Dennis puzzled over the problem as he leaned back in his chair. He glanced at the clock. Most of his deputies were at one of the venues popular during homecoming weekend. Soon he would do his own reconnoiter of potential trouble spots. But right now, he could focus on the Phelan issue. This was on his mind when his smartphone rang with an unfamiliar number. As he answered it, he wished, and not for the first time, this backwater town would allow the installation of Omni drones.
The display on his secure smartphone read “Juno,” and he sat up quickly.
“Ma’am?”
Juno was the codename for the woman with whom he’d been in contact with for the past eighteen months. She asked him to run interference on occasion and in return, deposited funds monthly in a numbered account he alone could access. He suspected the person worked for Pantheon. She always used a voice masker during their calls.
“Chief.”
He was about to get a new set of marching orders.
Dennis didn't know why Juno wanted Dolores Black. He just knew Juno wanted her, was willing to pay handsomely for her, and that was good enough for him.
He hated the Cermaks. In his opinion, none of the Cermaks showed proper deference to him, the son of the pack alpha. Bubba Cermak had been banished from Perdition, and rightly so, for daring to attack him. It was time for the rest of the Cermaks to learn their place. Next on the list was Phelan and his cute little number from Dallas.
No, he didn’t know why Pantheon wanted Lola. Nor did he care. All he knew was Pantheon wanted Lola, and so did Phelan. Dennis hated Phelan. Therefore, turning Lola over to Pantheon would make Dennis and Pantheon happy and Phelan unhappy. Lola was simply a pawn in this game, and her feelings didn't matter.
He would have preferred to wear his civvies to the carnival to conduct his Pantheon business. As a pack member, even as the non-shifting son of the alpha and his human mate, conspiring with Pantheon against a pack member was highly illegal, and in the old days, punishable by death. These days, banishment was the sentence.
He didn’t give a flying fuck about anyone in Perdition with the exception of his parents. It would suck if he had to leave Perdition, and embarrass his parents for sure. The gods would pay for her to leave Perdition, and Dennis would play a hand in depriving his enemy of the one thing he could never replace–his mate. He smiled to himself in satisfaction.
When Dennis arrived at St. Ailbe’s campus, the carnival was in full swing. Dennis wasn’t a shifter, but he had a decent nose as far as wolves went. He followed the scent trail he needed. Hers was light, floral and fruity. But he knew Phelan’s scent and had known it for years. Spice with musk undertones.
He strode past the ticket gate, not bothering to pay, following their scents. He stopped at the hot dog stand they had been to not long before and greeted the attendant.
“What can I get you, Chief?” the attendant asked.
Dennis placed his order.
“Everything good tonight?” Dennis asked. Might as well do a little work while he was there.
“Everything’s good, Chief,” the attendant said, handing him the hotdog. Dennis took the hotdog and thanked him.
He walked away without paying since his uniform served as payment in Perdition. He tried not to be an asshole about it, but he took advantage of it as a perk of the job, and he found the local businesses wanted to give him these small perks.
As he followed the scents, he made sure to stop and chat with others along the way, and he kept his excitement in check as the scent trails became stronger.
He passed the bumper cars, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Ferris wheel and finally caught up with them at the arcade games. He stayed well out of range of the two of them, downwind of Phelan’s wolf nose.
He watched them play a game involving aiming counter-mounted water pistols at tiny holes a few yards away. Hitting the target caused an indicator to rise until it reached the top and made a bell ring. Lola was a short woman who had an advantage over her date, as she could pose in an effective shooting stance more comfortably than Phelan. After she won, she hopped up and down excitedly, then jumped into her man’s arms, straddling his waist with muscular thighs as he cupped her ass with his hands and kissed her.
Dennis had been born and raised in a free-wheeling shifter town, but he found most public displays of affection disgusting. He grimaced in revulsion. Typical of the Cermaks, who liked to take the best women, then rub everyone else’s noses in it. Dennis thought about Bubba and Mary Jean, the girl Bubba had stolen from him when they were teenagers. And when Dennis and his buddies taught Bubba a lesson, he’d brought his cousin Phelan to fight for him. That didn’t matter anymore since Bubba would bear Dennis’s mark for the rest of his life...just like a mating bite.
He watched Lola and Phelan collect their prizes, then move on to another attraction, following at a safe distance. They moved on to a ring toss game. A large area contained glass drink bottles of different colors, ranging from dark blue at the center and clear at the edges. Prizes of stuffed animals, toys, and gadgets hung from above. Dennis had played this game before. The object was to toss a ring onto the necks of the bottles. Landing a ring near the center was better than either missing, or snagging a bottleneck closer to the edges.
He watched Lola again leave her man in the dust, landing her rings on the middle bottles time after time.
“Not so high and mighty after all, Cermak,” Dennis mumbled under his breath.
The couple played another round of ring toss. Lola went first, landing ring after ring in quick succession, all toward the center. She smiled at Phelan, a look of teasing superiority tipping her lips at the corners. Dennis found himself enjoying this bit of comeuppance. Serves him right to have a human mate that far out of his league, even though she was just a cocktail waitress.
She stepped back, handed Phelan the rings, and folded her arms across her chest, watching him. Dennis watched casually from the partial cover of another attraction. He inched forward to get a better view. Lola rubbed at her forearms nervously and looked around with uncertainty written across her features. He moved closer, and she whipped her head around to check her surroundings, searching for something…
Then her eyes landed on his and it was as if he was standing inches away from her in full daylight, not yards away in the dusk. Unperturbed, he lifted his hat, nodded at her, and moved on. Now was not the time to make his move. Juno wanted Lola to leave Perdition within forty-eight hours. It was urgent, not an emergency. He had time to do this right.
He turned to give her one last parting glance and found her standing like a statue, watching him go.
Chapter 27
Phelan watched Lola out of the corner of his eye as she sat in the passenger seat of his truck, cuddling a hot pink stuffed panda and cooing at it.
“Wasn’t it great how I won all that stuff?” Lola gloated to the panda.
“Oh yes, you are soooo good at arcade games,” she said, affecting a cartoonish, high-pitched fake voice and moving the toy in time with the voice, as if it were answering her question.
“And what was your favorite prize? The purple puppy?” Lola said in her normal voice.
“Oh, I liked the purple puppy,” said Lola, in her stuffed animal voice.
“Me too,” she agreed with the panda. Out of the corner of his eye, Phelan glanced at her.
“I guess you think you’re being funny?” he asked, fingers flexing on the steering wheel. She could be really irritating when she wanted to be.
“I’m hilarious,” she said smugly. “Your expression when I rolled that skee ball up the ramp in the center hole. What was it? Five times?” she chuckled.
He’d thought it was beginner’s luck.
“You’re a ringer, you know that?” he groused. She’d mopped the floor with him in all the arcade games, including the duck shoot, whack-a-mole, shoot the clown, and the ring toss. She’d guessed the amount of jelly beans in a massive jar, was triumphant at the shell game time and again, and lost only
the ring the bell game. Every cheap toy was a kind of trophy judging by Lola’s excitement.
And the gloating. Oh, the gloating. She could be really annoying when she put her mind to it. He gave her a speculative stare.
“Oh, is Phelan cranky now?” She wiggled the panda as she spoke in her stuffed animal voice. She exaggerated a sad face and a pout.
“I think he might be,” Lola said in a normal tone of voice that was matter-of-fact and therefore, extremely annoying. “He thought he was going to save the day by winning all the valuable prizes All. By. Himself,” she told the panda, tapping its button nose with the tip of her finger to emphasize each syllable.
This was too much.
“Listen,” he said, a little peeved now. “I seem to remember you telling me you had never been to a carnival before.”
“I haven’t,” she said evasively, not answering the question she had to know was implied.
She unbuckled her harness and twisted in her seat to rifle through the small pile of stuffed animals, cheap toys, and costume jewelry she had won at the various games. He was about to tell her to sit her cute round ass down until she crouched on her knees to reach even farther behind them and said ass was positioned a few compelling inches from his face. He had to physically restrain himself from sniffing her. He had been semi-hard all evening. Now his dick perked with interest and needed no further encouragement. He kept his hands on the wheel and shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“How did you learn how to play all those games?” he blurted.
She sat on her ass again, hard, and looked at him. Her eyes were dark and teasing. And smug. She was holding a blue and white stuffed wolf in her lap, which she had won shooting mini basketballs, a game he was sure he would win, but didn’t.
“You don’t have to go to the carnival to learn how to play arcade games,” she said, matter-of-factly.
He took her hand and moved it to his thigh, running his thumb over the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. She gave him a tremulous smile.
“I used to play at the arcade near Ruby’s house,” she started, looking away as if recalling old memories.
“Ruby?” he said carefully, wanting to know more about her, yet cautious about scaring her into silence.
“My last foster mother,” Lola supplied.
“How long were you with her?”
“Nine months the first time...then about six years the second time.”
He watched her face carefully for signs of emotional stress. He didn’t see any, so he squeezed her hand.
“Two times?”
“I sort of ran away the first time,” she said, smiling ruefully. “I’m not even sure why I left that first time—I was only nine. When they caught up with me, Ruby said I could stay as long as I promised not to run away again. But I wouldn’t promise, so they placed me with another family. Three families later, I decided to go back to Ruby’s. I stayed until I was eighteen and aged out of the system.”
“What made you go back?”
She shrugged. “Ruby was always straight with me. I didn’t want to keep bouncing from place to place, and Ruby is a nice person.”
They reached the cabin. Phelan cut the engine, undid his harness, and turned to look at her. Her eyes were wide and her expression restrained. Her lips twitched as if she were trying to hold back her emotions.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he said. Her eyes were dark in the gathering night, her expression went sad, haunted.
Phelan wanted to know all the things that had made her cry, all the things that had disappointed her in life. He wanted to be the man to soothe all her heartaches and wipe all her tears. He realized there wasn’t just a mating bond between them. He was falling for this woman.
Phelan moved toward her in a rush, a movement guided by instinct, not conscious thought. Her face filled his vision. He cupped her cheeks in his hands and covered her mouth with his.
She relaxed, her soft body melting into his. She tasted like the cotton candy they’d had at the fair, and he reveled in the texture of her tongue, and she allowed his invasion. No, not just cotton candy, but her natural taste, which made him think of ripe peaches. Her breath hitched, she let out a little moan, and the semi he’d been sporting all evening became a bar of steel in his jeans. He sucked on her tongue and engaged in a thorough exploration of her mouth. He was careful not to let his beast be unchained with this woman.
He disengaged to look at her, wanting to gauge her reaction, afraid he might be too much for her. Her eyes were closed. She ran the tip of her tongue over her soft pink lips, drunk on lust.
“You taste like–”
He started to speak, but in the blink of an eye, she had her harness unbuckled. She was in his lap in the next instant, pulling his head to hers, her lips seeking his. She wiggled her ass as she fumbled for his hands with her mouth still locked on his. Once she had his hands in hers, she guided them to where she wanted them.
His hands went under her t-shirt, seeking the clasp with her bra to unfasten it. But it was taking too long, so he pushed the T-shirt up, pulled down a bra cup, and sucked her breast into his mouth.
“Mmmmm…” she hummed, the vibration shooting through him like an electric shock. He slid his fingers underneath her elastic waistband to grab her ass and grind her into him. When she moved, the scent of her sex wafted up from between the apex of her thighs and filled his nostrils. He could feel her heat through the layers of clothing, and he was desperate to be inside her. Her hands roamed under his t-shirt, her touch urgent as she scored his skin with her nails. She broke the kiss, placed her face in the crook of his neck, and inhaled his scent.
“You smell so good,” she said, her moist lips grazing his skin. She trailed her lips along the line of his jaw, peppering teasing kisses as she went. He shuddered in response. His hands filled with her ass cheeks, ground her pussy harder against the turgid flesh between his legs. He felt drugged, intoxicated by her scent, her touch, and all that was her.
“Big Dipper,” she whispered against his ear, and he felt the light touch of her lips against his earlobe. She rubbed her body against his, her heat encasing him.
“Mmmph,” he responded, matching the grind of her hips with his own.
“That’s your nickname,” she said, kissing one side of his neck beneath his jawline.
His brain struggled out of the fog of lust to follow the train of conversation. They had been talking about nicknames for his team on the way to the carnival earlier in the day.
“It is?” he mumbled absently. He grasped her ass tighter, she would probably have his marks all over her the next day. Then he attacked her neck with kisses, his tongue trailing from her ear to her shoulder. He kissed along her hunter’s bow shaped collarbone and she moaned with abandon. Then she pushed on his shoulders and tried to get away.
“Too– too much,” she panted, her head lolling back, her neck exposed.
In wolf culture, exposing the neck was a sign of submission. Phelan had to leash his wolf to not do what came naturally— lose himself in her body, fuck her until they were both sore, and give her his mating bite. There was no way she knew what exposing her neck meant to a wolf.
So, he wrapped his arms around her, held her tight, and paused to catch his breath. The musky sweet aroma of her pussy challenged his resolve. She squirmed with discomfort.
“The steering wheel is digging in my back,” she said, sounding breathless.
He leaned away and took her in. Her eyes were glazed with passion, her lips swollen from his kisses.
“Let’s go inside.”
Chapter 28
Lola was no stranger to sex. No stranger to lust. She traded in both every day in her job, plying the brothel customers with coy looks and flattery. It was all a part of the brothel experience. Get the clients worked up and primed for the upstairs girls. Make commissions from the watered-down drinks and teasing seduction. It was mercenary business, but everyone walking into Woodland Creatures knew w
hat to expect.
As much experience as she had getting her customers sexually revved up, she had no experience with passion. She wasn’t a virgin when it came to sex. But she was a virgin when it came to passion.
Phelan pushed open the driver’s side door.
“Hang on,” he rumbled, his fingers digging into her ass cheeks as held her in his arms.
She barely had time to process this command when they were somehow outside of the truck, covering the distance to the front door of the cabin in long strides. Instinctively, she tightened her thighs around him and looked over his shoulder at the truck’s wide-open door, the dome lamp casting harsh shadows and light across the gravel path. His scent had intensified, and she inhaled deeply as she held on for dear life.
Inside, he slammed the door behind him and tossed her onto the leather sectional. She scrambled to right herself. It was on her mind to mention the open door of his truck, but a moment later he fell to his knees in front of her. He hadn’t bothered to turn on any lights. The room was dark save for the light produced from the truck’s headlamps through the windows. The light illuminated his features just enough to catch his eyes, making them glow an icy blue in the shadows.
“I need you,” he said simply, as if that explained everything. He grabbed her ankle and dragged her to the edge of the couch, then slid his fingers under her waistband again and peeled her leggings and panties down her legs.
“It’s only been a little more than a day since I met you, but it feels like I’ve wanted you for ten years. I need you,” he repeated, his eyes intense, his voice raspy with lust. He looked at her, awaiting her reply.
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