Colt swallowed and turned his gaze up to the ceiling. My job. Right. He was unpracticed in being a listening ear. The guys in the pack didn’t lay their burdens out for their packmates to brainstorm about, and his mother had never told his father shit because his father probably wouldn’t have done shit. Colt had never thought that was unusual until he met the Carbones. At first, he’d thought the Carbones were unusual in their constant communication. It had taken a year for Colt to figure out that they actually respected each other. He was pretty damned pathetic.
She skimmed her fingers up his chest and grazed the stubble on the underside of his jaw. Her gaze was on his face now, and there was no question that she saw him. She was too meticulous with her strokes for her to just be fidgeting, though.
Her hands moved with purpose, as did her lips, which shaped whispers.
“I was wondering if you’d shave. I prefer this to the beard. I like being able to see your face.”
“Yeah?” He breathed in time to the rhythmic gliding of her thumbs against his cheeks and closed his eyes.
Every gentle touch seemed to loosen some tight knot, either in his body or in his energy. It was like she was molding it beneath her fingers, smoothing the rough edges. Forcing out the garbage.
“Mmm, you’re a bit of an alpha yourself, aren’t you?” he asked as her fingers worked down his chest again. “I don’t know anyone else who can move power around like that. I bet your old alpha was happy to see you leave.”
“He didn’t know I could do it. I would have had to touch him for him to know. And I think the gift is stronger now that I have your bite.”
“Happy to be useful.”
She laughed. “Always talking back, huh?”
“Can’t help it.”
“I’m seeing that.” She sighed and backed away, crossing her arms over her chest.
Come back.
“Hard to be so close and not touch you,” she said. “You’re distracting.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“When you’re trying to have a conversation about things that aren’t sex? Yes. Listen, I raised my sisters more than my parents did, really, from the time I was eleven or twelve. It was a shitty arrangement, but we didn’t have a choice. While they worked, I babysat. Try as I might to get them to toughen up, they just aren’t fighters.”
“No one really expects female wolves to be.” Not everyone could be like Lisa, just like how not every man could be a true alpha, even if he somehow managed to steal the position.
“I’ve got less than six months to get the seventeen-year old out. My parents won’t be able to do it from the inside because they’ve got no clout, but I can do it from here. Everyone knows I’m a wildcard. The pack higher-ups will leave my parents alone, thinking it is all my idea. The pack won’t give them a hard time if the girls get absorbed into this pack first. They can’t leave without their alpha’s permission, or Adam’s consent for them to come, though.”
“I don’t think Adam would deny them, but why can’t they do what you did and answer a mate call? There’s a chance they could end up somewhere better.”
“Because mate calls are unpredictable. My old alpha is going to try to pair Graciella off the day she turns eighteen, and there may not be a call in time.”
He rubbed his chin and furrowed his brow. He could figure it out. He was the best tactician in the pack, and the guys relied on him to find simple solutions to complicated problems. He could do that for Lisa, too. He could prove he was good for something besides being an asshole with a big mouth.
And…hell, maybe he liked talking to her a little. He didn’t have conversations with the guys. They dealt more in grunts than words, and Colt was a talker. Always had been.
“But even if you get her out, your other sister will be on the hook, and their alpha will know the game by then. He’ll be waiting to pounce and reject any requests that come through.”
“That’s why I have to get them out together. I just need to figure out how.”
Her voice always seemed to hold a note of persistence when she talked about her family. Colt had never been moved to such sentiment by anyone. He’d never wanted to fight for anyone, besides himself. His woman was scrappy. He couldn’t deny that. She wasn’t what he’d imagined he’d get in a mate, because he hadn’t really known that women like her existed.
“In my old pack,” he said, “there used to be a custom that wolves would get promised during their adolescence. Arranged matings, I guess. Everyone would know about them, so none of the males would pursue the females that had already been earmarked. The day they turned eighteen, the women would get packed up and shipped off to their mates, no questions asked.”
Lisa rubbed her chin and narrowed her bewitching, dark eyes. “That custom is widespread. People don’t do it much anymore, but I don’t see why I couldn’t try it. The problem is, there are no males here of the right age, or even any eligible ones for that matter.” She pressed her palm against his belly and slid it down idly, chewing on her bottom lip as she went quiet in her thoughts.
He drew in a deep breath and let her fondle. His toes curled in his boots and ass cheeks clenched with each rasp of her fingernails against his tender skin.
And then she stopped.
“Don’t stop.”
“Huh?” She cast her gaze upward and furrowed her brow. She probably hadn’t even realized she’d started touching him again.
“Touching me. I mean, it’s okay, if you want to. I won’t get pissed, although I do feel a little teased. Not helping my blue balls any, but I’m not going to say no to your hand being on my dick.”
She put her hand back and smirked. “Do any of you men have brothers or cousins young enough for a couple of naive wolves?”
“I don’t.”
“Damn.” Her smile fell away, as did her hand.
No, no, no. You’re failing her. Fix it, dipshit. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it. He couldn’t remember ever just holding a woman’s hand, besides his mother’s. “Hey, I’ll ask around. Give me a few hours.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You might be better off asking the other mates, though. You’re all younger than us. There’s probably one or two who have brothers who are close to being expelled from their packs anyway. Adam would definitely take them in.”
“And if they don’t end up liking each other, it won’t matter, because they’ll be free to do what they want.”
“And who they want.”
She gave his cock head a punishing squeeze that had him spreading his legs for balance. “And here I was thinking you were being helpful.”
“I’m trying. Goddess knows I am. I say stupid shit all the time.” He thrust his hips a bit and she graciously loosened her grip on him enough to let his cock slide through it. “Fuck. I’m so hard, it hurts.”
“You’re dripping.” She worked her thumb over the swollen head, and he tamped down a pathetic moan. “You could jack off, you know.”
“I probably should, and soon.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“So many things.” He’d been hoping she’d let him fuck her, for one, but mostly he hadn’t because she didn’t tell him he could. After he’d given her his mark that first night, she’d told him to go take care of himself, but he hadn’t had a chance to. He’d been too busy feeling sorry for himself.
“Use words, wolf.”
Wolf.
He closed his eyes and forced some air through his teeth. “No. Colt. I’m Colt.”
She called him wolf, just like the alpha who’d taken his father’s job. Wolf—as if he didn’t have a name, or at least that it wasn’t worth being learned.
Wolf, as if he was some useless thing, one step away from being cast out on his ass with no one to care for him or about him.
He’d thought maybe she might care, but obviously she didn’t. She was just another user.
He wasn’t going to be called wolf in his own house, not even by a woman he�
�d let do anything to him. There, he drew the line.
He swallowed and straightened his spine. “Well, princess, I didn’t do it because I figured it was your job, and I wanted to save all of my cum for your tight snatch.”
Her eyes went wide and he chuckled, spreading his legs a bit farther apart. He placed her other hand on his cock and guided her in rubbing him.
“Am I being helpful now, princess?”
She gave his cock a hard pluck and walked away. “Fuck you.”
“Nah,” he called after her. “I’m gonna do exactly what you said and go fuck myself.”
At least that was reliable. He didn’t need anyone else. He had himself, same as always.
CHAPTER FIVE
Even when Lisa wasn’t in her wolf form, there were certain perks to having supernatural wiring. For one thing, her nose gave her information that her eyes and ears didn’t.
She could see anger on Colt’s face and in his confrontational body language, and hear it in his thunderously deep voice. But anger wasn’t what she smelled. She was beginning to discern the nuances in scents the longer she spent around wolves and in her wolf form. Every strong emotion had its own hormone bouquet, and what Colt was feeling wasn’t just anger, though there was a bit of that there. There was something else that she couldn’t quite put a figurative finger on, but it gave her pause…so she gave him space.
She wasn’t going to try to psychoanalyze him. Every wolf she knew was some degree of fucked up—herself included—and wolves generally weren’t so great at verbalizing what was wrong. It’d be too deep-seated and sewn into their personalities. But her parents had taught her to speak up, at least in her own house, and to pull up the people around her. If everyone around her were happy, she’d be happier, too.
She and Colt were dancing around each other, tiptoeing over actual discourse, and discussing nothing about their relationship. She’d stormed into his house thinking he needed to be fixed—and maybe he did—but she’d given little thought to why he needed to be fixed. Only that he did. Then she’d managed to piss him off in a way she still hadn’t been able to figure out. It wasn’t because she was bossy, but there’d been some other trigger. Something she’d said, but she couldn’t determine what.
After a month of avoiding Colt at every turn, and him doing the same by picking up all those overtime shifts he’d claimed before to not want, she met Ashley at the coffee shop in Norseton. They settled at a table by the window, and Lisa propped her laptop bag against her chair legs. She’d hoped to get a bit of work done outside of the house. Colt supposedly had the day off, so if she were the reason he didn’t want to be at home, she’d clear away for a while.
Ashley pushed a swath of her dark hair back from her face and tented her fingers. “So, how are your sisters?”
Lisa let out a long breath and swirled the coffee stirrer through her cappuccino’s foamy top. “Hanging in there the best they can. Their alpha keeps stopping by the house to supposedly check up on them when my parents aren’t home, and my folks usually aren’t. They’ve got five jobs between the two of them. They’re still trying to dig themselves out of the hole. That sleazebag wouldn’t let them file for bankruptcy earlier this year.”
“Because the trustee would question why so much of their money was going to the alpha in dues?”
“Yep.” Adam may be the only alpha Lisa knew of who didn’t collect dues. Mrs. Carbone did oversee a wolf fund that was earmarked for things like courtyard improvements, but every penny of that money was annotated on a log, and the log was kept just inside Alpha’s front door where everyone could find it, if they wanted to.
“Did your sisters open the door for him?”
“They try not to, but sometimes he hears, you know? Can hear them walking up to the peephole, and he makes them open up.”
“What does he want?”
Lisa shrugged. “Stupid shit. He doesn’t say much, but the girls say they feel like he’s sizing them up and making mental notes. It’s so fucking gross. I wish I were there. He didn’t do that shit when I was there.”
“Did you talk to Alpha?”
“Yeah, I talked to Adam. He’s a busy guy, though.” Lisa scoffed and took a sip of her coffee. “He actually works for a living, unlike some alphas.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said he’d take care of it, whatever that means. Then some call came in and he had to run off. That was last week. I’m getting more and more paranoid that something bad’ll happen before I have a chance to do anything for them. I wish they could all leave, but my parents wouldn’t uproot themselves with my grandparents still being in the area. They’re all old, and you know the pack’s not gonna take care of them the way they should, especially if my parents transfer out.”
“That’s assuming your old alpha would even let them transfer out.”
“He wouldn’t. No way. He wouldn’t give up two dues-paying members of the pack unless they were troublemakers, and as docile as they’ve been in public up to this point, no one would take them seriously if they did make a stink now.”
“But they raised you to make a stink.”
“Yeah. I’m not sure what they saw in me to smack that chosen one label on my forehead, but here I am.”
“And there they are.” Ashley rolled her eyes and put her back to the window.
Pushing up an eyebrow, Lisa looked out it. Three out of five Pack males were standing outside the deli across the street clutching bags in their big mitts—Anton, Vic, and Colt.
Shit. Lisa put her back to the window, too, and muttered, “Trouble in paradise?”
“Haven’t gotten to paradise yet. We’re still on the freakin’ plane, and it’s circling around the island because the landing strip is too short or something.”
“Poignant.”
“It’s the truth. He hates me.”
“What?” Lisa turned slightly and cut a sideways gaze to Alpha’s son. From the interactions she’d had with him in five weeks, she’d known him to be a friendly guy. He was charming and well mannered, but of course he was, given Mrs. Carbone’s close influence. He should have been an easy wolf to get along with. Not like Colt.
Colt…
Colt, who was mysteriously quiet as his peers chatted in the doorway. The man always had something to say, but he sat on the bench outside the deli fondling his bag and staring at something—or perhaps nothing—down the street.
Lisa suspected that if she got close enough to smell him, he’d discern he was sad. She might even discern that she was to blame for it.
What did I do?
She had to figure it out soon, and not just because she needed his help. She may have had dominatrix tendencies, but she was also a toucher, and she desperately wanted to touch her mouthy mate. The separation was driving her a little battier with each passing day. Mrs. Carbone had said that was normal. It wouldn’t work that way if it weren’t a good match. Deep down, Lisa knew it was. They were just having a bumpy-as-hell start, but she’d never been afraid to work for things she wanted.
She set down her coffee cup and pushed back from the table. “I’ll be right back. Babysit my laptop, will you?”
“Yep,” Ashley said.
Lisa crossed the street, waving at the guys in the doorway as she cut between two parked cars.
Colt turned, spotted her, and rolled his eyes before fixing his attention on the open bag on his lap.
She kept her distance from him and leaned against the parking meter. “Doesn’t Mrs. Carbone usually make you guys lunch?” The question was for Colt, but she kept her gaze on Vic and Anton.
“Mom’s tied up at the moment,” Vic said. “There’s some sort of big meeting at the executive mansion, and she’s up to her elbows in crudités, whatever those are.”
Lisa stifled a snicker. “Cut-up vegetables for hors d’oeurves. Carrots and celery. Raw peppers. That kind of thing.”
“Rabbit food.”
She shrugged. “Not everyone has wolf appetites.”
And speaking of appetites…
She turned to the walking ball of sex on the bench and drummed her fingers atop the meter. She could hardly stand being in the same house with the man and not being able to touch him every time he stomped past. She wanted to grab him by his belt and yank him into submission—to quiet him and pry some words out of him. She needed to see what was wrong—how she’d offended him, because she obviously had, even if she couldn’t discern why. She was usually so much better at that, but none of her previous partners had been as wild as her husband.
“Thank you for rewiring all the Internet stuff,” she began. “I don’t even know when you did it. You were so quiet, and I’ve hardly left the house in a week.” Quarterly taxes were due, and she’d been number crunching all through the night.
“Last night while you slept.”
“Oh.” She hadn’t heard a thing. There should have at least been a little swearing. If not that, then certainly some crashing and flailing. Wolves weren’t known for being delicate.
Vic perched against the far arm of the bench and set his bag beside Colt. He gave the other man’s shoulder a nudge. “Coming down with something? Not like you to do your good deeds in secret. You want instant approval.”
Colt didn’t respond, except to cut his pale gaze to his peer, and then he took a bite of his sandwich. Looked like turkey and cheese. No lettuce, no tomato—no so-called “rabbit food.”
She didn’t even know what the man liked to eat. They had yet to sit down at the same table. Even when they were both in the kitchen at the same time—perhaps her on her laptop and him having a quick meal—he’d eat at the counter, turned away from her.
They may have been mates, but they certainly weren’t acting like they were married. She knew couples like them. They only ever interacted by choice when the woman was fertile and her mate couldn’t resist her. That period had come and gone. Colt had stared at her a hell of a lot, and the bulge in his pants indicated that he was raring to go, but he’d kept his hands to himself—and his words, too.
That had been just fine for her a month ago. Now, she was becoming increasingly annoyed by it. He was not only ignoring her, but suppressing his basest notions, too. That took a lot of willpower.
Idler (Norseton Wolves Book 3) Page 5