194
A Rogue Surrenders to Jessica
The Wisconsinites had to fly back on Monday. Lisette and Tony would be my guards during the trip, as Brigitte and Conor needed to get back to teaching the class that had been given a couple weeks with an alternate instructor, (another older wolf,) while we took our road trip. Which also meant Dani would be going with, since they didn’t want to leave her alone, given Quinn had only captured one of the rogue wolves that had plagued the Portland area the last time I went to the airport.
That meant the weekend was filled to the brim with sex, except for our running, now back to ten miles a day as I swelled, except for Dad. Dad was only doing five, since he’d just started, Gretchen was down to five owing to her more advanced pregnancy, and Ingrid, ran with her, because she needed to stick with her charge. She usually took another run in the woods after dark as a wolf.
I spent as much time in the sack with Gretchen and Ingrid as I could, giving Gretchen as much of myself as I could spare, because I was unwilling to become more than a sexual partner to her. Mom and Dad did the same with Conor and Brigitte, taking advantage of their willingness and availability, to have as much extra-marital sex as they could.
They were still extremely excited about the prospect of a new child to raise, and I often heard them discussing the prospect when they weren’t engaged in sex. Meals tended to be hurried affairs, raw meat for the wolves, salads with a little cooked meat for the humans.
Monday rolled around and Tony and Lisette were in the front of the big Suburban. Dad, Mom and Ingrid were in the middle seat, and Gretchen, Dani and I were in the back. The parting scene at the airport was a bit of a tear jerker for Gretchen, my parents and me. The enforced closeness of the road trip had left me feeling closer to them than since I was in high school. The driving bits had given us a lot of time to talk.
Gretchen had done a lot of sketching on the trip and had the start of some great paintings. Roughly a third featured me in some way, both for herself and for possible paintings for Quinn. There was one where I was rocking in a chair in front of a fireplace in one of the Inns where we’d stayed, my hands on my bare rounded belly, I was particularly fond of.
“Thank you, Jessica, for giving me so much of your time. I know we can’t be together, so this was in the way of a goodbye.” I started to say something, but she put a finger on my lips. “Not like a permanent goodbye, but a ‘this is all you can have of me, goodbye’. I really appreciate how much time you gave me. I know our lives will diverge somewhat at this point. You’ll find someone, I’ll find someone else. We’ll see each other, but probably not like this. Not nestled in each other’s arms for a couple weeks. So I thank you for giving me this much. It’s what I always dreamed of, and I’m glad you gave me a great big taste of what it would have been like. I hope we can spend some time together in the future, but who knows what the future holds.”
I wished I could give her what she wanted, but I wasn’t built that way. So I hugged and kissed her and let the tears flow, knowing she was right. Our paths would diverge and this episode would likely never be repeated. Ingrid had been our companion half the time we spent in bed, and I’d enjoyed her company as well. She was an accomplished wolf in the ways of pleasing a woman, nearly as good as Brigitte, so I shed a few for her.
I hugged my parents desperately, and they said they’d be back for the birth. I told them that the other breeders and I had talked about a trip to visit all of our families while we were still unemployed, and told them we still hoped to take one if Dani’s wedding didn’t blow it up.
“Blame me,” she laughed.
“We don’t have any other reason to hang around here,” I replied.
“I can do a lot of my planning on the road, bitch, and my Mom would certainly want some input into my wedding. I think we can still pull it off. I can give Carl instructions on what things he has to do. I still think it’s doable. Give us a month to six weeks, and you might have four pregnant bitches knocking on your door.”
“Not five?” Mom asked. “What about Brigitte?”
“She probably needs to keep up with her classes, for as long as she can, and I’m not sure we can travel with eight body guards,” I said. “We’ll probably need to make do with four, take the Suburban again. I’m not sure Brigitte would be one of them. Perhaps not Conor either, as he’s not a very senior wolf. I’m thinking Tony, Lisette, Nat and Daphne.”
“Tony probably won’t be able to go,” Lisette said. “Some other thing he needs to do, a wolf thing.”
“Take Quinn,” Ingrid said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing him again, nor would Anita from how she begged for his cock.”
Mom blushed and Dad grinned.
“As head tracker, I’m not sure Quinn could go that long,” I said, “and I for damn sure, don’t want to be stuck in a vehicle with him that long.”
“Where do you need to go?” Lisette said. “How far do you need to travel?”
“Simone’s family is in Quebec, mine is in Wisconsin, Dani’s is in northern New York, and Randa’s is in Pennsylvania,” I said.
“You could do like a modified Great Circle route,” Tony said, “starting in Quebec, counterclockwise around the Great Lakes, but skipping Lake Superior, crossing into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at Sault Ste. Marie, into Wisconsin, to Pennsylvania, then New York and back home. Three and a half to four weeks, depending on how long you want to spend at each place, say three to four days each, the rest driving time.”
He pulled up a map on his phone and showed us. It did look doable. Maybe 1800 to 2000 miles. If we did four to five hundred driving miles a day, probably closer to four hundred so we could get runs in daily, five to six days of heavy driving, the rest visiting.
“How many packs would we have to deal with?” I asked.
“I’m not entirely sure,” Tony said. “You’d have to check with Rene. Four for sure, Quebec, Upper Peninsula, Pennsylvania and New York. Not sure who you’re dealing with in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. They might all be subsets of the Kentucky pack because they’re not all that wooded anymore. Eastern Ohio may be under the Pennsylvania pack or the West Virginia pack.”
“You can take a month out of your wedding planning?” I asked.
“If Carl does as he’s told,” Dani said. “I’ll leave the scut work to him. So much can be done online now.”
“So we have a semi-plan. Perhaps we’ll see each other again in a month or so.”Content © copyrighted by NôvelDrama.Org.
“That would be nice,” Gretchen said.
So we had tentative plans for our future, which still needed to be cleared with Simone and Randa, plus Rene and any other packs whose territory we might pass through. We did need to go before we all got too big and cumbersome. I figured that by the sixth month, I wouldn’t be up to traveling for a month. The later it got, the less likely I’d feel like going. Running even ten miles a day was starting to take a toll. I’d need to start cutting back at some point.
******
On the way back, I sat in the second seat and talked to Dani about her sister. Rene had recommended an attorney who’d practiced law for ninety years, licensed to practice in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. A wolf, obviously, who had to retire every so often and open a practice in another state, with the help of the Feds. He had the reputation as a cutthroat. His current practice was in Massachusetts, and it had been sixty years since he’d been in Connecticut, so any lawyers he’d worked for or against there were now dead and buried.
The lawyer and the PI were meeting this week so all of Eva’s evidence could go to him and he could start the divorce paperwork, waiting until Eva was ready. Eva was meeting him next week on Wednesday, so he had time to go over all the evidence and develop the plan. That would be while she was on her way to Maine for her meeting with Dani. She’d gotten a snapshot of their financials for the attorney, and he would be looking for anything Eva might not know about. Eva had agreed to waiting until the divorce was started to get pregnant, and she’d stopped having sex with her husband, not that she wanted to anyway. Between his late nights “working, read fucking,” and the occasional “headache, read ‘no fucking way you’re sticking your cock in me again, asshole’,” sex with her husband was now off the table.
Eva still didn’t know about the wolves, but I guess they could knock her up even if she only wanted a human child. She’d only get paid for puppies, though. I’d seen at least six dark skinned men/wolves so far, and knew there were others. Three of them had been in the strip show, plus Nat, though I didn’t know any of the others more than having seen them. If she wanted a black child, I’m sure the wolves could give her one.
We were reaching the rest stop where we’d had the trouble before and I told Lisette to pull in.
“Why?”
“I want to see if we can capture a wolf.”
“Jessica! We’re not equipped for it. We don’t have our guns.”
“Not guns. You’ve got your silver knives, don’t you? I’ve got mine if you don’t. I don’t want to capture him that way. I want to see if he’ll come willingly. The silver is for if he’s feral, but I’m hoping he’s smart and reasonable.”
“Okay. What do you have in mind?”
“Asking him to turn himself in, for a chance at leniency. No one’s caught him by chasing him.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Tony said.
“Me, too.”
Lisette pulled in and we went to the table where we’d picnicked before.
“Here’s what I want you to do? I want you to shift in the woods there and call him to come in. Tell him he won’t be hurt, and he’ll be allowed to leave again if he doesn’t want to turn himself in. Then come back and we’ll wait and see what happens. We won’t take longer than a half hour if he doesn’t show.”
I wanted Lisette to call for him as I thought he’d more readily come for a female than a male. The rest of us had a seat and waited. Lisette went into the surrounding woods, shifted to her wolf, ran out a half mile where the sound of a wolf howling wouldn’t be quite as frightening. We heard her wolf howling in the distance, so it carried a long way. Five minutes after her calling, she was back, dressed, and I started a timer on my watch.
After twenty minutes, Tony said softly, “He’s out there.”
I raised my voice and said, “If you want to talk, now is the time. If you’re hungry, we can feed you if you come with us.”
We didn’t hear or see anything for five more minutes. Finally, a voice in the bushes said, “I’m naked.”