by Holley Trent
“So, what?” Arnold asked through clenched teeth. “He thinks the fact that you talk more means you’re stupid?”
He might have been trying to get a read on her, but she was having a hell of a time getting one on him, too. She didn’t know why what she said would have peeved in him in such a way.
She fondled the end of her braid and shrugged. “Stupid. Yeah. I think most wolves would accept that assessment as truth.” She cozied her back against the door, slung her right leg up atop the seat, and settled Kinzy into the crook of her right arm. Holding a baby for a short drive was one thing, but Leo’s arms were starting to go leaden due to the length of their trip.
“You gonna tell me what happened?” he asked.
From her low position behind his seat, she couldn’t see him anymore, and she was glad. If she were looking at him, she wouldn’t be able to force her brain to think up a good lie if she needed to.
She sighed again and slung her free arm across her eyes. “Does it really matter? All that’s important is that I’m not there anymore, and you’re not gonna let me flee.”
“Yes, the story matters. Stories always matter, because our pasts mold our power. And if you get to Norseton and decide you want to leave, no one’s going to hold you there, including me.”
“Then why are you taking me, if the probability is so high that I’ll leave?”
“Because I have to.”
“Says who?”
“I didn’t pull the strings, Leo. I’m just going where they tug me. Sometimes, those strings make me move other people into the places they need to be, at least for a while. If you want to leave Norseton, you can leave. Folks will worry about you, but at least we’ll have given you the chance to make a choice about where you’d like to be.”
“So, that’s what you think you’re doing? Kidnapping me so you can give me a choice?”
“No. I’m taking you to a safe place so you can see for yourself how a functional pack runs—a pack that’s a little more integrated into the community it lives in.”
“And if I decide to stay, then what?”
He gave no immediate answer, but she was starting to get used to that.
She pulled her arm away from her eyes and sat up so she could see him. “Well?”
He was grinding his jaw and flexing his grip tighter around the steering wheel.
Probably not a good sign.
“Trying to make up a good lie?” she asked, exasperated.
“No. I just can’t imagine why anyone would want to leave once they get there, unless they were afraid of being a little bit normal for a change.”
“Werewolves don’t get to be normal.”
“No. We get to create our own version of normalcy, though. Don’t you want that? Don’t you want Kinzy to have that?”
Leo expelled a petulant harrumph, and then slouched away from his mirror-reflected gaze again. “Don’t bring Kinzy into this.”
“She’s already in the mess. She’s right there in your arms, and in this truck. Obviously, things weren’t going so well for you in Wolverton, or else you wouldn’t have run off with a tiny baby to the middle of no-damn-where, so what’s your deal? Where were you running to? Or what were you running from? You gotta tell me some things.”
“No, I don’t,” she muttered. “I didn’t ask you to pick me up. I don’t even know how you found me. You claim the folks back at home didn’t send you. And you claim you’re not working in any official capacity, and yet you honed in on me as if I were a missile on radar. How? And why?”
“How? Because that’s my gift.”
“Pardon?”
“Same way I can survive inside a pickup truck that gets squashed like an accordion. I’m the descendant of powerful wolves. I see things. I have sight.”
“Sight?” She didn’t think he was talking about how well he could see the road he had the truck screaming down. But what he was talking about didn’t exist. Psychic stuff wasn’t real.
“My mother had them, too, and my grandfather. It’s why folks left them alone, for the most part.”
“You’re pulling my leg.”
“I don’t see what the good of that would be.”
“Okay, but even if I believed you really had the sight, why would you be getting images of me?”
“The visions aren’t supposed to make sense, but I’ve learned that ignoring them isn’t wise. They always guide me to where I need to be, or where I can help someone. Last time I ignored one, I nearly got struck by fucking lightening. Didn’t see that coming.”
Wide-eyed and more than a little petrified, Leo settled Kinzy atop her chest and stroked her downy hair as she slept.
Yikes.
Leo had always thought the Wolverton pack was a little less backward than some, but she could admit every member had his or her biases about the outside world. Until she’d met Samuel—or had been forced to meet him, rather—she hadn’t had much interaction with women from other packs. The only ones she’d met were new brides brought in from distant groups, and they were always expected to integrate quickly and leave their old ways in the past. The ladies rarely talked about their old packs, but Leo had always gotten the impression that nothing was all that different about them—that they were all filled with the same kinds of plain-old wolves.
In a nutshell—people like Arnold weren’t supposed to be real.
Maybe he’s not.
She narrowed her eyes and stopped patting Kinzy’s head.
Maybe he’s just feeding me lies.
If that were the case, she could lie, too. Just until she knew talking was safe. For all she knew, he could have been testing her just to see how ditzy she really was.
She wasn’t falling for his ploy. The less she said, the better. If she were lucky, he wouldn’t have anything to report back to whoever had sent him.
Lacking ammunition against her, he’d have to leave her alone. Keeping a lady wolf who technically belonged to a man from another group could get a pack in a lot of trouble. Leo was counting on the fact that her stoic abductor knew that.
She pinched her lips, closed her eyes, and forced herself to ignore him sitting so close to her.
She couldn’t, though. His energy thrummed like a homing beacon and compelled her to open her eyes, to look, to talk, to know him.
But she wouldn’t. She wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t going to start acting like she was, either.
CHAPTER FIVE
Arnold snatched his phone out of the cup holder and, with his hand shaking and vision blurring, somehow managed to tap out his new alpha’s number.
He gripped the truck’s steering wheel like a vise with his left hand and tried his damnedest not to blink. If he blinked, he’d want to sleep, or worse—the wolf that was nagging at him for his chance to be let out to run was going to force a shift, whether Arnold was ready or not.
He couldn’t put off shifting for another night. He’d ignored the previous night’s call by the moon and his body was paying the price. He didn’t think he could hold out much longer, and needed to get the truck brought to a stop and Kinzy stowed away.
Although Leo seemed fine at the moment as she hadn’t skipped her shift the previous night, he didn’t doubt for a moment that if she saw him shift, she wouldn’t be able to hold back her beast. Wolf brains were susceptible that way. It was kind of like sympathetic vomiting. Once someone hurled, a poor bystander might feel the urge to do the same.
“Arnold, is that you? I’m guessing by the area code.” Alpha asked when he came on the line.
Arnold cleared his thick throat and let out a raspy, “Yeah. Listen. Hate to be terse, but could you have whoever’s at the gate pull the bar up so I can drive right through? I need to stop this truck and shift, and don’t want to do it until I get back to wolf housing.”
“Hold on.” Alpha must have put a thumb over the phone’s speaker, because Arnold couldn’t make out the muffled words from behind it. “Colt’s at the gate,” Alpha said when he came back on t
he line. “I guess he’d recognize his own truck.”
“Thank the gods.” Arnold took the right turn-off toward Norseton and kept his gaze on the gate and how the bar was moving so slow.
Come on, come on.
His body was burning, and the moon through the windshield was taunting him. Ha ha, stupid, it seemed to be saying, and, I bet you won’t do that again.
He gritted his teeth and inched the accelerator pedal down more as he approached the gatehouse. “One more thing,” he said to Alpha.
Arnold waved at Colt as he passed.
“I’ve got a lady in the truck and she needs to shift, too. Someone who’s not running tonight needs to watch her baby.”
“Wait a minute—” Leonora started from the backseat.
Arnold risked taking his eyes off the road to turn and look at her. “You can not just leave her laying around while you run, and you haven’t been able to shapeshift long enough to stop the change from happening.”
“But—”
“They’ll watch her.” With his gaze back on the road, he leaned his head left then right, willing the burning warnings to hold off just a few more minutes. Alpha had been saying something into the phone, and he hadn’t caught a single word.
“I’m sorry, Alpha. Repeat that?”
Arnold sped around the Norseton downtown area and pinned his hopes on the cluster of adobe houses in the near distance.
Almost there.
“Someone will take the baby,” Alpha said. “We’ll figure out who when we get to the truck. I see you coming now.”
Arnold tossed his phone onto the passenger seat and concentrated on breathing, and on holding his body together.
At the rate he was going, he was barely going to get the door open before the wolf came out.
The truck squealed to a hard stop in the cul-de-sac, and the wolves who’d scattered out of the way moved closer in again.
Some on four legs, some on two. He didn’t recognize any of the four-legged ones. He hadn’t been at Norseton long enough to do a full moon run with them.
He hastily unfastened his seatbelt and pushed the door open.
He tugged at his shirt, kicked off his boots, and held his body in his human form until one of the two-legged ladies scooped Kinzy out of Leo’s arms.
Then the wolf burst free, and Arnold ran, glancing behind him at Leo as he went. He kept watching until she shifted, too, and then he put his head down and ran hard toward the moon.
___
Arnold shifted against the cold ground he’d apparently collapsed onto the previous night, and groaned.
He rubbed his eyes and rolled off his belly. The rough ground was burnishing his dick, and not in the way he liked. He’d turned halfway when his body hit a soft, warm thing.
The thing yipped and moved.
Not a thing, but a soft warm person, and Arnold’s nose said that person was Leo. He would have recognized her sweet, maternal scent anywhere.
“What in the hell?” He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and then opened them to peer at the soft glow of the morning sun in the desert around them. They’d apparently collapsed about a quarter mile from wolf housing, but Arnold couldn’t remember that. He usually remembered everything that happened during his runs. Further, he must have been really out of sync to have not felt someone tossing a blanket over the two of them.
“What happened?” Leo asked, still flat on her back with her face toward the sky. She kept her eyes closed and one arm clamped over the blanket.
“Don’t know. I guess we conked out during the run. I don’t think I’d ever put off a shift for that long, so my wolf’s thoughts aren’t attaching to my short-term memory as they should. The memories will probably catch up to me soon.”
“Memories. I—” She sat up in a hurry and yanked the cover away, wrapping the blanket around her body. “My baby! Where’s my baby? Who took her?”
Bracing a hand on the ground, Arnold stood and tried to knock some of the red dirt off his body, to no avail. He looked like he’d been swimming in mud.
Did it rain last night?
He looked up to find Leo’s pale eyebrows pushed up into the stratosphere and eyes went wide as saucers.
She sure as hell wasn’t looking at how big his feet were, either.
He shook his head and shifted his weight. “Standard equipment. You should know that, having been made a mother.”
She looked away and tightened the blanket around her.
Then she muttered some incoherent things under her breath and started stomping toward wolf housing.
“Pretty sure Leticia took Kinzy,” he called after her. “Head for the house with the yellow door.”
She picked up a little speed as she approached the cluster of houses, quickly scanning all around until her gaze settled on the right one.
She knocked, hitched her blanket up higher, and pressed down her hair as she waited.
He shook his head again and took a slower pace to the houses. He wasn’t in any urgent hurry to put clothes on, nor was he so eager to have Petra rip him a new asshole for having disappeared on her.
By the time he stepped onto the concrete walkway around the house he shared with Petra, a bunch of wolves had poked their heads out their doors, likely checking to see what all the commotion was.
Alpha’s throaty laugh echoed through the desert, and Arnold didn’t bother turning to look. Someone had pulled open the yellow door, and Leo had stepped quickly inside the house.
“Was wondering when you’d get up.” Alpha stepped across the courtyard with his hands jammed into the pockets of his dark cargo pants and a with smile tugging at the corners of his lips.
Arnold let his breath out in a sputter of his lips and raked a few bits of the desert scenery out of his long hair. “What time is it?”
“Only seven. If you were going to be out there much longer, I might have had to dump a bucket of water on you to try to get you up so you didn’t fry under the sun.”
“Appreciate the concern.” Arnold ground the heels of his palms against his eyes and sighed. He wasn’t much of a sigher, but the reaction seemed necessary and appropriate. “I have no idea what happened last night.”
“Yeah, well, that makes a whole bunch of us. You missed a lot and, obviously, so did we.”
“I’m sorry for going off like that without saying anything. That was probably rude of me, seeing as how you so kindly offered my sister and me a place to stay, and—”
Alpha slashed a dismissing hand through the air and turned on his heel. “Let’s talk over breakfast. Lil’s making omelets.” He stopped. Turned. Tapped his chin in that I’m thinking way he did sometimes.
Oh hell. Let me have it.
“You might want to avert your eyes as you enter your house. I’m not sure where Paul slept last night.”
“Paul? I’m sorry, what?”
“Your sister’s mate.”
“My sister’s mate?” Try as he might have, Arnold couldn’t quite conceal the note of incredulity in his tone. As much as he loved his twin and wanted the best for her—part of the reason he’d allowed Alpha’s niece to transport them to Norseton—he’d never once considered that Petra would take a mate. She was just too…Petra.
Alpha shrugged in a don’t know what to tell ya, man kind of way, so obviously Arnold wasn’t alone in his opinion.
“I wasn’t even gone that long,” Arnold said.
Alpha shrugged again. “Doesn’t take long. We’re werewolves, not Victorian aristocrats. Sometimes, we let nature take its course, and nature isn’t the kind of thing that likes to wait around.”
Arnold cut his gaze toward the quiet house he and Petra had been assigned, and held up a hand. “Don’t tell me anything else.”
“I was just warning ya. Anyhow, shower fast. Lil has to get to work, so I don’t imagine she’ll hold breakfast long.”
“Thanks.”
Alpha continued on his way to his house.
Arnold went to his, not sure it was rea
lly his anymore. If Petra had started shacking up with some guy in the few days Arnold was gone, Arnold would have to find someplace else to live. Being roommates would be too awkward. He and Petra had shared a lot of motel rooms in ten years, but they had always been very careful to keep their love lives private. He hadn’t even been sure Petra’d had a love life.
Now she has a mate. Unbelievable.
And that mate was standing right at the kitchen counter in Arnold’s house, warming a cup of coffee between his hands atop the counter, and apparently having lost his shirt.
Arnold cleared his throat and let the screen door rattle shut. He nodded at the Viking doctor—a member of Norseton’s Afótama clan—and cleared his throat. “Paul.”
Paul nodded back. “Petra has some words for you.”
“Cool. I’ve got a few for you.”
“Not worth the breath, though, are they? Any argument you could make, you’d likely immediately decide for yourself is fallacious.”
“Doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to kick your ass, anyway.”
Paul sipped his coffee. Grunted. Drummed his fingertips atop the counter. “Okay, so let’s run down the Mind-Your-Own-Business list all at once and get the chore out of the way. Number one—your sister is twenty-five years old. Even if I weren’t her mate and she weren’t stuck with me because of my weird psychic shit, she’d still have the right to fuck whoever wants to fuck her. She’s not a little girl.”
Arnold groaned and moved to the sofa to grab the afghan off the back. He couldn’t have that conversation while he was naked.
“Number two,” Paul said. “Yes, I was her doctor. I was treating her injuries. I did not take advantage of her.”
“All right. You’re doing a good job with that list. What else do you have?”
“We’re getting married.”
Arnold closed one eye and crossed the other one.
“What do you have against marriage?” Paul asked.
“Nothing, for some folks. To a lot of folks, the institution doesn’t mean much. Hell. My parents were married, and that didn’t stop my father from leaving my mother.”