Skid licked his bottom lip—fuck, he’d forgotten that cracked lip needed nursing. Still he obliged and turned to face the man.
“Sit up,” Alpha ordered.
Skid sprang up, nervous. The wolf pack could have left him there to die in that forest fire, but they hadn’t. They had carried him out of the woodlands and brought him here, wherever the here was. Not knowing whether it was appropriate to make eye contact or not, Skid deferred to staring at the floor near Alpha’s feet.
“What’s your name?” Alpha asked. His shiny black combat boots now appeared quite interesting.
“Um, Skid,” he said. He didn’t have a name, wasn’t born with one, and never took on the name the state had given him. Firefighters had found him at their station one cold morning not long after he was born. They figured that he could have been a few days to a few weeks old at the time of drop-off. No birth certificate, nothing. For the longest time he’d felt ashamed to be the only kid to not know his birthday—his real birthday. Only recently in the past year did he decide that since he didn’t know the actual day of his birth, then he could very well celebrate his birthday for the whole month of December.
“Skid?” Alpha repeated. “Look at me.”
Skid gulped and looked up. The man before him had dark blond curls with light brown tips at the ends, a chiseled jaw, furry brows, amber eyes, a regal nose and lips that were just the right size—not too thick and not too thin. Likewise heavily muscled, a black vest and matching cargo pants barely contained the Alpha’s rippling chest and washboard abs.
One word vied with another when he saw Alpha: FORMIDABLE mixed with FORBIDDEN. Alpha was formidable in that Skid wouldn’t want him as an enemy any day. He was forbidden in the sense that Skid secretly liked having such a fit body, even though he knew he’d never have the bone structure to amass muscle like that.
Alpha was … handsome. He could have stepped out of the cover of a magazine. Judging by his looks, he couldn’t have been older than thirty and that was being conservative. Skid bet that the man was borderline mid-twenties. Then again, he could be wrong. Did wolf shifters look younger than their years or vice versa?
Skid: A Prequel (Black Storm Pack) is a prequel to the Black Storm Pack series.
If you like stories about gay males, you may also enjoy Vaughn 1 (Man X Chronicles).