"I'm fine. You go clean up and leave me to my business. It's almost lunch and I got work to do. Leave me be," she said bossily.
"When was the last time you ate?" Charles asked again, his tone demanding an answer.
Maybe it was the tone of his voice which now sounded deeper and more commanding or maybe it was the way he stood up and over her that made his shoulders look broader, his legs look longer, his whole body look more powerful. Whatever it was, Mrs. Martin shifted back in her chair and averted her eyes.
"Day before yesterday," she confessed.
"Why?" It was another demand.
Mrs. Martin hung her head, clearly ashamed. "I spent the last of our money on the gas to get us here."
"Why didn't you tell Begley you needed money? He would have billed it to me." Charles' eyes never left the older woman's bowed head.
"I didn't want you to think we came a-begging," she whispered. She started to rise again.
"You sit until I tell you to do otherwise," he snapped and Mrs. Martin sat.
Kat wanted to be anywhere but in that room witnessing this proud woman confess her penury and she was shocked by Charles brow beating her. Her fist was clenched, ready to do battle on the older woman's behalf. She started forward.
Charles hand snapped up, one finger raised. Stop. Kat was brought up short. Charles didn't look to see if his gesture was obeyed. His eyes never left Mrs. Martin.
"Becoming a member of this... family," he went on in a stern voice, "was a condition of your coming here; that and a release from your previous... employer. Do you honor that agreement? Do you stand for me?"
At his repetition of the same words he'd used when speaking to her, Kat's fist unclenched, her curiosity aroused. It was like being eight years old again, sitting at the kitchen table doing homework, listening to her parents talk about one thing while meaning something else. She'd known they were talking in code, but didn't have the key to break it.
"Of course I do and Buddy, too," Mrs. Martin said, offended. "Where I go, he goes and you know he'll be loyal to you." A little of the snap was back in her voice.
"Then why would you shame me."
"I didn't..."
"You did! It's my duty to see my p... people are cared for, fed, housed. What would it look like if I let someone I stood for go hungry, a widow no less?" His finger poked the soft arm of the chair for emphasis and Mrs. Martin jumped. "We're small. We're new. I'll be observed and tested and I will not be found wanting. I stand for those who stand for me, Tilda Martin. Don't you forget it."
"I won't, sir," Mrs. Martin said, nodding her head sharply. She smiled at Charles like a mother proud of her son. "It won't happen again."
"See that it doesn't."
He held out his hand and the housekeeper placed her hand in his, he patted it and smiled affectionately. His whole bearing changed as he returned to role of affable painter.
"You sit right there. I'll get you some water. Katarina will keep you company."
"It's Kat and I want to know what the..."
"So do I. We'll talk about that later," Charles said in that voice that oozed authority and expected obedience. He turned to Mrs. Martin lowering his chin and raising his eyebrows in a significant look. "You're right, she doesn't belong here. You keep that in mind."
Mrs. Martin's nod contradicted her words as a body hurtled across the room.
"No!" she shouted as the huge man wrapped his arms around Charles and lifted him from the ground in a bear hug that had the power to break the smaller man's ribs. "Buddy, no!"
"Charlie!" Buddy danced around the room with Charles dangling from his arms like a big rag doll. "I'm back, Charlie. I'm back. I come home."
"Buddy Gregory, you put him down!"
"That's great, Buddy," Charles choked out in a strangled voice, "Could you put me down now."
"Sure, Charlie, sure."
Charles bent in half and rested his hands on his knees while he gulped in enough air to replace what had been squeezed from his lungs.
"Well," he rasped out a laugh, "Buddy hasn't changed much." He straightened and then bent backward with a groan to realign his spine. "Good to see you, man, but I sure hope you don't hug the girls like that."
Buddy was tall, six-six or seven to Charles' six feet and where Charles' well-muscled shoulders and chest narrowed to slim hips and long legs, Buddy was simply huge. He dwarfed Charles with his massive neck, hulking shoulders and thick arms. His broad chest crowned a thick torso and wide hips that were supported by thighs the size of telephone poles. Even though his back was to her, Kat could see the blush creep up the pale skin of the ears that stuck out on either side of his red ball cap.
"I wouldn't hug a girl like that, Charlie," the man said seriously and as if Charles should know better than to say such a thing. "You got to be careful with girls. They're like Mama's china tea cups and break real easy. And no huggin' lessin' she's your girlfriend," he continued as if reciting a rule. "I don't got no girlfriend. But you do," he said slyly and turned and winked at Kat.
Three voices sounded at once.
"Buddy!"
"No, she isn't."
"N-no. I'm not." Kat was as quick to answer as Charles and she hoped the others thought her stutter was caused by the comment and not by her first good look at Buddy's face.
Buddy Gregory was an albino with snow white hair, colorless brows and lashes and pale, almost transparent blue eyes. His lips, too, showed only a hint of color against the gleaming white of his teeth bared in a childlike grin. It was hard to put an age to his innocent and unlined face, but if she was forced to guess, she'd say his late twenties.
The white haired giant blushed fiercely. "But Mama said if Charlie was gonna be..."
"Maybe you better pay less attention to your Mama's mutterings and more attention to your manners," Mrs. Martin interrupted before Buddy embarrassed them both. "Instead of tossing Mr. Goodman around, maybe you should have been holding out your hand and introducing yourself to the lady."
Poor Buddy looked like he wasn't sure what to do. He looked at his mother, looked at his hand, and looked at Kat.
Kat took pity on the confused man and held out her hand. "Hi, I'm Kat. It's nice to meet you, Buddy."
"Kat?" he grinned as he shook her hand, very gently, she noted. Still shaking and grinning, he looked to his mother. "You were right Mama. We got us another Kitty Kat." Buddy laughed at his joke. "Our other one died," he explained to Kat, "But I didn't eat it. We don't eat cats." He emphasized each word with a shake of his finger as if it was another rule.
"I'm glad to hear it" she laughed.
Chapter 7
"What do you mean he's not there?"
Charles was shouting so loudly into his phone, they could hear every word from the kitchen. He was pacing like a wild animal held in a cage, back and forth, back and forth, in front of the windows looking out over the patio. He'd been making phone calls for the last half hour, becoming louder and more frustrated each time the people he tried to contact were unavailable.
By the sound of it, he'd gone back to the top of his list.
"Don't give me that out-of-town shit, Henry. We both know he's not on vacation. Saint Marshall wouldn't leave his precious Rabbit Creek unattended." His jaw clenched as he listened to what Henry had to say.
"Bullshit! Elizabeth'll be ready to whelp any day now. Hell, half your female population must be ready to drop their cubs, so you know as well as I do, nobody's going anywhere any time soon."
Whatever was said on the other side of the line made him grin, but no one would know it from the sound of his voice.
"You're welcome," he snarled, "If you weren't my cousin, I'd come down there and rip your throat out. What kind of a Second are you? You don't know where your Alpha is. You don't know where the goddamned kids are and you don't have a contact number for Eugene Fucking Begley." He held the phone out and looked at it as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing.
"I didn't call him," he yelled at the
phone in his outstretched hand, "Elizabeth did. She said she'd take care of finding me a housekeeper for this place and a teacher for the kids." A pause. "Yes, dammit, but she knew damn well they weren't both supposed to come here. Shit, the teacher isn't even one of us!"
"You know damn well what she is! Keep laughing and I really will come down there and rip your throat out. You tell Marshall the same goes for him and don't think that pretty little mate of his is going to save either one of you."
He looked at the phone in his hand again and for a moment, Kat thought he was going to hurl it into the pool, but then he punched it with his thumb without saying goodbye and jammed it into his pocket.
Mrs. Martin's whole head followed each time Charles changed direction, like this was a tennis match and his head was the ball. She pursed her lips and sighed.
"Looks to me like Buddy isn't the only one who hasn't changed. Listen to that language. I told his mother long ago she should wash that filthy mouth out with soap, but poor Emily, God rest her soul, thought he'd grow out of it. Don't see why. His Daddy never did. He had the same foul temper peppered with the same foul words."
"Like father, like son," Kat commented.
"Lord, I hope not."
They'd eaten lunch in the small eating area off the kitchen, the Breakfast Room, and over sandwiches piled impossibly high with slabs of ham and thick slices of cheese, Kat learned that Mrs. Martin had worked for Charles' mother when he and his brothers were boys. She'd been Mrs. Gregory then and her son, older than the Goodman boys, had worshipped Charles, the eldest son, and followed him about so closely, Charles couldn't stop short without the bigger boy bowling him over.
Kat did the mental math and came to the conclusion that Buddy, the man she'd judged to be in his twenties, was a good twenty years older than that!
As for the grownup Charles, he all but ignored Kat during the meal and spent his time trying to chat with Buddy about how the other man had spent his time during the years they'd been apart. It wasn't easy. Buddy only wanted to talk about Kat.
"She sure is pretty," he told Charles as if Kat wasn't in the room.
"She is that," Charles agreed, "So you say you couldn't find much work, huh?"
"No. I think she'd make a fine Mate. She's a teacher, you know."
"So I gathered. You think you'd like to work for me?"
"Mama says I got no choice if I expect to eat. You think she'd like having babies? I could help take care of 'em. I do good with babies, 'specially if they was your babies, Charlie. Mama says it's important for a Mate to like babies and if she's a teacher, she must like 'em, right?"
Charles was beginning to look uncomfortable and Kat didn't feel much better. "Maybe we can go for a run later, Buddy. Would you like that?"
"Sure would!" Buddy nodded enthusiastically. "If Kat was the Mate, she could run with us. I bet she'd look fine a-runnin' wild. You like to run Miss Kitty Kat?"
"I used to," Kat told him, "But mostly when I had to catch a bus"
It was true. When she was young, she ran for the sheer joy of it, but like so many things she enjoyed, running was set aside because it got her no closer to her goals and running on city sidewalks held little appeal.
"See, Charlie? Miss Kitty Kat is just about perfect." Buddy folded his arms and sat back in his chair and nodded, argument won, conversation over.
"You need to talk to him, Mrs. Martin."
"Indeed I do, Mr. Goodman, but you have to understand. Buddy's not a child anymore and he has his own opinions."
Charles spent the rest of the meal in silence before he went outside and started making phone calls.
"Wes Goodman, Charles' daddy, was a hard man, but a just leader and fair in his dealings with his people," Mrs. Martin went on. "He did right by them, took good care of them and he was soft and sweet as marshmallow when it came to Emily. It was them boys he was tough on. Toughest on Charles because he was the oldest and supposed to take his father's place." She glanced over her shoulder at Kat. "You need to remember that."
"I don't see why. According to Mr. Goodman, I don't belong here." It was like she'd suddenly grown warts on her nose, turned wall-eyed, lost half her teeth and contracted plague. The man wouldn't even look at her. "I'll be leaving come morning."
"I wouldn't count on that if I were you." One side of the woman's mouth curved up into her cheek in a lopsided smirk that Kat already recognized as Mrs. Martin's version of a smile. "If Eugene Begley sent you here, he must mean you to be here."
"You heard Mr. Goodman. It was a mistake."
"Eugene Begley don't make that kind of mistake."
"Charles' plans for this place didn't include me or kids. I thought he made that pretty clear."
Looking only at Mrs. Martin across the table from him at lunch or at Buddy to his left, Charles explained in code again (and that was really ticking Kat off) that he'd purchased this place in the middle of nowhere as a 'retreat' for his people, to be used mostly on weekends for adult relaxation and pursuits, emphasis on 'adult', and not for a schoolhouse.
You didn't have to be an expert at code breaking to understand the meaning of that! With the pool and hot tub, food and liquor enough to stock a neighborhood bar and six bedrooms and baths above, he was looking for party time, not foster parent time and he had thought to begin this week's party early with Kat. The flaw in that theory was Mrs. Martin herself who didn't find their circumstances amusing when she walked in on them this morning, but later nodded her head in understanding at Charles' plan. Of course, at the time, Mrs. Martin thought Charles was the painter and not the boss. The guy who signed your paychecks always had great ideas.
Kat brushed the last of the crumbs from the counter into her palm, tossed them into the container under the sink and came to stand next to Mrs. Martin. Together they watched Charles look up at the gray and water swollen sky and frown.
He held his hand out, palm up, catching the first fat drops of rain and then his hand went to his mouth and with two fingers between his lips he issued a piercing whistle before waving his arms to call Buddy in.
"You're supposed to be sitting down."
Kat touched the other woman's arm and indicated the wooden rocker in the corner, mostly because she didn't want to watch Charles' high and tight rear end move beneath the canvas work pants. She didn't want to imagine how the muscles of his tapered back rippled under the faded oxford shirt.
Damnit! What was the matter with her? She didn't even know this guy and if they hadn't been interrupted, she would have been stripped and spread after only a grunt and a nod from him. She'd never done a one night stand in her life and she sure as hell never felt like that about anyone, never mind a guy she just met. After the way he'd treated her, what he'd said to her, the way he ignored her at lunch, how could she still feel this disgustingly insatiable interest?
"You don't belong here," Kat said aloud, "That's what he said and he was right." He might as well have slapped her.
She'd heard and felt those words so many times, they shouldn't hurt any more. Repetition had taken the sting out of those words long ago or so she thought. Kat had spent a lifetime trying to belong, trying to have what other people had, trying to live the way other people lived. Trying and failing.
She never belonged; not in her old neighborhood, not in high school or college, not with her colleagues at Greenwood Preparatory Academy and apparently not with those of the Bastard, either.
"Seems to me, men say a lot of things they don't mean." Mrs. Martin rocked that chair the way Kat suspected the woman did everything, in double time.
"Trust me, Mrs. Martin, this one means it. He wants me gone," Kat said bitterly and wondered again why it should bother her so much.
"Don't know you well enough to trust you and call me Tilda. I expect we'll be spending a lot of time together. No sense being formal."
Before Kat could reply, Charles stuck his head in the door.
"I'm going for a run," he said, "See if I can catch up with Buddy."
At the sound of her son's name, Tilda's head snapped up. "You let him run?"
"I did," he nodded. "He said it had been a while and he missed it, so I let him go."
Tilda looked ready to run out the door after her wayward son and Kat could understand why. In the few hours she'd known them, she'd already seen that the man had the mind of a child and was actually older than Charles though he didn't look it.
"He can't run, not alone. He gets distracted, confused... lost."
"He'll be fine. He can't have gone far. I'll call and he'll come," Charles said confidently.
"He won't," Tilda told him worriedly with a sharp glance at Kat. "When he runs, he turns deaf. All he hears is the wild. They'd get so mad at him, but he can't help it. The pull is too strong, he doesn't hear."
"He'll hear me." Charles stripped his belt from the loops of his spattered painter's pants. He crossed his arms and gripped the hem of his shirt in that way men have of stripping off their shirt and leaving it inside out. Arms stretched above his head, he offered a perfect display of pectorals and abs.
His chest was every bit as beautiful as Kat imagined. Unprepared for her reaction, she sucked in her breath on a wave of longing and had her arm outstretched to touch him before she realized she'd moved. Disgusted with herself, she turned the gesture into a comforting one and laid her hand on Tilda's shoulder.
"I can look for him, too."
"No, you can't. I want you here, with Mrs. Martin," Charles ordered.
"Yes, I can. I'm perfectly capable… "
The closing door told her what he thought of that.
Being a mature adult, Kat wrinkled her nose and stuck out her tongue at the back of the man striding away from the door. "Asshole. I wonder if he orders everyone around like that or just me."
"I imagine he's used to being obeyed," Tilda observed vaguely.
She was watching through the window, eyes squinting to see through the sheets of rain that beat against the windows as the sky released its burden. Her thumb rubbed against the tips of her fingers in a nervous gesture and her jaw was tight. Even on such short acquaintance, Kat knew this woman wasn't one to worry over trivial things. If she was concerned for Buddy's safety, she had reason to be. A tear formed in the corner of the woman's eye, just one tear, but it was enough for Kat to make up her mind.
The Alpha's Choice Page 5