MARRIED TO THE THREE ALPHAS

"Soren, get off your fucking phone."

"That's rich-coming from you." Slumped on his barstool across the table, the blond wolf shifter kept his eyes on the screen, thumbs flying. "I'm in the middle of a conversation."

Lucian leaned over to steal a peek, moss-green gaze briefly illuminated by the phone's max brightness setting.

"He's texting his mum," the Brit growled, settling back in his seat with a flick of his eyebrow, followed by a huge chug of stout. I stared at him for a beat, just waiting for the leather-clad wolf to take it back, but when he slapped his mug down and smeared the bubbles from his beard, I closed my eyes and sucked down a deep, calming breath.

Of course Soren was texting his mom. Of fucking course.

Sat in a pub at the crest of the southern wastes in our newly combined territory, a franchised location that had branched off from the wildly successful Farrow's Pub in Soren's lake tourism empire, conversations all around us but silence at this hipster barrel-top table, three stubborn alphas tucked away in the corner...

Of course he was talking to his mom instead of us.

Fuck me. I could have gotten so much work done in the two hours our asses had been stuck in these stupid chairs, all hard angles and aesthetically pleasing but grossly underwhelming in terms of comfort. Not like the biggest season of the year for Redwood Grove was about to kick off or anything-the one that would rake in the serious cash. Nope. I was here, not talking and nursing a weak bourbon while Lucian drank the entire pub dry and Soren texted his mom.

Could this night suck any harder?

I cleared my throat, fingers coiled loosely around the glass tumbler, its ice nearly gone, the bourbon too cheap to actually enjoy. "You were the one who planned this-"

"Yeah, because it's how normal wolves bond." Dressed in a navy button-up patterned with tiny pineapples, Soren Acker was the preppiest of our surly trio, going so far as to rock a pair of dark khaki shorts like it was still the height of summer and not late September. He swept a hand through his dirty-blond locks, smoothing back that long on the top, shaved on the sides cut. "They go to the bar and drink a lot, share stories, talk, laugh, scope out the females, and then go for a run." He finally clicked the little button on the top of his phone, then set it on the table, his bottle of Belgian beer downed ages ago and not a refill in sight. "But you two..." The alpha's pointed glance between Lucian and me had my inner wolf's hackles rising. "You two antisocial assholes managed to turn this into a night of drinking and staring at the table, so I figured no one would notice if I stared at my phone instead."

For fuck's sake. I kept my fucking phone out of sight despite it buzzing away in my fucking pocket all night long-

I bit the insides of my cheeks, consciously trying to soothe my inner wolf. Of this new pack, he and I had the biggest issue with Soren and his wolf, but no surprise there. Close in age with an original territory that was established and self-sufficient without mine, he was direct competition.

A palpable threat.

We were all alphas, sure, but the innate need to seize top spot, claim the pack throne for ourselves, didn't go away just because as men we had combined three neighboring territories into a massive new one.

And blaming me-plus Lucian, but we had known the English bastard wouldn't say more than five words total going into this disaster-for the failure of this pathetic attempt at bonding was horseshit.

Just as I was about to snarl something back, Lucian guzzled the rest of his stout. Noisily. Aggressively. All of it in one go, looking more like a Viking tossing back a horn of mead than a modern-day shifter, a lone wolf, a solitary alpha from England who had somehow ended up in our neck of the Canadian wilderness fuck only knew when. According to Soren's dad, one day the silent, brooding wolf was just there, content to live alone in a log cabin deep in his territory within the western woods, distant and unobtrusive, barely noticed by the rest of us. Sure, he was still an alpha, huge and terrifying to behold, but not a personal threat.

Yet the way he pounded his empty mug down, green eyes flitting between me and Soren, sober and in control, annoyingly calm, quashed what would have been one of many heated exchanges between us.

"Let's run."

My inner wolf whined, animosity forgotten at the thought of finally running again, free and unchecked, wild to the bone. I grimaced, fighting the way his excitement reverberated through me, adrenaline suddenly spiked and hands slapped with a giddy tremor. It had been way too long since I unleashed the beast, and my inner wolf, my companion for life, had grown surly and frustrated as the summer dragged on. Unfortunately, my life needed the man right now: logical, cautious, calculated, focused. The wolf had to be caged to survive and thrive this first year as a one-third alpha of a new pack, with a huge new territory and new businesses to manage.

Tonight, the man just wanted whatever the hell this was to be over, so, fuck it-time to run.

Soren tapped his phone screen and squinted into the light. "It's barely nine o'clock-"

"Good enough," I growled, then shot back the remainder of this shit whiskey and stood. Seconds later, more chair legs scraped across the plank- wood flooring, the others rising and tossing cash onto the table to pay for our tab. Despite owning this territory, it was still a human's world; supernatural and shifter communities remained in the shadows, secret and the stuff of folklore, outnumbered but never overpowered, living alongside them but not with them. The best way to really make it was to buy shit: buildings, restaurants, spas, land.