by Selena Scott
Phoenix shrugged, relieved that they were actually getting somewhere in this conversation. They weren’t going in circles like they were before. “I’m not picky. Clean, I guess. Somewhere that Ida would like to be.”
Wren turned and eyed him, tapping one finger over her lips and cocking her head to one side. “You really like her, huh?”
He furrowed his brow. “Doesn’t everyone?”
Apparently his answer was satisfying to Wren because her face lost a bit of its skeptical angle. “Yeah. They do.” She eyed him some more. Up and down. “You’re kind of a scary dude, you know?”
He twisted his lips in chagrin. “Yeah. I’m learning that. I was going to have Ida help me figure out how to be more, I don’t know, un-scary.”
“No, no, no!” Wren waved her hands in the air. “That’s not what I meant. As far as I’m concerned, never change. Your scariness could solve a problem for both of us, actually.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come upstairs. I’ll show you.”
***
This time, it was Ida who was barging in on Phoenix. He whirled around when she nearly kicked his door off the hinges.
“You quit the center?” Ida hissed, practically steaming from the mouth.
“Hi,” he said, maddeningly calm. He grabbed his crutches and came over to where she was standing. “Can I kiss you?”
“What?! No, you lunatic!” She threw her hands up in the air and paced around for a minute. “What the hell is going on? I go to the center for a noon appointment and there’s Diana, handing me papers to sign about your departure from the center. She was surprised that I didn’t know already! But not as surprised as I am that I didn’t freaking know! She said that I should probably talk to you about it! Which means that you and my boss both know the reason, but I don’t know the reason!”
She had plenty more to say, but as she looked around, her hands on her hips, she finally got a load of what Phoenix was doing.
“Are you packing your things?”
“Yes,” he nodded.
“Why?” she asked weakly, wondering if she even wanted to know the answer. She was kind of on a drama overload right now.
“Because I’m moving. So are Orion and Dawn.”
“They’re placing you in different government housing?”
“Nope,” Phoenix shook his head. “Wren is letting us come live in the fancy cake house.”
“The fancy cake … what?”
“Oh. That’s just what I call the place where her hair salon is. She taught me that word today. Salon. I call her place the cake house because it looks like a cake. Anyways, she’s had some trouble with her brother breaking in and doing bad stuff, I guess. So she said that I could live there for free in one of the bedrooms upstairs if I didn’t mind scaring the crap out of him whenever he broke in. Which sounds really easy. And then when she showed me the upstairs, I saw that there’s a ton of extra bedrooms and I asked if Dawn and Orion could come with me. She said the more if you marry her. Or something.”
“The more the merrier,” Ida said weakly. “It’s an expression.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “So, let me get this straight, it’s only three in the afternoon and somehow, already today you’ve talked with Diana, quit the center, arranged for new -free- housing with my best friend, and now you’re moving?”
He nodded and she just kind of ker-plunked down onto the little twin bed. Wow. He’d gotten more done in one day than she had in two weeks of mentoring him. Maybe she should get fired from her job. Apparently she wasn’t very good at it. At least where Phoenix was concerned.
“Don’t sit there,” he said softly, drawing her up from the bed. “This whole thing is because I don’t want to see you in this shitty place. I want to see you in a nice place. Like Wren’s house. It’s fancy. And clean. And you can spend as much time there as you want and I won’t consider it mooching.”
“I … what?” She went to sit again but he held her up, that strong arm banded around her again, just like last night.
“Come see it.”
“Wren’s house? I’ve been there a million times.”
“Yes, but now it’s my house too. Come see the house with me.”
How had she ever thought of his eyes as dead? Because those babies were burning right now, burning with something she didn’t understand and was too afraid to identify.
“Phoenix, please, just tell me what all this is about.”
The man had already turned her world upside down with the kiss of a lifetime and now this?
She had gone to the center at noon, not for an appointment with a client, but for an appointment with Diana. After tossing and turning all night, Ida had deemed herself unfit to be a mentor. She’d kissed a client for god sakes. How unprofessional was that?! She’d written up her letter of resignation, cried a whole lot, taken a shower, and headed to the center like she was heading down to the river Styx, resigning herself to passing through to the other side. This job meant so freaking much to her. It was her connection to—
No. She’d made sure not to think of her brother as she’d marched into Diana’s office and attempted to hand over her letter of resignation. Diana, however, hadn’t even glanced at the letter. She’d just shoved it back into Ida’s hands, wrinkling it irrevocably. She’d handed over papers of her own. Papers which had thoroughly discombobulated Ida.
“Phoenix is quitting?” she’d asked dimly, a hundred horrifying scenarios running through her head. All of them basically accumulating into one vision, in which he felt extremely violated by her actions and decided that he couldn’t even be at the same center as she was.
But Diana had been smiling at her. “He sure is. Seems that he wants to focus his attentions in, um, another direction.”
What the hell did that mean?”
“Diana, I—”
“Wait.” Diana had raised her palm. “Before you say something that I can’t unhear, please just know that clients leave the center all the time, and rarely for good reasons. So, as much as it pained me to lose Phoenix this morning, it was also a joy to hear that it was for a happy reason.”
Ida scrambled to catch up. “Phoenix seemed happy when he decided to leave the center?”
Diana frowned, seeming to realize that Ida had absolutely no clue what was going on. “Uh. As happy as Phoenix can be, I suppose.”
“And what was his reason for departure?” Ida asked weakly, not sure if she even wanted to hear it.
Diana perked back up. “He specifically stated that there was no reason.”
Ida frowned. “And you just let him leave?” That was a distinctly un-Diana-like move.
“After a brief conversation, in which no dramatic information was revealed, yes, I let Phoenix walk out of here completely unaffiliated with the center. A free man. Free to do, ah, whatever he’d like.”
There had been something in Diana’s tone that had seemed an awful lot like she’d been implying that Phoenix could walk out of there and do whomever he liked, not just whatever he liked. But that couldn’t be right. Her professional boss never made sexual innuendo. And she’d never encourage an employee to date a client, even a former client. Right? Right?!
Ida had left the office thoroughly confused, but with her job still intact. Diana had insisted that if she had more questions, then Phoenix should be the one to answer them.
So, here she was. Standing in his apartment, chest to chest with him, receiving no answers.
“I’ll tell you in a week,” Phoenix promised. “I’ll tell you everything. There’s still some stuff I have to get worked out. But in the meantime, can we leave this dump?”
“Knock knock.”
Ida turned at the familiar voice, blinking as she saw Wren standing in Phoenix’s doorway swinging keys around her finger, Ida’s worlds colliding.
“Wow, this place really is a shithole,” Wren said, tipping up her mirrored aviators to get a better look around. “Need a hand with that bag?”
App
arently all that Phoenix was taking could fit into an athletic duffel that he was attempting to hoist over one shoulder while balancing his crutches.
“Sure,” Phoenix said, to Ida’s great surprise. He wasn’t exactly good at admitting his need for help, but there he was, handing over his life’s possessions to Wren.
“I already got Orion and Dawn loaded up, so we’re just waiting for you, boss.” And then Wren was gone from the doorway.
“Wren is giving you and your siblings a ride over to the salon. Where you live now.” She tried to make it all make sense in her head.
Ida knew all about Wren’s trouble with her brother. The cake house had been given to Wren by their grandmother right before she’d passed. Wren and her brother Sid had been raised in that house. Sid had always felt like it should have been given to him, seeing as he was older than Wren. But Sid had nefarious plans for it, no doubt planning on turning it into a meth lab or something. Ever since Wren had renovated the first floor, transforming it into a hair salon, he’d been lurking around, popping up every now and then crashing for a night here or there, inviting losers over to get wasted in the bedrooms upstairs.
Ida always thought that Wren should call the cops on Sid and be done with it. But she also knew how complicated a relationship with a brother could really be. In a way, having a little hired muscle occupying the bedrooms upstairs was a brilliant idea. No one was using the bedrooms anyways, and this way Wren wouldn’t have to worry that her place of business was going to be trashed by her deadbeat brother.
“Yes,” Phoenix said, stepping into her space again. “Come see it,” he repeated.
“I can’t,” she replied dimly. “I have a client appointment in half an hour. Work. I can’t come.”
“Okay.” He gently untangled a lock of her hair from the arm of her glasses. “Then maybe tonight? Maybe you’ll come see it tonight?”
“Phoenix, you quit the center.” It wasn’t until she was standing here, awash in his wild scent, avoiding his dark gaze, that she really experienced just how freaked out all of this made her. “I’m not your mentor anymore.”
“Exactly,” he murmured. “Ida, come over tonight.” His voice was firm and bossy and brooked no argument. “Or invite me to your house. I don’t care.”
“Oh, jeez.” Her mind was spinning. “All right. I’ll see you later tonight.”
She was momentarily stunned by the sight of his wolfish teeth, the unexpected light in his eyes. He looked … excited.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
So, at eight o’clock that night, Ida padded up the familiar staircase of Wren’s childhood home. Only this time she wasn’t headed up there for a pizza/sour candy sleepover. No. This was to check in on her former client who’d kissed her brains out of her ears last night.
What a world.
“Phoenix?” she called, not sure which bedroom he’d chosen. There were three floors above the salon.
A door creaked open and a solitary dark eye peeked out. “He’s on that end of the hallway,” Dawn whispered before closing the door.
Of course he would be. If it really was his job to scare the wits out of Sid if and when he showed up, then Phoenix would want to be over there, nearest the entrance and exit.
Wow. This was all really happening.
Ida took a deep breath and knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Phoenix called.
She pushed open the door and blinked at what she saw. Phoenix was laying on a queen sized bed, looking even larger in his state of relaxation. His crutches were propped up on the wall and his hands were behind his head. He was peering backwards, out the window, toward the gibbous moon. He turned his head when she came in.
“Oh,” he sat up. “I thought you might be Wren. I would have come down to get you if I’d known you were here.”
He held out a hand to her, beckoning her closer to him. There was plenty of room on the bed, but she opted for sanity and chose the desk chair instead. As she sat, she took a minute to look around. This room had always been a guest room, even when Wren’s grandmother had lived here, but it looked a bit different than Ida remembered.
The bedding was dark and looked soft. There was a large photograph of a misty-early sunrise over a mountain that she’d never seen before. A few utilitarian lamps that didn’t look anything like Wren’s grandmother’s style, and a blunt desk. The closet door was open and Phoenix’s clothes hung there, barely taking up a quarter of the space.
“Wren took us to the mall,” Phoenix said, his eyes on her face, interpreting her reactions. “She let us pick out stuff we’d like for our rooms and said we could pay her back when we got jobs.”
Ida blinked. She’d have to take this up with Wren. Her friend must have known that there was no way these three wolves were getting jobs anytime soon. The free rent she could kind of understand, considering the house needed to be protected and Wren didn’t want to stay here. But all the stuff? If Wren had decked out the other two’s rooms like this, then she’d easily spent over a grand. Oy.
His eyes were still following Ida’s every expression, a dark black laser that she couldn’t ignore. “I know how important jobs are,” he murmured. “That’s one of the many things that you’ve taught me. Which is why I quit the center.”
Finally Ida gave him her eye contact. This was what she needed to know, the information she desperately needed. “What do you mean? That doesn’t make any sense. It’ll be so much harder for you to get a job now that you’ve quit the center.”
He shook his head. “I mean that I didn’t want you to lose your job. So, I quit the center. This way we both get what we want.”
She blinked at him. “How is you quitting the center both of us getting what we want?”
“Because,” he said, that playful light in his eyes again. He reached for her hand and tugged her up so that she was standing between his legs. “Now you won’t lose your job for kissing me.”
“Oh, brother,” she said, gasping for air. This was… a lot. A whole lot. An awful lot. “Phoenix, I can’t let you do that. Sacrifice your opportunities for a few make out sessions.”
“To be honest,” he shrugged, playing with her fingers, inspecting them, turning them over in his large hands. “I think this lifestyle suits me better. I don’t like having to rely on people. I liked spending time with you. But that was the only part of the mentor thing that I really liked. This is better for me. Doing it my own way.”
“But …”
“I’ve only been on my own for less than a day and I already have a new place to live. Diana said she had an idea for a job I could have. And the government is still paying for my physical therapy. And this way my situation doesn’t endanger your situation.”
She got the distinct feeling that he was quoting something he’d heard before. But she couldn’t deny that he was speaking the truth. It was a weight off her soul, seeing him free of that dingy condo. She had to admit that the mentor/mentee set up had never quite suited him. He wasn’t the type of person who benefited from unasked-for help. Now, that didn’t mean that she hadn’t been good for him. There was something about the two of them together that just felt good. But Ida was starting to wonder if it had a hell of a lot more to do with chemistry than it did their professional arrangement.
She had one more question. “What did you mean that you’d tell me next week? When I asked what all this was about.”
“Oh.” One of his hands took a long, slow trip up her spine, his eyes dark and fathomless, his knees firmly touching either side of her thighs. “Next week I can ask if I can be your boyfriend. But not before that.”
Ida’s chin dropped, her eyes going wide. “You want to be my boyfriend?”
He closed her mouth with a firm hand. “Yes. That’s what humans do when they feel like this, right?”
Feel like what?
Her head was spinning. “You want to be my boyfriend, but not until next week.”
He nodded, stopped, and then shook his head. “No. I want
to be your boyfriend right now, but I won’t ask until next week because then I’ll have a job and I can be a really good boyfriend. According to the, uh, what’s the word? Criteria?”
“Whose criteria?”
“Diana’s.”
“Right.” Ida shook her head. Diana gave Phoenix relationship advice. Right after Phoenix quit the center in order to kiss Ida whenever he wanted. And now he was living in her best friend’s childhood home. And playing with the ties on the back of her dress. And staring up at her with eyes as dark as fresh earth. And waiting patiently for her to catch up to all this new information.
She said the only thing she could think to say. “You were so scary when we first met.”
How they’d gotten from there to here in just two weeks she’d never know. But suddenly the memory of an angry, pained Phoenix bloomed in her mind. The man with the dead eyes. Who wanted nothing to do with human culture. He’d stared at her like she was an idiot. Like all humans weren’t worth the air they breathed.
And now he was practically cuddling her, one of his hands firmly on her back, the other hand bracing himself as he leaned a bit back on the bed, peering up at her.
“You’re not scared of me, are you?” he asked quietly.
“No,” she whispered back truthfully.
“Ida,” he said, and she already knew what was coming next. For as wild and untamed and primal as he was, he was a man who cared about the rules, if not just to make her more comfortable. “Can I kiss you?”
She couldn’t speak. Twenty four hours ago, she’d had a whole litany of reasons why she couldn’t kiss Phoenix Wolf. Ethics, her job, the fact that he was so beautiful it actually hurt to look at him. And now, in less than a day, he’d destroyed so many of those roadblocks. Now, there was really just the beauty thing in between them.
And the boyfriend thing.
She would have to explain to him at some point that they could never really be together like that. That she’d never agree to be his girlfriend. But he wasn’t asking for that right now. He was asking for that in a week. Apparently.