by Holley Trent
She sat up too quickly, head spinning like a merry-go-round fueled by Pixy Stix and speed.
She tipped backward, but thanks to Paul putting an arm up behind her, she didn’t crack her skull on the headboard.
“What happened?” she asked.
The last thing she remembered was arguing with him on the sidewalk downtown. Somehow, she’d gotten back to her room.
A glance downward confirmed she was in the same clothes, so she couldn’t have slept too long. At least, she didn’t smell like she’d slept all that long.
“Careful.” He leaned her back so her spine was against the headboard and pulled his arm away. Then he tossed the book he’d been reading onto the nightstand at his right and folded his hands atop his belly. “I’ll call Adam and let him know you’re awake. He told me to let him know first thing, but take a minute to get your bearings before I do.”
“What happened?” she repeated. Him not having immediately responded wasn’t a good thing, in her estimation.
“I think you had a seizure. Your temperature was through the roof, probably from your body working so hard to heal itself, but I can’t be sure. Your physiology isn’t quite like that of anyone else I’ve ever treated.”
She suspected that healing probably wasn’t the only reason she was running a fever. The mate bite likely had a little something to do with that, too. She’d felt the flaring heat in her body before she’d gone to sleep and knew with an unusual certainty that he’d caused it…or rather, what she’d told him to do. She wished her mother had been around to explain things to her when she’d come of age. She hated feeling like she was stumbling her way through life. Things were easier for Arnold.
“A seizure…” she whispered, staring as his socked feet at the end of the bed.
“Got you a second opinion. He also thought that’s what happened, but he’s going to call in a specialist. They’ll likely want to do some tests on you, and hopefully soon. Most of the medical practitioners here are generalists, so we have to call outsiders in to treat specific conditions. Hard sometimes to find folks who will be as discreet as we need them to be, but we’ve got a pretty good referral list.”
“You gonna find me a werewolf brain doctor?”
“Nah. No need. We’ll just tap into our network of psychic friends.”
She snorted, in spite of herself. In spite of how pissed she was at him.
But she didn’t know what else she could do. When he’d said “seizure,” she’d taken the news with her usual stoic bracing, but the longer the word sat at the forefront of her mind, the more frightened she became.
Why me? And why now?
She turned to him, tangling the covers around her body and swatting them away with impatience. “Is there something in my head? A tumor, or—”
“Shhh. No, no. Don’t worry about that. We got you into a CT machine after you blacked out. No signs of tumors. There are a lot of reasons people could have seizures.” He flipped his phone in the air, easily catching it again and again without looking. “Some people have predilections for them and they just don’t become apparent until there’s some precipitating factor.”
“Am I going to die?”
He chuckled.
“Don’t laugh at me. Don’t treat me like I’m stupid.”
“I’m not. I’m laughing because I know how pissed you’re going to be when someone suggests that you shouldn’t drive anymore.”
She rolled over onto her hands and knees and pounced at him, but apparently Viking reflexes were better than wolf reflexes—at least at the moment—and he caught her by the shoulders before she could sic teeth, claws, or anything else into him.
“See what I mean?” he whispered.
“Put me down.”
“Are you going to behave yourself?”
She scoffed, but did retract her fangs.
He still didn’t put her down. He held her up at arm’s length as if she were a rag doll he wanted to examine from a distance.
“Are you going to be nice?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Awesome. You and my mother will get on swimmingly, I bet. She’s very territorial. And opinionated.”
Petra squirmed in his iron-strong grip and kicked her legs a bit beneath her.
He clucked his tongue and narrowed his eyes. “She likes to tell people everything they’re doing wrong. She maintains a written list of all my deficiencies. Recites items from it every time I walk home.”
“Well, at least you have a mother.”
“Yep. I’m grateful she exists. She’s a good woman, if a bit tactless, but she’s persistent in the way Afótama mothers are. She’s already figured out something’s not quite right with the web around me. She’s been texting me endlessly for the past three hours, which is impressive, seeing as how dawn is approaching. She’s normally in bed by nine.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.” She squirmed again. Her neck was starting to hurt from being held up at that angle away from him, and if she let her head loll, she wouldn’t be able to keep staring him down.
Not that he seemed all that affected by her stare, anyway. He wasn’t afraid of her. In the past ten years, she’d gotten used to men quickly backing away immediately after approaching. She was very good at making herself seem like she wasn’t worth their effort.
Paul was putting in a lot of effort, but he hadn’t indicated that he thought she was worth it yet.
“You sure you weren’t the one raised by wolves?” she muttered.
He grunted. “Actually, my mother is incredibly uptight, and my father doesn’t talk about anything except stock prices and baseball scores. You may not agree that I am, but they’re perfectly civilized.”
She sighed, finally gave up, and let her head loll. She couldn’t keep straining her neck. “Put me down, Paul. My neck hurts.”
“Okay.” He lowered her atop his chest and patted her head. “Better?”
“No.” She closed her eyes and inhaled. “I want coffee now. You smell like coffee.”
“I imagine most doctors do, and I imagine the scent is preferable to disinfectant or several other alternatives that could get transferred onto a person during a long shift.”
She knew about some of those scents. They’d clung in her memory long after her mother had died in the hospital, all sickly and frail. A woman laid low by an aggressive illness not even a wolf of their strong line could fight. The doctors said it was cancer, but cancer may as well have been black magic for how quickly it spread.
Petra feared that one day, she’d be the one in a hospital bed whispering instructions to whoever was left to give a damn about how to handle her remains.
She closed her eyes and tried to push the thought away with happier ones. That usually worked, but for once, it didn’t. She couldn’t shake the feeling—the dread and hopelessness she’d felt as a girl about how much worse her life would get after her mother passed. Life hadn’t been all that great when she was living, but at least they were together.
“Hey,” Paul whispered. “You’re sad. Why are you sad?”
Stinking psychics.
She shook her head against his chest and successfully chased away morbid thoughts with curiosity. There were still so many questions she needed answered, and the answers would spark more questions. If she didn’t have time to think, she wouldn’t go back to that dark place in her past.
“How long did you have to go to school to be a doctor?” she asked. “I dropped out at fourteen. I feel bad about that.”
Probably thinks I’m an idiot.
“I don’t think you’re stupid. Undereducated? Maybe. Not the same thing.”
“Get out of my head.”
He let out a breath and rubbed the middle of her back.
She was like putty under his touch. Her body felt like it was melting into his. Werewolf frosting on top of a Viking cake.
She sighed and wished he didn’t feel so good. She’d be able to roll off him and go seiz
e the day or some such shit if he didn’t.
“I had four years of college,” he said, still rubbing. “Three years of med school. Then I held a residency at a hospital for several years.”
“Here?”
“No. I lived outside the community from the time I turned eighteen up until last year. For the most part, we don’t stray far from the community.”
“Why is that?”
“We’re psychically knit to each other by Queen Tess and all the queens who came before her. Being closer to the group will always make us more comfortable than being away. What helped me not to feel so restless, though, was that Chris was going through all the same paces at the same time. We went to the same university, the same med school, and even did our residencies at the same hospital.”
“You came back at the same time?”
“Yeah. At this point, I can’t remember who brought up the idea of us coming home, but as soon as one of us did, the other knew he’d have to go, too. Certainly, we could have survived without the other. Afótama are living out in the wider world now, but I’m sure they all feel the urge to come home.”
“Home…” She tasted the word in her mouth. Let the magic of it thrum through her. Like some sort of trigger, the word “home” sent soothing vibrations through her whole body, starting at the ear pressed to his chest, down to her toes.
She curled her fingers into the fabric of his shirt. Clung to him, really. She didn’t want to get off.
She didn’t know if that was typical mated wolf clinginess or if she was just needy and broken. Either way, she was having a hard time convincing herself to move. She’d never had a mate before, and he felt nice—like he stood between her and everything that was wrong with the world.
“I never feel like that,” she said after a few minutes of kneading him like a cat. “Like I want to go home, I mean. Except on the anniversary of my mother’s death. That’s the only time I want to go back to Oklahoma. Maybe Arnold and I left too early, and that if we’d stayed longer, I’d feel differently. But I’m not used to thinking of any place as home.”
“And now you’ve been given one.”
“Yeah, and I don’t understand that. These folks don’t even know us.”
“They’re trying to grow their pack. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, from Adam’s perspective.”
“What do they get from taking in two wild wolves? And where the hell is Arnold, anyway?” She tried to sit up, and regretted moving the moment she did. She’d felt like a rubber band had stretched and nearly popped in her chest, and whatever the sensation was, Paul must have felt it, too, because he winced.
“Just be still for a bit,” he said. “That should stop in time.”
“What was that?”
“Afótama shit. Autonomic response to you moving.”
“Speak English.”
He chuckled and smoothed down her hair in the back and massaged downward from her uncovered neck. “Just a reflex. You moved, my brain didn’t like that, and my heart stuttered a little. That’s all.”
“Then why did I feel it?”
“Like I said. Afótama shit. We connect to our partners in different ways, but folks in most fated couples tend to knit psychically into each other. Of course, most Afótama pair off with other Afótama, so I’m not exactly sure how this is supposed to work.”
“You don’t think it’s supposed to work at all.”
“I never said that. If anything, I said that I was surprised that I had a match. I’m not exactly the easiest man for women to get along with.”
“’Cause you’re so damned unapproachable?”
“Pot, meet kettle.”
She blew a raspberry of protest, but she wasn’t ready to let the subject drop. She sat up a little, enough to prop her chin atop his chest, and stared at his jaw. That was easier than meeting the intensity of his gaze. “What’s supposed to happen now? You say I’m attached to you on this—psychic web thing?”
“Mm-hmm. Anyone close to me would know something’s different. Some will figure out why more quickly than others. Obviously, Queen Tess and all the folks in her tier of magic have already worked out the change. And my parents. And Chris, because we know each other so well. He’d be one of the first to notice that my buzz on the web was a little different.”
“Do they care that I’m not like you?”
“No.”
“Do you?”
He didn’t answer. His hand stilled on her neck.
She brushed it away and tried to scramble off him for good, but his other arm clamped down over the small of her back and kept her pinned.
“Be still,” he hissed.
“No. You’re just tolerating me right now, and fuck that. I’m not gonna be that chick.”
“I assure you that I’m doing a little more than tolerating you right now.”
He pressed her down even harder against him and arced his hips upward.
Hard steel probed between her thighs and his rapid heartbeat pounded in her ears.
“Give a man some time to think before he talks,” he whispered. “If you jump to conclusions about me, you’ll find yourself angry every time.”
He slid his hands down her back to her ass and cupped it, tugged her up higher, evidently so he could better see her face.
“You want to think I’m pushing you away, don’t you?” he asked. “If things go wrong, you want everything to be my fault. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I’m not the easiest man to get to know, but what about you, huh? You want me to be your mate, but at the same time, you don’t want to tell me anything. You’ve got to tell me things.”
“What’s the point if you’re going to run away?”
“Where the hell am I going, Petra? I live here. Right here in this community. I’ve got a job here. My family is here. I’m psychically knitted into the clan here and only an act of the gods would compel me to leave again. If anyone runs, it’s going to be you.”
“Funny, that’s what my father said two weeks before he bounced. He didn’t even go all that far. From one end of the Osage reservation to the other, but that was far enough. He didn’t want to be with a wolf, either.”
“Excuse me?” Evidently incredulous, Paul scoffed. “Before last year, I’d never met a wolf in person, so you’re going to have to pardon me if I’m ignorant about how I should treat one. I tried treating you like a lady, but that didn’t work, either.”
“Go fu—”
He likely knew exactly what she was going to tell him to do with himself, but he didn’t give her a chance to get the words out.
Somehow, she ended up on her back with her arms pinned over her head and an angry Viking straddling her hips.
“Like I said,” he snarled. “I tried. I’m starting to think you don’t want me to treat you with dignity. If you did, you wouldn’t keep poking and goading me.”
“You wouldn’t know dignity if it bit you in the ass.”
“See. There goes the mouth again. You can’t help yourself, can you?” He gave her wrists a little shake. “You just have to keep running it. Have to have an answer for everything, even when being quiet is perfectly acceptable. I’d prefer the quiet.”
He lowered his body onto hers, still clamping her wrists, and holding his lips barely an inch from her ear.
But he didn’t need to talk because he was a fucking telepath. Apparently, he’d just needed a bit of skin contact, because he put his lips against her ear and whispered through her mind, “Be quiet sometimes, Petra. You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to listen to me talk, either. Silence is fine. I’m begging you.”
He skated his lips along her jaw to her chin, then up to the mouth she’d parted to spew some objection she couldn’t even remember—something that probably hadn’t been important but that she’d had to say anyway.
“We could learn a lot about each other in silence,” he said.
She wondered if she could respond in that way, or even if she should. She did
n’t have anything productive to add to the conversation, but she was used to being the one controlling the airwaves. Even Arnold tended to let her do all the talking. They each had their roles. Petra was the one who always spoke up, and Arnold was the one who assessed risks.
And where is that doofus right now to tell me about this risk?
Paul danced the fingers of his free hand along her hairline, gently skimming her cheek and the back of her neck, down to her shoulder. He worked his fingers lightly down the side of her ribs, both tickling and arousing, and naturally—she squirmed beneath him.
And she kept her mouth shut.
She pinned her lips together and tried to keep her brain from accidentally triggering that psychic thing that he was so good at. She cleared her mind and thought of nothing but his touch. About how gentle, but persistent it was. About how she knew he was going to get what he wanted, and how she wasn’t going to object, because there was no good reason to.
She was too curious—too eager for him to touch her, finally. He needed to fulfill the promise of the bite.
“Your skin is so soft,” he said in that mental whisper. “How dare you be so soft?”
She didn’t respond because she didn’t have a good answer, and she wasn’t going to swoop in and monopolize the conversation. Wasn’t going to derail things. Fewer words seemed the better plan.
“I think you’re soft all over, but I can’t remember for sure. Take this off.”
She didn’t know what “this” was until she looked down to see him holding his hand over her shirt buttons.
Oh.
She nodded, and he gave her room to sit up, unclamping her wrists only to move his hands to the bottom of his own shirt.
As she clumsily worked her uncooperative fingers down her buttons, she watched him strip naked. Efficient. Shameless.
Gorgeous.
Three buttons. She’d unfastened three buttons, and there he was climbing back on the bed perfectly nude, save for his glasses, which he nudged up his nose.
He didn’t speak his impatience, but he didn’t have to. She could sense it when his skin grazed against her chest—as he took over undressing her. She could read some of the suppressed thoughts bobbing around in that mysterious head of his.