A Pack of Love and Hate

by Olivia Wildenstein

  My heart clenched with horror. “You think”—I lowered my voice—“he tortures people?”

  Frank shook his head, and his mass of white hair fluttered around his face. “I think he used that room when he needed to shift. Even with Sillin in his system, in his prime, the full moon would’ve brought on a change. Perhaps not a complete shift, but parts of his body would’ve taken on a different form or texture.”

  “When I was in LA, full moons didn’t affect me.”

  “You were a thousand miles away. His pack was only a hundred miles away. He’d have felt their influence. Anyway”—he tapped the hood of the car—“I’m sure you have places to be.”

  I drew my door open, but before climbing in, I asked, “You think I’m right, Frank? About Cassandra cheating?”

  “I hope you are. But if you aren’t, I hope Liam will have the strength to defeat her, because the alternative—” He shuddered. “I’d rather not consider the alternative.”

  After Liam challenged Cassandra, I’d told him he was impulsive and insane, but wasn’t I the same? Thinking I could save him was insane. Truth was, I didn’t even wish Cassandra Morgan dead, but since only one leader could walk out of the duel with their heart intact, I’d do everything in my power for that person to be Liam.

  I turned the volume of the car stereo louder to drown out the incessant chatter in my brain. Not to mention my stomach was cramping from the stress of all the thinking I was doing.

  I pressed a hand against my navel as I stopped at a red traffic light, then scanned the street for a parking spot, but then I forgot all about parking and all about the cramping and all about Cassandra Morgan. Stopped opposite me at the intersection was a black pickup, and at its wheel was the man who still hadn’t answered my text message.

  His gaze banged into mine. The impact was so tremendous it knocked the breath from my lungs and made my heart rattle.

  Only a day had gone by since I’d seen him, and yet the hours we’d spent apart stretched further than all the years we’d been separated.

  I watched him watch me, wondering what he was thinking, wondering if he’d pull over so we could talk. I imagined myself getting out of the van and striding over to his car. I imagined myself knocking on his window—

  A loud honk had me jerking on the gas pedal. I lurched into the intersection before even checking if the light had turned green, and then I was driving past him, and he wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was staring straight ahead as though I wasn’t even there. I swerved a little, and the car behind August’s honked. I spun my steering wheel and gunned the van back into its rightful lane before turning on my blinker and sidling in next to the curb to catch my breath.

  Breaths tinted with the fragrance of Old Spice and sawdust that always clung to his skin.

  Surely I was imagining his smell—my windows were shut. Nonetheless, I inhaled long and deep, as though if I managed to pull his scent into my lungs, I could reel in the man.

  Didn’t work like that unfortunately.

  The only thing I could potentially reel in was the tether, but the last and only time I’d tried, it had tickled August’s abdomen. When he’d done it to me, though, he’d moved my entire body.

  Some things simply weren’t fair.

  Matt said August would understand, but Matt was wrong.

  I clutched my phone and typed: Turn back. Let me explain.

  My thumb hovered over the send icon. Before I could chicken out, I stamped the screen. Phone rattling in my hands, I waited for August to answer, but he sent no words back. How was I supposed to make him understand if he wouldn’t give me the time of day? I slapped my steering wheel so hard I blasted the horn.

  “Goddammit, August, I didn’t do it to spite you!”

  At least Liam has nothing to worry about, I thought morosely.

  I gripped my head between both hands until my skull stopped throbbing and my eyesight cleared. My track record with boys was so pitiful—four days with Liam, one night with August. Was there something wrong with me? Before pulling back into the light morning traffic, I picked up my phone and texted my question to Sarah on the off-chance she’d gotten out of bed before noon.

  By the time I found a parking spot, my hands were still shaking. I thought of Mom’s silver-lining theory, that if you looked long enough at one, it would outshine everything else. The silver lining of today: solicitors would stop hounding me to inform me of rising interest fees.

  As I entered the bank, I took the check out of my wallet and smoothed the crinkles to make sure the ink hadn’t faded overnight, but all three zeroes were still there. I got in line behind an old woman hunched over a walker, the knobs of her curved spine pressing against her flowered blouse. She glanced over her sunken shoulder at me and smiled. I smiled but then wondered if she’d meant to smile at someone else.

  “You’re the girl from the inn, aren’t you?”

  The trembling subsided then, replaced by surprise that made me go rigid. And mute . . .

  “You served me a lovely brunch a couple weeks ago. I called to make a reservation, but they told me the inn was closing indefinitely. Is that right?”

  “It changed”—I cleared my voice—“ownership.”

  “What a shame. What a shame. And just when the food was getting good. You wouldn’t happen to know what happened to the chef?”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “She’s still in Boulder.”

  “Oh. How wonderful. My son and his wife run a restaurant in town. You might’ve heard about it? The Silver Bowl?”

  “I don’t go out much.”

  “Next,” a bank teller called.

  The hunched woman paid her no mind. “Anyway, she used to do the cooking, but she came down with something called algeria or agora, and it made her very fatigued. So they’re on the market for a new chef. You wouldn’t happen to know if the one from the inn would be interested?”

  “I could ask her.”

  “Next!” the teller called out louder.

  “Great. Let me get you my phone number.” As she dug through her bag, its contents spilled onto the floor.

  I gathered everything up for her, then hooked it on the walker.

  “Ladies, I don’t have all day,” the teller said, exasperated.

  “You know what, why don’t I just tell her to call the restaurant?” I asked.

  The old woman nodded, and her wispy gray hair frolicked around her face. “Tell her to say Charlotte sent her.”

  The teller cleared her throat.

  “The young are always in such a hurry,” Charlotte huffed as she hobbled forward, her walker scraping the floor.

  For a second, I thought she was talking about me because the teller was well past her prime, but Charlotte didn’t know me, so she couldn’t know at what speed I lived my life.

  But it was true. I was in a hurry.

  In a hurry to get to the bottom of Cassandra Morgan’s feat.

  In a hurry for the duel to be over.

  In a hurry to get back in August’s good graces.

  A moment later, another teller called out, “Next.”

  I smoothed out the check again before handing it over, along with my debit card and a picture ID.

  The employee squinted at my ID, then at my card, then flipped the check over. “Sign at the back, please.” She tapped a long acrylic nail against the check.

  I signed it nervously, my name looping off the faint line. This felt too good to be true. I expected the check to bounce and security guards to escort me away for questioning. I moistened my lips with the tip of my tongue and waited as the teller clicked and clicked her computer keypad with those long nails of hers.

  Finally, she printed out a sheet of paper and handed it over. “Your balance.”

  I snatched it, and my heart stuttered to a stop when I saw the new number. “Um. I think there’s a mistake.”

  “A mistake?”

  “Are you sure this is my account?”

  “Are you Ness Marianne Clark?”r />
  “Yes.”

  She leveled her gaze on her monitor, clicked on her keyboard again. “Then there’s no mistake.”

  My heart hurtled around my ribcage now.

  “Were you expecting a higher balance?” she asked when I still hadn’t moved. As I read the number over—and over—she added, “We have some great investment opportunities. I’d be more than happy to set up an appointment.”

  I licked my lips again. Was there any other way of depositing money into someone’s account? “Can you give me a printout of the latest activity? Wire transfers or checks or . . .”

  “Sure thing.”

  Her printer burst to life and spat out another sheet of paper, which I all but ripped from her fingers this time. When I saw the name on the check that had been deposited into my account barely an hour ago, my hands started shaking anew. Or maybe they’d never stopped shaking.

  “Thank you,” I whispered hoarsely.

  “Everything all right, honey?” Charlotte asked from her teller’s window.

  I nodded even though nothing was really all right. It was all wrong. “I’ll . . . I’ll—Um. I’ll tell Evelyn to call.” I waved, then slipped my phone out of my bag and, fingers stumbling over the slick screen, I dialed August.

  It went to voicemail.

  Ugh!

  ME: I just stopped by the bank. What did you do?

  I tried calling him again. Again, he didn’t pick up.

  ME: If you don’t answer me, I’m going to hunt you down.

  A dropped pin on a map appeared in my messages.

  5

  The address August sent me took me to the construction site Matt had mentioned during our run.

  I shut the car door so hard it lifted the hem of my white eyelet dress. So many emotions whirred inside me as I stomped toward the site that I didn’t feel the ground beneath my feet or the sun in my hair. I felt like a livewire, jumpy and ready to electrocute anyone who came in between me and my target: August Watt.

  I walked around the work site until I located him.

  The man who’d looked at a traffic light instead of at me and yet who’d deposited an ungodly amount of money into my bank account.

  The man who hadn’t taken any of my calls and yet had sent me his location.

  The man who was wearing a hard hat even though he’d crashed in a helicopter and survived.

  The man who made my heart sprint and my navel burn and yet who was no longer mine to hold.

  “August Watt!” I yelled.

  I must’ve called out his name really loudly because every single worker swiveled around.

  August looked up from a blueprint stretched over a work table. Unhurriedly, he exchanged a few words with one of his men before strolling toward me, hands in the pockets of a pair of faded jeans.

  His body ate up the sun and the land and the sky and all of the ambient noise.

  Once he stood in front of me, I craned my neck.

  “Yes?” His husky voice brushed over the tip of my nose.

  I swallowed because my mind had gone blank, and I couldn’t remember why I’d come. And why I was mad. Was I even mad?

  Oh, yes. I was livid.

  I narrowed my eyes. “What the hell’s gotten into you?”

  “Funny.” He crossed his arms, making all of his muscles pop. “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “I didn’t deposit”—I dropped my voice to a hiss—“five hundred thousand dollars into your account.”

  “No, you put your life on the line for your ex. Your fucking ex who then proceeded to tell me to fuck off. So let me turn that question on you; what the hell’s gotten into you?” His jaw clenched so hard it sapped all the curves from his face. Even his full lips looked etched in steel instead of skin.

  “I hope you didn’t give me all your money, because you’re going to owe your mom a whole bunch for all the cursing.”

  His mouth didn’t even twitch, which alerted me to the fact that he was well and truly mad.

  I sighed. “Why?”

  “Why did I give you that money? Because it was owed to you.”

  “Owed to me? What are you talking about?”

  “When we bought your family’s business, we got it at a bargain price. Dad never felt right for paying your mother such a pittance.”

  My jaw slackened but then snapped shut. “Mom never thought you guys underpaid, August.”

  “But the fact is we did.”

  “No you didn’t. You paid the amount it was worth at the time.”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “Because it’s half a million dollars,” I whisper-shouted. “You can’t just go around gifting that much money to people.”

  “You’re not people,” he said, a tad more softly.

  “What am I?”

  “I was hoping you could help me define that.”

  Even though I stood in his shadow, heat still pricked my skin. I suspected it had little to do with the sun and everything to do with the looming male.

  “Why did Liam tell me to fuck off, Ness? What exactly happened back at the inn? What did you promise him?”

  I pushed my hair off my face. “I promised him that I would stop . . . whatever it is we’d started . . . to prep him for his duel.”

  His dark eyebrows dipped. “Why would you have to stop seeing me to prep him for his duel?”

  I averted my gaze, studied a dusty clump of grass next to August’s heavy-duty work boots. “He wants a hundred percent of my attention.”

  August snorted. After a stretch of silence, he muttered, “You forgot to flick me.”

  I returned my gaze to his. Every time he’d grunted in the past, I’d flicked him to show him how often he resorted to making that caveman noise instead of using words. “If I touch you, your scent”—spice, wood, earth, heat, home—“it’ll rub off on me, and he’ll know I saw you.”

  A muscle flexed in his forearm. “So what?”

  “So he’ll fight Cassandra without my input.” I rolled the hem of my dress between my fingers.

  “I’m not sure whether to be offended or fucking jealous that he wants you back so badly he’d lure you away with blackmail.” His warm breath fanned against my forehead. “Look at me, Dimples.”

  I raised my gaze to his, but not because he’d asked. Because he’d called me that nickname that made me feel knee-high to a ladybug. “August, you know I can’t stand that nickname.”

  “And I can’t stand that my girlfriend is breaking up with me over her ex’s bruised ego. So I’ll call you what I want to from now on, the same way you did what you wanted yesterday.”

  I sucked in a breath that burst right back out of my mouth. “August, I didn’t want this. His confidence was going to get him killed!”

  His green gaze flared so brightly it became almost phosphorescent. And then my stomach acted up, performed a slow roll that had me pressing my palm against it. The warm wind blew August’s intoxicating scent into me. Instead of easing the tension, it increased it, made my skin desire the long fingers that gripped his bent elbows to brush over my elbows, my arms, my wrists.

  This was so not the right time to concoct racy scenarios.

  I shifted from one foot to the other, hoping he couldn’t guess all that was going through my mind.

  “I need to know something.” His voice was so rough it spurred my smutty contemplations. “Am I going to lose you?”

  “Lose me?” I snapped out of my trance.

  “To him? Am I going to lose you to him?” His words whispered over my nose. “You’re worth fighting for, but I need to know if it’s a fight I have a chance of winning.”

  My heart climbed into my throat.

  “I’ll step back, Dimples”—the nickname didn’t sound very childish suddenly—“even if it goes against everything I want, I’ll step back, but you have to ask me. Do you want me to step back?”

  “No,” I blurted.

  His stance softened, which wasn’t to say he slumped or unwound his
arms. He was just more timber than steel. “But I can’t step forward, can I?”

  I gulped and shook my head.

  He bobbed his head as though he was filing the rules away. After a beat, he said, “I don’t share what’s mine.”

  Those words were like lighter fluid poured right into my core, igniting something fierce and deep. “Good, because I don’t share either.”

  A smile ghosted over his lips, bumped straight into my heart, made it beat faster.

  “I’ve got some terms of my own.”

  “Oh?” I swallowed, trying to moisten my throat that felt as dry as plaster. “I’m listening.”

  “I won’t touch you, but there’s no way I’m not seeing you every day, and not from the nosebleed section.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want to know what you’re up to, and where, and not through the mating link. This isn’t me being a stalker, but there are Creeks in Boulder, and I trust those bastards even less than I trust Liam, which is saying a fucking lot.”

  I’d never heard August curse so much. Then again, he was no longer the soft boy I’d had a crush on but a man weathered by human wars and pack skirmishes.

  “And before you make a comment about my unhinged swearing, know that I’ll drop a hundred dollar bill in Mom’s curse jar, and you’re going to witness me doing it, because I’ll deposit it tomorrow night during dinner at their place, dinner to which you are coming. And to which you can bring Jeb.”

  I jutted my hip to one side and planted my hand on it. “What if I don’t want to go to dinner at your parents’ house tomorrow night?” I did, but I didn’t appreciate the form of his invitation.

  His gaze turned challenging. “You don’t have to come, but that’ll break Mom’s heart.”

  My hand skidded off my hip. “That’s a low-blow. How am I supposed to not come now?”

  His smile grew a little wider and a little more roguish too. He was enjoying riling me up.

  “You know, if you’d just asked me, I would’ve said yes.”

  “Just wanted to see your face light up, Dimples. Just wanted to see your eyes turn that spectacular shade of blue they get when you’re emotional. Even though I’d much rather make them bluer using . . . other methods.”