by Holley Trent
Lying. I’d be a lying-ass-liar.
“Why lie?” she said quietly.
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“This isn’t what I thought I wanted, and I’m afraid that accepting this huge freakin’ change means I didn’t know what I wanted in the first place. Or that I’m fickle and indecisive.”
“But how could you possibly be expected to know what you want when you haven’t been exposed to all the potential options? You can’t want what you don’t know exists.”
And she hadn’t known people like Arnold existed. If she had, she would have wanted him for sure. She would have ran sooner to go looking for him.
“How’d you get so smart?” she asked in a quavering voice.
Arnold settled his hands on her waist and just looked at her for a long moment.
The compulsion to try to tidy up her hair or rub her face was so strong, but she kept her hands still and let him look.
“You and Petra can argue about whether or not I’m smart,” he said after a minute. “I don’t know if I am. I just do what makes sense, and try not to hurt anyone in the process.”
“Don’t hurt me.”
Everything coming out of her mouth was admittedly pretty pitiful, but if he wanted her to talk, she was going to tell him what she needed him to hear. She didn’t want to belong to things that would hurt her.
“I can’t promise that I never will,” he said, “but I’ll do everything I can not to hurt you intentionally. People aren’t perfect, but I won’t stop trying to be. For you.”
The truth wasn’t extinct yet. Arnold harbored it, and wondered if that was part of the reason she’d been trying so hard to avoid him. The truth was scary, but she believed him. Trusted him, as much she did Mrs. Carbone and any of the other lady wolves, and she was tired of running away from him. They all had something good with their mates, and Arnold was offering Leo a shot at the same. He was offering her a true mate, and not just treating her like a woman who’d been assigned to him.
She eased his hands down to her waistband and helped him wriggle her pajama bottoms down her hips. “You wanted me to talk, so here you go.” She knelt up so he could slide her pants to her knees. As she carefully pulled her legs from each hole, she said, “I want you to touch me like you see me as an individual, and like you know that I can feel things. I want you to look me in my eyes sometimes, so I know you remember that I’m still here.”
She tossed her pants onto the floor along with her panties, and then retook her seat atop his legs.
He slipped his palms up her thighs, stopping at the bottom of her shirt, which he tugged.
Off, he seemed to be saying.
But she still had some more words for him.
“I want you to do things to me that feel good, and I don’t know what those all are, but I want you to ask if they do. And I’m going to touch you, too, if you let me. Because I think you’re pretty, and I want to.”
“You’re a mess, Leo.”
“At least one of us looks good.”
“Not what I meant.” He slowly unfastened the last of her shirt buttons and pushed the top off her shoulders. “Damn.”
Her first thought was to cover herself, but before she could put thought into action, he’d clamped her arms to her sides and sat up easily, because he obviously had fully functional abdominal muscles and not what amounted to werewolf hamburger meat thanks to having given birth to a nine-pound baby. Apparently, speedy shapeshifter healing didn’t do diddlysquat for pregnancy trauma.
She let out a reflexive titter as his warm chest crushed her breasts and his lips traced a searing line down the side of her neck.
“So soft,” he whispered. “Love that.”
She swallowed down her rebuttal. She always had one raring to go, even if she really didn’t need to say anything.
“And your smell, Leo—shit, it does things to me. Can’t even get close to you without wanting to do unmentionable things to you.”
“Like what?”
“I’ll tell you some other time.”
“Do some mentionable things to me, then.” Please.
He scooped her up by the ass and turned, depositing her onto her back.
A moment later, his pants were gone, as well as anything else he’d been wearing that she simply hadn’t been paying attention to.
She tried to keep her focus above his waist, which had plenty of pretty things to look at, but she’d been denying herself of her mate for ten weeks, and her mind had suddenly narrowed to a single track.
And I’m going to marry this guy.
“Holy—”
He climbed onto the bed between her legs and grabbed a pillow from the head. She let him wedge it beneath her ass and then watched him thread her legs around his waist.
“Are you still going to marry me?” she asked.
“You don’t hold anything back, do you? You just ask things as they pop into your head?”
“I should talk less, and I’ve been trying to, but around you, I—”
He laughed and leaned down, taking her mouth in a kiss that seemed simultaneously possessing and gentle. She didn’t mind the possessing part so much because he was so gentle.
“You can talk all you want,” he said. “And yes, I’ll marry you if you’re sure. I can’t give you my name, though.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want anyone I love to have my father’s name. I haven’t legally dropped it, but I will one day.”
“Oh. Well, we could make up something for both of us. Change at the same time.”
He nipped at the lobe of her ear, and the rumble of his chest as he moaned stirred her arousal and made her grip him more tightly around the waist. She pulled him toward her core, desperate to have him inside, finally.
“Surname by committee?” He slipped his hand between their bodies, and suddenly he was inside her, and she couldn’t breathe.
Oh. My. Dang.
She didn’t know how long she lay there blinking at him, but by the time he moved again, her body was soft as putty, her muscles slack and useless, and her mouth open to release some sound that was half moan and half wail.
He didn’t thrust so much as stroke—long, slow strokes of his thick length in and all the way out of her, again and again, until she stopped making that noise and breathed.
The weight of his body atop her was inconsequential. The slight smothering added one more sensation to the already overwhelming mix. And she wanted more.
She dug her fingers into his backside to quicken his thrusts, and shorten them, too. She wanted more sensations, and faster ones. More exhilaration. Less control. She wanted to lose control for a change, and with someone who wouldn’t mind if she did.
“Careful,” he said into her ear. “I need to outlast you. You’re making that hard, baby.”
“I can’t help it. I—I like it.”
“There’ll be more chances. Every day, if you want, and different every time. I don’t belong to anyone else. Just you. I’ll always come home to you.”
“Aww. That’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Leo had never expected to sob her way through her first orgasm, but so much in her life had been unpredictable in that way.
The lingering postpartum hormones probably weren’t helping, either.
“It’s all right.” Arnold kissed her tear-tracked cheeks, never missing a beat down below. He kept moving into her, faster and faster, and then less rhythmically. She gripped him even tighter when his liquid heat filled her, and his fangs broke the skin of her shoulder.
She couldn’t feel the pain, just the pleasure.
She already belonged to him, so the bite wasn’t necessary. He’d just given her one that she’d actually remember.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The wolf goddess showed Arnold two choices. Usually, there were no choices—just a single path for him to follow if he wanted to keep her favor. But in his dream she gave him two, and afterward, he lay in Leo’s
bed, clutching her sleeping form tight as the options played out in his head on repeat—until he chose.
Choice one: do nothing. He could stay put and pretend he didn’t know there’d been options. He could let Sheldon do his job, and watch the custody mess drag on for months in the courts, risking exposure of them all. Certainly, someone would eventually slip and say the wrong thing, or perhaps one of Samuel’s other wives would get jealous and step forward to talk.
The second choice was to confront Samuel. Arnold could challenge the man, and they could fight it out as wolves, or upright in their human forms. If Samuel submitted, he couldn’t push for custody of Kinzy, and nor could his family. They’d lose any claim over her. Samuel had other wives to concern himself with, anyway. He couldn’t possibly love Leo enough to deserve to keep her.
The problem with the second choice, though, was that a challenge like that would be a ripple through the wolf grapevine. There were unspoken rules that packs followed, and interfering in the dealings of other packs just wasn’t done.
But the dealings were wrong. Wolves in general were wrong, and the culture would never change unless people started to challenge the status quo.
He looked down at Leo, who was sleeping deeply with her body half on top of his, and wondered how anyone could ever want more than her.
But he already knew the answer. Greed. Greed motivated too much of wolf behavior. His grandfather had always said so. He’d said that greed was a slow-spreading cancer that no one feared enough to look for a cure, because the cancer felt too good.
Everyone had thought his grandfather was crazy when he talked like that, but he wasn’t crazy. Like Arnold, he saw too much.
And Arnold was seeing a way to make a small stand that could have long-lasting repercussions.
He couldn’t just be idle. He needed to be proactive and fight for the kind of life he wanted, and that wasn’t selfish. He wanted that life for his sister, too, and all the other wolves in Norseton who’d done so much to make rejects feel at home.
Home was worth fighting for.
He laid kisses across the top of Leo’s forehead and carefully shifted her onto her belly. He fixed the covers around her, found the baby monitor’s receiver, and then turned it on.
He grabbed his clothes and dressed quietly in the living room, planning out the note he’d leave for Leo. She wasn’t like Petra. Leo wasn’t yet used to him running off to fulfill tasks laid out in visions from the goddess, and he didn’t want Leo to think he’d run away from her.
He’d meant everything he said about them belonging to each other, but he had to act. Had to call off the dogs. Kinzy would never truly be safe until he did, and he didn’t doubt for a moment that when Samuel realized what he’d lost, he’d play dirty to get Leo back, too. Arnold sure would have.
___
Arnold had assumed that Adam would deny him permission to go confront the pack in Wyoming, but he didn’t. He’d sent Arnold on his way with a wad of cash for gas, his blessing, and the instruction to take a buddy along for backup.
Arnold and Jim hit the road at sunup, and Leo tried calling his cell not long after. He ignored the call.
“What’d you say in the note you left her?” Jim asked.
He’d barely had time to throw some weapons in a bag and brush his hair following his night shift, but when Arnold had asked, he didn’t hesitate to tell him yes. He was a good friend. Arnold had never had such a support system when he and Petra had been on their own. He wanted every wolf to have one, but he knew many would be too scared to fight for it. That made him sad.
“I told her I was going to make it so Samuel rescinded the hunt for her,” Arnold said. “I didn’t go into too many details.”
“Probably smart. She’d worry too much. Alpha gave you permission to use the pack’s name in your confrontation?”
“Yeah.” Arnold let out the stale air he’d been holding in for too long and then took a long sip of the black coffee he’d picked up on the way out of Norseton.
“He’s a mysterious guy,” Jim said.
“Sure as hell is. I think there’s only one other pack who’ve had more than a superficial awareness of the wolves in Norseton, and that’s only because Alpha’s son married an old enemy’s daughter. I was young when I left my pack, but I’ve never heard of an alpha condoning what could turn into a potential pack war.”
“But he’s like you, isn’t he? He sees things?”
“Nah. Not like me, unless he’s lying about the extent of his abilities.”
“The goddess talks to him, though. I know that for sure.”
“Yeah. That’s true. For all we know, she told him not to give you a hassle.”
“He’ll never tell us if she did. He keeps that stuff so private.”
“I guess that’s the burden of a true alpha, huh?” Jim’s voice tapered off at the end, and Arnold looked over to see the other man with eyes closed and pinching the bridge of nose.
“You all right?”
“Yeah, just thinking about old shit. I think we both know nothing good rarely comes of that.”
They were mostly quiet the rest of the trip up to Wyoming, which suited Arnold well. He needed time to think, and Jim needed to get some sleep.
The next time Arnold’s phone rang, he was navigating through road construction in Colorado, and marveling at how Jim’s snores sounded in time to the beat of the song on the radio.
Arnold answered when he saw that the caller was just Petra. “Yeah?”
“Where are ya going?” she asked. “Alpha was being vague. I mean, he’s usually a little vague, even on the best of days, but he was being more mysterious than usual. What are you up to?”
“Just making sure this mess with Leo gets nipped in the bud. Gotta make a stand somewhere, you know?”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, I’m driving up to Wolverton, and I’m gonna find that guy Samuel and whoever the alpha is up there, and I’m gonna make sure they back the hell off.”
Petra—the woman who would never let an opportunity for having the last word pass her by—was curiously silent. Arnold risked a glance away from the road to look at his phone screen. It said the call was still connected. He put the phone back to his ear. “Petra?”
“And Alpha let you go?” she asked, voice tinged with some quality Arnold couldn’t quite identify. Perhaps half fear, half wonder.
“Yeah. He knows what might happen.”
“Damn. That explains why the guys here have been so quiet and tense all morning. They’re not the chattiest bunch in general, but they’re acting weird, and all the ladies have been commenting on their behavior.”
“They wouldn’t tell you?”
“No, and I’m not gonna tell them, either, now that I know. No use in getting them all worked up over something that might not turn out to be a problem.”
“Yeah.” He hoped it wouldn’t. “So…have you seen Leo?”
“I saw her first thing this morning when I was pushing Paul out the door for work. She went tearing out of her house, looking pissed and not making a hell of a lot of sense. I didn’t understand what she was going on about until she showed me the note. Way to be vague, bro. She’s freaking out, thinking you won’t come back.”
“I very specifically said I would be back.”
“Yeah, but look at things from her perspective. Any woman would freak out if her mate went off adventuring the morning after he bit her.”
“Bit her again.”
“Whatever. In her estimation, the first one didn’t count. Anyway, what do you want me to tell her?”
“Nothing. I don’t want her to worry. I don’t want her to think that anything bad that could happen is her fault. If you’re gonna do anything at all, just keep her busy. I’ll be back as soon as I can. No one’s done this before, so I can’t say what’s gonna happen, only that it shouldn’t be allowed to happen anymore.”
“Yeah. You’re right.” Petra sighed. “Mom would be proud of you.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah, I do. She’d be pleased that you’re bucking the trend when the trend doesn’t make sense.”
“She did that, too, when she didn’t beg our father to stay.”
“Yeah,” she said softly—a rarely used volume for her. “Like Granddad, Mom wasn’t afraid of being an outcast, I guess. Maybe her decisions put us in a bit of a shitty place after she died, but I think we’re better off now because of everything that happened.”
“Yeah. Outcasts with no names.”
“Nuh-uh. I have Paul’s name. You have to get your own.”
“Working on it.”
“You could always take Granddad’s. I think that was what Mom was going to do if the divorce ever got finalized. She was going to revert to her maiden name.”
“Hmm.” Arnold had actually given that some thought before—erasing the name he didn’t want and reknitting his family tree to respect the ancestors he honored. “You don’t think ‘Graywolf’ is a little trite, though?” he asked.
Petra laughed. “Maybe a little. It’s descriptive, at least.”
“I’ll have Leo try it on and see what she thinks.”
“Leo Graywolf has a certain irony. Or it’s an oxymoron or something. I think I skimmed that particular home school unit.”
“It’s funky,” he said. “I think she’d appreciate the built-in joke.”
“Well, there you go. Drive safe. Call and let Alpha know what’s happening when you get up there.”
“Will do.”
Arnold disconnected and set the phone into the cup holder beside his empty coffee cup.
The last time a Graywolf had confronted an alpha, there’d been a pack war. James Graywolf had been the winner, but the victory had been a hollow one. He hadn’t gotten back his mate and his child who’d been taken away—the reason he’d made the challenge in the first place. He’d died not knowing where they were—without learning what wolf had taken them, only that the alpha had arranged for their removal, and that he’d done so because James was weird.
Weird like Arnold.
Like James, Arnold didn’t plan to lose the challenge. Maybe Leo wouldn’t like him by the time all was said and done, but he hoped that one day, she’d understand why he had to do it.