by R. J. Blain
Sebastian sighed. “Don’t bother arguing with him, babe. He’s right.”
“I still don’t know how the punk figured out how to bring her into the pack,” Pauline complained.
“You pushed his buttons, and he figured the only way to fix his marriage was to solve the core problem. I’ve told you once, and I’ve told you again; foxes are as social as wolves, and there was zero chance of her accepting anything other than equality. Maybe you enjoy being blindsided, but I figured he’d either figure out how to bring her into our pack, or he’d start requesting subjugation from other packs until he found one that’d take them both. There are packs out west with humans in them. Why not a fox?”
I flattened my ears. To show my displeasure at being treated like an outsider, I bit down on the doe’s leg bone as hard as I could to enjoy the way it crunched between my teeth.
“Well, we know she’s compatible with packs now. You’ll have to teach her the ropes, Jake,” Jake’s mother replied, her expression disapproving. “You’re supposed to be granted permission before doing such a thing, and you’re supposed to have the Third, Second, or Alphas initiate the pack bonds.”
Jake bared his fangs and voiced another low growl.
“Jake,” his mother warned.
“Send him to his room for a week with his wife. Then you get a son a little less pissy at you and a daughter-in-law who might be able to tolerate being in the same room with you,” Jake’s father suggested.
“Fine. Go to your room and take your fox with you.”
I would never understand the Thomas family.
Sixteen
Hasn’t the pack suffered enough?
The doe did me in, and I opted to take an extended nap rather than deal with my unwanted in-laws, leaving Jake to handle the details. At one point, someone offered me a fast food burger, which woke me up long enough for me to gulp it down before I returned to sleep. Jake woke me up to force me to shift so we could get into the house without anyone being wiser to our possession of fur coats.
Somehow, we’d spent all night hunting and most of the day, and I could only assume the fast food had been our lunch.
To my annoyance, the in-laws tailed us into the house. Muttering curses, I headed for the stairs only to have Jake snag me around the waist and pull me to him. In typical Jake fashion, he ignored my struggles to escape his hold, and I cursed his iron-strong muscles.
“I’m not sorry,” Jake announced.
“We’re aware,” his mother replied. “Still, we will have to discipline you over this, or the pack will suffer as a whole.”
“Hasn’t the pack suffered enough?”
I grabbed Jake’s arm with both hands and fought to pry free, unable to move him even an inch. Grunting, I went for my next tactic, dropping my entire weight against him so I could slide out from under his hold. Jake pinned me against him without taking his eyes off his parents.
Asshole.
“You disobeyed a direct order.”
“And I’ll do it again if you try to separate me from Karma. If you want to discipline me, then remove us from the pack, and we’ll go rogue until we find a pack willing to take both of us. The rest of the pack seems quite pleased about our newest member, so if you’re out to make the pack suffer as a whole, that is how you go about it.”
Months ago, I would have paid a great deal to watch the cage match between son and parents, but I recognized I was in the direct line of fire. “Could you wait until I’m not here to do this? If you three start fighting, the entire first floor of the house will be destroyed, and I don’t want to be one of the objects in this house to be trashed.”
“They might live to regret it if they touch you,” Jake growled.
“The house might not survive if you three start.”
“The house can be replaced. You can’t be.”
I debated biting him to win my freedom from his hold. Before I could reply, Mason and a handful of other Fenerec strolled in through the door, and they all gave my in-laws a dose of the silent treatment.
“You wanted better pack cohesion, babe,” Jake’s father commented, and he chuckled. “You just got it in a way you didn’t want. Sometimes, being Alpha means surrendering to the will of the pack, and I think they’ve done a fairly good job of making their position known. So, our pack has a fox in it. We may as well start integrating a few humans, too, to see how it settles out some of our more sensitive members. Had we accepted their wishes rather than our sense of smell, a lot would be different right now.”
Pauline scowled.
“You can’t put a fox in wolf culture and expect her to accept the rules of our culture when the price is her mental health and happiness. It’s our fault we were blind to the damage our culture did to her. It’s the fault of our culture things came to this. The west coast packs thrive with humans among them—and with witches among them, too. Stop being so hung up on tradition for the sake of tradition, especially when those traditions are toxic to our own family, although I think we’ll find she won’t consider us to be a part of her family unit—and Jake is going to be challenged convincing her he’s part of her family unit. And that, alone, should be enough of a reason for you to change your tune. I tried to tell you. I tried to tell you at the beginning of this. I had hoped when the consequences had begun, you would have changed your stance to mitigate them, but you’re as stubborn as you can be stupid at times.”
Ouch. I considered Jake’s father with a frown, maintaining a token struggle to escape Jake’s grip.
“Why are you looking at me like that, little vixen? Is it that unbelievable I might actually be so vocal about something like this?”
“Yes,” I replied, and I hoped he heard the skepticism in my voice.
“Deserved,” he replied. “Trust can’t be earned just from backpedaling a little and permitting change, babe. She may never respect either one of us again, and that would be deserved. And she definitely can’t begin learning to respect Jake again as long as we’re hovering and making even more of a mess. As such, I’ve taken some steps.”
“Steps?” Pauline asked, and she crossed her arms over her chest.
“Steps. I am evicting these two troublemakers for a while, putting them into the care of someone qualified, and refusing to permit them back into our territory until I receive a satisfactory report regarding their progress. I have recruited several capable people for this purpose. One of them hates you almost as much as our daughter-in-law does. If that doesn’t tip you off on what’s going on, I’ll wait for you to figure it out.”
“You called her, didn’t you?”
Her? I twisted in Jake’s hold and stared up at him.
“Don’t look at me, Karma. I have no idea what he’s talking about, either.”
“Amelia,” Jake’s father announced. “She’ll be an excellent grounding influence for your mate, Jake, and I’ve told her she can tenderize you as often as she wants if she feels you’re stepping out of line. Amelia comes with a second individual, one who can provide counseling. I went over your head on this, Pauline, because your psychologist of choice only managed to barely salvage the situation, where my choice might actually do something positive about it.”
Jake’s father had called Amelia? I frowned. On one hand, I liked her a lot—and she was the only one who’d believed, without a doubt, Jake was supposed to be mine.
No, that wasn’t right, either. Mellisa believed it, too.
“You called her, too?” Pauline demanded, her tone exasperated.
“Of course I called her. Who else would I call? This isn’t about us or our wishes. She understands Karma better than the rest of us, and Karma doesn’t need what we want for her. She needs what’s best for her, and Mellisa has a knack for that sort of thing. We don’t, as is obvious from our current situation.”
The world had taken a sharp left turn on me, and I wasn’t sure what to think about the drastic changes in Jake’s father. “Has your father been kidnapped and replaced with a doppelg
änger, Jake?”
“I suspect so.”
“Jake,” his mother warned.
“To them, they have good reason to believe such a thing. Don’t rebuke them for their skepticism. We’ve earned it. So, this can work one of two ways, Pauline. You can go along with my idea, clean up your attitude, and work towards earning Karma’s trust again, or you can wage a war with our son over his woman—and we will not be the winners of that war. He tried to ride both horses once, and he almost lost her as a consequence—and there’s no guarantees he won’t lose her due to our foolish pride. He knows that. You know it. I know it. I recommend you take the route of attitude adjustment, book time with a psychologist of my choice, and figure out where you’ve gone wrong and how you can go about fixing what you’ve broken.”
“And what about you?”
“I’ll pay the consequences of my actions as she sees fit. My attitude has already been adjusted, and I’m taking the appropriate steps to find a solution to this problem. I’m sure Karma will come up with some heinous way to make me pay for my crimes. I might start with providing her with an unlimited supply of keys she can practice kicking out of my hands, unloaded and broken guns she can pistol whip me with, and generally allow her to use me as a combat dummy to get back into physical shape. In her current condition, it could be half a year before she’s ready to even apply to rejoin the FBI in an active duty role as a special agent.” Sebastian’s attention focused on me. “I have made arrangements for some interior work that’s blended with minimal field work for you, Karma. Jake will maintain his active status as a special agent, and he will be armed at all times. You’ll have to deal without a firearm unless you happen to venture into an open carry state or can be bothered with any licensing you need. This interior work may come with a private investigator’s license to give you some freedom while you’re checking into things.”
I didn’t want to be a private investigator. Private investigators annoyed me on a good day; they insisted on poking their noses into organized investigations, and they sometimes neglected to maintain evidence in a way that made it viable for court. I’d seen too many cases where an idiot private investigator had polluted a crime scene, rendering potential good evidence inadmissible to court because of their lack of care. “A what license?”
Jake snickered. “She likely did a mental review of every case we had screwed up on us thanks to a private investigator’s lack of proper training and neglect, reached ten, and had her frayed temper snap. I should let her go so she can beat you. It’ll be good for her.”
Mason chuckled, dared to enter my personal space, and ruffled my hair. “We all get pissy over the private investigators, even us interior mules. You’ll be the first private investigator we actively like and would willingly work with. It’s an honored position. You even get your own FBI slave to follow you around and serve as grunt labor.”
I snapped my teeth at his hand, which did nothing to discourage him. “Being an unarmed private investigator sounds like my personal hell.”
“You’ll be all right. View it as a warmup for coming back to active duty. It’ll give you something useful to do, give you time to get back on your feet, and will help augment our efforts. It was my idea. You’re the type.”
“The type?”
“The needing to be doing something useful and physical type.”
“It’s true.” Jake chuckled, and he kissed the top of my head. “It’s probably just to sniff out leads the FBI deemed not strong enough to justify sending a pair for. You know how you hate when they can’t send people to check leads that could become important—and then they forget to ask local law enforcement to look.”
“Inefficiency,” I spat.
As I hadn’t pushed him away, Jake pulled me close, wrapped both of his arms around me, and tested his luck with a kiss to my cheek. “Yes, yes. I know. You can be a good little investigator, properly record and gather evidence, and work out what’s important and what isn’t. If you’re not happy with the work, then we’ll find something you are happy with. It’s worth a try. I’ll be armed and on duty, so that can work, and if you wanted to use your private investigator license to help the defense, well, I certainly can’t stop you.”
Hmm. I considered that, and as the negotiations could benefit me, I tolerated his advances. “Sometimes, I wish we’d been able to go to bat more often for the defense,” I confessed. “Especially those shit cases where we were pretty certain the accused was innocent, but we hadn’t found sufficient evidence to prove it because we’d closed our end of the case up to management’s satisfaction.” It happened more often than I liked, as the FBI preferred to get cases wrapped to free agents for the latest critical situation. The idea of sending the wrong person to prison hadn’t sat well with me then and wouldn’t in the future.
“I know, I know.” Jake dragged me towards the front door. “Where should we meet Amelia and Mellisa?”
“They’ll arrive tomorrow morning,” Jake’s father answered.
“Then we’re going to go to Baltimore to the nicest hotel I can find on short notice, where we will be undisturbed by anyone in the pack, and you can tell Mellisa or Amelia to call me. I am unwilling to negotiate on this. I have plans for coddling my wife, and none of those plans involve you two bothering us.”
“Try to contact us by text once a day.”
“Once a week, and that’s only if I’m feeling generous and believe there has been sufficient attitude adjustments regarding my wife.” Jake continued to drag me, and his path took me close enough to my purse I snagged it with my foot on the way by, spitting curses as I struggled to keep my balance on one foot. “You will be prepared to grovel to my wife when we are finished with this task, whatever the hell it is.”
“I’ll email you with the details and call you about some of the more complicated elements. Drive safely.”
Jake slowed long enough for me to lift my purse by my foot, grab hold of it, and remove the tripping hazard. He then said, “You get to return Dean’s car. It’s in the garage. Mason, you’re driving.”
“Of course I am. I should have guessed. Your vehicle is at the pack house. Why am I being dragged into this?”
I found it interesting Mason had opted against calling it his parents’ place. Sometime later, I would ask him about why he thought, as the general pack peacekeeper, he wouldn’t be dragged into the feud between the Alphas and their son. “Get an electric knife sharpener and help out in the kitchen while we’re gone, Mason.”
The Fenerec chuckled. “I’ll think about it. Head to my SUV, and I’ll grab some clothes for you, as I really don’t think you’ll want to come back tomorrow for anything.”
That earned twin growls from the Alphas, which the submissive ignored.
Jake dragged me to Mason’s SUV, shoved me inside, and hovered until I put my seatbelt on and made a show of cooperating with his wishes.
Wolves. Were there more annoying creatures?
Using some form of black magic, Jake managed to get a room at the Ivy Hotel, which had started its life as a manor before being converted to a luxury hotel with a spa. I frowned and wondered if he’d gotten the reservation earlier, making plans with the rest of his pack while we’d dodged his parents before the hunt.
The Ivy Hotel didn’t just have unexpected vacancies on short notice. It could take weeks or months to get a room at the place, especially when there was anything going on in Baltimore, as it had an excellent location to go with its excessive luxury.
I decided I wouldn’t ruin the moment, although I questioned everything about my situation.
Mason dropped us off, and I spluttered, wondering what the hell we were doing at such a nice hotel. “Jake?”
He slung the bags Mason had packed for us over his shoulder, took hold of my arm, and marched me into the lobby. “I’m making the assholes pay for it if they ever want to speak with me again. They can pay me back later. I’ve notified them they will be paying for it by text. As I’m wise, I notified my
father, who readily agreed to my terms. My father, at least, understands when I’m not joking around. My mother is still learning we have new rules in our family. She’s also mad I’m the one making the rules.”
“We’re going to be ordering room service, aren’t we?”
“I have already requested strawberries and champagne, some chocolates, and everything a gentleman might need to pamper his wife. I bought a ridiculous number of products from their spa to help me pamper you, and you have a date at the spa tomorrow afternoon for professional attention. While you are being professionally attended to, I’m getting a haircut and picking something up. We’re not really dressed all that elegantly right now, but it’s not like we’re going to be loitering in their lobby all night long. Don’t ask how much the room cost, as you get upset over things like that. It’s not a waste of money.”
Well, as there was no escaping, I may as well see what he had in mind. “But did you bring your handcuffs?”
“I’ve learned I should always have my handcuffs readily available if I want any guarantees I’m not tenderized by the time you’re done with me. I have several sets of handcuffs with me, and one of them is fuzzy so they won’t hurt your wrists.” Jake smirked and headed for the front desk, keeping a hold on me so I wouldn’t wander off. “I have a reservation under Thomas for two,” he told the woman behind the desk.
“Good evening, Mr. Thomas. Your room is ready, and your requests are waiting for you in your room.” She had us checked in within a minute and gave us a pair of keys rather than the cards most hotels used. With a smile, she gave us directions to our room and wished us a good evening.
Jake transferred his hold from my arm to my hand and pulled me in the direction of our room, which spanned the second and the third floor near the spa, separated from the rest of the suites in a quaint little tower. The entire place oozed opulence, and while I gaped at everything, he guided me straight to our room, unlocked the door, and pushed me inside. “We can explore tomorrow. We’ll be here for three nights. Amelia and Mellisa will just have to find accommodations somewhere nearby. For the next three days, you’re going to rest, and I’m going to cater to your every need.”