Biffy wanted to lick the long line of his graceful throat.
So many things rolled up in that gesture: acknowledgment, power transfer, offering, acceptance. Much to his incalculable shame, lust spiked through Biffy. Possibly as a result of all four, possibly simply from his Beta’s smell, for under Egypt, and India, and long sea journeys, Lyall still smelled of something else. Something familiar and half-remembered. Something yearned for and lost.
Mine.
The chin dipped, the sandy eyes lowered. Those lashes spread out, long and pale against his cheeks. “So, are you ready?”
“Is anyone ready to be Alpha?”
“Only the ones doomed to fail think they are prepared.”
“Are you ready to be back?”
“Of course. This is where I belong. And I already know how to be a Beta.”
Biffy let out a breath. Happiness bubbled inside him like Lord Akeldama’s stupid pink slurp, so unexpected it was all the more intoxicating. He slid into the wrong class for just a moment. “Bloody hell, Lyall, it took you long enough.”
Professor Lyall barked out a surprised laugh. Then remembered himself.
Biffy wanted more than anything to reach for him, to pull him in close. But he was all nerves and worries. What had been pain and consolation twenty years earlier wasn’t necessarily love now. Lyall had been there after Biffy changed, and held him, even knowing Biffy still loved Lord Akeldama. They had been something to each other. Necessity, perhaps. But that was two decades gone. Biffy wasn’t a newly made, newly brokenhearted werewolf anymore.
And Lyall was his Beta. Biffy was pretty darn certain pack members weren’t supposed to sleep with each other, let alone Alphas and Betas. That seemed a recipe for disaster. He’d certainly never heard nor read of such a relationship.
So, Biffy held himself apart and tried simply to be glad that his Beta was home. His Beta was there. It was, he thought, good enough. Or he would learn to let it be so.
CHAPTER THREE
A New Pack Member
He looks well enough. Lyall followed his Alpha’s long, elegant strides out of the hat shop and into a hailed cab.
The silence in the hackney was awkward but not uncomfortable.
“How are they handling it?”
“Better than we hoped.”
“And Channing?” The London Pack’s strongest and most difficult member was their Gamma, Major Channing Channing of the Chesterfield Channings. Lyall had hated leaving Biffy to cope with him alone. But he could be coped with.
“He challenged.”
“Of course he did.” It was in a Gamma’s nature to fight, to strike out, to react in anger to any change. It had its purpose within the pack. Providing, as much as a Beta did, its own kind of balance. But Channing was worse than most, more extreme.
“And I beat him back.”
“Of course you did.” Lyall was relieved to hear it but didn’t let it show. He had worried. Biffy wasn’t by nature a fighter. But he was Alpha, innately dominant, and blessed with Anubis Form. The ability to make new werewolves, which meant, regardless of his surface personality, no one should be able to challenge him for long. It’s only that Biffy didn’t come off as Alpha at first glance. Too delicate. Too pretty. Too civilized.
If we can find a way to meld these qualities, he will be everything we need henceforth.
Lyall’s worry had been all for Channing, for Biffy’s control. Channing was so much bigger, and so much angrier, he had thought there was a chance, just a chance...
“I’m glad you didn’t have to kill him.” He didn’t like Channing, but he was, in his way, Lyall’s brother if not friend.
“Me too.” A wealth of feeling in those words from his Alpha. As if Biffy understood his worry, and the odd exasperated affection of centuries.
How horrible it would have been, not for Channing to die (although that was reasonably bad, for Channing) but for Biffy to have to cope with loss at his moment of Alpha acquisition. Not to mention a pack that had neither Beta nor Gamma.
“And how has he been since then?”
“Absent. He’s now head of BUR and very much taken with the job. Did you know?”
Lyall inclined his head.
“Of course you knew.” Biffy sat, still and poised across from him, the flickering lights of the lanterns making his too-pretty features shift in and out of focus.
Lyall knew those features well, had traced them with his fingertips. Straight nose with a tiny bit of up-tilt at the end, pointed chin just square enough to be masculine, lower lip slightly fuller than the upper one but together making a mouth almost feminine in its perfection.
“It is a good place for him, given that he no longer has his military position to distract him. He has worked for the War Office before. And the Home Office, I believe. He can handle the bureaucracy.”
Biffy let out a slight breath.
Lyall could guess the source. “You came up with the idea to give him that job?”
Biffy nodded.
“Good instincts, Alpha.”
He watched Biffy’s shoulders relax slightly. “I had to fight for it. The Queen considers him a bit of a loose cannon, and it is by royal appointment. It could have gone horribly wrong.”
“But it didn’t. And a month in, he’s doing well. Or so I hear.”
Biffy’s smile was more shaky than confident.
We will have to work on that.
*
It was late by the time they reached the new pack house. Biffy was proud of the place. It was much bigger than the previous town house. It had a large garden, and Blackheath was right there, beyond. Perhaps not big enough to be a full running ground, but big enough to give the whole place a feel of freedom and open fields, even in London.
Biffy was a city boy himself, always had been, but werewolves needed a sense of space, and this house gave it to them. He’d purchased it thinking that he needed to satisfy the shifting needs of his pack. They needed a greater sense of freedom than inner London allowed, but also, he wanted to give the populace a sense of their settling down.
The previous Alpha, Lord Maccon, had been very... well... much. As had his wife. Very much to tend to and very much to accommodate. Werewolves were pack – they liked to take care of their own. There had been the Maccon daughter as well, a handful herself, for all that she lived the bulk of her time with Lord Akeldama. Prior to Biffy’s reign, the London Pack had withstood a time of upset and confusion. With Lord Maccon turning slowly mad under Alpha’s curse, a stinky vampire living so close, politics and excitement all around them, it had been decades of aberration and unsettlement.
Biffy might be a new Alpha – different and young – but he knew it was his role to provide stability. And now with Lyall home, he felt that their legs, weak and newborn and shaky, could perhaps grow into something strong and sure.
Some instinct had urged him to buy a bigger house as a result. He wasn’t certain if it was an Alpha’s hope that they might be adding new members to their pack. Or some weird instinct that suggested, now that the London Pack Alpha was a civilized gentleman with a marked preference for other gentlemen, some of his pack might consider marriage their duty.
They had abstained for decades. Lady Maccon was a lot to look after, and not the type of female to brook other ladies in her domain. However, werewolves were allowed to marry under British law. Even encouraged to do so, where widows with children were concerned. Werewolves, being undead, could not (of course) have children of their own. But the pack structure was considered an excellent welfare resource for a worthy gentlewoman who was too long a spinster or too old a widow. Such marriages were thought good for the pack, bringing (as society deemed it) the taming forces of womanhood to an otherwise worryingly masculine environment.