The delivery was dropped off after everyone had gone for the day. Thank God Mack had inspected the load first thing this morning. Had it been used, Adam would have rework instead, on top of dead time with men on pay. It would have been a hell of a mess.
Adam was later than he’d wanted to be getting the lady’s car. There was no telling what was going on at the house in his absence. Last night, the boys had scared the wits out of Diana Ridley while rescuing her.
She’d seen and heard enough to think them all monster movie werewolves. Adam only hoped she blamed the fur-fest she’d seen last night on exhaustion and bad dreams.
Maybe he could convince her it had all been a hallucination.
He wrestled with the seat adjustment on Diana Ridley’s car, trying to fit his six-foot-four-inch frame into a space normally occupied by a petite, short-legged female. Not that he’d noticed her legs, or how her soft curves felt pressed close in his arms either.
Adam’s pack consisted of five underage pups. No fighters. No wardens to stand with him against a threat. He didn’t count the Mack, no matter how good the human was.
He wanted Mack tucked away safe, but that wouldn’t happen in a million years. The exsoldier was too good at finding his own trouble.
In the confines of the car, Adam inhaled the woman’s scent as he cranked and pulled out. A peculiar growl/whine slipped out of him. Her everyday use of it marked the vehicle as hers.
She smelled delicious. Woman/cookie/citrus was Diana Ridley, a tasty morsel that roused hungers in both the man and the wolf. ... No hint of the magical flavor psychics gave off when using their gifts lingered.
Apparently, he’d inherited his sire’s human fetish, even if he wasn’t in the market for procreation. Not a bad thing. At the end of the run, humans and shapeshifters shared the same DNA. Besides, humans had to be added in every couple generations for his line to stay fertile.
Halfway across town, his cell phone rang, pulling Adam from his musing. He glanced at the ID and pressed the button.
“Yeah?”
“Forget the lady’s car, Adam. You better get back to the job site.”
“Jesus, Mack. It’s been what? Fifteen minutes?”
“Uh-huh. Just long enough for the crap to hit our doorstep. Hold up a sec.” After a muffled bump, the line went silent. Mack had covered the receiver with one hand. Adam made an illegal u-turn and headed back across town.
“Adam? You still there?”
“Yeah. What’s going on?”
“Sorry, that was the guy from Animal Control. We found a dead wolf in the dumpster.”
A knot of apprehension tightened Adam’s stomach. He’d had a few run-ins with animal control back in the Tarrant pack. Things were always touchy dealing with people who risked their lives handling wild and dangerous animals. People who occasionally ran into a changed wolven and captured them, thinking of keeping the human population safe from animal predators.
If they only knew.
The knot in Adam’s stomach turned into a smoking lava rock as Mack continued.
“Animal Control is hauling it out now. I’m going to stall him as long as I can. But you’d better hurry if you want to take a look at it.”
Damn, damn, damn.
Adam made a quick call to the house, checking heads as much as telling the boys to keep the woman there. His stomach eased while Mark rattled in his ear. There was nothing to eat in the house and the kid wanted this awesome cool skateboard with red and acid green flames for his birthday. Neither pronouncement was news to Adam. The boys ate everything they could pour ketchup on and the description of the skateboard was burned into Adam’s memory from repetition.
Gee. Sarcasm laced Adam’s thoughts. I wonder what I’ll get Mark for his birthday.
———
The world shifted. The gentle bounce of the mattress, the soft cocoon of blankets reassured Diana. Dreams and fantasies held no sway over the waking of day. With her eyes still closed, she drifted in a half asleep stage. The presence of another person near to her comforted her.
The dream had been awful. A lot of running and monsters trying to eat her.
No. Wolves. There’d been wolves and coyotes, but the monster had saved her. A monster that turned into a sexy hunk.
Yes, it had been a very bad dream. If she didn’t do something about it now, she would be feeling everyone else’s moods all day long. She’d wind up holed up in her bedroom with a migraine with a hot compress on her forehead, wrestling the child-proof cap off of a bottle of useless pain reliever.
As a natural empath, her first twenty-two years had been sheer hell, living a life bombarded by what others felt. Richard Ridley, her ex-husband had called Diana crazy.
The truth was, her powers scared him. The divorce, emotionally devastating as it was, turned out to be Diana’s salvation. When Karen’s gifts manifested, Diana made sure her daughter had all the understanding and security she needed to develop.
This morning Diana’s control over her own gifts was shaky. There was no one like her that she knew, no one to help her understand her abilities. She practiced a little yoga for control, to understand the energies that powered her psychic empathy. She had learned to build walls around herself, emotional and metaphysical.
The nightmare still felt so real. Her mental image of a fence and locked gate crumbled, leaving her mind open.
Diana felt drained, as if her energy was spread too thin, pulled outside her body over a distance. She sought her center, a nice seascape of peace and tranquility, but found a forest instead. A forest inhabited by wolves.
Her son, she assumed, settled on the bed and broke her scattered, sleep deprived, concentration with his insecurity. He should feel sorry.
If Matthew had needed a ride so badly last night, then he should have been at the Park entrance like he’d said he would. Sometimes he could be as thoughtless as his father. Diana pushed away the uncharitable thought. Matthew wasn’t his father.
It was the dream. Was it a dream? Diana swallowed.
No, it was a dream. Otherwise …
Keep a low profile. You don’t want the monsters to find you. Diana brushed off the stray admonition, obviously the result of too many internet chats with her favorite oddball computer whiz, Jax. She was going to have to get taller, less paranoid friends.
So close, his emotions resonated within her exhausted psyche, keeping her from sleep. She huffed and gave in to the inevitable. Digging under the comforter, Diana gave the lump behind her a pat and a light shove. He shifted, arm going over her legs. She wanted an apology, not this drawn out prelude to a drama.
“Matthew.”
Not Matthew. The teen sitting next to her was not her son. And she definitely was not in her bedroom.
What exactly had happened last night?
Diana’s heart thumped hard. She glanced around the room, checked her state of dress. Sudden fear dumped a jolt of adrenaline through her veins.
Her clean hand found her own dirty tee shirt. The underwire of her bra poked reassuringly into a breast. Her shorts were in a twisted wedgie.
Assured that she was relatively safe and unmolested, Diana forced herself to calm down. She focused on her visitor. Younger than her son, the boy was dressed in a ragged, oversize pair of jeans and an equally disreputable tee shirt that should have been thrown out by its first owner.
Familiar chocolate brown eyes watched her. The boy’s prominent cheekbones and chin were all angles under the shaggy mess of rich, dark brown hair. The promise of a well-built man was there, needing only more weight and age to fulfill what nature had begun.
“Brandon Starr?”
He flushed and drew his knees up to his chin, wrapping his arms protectively around them. The boy’s insecurity and underlying fear was a raucous noise inside her.
This was familiar too.
Instinctively, she wanted to cuddle him and make it better. She pushed down the urge to mother everyone. Her own kids were nearly grown. Every day she was
able to reclaim a little more time for herself. She didn’t need to add someone else’s to her list.
She was almost home free from the awesome responsibility of parenting.
Brandon and his twin brother Bradley were from the pre-adolescent gang her daughter used to drag home for dinner. Over the years her, Karen had brought every kind of stray imaginable, human and animal, for Diana to mother. She’d been Room Mother, Club Den Mother, and neighborhood sitter.
Karen had a different dinner gang now—more giggling girls than the motley bunch of rough and tumble boys.
Of the twins, Brandon was a shy, sweet boy that often faded into the background.
The others bossed him relentlessly until she pulled him into the kitchen to help with one thing or another. Diana didn’t realize how much she missed Karen’s old buddies, and almost thought of them as her own.
College was just a year away.
“Where am I?”
Diana tried not to sound harsh, she really did. Waking from starring as the prey in her very own werewolf flick in a strange man’s bedroom set her on edge. The stack of Three Stooges videos on the bedside table were a dead give away.
She was physically exhausted. Nightmares tended to do that. And she had no memory of how she’d gotten here.
At any rate, her tone of voice fell short of friendly. Well within the range of a PMS moment. That state that every woman hits where simply existing was annoying.
Warm and fuzzy memories weren’t going to get poor Brandon off the hook.
Brandon, being male, and young and shy, did what any man with an ounce of selfpreservation did. He froze.
“Well?” Diana raised her eyebrows, waiting for an answer.
He ducked and mumbled unintelligibly into his knees.
Oh, well. He wasn’t forthcoming and she needed to find the bathroom. Diana slid off the edge of the bed.
“Don’t mumble, hon. Which way is the—”
Her legs gave out. She gasped and crumpled into a surprised, painful, heap. She clutched at her calves as the muscles in both seized into rock-hard charlie horses.
“Are you okay, Miz Ridley?”
Diana glimpsed Brandon’s head over the edge of the bed. Worry filled eyes peered down out of the shaggy mop that framed his face.
The bed moved, and then he was crouching down beside her. She closed her eyes against the agony in her calves and gritted her teeth.
“This is going to be weird.” Brandon’s insecurity threaded with a quiet confidence. “But pinch this little bit of skin between your nostrils.”
A long forgotten Lamaze class floated in her memory. In the blink of an eye the boy turned from shy and intimidated to competent and nurturing. Like a pro, he massaged the hard knots out of her legs.
“That’s better now, isn’t it?”
One side of his mouth raised in a faint smile. His hand worked down her calf once more and dropped to pick fuzz balls out of the thick pile of navy carpet. Not one wear spot marred the plush surface. Not even a path to the door.
Diana eased out a breath, daring to let go of her nose. She could do without ever having to experience another charlie horse ever again.
“It is. Much better.” She sighed, a little wary of the muscles knotting up again.
“Tell me you’re a licensed message therapist, because my old one, if I actually had one, is now fired. How did you know that?”
His hands were warm and steady as he helped her to sit back on the edge of the bed.
“The Discovery Channel. And I read a lot. You should wait and rest before you get up.”
He squatted back down by where her feet dangled down from the high tester bed.
If it were hers, she’d need a small stepladder to climb in, or maybe a wild scramble up.
She smiled a little at the thought. He took that for a good sign and smiled back, surprising Diana. She remembered that Brandon saved his smiles, like a priceless treasure sparingly doled out.
Handsome and sensitive. God, he’d be a lady killer when he grew up. His voice was soft, but sure.
“You should eat something. You need protein after physical stress.”
“Something else you read?”
He made a little sound that could be taken either way. He touched her leg with the tip of a finger. For the first time, she noticed the mass of scratches and bruises covering her legs. Her arms looked the same.
Alarm flared through her and she leaned away, wary for the first time.
It was a dream. It had to be.
“What happened?”
She felt the spear of hurt from him. Why, she didn’t know. She felt him simply fold away within himself, something she’d never experienced before. But that was not surprising since she’d devoted a great portion of her time to blocking out other people’s emotions.
Brandon dropped his eyes and removed his hands to rest on his knees. The small space between them was a great chasm.
His answer was a mumble.
Well, drat. She felt guilty for weirding out and taking it out on the kid. It wasn’t everyday you woke up in a strange man’s bedroom, at least for her it wasn’t.
She’d always had a soft spot for Karen’s friends. She reached out to close the distance. Her fingers touched the silky softness of his hair.
Brandon sighed and closed his eyes as she finger combed through the messy locks. The look reminded her of a puppy getting its ears rubbed. She shoved that analogy away, hard. It touched too close to her nightmare.
It was a nightmare.
The emotional connection between them flared open again. She couldn’t help but try to ease that need, the loneliness she felt inside him.
Vaguely, Diana remembered reading about the Starr boys’ guardian dying in a fire last year. She felt bad for not paying attention to the events.
“How long since you last came to dinner? Two? Three years?”
Brandon leaned into her legs with a sigh.
“Two and a half years.” He breathed.
“So, what happened?”
He tensed then peered up at her.
“Then or now?”
Diana ruffled through the silky mop again and smiled.
“How about last night? I had a strange nightmare and can’t seem to get past that.”
He went still, inside and out and looked away again.
“You fell.”
Hmmm. It would certainly seem that she’d dove head first into something.
He spoke carefully, choosing his words. A nervous energy possessed him.
Brandon pulled away while he was speaking and stuck his head under the bed. His voice rose so that she could hear.
“We found you at Dogwood Park. I think you rolled down a hill or something.”
Diana’s sleep and coffee deprived brain supplied the rest.
“Who’s we?”
He popped up with her shoes and began to undo the laces.
“Bradley, Mark, Rick, Seth, and me. Oh, and Adam.”
He stopped with the laces and added an after thought.
“Adam Weis. All of us live with him now. He’s been our guardian since ...”
Diana felt like grimacing. No need to make the boy rehash all of that.
“I understand. Didn’t you and your brother used to baby-sit the other three?”
Brandon nodded and slipped the tennis shoe over her bare foot. She decided not to worry about where her socks were. Diana slapped a palm against her forehead.
“Oh, no! Karen!”
She would have jumped up, but Brandon held her other foot in a firm grip. He was stronger than his appearance suggested. She fell back on the mattress with a bounce.
“Don’t worry.” He smoothed a hand over her calf. “We called Karen last night and told her what was up. Adam slept on the couch and the rest of us guys have rooms.”
Diana felt the truth of his sincerity and massaged the point between her brows, hoping to stimulate thought processes. It didn’t work. She needed coffee.
<
br /> She studied the room for a moment trying to decipher what it told about the owner. Bold colors spoke of a dominating presence. There was a lingering of something that whispered to that part of her that read other people’s emotions. She didn’t delve into that.
Looney Toons poster prints and the Stooges movies told her that the man had a sense of humor. The furniture was golden and natural varnished in a simple blocky style.
Overall, the room had an open-air feeling without the benefit of any windows.
“So. Where is this Adam? And why bring me here?”
Brandon didn’t answer, so she gave his hair one last ruffle and decided to leave him to his silence.
“You really don’t remember, do you?”
Disbelief and suspicion emanated from him. Bending down, Diana did what came naturally and placed a motherly kiss on the top of his head. If anyone needed one, Brandon Starr did.
———
“Ah-hem.”
Diana looked up, seeing a stronger, confident version of Brandon standing in the open doorway with his arms crossed over his chest.
This version looked more man than boy. He had a hint of rounded edges in his face and form that would finish filling out and harden in the years to come.
In his tight tee shirt and jeans, he looked young and tough, a brooding bad boy to set the girls’ hearts, and hormones, aflutter.
His eyes were the exact shade of brown as his brother’s, yet hard, as if they had seen the world and it had not been a nice place.
His dark brows pulled together as he watched her. She wasn’t sure what he felt.
Thankfully, his emotions were closed off to her from his end. She still didn’t have enough strength of will to do it herself.
“Hello, Bradley.”
“Miz Ridley.” Bradley nodded, his eyes sizing her up.
Diana smiled, hoping for friendly instead of a grimace as she shifted to stand up. She really needed to find that bathroom. Her legs felt rubbery and sore.
Nightmare. It was a nightmare. Some delusions you had to repeat to keep them real.
Brandon stopped her with a warm hand on her arm. He directed his words at his brother.
“She’s weak from last night.” He gave a slight pause and glanced up at Diana.
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