Billion Dollar Wolves: Boxset Bks 1-5

by Dee Bridgnorth

  She bit her lip and felt the familiar ache in her right knee. Then she stepped down onto the brick patio and headed directly for the trash cans. She did not look at the Adirondack chairs or the fire pit. She did not want to remember. Sometimes she was very sorry that she had ever bought this house. She was angry that the brick patio had been such a selling point to the tiny A-framed house with the ancient flooring and leaky roof. But then Landry would remember that it wasn’t the house’s fault or the realtor’s fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault that there were nasty people in the world who would happily harm another human being just because they felt that they could.

  The trashcan lid stuck when she tried to open it. Fortunately this brief moment of irritation was enough to take Landry’s mind off the past. She had to set the garbage down and yank with both hands to get the lid off. Then she shoved everything inside with as much vigor as possible. Finally the lid went back on and Landry began to slowly drag the can around the side of the house.

  As she got to the corner of her home where the gate was, Landry bit her lip. It was dark over here. The narrow space between her house and that of her neighbor wasn’t much to speak of. But with no lights on in the windows above her it was dark and seemed ominous.

  I can do this. It’s freaking garbage!

  She didn’t have to do it. There was probably no reason that she could not wait until the morning. She would have to get up a good fifteen minutes early so that she could drag the can through the alley and to the front of the house before the bus from the middle school arrived at the end of her driveway to pick her up for school.

  That was a bit of a pinch sometimes for Landry in the mornings. She didn’t like to have to get up early. The medication she took to help her sleep at night made mornings sluggish and almost impossible to navigate. Besides, she needed to get over her fears. There were floodlights in front of her house now. They would come on the second she stepped around the corner. Her back porch light was on. There was nothing but this short stretch of darkness to deal with. Surely Landry was a big girl. She could do this!

  Puffing along, she opened the side gate and pushed the trashcan through on its little cart. One wheel stuck for a moment and she had to shove the thing from side to side to get it through. The noise it made was like the shriek of metal on metal. At least it would scare away any wild animals that happened to be around.

  That almost made Landry laugh out loud. Wild animals in the middle of Dallas? Like that was ever going to happen! There were no wild animals around here. It was more stray cats and dogs and the odd rabbit that hadn’t been eaten by one of the others.

  Finally she managed to get the trashcan out of the back gate. It slammed shut behind her and she heard it click. Exhaling a deep breath she continued to push the trashcan forward into the inky darkness of the alley. Forward. Forward was her friend. Just keep moving. Right? Through the pools of night she went. There was nobody out here. Nobody at all. She was alone and it was good.

  The cans went down by the curb and then it was over. She could go back inside to the warmth and the light and at some point she was going to figure out deep inside her brain and her wounded psyche that this whole taking-the-garbage-out thing was not really scary. Someday.

  As she hummed to herself, Landry headed around her lonely little car back to her front door. Never had anything looked quite so welcome. In the door. Locked tight. And then she returned to the back door to lock that and turn off the lights.

  That was when she spotted the pair of glowing eyes out in the corner of her yard.

  “Hey!” Landry shouted almost immediately because the words were about to burst from her lips and explode out of her powered by the panic she was feeling. “Get out of here! Who are you? What do you want? Get out of my yard!”

  It went through her head that this could also be the source of the sound she had heard just the night before. What if there was someone watching her? What if someone was crouching out in the corner of her yard and she had no idea who or what it was?

  The eyes disappeared. Landry leaned forward. At this point she was almost falling out the back door. She was so scared right now that she was about to pee her pants. She knew it. She knew that it was bad. It was going to be bad. Someone was watching her. It was only a matter of time before they were going to attack her.

  Panic made her stupid brave. Landry reached back inside the house and retrieved the mop she had set aside earlier. It was dirty and smelly and also one of the old school wood handled versions. Snatching it up she held it in both hands like some kind of kung fu weapon and charged back out the door.

  A flying leap off the back stoop landed her several feet onto the brick patio and nearly had her tripping over her chairs. The end of the mop handle cracked against a wood chair and she squeaked with alarm as the reverberation flew back up her arm. But it didn’t stop her.

  Landry wrenched that mop handle away from the chair and continued her full force charge across the backyard. Nothing was going to stop her from defending her territory. Nothing! Not even the hammering beat of her heart against her ribs or the cold sweat breaking out on her forehead. Her hands felt sweaty on the mop handle too. She gripped it tighter and did not let that deter her from her goal.

  The eyes were gone. That didn’t mean that the intruder was though. There were bushes back here in the corner. Landry liked greenery. She hadn’t wanted to rip them out, but now she was thinking that no trees or bushes in the yard might be a good thing. There was a huge old shade tree in this corner. What if it was giving someone a place to hide?

  “Come out where I can see you!” Landry shouted. She poked at the bushes with her mop.

  There was a rustling sound. Something moved! The noise threw Landry off her game. She hadn’t actually expected to find anyone. Not really. But now she could not back off! Poking again, she felt the mop handle hit something soft. There was a noise. A grunt maybe. It was hard to say.

  “Who are you?” Landry snarled. She tried to sound as fierce as possible.

  The sky was heavy with rain. She could feel it in the air. It had been this way for days. The smell of damp earth was overwhelming and every time she stabbed the bush it flung up a bunch of water that coated her arms and chest. Her T-shirt was now damp with the raindrops.

  “Get. Out!”

  Two more stabs and then something absolutely enormous and most certainly not human bounded out of the bushes. It knocked Landry aside as though she were an ant. The creature sprinted across her yard toward the side gate where she had taken the trash out only a short time ago. Landry had nothing more than the impression of a huge beast with four legs, claws, and slavering teeth. There was a tail. It was a bear!

  Wait. Bears did not have tails like that. This one was long and bushy like a huge dog. A dog! It was a dog! Oh God, it was just a dog!

  Relief poured into Landry’s body and left her limp. She flopped backwards onto the wet grass and laid there. She had startled some stray dog. That was probably what had happened. And now the creature had just jumped out her side gate and was gone.

  Landry pushed herself into a sitting position. Hang on just a damn minute here! The dog had jumped over her side gate? That was the big one. It was nearly six and a half feet tall. The whole privacy fence back here was six feet and a bit. She had paid to have that gate put in when she had discovered that some arrogant, pig-headed teenagers had been climbing the old chain link fence that had been the weakest link in her backyard set up. The huge wood privacy fence had always been back here, but the gate was now utterly impenetrable.

  “It had to be open from when I took the trash out,” Landry whispered out loud. She stared at the darkened corner. The gate did not look open. “But it clicked! It. Clicked! I know it did. I heard it.”

  So the enormous gate had been locked. That meant the animal was so enormous that it had leaped out of her yard without one single moment’s hesitation. How did that even happen? How? And what kind of animal could leap a six-plus-foot privacy
fence in a single bound?

  Chapter Six

  “You should probably avoid Mother if you can.” Devon did not look up from the papers he was pushing around on his desk.

  It was a—actually, Zane didn’t know what day it was. It was just a day and he had come back to the office to gather up his stuff because there was really no reason for him to be spending his time here anymore.

  Now Devon lifted his gaze from his desktop. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Sure. As much as I ever listen to anyone,” Zane said with deliberate flippancy. “You have to realize that I’m fully aware that all of you think I’m an idiot and that makes me rather lackadaisical about my attention span when I speak with the lot of you.”

  “You claim in one sentence that I think you’re an idiot and then you use the word lackadaisical in the next,” Devon observed. “Maybe we only treat you like an idiot because we realize that you seem to prefer it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about my idiocy.” Zane really didn’t want to talk at all. “I just came to tell you that I’m cleaning out my desk.”

  “I wish that you wouldn’t.”

  “Why? So I can work here for free?”

  Devon frowned. He set his pen down. Wow. That must have been a huge deal to get him to set his pen down for more than five seconds at a time just to talk to Zane of all people. “That’s not true. You wouldn’t be working for free. You’ll get the regular salary.”

  “Which I’ll get for doing nothing because I believe that is a very weird and somewhat suspect caveat of our father’s will. Jason, Edward, and I are all required to be paid a salary by the company even if we don’t bother to come in because our presence and contributions are completely secondary to the main purpose of the company at large.”

  “You actually read the will?” Now Devon’s mouth was hanging open. As satisfying as that was, Zane didn’t really want to get into this discussion with his second oldest brother. Everything was so very complicated and it was mostly just bullshit.

  “I did. But it doesn’t matter.” Zane intentionally brushed off the whole thing. “I’m just a pawn in this game like you and like Orion—even though neither of you seem to see that. At least Jason and Edward got the gist of what’s really going on here.”

  “What? That our father was trying desperately to keep his wife from taking him for everything he had?” Devon pinched the bridge of his nose, and for a moment it looked as though he were going to rip it off. “Do you know how many times a day I think about just getting up and walking away? Who the hell cares? Who really?”

  That was a bit of a surprise. Zane leaned against the bookshelves in Devon’s office. The whole place was a study in his brother’s boring personality as far as Zane was concerned. The walls were lined with bookshelves and absolutely packed full of his brother’s collection of—well, whatever he read. Zane didn’t know and didn’t care. There were books and dark paneling and huge overstuffed leather chairs studded with brass tacks that appeared to have been covered in the biggest Texas Longhorn that any furniture manufacturer could find. There were some nice landscapes on the wall that seemed to have been painted of scenes on the ranch. One of them even featured the old house and the barn. There was a single potted banana plant that seemed to be wilting. Weird. Didn’t the cleaning crew take care of that sort of thing?

  That was when Zane noticed that the shelf he was currently leaning against was actually smearing pale brown dust on his black dress slacks. Zane lifted his gaze to his brother and smirked. “Have you been screwing a member of the cleaning crew?”

  Good God, the expression on Devon’s face went from neutral to full out alarm in one second flat! “What? What are you talking about? Why would you say that? What have you heard?”

  “Whoa there, Casanova!” Zane pushed away from the shelf and put up both hands to stave off an actual physical attack.

  Devon glowered at Zane. “We’re not all a bunch of skirt chasers like you. Zane King is the womanizer of the King family and I swear we can only afford to have one.”

  Zane resented that, but at the moment he felt like most of Devon’s attitude was about trying to deflect anymore uncomfortable questions than about the facts surrounding Zane’s reputation. “Calm down! I just said that because it appears that they have not been cleaning your office.”

  “Oh.” The subdued word was a far cry from the freak-out of a moment ago. What the hell was going on here? Then Devon cleared his throat. “I don’t know. I’ve never had a problem with them before. The company is very professional.”

  “Yeah?” Zane peered down at his pants. “Well, they’ve stopped dusting your stupid shelves and now I’m dusty.”

  “Sorry.”

  Zane stared at his brother. Devon King was the second oldest of what used to be five King brothers and was now six. Orion was the eldest of their family unit. Of their wolf pack. But Gemini King was the oldest King by another two years. He had no interest in the business, in the pack, in the family, or pretty much anything but the land.

  “Is Gemini still living out at the ranch house?” Zane asked suddenly.

  Devon looked for a moment like he was going to rip his hair out. “Yes, and Mother has been giving me endless grief over that. I don’t know why she doesn’t bug Orion. It’s his call just as much as it is mine.”

  “You really don’t know?” Sometimes Zane could not believe how obtuse Devon really was. “Oh, my ostrich-like brother who has his head constantly stuck in paperwork...”

  “What?”

  Zane snorted and gave and exaggerated sigh. He was going to have to spell it out. “Our mother has Orion under her thumb. Have you not noticed? That means she doesn’t have to put pressure on him. Orion will say whatever she wants him to. But you’re the one in the way at this point. I don’t have a say. I don’t think Edward cares anymore. And Jason?” Zane shrugged. “I actually have no clue how Jason feels about it.”

  “Actually Jason supports the idea of letting Gemini live out there. Jason now wants to build a second house for himself and Skye. He claims that it would be better to have another house at the other end of the property to help keep vandals and squatters out.”

  “He’s not wrong,” Zane murmured. His brain began spinning in that direction. Jason was another King brother who was very in touch with his inner wolf. But Jason didn’t like the suburban lifestyle like Zane did. Zane liked the city. He liked to roam the city streets in his wolf body even when it earned him some bruised ribs from a certain mop handle wielding woman named Landry Fisher.

  “I’m not kidding about avoiding Mother,” Devon said suddenly. “You’re going to find yourself without a home if you don’t watch it.”

  “How is it that I can be completely cut out of my own father’s will when it provides for me explicitly in its language?” Zane retorted. “You realize that the stupid thing stipulates that we can live in that house as long as we want because it belongs to the company and not to our mother. Right?”

  “Explain that to her,” Devon grumbled. “Try making a woman, who has been the queen of the neighborhood for nearly thirty years, understand that she doesn’t get to keep her house because her husband carefully made sure she didn’t actually own it.”

  “So that’s why Tex had to die.” Zane was disgusted with his mother, his brothers, his father, his mother’s former lover—pretty much the whole kit and caboodle. They needed to have a serious attitude adjustment. “I suppose poor Skye was just a pawn in that game.”

  “I suppose.” Devon shrugged.

  About that time Zane turned to see a woman come sailing into Devon’s office. The lady wasn’t really all that feminine to begin with, but it actually seemed to Zane that she was actively trying to look ugly. She was obviously part of the building’s regular cleaning crew. She was wearing a set of dark blue coveralls with the cleaning company logo emblazoned on the breast pocket. His sensitive preternatural nose twitched with the unpleasant scent that came with her. The woman reeked o
f orange oil and some kind of grease. She was short and stout with brown hair pulled back into a bun and she did not seem to see Zane at all. Her gaze was locked on Devon and seemed absolutely riveted to him.

  “You!” the woman snarled. “You and I need to talk!”

  Devon raised an eyebrow. He didn’t look surprised. What. The. Hell? If a cleaning lady had come sailing into Zane’s office and treated him like a peer he would have had a heart attack. Then he would have sent her packing, of course. He did not have familiar relationships with the help. It wasn’t because he somehow thought he was better than they were either. It was a simple liability thing. One did not hunt for bed partners in one’s backyard. It was just bad practice.

  Devon cleared his throat. “Ma’am, I have a guest.”

  “Ma’am?” The woman drew back in what Zane would have called the classic oh-no-you-didn’t pose. She waved her index finger in the air and then jabbed it at Devon. “Did you honestly just call me ma’am? Me? Me?”

  “Kami, please?” Devon exhaled a huge sigh. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you. I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful at all. I was just very aware that this is not a conversation we should probably have in front of my brother.”

  The emphasis on the word brother was rather interesting to Zane. Kami’s hot dark gaze slid his direction and Zane could not resist the urge to wink at her. “On the contrary, Kami. I would hate for you to have to wait to talk to my brother if you really need to. So please. Don’t mind me. You go ahead and have that chat if you’d like.”

  “See!” Kami shouted at Devon. “He doesn’t mind. He doesn’t try to be rude and tell me that later is better because later means that he can ignore me for a few more hours at least!”