by L. A. Banks
“You have to close the door all the way,” he said, keeping his eyes on the windshield.
“Nick’s Diner isn’t that far—ten minutes, tops, at this hour with no traffic. Drive with me holding the door ajar,” she said, keeping her gun trained on him.
“If I hit a bump—”
“Either you’ll get shot or I’ll fall out, so I suggest you drive with care.”
He drove with care.
CHAPTER 5
TRUE TO FORM, and even truer to what she was, she’d held on to his truck door, keeping it ajar and her gun leveled at him all the way to Nick’s Diner while he pushed seventy-five miles an hour on pure, open highway. Half of him wanted to smile; the other half was ready to snarl when she’d insisted that he walk in front of her, given the heavy crowd of eighteen-wheeler rigs in the lot.
She was tough, something he really liked about her but that he also decidedly hated. He found the most remote booth in the place, the one farthest from prying eyes, and watched her slide into it across from him, sitting only after he’d settled in. Weary, he let out an exhale of frustration and rubbed both palms down his face. Only the waitress’s tired footfalls and the distant clatter of silverware punctuated the silence at their table.
“What can I get y’all folks this morning?” the waitress drawled with a fatigued smile that still reached her wan blue eyes despite how exhausted she seemed to be.
He gazed up at the deep lines in her face and the dark roots of her hair that ended in blond, almost absorbing the ache in her swollen ankles, and then looked over to Sasha.
“Just coffee,” Sasha finally said, giving him a warning glare.
“Steak, really rare, and eggs with a side of bacon and sausage,” he said. “Keep the coffee coming, too. Thanks.”
“You got it, hon,” the waitress replied, merriment slowly filling her eyes. “I remember them partying days.” She winked at Sasha. “You keep ’im in line, and if you change your mind, I’ll bring you a breakfast, too, okay?”
“Thanks,” Sasha said with a tight smile. “I appreciate that.”
They both watched the waitress shuffle off and dispense her Florence Nightingale–style attention on weary truckers who sat like lone soldiers hunched over plates and steaming mugs. A few late-night party people reclined within the dull, tan plastic booths in small clusters of humanity trying to sober up or service a case of the munchies, but at the near dawn hour—transition time—the diner was fairly empty.
“Okay, you can knock off the guilt thing,” Sasha said, once she was sure the waitress was out of earshot.
He shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, you do. Okay, so these people . . . or people like them, shouldn’t have their lives snuffed out by . . . by a situation beyond their control.”
He leaned forward quickly, not caring that she had a Glock nine pointed at his groin beneath the table. Fatigue was eroding his patience.
“Call it what it is,” he said between his teeth, feeling his upper and lower canines beginning to crest but willing them back. “None of these people in here should have their lives suddenly taken in the most horrible way you can describe, namely being eaten to death, savaged, by a demon wolf.” His gaze held hers captive and he watched her eyes begin to change as she struggled unsuccessfully to disengage from him. “It’s better to always call it what it is than to play games with yourself. That way you never forget your true calling, or your ancestry. This is your job.”
“First of all,” she said, a low, warning growl layered beneath her words. “Who the hell are you? That’s what you need to answer before you start telling me about whatever.”
He rolled his shoulders and leaned in closer, his gaze hard and steady on her. “The name is Hunter.”
“You’re being funny, right?”
A long silence sat at the table with them, taking over the booth.
“Max Hunter,” he said, thoroughly offended.
She pushed back and smiled a slight smile as the waitress returned with two steaming cups of strong coffee. “Okay.” But she glimpsed from him to the waitress’s back to the coffee like he might have poisoned it.
He remained silent until the waitress left before resuming the conversation. “What does ‘okay’ mean, and why is my name a problem? And you’re acting like I drugged your coffee or something, when you saw for yourself that the woman brought it out from the back and poured it from the same pot she’s serving everyone else from!”
“Sounds like an alias.” Sasha sat without looking at him. She focused on adding lots of cream and lots of sugar to her coffee, thinking about the same line of conversation she’d had with Shogun. “And you could have accomplices.”
“Right. The bleached blonde is my contact,” he said sarcastically in a near growl, then took a slurp from her cup and then his. “Satisfied—or now do you want your own fresh cup?”
She swallowed a smile. “This is fine.”
“Too sweet. The levels of refined sugar in it are lethal enough.”
“So he makes jokes.” She dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “I like my coffee this way.”
He noted that she’d finally stashed the weapon in the pocket of his jacket that she was still wearing. He sat back to add a little cream and sugar to his coffee, and tried not to think about how much he liked seeing her wrapped in his coat. “Well, it’s not.”
“Not what?”
“An alias,” he shot back, thoroughly annoyed.
“Who are your people?” She didn’t stutter, didn’t blink, just hit him with the question right between the eyes.
He met her smoky-gray gaze. “My father was Blackfoot and French Canadian of the Haitian variety, up near the Canadian border. My mother was full Ute, what we call Noochee, ‘the people,’ from here.” He brought the cup up to his mouth as she brought hers up to meet her lips. “Trudeau . . . that’s French. So—”
“Hunter isn’t. Where did the name come from if your—”
“My mother’s last name.”
“Oh.” She sat back and cradled the cup in her palms and then looked down into it, seeming a little embarrassed for making assumptions. “Trudeau is Creole, by way of Louisiana. New Orleans.” But when she glanced up at him again, her gaze had hardened just that quickly. “But I figured since you’d been skulking around my apartment, you would know that by now.”
“I never went into your apartment or violated your personal space.”
“Yeah, right,” she scoffed, taking a liberal sip of coffee.
“I told you once before, I am no liar. I won’t say it again. My second point is this,” he said, setting his cup down with angry precision. “My goal was to be sure you weren’t savaged. My other goal was to find the infected one. ‘Skulking,’ as you call it, wasn’t necessary. Going through your personal effects wasn’t necessary to do that—so I didn’t.”
“All right, my bad. But given all these circumstances, I have every right to think the way I do.”
He couldn’t argue the point, especially not while sitting so close to her and absorbing her dancing shadows. They played across the table as she moved, touching his hand, grazing his skin, teasing the wolf within him. He watched her move the table flatware nimbly between her fingers in an absent gesture, not sure if it was a warning or just something she did when nervous. Then he realized what he’d said and why she perhaps seemed to mellow by slow degrees: he’d said his first task was to protect her, then the community at large, and not the other way around as it should have been. The tribe first, the pack first, with individual concerns always second. Whoa . . .
“Okay,” she said more quietly. “Let’s say I believe that you haven’t gone into my apartment, how’d you get my last name?”
“Your brothers in arms called you that at the bar a lot more than they called you ‘Sasha.’ ”
She nodded and peered at him over the rim of her cup. He was practically lost in her smoky eyes until she lowered her gaze from h
is.
“Right . . . at Ronnie’s Road Hog Tavern . . . where you were spying on us for months.”
“Gathering intelligence, much like I’m sure you do on your missions. That doesn’t make me a bad person, just informed. I needed to be sure, not just act on a whim.”
“That’s valid,” she said quietly after a moment. “So, the tribal councils, plural, are Blackfoot and Ute, then?”
He nodded, his voice temporarily failing him as her hackles lowered and her tone lost its strident edge. “And more . . . each tribe has a legend of the honorable wolf as old as the tribes themselves,” he murmured. “There’s also a larger Federation of Clans.”
“In your culture, they’re good—wolves in general?” She looked up at him, her eyes seeking. This had to be the truth; he’d confirmed what she’d heard in South Korea.
Again for a moment his only response was a nod.
“Then . . . tell me where the bad ones come from. What happened?” Her gaze searched his face, her eyes furtive and drinking from his. She wanted to hear his version of the story.
“We have a saying that there is a good wolf and a bad wolf in each man or woman. That’s the shadow wolf, a different species than the other.”
She shook her head. Did he mean good werewolves were shadow wolves or was there a completely new entity he was describing? Rather than tip her hand about how much she knew, she threw out a question as bait.
“I hear you, Max . . . but how does one know which one will win, which one will be the one that comes out?” Her voice had become so quiet that he could barely hear her. She’d meant to bait him, but found a partial confession in her statement. Battle fatigue was wearing on her; it had to be the phase of the moon. “My parents were good people. Military, they tell me. Dad from New Orleans Cajun folks, my mom was African American from Alabama. They died in the line of duty in Rwanda. But Mom was attacked here, Stateside, before all that. Guess back then they were just learning about it all.” She let out a resigned breath. “Anyway, short story is, she got the virus while carrying me and unwittingly passed it on. Does that make me a bad wolf, or a good one?”
“I’m sorry, Sasha. For the loss.”
“Yeah, well, I only did the early years in foster care, until Doc was able to rearrange his life to take me in. I survived.” She looked at him hard, hating that her eyes were probably sad and the pain within them deep. But somehow just saying what she had seemed to ease the burden of her recent loss. “That’s why I hate to give up on anybody I care about . . . what if they’d given up on me? I just want to know which wolf it is and how to control it.”
He fought not to place his hand over hers. There was so much to tell her, and so much, still, that he didn’t know. But he accepted her confession as the peace offering it seemed to be. It was more than that, it was a sacred trust given. A supreme gift when she had no reason at all to trust him. She’d also finally warmed enough to his presence to say his name.
Didn’t she know that also sharing his scent by wearing his jacket, as well as sharing a meal that he’d provided . . . following him to a feeding place . . . meant everything among the wolf clans? Yet he had to remember that she knew nothing of these customs and that these instinctive mating rituals probably had no meaning for her.
Still, so much of him wanted to make healing-touch contact with her soft, café au lait skin. He knew the pain of feeling isolated and alone, the mourning howl of loss that clawed at one’s soul. But he knew better than to spook her by offering her his touch too soon.
Rather than touch her, he made a tent with his fingers in front of his mouth to occupy his hands for a few seconds before he spoke.
“When I was a boy, I asked my grandfather the same question,” he admitted after a long pause. “And rather than tell me directly, he told me a story about another boy and his grandfather. He said that he wasn’t sure who first told the story, but as things go in the oral tradition, sayings and stories transform as they are passed along. So, he said, ‘There was a boy who asked his grandfather, “Which wolf inside me will win one day—the good one or the bad one?” The grandfather simply replied, “The one you feed.” ’ That’s as much as I can say about it, for that’s all I know.”
“You are speaking of the shadow wolf now, right?” Her gaze slid from his to the window. “The other one . . . it can’t be helped, can it? There’s only destruction.”
“Yes,” he murmured, and chanced touching her hand, then covered it. “Sasha, if I knew any other way . . . But you aren’t what you fear. That is not what attacked your mother—your scent would be different, if it were.”
“Promise me.” She closed her eyes for a moment as she finally allowed someone she didn’t even know to quietly understand her deepest fear.
“I swear it. Scent me. You know I am different from the one named Butler.”
She breathed him in, almost afraid to open her eyes, and nodded. Until now, without the comparison, she hadn’t known, couldn’t tell. Oddly, his scent was also different from Shogun’s, but she knew instinctively not to mention the werewolf.
Slowly opening her eyes, she stared at the man sitting across from her for the truth. The heat of his rough-hewn hand soaked into her bones, practically melting them. His hand was massive compared to hers, his fingers long and thick but with a graceful quality to them. Yet the searing warmth brought such comfort that she had to fight the urge to allow her fingertips to trace the contours of his hand. There was so much honesty transmitted in his touch, something like being home, something that she was sorry the waitress interrupted when she brought his huge plate and multiple side orders.
“Enjoy, hon,” the waitress said. “But, um . . . you sure I can’t bring you just a little something to eat, too?”
Sasha had recovered her hand but hardly her composure. She glanced at the mouthwatering meal on Max’s side of the table and then glanced up at the waitress. “You know . . . come to think of it, a steak, rare, with a stack of pancakes, and some corned beef hash could work.”
The waitress grinned. “I’ll put that right in—but I’m gonna whisper it, because every other woman in here will want a piece of your hide for having a figure like yours and eating like that. It just ain’t right.”
Sasha laughed as the waitress walked away, keeping up her good-natured banter, but noticed that Max’s expression was stone serious.
“What?” she said, tilting her head to closely study him.
He briefly shut his eyes. “I was just surprised that you would eat with me.”
She smiled and swiped a piece of his bacon. “What can I say, your steak looks good.”
He immediately cut a piece of it off for her and stabbed it with his fork, and then offered her the flatware. She noticed that his hand trembled ever so slightly as their fingers touched. Then she watched him watch her as the natural juices leaked from the meat onto her chin as she bit into it. He was so still that she was sure he’d stopped breathing.
“I’m sorry, thanks—here,” she said, licking as far down on her chin with her tongue as she could and handing him her clean fork. “Good choice, the steak.” She didn’t know what else to say; the hunger in his eyes was disorienting.
He took the fork from her, allowing a caress to briefly unite their hands, but held her gaze, cutting his steak without looking at it, and then brought a large, dripping piece of meat up to his mouth, still holding her gaze.
As embarrassed as she was by her own response, she couldn’t help staring at his mouth. It took all of her willpower not to lean across the table and run the full width of her tongue across his lush, sensual lips as she watched steak blood wet it . . . wet her, awaken parts of her anatomy that were supposed to be off limits for a potential foe. What the hell was wrong with her? She was practically panting, just watching the man eat, and she was so glad that his huge jacket hid her nipples that now felt like tight little stinging pebbles.
But when he opened his mouth, she nearly gasped. His eye teeth had lengthened, as
had the bottom canines. She was almost up and out of the booth—forget the Glock, she was about to be gone in sixty seconds. However, an instantaneous tight grip held her wrist, accompanied by a low, nearly inaudible growl. And the man never stopped eating, just looked up at her.
“Your teeth,” she murmured in a choked gasp.
He nodded nonchalantly, but didn’t remove his hand from her wrist. “Run your tongue over yours.”
She did it and nicked her tongue. “Shit . . .”
“You need to eat, that’s all.” He shoveled huge forkfuls of eggs, bacon, sausage, and hash browns into his mouth as though they’d been discussing the weather.
“Shit!” She knew she was repeating herself as she quietly freaked out, but couldn’t help it.
“Remain calm, and have some more of my steak until yours comes.” Max Hunter kept eating and also kept his hold on her firm.
She didn’t wait for him to cut her a piece, but leaned over and stabbed one of his few remaining sausages with her fork. He released her hand and suddenly didn’t seem to fear that she would bolt, shoot him, or otherwise try to stab him with the dull dinner knife that was on her side of the table. The moment both her hands were free, she cut a section of his steak off and retreated to her side of the table, putting it into her mouth and moaning as she closed her eyes.
The sound of him shoving his plate toward her made her open her eyes. He didn’t say a word, but began cutting sections for her and handing them to her from his fork.
“What happened?” she said through a mouthful, suddenly ravenous.
“How long have you been without your medication?” His breaths were coming in short bursts.
She stopped chewing for a moment, her jaw filled with meat. Her gaze narrowed. “Hey, I thought you said you didn’t go into my apartment. How would you—”
“I never said I didn’t go into his,” Max replied, no apology in his tone. “And I think you’d have to agree, I had reason.”