The Wolf's Joy

by Holley Trent

  Her face burned hot enough to make her ears pop. She glanced behind her. Except for Tamatsu and his angel friend, Tarik, conferring, most of the crowd had dispersed. No one was paying any attention, not even when Ben pulled her against his front and buried his face against her neck. “Mm. You smell like cinnamon.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Thought that was obvious. I’m cuddling. Taking my payment for them seeds.”

  “Um. Maybe the better question is why you’re doing it?” Not that she minded at all. She liked that he wasn’t afraid to attach himself to her in such a public setting. “Wolves cuddle?”

  “They cuddle their mates.”

  Mates.

  “Ben,” she snapped. “We already had this talk.”

  “Yeah, and it didn’t end well.”

  His lips tickled her flesh in a flirty, enticing caress that had her nipples hardening and anger mounting.

  She tried to wriggle away from him, but it was no use. Dogs didn’t give up their toys unless they were playing fetch with them, and he’d already played fetch that morning. “Can’t think straight with you against me.”

  “You’ll get used to it, I reckon.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You won’t be able to help it. I’ll be around a bunch.” He swayed her side to side, nuzzling her hair, his breath warming the side of her face.

  Driving her mad with teasing.

  “You’ll get sick of seeing me, probably,” he said.

  “That’ll be hard to accomplish given the infrequency of your visits.”

  “Who said anything about visiting? Staying.”

  “What?” Alex finally managed to put some distance between them—enough to see the seriousness in his unsmiling expression. If he were pulling her chain, gassing her up only to crush her as soon as the fun had worn off, he was hiding his intentions well. “But what about—”

  “Long story short, you need someone here with you, aidin’ and abettin’.” He pulled her back against him, and stunned, she let him. Things were moving so fast; she’d barely had time to process one thing before the next happened.

  Is that what life’s like for a shifter? Everything happening on fast-forward?

  If so, she could understand why Belle couldn’t sit still.

  And she understood why Belle had been so sure that Steven was perfect for her, even without the benefit of knowing him for months or years. She was practical, and no one else had made as much sense to her as Steven.

  Ben seemed to get Alex. As much as anyone could, anyway. She wouldn’t discount how important that was.

  “I gotta wrap up some stuff back east, of course,” he said. “Might take a little bit of time, but that’s probably good. Maybe by then, you’ll figure out what you’ll want to do with me, if you still want to do anything with me at all.”

  Her brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders. She and Ben were speaking the same language, but something was getting lost in translation.

  “But, I thought . . . You said Clarissa needed you too much.”

  “Still does. I’ll be based here instead of there. I hope that’s okay with you. Stuff happens fast when you’re dealing with one of us.”

  “It’s okay!” came out in a squeak before she could even try to tamp down her giddiness. He was going to bring some verve and noise to her little house, and maybe he could use that peculiar brain of his to help her figure out how the heck she could take Belle’s mother up on her supremely generous offer. “Maybe we could—”

  Tamatsu and Tarik bolted around them suddenly, and as they were angels who sometimes moved at speeds faster than the human eye could process, it took a moment for Alex to figure out where the fire was.

  They’d joined the back of the parade, following a certain chamber of commerce head in his little golf cart. He stomped on the pedal, face flushed dark as a plum as they closed the distance, casually loping behind him. Before meeting those two, Alex had always thought angels were supposed to be comforting.

  “You were saying?” Ben asked, raising an eyebrow when she turned back to him.

  “I have no idea what I was saying, but we should definitely follow them for that guy’s sake.” She crooked her thumb toward the end of the parade. “Pretty sure they’re wearing swords.”

  “So? Doubt they’ll draw blood. It’s too close to Christmas. They’ll be generous.” He chafed her arms, then guided her out of the path of dispersing onlookers. “Besides, last I checked, brandishing is illegal in Maria. They’ll only hint at violence if they need to.”

  “Ben,” she scolded. She needed to at least pretend that he didn’t condone whatever happened.

  He shrugged. “Not gonna lie to you, sugar. That’s how they think.”

  “Apparently, there’s so much I don’t know.”

  “I’ll teach it to you, if you want me to.”

  Staring at the ground, she shifted her weight. “Starting when?”

  “Tonight. And then some more tomorrow. Maybe every night through New Year’s and bit after. We’ll see how you feel then.”

  “Everything’s up to me, then?”

  He grunted. “Sweetie says she doesn’t see how anyone could put up with male Wolves. I’d hate to move all the way here for you not to like me.”

  “Unless your animal half has a Mr. Hyde personality he’s keeping tamped down, I don’t think that’ll be a problem.”

  “Nah. With Wolves, what you see is generally what you get.”

  No guesswork, then?

  No more bait and switches from men who wanted to pirate her time and her emotions. She’d always know where he stood with her, and there was emotional safety in predictability.

  She was in his space then, seed bag and empty coffee cup crushed between their bodies, and her weight on the tips of her toes.

  Obviously guessing what she sought, he wrapped a bracing arm around her, keeping her balanced as she sought his lips. Warming her through and through with his quiet chuckles as he smiled against her mouth.

  “Quit laughing at me and kiss me,” she demanded.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She may have been awkward, but Ben wasn’t. He gripped her like she’d walked too close to a ledge, kissed her like he needed to memorize her taste, greedy and forceful, and her legs went limp.

  She pulled back for air, head swimming, face blazing, smile goofy, and dangling limply from his arms.

  “That all right?” he asked.

  Alex breathed out an incredulous titter. “Keep kissing me like that and we’ll probably get cited for indecency.”

  “Sounds like a life goal. Never had one of them tickets before.” He tucked her seed bag into her coat and wrapped his arm around her back, holding her close.

  “You’re going to turn me into a scandal.”

  He raised a brow. “You care?”

  “Eh.” She shrugged and tossed her empty coffee cup into the trash as they traversed the sidewalk.

  She probably should have cared more what people thought, but concerning herself with other people’s hang-ups didn’t seem like an efficient use of energy. Still, there was some value in slowing down a hair—just until she knew for sure what they were doing. She wasn’t quite ready to get her hopes up.

  Stealing a glance up at him, she drew in a bracing breath. “So . . . this is happening? You’re really staying?”

  “Yep.”

  No hesitation. No indecisiveness. He even nodded sharply as if to accentuate the point.

  “Oh.” Her lungs unclenched so she could breathe again. She hadn’t even noticed she wasn’t.

  “The way things’ll work out, I guess, will be that Clarissa’ll have a Wolf on this end whenever she visits, and I get to avoid the next damn pack spat. Every season, some new shit with them. Rather be here with you.” He gave her a little squeeze, leaned in close, and whispered in a low, sultry tone, “I like the way you think, by the way.”

  She put her hand over her heart and moaned as though she’d f
ound a surprise fruitcake on her counter. The words may as well have been foreplay for the way her blood surged. “I’ll never get tired of hearing that.”

  “I told you I’d keep telling you. I like the way you smell after I tell you that.”

  “What do I smell like?” she whispered.

  “Like you want to be kept.”

  Oh.

  She could only blink at him and hope that someday soon, she wouldn’t be as mortified at the fact he was reading her smells for instructions the way people read road signs.

  Chuckling again, he steered her into the coffee shop. “Hey, can I get a coffee?” he asked the bored barista. He unhanded Alex long enough to hold his hands about eight inches apart demonstrably. “One about that big.”

  “Is that for me?” Alex asked. “If so, thank you. I haven’t slept.”

  “Make that two,” he amended.

  “I can’t believe you’re really going to move here for me,” Alex whispered.

  The barista got to work grabbing cups. While she poured servings of the dark brew, Ben leaned in and whispered, “Not just for you, shug. Half for me. Wolf needs his mate.”

  And mate needs her Wolf.

  She set the bag of seeds atop an unoccupied table and gratefully accepted a coffee.

  They sat quietly for a while, staring coyly at each other between sips. There were so many things she could say—so many things she needed to ask—but none seemed urgent. Nothing seemed as important as them sitting and just being.

  Just for a little while.

  Until she was certain he was for real and that he was going to fill the cavernous hole in her life.

  He gave the tip of her nose a tender tweak. “Forgot to tell you the rest of my story.”

  “What story?”

  “The botanist.”

  “Oh!” She straightened up, curious. “Tell me.”

  “He said it looked like I was desecrating nature. I told him me and nature get along fine and smiled at him.” He demonstrated, unsheathing his fangs.

  “Ben.” Alex could feel her eyes bulging out of their sockets.

  He put his fangs away and sipped his coffee, staring through the window at pedestrians passing on the sidewalk.

  “You can’t do that,” she whispered.

  “Was I bad?”

  “Yes. You were very bad. Apparently, I can’t leave you unsupervised.”

  He shrugged and took another sip. “Typical Wolf. Caveat emptor, or whatever. Take me or leave me, sugar. I come with a quality moonshine recipe and bad manners. I’m at your service.”

  She took a deep breath, let it out, and closed her eyes.

  No way was she going to leave him. He simply needed to be housebroken. Or Maria-broken, rather. She’d handle him, and she’d have fun handling him, once she found the manual that was supposed to come with him. Maybe Belle knew where she could get one.

  “I’ll have to keep my eyes on you at all times.” She opened hers then for emphasis.

  He smiled behind his coffee cup. “I don’t think I’ll mind that one little bit.”

  About the Author

  Holley Trent is an award-winning, USA Today bestselling author who’s written dozens of paranormal romances. She didn’t have cable during her formative years, so her sense of humor was molded by Britcoms on public television, watching Coming to America several hundred times, Lucille Ball, and three out of four Golden Girls. She’s married with two kids and two cats, and no one in her house can tell when she’s being sarcastic.

  So you don’t miss future stories about Maria, New Mexico’s most disreputable citizens, sign up for Holley’s paranormal romance newsletter at: http://holleytrent.com/blog/newsletter-sign-up/.

  Turn the page for an excerpt from

  The Cougar’s Pawn

  Chapter One

  Ellery Colvard zipped her sweatshirt up to her chin and tugged her bandana down so it covered her ears from the freezing Utah air. “I hate you both,” she said to her friends.

  Miles, shuddering on her little corner of the rapidly deflating air mattress, wore a broad grin. A manic grin. Ellery had known the woman for ten years, and thus knew the smile was as phony as that Gucci purse Ellery had bought out of some guy’s trunk last Christmas. Momma hadn’t figured out it was fake yet, and given their tumultuous relationship as of late, Ellery didn’t care if she ever did.

  “Pretty sure the fifty states camping trip bucket list was your idea, precious,” Miles said sweetly.

  Teeth chattering, Ellery shook her head. “No. It was Hannah’s. I was too drunk to say no.”

  Hannah sighed and rapidly chafed her thin arms. “Okay, maybe it was my idea, but it was Miles’s idea to run down the states in reverse alphabetical order. We could have been in California right now.”

  “Yeah, I was definitely drunk when I suggested that,” Miles said. “But in my own defense, what woman in her right mind—especially a woman as educated as you two are—would give a flying frick about the specific order they received their torture in? Y’all, it all sucks equally, if you ask me. Which I guess you did. Why did I say yes to this?”

  Ellery turned her gaze to the tent’s sagging fabric above them and sighed. Try as they might, they couldn’t get the stakes positioned right, and this wasn’t their first camping rodeo by a long shot. “If we’d done Alaska first, it would have probably also been the last,” she groused. “I hear the bears up there could shit out a human being completely undigested.”

  “For God’s sake, screw the bears,” Hannah said. “The people around us are bad enough. So damned hunky-dory. Happy smiley people in their head-to-toe Patagonia gear who’ve barely gotten their boots broken in.” She wound her long blond braid around her index finger again and again and let her knee bob. “I actually hate camping. I did it so much as a kid with my dad and brothers, and I hated it back then, too. It’s just so inconvenient.”

  “But you agreed,” Ellery said. She leveled her friend with an incendiary glare, but Hannah was unmoved. Didn’t even flinch. Ellery should have expected that. Southern women couldn’t use the stare on each other. They were born immune to it from everyone except their own grandmothers. No one was immune to a granny stare. When Granny gave that look, a little girl would sit up straight and get the scrunch off her face immediately.

  Hannah shrugged. “I just thought it was time I did something more adventurous than chasing butt-naked practical joker patients down the hospital halls. So sue me.”

  “Thanks for bringing us down with you, girl.” Ellery pulled her leggings-covered knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her shins. Her damned coat was too snug and too short to pull over them. “Who would have thought it’d get down to forty degrees in Utah in the middle of the summer?”

  “Might have something to do with that hail storm coming through,” Hannah said. “I think I caught something about that on the radio when I was at the Jeep.”

  “Hail storm?” Ellery’s voice careered to that stratospheric pitch her sister Gail had been trying to coach out of her for the past year. When Ellery got agitated, she got shrieky, but who could blame her? She wouldn’t get so freakin’ frustrated all the time if crazy shit didn’t keep happening to her.

  She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and concentrated on the sharp sting of her nails against her palms.

  Deep breath.

  Deep breath.

  Anxiety gets in the way of clear thoughts.

  She pushed her panic away on an exhalation and opened her eyes. When she spoke again, she wanted her voice to be level. Calm. “So, Hannah, you didn’t think that, perhaps, with the storm coming that we’d like to get under some cover more than a millimeter thick? Or did being in this dinky tent while hail and wind pelted it sound like a proper adventure to you?”

  Ellery could handle a little wind. She was a goddamned witch, for crying out loud, and her magic was tied up in air and weather. She could buffer them a little, at least for a while, but Hannah and Miles didn’t know tha
t. In the ten years they’d been friends, Ellery had never told them what she was. Folks like her played their cards close to their chests. No one was “out,” and knowing too much about the supernatural world wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Sympathizers sometimes became targets, and Ellery had been fighting off boogeymen of the demonic and minor-god sort frequently during the past year. It was all Gail’s fault. At least, that’s what Ellery liked to tell her. It wasn’t really, but Gail hooking up with that gorgeous half-demon witch had a little something to do with their goddess zillion-times great-grandmother coming out of the woodworks and raising Hell—somewhat literally—a year ago.

  Nope. The girls didn’t need to know about that.

  “Next time, warn a girl, would ya?” Ellery muttered.

  “Shhh!” Miles hissed, and she put one index finger on each friend’s lips.

  Ellery grunted. She loved her friend like a sister, but she was shivering so hard that she could see sounds and feel colors. Her patience was edging ever-closer to cut-a-bitch territory, but that dull-ass knife on the multi-purpose tool she’d bought at Camper’s Paradise before their last ill-fated trip couldn’t cut cheese, much less flesh. Her fingernails would have to do.

  She nudged back one cuff and studied her nails. Oh yes. Nice and jagged.

  “Did you see that?” Miles’s pale eyes went wide in the dim light and her gaze flitted from the tent slit to each corner of the enclosure in search of some phantom shape only she had seen.

  “See what?” Ellery whispered.

  “Don’t do this to me, tramp,” Hannah hissed, and she grabbed Miles’s wrist. “So help me God, if I have to get my gun out of the Jeep to feel safe enough to sleep tonight, you’re gonna—”

  Wind whipped around the trio, blowing maps and paper wrappers around them as their tent peeled back in one easy yank, exposing them to the elements.

  “What the hell?” Ellery scrambled to her feet intending to chase the tent, but no sooner had she turned did a rough hand clap over her mouth and another over her eyes.