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