Seduction (The Journal of the Wolves of Spruce Hollow) by Tarrah Betts Read Free Book Online

bottomless, constant, physical ache deep inside me for the past five years.  
    When my errant wolf decided to challenge me for power, I’d had no other choice but to leave Spruce Hollow. I’d known it would be beyond my ability to stay away from Aspen with consistency, so I’d joined the military to keep myself away from her. They did what I couldn’t do and forced me to stay away by sending me on numerous overseas deployments. I wasn’t even in the same country as Aspen a lot of the time.  
    But when I was back on home soil and stationed at the base…I couldn’t help myself and I would watch her.  
    It would make me sick to my stomach with loneliness and wanting. But every single time I was on leave, I would come back to Spruce Hollow, stay with either Griff or Caver for a few days, and follow Aspen around town like a little, lost puppy in my wolf form.  
    She never knew the truth though. I’d made sure of that.  
    Aspen never once suspected that I was around, watching and following her every move. She was positive that I’d abandoned her and while I knew that my plan wasn’t perfect, I’d felt that I had no other option available to me. I wanted her to live a normal life and be free of our growing connection, a connection that neither one of us could act on until she got older.  
    However, it didn’t work out exactly as I’d hoped as Aspen had been utterly devastated by me leaving Spruce hollow. Valerie and I had kept in constant contact throughout the years, so I knew absolutely everything that was going on in Aspen’s life and unfortunately, I wasn’t always happy with what Valerie had to tell me. Apparently, Aspen’s personality had changed drastically once I left. She went from a secure, happy and bubbly teenager to an insecure, depressed and angry one who often hid in her room and cried every time she got a letter from me in the mail.  
    Logic would dictate that I should have stopped sending letters to her since they made her so miserable, but I knew Aspen and deep down, I was certain that stopping my weekly letters would have only made it worse for her in the long run. In her mind, I knew she saw my letters as the only remaining connection that she still had to me and things were horrible enough between the two of us without cruelly ripping that away from her too.
    I wrote to her for two whole years, but then she graduated from high school and everything changed.  
    It had shocked the hell out of me at the time, because after graduation Aspen took off like a scared rabbit and ran as far away as from Spruce Hollow as she could possibly get. And I really wasn’t anticipating her making that move.  
    At all.  
    I guess in my mind, I had always figured that she’d stay here with the rest of the pack and maybe go to community college or something. She’d always loved animals and had expressed an interest in becoming a veterinary technician someday.  
    But no, she took off out of the blue one day and moved hours away, to Springbay. She’d cleaned out the savings account that both Valerie and I had deposited into every month since she was six years old and then used the money to buy a car and rent an apartment several blocks away from the ocean.  
    The bank had even called me the day she’d tried to withdraw the money for the car, as it was held in trust for her and they needed my permission to release it.  
    I could have said no. I certainly thought about it. I didn’t want her to leave town because she was safe and protected there. But, eventually, I realized that part of the reason that I had left her behind in Spruce Hollow in the first place was so that she could have normal human experiences before I claimed her as my mate. So, as much as it killed me, I gave my permission and they released the money to her.
    I mean, it’s not like she was acting irresponsibly and blew all the money on partying, like most teenagers would have. On the contrary, after she bought the car she’d returned