by Cara Adams
“It’s just as fucking well wolves are supposed to share a woman. If I have to share her I couldn’t have a better partner than Lewis, but it’s still a goddamn fucking shame he wants her. And if I don’t get a move on, someone else will likely come on in and rip her away from both of us.”
Andreas stopped the machine and got off, stretching his body carefully before heading into the showers. The fitness center opened at six so the wolves who lived in the professional suites could exercise before starting their working day. It’d originally been built to give the wolves somewhere socially acceptable to exercise and use up some of their excess testosterone. Well, he knew where he’d like to put his testosterone, but that wasn’t going to happen just yet so he needed to get to bed so he’d be able to open the center up again in the morning.
But he was still no closer to a solution. Unless he just asked her outright what she wanted. But what if she said no? At least at the moment he had hope and time to think of a plan. Yes, it would be better to get some kind of a plan together before he spoke to her.
* * * *
It was only the next morning after Lewis was showered, dressed, and had carefully thought through what he wanted to say to Cadfael Hanson about the roof garden, that he realized he didn’t know how to make an appointment with him. Up until now he had been the one being summoned. He was staying in a vacant apartment in the professional suites, and people had come and gotten him and taken him wherever he was wanted. Now he had his own swipe card, which let him get into his apartment and also up to the roof. The only place the elevator would go simply by pressing a button was to the fourth-floor foyer area, where the professional suites began. His card had been programmed as if he was a regular office worker but instead of accessing one of the other floors, his card accessed the roof.
If he walked out of the professional suites’ double glass doors he was in the mall itself, which extended from the fourth floor, down through the other levels. The supermarket and food court were on the lowest level. He’d explored all over the mall, mostly in the evenings after it was closed. He was still a bit hesitant of crowds, although when he bought his groceries he had to go during store hours of course.
He’d spoken a bit to Sophie, the receptionist. She’d been kind and patient with him, explaining where the various stores were and other things he needed to know. She’d be able to tell him how to make an appointment with Mr. Hanson. He’d ask her.
Feeling energized, Lewis ran down the stairs from his eighth-floor apartment to the lobby area on the fourth floor. As with the elevator, the stairwell door would open on the fourth floor with any swipe card. But again like the elevator, that was only to get out. To get in the stairwell, or to make the elevator work, the correct swipe card had to be used and the relevant buttons pushed. Lewis liked the tight security here. It’d prevented Jackson Hamilton from accessing the apartments on one occasion he knew. That gave him a feeling of safety and security as well. He never wanted to see that man again even though he was no longer alone and friendless.
Before exiting from the stairwell, Lewis opened the door a few inches and peeked around at Sophie’s desk. He didn’t want to interrupt her if she had customers waiting or if maybe there was a line of people to see the center manager whose office was right here as well. But she was alone, typing something into her computer. Of course, she was working and he’d be interrupting her, but not just for idle chatter. He had a genuine question to ask her.
He left the stairwell and walked across to her desk.
She looked up and smiled at him. “Hi, Lewis.”
“Hi, Sophie. I’m sorry to bother you but I don’t know who I ought to ask this question to.”
“It’s not a bother. Everyone asks the receptionist because we always know everything.”
She was teasing him, he understood that since her lips were curling slightly at the corners and her eyes sparkled.
“Mr. Hanson has spoken about establishing a roof garden and I’d like to build it for him. I was brought up on a farm and I understand growing things and constructing garden beds and retaining walls and such things. But I don’t know how to go about making an appointment with him to talk about it. Or even if he’s already arranged to begin the work. If he has, maybe I could be one of the laborers on the project.” Lewis stopped, not wanting to bore Sophie with all of his thoughts. Then he realized he hadn’t asked the question he was here to ask yet. “So can you tell me how to contact his secretary or whoever I need to speak to for an appointment please?”
“If you ring Rhion, he’ll arrange a time for you.”
“What’s his number, please, Sophie?”
She recited it and he repeated it in his head several times.
“Aren’t you going to put it in your contacts?”
“My contacts? Oh you mean in a cell phone. I don’t have one. There was no sense having one in the mountains as reception was very patchy and I haven’t gotten one yet.” And until he could find paid employment he wouldn’t be buying one either. It was bad enough feeling like he was living on charity here, even though he’d spent hours helping on the genetics project. He had no intention of using the credit card he’d been given for anything but the most basic necessities.
“If you don’t have a cell phone for him to ring you back, that’s going to make it harder for him to contact you with an appointment. You can’t stay in your apartment maybe for days on end waiting for him to phone you. Let me call him now.”
“It’s not urgent. I don’t want to be a nuisance.” But she’d already punched some numbers into her phone and was ignoring him.
“Hi, Rhion, it’s Sophie. Lewis is here and would like to talk to Cadfael about the roof garden. He hasn’t got a cell phone. I’ll ask him to wait here until you call back.” Lewis stared at Sophie and she burst out laughing. He could feel his cheeks color slightly, certain Rhion had made a joke about him. Surely they wouldn’t be angry with him for wanting to be useful? Oh, shit! The last thing he needed to do was upset the people who’d provided him with a home. A home he wanted to stay in even if it wasn’t the mountains.
Sophie looked at the double glass doors into the professional suites then said, “Rhion wanted to know if you were a dinosaur or a wolf.” She laughed again. Lewis was puzzled and then got the joke. “Oh, a dinosaur because I don’t have a cell phone? I understand now. Whatever would he think if I told him there wasn’t even Internet in the mountains until I was a teenager?”
“No Internet? But didn’t you tell me you were homeschooled? How did that work then?”
“There was one other boy in the pack. He was five years older than me. I used the same books he’d studied from. We wrote our answers in notebooks instead of in the study book, and his mom, who taught us, kept the answer pages to mark our work. I suspect we didn’t learn as much as kids in a regular school because when we had to write stories or design projects we had very few resources to use to gather the information. Mostly I wrote about things on the mountain.”
“You miss the mountains don’t you?”
Lewis answered as honestly as he could. “I miss the trees and the hills, the huge empty sky, the utter silence and complete darkness at night. But there was no future there. My future is here.”
“You are welcome here among us, Lewis,” Sophie said.
Lewis nodded. He liked Sophie. If he wasn’t so in love with Dakota he thought he could become fond of Sophie. She was perceptive and sweet. But Dakota was more than that. It was Dakota who stirred his heart and his cock. It was Dakota he wanted to kiss—and do even more than that. But he appreciated Sophie’s kind thoughts and words.
“Thank you, Sophie.”
The elevator door beeped and Lewis stepped back from Sophie’s desk. She might be needed by whoever was coming down from the professional suites. But instead, it was Rhion. “Come on up to my office, Lewis. We’ll talk.”
Lewis was surprised that Rhion would interrupt his no doubt busy day to talk with him.
&
nbsp; “I’m sorry to have disrupted your schedule.”
“Not a bit. Willow and Hawthorne have both been keen to get the roof garden underway and Cadfael hasn’t gotten around to thinking about the project yet. But if you have some ideas that would be very helpful.”
Lewis was relieved that Rhion wasn’t annoyed with him, but he still suspected Rhion had many more important things to worry about than a roof garden. “There must be so many calls on your time to manage such a huge enterprise as this mall,” he said.
“Yes, but we’ve gotten together an excellent team of managers to help us. That’s one of the benefits of being in a wolf pack. There are plenty of men and women with a variety of talents so everyone can find a job they don’t mind doing. Plus there are humans involved as well. But if you’re willing to take on the roof garden maybe we can get that project underway now, too.”
While they were talking Rhion had swiped his keycard and pressed a button. Lewis recognized the sixth floor when they got out of the elevator. He’d been here before to the conference room. Rhion’s office was in the other direction from the elevator, and there was a male secretary in a sort of anteroom that led to four offices, one of which was apparently Rhion’s. Rhion opened the office door, waved him to a chair, and sat behind the desk. “So tell me your thoughts about the roof garden.”
Lewis had thought through this carefully, but it was difficult not to be nervous when such an important person was speaking to him, no matter how nice the man had been. “You know I grew up on a farm. All my life I’ve worked with crops, vegetables, flowers. All different kinds of plants.”
Rhion nodded at him.
Lewis struggled to explain himself. “I understand plants. They—not talk, that’s not the right word, but, maybe show me what they need.”
Rhion nodded again and his face displayed no anger or impatience. Lewis relaxed a little. “I’m not really used to a city yet. I’d never seen one until I was an adult, and on my way across the country from Wyoming I avoided not just cities, but even larger towns. So I’d like to be working on the roof, away from people, just with plants. I dig my fingers in the soil and I know if it’s too wet or too dry. I look at their leaves and flowers and know if they need more sun or more nutrients. I know I could build you a garden where the plants would thrive. I could design the beds so the plants each got what they needed. Sun or shade, or protection from the wind. I could blend the flowers and herbs together so insects wouldn’t attack the plants because they’d be discouraged by the plants they don’t like to be near.”
Lewis stopped, not sure if he’d already talked too much, but Rhion was smiling.
“We’ve also talked about having an area where wolves could run on a dirt pathway with twists and turns and maybe some obstacles to jump over and humans could run there as well if they wanted to.”
“I could do that.” Lewis was confident. As a wolf he knew the joy that came from running and jumping.
“What about the building materials? You’d need to go to a lumber yard and buy timber and soil and bring them all back here. Can you drive a truck? A stick shift? Do you have a driver’s license?”
“Yes, I can drive a stick shift and I do have my license. There are roads in the mountains, but most of them are dirt so I’m more used to driving a truck on a dirt track than on a highway. I’ve never driven in a city but I could learn. I know the road rules.”
Rhion swung around to his computer and began typing things in. Lewis waited patiently for the next question. Even though the Internet hadn’t arrived in his neighborhood until he was fifteen he knew how to use a computer. He rather thought computer games were hardwired into every male, since the concepts had come to him so easily.
“You still have plenty of money on your credit card. Buy yourself a decent phone. One you can check e-mails on. Then e-mail me with your cell phone number and I’ll have a copy of your e-mail address to add to my address book. Then I’ll be able to contact you more easily.” Rhion handed Lewis a business card with his cell phone number and e-mail address on it.
“In a couple of days we’ll go up to the roof and begin measuring it up and planning where things will go. I can’t remember now whether it was Willow or Hawthorne, but one of them had some quite good ideas you should be able to incorporate into your plans.”
Lewis felt a giant ball of happiness swell in his chest. Rhion was okay with him being involved. He’d be able to contribute usefully to the pack. He could stay here and see Dakota often, even though she would probably never be his. But he could look at her and perhaps even help her from time to time. He liked the idea of maybe assisting her in some way or just sharing time with her. And while he was building the garden he’d be at peace and in harmony with the sky and his environment. He rather thought the roof garden was the closest he could get to his old home. And he’d be up there for the next several months making the roof beautiful. And after that? Well perhaps they’d let him stay in a shed on the roof at least until it started to snow.
Lewis couldn’t wait to tell Dakota all about it. He knew she’d understand his joy at the project and perhaps she’d have some good ideas for him to include as well.
Chapter Two
The security guard shifts at Hanson Mall were on a roster and everyone was rotated through each shift—midnight to eight a.m., eight ’til four, and four to midnight. Midnight to eight was usually the quiet shift. Eight to four was the busiest shift as the stores were all open and the mall was bustling with customers. Four to midnight tended to be the one where pranksters and graffiti artists were liable to cause trouble in the parking lots, and customers leaving the late movies and who’d perhaps drunk a little too much in the restaurants tended to get into arguments.
Dakota liked them all. Variety suited her and it wasn’t as if she had a cat to hurry home to feed or kids to get off to school each day. But her favorite was the four to midnight shift, which she was on at the moment. Lots of people didn’t go to bed much before midnight so she wasn’t very different in time schedule from everyone else and there was enough work to keep her busy without being run off her feet racing from crisis to crisis.
It was just after ten in the morning and Dakota was awake and about to have a shower when her cell phone rang. Her uniform was lying across a chair where she’d left it the previous evening, and she snatched up her pants and pulled the cell out of her pocket thinking that there was trouble at the mall. “Dakota,” she said.
“Oh, Ms. Rutherford, it’s Jackson Hamilton here. You left me a message last night.”
Wow. That was a quick response.
“Good morning, Mr. Hamilton. I was introduced to your brother, Bailey, at a fund-raising event a few months ago, and I mentioned that my grandmother’s dementia is getting worse and that I need to find secure care for her. He offered to introduce me to you. I believe you were at the same fund-raising party. But I wasn’t ready to make a decision right then. Now, it’s quite clear to me that Grandma needs extra care so I was following up about that. Are you taking on any new patients at the moment?”
“Yes, Ms. Rutherford I have a few vacancies. What are your grandmother’s needs?”
“Basically she has to be supervised all the time. She still wants to make herself meals but we can’t trust her near the stove. She’s already burned the bottom out of several pots. We can’t let her iron clothes for the same reason. She scorches them. Mostly we distract her with other activities and she quickly forgets what she’d been going to do.”
“That all sounds consistent with the usual progression of the disease. I’d need to make an assessment of her before anything was decided of course.”
“I can send you her paperwork. She’s been assessed quite recently. What’s your e-mail address? I’d need to see your clinic, too, and the room where she’d be staying. Are there any vacant rooms where she could look out into a garden? She loves plants.”
“The well-being center is surrounded by gardens. I’m sure your grandmother would be hap
py here.”
Dakota didn’t like the way he said that. He sounded, not slimy or sleazy exactly, but certainly heading in that direction. Even if she had been considering sending her grandma to him she’d be reconsidering her plans right about now.
“Thank you. I’ll send you the paperwork and then we can talk some more.” He said something more but she wasn’t really listening and clicked off the call. Now more than ever, she thought he was not a nice person. Definitely the bad guy here.
She really wasn’t looking forward to seeing inside the well-being center. Dakota felt sure she’d see a lovely room, and maybe a few nicely dressed but heavily sedated clients. But she wouldn’t be shown the heart of the complex where innocent people like Lewis had been kept locked up. Although one thing did occur to her. Lewis had managed to convince the guards that if he wasn’t allowed to run outside he’d die. Therefore, not only were they humans, but also they didn’t know much about wolves. She’d never heard of a wolf dying from being unable to run anymore than a human would die from not being able to run. Of course, without begin given adequate exercise they might become overweight, or develop brittle bones or other issues, but no one died because they were banned from running. These people didn’t know shit about real wolves or even real human health. Which put her at the advantage. If Lewis could mislead them she could too.