About Face (Wolf Within)

by Amy Lee Burgess

  “We didn’t fight. He just told me he wasn’t happy and walked out,” I admitted and waited for her to blame me just like everybody else had.

  Fiona’s eyes narrowed as she tossed this idea around. It seemed to be the last thing she’d expected to hear. It was clear Paddy had not said a word to her. Anger rushed through me again. Bastard men. Why did they keep each other’s secrets from their own bond mates? We would have told them in a heartbeat.

  “Bollocks,” she said, and I smiled a little because it did sound like nonsense.

  “I was mad at him because he didn’t stay with me at the tribunal. He went to the archives in Virginia to search for a precedent, and I wanted him with me. I was pissy to him when he finally did show up. Cold and distant, but I told him I just needed some time to get over it, and I would have. When he walked out two days after the tribunal, I was almost all over it. Now I can’t even remember why I was mad. He was still with me even if he wasn’t in the same goddamn room. I guess I was a bitch, but I don’t know why it was wrong to want him with me. Was it wrong?” I held my head very still so the tears in my eyes wouldn’t spill down my cheeks.

  “Only a complete bastard would have gone to the fucking archives instead of staying by your side. I would have screamed bloody murder if Paddy tried any such shite with me. He wouldn’t because he knows better. Liam really wasn’t there?”

  “Paddy didn’t tell you?”

  “He and Paddy cover each other’s asses. Always have, always will. When we were kids, if Paddy fucked up, Liam’d take the blame or cover for him, and it also went the other way, but Liam wasn’t one for getting in trouble. Paddy was always the troublemaker of our trio.

  “Well, then there was me, but they both covered my ass, so I hardly ever got blamed for anything I did. One or the other of them always got whipped instead.” Fiona’s grin was infectious, and I imagined Murphy as a young boy with his twin sister and curly-haired best friend and remembered my own childhood with Mark and Faith.

  Despite myself, I let out a prodigious yawn. Fiona was on her feet as quickly as she could move her pregnant body.

  “I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning around ten,” she said as she walked to the front door. “We’ll go shopping, out to lunch. Girl stuff. Unless my stupid brother comes home, but let’s not hold our breath on that one. Good night, Stanzie.”

  I waved goodbye and watched her leave, then I took my mug into the pristine bathroom. Gold tile covered the floor and walls. The pedestal sink gleamed white with chrome fixtures. A glass door shielded the soaker tub and shower, and I drew a bath as I sipped my tea.

  Murphy did not have bubble bath, but he did have Epsom salts—most Pack did because the day after we shifted could be a sore one. I poured a healthy amount into the warm water, watched it dissolve and then let my clothes fall to the gold tiles.

  The water, scented like eucalyptus, was warm and enveloping. I closed my eyes and lay submerged to my neck. When I next opened my eyes, the water was clammy cold, and my fingers and toes were pruned.

  Murphy had not changed the sheets before he’d left for Belfast, and I hugged his Murphy-scented pillow tight to my chest as I curled beneath the duvet and let sleep sweep me under again.

  Chapter 6

  “This doesn’t look like a shoe store.” I surveyed the pretty, terraced row houses with suspicion. We weren’t even in Dublin proper anymore. The four houses were semidetached with a wide swath of green grass and attractive flagstone walkways leading to the front doors. Fee—she insisted I call her by her nickname since the only time anyone called her Fiona was when she was in trouble—laughed and thrust open the car door.

  “Get off your ass, you chickenshit, and come meet my parents.” She waddled down the walk of the row house on the end, the one with the kelly green door.

  “Fuck me,” I muttered, but I followed her. Damn Alpha female bitch.

  The door opened before I made it to the front steps, and a tall, blond woman stared past Fee’s shoulder straight at me. Her eyes were hazel, like Fee’s, but I would know this woman as Murphy’s mother anywhere. She even had his arrogant stare, the one he never used on me anymore. Or, at least, he hadn’t before he’d left me.

  My stomach clenched, and for a moment vomit burned the back of my throat. Damn Fee. Damn her. I wasn’t ready for this.

  “Siobhan, this is Constance Newcastle. Stanzie, this is Siobhan Carmichael, my mother.” Fee performed the introductions with a breezy smile, but there was an undertone of worry buried in her voice.

  “Well, I’ll have to meet you properly some other time. I’m off to do the marketing.” For the first time I noticed Siobhan had her purse slung over her shoulder and keys in her hand.

  “Siobhan,” said Fee with a sigh of impatience. “What the hell? Your son’s bond mate shows up on your doorstep and you’re off to the market? Why don’t you just spit in her face instead of this passive-aggressive shite?”

  Siobhan Carmichael’s expression remained frozen and polite. Now I had a facial expression to add to the tone I remembered from the phone calls.

  Every Sunday before Murphy left me, he’d called to speak to his family. He’d told me that on Sundays the family gathered for dinner at Siobhan and Glenn’s house. After Sorcha’s death, when he’d lived in Belfast, he’d called to try to convince them he was fine living alone. After he bonded with me, he’d called to tell them how happy he was with me.

  “Not happy enough to bring you home to the pack,” Siobhan had observed once. Murphy spent five minutes telling her how happy he was before he’d handed me the phone. It had been the only thing she’d said to me before she’d passed the phone to her chattier daughter.

  Siobhan Carmichael blamed me for keeping her son away from his pack, and now she probably blamed me for Murphy’s return without me. Her next words proved it.

  “I’m not rearranging my schedule for a woman who decided after four months it might be nice to come visit Liam. Her birthday’s this month. Liam told me. So you know she’s here to break the bond. I don’t care to disrupt my day to meet my son’s soon-to-be former bond mate. Now if you please, move aside so I can pass. Using your belly as a barrier is a terrible atrocity, Fiona Carmichael. I taught you better than that, I hope.”

  “I’m not using it as a barrier, damn it, I’m just huge,” snapped Fee. She moved aside, and as her mother swept by, she rolled her eyes at me to make me laugh. I didn’t find it remotely funny.

  I wanted to tell Siobhan I wasn’t here to break the bond with Murphy, but when she sailed past me, the spit dried up in my mouth, and my vocal cords shriveled. Speech was impossible, tears a distinct possibility.

  “Is Da inside?” Fee yelled after her mother.

  “Why don’t you go in and find out instead of bellowing like a cow in the street in front of my neighbors,” Siobhan screeched back.

  Fee gave her the finger.

  “Is that any sort of a gesture to give your own mother, you little viper?” Siobhan didn’t turn back and kept up her brisk pace.

  “How the hell can she see behind her? Does she have eyes in the back of her frigging skull?” Fee muttered.

  “I don’t need to see you to know what you’re doing. Don’t be such a dimwit.” Siobhan increased her speed and disappeared around the corner.

  Sputtering, Fee stalked through the open doorway into her parents’ house.

  “Well, come on, goddamn you,” she screamed back at me. My feet were rooted to the sidewalk. This was pure hell.

  “You don’t have to shout,” I yelled. Somehow, I managed to move forward.

  Inside, it smelled of apples and spice.

  “Pie!” Fee made a beeline for what I presumed was the kitchen.

  I followed, reluctant to be left behind in the narrow hallway crammed full of occasional tables topped with knickknacks—mostly glass and china. The walls were crowded with photographs of Murphy and Fee. They got younger as I advanced. By the time I reached the kitchen doorway, they were babies in
blue and red sailor suits complete with dorky hats. Baby Fee slept peacefully, while baby Murphy scowled. It was probably gas, but I preferred to believe even as an infant Murphy would have hated that hat.

  His pictures jolted me. I wanted to see him so badly it was like a missing piece in the puzzle that was me. What would his first words to me be? “Go away?” “I’m glad you came?” Maybe he wouldn’t even speak—he’d just turn and walk away. He might even refuse to see me at all.

  My bottom lip quivered, and I bit it, the traitorous thing. I was not going to be reduced to tears by the sight of Murphy in a sailor suit. No way.

  A tall, ruggedly good-looking man sat at the kitchen table, a plate with pie crumbs in front of him next to a mug of steaming tea. He was reading a book about golf, but when I walked into the room, he set it aside so he could look at me.

  Fee was at the kitchen counter greedily dishing herself a slice of apple pie. Pregnant Pack women were bottomless pits. We’d just had lunch and she’d eaten half of mine.

  “Pie, Stanz?” She called over her shoulder. I wanted to slap her for being so goddamn nonchalant, but she was pregnant and my Alpha. If I ever got to be pregnant and an Alpha, I would never use either one against a defenseless pack mate. I would be above that shit.

  Ha. The chances of me ever being bonded again, let alone pregnant and Alpha, were about as remote as Glenn Murphy’s brown eyes. I gulped.

  “Hello.” He rose to his feet. Although taller than his son and huskier, his voice was so like Murphy’s I wanted to cry. “We finally meet in person, Constance.”

  He held out his hand for me to shake. If Murphy had been the one to introduce us in person would he have hugged me? Probably.

  “Hello, Glenn.” He had a firm, practiced handshake. I remembered then he was a Regional Councilor. Had I blundered? Should I have referred to him as Councilor? It was tricky since I was bonded to his son.

  Fee deposited two plates of pie on the table and sat down in the chair next to her father’s. She’d pushed my piece across the table so I’d have to sit on his other side. Bitch. Why couldn’t I sit at the perfectly good chair at the foot of the table?

  “Sit down.” Glenn gestured at the chair, and I sat, but I didn’t eat. It was all I could do not to puke. “What precisely are your intentions? Why are you here?”

  Fee choked on a bite of her pie. “Da, let the woman eat her pie before you interrogate the shite out of her. You bloody Councilors are all the same. She’s not facing a tribunal. This is a family visit, for fuck’s sake.”

  “It’s all right, Fee.” I found my voice somehow and stared straight into Councilor Glenn Murphy’s brown eyes. “I’m here to try to fix things between me and your son.”

  He met my gaze and held it for an excruciating moment. If I looked away first, I was a liar, but goddamn, he had an Alpha’s stare, and it was so hard not to bow down.

  A slow, attractive grin spread across his face.

  “Well, that’s fine,” he said. “I think I’ll have more pie before I go back to my office.”

  “His office is upstairs in the spare room,” said Fee as she happily chomped her pie. “Being a Councilor has its perks. He could work in his pajamas if Siobhan would let him.”

  “I’ve tried,” he agreed with a laugh as he pushed back his chair. “No dice. Apparently even over the phone people would be able to deduce I was in my robe and slippers.”

  Fee snorted and something twisted tight inside me loosened just a little bit. Enough so that the pie on my plate looked appetizing.

  After we finished our pie, Glenn Murphy took me into his den while Fee insisted on washing the dishes. I went with him, and without Fee as a buffer, all my confidence drained away. This was Murphy’s father. I wanted his family to like me. Hell, I wanted them to love me. I wanted a family.

  The den was small and very masculine. Lots of plaid and brass. A huge desk took up most of the room, and for a moment I thought he might sit behind it. If he did, I knew I’d shrivel into a ball of desperate humiliation. He was already intimidating enough.

  Instead, he led me to a plaid sofa and sat down beside me. Up close I could see the fine lines radiating from the corners of his eyes. He looked like a man approaching his forties, which made him in his sixties from a Pack perspective.

  He didn’t look like Murphy, except they had the same forest-brown eye color, but when he spoke, it was as if Murphy were in the room with me. I could listen to him talk all day. As long as he didn’t ask me hard questions.

  “What in the world is wrong between you and Liam?” A hard question. Goddamn it.

  I studied the brown carpet with increasing desperation, aware of my thundering heartbeat and the stench of guilt rising from my skin.

  “I don’t know,” I confessed, but it was the wrong answer. Glenn Murphy frowned. He smelled like cherry tobacco, and I looked around the room. Yes, there on the edge of the desk in a large green glass ashtray was a pipe.

  “You came here to make it up to him, didn’t you?” He used his Councilor’s voice, and a flare of resentment stabbed through me. I was family, not some fucking witness at a tribunal.

  “He left me, Councilor,” I said and the man frowned again.

  “Will you not call me Glenn? What’s this Councilor shite?” He got up and began to pace restlessly.

  “This feels like an interrogation,” I said.

  “It’s a bloody conversation.” He shot me a dark look, and I wanted to leave the room in the worst way. Damn Fiona. Damn her Alpha female meddling ass. Why couldn’t introductions to her parents have waited until after I’d worked things out with Murphy? If I did. He wouldn’t have left me alone with his father to be badgered because if we were together again, it would be water under the bridge.

  “He left me,” I repeated. I stared at his shoes, not him. He had on brown loafers that needed to be thrown out. What was it with the Murphy men that they had to wear shoes until they begged to be put out of their misery? “I have no idea why.”

  “Bollocks.” He sounded so much like Murphy my heart skipped. “A man just doesn’t walk away from his bond mate without both of them knowing the reason why.”

  “I’m here to get back with him. Isn’t that enough?” My hands clenched into fists, and the apple pie rolled around in my gut until I suspected I might puke on Councilor Glenn Murphy’s brown carpet. And I was damned if I’d be the one to clean it up either.

  “Liam had a rough time of it with Sorcha and after her death. He needs someone stable in his life, not some flighty American girl who can’t even look me in the eye. I’m a Councilor. My experience has taught me that people who can’t look me in the eye have something to hide. What are you hiding? If you’re here to make a mess of his life again, I suggest you go back where you came from.”

  “Do you know how hard it was to come here?” The words cut like ground glass in my throat. I forced my gaze to meet his. “Do you have any idea?”

  “No,” he answered. “I don’t. Because I don’t know you. You seem nice enough on the surface, but I want to know what’s beneath it. Liam needs a good woman. He deserves one. I don’t know the particulars of how you two came to be together, but Jason Allerton had a hand in it, and that disturbs me.”

  “Jason Allerton is a good man. He tried to help us.” Now I was pissed.

  Glenn Murphy, incredibly, smiled at me. “So you do know how to be loyal. That’s the first positive thing I’ve seen today. You just might be good enough for my son, woman, but you’ll need to prove yourself.”

  “How?” Goddamn Mac Tire males and the way they believed everyone had to go around proving themselves all the damn time. Why couldn’t we just be who we were instead of constantly trying to prove our worth to other people?

  “By making the poor bastard smile again for starters,” he said. “He’s been back for four months, and I can count the conversations he’s had with me on one hand. None of them deep, all of them short. He talked to me more when he was gallivanting thro
ugh America with you. Get him to talk to his da, and I’ll be happy. Stick with him, and I’ll be happier still.”

  “I’m not the one who left,” I whispered. I looked into Glenn Murphy’s handsome face and wished I knew him better. Would he become a good friend in time? Or would he set obstacle after obstacle in my path? Make me jump through hoops just like my father had? I was so tired of jumping through hoops.

  “Well, see that you’re the one who stays,” he suggested.

  Chapter 7

  The red-haired giant, Colm, was on duty outside An Puca again. He saw me with Fee and opened the green pub door.

  “Still no ring,” I muttered, waving my ringless fingers in front of his face on my way past him

  “Anyone with the Alphas gets in,” he informed me, and then he winked. His green eyes were frankly appreciative, and I knew I looked a hundred percent better than I had the night before. In fact, I looked damned good.

  A new pair of black ruched leggings with a black sleeveless scoop neck tunic fitted me to perfection. They were new purchases from my Fee-inspired shopping spree. After we’d left her parents’ home, I’d splurged on myself in the vain attempt to push Glenn Murphy out of my head. My favorite purchases of the day were my new black platform ankle boots with dull gold buckles and a dark purple leather hobo bag. I’d braided my hair to the side and wore my bond pendant on the thick silver evening chain. It and a pair of silver studs were my only jewelry.

  It was a cool night so I wore a purple leather jacket, also a new purchase.

  Inside the pub it was warm, and I left my jacket and purse at the table near the bar where Fee held court. Before she could sit all the way down, a plate of sausage and mashed potatoes was on the table and a pitcher of water.

  Alannah Doyle looked at me. “Bangers and mash, the same as Fee?”

  I nodded. I’d never heard sausage referred to as bangers before, but this was Ireland. A sudden stab of homesickness assailed me. What the fuck was I doing here?