Arielle and the Three Wolves (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Read Free Page A

entrance to the room.
    Her bedroom was the largest room of the house. In the daytime it looked out onto her garden in the backyard. At night when the moon was out, she could lie in bed and watch the moon shine off the Teton Mountains to the west.
    With a queasy stomach, she dragged the wolf inside her bedroom. It was better this way, she tried to tell herself. At least she would not be constantly worried as to whether it had awakened in the night. It was so large she suspected she may not have given it enough tranquilizers.
    She backed away from it and stood in the center of her room and looked down at the black form. It felt odd to have it here inside her bedroom, and a tiny bolt of fear shot up her spine. She thought about what she should do next for a moment and then realized she was too muddled from exhaustion to think clearly anymore that night. She had already brought a wolf back to her home and carried it into her bedroom. She couldn’t have been thinking too clearly.
    One last thought occurred to her, and she ran out of her bedroom and down the hall to her office. “Thank God!” she said to herself as she found what she looked for and ran back to the animal on her bedroom floor.
    She fit the muzzle over the wolf’s snout. It barely fit, but after it was secure, she felt a little safer.
    When she crawled under the covers of her bed, she was asleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillow. She had vivid dreams that night, but she didn’t dream about the wolf. Instead she dreamed about a big man.

Chapter Two
     
    The operation was a success. She drove to her office and retrieved the equipment she needed and performed it that morning in her home. Arielle was able to piece back together the fractured bone on the wolf’s hind leg. It went better than she could have anticipated, and she didn’t even have to use any wire to repair the damage. The wolf would live. Now a two- or three-month recovery period would ensue before the animal could be turned back to the wild once more.
    She kept the wolf under the tranquilizer for the rest of the day. Eventually she would have to let it come out from under the drug or risk brain damage. Just in case it woke up early, she made sure the muzzle remained firmly in place.
    She made a bed for the animal just beside her own bed. She couldn’t really fathom why she wanted to keep the wolf so close to her. It was like she didn’t want to let it out of her sight. No longer did she feel guilty because she hit it. Now she had done her part to save it.
    No, she knew the real reason was the beauty and intelligence of the animal. It was noble and big and strong. The way it had looked over its shoulder at her like it was a human had piqued her curiosity. In some ways she could hardly wait for it to wake up so she could see if it was as smart as she had first thought.
    Or maybe she had just wanted it to be smart and human-like. She was lonely. She had lived out here on the outskirts of town like a hermit for the last eighteen months. She had suffered a lot in that time. The introduction of a wild animal in her life was enough of a change to shake up her humdrum life.
    Perhaps when the wolf regained consciousness, it would turn vicious like a forest animal should, and she would be forced to finally come to grips with how bad her life sucked, and how much she longed for a change, any kind of a change.
    After she had performed the operation, she had spent the rest of the day out in her backyard in her garden. She had house cleaning to do inside and laundry that had to be done, but it was a beautiful day after the storm of the previous night, and it was one of those days where it was just too nice to remain indoors. However, every twenty minutes, she ran inside her back door and down the hall to her bedroom to check on her house guest. As she had suspected, there was no change in him all afternoon, and he continued his peaceful sleep.
    That night she fixed herself the dinner she was supposed to