Every Night Forever (Hyena Heat One) Read online

  Every Night Forever

  (Hyena Heat One)

  by R. E. Butler

  Copyright 2012 R.E. Butler

  Every Night Forever (Hyena Heat One)

  by R.E. Butler

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover by Ramona Lockwood

  This ebook is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locations is coincidental.

  Disclaimer: The material in this book is for mature audiences only and contains graphic sexual content and is intended for those over the age of 18 only.

  * * * * *

  I would like to extend sincere thanks to Alexis Arendt at Word Vagabond for editing this story. Thank you.

  To my Aunt B.L., for her encouragement and to my husband, B.B., I love you both.

  Jacq McNeill, who’s become such a sweet and dear friend, thank you for your insight, your help, and your friendship.

  To my new friends and fans, thank you so much for your support. For Jackie, who teases me with pictures of sandy beaches, and for Alex G. who tirelessly runs my FB page, I’m so glad to know you.

  * * * * *

  Author’s Note : Thank you for purchasing the first in my new series, Hyena Heat One, Every Night Forever. This series is connected to The Wolf’s Mate series. Those of you who have read The Wolf’s Mate series have met the three heroes in Every Night Forever - Dante, Cairo, and Mason Stone - in Book 4, Michael & Shyne. Although events in The Wolf’s Mate Book 4 are mentioned, it is not necessary to read it prior to reading this story. This book, and this series, are about were-hyenas and their search for their shared bride, and is not about the Tressel Wolf Pack in any way. I loved Dante, Cairo, and Mason’s characters so much when I wrote them in the fourth wolf book, that I knew I had to give them their own book and series. I hope that you’ll find the three brothers to be as deliciously sexy as I do. All the best, R.E.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note About the Series

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Contact the Author

  Other Works by R.E. Butler

  Coming in 2013

  Chapter 1

  Alyssa gripped her hair in frustration. Her own stupidity. This was why she was in this predicament in the first place. The timer beeped for three minutes. She didn’t move.

  “Are you going to look or should I?” Her friend Bethany asked, looking up from where she was scrubbing an emery board over her nails.

  “No, ah, I’ll do it.” Alyssa stood up from the bed and walked stiffly to the bathroom. The full moon in July, she’d been so damned horny she couldn’t control herself and she had willingly gone home with Ben, one of the younger wolves in the pack. She’d wanted to take the male who had joined the pack last summer to bed with her, but he hadn’t wanted her. Cody was a high-ranked male and well thought of in the pack. Gorgeous to boot. But he had never looked at her as anyone worthwhile.

  The night before the full moon she had walked into the pack bar and found the handsome wolf making out with a human woman in the corner, and her confidence had been shattered. It was one thing to be passed over for other she-wolves, but to be passed over for a human just seemed plain wrong. She’d been feeling particularly humiliated that none of the males in her age group had been interested in what she was offering, so she’d drunk more than her fair share of beer and taken Ben up on his offer. She was thankful when she woke up the next morning that at least he was over eighteen.

  “I still don’t understand what the big deal is. You’re on the pill.”

  Alyssa hadn’t opened her eyes yet. “I know that, Bethany, but I’m late, and I just recently switched pills and this one is screwing with my cycle. I just have to be sure I am before I make plans to rip the throat out of my doctor.”

  Bethany snorted delicately. “You’ve got such a strange sense of humor, Alyssa.”

  Her eyes opened slowly until she was staring at the pregnancy test. There, in easy-to-read print, it said “not pregnant”. She whooped a hallelujah to the heavens. She wanted to have kids eventually, but definitely not with an eighteen-year-old just out of high school kid who couldn’t have found her clit with a map and a flashlight. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d enjoyed sex. The only time she ever got off was when she was alone. Now isn’t that just pathetic?

  After the test clunked in the wastebasket, she looked at herself in the mirror, really looked, for the first time in a long time. Twenty-six. She should at least be in a relationship. Doing something with her life. She was just drifting, and not to anywhere good. She’d spent the last ten years playing whore to the males in the pack, and she knew without thinking too hard that all that sex, the trampy clothes, the flirting – it was just a front. All the time she’d spent being the fun girl, the sexy girl, and no male had ever wanted her for anything except sex. She shouldn’t have expected them to want to see past her slutty ways, but there was a part of her that was hurt that no one had.

  Bethany stood up when Alyssa walked out of the bathroom. “The girls are going to meet us at Flannigan’s. You ready?”

  Floating on Cloud Nine after narrowly escaping having Ben as her baby-daddy, she was more than happy to go out with her friends and party. She grabbed her ID, cash, and keys, and followed Bethany out of her apartment. Bethany drove; she was one of the few girls in their pack who was always the designated driver, because her mother had been a fall-down drunk and Bethany didn’t want to follow in her footsteps.

  Flannigan’s was run by her pack. The interior was dark paneling and stained, faded wallpaper. Tables and chairs were crowded together and there was a small space towards the stage where the floor was cleared for dancing. She followed Bethany to where their friends were sitting, in their usual place - center booth along the far wall, directly across from the bar and just outside the dance area. Alyssa said hi to her friends and fellow pack members - Nina, Lori, and Wendy - as she and Bethany slid into the booth.

  Drinks were ordered, and she cast her gaze over the full bar. The house band was playing a country song she vaguely recognized from the radio, and a few couples were dancing on the floor, along with a few already-drunk women. She saw Cody sitting at one of the tables with his friends, and her heart quickened at the sight of him. Lean and tall, his sandy-blond hair was just long enough to dust his collar and always looked just-rolled-out-of-bed ruffled.

  As the night wore on, Alyssa was very aware that her friends were all asked to dance, but she was outright ignored. She felt as if she were invisible, sitting alone in the booth while her friends had fun.

  When the girls said they were going to the bathroom, Alyssa decided to check out her makeup and make sure she didn’t have lipstick on her teeth or something else that was stopping anyone asking her dance. She could admit
to herself that the last few weeks she hadn’t been nearly as popular as she had been before she decided to close her legs to casual sex, but she’d never felt like such a pariah before.

  Touching up her lipstick and double-checking that her teeth were color-free, she turned to her friends at the sinks and said, “Is something going on?”

  Lori tousled her long, blonde hair and met her eyes in the mirror. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, no one’s asked me to dance. All the guys in the pack are acting like I don’t exist. I just thought...” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence. What she wanted to say was that she thought she was pretty enough, nice enough, to get asked to dance. But she couldn’t say that out loud.

  Nina let out a disgusted sigh. “You thought, what? That your personality was nice enough that the boys would want to be around you with your clothes on? Puh-lease.”

  Shocked, Alyssa’s mouth fell open.

  Wendy turned and leaned against the counter. “Face it, Alyssa. You were only good for one thing to the males in our pack, and when you took your pussy off the table, they lost interest. It’s no one’s fault but your own.”

  Her face turned beet red in shame and horror. “I’m not a whore.”

  “No?” Lori laughed. “You’re a pack toy, for fuck’s sake, Alyssa. Did you think they would accept you being less than that just because you had a change of heart?”

  Alyssa’s eyes burned with tears, and she fought not to cry as she looked at Bethany. Her best friend shrugged and blotted her lipstick on a piece of toilet paper. “They’re right, Alyssa. Because of you, we’re all suffering, picking up your slack.”

  “Excuse me?” Alyssa ground out.

  All four women looked at her with varying degrees of contempt. Nina said, “Did you really think you had anything else to offer besides your body?”

  Anger rioted through her as she shot back, “You’re no different than me.”

  Lori laughed, “Oh really? I’ve never taken an eighteen-year-old geek home in a drunken stupor because the pack hottie won’t give me the time of day. At least we have standards, Alyssa. You’ve always just been a toy and nothing more. The sooner you accept your place in the pack and get off your high horse, the sooner things can get back to normal.”

  She stared at her supposed friends in shock, their harsh truths and betrayals cutting through her like sharp blades. She walked quickly out of the bathroom, eyes blurry with tears, and ran straight into Cody’s chest as he exited the men’s bathroom.

  She stumbled backwards, but thankfully didn’t fall.

  “Sorry, Cody,” she said, clenching her teeth against the sob that threatened to break free.

  “No problem, uh-” he said, looking at her as if he had never seen her before.

  “Alyssa,” she supplied, as her ears burned in humiliation.

  “Oh, sure, Alyssa.”

  Just then, one of the males she used to sleep with frequently came down the hallway. His eyes were bright and she immediately scented alcohol on his breath and knew that he was drunk.

  “Hey, there’s the female that thinks she’s too good to be a toy!” Jenner snorted, coming to stand next to Cody. “Too bad. She gave the best blow jobs.”

  Alyssa wanted to sink into the floor and disappear. Worse still, recognition lit Cody’s eyes and she knew that he now knew who she was. Not because he recognized her face her or her name, but because of Jenner’s statement. Too good to be a toy?

  “Excuse me,” she said, walking quickly around them. She heard Jenner say something to Cody and they both laughed. She hadn’t heard the words, but she knew they were talking about her. She exited the bar and stood in the warm night air, sucking in a few deep breaths before pulling out her cell and calling for a cab.

  An hour later she was home in her small apartment, alone with her thoughts. She felt small and low. She’d known that her past behavior had set her up to be viewed in a certain light, but she also knew that she had a right to make changes in her life. It was her body, and she wasn’t the property that the pack males seemed to think she was.

  The next day, Bethany called her to go out to lunch. “Why didn’t you stand up for me?” she blurted out.

  “What are you talking about?” Bethany asked.

  “Last night in the restroom, when the girls were saying such horrible things about me. Why didn’t you defend me? You’re supposed to be my best friend.”

  Bethany said nothing for a full minute and then her voice came out slightly bitter and angry. “We didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. A couple months ago you went home with that kid, and then you just decided that you were too good to help out the males. You know they need to fuck on the full moon, and the single males rely on the single females to help them out. There are a lot more males than females in our pack, so we each need to do our share. You have some kind of moral crisis, decide you’re too good for the full moon fucks, and it falls on the rest of us to pick up your slack. How do you think that makes us feel?”

  She swallowed hard as Bethany’s words stung her like darts. “I don’t want to be a toy for the rest of my life. I want to be with a male who loves me for me first, not for how good I am in bed. I want to be with a male who’s proud to be with me, who wants to take me home to meet his family.” Tears pressed against her eyes again, but this time they were from grief, not humiliation. She didn’t think she’d ever had a man say he had feelings for her.

  “You’re a pack toy, Alyssa. You’ll never be anything to them but that. You want someone to love you for yourself? You better find a new pack.”

  “Aren’t you in the same boat as me? You’re a pack toy, too.”

  “So? I love it. When I’m ready to settle down and have kids, I’m going to leave this pack and join my cousin’s pack in West Virginia. Now, are we going to lunch or what?”

  Alyssa felt a little kernel of self-love bloom inside her. Bethany was entirely right. If she wanted to find a male who would love her for herself, she had to get away from the people who didn’t see her as a whole person. “No. You go on ahead. I’ve got some stuff to do.”

  Alyssa ended the call and let the silence in her one-bedroom apartment surround her. She’d lived in that apartment for almost eight years. But it hadn’t ever really felt like home. No place had, she realized sadly.

  Her mother and her sister, her only family, had both left her behind as they found new lives in other packs. She’d spent the better part of her adult life trying to fill the void left by her family with meaningless sex and empty, unfulfilling friendships. But if her family could start over, then she could as well. There was nothing tying her to her pack and this life except her unwillingness to move on.

  Determination filled her, and for the first time, she could see a brighter future ahead of her. That day, she began to look for a place to make a new life. As she searched for a job online, somewhere away from her pack and her old life, her heart lifted.

  Firing off her resume to several companies that were hiring people with her limited skill set, she stood up from her small desk and began to pack up her life. Hope filled her as she thought about making a new life, starting over, and finally being happy. While she was pulling clothes out of her closet and folding them into one of several suitcases, her phone buzzed with a text: an insulting message from Ben, stating he was free for a quickie before he went out with his friends to party. The young wolf had been sending her similar texts since their one night together, sometimes begging her to be with him again, and sometimes ragging on her for being a ‘she-bitch tease’.

  A sense of purpose kindled within her and she smiled as she sent a simple three-word text to Ben, taking the first step into her new life by firmly closing the door on her old one.

  Go fuck yourself.

  Chapter 2

  Dante Stone took a drink from a bottle of water and looked out at his backyard from the sliding glass door in the kitchen. It was early, but he’d been unable to sleep.

  He worked
the late shift at the gym that he and his brothers owned, from three to eleven. Normally he came home and crashed out, but tonight, like many recent nights, he had tossed and turned and been unable to really rest.

  “You’re up early,” Cairo said with a yawn as he came into the kitchen, dressed for his first shift at the gym.

  Dante looked over his shoulder. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  He heard Cairo slip his shoes on and then his brother joined him at the back door. “Something bothering you, bro?”

  “Nothing new.”