“Apparently not.” Chelsea sighed. “And these tiny terrors don’t scare the pack at all.”
“Hey! I am very thcary!” a little boy with a lisp said indignantly. “Benjamin thaid I thcared him when I howled!”
“You are scary,” Chelsea agreed with a somber nod.
“Roman’s a stubborn one.” The woman shook her head. “Well, I guess we’ll have to take the little monsters back, then.”
This was met with yips and groans of disappointment from the cubs, but after breakfast, the parents shepherded their reluctant children back to the schoolbus, leaving behind Chelsea’s car, which they’d driven up there for her.
Erika stayed behind to help Chelsea clean up. Marcus came to join them, but resisted all efforts at drawing him into conversation, answering only with grunts when they spoke to him.
“Do you think Leland really actually likes me?” Erika asked Chelsea. “He keeps talking to me. A lot. Like he likes me. But it’s hard to believe that a guy actually likes me. Maybe he just likes me as a friend.”
Before Chelsea could answer Erika, they heard the sound of an approaching car. The car was driving towards the campsite.
“Who is that? Is this another one of your tricks to arrest Roman?” Marcus growled at her.
“Uh, nope. I’m all out of tricks,” Chelsea said, shaking her head.
The car parked, and a woman climbed out and began heading towards them. She was voluptuous and stunning, and had long, wild dark hair. Her painted-on jeans accentuated her slim figure, and her red lycra top plunged deep, displaying her cleavage. She walked with the smug confidence of a woman who knew how beautiful she was.
When she reached the clearing, she paused for a moment, looked around, and then her gaze lighted on Chelsea. She walked straight towards her.
“So, you’re the whore who’s been sleeping with my mate,” she smirked at her.
She gestured at her neck. There was a mate mark there, clear as day.
“Mate?” Chelsea echoed faintly, as Erika let out a threatening growl.
“Yes, as in, the woman he’s committed to for the rest of his life.”
“I know what being mated means,” Chelsea snapped, scrambling to her feet. Erika joined her. “Don’t hit her,” she added to Erika.
“I wasn’t going to hit her hard,” Erika muttered, glowering at the woman. “I probably wouldn’t have broken any bones.”
“Helen,” Marcus growled, folding his arms across his broad chest. He didn’t look too pleased.
“Holly,” the woman corrected him indignantly. “I’m the Alpha’s wife. Get it right.”
“Is she really his mate?” Chelsea asked Marcus, her stomach clenching. She thought she’d be sick. She’d slept with a man who was already mated? Roman, the king of no commitment, had mated a woman—and it wasn’t her?
“He never mentioned it to me.” Marcus didn’t look entirely convinced.
“Nobody mentions anything to you, because they’re all too busy trying to avoid you,” Holly said scornfully. “Bad vibes. Please call my dear mate and ask him to come greet his wifey. I’ve missed him.”
So Holly knew Marcus. She’d been with the pack before.
“Excuse me, I need to be going,” Chelsea said tightly.
Erika followed her to her car in silence.
Chelsea blinked back hot tears of humiliation as she drove. God, how stupid could she be to have fallen for Roman’s smooth talk?
“I can’t believe Leland didn’t tell me,” Erika said, her tone wounded. “I thought he liked me.”
“He more than likes you—he’s crazy about you,” Chelsea said. “You should keep seeing him. And he may not even have known. Marcus didn’t seem to know. Roman may have mated in secret and…run out on her.”
As she said it, nausea filled her and she almost gagged. Erika made a retching sound too. Shifters took mating extremely seriously; the idea of a shifter cheating on or abandoning their mate was literally, physically sickening to them.
* * * * *
Holly sat on a folding chair by the fire, sipping a cup of coffee, looking lovely and smug. Half the pack had come rushing back when Marcus had called up and barked out that there was an emergency. Marcus probably should have been more specific, but communication wasn’t his strong suit.
“You mated her and didn’t tell us? None of us can pick a mate but you did?” Leland demanded furiously of Roman.
Since when did any of them want to mate and settle down?
Paul and Leland, especially, had been acting extremely strange lately. He knew they’d been sneaking off in the middle of the night, when they thought everybody was asleep. Where did they go? Why were was Leland talking about picking a mate?
Paul strode up, standing next to Leland protectively.
“Roman, up until now, I would have laid down my life for you. But if you truly mate-marked a woman and then abandoned her, I can not follow you any more,” he said to Roman.
The fury that swelled up in Roman threatened to choke him, and he had to fight to keep his wolf inside his skin. But it wasn’t really his pack he was mad at.
Chelsea. This woman had hurt Chelsea. The thought made him burn with rage.
“At least someone takes Mate-Marking seriously,” Holly said in wounded tones as she strode over to Roman. She flipped her hair to the side and gestured dramatically at the Mate Mark on her neck.
“See that?” she called to everyone. “He Mate-Marked me. Yes, he was drunk off his ass when he did it. Doesn’t matter. Shifter law. I am now the Alpha’s Mate. I am his woman.”
“Holly,” Roman snarled. “What the fuck? You know I never did that. How dare you come here and lie to my pack?”
“Oh, please,” she said scornfully. “Do you think I Mate-Marked myself?”
“I did not Mate Mark you. Trust me, I’d never get that drunk,” he said nastily, and was rewarded by seeing her pout, but she still stood her ground.
“I don’t even recognize her,” Petrov yelled as he came striding up, looking annoyed.
“I do,” Zeke’s voice rang out grimly. He’d been the last to return from the job site, and he walked up to them, fists balled, his expression a mixture of rage and hurt. “She’s the woman I’ve been seeing the last few weeks. The woman I was going to propose to.”
“What the hell?” Roman was so angry that his claws shot from his fingernails and his voice ended on a lupine growl.
“Colorado, ten months ago,” she called. “After the Shifter Festival. Gathering of the packs. I didn’t get a chance to meet all of you, but I sure met Roman. He came to my house and we did it all night long, and he Mate-Marked me. I woke up with a scarred neck and an empty space in the bed beside me. I came out to your campgrounds to find my new darling mate, and surprise surprise, all of you were gone. You’d packed up and fled town.”
“We didn’t flee town,” Benjamin said indignantly. “We travel. That’s what we do. We were planning to leave that day, and we did.”
“You lied to me,” Zeke said in tones of bewilderment, striding up to her. “You told me you were a widow.”
She shrugged. “I did what had to be done. I’d finally tracked you down, and I needed to do some recon. Find out what I was dealing with. Find out if he’d Mate-Marked anybody else.”
“She told me she was shy about meeting all of you,” Zeke said bitterly. “But now that I think about it, she was always asking about the pack…and about you.” He looked at Roman with deep hurt.
“What does shifter law say about cheating on your mate?” Benjamin asked, folding his arms across his broad chest and glaring at Holly.
“She is not my mate!” Roman roared, and fur shot through his skin. He felt his fangs itching, burning in his gums, desperate to descend.
She smirked. “I am an abandoned spouse. I needed to gather some intel before I rejoined him. If challenged, I will simply explain that I was willing to do anything possible to reunite with my mate.”
“Including m
e, obviously,” Zeke said.
Holly walked up close to Roman and began stroking his arm. He furiously batted her away and took a step back.
“Don’t touch me,” he growled.
“I will take this up with the council. You will be my mate,” she told him, and her eyes gleamed with a crazy light. “Come on,” she crooned, leaning close to him. “You and me together? We were incredible. We’ll be incredible again.”
“I’ll die first, you crazy bitch,” Roman growled, and backed away from her.
“You leave me no choice! You have until tomorrow morning to agree to honor your commitment to me, or I will report you to the Council for Shifter Affairs!” she yelled after him. “You will fulfill your duties as my mate! That means everything, lover! You will fuck me, you will satisfy me, and you will father my cubs! You will treat me with respect! And I better not catch you cheating on me with that fat bitch ever again!”
There was a chorus of furious growls from the pack, and Roman whirled on her with such an expression of rage that she whimpered and cringed. She’d gone too far.
“Don’t even mention her. She’s worth a million of you, you lying, crazy bitch.” And Roman stormed off to his tent, shaking with fury.
If she reported their pack to the Council For Shifter Affairs, God knew what would happen. The warrant for Roman’s arrest was the least of his worries. He’d been fudging paperwork for his pack members. There were a few he didn’t report on at all, at their own request. As long as they spent enough time with the pack to stay sane, he didn’t care if the Council knew about them. Some of them were there under false names. They were probably fleeing something dire. They might be facing serious charges somewhere.
And deep in his mind he was wondering – was it possible that he could have Mate-Marked her? It was hard for him to believe. He did get blackout drunk from time to time, but to the best of his knowledge, it was not physically possible for a shifter to Mate-Mark when in that state.
To Mate-Mark, the shifter had to deliberately flex a set of glands that were meant for only one purpose. The glands released a substance that flowed through the teeth and caused permanent scarring on a shifter. It might be done in battle to mark up a foe, or in the heat of passion to mark a mate. The passion, either rage or sex, had to be there, and the conscious will.
He couldn’t have. Could he? Dear God, what if he had?
Chelsea. Chelsea was what he wanted. She was all he wanted. He wanted to Mate-Mark her. If he couldn’t, life wouldn’t be worth living, he realized. He’d never be the suicidal type, but life without her would just be going through the motions. She brought everything to blazing, Technicolor life; without her, everything would be dull shades of gray and white.
And yet he didn’t dare beg her to stay with him forever and accept his Mark unless he could straighten out this horrendous mess with Holly.
Chapter Eighteen
Mitch Rodgers sat at the kitchen table, looking Joyce up and down in a way that filled her with loathing and dread. She was standing by the stove, as far away from him as possible, rigid with anger and struggling to keep her expression neutral when all she wanted to do was grab a kitchen knife and bury it in his heart.
I have to stop him. I have to. But how?
She glanced at the boiling stew pot next to her. Could she dump it on his hand and scald him to death? She could, but then what would happen to her brothers?
“Lunch ready yet?” he demanded.
“Almost,” she said curtly, looking out the window.
“Don’t worry, this will all be over soon. I’ll have that land, and those shifters will be out of my hair.” He bared a big, snaggle-toothed grin. “And then finally you and I can get a chance to know each other better.”
the time he was speaking, her mind raced. She had to find a way to get out of this—a way that did not involve luring a shifter to his death, and lying down next to a man at least thirty years her senior who had kidnapped her family members.
She turned back to face him. “You know, you always got along great with the shifters in the past,” she pointed out. “Why are you turning against them now?”
“Of course I didn’t have a problem with them in the past. The shifters were some of my best customers.” He shrugged. “I don’t need them anymore. I just need their land. They should have given it up when I asked for it the first time. They’ve got thousands of acres—what’s a few hundred?”
She still wasn’t entirely sure what made him think their land was so valuable. He’d been hanging around her house for the last couple of days, ever since he kidnapped her brothers, and he’d taken a few phone calls while he was there. She’d eavesdropped on his phone conversations. He was talking to some developers from California, and she gathered that he planned to open up a hotel—half on her family’s property and half on the shifter pack’s property. He’d talked about some tests he’d run. Tests on what?
It didn’t make any sense to her. They were so far out in the wilderness, so remote. Who would come stay at a hotel here?
Whatever the reason, he’d really been working hard on it for a while. He’d captured a few wild wolves, used them to kill his own sheep and tried to pin it on the shifters, several times now. He’d stolen items of clothing and shoes from the shifters’ camp on one of the rare occasions they’d left it unguarded. He’d planted the items, along with shoe-prints from the stolen shifters, next to the dead sheep, but apparently her brothers had found the sheep first and had erased the shoe-prints and stolen the pieces of clothing from the site. They’d been trying to protect Roman’s pack.
That was why Mitch had been raging about the shifter investigator covering up for the pack—because he’d kept expecting there to be incriminating footprints and shreds of the pack’s clothing at the site of the sheep killings, and there never had been.
Why had her brothers done that, and why hadn’t they told her? Why were they trying to protect Roman’s pack? She desperately wished she could ask them.
They’d been doing it again a couple of days ago when he’d caught and kidnapped them. And now he was holding them hostage while he planned his next move.
He’d found out that Paul had a soft spot for her, apparently. Mitch was going to force her to lure Paul to the property, and then he’d kill Paul and plant his body next to more dead sheep. Mitch would claim that he’d caught Paul in the act of slaughtering the sheep and had no choice but to shoot him.
She’d managed to stall for the time being, saying she didn’t have Paul’s number and she’d have to get it from him when she ran into him at work. But she couldn’t stall much longer, she knew.
He slapped his hand down on the place setting in front of him on the table. “Where’s that stew?” he demanded. “I do like a woman who cooks for me.”
She swallowed hard and began ladling the stew into a bowl.
“I need to go find my grandmother,” she said, her hands shaking. Some of the stew splashed onto the counter. “She keeps going out to the mineral springs. She shouldn’t be alone in her condition.” For a senile old woman, her grandmother was amazingly good at sneaking off. If Joyce survived this, she swore she was going to put a damn bell on Edna.
He flashed an ugly smile as she set the bowl down in front of him. “I’ll go with you. Don’t like you wondering around out here by yourself. It’s not safe.”
The back door banged open, and Mitch started and reached for the gun he kept holstered at his side, but it was just Edna.
“What’s not safe?” Edna yelled. Apparently there was nothing wrong with her hearing. Her hair was dripping wet, and she wore a terrycloth bathrobe wrapped tightly around her as she walked in. Joyce thought that Edna seemed to be moving much more gracefully than she used to, so maybe the mineral springs were helping her a little bit.
“It’s not safe for you to go wandering off alone,” Joyce said, exasperated.
“Well, come with me next time, dear. Who’s this you’ve invited over for lunch? Shall I br
ew him some tea?” She moved towards the coffee pot.
“No!” Mitch barked, involuntarily flinching and fixing her with a steely glare.
“Listen,” Joyce said quickly, to distract him. “The thing you asked me to do. Calling Paul. I’m not going to do it unless you bring my brothers back here.”
His lip curled up in a sneer, but she rushed forward with her argument. “Don’t bother to threaten them again, because if you hurt them, you’ve got nothing to use to force me to cooperate. I will never sign the land over to you.”
“I’ve got your grandmother.”
“If you touch her, I’ll kill you with my bare hands or die trying.” She glared at him. “Getting this land is so important to you? Bring the boys back here, or you’ll get nothing from me.” She paused, swallowed hard and made her voice softer. “Besides. You keep saying that you want us to be friends. You want to get to know me better. Do you really think that will ever happen if you hurt my brothers? I can’t concentrate on anything until they’re back here. Then we can talk about the hotel and all the money you’re going to make from it. I do like a man with money.” She thought of how much she wanted to see her little brother’s faces again, and forced a smile. “Maybe we could talk about it over dinner.”
“Really?” His face lit up.
“Honest,” she lied through her teeth.
* * * * *
The sheriff’s office phone blared, startling Chelsea. She set down her coffee cup and grabbed it as Pepper waddled over next to the desk and settled into the little dog bed that Esther, the town’s seamstress, had made for her. The caller I.D. told her that it was Chief Tomlinson. With a sigh, she picked it up.
“Hello, Chief,” she said glumly. Hello, Chief, I’m quitting my job today. Why? Kinda hard to explain…
“Chelsea, I’m glad you’re in. I ran that license plate number you gave me, and what I came up with was…interesting. I think it might explain what’s going on with the sheep. Porter, what is it?”
Mate Marked: Shifters of Silver Peak Page 10