Her Viking Wolves: 50 Loving States, Michigan Read Online Free PDF Page A

Dark Wolf princess. I got the Dark Wolf mark. I even got engaged just like you wanted me to. But this…this thing you arranged behind my back with Clyde and Kyle and God knows who else? That isn’t something I can forgive. Like ever, Dad.”
    “Tee,” he says, like I’m a child blowing everything out of proportion. “Don’t be so—”
    “Don’t call me dramatic!” I nearly scream.
    Because Dad’s right about a lot of things: my weirdness, my undateability, a lot of things. But he is dead wrong about this.
    And maybe he gets that a little, because he says, “Look, I’ll go downstairs and tell everybody you got a headache or something. I’ll let you sleep on it. Kyle’s a good prince. And he’s willing to put up with…” Dad seems to struggle for the right word and settles for, “…you. You’ll see that in the morning.”
    It feels like a command. My Alpha King telling me to go to sleep and get my head right with marrying a gay wolf, just like he told me to make sure my face stayed fixed when I got the Dark Wolf brand burned into my back.
    My mother hadn’t cried. Evelyn hadn’t cried. Neither his sister nor his brother cried. Clyde hadn’t cried. Dad expected the same of me. To be a good Greenwolf. To put my feelings aside and fall in line. Even for a gay fiancé.
    Then, as if to prove how far he’s got me shoved under his thumb, he doesn’t bother to wait for my answer. Just leaves out my rooms. Sure as shit that I’ll do exactly what he wants just like I always have. From getting the Dark Wolf brand to accepting Kyle’s proposal.
    In fact, I remember how that proposal went down with new eyes as I watch Dad walk out of my rooms. Dad drawing me aside at Thanksgiving and informing me that Kyle asked him for my hand in marriage. Me saying “For real?” because Kyle and I had had fun on our dates, and we’d enjoyed playing my video games together, but our relationship had not felt like much more than that.
    “Yeah, for real,” he’d answered. “And I expect you to say yes.”
    So I had with a mixture of bafflement and “okay, I guess this is happening.”
    What an idiot I’d been. What. A. Freaking. Idiot.
    The door closes behind my father with a final click.
    And for a moment, everything in my life feels as dark as a Game Over screen, lit only by the larger than life image of the red-haired Viking surrounded by dragons on my LED screen.
    But then…something in me reboots. A hard reset unlike anything I’ve ever known, with three simple words flashing inside my mind: “Not this time.”

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    S oooo …my Alaska cousins probably weren’t expecting to see me for their annual Christmas party. For one thing, none of the Detroit royals have ever attended any of their annual Christmas parties. Or even gone to Alaska, as long as we’re on that subject. We always make them come to us in Detroit where, “Ain’t nobody gonna get ate up by a bear,” as Dad puts it.
    But three planes and a half-mile trek on ice skates after being ordered to suck it up and marry my gay fiancé, I arrive at their front door like, SURPRISE!
    Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. It’s actually impossible to show up for a surprise visit to the royal Alaska family. In fact Aunt Wilma, my father’s sister, not only sends a small plane to fetch me when I call her from the Fairbanks airport, but she and her entire clan, including her husband, the Alpha King of Alaska, their three daughters, their husbands, and their small children, are all waiting for me on the pier.
    Still, Aunt Wilma looks real alarmed when I skate up.
    “What’s going on?” she demands, pushing her way to the front of the small crowd of Alaska relatives. “Are you okay? Is my brother okay?”
    “Should I get Ford?” her much shorter Inuit husband, King Tikaani, asks.
    Ford is Wilford, Aunt Wilma’s other brother—my uncle—who according to family legend, came to the wilds of Alaska to serve as Uncle Tikaani’s beta over three decades