“Never!” Kami wrinkled her nose. “You guys have fun with that if you want, but we don’t want kids.”
“And I don’t want to perpetuate this werewolf curse on any kids,” Devon added for the benefit of his brothers. “I think that you guys will probably have enough offspring to carry on the King family traditions. There’s no need for me to add to the over crowdedness.”
Zane pulled a face. “I suppose I can see your point. Maybe we should all decide not to have kiddos.”
Landry elbowed him in the gut. “Don’t you dare! I want babies! I love babies!”
Of course Jason was laughing at his brother. “I can see that you’ve got this whole thing totally under control.”
Skye poked at Jason. “Don’t you even start! You know I’ve been thinking about kids too.”
“I have too!” Jason reminded her. Then he gestured to Devon. “But I understand why you wouldn’t.”
“What about Orion?” Kami could not help but bring this up after seeing the oldest King brother with the strange woman. “It’s apparent he’s got a female admirer.”
“What?” Devon was the one to speak, but all of them looked confused. How odd.
Kami gestured in the direction that she’d just come from. “I saw Orion with a young woman who seemed to be really worried about him and very, very open about it.”
Two frown lines appeared between Zane’s eyebrows. “Describe her.”
“Exotic looking, but not necessarily Hispanic, with brown hair and big brown eyes. She’s pretty. Taller I think. At least lots taller than me, but that’s not really saying much.”
“Sounds like Eleni Ariosa,” Devon mused. “How interesting. We’ll have to ask Orion about it.”
Skye was shaking her head. “I can’t believe that Tisha would invite or allow Eleni inside the house after all that drama before!”
Kami shrugged. “I’m here. Right? Maybe this is just a party so big that she doesn’t care who comes.”
Devon put his arm around Kami. “Well, there is no amount of bullying that will get me to come to one of these house parties if you’re not with me.”
Kami grinned up at him. “Maybe next time you can work back in the kitchen with me.”
“The food would be sure to be poisoned,” Skye quipped.
Kami didn’t need to think about that or anything else. She was still absolutely floored by the fact that she was managing to straddle two worlds. She was a hard-working woman who had found a man to respect and adore her. But he also realized that she was always going to be hard working and that meant the world to her.
“I love you.” Kami stood on tiptoe to whisper in Devon’s ear.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. She could feel his love plain and simple and she was so very grateful to have it. For good.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Orion sat at his desk and stared unseeingly out the bank of windows overlooking the Dallas skyline. He had no idea how long he had been sitting there. Maybe it didn’t matter. It didn’t feel as though it did. The buildings across the street had been decked out for the holidays and when night came the sky would be lit with red and green lights, but Orion didn’t feel as though it were Christmas. Not really.
“Why are you still here?”
There was no need to turn around and face his mother. Tisha didn’t particularly need an answer to her obviously rhetorical question anyway. What she really wanted to know was why wasn’t he on his way to pick up Tansy Dunlop for tonight’s soiree at the upscale downtown steakhouse.
Orion wondered what would happen if he told her that he didn’t want to go. What would she say if he told her that he had no desire to go and drink champagne and pretend to be interested in a woman nearly ten years younger than he was? He generally couldn’t stand being around Tansy anyway. The idea of intentionally seeking her company for the evening was abhorrent.
“Orion?” Tisha apparently gave up expecting an answer and stomped the rest of the way into his office. “Answer me! Why are you still here? You are supposed to be picking up Tansy Dunlop in less than an hour. You cannot expect to pick her up for the party still wearing the suit you’ve been in all day long!”
“Why not?” The words slipped out because he really didn’t care and it was difficult to pretend that it did. “It’s not as if it matters what I do this evening anyway. You’ve decided, right? I mean, you’ve decided that since Devon is now off the market I’m your final option to marry your way into the Dunlop family.”
“Feeling sassy tonight, aren’t you?” Tisha put her hands on her hips and glared at him. She was already dressed in her party clothes. The tight red and silver dress barely left enough to the imagination in Orion’s opinion. “You’d better watch it. That’s all I can say. If you keep pushing me like this, I will end you. Do you understand me? End. You.”
“What does that mean?” Orion had heard her make threats like this before. It wasn’t the first time by a long shot. But what he never quite understood was the threat itself. “Can you explain to me what ending me looks like? Because I’ll admit that I’m getting rather bored of that random threat. It’s almost as though you don’t know what the result would be for defying you so you’re just kind of issuing a generic threat.” He cocked his head. The expression on her face was odd. It was like she was bursting to tell a secret. “Is this about the Dunlops? Is this about Tansy’s father running the company? Because I think we all know that you don’t really want the Dunlops running King Security Services. Yet you keep alluding to the fact that you’re threatening to do just that.”
“Am I?” Her smirk was enough to make Orion grind his teeth with agitation. “Because I feel like that’s not the case at all.”
He turned back toward the window. It was after three o’clock. It was going to be dark soon. Orion liked the short days and long nights. He liked winter and the colder weather. But it never lasted. Not really. Soon enough it would change. Everything changed.
“I saw you at my party the other night speaking with Eleni Ariosa.” Tisha’s change in topic was enough to freeze Orion’s blood.
He refused to look at his mother. It wouldn’t do any good. She was fishing for information anyway. Just fishing. So he avoided her trap the best he could. “I was surprised to see her there. She said you invited her. I figured she was crashing. But no. She said she was as surprised to get your invitation as I was that you sent one. So yes, I said hello. I’ve known her since grade school. What? Am I supposed to ignore her just because you and her mother are arch enemies now? That would be extremely juvenile, don’t you think?”
“I suppose.” There was a hint of something truly ugly in his mother’s tone. “As long as you’re not getting too chummy with the girl. She’s trouble, you know.”
“Yeah, but you weren’t worried about that when you wanted us to marry her in order to join the Kings and the Ariosas. Of course, that was before you realized that the Ariosas were broke.” Oh yes. His mother didn’t like that insinuation one bit. She was actually looking rather cross now.
“I don’t care about that bitch or her daughters,” Tisha growled. Then she pointed right at Orion. He could see her blood red nail from the corner of his eye. It was like a knife about to stab him through the back. How apropos. “You had better get your ass changed and get over to pick up Tansy Dunlop before I cut you off without a penny.”
“Mother, that threat loses its sting when we’re the ones with the money and all of Dallas knows you’re just mooching.”
But Tisha didn’t respond. How interesting. She just twirled on her stiletto heel and stalked out of his office as though she had been the one to win the argument anyway. How typical. The woman could pretend all she wanted, but Orion knew the truth. Without Devon and Orion running King Security Solutions, Inc, she had no money, no place to live, and no social standing in the Dallas social circles she valued so much.
Of course, that begged more than a few questions. Like how could Tisha Olivares-King just pretend so well? Orion
wasn’t afraid of her. No matter what his brothers thought. He wasn’t afraid of their mother. He wasn’t her lapdog. He just hadn’t seen the right moment yet to make that apparent. There were still too many questions.
He turned away from the windows and looked at his desk. There was a framed photograph of himself and his four brothers with their father sitting on that desktop. Orion picked it up. He held it for a moment and tried to remember that day. It was pretty vivid. He had only been about fifteen at the time. His brothers had stair-stepped down to Jason who was only ten. The five of them and their father had been at the ranch that weekend. They had run as a wolf pack all over the terrain, and it was the first time that Jason had been allowed to run with them.
Orion recalled the feeling of family that he had experienced that day. It had been a bond that he had felt would never die. And yet their father was lying in a grave and there was no doubt in Orion’s mind that someone they knew—someone their father knew—had put him there. It wasn’t an accident. Mac King would not have died from an accidental gunshot wound. Just because they could not blow the whistle adequately on the general public for the nonsense cause of death issued by the coroner. That did not make it a reasonable explanation for what had really happened.
There was movement at the door of his office. Orion did not look up from the photograph. He assumed that his mother had come back to the office to whine and rant a little more. Perhaps she had decided he needed just a little more prodding to do his duty and go pick up Tansy.
“I’m not interested in what you have to say about my plans for this evening, Mother,” Orion said irritably.
There was a very male, very un-Tisha-like snort. “That’s good because I don’t care about your evening plans.”
Orion’s head jerked up. He smelled Gemini immediately and wondered how he hadn’t been alert enough to realize that the man had gotten off the elevator. Surely Orion should have smelled him from that moment. Surely he was in touch enough with his shifter senses to manage that one thing?
“What do you want?” Orion snapped. “You don’t belong here. I don’t care if Devon gave you proxy privileges for the duration of that one meeting. It does not entitle you to a free pass to come up to the corporate floor and bug us whenever you want!”
“Keep your panties on,” Gemini growled. “What is your problem? Seriously. I came up here because I wanted to share a few concerns that I have about the company. It has nothing to do with you or this free pass to bug you or anything else.”
“Our company is none of your concern.” Orion hated the thought that not only had his father loved this older illegitimate son, but that he had loved Gemini’s mother as well.
It wasn’t fair. Orion knew he was being irrational and yet he could not stop himself. There was a horrible immature belief that had taken root in Orion’s heart that left him believing wholeheartedly that his father would have loved his mother if it had not been for Gemini and his mother.
“I don’t want your stupid company, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Gemini snorted and leaned insolently against the doorframe. He folded his arms across his chest and looked extremely bored. “I just wanted to let you know that I truly believe your mother is angling to sell this place. You should keep an eye on her. That’s all. I told your brothers the same thing. I just wanted to talk to you face to face because I think you already know this is true. I think you can see it. I think you can see right through her. I just think you’re so freaking blinded by everything else that you refuse to acknowledge what’s right in front of your face.”
“The only thing that needs acknowledging is the fact that your mother was a whore,” Orion growled. “She cheated with my father on my mother. That’s why Tisha is the way she is. It is your fault. Yours and your mother’s.”
“You must be joking.”
The wry tone of amusement in Gemini’s voice jarred Orion for just a moment. Was he actually suggesting that this wasn’t true? His expression was deadpan and confident. Orion hated how freaking confident and absolutely unshakable this older half brother always was! It wasn’t right. He should have been off balance and completely worried that Orion was the one in the right.
“Okay. So you’re obviously not joking.” Gemini shook his head. His hair was a dark russet red. It was a bit of a difficult thing for Orion to see his father’s face and expressions and mannerisms on this dark red-haired doppleganger. Then Gemini pointed right at Orion. “When you want to put two and two together, pull your head out of your ass, and figure out what’s really going on with our father’s murder, you come and find me. Do you understand?”
“What do you know about it?” Orion snarled the words. They came so harsh and so angry that for a moment he could barely keep himself from leaping out of his chair and launching right at Gemini. “Or is this the part where you admit that you and your mother murdered my father?”
“My mother has been dead for awhile.” Gemini snorted. “And like I said. Pull your head out of your ass. You’ll see that your mother has been the same person since the day she was born. Bad. All bad. And if you think me or my mother had anything to do with making her the way she is today, you’re out of your damn mind. On the other hand, if you want to look for a murderer, you might want to look right in your own backyard because the one who had the most to gain is sitting pretty right now running the rest of you ragged. Ask yourself why she keeps pitting all of you against each other and trying to run your lives into the ground? Why spend so much energy making sure the rest of you are miserable?”
Orion might want to think that Gemini was nothing but an asshole and a moron, but there was no ignoring the truth in his words. Even a grain of truth was truth, and there was no doubt that Tisha Olivares-King had been keeping them all dancing to her tune. They might not fall into her traps, but she certainly kept them busy trying to avoid her.
“You’re not stupid,” Gemini told Orion quietly. He pursed his lips and shook his head. “I’m not trying to be your friend. I shouldn’t even give a shit. I have nothing to gain. But I do want to find out who murdered my father. I loved him. He might not have been the best father in the whole world, but he was mine just as much as he was yours. And I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of people talking about how he accidentally shot himself to death.” Gemini made a derisive noise. “Big Mac King was a lot of things. But a careless hunter who had a fatal accident wasn’t one of them.”
Gemini didn’t wait around after saying that. He turned to leave. Orion cleared his throat. It was on the tip of his tongue to curse the man for a fool and tell him to go to hell. But those words never came out. Instead Orion found himself thinking about what Gemini had said about having a father and knowing the man well enough to realize that Big Mac King wasn’t a careless hunter. In fact, Big Mac King never hunted with a gun at all. He had teeth and claws. So maybe Gemini was right. Maybe it was time to put an end to his mother’s ridiculous games and call her on the one thing that she never seemed to want to discuss.
What exactly happened to Big Mac King on that day a few months back when he was shot and killed in a hunting accident?
The Mother of All
Chapter One
“The weather outside is frightful, the fire is so delightful! And if we’ve no place to go, let it…”
Rain. Let it rain. Let it rain.
Eleni Ariosa snorted with passive aggressive glee as she listened to the dulcet notes of Christmas music piped throughout the department store. Inside the building, Christmas was in full swing. Trees glittering with silver ornaments and topped with enormous angels sporting harps graced every single intersection of walkways. Greenery had been hung from the support pillars and there were enormous red bows topping most of the display racks.
However, if one turned to look out the front windows of the store, one would discover that Dallas weather was doing its level best to make Christmas the most sodden day of the year. Raindrops spattered the enormous windows and long rivulets of water stre
amed down the pristine glass toward the already wet ground. It had been raining for days now. It felt as though it had been months, maybe even years.
“Hold this.”
Eleni was brought forcefully back to the moment when the sequins of her mother’s potential dress purchase whipped right across Eleni’s right cheek. Thank goodness she managed to close her eye right in time to avoid losing it. The gold and silver confection didn’t actually have that much material. The bulk of the garment was now draped right across Eleni’s shoulder.
Scrambling to get the prickly thing away from her favorite cashmere sweater, Eleni glared at her mother. Of course, the expression and every bit of frustration that went with it was completely lost on her mother. The woman was totally oblivious. She was too busy searching the designer racks for yet another frock to wear to yet another holiday party.
“Are you sure you need this many dresses?” Eleni ducked as another one came flying at her face. It was like playing softball only with designer clothes. She fumbled the dress and happened to see the price tag. Holy. Crap! “These are kind of expensive.”
Alaina Ariosa only snorted. “Like I’m going to pay. Are you having a laugh or something? I own this store!”
Alaina plowed through yet another rack as though she were trying to find the pick of every rack in the store. Eleni sighed. It was December twentieth. Only five days left until Christmas, but Eleni had a bad feeling that Santa was finally about to give Alaina Ariosa the stocking full of coal that she had deserved for so long.
“Excuse me, madam?”
A store employee appeared a few yards away with her face set in what appeared to be a permanent customer service smile. The young woman was neatly dressed with a bright red apron and a red Santa hat. All of the Orville’s Department Store employees were dressed in the same way. It was part of the upscale shop’s efforts to seem family friendly to all of their customers during the holiday season. The embroidered nametag on the woman’s apron said LEEANN. Unfortunately for Leeann, politeness was going to get her nowhere with Alaina.
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