"I'm stuck," I explained.
"Never would have guessed it," my milk brother muttered. Then, louder: "Look, I'd offer to help, but the food's really all I've got in me. You know computers and I don't get along...."
I shrugged my understanding. Honestly, I wasn't entirely sure why I'd called in this local contingent of the pack for assistance. Maybe I just felt better having shifters around when I subsumed myself into the problem at hand—no need to exert the energy necessary to watch my own back here in outpack territory. Whatever the reason, my gut had prompted me to hit that button on the cell phone. And I always followed my gut.
Except with Terra. I flicked the thought away. Just what I didn't need while under deadline—to get sidetracked by a pack princess that I definitely couldn't have.
"You know..."
Chase and I both looked up, surprised that the usually silent Wade had offered words unprompted. The kid was clearly overawed by my alpha presence, and try as I might, I'd so far been unable to get it through his thick skull that I wasn't the replica of my brother that I appeared.
Okay, that wasn't fair. Wade trusted me to protect him with my life. He worshiped the ground I walked on. He just didn't seem to think his own opinions were worth mentioning in the mighty alpha's presence.
Which meant the kid must have something profound on his mind if he'd braved an interruption now. Especially given my current twitchy mood, which I was unconsciously radiating to all and sundry. I clamped down on my inner wolf a trifle to give the kid courage to speak.
"Hmm?" I prompted, taking care to keep my eyes averted. Sometimes Wade did better when he didn't think he had my complete attention. He preferred to assume an alpha's mind was 95% occupied elsewhere and might miss any symptoms of foot-in-mouth disease.
Of course, my interest was piqued, so I wasn't actually ignoring him. Instead, I found that if I turned my head just right, I could catch every expression that flitted across the youngster's face by perusing his reflection on my laptop screen.
My covert appraisal snapped into full alertness as the teenager's gaze met mine. No, that wasn't right. He was instead intent upon the code I'd been struggling with for the last far-too-many hours.
"I think you dropped a line there..." Wade had forgotten himself enough to drift forward so his finger could hover atop a mistake that I'd been glossing over during a multitude of bug checks. I cocked my head to one side. How in the heck had I missed that? It was a hole roughly the size of China.
And how had Wade come to understand programming well enough to pick out my mistake?
"I..." The kid stumbled back in distress, attempting to escape my piercing gaze. Only then did I realize that I'd voiced my question aloud.
Chase surreptitiously kicked me under the table, a subtle reminder not to scare the pup. My return blow might not have been quite so surreptitious. Neither was the way I sprang erect and enfolded the youngster in a bear hug to thank him for unraveling my web of confusion.
"Good save," I said, thumping Wade on the back encouragingly. At my first touch, I'd noticed the way he tensed and readied himself to flee. But I ignored the unconscious reaction and was pleased to feel his spine solidify into erect pride mere seconds later. And this time he offered an explanation without further prompting.
"I used the laptop some afternoons. I checked your browser history and got interested in ASP..."
Such a smart shifter. Always follow the trail to the end if you catch a good scent.
Further praise now might make the kid's head explode, though. So I instead walked across the room to snag a second slice of pizza, releasing him from my gaze. "So, what's the next step?" I asked.
The kid had sidled closer to the chair as I ate, and now he leaned over to tap a few keys. Taking the alpha's seat was obviously still too terrifying for the pup, but he couldn't quite hold himself back from the puzzle.
"Well, it seems like if you..." Within seconds, Wade had forgotten himself and sunk down to ease his typing. His shoulders were tight at first as if waiting to be struck down for his impudence. But as he got into the flow of paging through my code, he forgot himself and relaxed fully.
"You fed him?" I asked Chase quietly, knowing that Tia would skin me alive if I kept Wade up all night on an empty belly. The staying-up-all-night part I couldn't do anything about, but the belly part I could.
"Yeah," my milk brother began, but I was already being sucked back into the coding puzzle myself.
"Wait a minute," I said, reaching over Wade's shoulder to hit the up arrow key. "Did you notice here?" My fingers flew faster than my words, and my partner in crime was nodding along.
"And if we..." Now he was typing again, and I spared one quick glance behind me to check on my milk brother.
Chase had shed his clothes, shifted into lupine form, and curled up atop the king-size bed. Opening one eye, his expression clearly stated, Well, we paid for the room. Someone should use this nice, comfy mattress.
"Knock yourself out, buddy," I murmured. Then, turning back to the chink in First Ohio's armor, Wade and I gnawed at the edges to create a larger and larger hole. Soon, we'd be inside.
Chapter 6
"TIME’S UP. PENDLETON’S in the lobby!"
Victor, darn his hard hacking heart, had apparently decided the only truly satisfying way to win was to rub his rival's face in the mud. So he'd stolen or created a key card to open my door and had burst in to spread his supposed bad news.
Unfortunately, being cuddly werewolves, the three of us had collapsed into a lupine heap atop the bed at crazy o'clock this morning, minutes after succeeding in our quest. Meaning that Victor was about to catch sight of a vision that would likely blow his mind...and our cover.
My gaze darted around the dim room, taking in the blinds that would help shield our fur from view for a few more seconds. But we needed to shift fast if we didn't want to be discovered.
I was furless before the thought had fully raced through my mind, and I used a bit of alpha compulsion to yank my companions back into humanity right along with me. But there was nothing to be done about our unclothed state.
"So I..." Victor stopped mid-sentence as he flipped on the light switch, his mouth gaping open at the view. And I couldn't really blame him for the deer-in-the-headlights expression. To a human, three naked males in one bed probably was a rather unusual sight. Add to that the bemusement of my companions at being force-shifted while half asleep, and we could easily have been mistaken for a threesome caught in the daze of post-coital bliss.
A human would have been mortified by the implications of our situation. But my wolf brain instead got an inordinate amount of joy out of my cyber buddy's beet-red face. Behind my back, Chase's snort of amusement proved that he felt the same way, and even stoic Wade seemed to be radiating amusement. Nothing like the prudishness of humans to wake you up in the morning.
Then a t-shirt and jeans flipped over my shoulder and landed in my waiting arms. Pulling my legs into the denim, I strode toward my opponent. "You were saying?"
"Um, that the job's mine," Victor replied, his gaze still trained on the naked guys lounging atop the bedspread. Neither shifter had bothered to pull up a sheet to block the human's gaze, but Victor still lowered his voice before asking, "Are those gigolos?"
Now even Wade chuckled. Sure, my pack mates were pretty buff from hunting for their dinner. But, really, did I look like I needed to pay for sex?
"Naw, just fuck buddies," I answered, mostly for the pleasure of watching Victor's face turn an even darker shade of crimson. "Now, about that wager...."
"Right," Victor agreed, nearly tripping over his own feet as he followed me out the door. "Like I was saying..."
"Better get your laptop," I broke in. "I think there's something you and good old Bob need to see."
* * *
WOLF YOUNG OWNS this site.
The words were emblazoned in neon-orange, flashing letters that scrolled across the top of the First Ohio website. Wade had even a
dded a couple of wolf paw prints for good measure, which I figured was harmless despite our intentions of keeping shifter-kind secret from the human world. After all, every hacker needs a calling card, right?
Victor's gaze remained riveted on the moving text, but Mr. Pendleton had taken only a single look at the website before hitting number three on his speed dial. Now he was deep in a muttered conversation I wasn't supposed to be able to overhear but could easily make out. Blah, blah, blah, hackers. Blah, blah, blah, security. I listened just long enough to discover that someone was having his ass handed to him on a silver platter, then tuned the rant out.
"How in the heck did you do it?" Victor asked now, sliding a mug across the coffee table in my direction before running an anxious hand through his no-longer perfect hair. The human male had recovered from his mortification at catching me in dishabille, but something about the experience had taken the shine off his ever-present coat of charisma nonetheless.
Before I could answer, a couple of the guys we'd been out drinking with two nights before walked past. Victor was too frazzled to recognize them, but I noticed how their eyes initially lit up when they caught sight of my companion. Then his ruffled demeanor sank in and the pair quickly looked away without offering a greeting. How very human of them.
And isn't that interesting? It seemed Victor's game face was only good for short periods of time...much like my own. No wonder he'd tried to stab me in the back if his previous attempts at friendship had been so short-lived. He probably didn't understand what was and wasn't cool behavior within a pack.
Mentally removing the hacker from my shit list, I deigned to offer a few tidbits of information on the previous night's coding spree. Then, as the bank manager turned back to face us, I finished, "I'll tell you more about it later, dude."
Because my attention needed to be fully focused on the matter at hand now that the moment of truth had finally arrived. I sat up straighter in the overstuffed chair that graced the lobby and searched the older gentleman's face with my eyes.
When I'd thought about this meeting after breaking into the website, I'd hoped Mr. Pendleton would be pleased, would clap me on the back and praise me much as I'd thanked my younger pack mate the night before. But it was obvious now that the win wouldn't be so easy. The bank manager's stance was stiff and his face stern. And once he opened his mouth, his words confirmed my suspicions.
"I should be offering you a job right now, Mr. Young," he said gravely. "But I honestly don't feel comfortable doing so. The truth is, I've run this bank on gut reactions for the last thirty years, and my gut says there's something not quite right about you."
The sudden inhalation of air beside me turned into a coughing fit as Victor tried his best not to swallow his own tongue. I knew my cyber buddy was replaying the scene of three naked males in my hotel-room bed one more time, the image burned into his retinas as if he'd peered too closely at the sun. Yes, by human standards, there certainly was something not quite right about me.
A bank manager from small-town Ohio would probably find my supposed ménage à trois reason enough to refuse to offer me a job. Victor knew that as well as I did. So I fully expected to hear the hacker's voice pounding the final nail into my coffin.
After all, hadn't Victor made it perfectly clear that this job hunt was just one more challenge, no different from his shoot-em-up video games? All's fair in love and war and all that jazz. So why not push the advantage he had over me?
Sure enough, Victor spoke as soon as his coughing fit subsided. But his words weren't at all what I expected. "I know Wolf comes across as a little strange at first, sir," the human male said. "But the truth is, I've known him for over a year, and he's as solid as they come. He once paid a speeding ticket for me so my parents wouldn't have to know about it, and he's been supporting his aunt and his entire extended family for pretty much all of his adult life."
A hint of a smile curved the corner of Mr. Pendleton's lips upward. To the older gentleman, I'm sure neither Victor nor I had spent any time as adults, which dramatically lessened the impact of my friend's second point.
Meanwhile, I found myself equally surprised by Victor's monologue, but for an entirely different reason. First of all, I hadn't been expecting my opponent to come to my aid, cyber-buddy status aside. And, second of all, since when had he actually started paying attention to the tidbits I let drop about my personal life? Victor had always seemed fully focused on the next video game and the next coding adventure. His own dramas had vastly overshadowed my own...or so I'd assumed.
Now I realized that my friend must have looked up the nickname we used for Chase's mother—Tia—and drawn his own conclusions about our relationship. As his rant continued, I learned that apparently we were Mexican immigrants struggling to find a place in this new nation of opportunity. I'd been kicked out of my nuclear family due to my sexual orientation, and as a result felt I owed it to my new clan to make their lives easier as they struggled to make ends meet. Unfortunately, my past made it difficult for me to find a job despite more than deserving this very opportunity.
In other words, I was the golden boy Victor had previously pretended to be. I looked up, expecting a glowing halo to materialize above my head.
Nope, not there. And, from the uncertain expression on his face, Mr. Pendleton didn't fully buy Victor's fairy tale either.
Chapter 7
"YOU TALK A good talk," the bank manager said when my friend's words of praise finally wound down. "But I judge a man's worth by the whites of his eyes"—whatever that meant—"and by a firm handshake. So, let's have it, Mr. Young. It's time to see what you've got."
A handshake was going to decide my pack's future? Seriously? But as I took in the set of the bank manager's shoulders, I finally got it. Bob was the human equivalent of a bloodling. He had the capacity to understand the depth of a human's character at a glance, and what he'd been seeing in me was a confusing mish-mash of wolf and man. No wonder the older man had blown me off yesterday and hoped to never cross paths with my ilk again.
A smarter werewolf would have chained down his lupine nature and allowed the bank manager to peer into eyes that rang of nothing but humanity. But Mr. Pendleton had requested honesty, and the unvarnished truth was that I was more wolf than man.
Which didn't mean I was going to shed clothes and go four-legged here in the hotel lobby, of course. But my own gut told me this wasn't the time to try to hide my lupine nature behind feigned humanity.
So I relaxed the blinders I'd been carefully holding around my wolf ever since setting foot in this hotel. I let my ears pick up the sound of a vacuum roaring to life two floors above and an annoyed dishwashing assistant griping about his girlfriend a hundred feet west. I let the chemical aroma of new carpet wrinkle my nose and felt the eddies of air currents brushing my cheeks as a revolving door changed the interior pressure with a near-audible pop.
Then I gazed at the bank manager with my full self on alert. The human possessed no inner wolf, of course, but my lupine gaze made his spine seem straighter than it had previously, his gray hair more like a white crown of wisdom than a weakness of old age. By shifter standards, Mr. Pendleton was mere meat, but I understood now that he was a man to look up to, a man to learn from. Not a man to vanquish via trickery.
The manager nodded once, and I reached forward to accept his proffered hand. My nostrils flared, taking in the scent of leather seats and bleached office paper. In his purest essence, I now realized, Mr. Pendleton was the bank. Which is why my late-night hack had backfired. Rather than simply proving my prowess as originally intended, the act had violated the man I'd intended to impress.
In other words, I owed him an apology.
"Sorry about the neon letters, Mr. Pendleton," I offered quietly. "Give me five minutes and I can put everything back the way it was."
We stood poised for an eternity...or perhaps for five long seconds. In wolf brain, it was hard to tell the difference.
Then, the bank manager squeez
ed my fingers with a strength that would have made a human wince. I considered pretending pain, but instead squeezed back with just one iota less pressure—a peace offering.
"The removal can be your first billable hour," Mr. Pendleton agreed. Then, as he withdrew his hand and turned to go, he called back over his shoulder, "And you can call me Bob."
* * *
"SO WE’RE COOL?"
Victor seemed absurdly concerned that I might now decide he wasn't worth my time and leave him friendless, proof positive that he was indeed as lonely as I'd at first assumed him to be. What the human didn't realize was that I'd long ago decided he was part of my clan. I'd yet to drop a pack mate due to sheer stupidity and I didn't intend to start now.
Especially not when Victor had come through with such an eloquent defense at the eleventh hour.
"Of course," I agreed. "And I could hire you on as a part-time consultant if it would get your parents off your back." Because now that I'd won the signing bonus that would let me put a down payment on my opening move against the Chief, I could afford to be magnanimous.
"That would be awesome!" Victor began, then turned red again as Chase and Wade stepped out of the elevator and into his line of vision.
My fellow shifters were fully dressed now, Chase in my discarded suit since I'd donned his jeans and t-shirt this morning in my hurry to win the wager. Meanwhile, Wade had clearly embraced his self-determined role of lackey, as evidenced by the suitcase and laptop bag he was carting along in the beta's wake.
They looked perfectly normal, in other words. But the waves of agonizing discomfort rolling off Victor proved that my pack mates' previous appearance hadn't been forgotten.
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