by Terry Spear
Once CJ was settled in the backseat of Brett’s car, she climbed into the front and Brett said, “I didn’t think to mention it, but we better run by your place so you can pack an overnight bag.”
“Uh, yeah, I guess so.” Laurel should have considered it, but then again, she hadn’t wanted anyone, her sisters included, to believe she had planned to stay with CJ all along. Yet, witnessing his bright smile when he saw her arrive, she had felt her heart flutter with happiness. How could she have done anything but agree to stay with him?
When they arrived at her place, she hoped to slip into the house and not wake her sisters, but being wolves, they both heard her shut the front door and had to investigate. She wasn’t certain if they wanted to ensure it was just her returning to the house, or if they wanted to know why she had returned and not remained with CJ.
As if choreographed, both of them opened their bedroom doors and peered out, frowned, and said, “What are you doing back here?”
She almost laughed at their growly looks.
“Don’t worry. I won’t ruin your plans. I’m grabbing an overnight bag.”
Instantly, their expressions brightened. “Oh good,” Ellie said. “Here I thought I’d have to go over there and stay with CJ instead.” As if Ellie would even consider such a thing!
They followed Laurel into her bedroom.
“You both can sleep. No need to keep me company. I’ll only be a second.” Laurel hurried to grab a change of clothes and some pajamas.
“Those?” Meghan started rummaging through Laurel’s sleepwear drawer. “What about this?” She held up a see-through, lace shorty nightie that Laurel loved.
“I’m not sleeping with him. And I’m not wearing that around him. And it’s for summer, not winter.”
“You’ll get hot. If I was sleeping with him, I’d get hot.” Ellie smiled.
“He’s bruised and skinned up. I’m not sleeping with him.”
“Oh.” Meghan pulled another pajama set out. “How about this one?”
Laurel grabbed it from her, shoved it in the drawer, shut it, and headed for the bathroom. “They’re waiting in the car for me, probably wondering why I’m taking so long. And you are not helping. CJ needs to rest so he can heal quicker.”
“He’ll heal quicker when you’re in his bed, guaranteed.” Meghan leaned against the bathroom doorjamb while Laurel grabbed some of her personal items, ignoring her sister’s comment.
“Even agreeing to stay with him probably cheered him tremendously.” Ellie moved out of the doorway to let Laurel leave.
Laurel jogged down the stairs, hoping her sisters wouldn’t follow her. She made a detour into the kitchen and grabbed the box of chocolate cake off the counter. She wasn’t certain it would lift CJ’s spirits, but if she were him and feeling like he was, the cake would definitely lift hers.
“You’re taking the chocolate cake?” Ellie said from the top of the stairs.
“We didn’t even get a piece of it yet,” Meghan teased.
Laurel knew they didn’t care or they would have gotten a piece already.
“Night!”
“Give him extra tender, loving care from us,” Meghan said.
“Pleasant dreams,” Ellie said.
Laurel shook her head at her sisters, then returned to Brett’s car. CJ was sound asleep, for which she was glad. She climbed in as quietly as she could, hoping that closing her door wouldn’t wake him. Brett just smiled at her and drove them to CJ’s house, located past a treed park and several walking trails. She thought how lovely it would be to run as a wolf there at night when everyone had gone to bed. She imagined that the park had been designed for wolves who lived close to town and still wanted a place to run.
When they arrived at CJ’s home, she thought how beautiful it was. French provincial style, fashionable, elegant, a big circular drive with a stand of birch trees in the center. She had thought his house might have had a simpler design. She loved it. And she couldn’t help thinking about living there—with him. She knew that was far-fetched, and yet a little thrill of excitement welled up in her at the thought. A real home. Roots. A pack. CJ. Yeah, she could see it.
As soon as Brett parked his car in the drive and shut off the engine, it was as if CJ’s wolf senses were awakened and he knew at once that he was home. He sat up, groaned a little, and then smiled to see her sitting in the front seat, as if he’d forgotten she was coming home with him.
Even though he objected to Brett helping him into the house while she carried in the cake and her bag, his brother reminded him, “I told Laurel you’d be on your best behavior while she stayed with you.”
She smiled at the brothers and unlocked the door. As they entered the house, the lights turned on immediately.
Brett told her the security code and where the alarm was located while he helped CJ in. She quickly disarmed it, then set the cake in the kitchen. It was all done in blue and white tile, and she loved the color scheme. Then she found Brett helping CJ to his bed in a large master bedroom suite, complete with private bath, wide-screen TV, and sitting area. She wondered what he watched in bed. She could envision seeing Christmas stories on the TV as she snuggled with him.
Everything in the room was decorated in forest greens and burgundies, making it look like a hunting lodge, very masculine and wolfish, yet really appealing to her nature too, probably owing to her wolfish side. It had a Victorian feel, not new age, and she loved that too.
“I’ll check on you both in the morning.” Brett patted her on the shoulder in a brotherly way. “Don’t let him give you a hard time.”
“I heard that,” CJ said, frowning at him.
“He’ll be fine.” Laurel walked Brett to the front door, said good night, then shut the door and locked it. She thought about getting CJ a slice of cake, but figured it was so late now that he’d probably rather just sleep. She had every intention of sleeping on the velour couch in his living room, if he didn’t have another furnished bedroom.
Tired, and ready to go to bed herself, Laurel returned to CJ’s bedroom. “Do you want me to remove your clothes?”
“Hell, yeah,” he said, and the growly expression immediately vanished. He held his arms out to her, his smile stretching from ear to ear.
“You’re hurting,” she said, drawing closer.
“Hell, one of the techs swabbed down all the insignificant scratches, just to look like he was doing something. I look great for getting a she-wolf’s sympathy, don’t I?”
She chuckled, loving his sense of humor, but then she frowned, unable to imagine him falling like that and surviving. “You could have been killed.”
“I wasn’t. I’m fine.” He let out his breath. “Thank you for staying with me tonight. Staying at the vet clinic wasn’t an option.”
She laughed and began untying his boots. “I would never have thought that an injured pack member would be taken to the vet clinic. What would they have done with you for the night? Put you in a cage?”
“No way. If I’d been injured that badly, Doc Mitchell would have transferred me to the human clinic. Doc Mitchell was called to come out since he’s more used to trudging through the woods. I was hurting at the time, so I didn’t want to shift in the cold and have to try to get dressed in a hurry.”
She sighed. “I really worried about you. Everyone was.”
“I’m sorry. I had no way to get ahold of you.”
“Darien and Lelandi kept me informed.”
“I’m glad. And Trevor was watching over things there.”
“Yeah.”
“I think more than a third of our pack members were out hunting for me. If any bunnies were around, they must have been quivering their little tails off.”
Smiling, she shook her head. “I’m glad the men found you okay.” She pulled off a boot and dumped it on the floor, and then the other. Once she’d slipped off his socks, she moved to unbutton his blue flannel shirt. He wasn’t wearing a sweater, but she supposed that was because he hadn’t wa
nted to wear anything else over his cuts and bruises.
When her fingers touched his top button, he wrapped his hands around hers. “No matter what we discover,” CJ said, his voice dark and serious, “I want you to stay here. With me, the pack. You and your sisters.”
She looked up at him. He was frowning at her, appearing a little anxious.
“Because of what we might discover about how our aunt disappeared?”
“Because I want you in my life.”
She took a deep breath and let it out. He was talking of mating with her? But she didn’t want to assume that’s what he was saying and make a fool of herself.
“What do you want, Laurel? Beyond learning what happened to your aunt? Do you always want to move to new locations and remodel old hotels? Do you feel that’s your calling? Or is it just something you love to do, but given a choice—like staying here with the pack, with me—you might consider just running the hotel and still be happy?”
“What if we learn your father was involved in my aunt’s disappearance?”
“Then he was involved. It won’t come between us.”
“What if it was someone else, someone close to you in the pack, and you felt resentful that we discovered the truth and upset everyone?”
“We can’t allow pack members to murder people without paying the price, no matter how long ago it happened or who they are or how well they’re liked. If it was due to extenuating circumstances—not saying that it was in your aunt’s case, but just an example, if someone was defending himself and fatally injured the one attacking him, then we would have to take that into consideration.” He ran his hands down her arms as she worked on his buttons again. “Did you find any secret compartments in the furniture that your aunt owned?”
“No. Not yet at least. Maybe they don’t have any. Do you have any cabinetmakers in the pack?”
“Jacob, the electrician. He’s made furniture on and off. We could have him take a look at the pieces. When you were looking over the old photos, did you see if your aunt was in any of them?”
“Aunt Clarinda didn’t look like us, unfortunately. She was darker haired than Mom, finer boned, taller. I didn’t see anyone in any of the photos that looked like her. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t there. Just that she wasn’t photographed in those particular photos.”
“I agree. Here, let’s take off your snow boots,” CJ said.
She gave him a look like she knew where this was headed.
“It’s late. You have to sleep. You can’t sleep in your boots.”
She smiled, sat down on the bed, and removed her boots and socks. Then she stood and helped him out of his shirt, though she was certain he didn’t need her help and was just enjoying her touch and the closeness it afforded him.
“Did you see any sign of the white wolf?” she asked.
He hesitated to say.
“You did. Brett didn’t say anything about it.”
“Yeah, I did. Though the thought briefly crossed my mind that the wolf was not really there. That I had imagined it.”
Surprised, she stared at him. “Why?”
“My head was hurting, and when I looked up again, he or she was gone. The wolf had to be one of us, or he wouldn’t have come to check me out. He had to be worried about me, or he wouldn’t have risked discovery.”
Laurel couldn’t believe that he had actually seen the wolf. “Did he howl for anyone to come to help you?”
“No. The next time I looked, he was gone.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“No.”
Her lips parted as she studied his serious expression. And she realized he was treating her like someone special. Someone he felt comfortable enough with to share the secrets that he didn’t want to divulge to anyone else. Something a mate would do.
She sighed. “I was hoping he wasn’t afraid of you and might allow you to approach him and learn who he is.”
“I believe he was concerned about me, but I doubt he would have come near me if I had been above the hole.”
“If he was concerned about you, that’s good news. Was he a gray wolf or Arctic?”
“Gray wolf. His ears were too big to be those of an Arctic wolf.”
“Then he has to be old.”
“Or an injured or stressed wolf. Though I don’t know how in the devil he made it across the river without us catching up to him if he was either old or injured.”
“You mean the first time? Maybe he let the river carry him downstream so that we wouldn’t see him getting out of the river and where he ran after that.”
“Possibly.”
“Are you sure it was a he?”
“No. It could have been either. All I saw were his head and forelegs. Not the size of his body. And it was dark.”
She touched CJ’s skin where it wasn’t bruised, glad he would heal quickly and that he hadn’t been severely injured. “Could the truck have belonged to someone else?”
“Might have, but it seems like the person in the truck would have seen the wolf and reported him.”
“Unless the person was afraid to mention it to anyone, worried the pack members would think he was seeing things. Or he might have been human.”
“Could be either possibility.”
Laurel straightened and considered CJ’s belt buckle with a brass wolf’s head engraved on it. She was putting off removing his jeans. Not that she was embarrassed, but because she was afraid CJ would take it as a yes for connecting in a deeper way—a mating that would bond them together for life. Yet, he might not be ready for anything of the sort, and maybe she was thinking too much into the situation.
He needed rest, to sleep and to heal his injuries. Most likely his ligaments and muscles would be sore from the fall.
She unbuckled his belt and then began to unzip his jeans, her hand unintentionally brushing down his arousal. She saw the tension in his face and his body, the way he was trying hard not to react to her touch. But it was too late for that. She fought smiling.
“We’ve only known each other for around six months,” she reminded him, as if they might want to take this…situation between them slower.
“That’s all? Hell, we should have been mated long before this. I don’t think I’ve known any wolf couple to wait this long before they mate. Except Silva and Sam, but even they finally agreed on it.” CJ took Laurel’s hand and pulled her on top of him.
She stiffened, worried she was hurting him. “Your bruises and cuts—they have to be painful.”
“That’s nothing compared to the thought of you packing up and leaving town. And that is killing me.” His arms wrapped securely around her, implying that even if he was sore, he wanted the intimacy between them more. Wanted to show her just how much he needed her in his life. How he didn’t want to wait.
She sighed and snuggled against him, and he began to stroke her back. She loved breathing in his musky male scent and feeling his hard body beneath hers, the way he was already aroused—all because of her touch.
“What if we never learn the truth about your aunt?” he asked gently, his touch just as tender, not pushing to go further if she didn’t wish it.
She had been afraid of that—not finding out the truth quickly enough. Of putting her life on hold when she could really build something here with CJ, her sisters, the pack. Especially because Meghan and Ellie both wanted to stay. In the past, they’d been just as eager to move on to the next project as she had been. Uprooting them now would be wrong. She couldn’t ignore their happiness.
Yet if she truly did want to leave, she was certain they’d follow her. She realized it must have been that way with CJ when Eric left the pack and CJ and the others left with him to show their support of their brother, even if in their hearts, they hadn’t wanted to leave the pack behind.
“Not as a have-to-or-die mission, but would you continue to help me search for clues about my aunt?” She had made the decision, right or wrong, feeling in her heart that she belonged with CJ, with his
pack, no matter what happened to the hotel or what else they discovered. Being with him felt right.
In one swift and powerful move, CJ managed to turn her onto her back and pin her down with his half-clothed body. He might have had some muscle strain from the fall, but if so, he sure was hiding it and showing that he was pure alpha-male wolf. “It’s a given and it’s my priority, because not only do we want to solve that dilemma, but we have to learn the truth about the Wernicke brothers and what’s going to happen with the hotel.”
She ran her hands up CJ’s chest in a soft caress, avoiding the bandaged areas and bruises. “What if they do manage to sabotage our sales? Ruin our business? Where would my sisters and I—”
“With me—this will be your home. I have plenty of room for your sisters too.”
“You only say that—”
He frowned at her. “Because I mean it. I care for your sisters as if they were like my brothers.”
She laughed. “I’m sure they’d love to hear it.”
He smiled. “I care for you in a whole other way—as my mate. Loving you and only you until the end. Say yes and you can show me how to create snow wolves and we can watch Christmas stories and…”
“Make love.” She pulled him down for a kiss.
She wasn’t being impulsive, she told herself. For half a year, she’d avoided any intimate entanglements with CJ, knowing he’d had an interest in her from the beginning that was more than just friendship.
It was obvious from the way he looked at her with wolfish interest and how he had gone out of his way to tell her how glad the pack was to have her and her sisters there and how beautiful the hotel looked. He also admired her for her dedication and tireless work despite all the troubles they’d had while renovating the hotel. He’d always been eager to help her.
She’d avoided getting in too thick with the pack members, even going so far as to ask Darien to tell his cousins she and her sisters didn’t need their help. Sure, in part it was because they feared how the pack would react if they learned the sisters were trying to discover what happened to their aunt, and the fear that anyone could have had something to do with her disappearance. But Laurel realized some of it was because of her concern that taking a mate would change her life forever, and that of her sisters. And yet, her sisters had wanted that all along.