Leaving Bo completely confused, kind of insulted, kind of not, and weirdly turned on because she looked shockingly cute in those oversized cargo pants.
But he blamed the mane for the turned-on thing. He totally blamed the mane!
CHAPTER 3
“So let me see if I understand this,” Sami said, her small fingers steepled under her chin. “All you know at this point is that her name is Blayne and that she thought—”
“Not thought. She was convinced.”
“Convinced. She was convinced you were a serial killer?”
“Yes.”
Sander sat down at the table, his plate piled with bacon, ham, and eggs. Bo had no idea where the pair had found all the food. He knew they didn’t cook it, and when he went to bed last night, they weren’t even in the state. But he woke up this morning in his furnished Central Park Avenue apartment provided by his Carnivore contract, complete with its own Olympic-size swimming pool, and a full breakfast waiting for him. He probably should find out where the food came from, in case the cops showed up again. That was always so awkward.
Sander pointed a fork at him. “Are you saying you gave up that seal farm for a wolfdog who thinks you’re a serial killer?”
“I didn’t know she had that perception at the time.”
Sami sighed. “This is what you get for not talking to us first before making these big decisions.”
“Talking to you about what?”
“About which offer to take. We”—she motioned between herself and Sander—“are the most important things in your life.”
“You are?” Because that was a kind of depressing thought.
“Yes. And do you know why?”
“How would I know why when I didn’t know you were?”
“Because we’re your foxes. All three of us are linked. Forever.”
“But you’re never really around.”
“Because we’re young,” she reminded him. “We’re traveling the world, trying to find ourselves. But when we’re older, ready to have a couple of kits, we’ll be back. And you’ll need to be able to take care of us. That’s your job.”
“Which would be greatly helped by the seal farm,” Sander said around a mouthful of ham and egg.
“You do both remember I’m only half polar bear, don’t you? The lion part would have no problems slapping you both around and biting your little heads off.”
Sami reached across the table and patted Bo’s hand. “But it’s the polar half we both love.”
Blayne took back her bacon and followed that up with a punch to Mitch Shaw’s shoulder. This was her monthly brunch with her wild dog Pack and the lion male had forced his way in, as was the way of male lions, and was now stealing her food! Rude!
“Ow!” the big cat whined.
“Stop taking my food or I’m going to start biting things off.”
“Stingy.”
“Greedy.”
“Here, cat.” Sabina of the Kuznetsov Pack dropped a platter of bacon in front of him. “I kill whole pig just so you can feed fat head.”
“I know somewhere in there’s an insult, but it still sounds so sexy with that Russian accent that I’m going to overlook it.” Mitch switched his breakfast plate for the entire platter.
Blayne shook her head. “How can you eat like that? People starving and you stuff your fat face.”
“Boo-hoo. My heart bleeds. Poor starving people.”
Blayne knew Mitch only said that sort of thing to upset her, but what appalled her was that she fell for it every time. She slapped at his head, ignoring his laughter.
“Not that we don’t love having you here for our Sunday brunch, Mitch,” Jess Ward-Smith said from her place at the head of the long Kuznetsov Pack dining table filled with adults, all the pups outside in the backyard playing or up in their rooms, “but I am curious as to why you’re here?”
“Important wolf Pack business has brought me here with my lady love and her Dee-licious cousin.”
“Dee’s here?” Blayne said with real excitement, and she jumped up, only to be yanked back down by Mitch.
“No,” he told her.
“But I just want to say hi!” She jumped up again, and Mitch yanked her back down again.
“No.”
“Come on. Pleaseeeeee let me say hi to Dee-Ann!”
At this point, Mitch was practically curled into his chair, he was laughing so hard while he still kept a firm grip on her arm. “No!” he finally got out. “And whatever you’re doing with Dee-Ann—stop it. Because at this point, I’m thinking there’s a shallow grave with your name on it.”
“No fun,” Blayne pouted. Then she snapped her fingers, her focus moving to something else entirely.
She reached into the backpack she had resting against the legs of her chair. “Look at this book I found—” She stopped abruptly when the entire table groaned. “What?”
“Blayne,” Jess said, “You can’t keep buying me books on pregnancy.”
“It’s not for you. It’s for me.”
Mitch leaned in and sniffed her neck. “You’re not pregnant.”
She glared at him. “Yes. I’m well aware of that.”
“The ol’ Blayne lower-land territory a little unused lately?” Blayne slammed the book in Mitch’s big lion head. “I was just asking!”
Blayne flipped through the book. “This book is about what to do to help a friend going through pregnancy. There’s a whole section on what to do in the delivery room.”
Mitch took the book out of her hand, his fingers covered in bacon grease. “What do you need that information for?”
Blayne reached for the book, but Mitch held her off by turning away from her and using his forearm.
“Hopefully I’ll be able to help out in the delivery room when the time comes, and I want to be prepped for that.”
“Is this in case the future Ward-Smith wolfdog is crazy like all the others and comes out of the womb trying to chew through the umbilical cord? I know! Maybe you can distract her with a squeaky toy!”
Blayne balled up her fist, ready to punch Mitch O’Neill Shaw in the nuts when the book was snatched from Mitch’s hand.
“Hey—oh.” Mitch faced forward. “Hi, Smitty.”
Smitty slapped his hand down on Mitch’s shoulder and squeezed, Blayne cringing from the pain she saw on the lion male’s face. Well, the pain and the blow to his sizable ego. “What was that you said about wolfdogs and my soon-to-be-here baby girl, Mitchell? Don’t reckon I heard you right.”
“Nothing,” Mitch spit out between gritted teeth.
“That’s what I thought.” Smitty pulled his hand away and kindly handed the book to Blayne before kissing her forehead. “Hello, darlin’.”
“Hello, Smitty. And thank you.” Blayne sneered at Mitch and Mitch sneered back.
Smitty’s sister, Sissy Mae, grabbed up the platter still half filled with bacon and dropped into a chair next to Mitch. She put her feet up on the table, worn cowboy boots right next to Mitch’s arm.
“That’s my bacon,” Mitch told her.
“You need to learn to share, Mitchell Shaw.” Sissy smiled at Blayne.
“Mornin’, darlin’.”
“Hi, Sissy.” Blayne looked around. “Where’s Dee-Ann? I thought she was with you.”
“Oh, well—Blayne, no!”
But Blayne was already up and running to the front door. She snatched it open and quickly scanned the downtown street until she saw the She-wolf halfway up the block. Grinning, Blayne screamed out, “Dee! Hey, Dee! Where are you going? Don’t go!” The She-wolf stopped, her shoulders tensing. Blayne held her breath, but it was for nothing. Dee moved on. “Dee! Wait! Dee! Ann! Dee-Annnnnnnnnnnnn! Come back!”
Dee-Ann didn’t come back, and Blayne closed the front door and went back to the dining room and the remainder of her breakfast. Once she sat down, everyone at the table staring at her, she picked up her glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and took a sip. “I guess she didn’t hea
r me.”
Mitch shook his head. “It’s like watching someone drive straight toward a concrete wall and yet there’s nothing you can do to make them stop.”
“Don’t know what you mean.”
“Forget all that,” Sissy said, leaning in a bit and grinning. “We saw Lock and Gwenie last night for dinner,” she said to Blayne.
“It’s like having a mountain at the table with you,” Mitch complained about Gwen’s grizzly. “And he moves nearly as fast.”
“And,” Sissy went on, ignoring her mate, “what is this I hear about you and the almighty gorgeous Bo ‘The Marauder’ Novikov?”
It was bad enough that Blayne spit out her own orange juice in surprise, but when half the wild dogs, wolf, and lion did it, too, she didn’t know what to think.
Bo finished up his hundredth lap, resting for a moment with his arms on the edge of his pool. It was Sunday, so this was his day off as per his schedule. Four hours working out in the pool was like a walk in the park compared with his standard ten-to-fifteen-hour daily workout the rest of the week.
Relaxing in a recliner and wearing a minuscule white bikini with her shoulder-length white hair up in a ponytail, Sami flipped through Japanese Vogue. Sander slept stomach down on another recliner. No snoring, but there was drool. It was not pretty.
“How long you two staying this time?”
Sami dropped the magazine onto the floor. She’d only been back in the States for a few days, but Bo could tell she was already bored, ready to travel again. Foxes bored easy, and Bo had gotten used to his friends appearing and disappearing randomly. If he were really desperate, he could always track them down through their parents. But to be honest, he was never that desperate. He enjoyed his friends while they were around, but didn’t think much about them when they were gone.
“I don’t know,” she said. “We haven’t made up our minds. Taiwan might be fun.” She reached for another magazine. “You know, we stopped home before heading here. Lots of people asked about you.”
“Lots of people asked about me? Or lots of people asked about Speck?” A nickname he completely loathed.
“Does that matter?”
“You kind of just answered my question.”
Sami turned on her side, facing him. “What about your uncle?”
“I can’t speak for him, but he’s never suggested he’s in dire need to see me.”
“You always talk like a lawyer when I mention your family.”
As usual Sami made it sound like Bo had this big family back in Ursus County, Maine, rather than one uncle willing to take him in when his parents died. No one else had wanted him. His mother’s Pride had no use for a male hybrid, and his father’s other brother had no use for Bo.
So, Bo’s Uncle Grigori left the Marine Corp and took Bo back to Maine where he was mostly ignored by the locals. They ignored him, that is until they figured out he was good at hockey. Hockey was all in Ursus County.
It wasn’t easy, though, in the beginning. Bo was considered “small” for a bear, and playing hockey against all-bear teams—even the junior and minor league ones—was not for the weak of heart or body. Yet Bo learned a lot in those years, playing against bigger, full-bred bears who found him small and useless. And what he learned was to be mean.
He knew his reputation as a hockey player and, as far as he was concerned, he’d earned every bit of that rep. There were two constants when he was on the ice. The puck belonged to him and if you tried to take his puck, Bo Novikov would do whatever necessary to get it back.
The intensity of his attack would depend on how much of a threat Bo considered a player. The more the threat, the worse the damage. When he was barely six-one and playing against bears at least a foot taller, this made sense and the damage was mitigated by his lack of size. When Bo hit his growth spurt, however, he didn’t change the way he played. The only difference now was that he had the size and power to amplify the damage twenty-fold.
Even worse… Bo didn’t care.
Winning was his goal. Always had been, always would be. The money, the contracts, the women, all of it, were the outcome of winning, but it was the winning that got Bo to the rink every day. It was winning that made him do whatever he had to do to get the puck from the other guy. Funny, he wasn’t this predatory when he was hunting down dinner, or this territorial about anything else in his life.
“You need travel money?” he asked Sami, not wanting to discuss his uncle or the town he’d left behind a long time ago.
“Nah. We have some cash left from our last job.”
Sami’s last “job” most likely being her and Sander’s last con. They were foxes after all, and foxes liked to steal. Sami was an Arctic fox from a very old Eskimo line. Sander was an Alaskan fox, his people from Kodiak. Bo had been unable to shake them since he’d moved to Ursus County, the pair latching on to him his first day of grade school. No matter where his career landed him, at some point Bo would look up in the stands and see Sami and Sander watching him, or he’d come home after practice to find them lounging on his furniture and eating his food.
It was simply just something he learned to accept, and as long as they cleaned up after themselves and controlled their clutter tendencies, he enjoyed having them around.
“Well, let me know if you need any.”
“You’re such a good polar,” Sami teased. “I’m so glad we made you ours.”
“Like I had a choice.”
“You so didn’t!” she laughed.
“See this?” Mitch demanded, lifting up his mane so Blayne was forced to look at the back of his thick linebacker-size neck.
“What am I looking at?”
“I was trying to get Novikov’s autograph at a game he had in Philly, and I must have startled him because I was hiding behind a door until he passed—”
“Why were you hiding behind a—”
“—and he slammed me into the wall so hard, I was bleeding and couldn’t stand for like an hour. I still have the scar!”
“Dude, dude, that’s nothing.” Phil, Sabina’s husband, pulled the neck of his long-sleeve thermal tee down, revealing faint scratches on his chest. “I got this during the game he had against the Jersey Stompers three years ago. The crowd was throwing soda and chips and popcorn on him after he annihilated the Jersey team. And I leaned out and screamed, ‘Novikov! You suck!’ And he slashed me with those eight-inch hybrid claws he’s got!” Phil leaned back in his chair, appearing way too smug. “And I totally survived.”
Horrified, Blayne said, “What are you two bragging about? Abusing fans is not appropriate behavior.” Blayne pointed at Phil. “And if you didn’t like him, why are you so excited about him physically assaulting you?”
“Who said I didn’t like him?”
“You said you screamed at him that he sucked.”
“Because I’m his toughest fan.” Phil lifted his hands up as if what he was telling her was somehow obvious to the entire universe. “Which is way better than being just his most loyal or whatever. Right, Mitch?”
“Absolutely.”
Disgusted, Blayne said, “The man is a total asshole. He fights with his own teammates. During a game! Who does that?”
“I don’t care if he beats his entire team to death,” Mitch said, disgusting Blayne even more, which she didn’t think was possible. “As long as he keeps winning for teams I support.”
“This isn’t about Dallas again, is it?”
“He should have never joined that team. It was the ultimate betrayal.”
Blayne looked down the table at Jess, crossing her eyes, because, yes, she’d lived through this ridiculous Philly Shifter argument before.
“Hey,” Mitch leaned in. “Since you know the guy, maybe you can hook me up with a signed jersey.”
“I don’t know the guy and I’m not getting you shit.”
“It’s like you don’t love me at all.”
“I don’t.”
“Fine. Be that way. But you can still
get me a jersey.”
“Two,” Phil added. “Two signed jerseys.”
“I’m not getting either of you anything.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because Bo Novikov represents everything that’s wrong in shifter sports.” She began to count off on her fingers, “No sportsmanship. No team spirit. No mentoring rookie or young players.”
“You’re so naive!” Mitch cried out in his usual dramatic fashion. “High morals don’t make you a champion. And,” he added, “it’s because of this attitude that Gwenie’s probably going to make you second string for the championship bout against the Texas Longfangs, so she can bring in Pussies Galore from the Jamaica Me Howlers.”
Her hands dropping into her lap, Blayne asked, “What?”
Mitch, most likely realizing how quiet everyone had suddenly become, looked around the table before focusing on Blayne. “Gwen, uh, did mention that to you, didn’t she?”
Phil relaxed back in his chair. “I’m guessing not.” Blayne shoved her chair back and stood, Mitch grabbing her arm.
“Wait! I’m probably wrong. I’m sure—”
“It isn’t that she would make that decision,” Blayne snarled, yanking her arm out of Mitch’s grip, “it’s that she would talk to you about it before me.” She swiped up her backpack and spun to leave, pulling the straps of her bag over her shoulder at the same time. And, yeah, she kind of knew she hit Mitch in the process, sending him flying into the middle of the dining table. Too bad she couldn’t bring herself to care!
Ignoring the wild dogs calling her back to the table, she went to the front door and yanked it open. The grizzly on the other side jerked back.
“Oh. Hey, Blayne.” Lock MacRyrie smiled down at her. “I brought Sabina her damn chest of drawers so I don’t have to hear her asking me for it anymore.”
“Gwen with you?”
Lock’s smile faded and he motioned behind him. “Yeah. She’s—”
Blayne pushed past the bear and went down the front stairs to the still running pickup Lock used to deliver his handmade furniture. She knocked on the window and Gwen, grinning, rolled down the window.
Beast Behaving Badly Page 3