by Carmen Fox
In a bizarre reversal of emotions, my instinct was to wait. I was way past any interest I might have harbored for Leo. He was too polite, too soft, and...Heaven help me...he wasn’t Drake.
“Good idea.” Jonah studied me, probably to ensure I wasn’t going to leave the room again without his permission. “You may go.”
I gave a courtesy bow and left. Maybe this turn of events was for the best. I was dying to visit the travelers’ camp. Drake would make a song and a dance out of it, quiz me about my motivation, and drill, drill, drill until he struck the truth. Luckily, one of Leo’s defining traits was his eagerness to please—a weakness I was fully prepared to exploit.
Eleven
Leo passed me in the hall and opened the door. At once, the heat knocked me back a few inches.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Sure.” I rallied and stepped into the inferno. “Feeling guilty for opposing me when I asked about Natalie?”
“Should I? It’s my job to schedule Jonah’s time.”
“And that’s why I’m giving you the chance to make it up to me.” I hurried to his sedan, driven by the prospect of its excellent AC.
Once again, Leo overtook me within seconds. “What did you have in mind?”
If the way he drawled his last words was anything to go by, his thoughts had fast-forwarded to romantic activities.
My expression no doubt showed little enthusiasm. His suggestive question should have brought out my flirtatious nature, but there was a disconnect between us, something that had broken the initial attraction. If anything, he was standing too close, the smell of his aftershave so pungent it blocked my nose. Another area in which he could learn from Drake, who’d found the perfect balance—a constant tease between sexy store-bought fragrance, refreshing peppermint and panty-melting wolf.
Still, I had a plan, so I looked up at Leo from under my eyelashes. “I need a change of scenery.”
“Oh, okay. Sounds good.” He waited for me to climb in and then got behind the steering wheel. “Where would you like to go?”
Bingo. Wrapped around my little finger. “Natalie told me of this lovely spot where travelers used to live.”
“In the woods?” He sucked in an audible breath. “Did you...want to run?”
“No.” I gave a childish giggle. Running in wolf form with a man wasn’t just an intimacy I wasn’t prepared for, it was of course also impossible. “I would like to talk about something other than Raven or land disputes for a while. That’s all.”
His glance swept over my neck and mouth before landing on my eyes. “Then let’s not waste time.”
Leading him on carried the stink of an underhanded, even cruel maneuver, but my situation didn’t leave me many options. I had no car, and I couldn’t risk this trip with Drake in tow. If Drake continued reading me like a book, he’d discover what I was—a dud—and that my shows of bravado were make-believe. I had nothing to counter his dominance with, except for a greater-than-average willpower that faded fast in his presence.
Leo had done nothing wrong. He’d respected my space every inch of the way, so at least I should be kind and show him the respect he’d earned.
The sun stood high, and I put on my sunglasses. The search for my mother’s past had reached a dead end, but Jonah had let something slip that could open up a new lead. Something that seemed important. If I caught my father on a good day, he might simply tell me what he wanted me to know, rather than let this ridiculous hunt continue.
And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
Why did men insist on being a pain in the ass? The simple ones, like Leo, were rare.
His casual top suited him better than the suit he’d worn on day one. Even his posture was more relaxed, although he still held the steering wheel like a seventeen-year-old.
He smiled, probably because he’d noticed my prolonged look. “What do you know about the travelers?”
“I assume they traveled a lot, and yet they had a camp. Weird, huh?”
“Don’t let the romantic notion of travelers fool you. They were a bunch of misfits, deviants, criminals even. People who, for some reason, refused to live in a traditional pack, accept pack law, or abide by the rules.”
“They were still werewolves, so there had to be some rules they followed.”
“Well, that depends on your definition of werewolf. I mean, some of them, sure. But through breeding with outsiders, many of them barely held even a drop of pure blood, I imagine. For all intents and purposes, they could have been as human as Cody.”
My shoulders stiffened in a painful attack. Was he right? If my mother’s people hadn’t been pure werewolves, what about her? I gripped the side of my seat, buried my fingers inside until they burned. Suddenly, everything became clear. Her ancestors had diluted their genes to the point that I was a dud.
Was this what my father wanted me to discover? He hadn’t sent me on some crazy, uplifting personal journey. No, he was too chicken to tell me the truth.
I was at least part human—and there was no cure for that.
“Hey. What’s wrong?” Leo frowned and placed his hand on my arm.
My lips trembled, my throat tightened to the size of an eyelet. “Nothing.”
“You’re pale.”
I lifted my hand. “I guess the heat is getting to me. That’s all.”
“Hang on.” He pushed a button, and the air blowing through the vents cooled. “Better?”
“Yes. Thanks.” My sunglasses shielded my burning eyes from his attentive gaze.
Drake wouldn’t have believed my half-assed lie, of course. He’d have parked up and shaken me by the shoulders until my secrets fell out.
I took a few deep breaths. All was not lost. I was my father’s daughter, so wolf blood did run through my veins. Alpha blood to boot. My mother had been able to shift into wolf shape, too. Besides, would Dad have married her if her own background had been sketchy? If the blood in her veins was partly human?
Wrong question. The guy had been too in love to make a rational decision.
In any case, Leo might be wrong. Who really knew another person’s genetic makeup? It wasn’t like you could tell by looking at someone.
As we approached the woods, tall trees increasingly blocked the sun’s relentless glare. Leo parked his sedan on a narrow piece of grass. I opened the door and inhaled the familiar scent. This trip might not answer my questions, but it might clear my mind.
Leo ambled over to stand in front of me. “We’re here.”
“I can see that.” I pointed my thumb at the tree line. “Ready to head in?”
“In a second. First, there’s something I meant to say to you.”
With his right hand on the door and his left on the roof, he leaned in to kiss me.
I pushed back into the car.
Dammit. If I hadn’t been vague about my feelings, I could have spared both of us a bucketful of embarrassment.
“That’s not a good idea.” I patted my stomach. “Still feeling queasy.”
He let go and frowned. “I wasn’t thinking. Sorry.”
“Yeah. Um. I’m also a little surprised,” I said in a low voice. “Actually, a lot surprised.”
“I liked you from the moment I saw you.” He kept me immobile between his body and the car. “I wanted to make sure you feel the same way.”
“That’s sweet of you.” I placed my hands high on his chest and gently put distance between us. “For now, all I feel is—.”
The sound of an approaching engine saved me.
Drake’s pickup blasted up the dusty path, spraying a pinkish dust out to the sides. He came to a stop, killed the engine, and climbed out of his truck. His face was all thunder and no flash.
“We had a deal.” Drake drew me aside. “You said you weren’t going to wander off again.”
“Give her a break.” Leo stepped up. “Jonah gave his okay, because once again, you had better things to do. She’s safe when she’s with me.”
; As much as I didn’t like the “she’s with me,” factually, I wasn’t in a position to deny it.
Drake unfolded his full height and stature, and stared down his fellow protector. A few seconds later, Leo moved aside with an awkward shrug.
“You couldn’t have waited one lousy hour?” Drake swiveled his head toward me.
Did the flare of his nostrils warn of danger—or was he inhaling my scent? His natural fragrance edged through, too, spinning my head into whirlpools. A touch, a wrong word, even a look could dissolve his control.
I knew it.
He knew it.
My head cocked, I watched him as his gaze moved slowly away from my eyes and settled on my mouth.
“I needed to get away.” I licked my dry lips. “Clear my head.”
“And you came here of all places. A total coincidence?”
I slow-shrugged and looked to the side. “Maybe not a total coincidence.”
“Leo, head back.” He spun his head to the other man, whose presence had slipped my mind. “Your meeting starts in half an hour.”
“All right.” Leo sneered. “I’ll pick you up tonight, Kensi. Okay?”
I frowned. “What for?”
“A restaurant. Do you prefer Greek or Italian?”
Had I agreed to that? Hell, the heat and Drake’s dramatic appearance had truly done a number on me.
“Today, I’ll need an early night.” I pulled back, now using Drake’s build as a shield.
Leo’s demeanor registered no disappointment. “Maybe—”
Drake barely moved, but a tiny shift was enough to command attention. “Time to do your job, so I can do mine.”
“Fine.” Leo stalked back to his car and got in. The sedan’s engine rattled as he reversed, a hair’s breadth from bumping into Drake’s pickup, and sped off.
“You can flirt when the job’s done, princess. We’re not paying you to make out with Leo.” Despite Drake’s harsh words, his voice yo-yoed.
A rare glimpse of emotion?
I took off my sunglasses. “I wasn’t making out with Leo.”
“So I didn’t see you two kiss?”
“No. What you saw was Leo making a move, that’s all.”
“Right.” His gaze drifted past me to the trees. “Good. What I was trying to...you know. Why are you here anyway?”
“I wanted to see the place for myself.”
Drake stilled for a moment.
In the corner of my eyes, small branches bobbed up and down in the breeze. Even though I’d never known the pleasures of running free, the forest was in my blood, part of my DNA. Under the dimmed light, my perception shifted its focus away from the eyes to my ears, my nose and my skin. A whole new world existed under that impenetrable foliage.
“Come on then.” Drake jerked his head. “Let me show you the old camp.”
We followed a path wide enough for grass to grow, but as the trees grew denser, vegetation on the ground became sparse. My pulse quickened every time I picked up a new scent or the sound of a scurrying animal, and within minutes, I’d lost myself in my new surroundings.
Drake moved with purpose. He knew when to turn right, when to turn left, when to duck a branch or simply push it out of the way.
“It was in woods like these that the first modern werewolves first crowned a king.” Drake gestured for me to catch up. “In their united form, the pack grew and expanded. The king’s two sons later each took charge of one half, with both halves now numbering in the hundreds. As resources became sparse, the younger one moved his werewolves away.”
I divided my focus between my environment and Drake’s butt. “Away from the area?”
“To what would one day become Germany, where the werewolf monarchy endures to this day. Back then, both here and in Germany, we lived apart from pure-blood humans and sustained ourselves through farming and foraging. But the world soon became crowded—too crowded to avoid mingling with humans.”
A scary time for my kind, I imagined. Even now, centuries later, werewolves found co-existing tough. Back then, it must have been downright terrifying to be faced by new worldviews, cultures and rituals.
“What did they do?” I hopped over a thick branch on the ground. “Hang on. Was that when they signed the Treaty of Frankfurt?”
“Yes. In Frankfurt, Germany the two packs decided to give up their isolation and allow our human form to live alongside pure-blood humans. Only our wolf forms would remain hidden. Not everyone loved that idea, and the two kings struggled, and failed, to keep peace.”
“The two packs splintered into groups and some declared their independence from the crown.” This was one part of history even I had known.
“Indeed.” He turned around and grinned. “Who’s a clever girl?”
I raised my eyebrows and glared in mock outrage. “I don’t know, but I’m a grown woman with an overwhelming urge to kick you where the sun doesn’t shine.”
“You want me to shut up?” His grin widened.
“I’m torn, but it seems you’re a half-decent history teacher, so please go on.”
He whistled. “A rare compliment.”
I pushed him along the path. “Shut up and keep talking.”
He laughed. “Okay. Anyway, after the Treaty of Frankfurt, about six smaller free packs split from the two royal packs, and over the next few years, the remaining royal packs themselves split into different monarchies in various countries, initially with the Germans as their supreme king.”
“My dad has enough problems keeping his people in line.” I chuckled. “Being in charge of several packs would drive him into an early grave.”
“No surprise then that, when the individual monarchies soon declared their independence from the supreme king, he quickly assented. No war, nothing. The problem was, every group had their own idea of how to deal with humans. Some avoided them, others embraced the human world and even became indistinguishable from them.”
“Did they mate with them?” I stopped walking as a sudden chill seized me. “Become human?”
Drake lifted a branch and let me pass first before dropping it and retaking the lead. “Sure. Their wolf genes faded, and the wolf in them went to sleep.”
The warmth left my body. I stopped mid-step and stared at Drake without seeing him, without seeing or hearing or smelling anything. My senses had shut down, locking me inside my brain, which was shouting I’d never be an alpha.
Twelve
Leo had been right. My mother’s ancestors diluted their DNA. Diluted it until I was unable to wake up my inner wolf.
All my life, my father had convinced me I was going to be an alpha, that one day my dominance would break free. I rested my hand on a trunk, braced my feet against its immovable mass until the bark dug into my palm. Dad should have told me the truth, damn it. I deserved to know the truth. Hell, my whole future rested on the notion that I was a real werewolf.
“Kensi?” Drake’s face popped into my personal space. “Are you okay?”
I recoiled. Of course, Drake had no clue as to the turmoil his tale had unleashed on my stomach, which was spinning itself into knots.
“I’m good.” I waved him away, unable to believe my own words. “I’m good.”
“If you’re not up to it, I can take you home.” He touched my arm, high up near my shoulder, and rubbed small circles into it. “There’s not much left here anyway. Just trees.”
His kindness didn’t make finding my composure easy. The muscles in my face had tightened into a grimace, but I forced them back into their original position, the one that would convince Drake I was ready to continue.
My mother might be the reason my hopes had crashed and burned, but she was still my mother, and this might be the one chance I’d have to see a place where she had lived and laughed.
Once my breath flowed smoothly and my heartbeat had settled, I straightened and stepped away from his touch. “Just the heat playing whack-a-mole with my nervous system. I’m good.”
Drake stud
ied my face, then nodded and continued along the path. “If you say so.”
Thank heavens.
“You were telling me that the various monarchies separated.” I followed close behind him, opening and closing my hands to draw blood back into them.
“The individual packs based themselves in Sweden, England, Scotland, Spain and so on, and once Western Europe could support no new packs, they moved further east into the Baltics. For about a century, a status quo was reached. Then the human world wrecked their peaceful existence. The USSR splintered, wars broke out... About forty years ago, one group of wolves returned to America under the guise of a tribe of Roma.”
That pack would have been my mother’s. “They’d come home to where the journey had started, but the welcome wagon was missing.”
“You could say that. The United States of America, as their old land was now known, was a different country from the one they’d left so many years before. Despite help from their European cousins, the American monarchy had been destroyed in a civil war. Only free packs remained, and they had a long memory and clung to their hatred of the old ways.”
The abundance of trees thinned to give way to an area that wasn’t quite a clearing.
“This is it.” He moved his arms to encompass the area. “This is where that tribe lived for a while.”
I did a slow three-sixty.
Dead stumps, covered with moss and dry leaves, formed a semicircle to my right. Be it coincidence or a deliberate move to create seating, it would have served the tribe well.
Drake described a vague shape with his hand. “This area was used as a communal living area. It’s sheltered, a great place to get together, and to meet strangers as a united front.”
“But they didn’t sleep here?”
“Each family entity made camp further back in the woods. Far apart, each claimed their own territory, but close enough to get safety through numbers when needed. Some built shacks or cabins, others roughed it in tents or lived in caravans.”
People had lived here, cooked here, laughed and cried here. Had my mom been one of them? She could have stood where I stood, felt the breeze as I felt it.