She sucked in a deep breath. Nodded. She stuffed the wadded-up paper towel in the bag, then bent and held it open next to the step, so he could just push the mess into the bag.
“What did Boyd have to say?” she asked.
“We want to know, too,” called Leah’s voice clearly. “Wait to answer that until you are in here.”
“She meant to say ‘please,’” said Sage cheerily when Brother Wolf let out a growl of annoyance.
Anna muttered something unhappily under her breath. Charles didn’t hear it all, but he knew it had to do with the lack of privacy at his da’s house.
“Exactly,” he told her.
* * *
• • •
“WHAT DID BOYD have to say?” asked Leah as soon as he and Anna came into the living room.
Charles glanced around the room and saw that a good two-thirds of the pack was here. From their attentive eyes and the hyperprotective glints of wolf eyes he caught here and there, he realized that they all knew about the dead man’s connection to Anna. He couldn’t see her telling them, so someone must have overheard them. Hard to stay quiet enough that any werewolf in sight couldn’t overhear you without trying.
So he told them what Boyd had said to him. When he finished, he looked around the room, and asked, “Do any of you know what Da did with the electronic files, financial and otherwise, that Boyd gave him?”
“Bran still has them,” said Leah. “He got them about a month back. He’s been working on them himself. He told me that you had enough on your shoulders, and he’d give them to you when the time was right.”
“Okay,” he said quietly.
Da had taken the files to work on them himself? What did that mean? “When the time was right”? His da could run a spreadsheet or conduct an Internet search, but he wasn’t in Charles’s league. Had his da just forgotten about it? That didn’t sound like the Marrok at all.
Had Da found something in the books that he didn’t want Charles to know about? Was that something the reason Bran wasn’t here?
He wasn’t in Africa. The last call Charles had made, before coming into the house, was to his brother. Samuel had not heard from their da since he’d gotten a call that all was well with Mercy. He had not heard that Da was headed to Africa—and he’d not seen him.
That meant Bran had lied. Over the phone, Charles reflected, lying would have been easy enough.
Good that Boyd was sending the files to Charles, then. He’d told his father’s message app about that, so his da would know that Charles was about to receive whatever information that data held. If he really didn’t want Charles to see something, he could come home and take care of this matter himself.
Anna brought a plate with crumbs and two peanut-butter cookies on it. “Have a peanut-butter cookie,” she told him. “They’re good.”
He looked at the cookies, still lost in trying to follow his da’s Byzantine thought process with half the information he needed to come to any kind of accurate conclusion.
“I thought you were making brownies,” he said.
“Brownies?” said Tag, distracted from his quiet conversation with a couple of other pack members. “I like brownies.”
“They have orange peel in them,” Leah told Tag, and Charles could tell that she thought that was a bad thing.
“Mercy’s recipe?” Tag said happily. “Awesome. You should get those baked before you go, Anna. One of your brownies, and those recluses will be happy to come out of their hidey-holes to have a few more.”
“The brownies can wait,” said Leah firmly. There was something in her voice that told Charles that the brownie dough would be in the garbage before it ever saw an oven.
If a dog made the sound Tag made then, Charles would have called it whining. But Tag’s eyes were shrewd and focused on Leah.
It was, Charles thought, very easy to make the mistake of buying Tag’s cheery-barbarian appearance and miss the sharp man inside who knew very well whose brownies he was praising—over the peanut-butter cookies that Leah had evidently made. And, once recognizing that sharp man, it would be easy to make the mistake of thinking that the barbarian berserker was a disguise. Tag was both—and that was before his wolf entered into consideration.
* * *
• • •
“TELL ME HOW,” Charles said, “you managed to get stuck going out to warn the wildlings with Asil?”
Anna couldn’t see his face because he was in the process of stripping out of his soot-stained shirt, and she couldn’t read his neutral tone.
“It wasn’t me,” she said. “Asil spoke up at just the wrong moment and sparked Leah’s desire to stir up trouble. It’s a talent he has. To her credit, she’s right, we need to get them all warned as soon as possible. Three teams will do that better than one.”
Charles emerged, his face as neutral as his voice had been. “All right.” Anna winced in sympathy when he jerked at the band at the end of his braid, and it snapped.
“I know,” she said with a grimace. “I know you would be happier pairing me with a different wolf. Maybe Sage should come with me and Asil go with you?”
Charles considered her suggestion that they switch partners but finally shook his head. “No. Brother Wolf doesn’t like it, but it is better this way. Some of these wolves wouldn’t listen to a messenger they see as lower-ranking.” He snorted. “Some of them won’t listen to any of us, either. But if one of them decides to cause trouble . . . Asil is a better deterrent than Sage or you. No one sane would attack the Moor.”
“Do we tell Leah about the traitor? So she can keep watch for oddities, too?” Anna asked. “Or work it so Asil is her partner, so one of us in each group knows to keep an eye out?”
He unbraided his hair, something Anna never got tired of watching. It wasn’t just that his hair was beautiful—though it was. It was the intimacy of the moment. No one else got to see what he looked like with his hair down.
“No,” he said finally. “Asil and you and I know. That is enough. I’m not convinced any of the wildlings is our traitor—you’ll see what I mean when you meet some more of them. Not only would they have trouble accumulating information—because most of them never see the main pack—but only a few of them are stable enough to hide lies this big without betraying themselves.”
“Okay,” Anna said. “Hester could have. How many Hesters are there among your father’s wildlings?”
He paused, raised an eyebrow, and nodded at her. “Score for you,” he said. “How about I warn Leah that we have reason to believe that these people were asking about the wildlings?”
“You don’t want to tell her that there is a traitor?” Anna asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t trust her to be subtle.”
Anna laughed despite herself. No, subtle was not something Leah was particularly good at.
“Who is Leah going with?” he asked.
“Juste,” Anna told him.
Charles grunted in what sounded to her like approval.
“She gave you and Sage the ones she thought would be the worst to deal with,” Anna said. “She gave Asil and me the most broken. She was careful, she told me, to make sure that ours have trouble controlling their wolves, not the other way around. That way, hopefully, Asil won’t have to kill any of them.”
“She took the easiest,” Charles said, taking off his boots.
“That’s not how she put it—but I think that’s how she sees it,” Anna agreed. “Should I have objected when she paired me with Asil?” She hadn’t planned on asking him, but the words came out anyway. “I probably could have made her send Asil with Sage if I had wanted to push it.”
Charles’s eyes brightened for an instant, and though no word came out of his mouth, she heard Brother Wolf’s Yes as clearly as if he’d spoken into her ear.
“No,” Charles said firmly. “She mi
ght enjoy stirring up trouble, but she came to the right conclusions. You’ll be safe with Asil. Sage will be safe with me. Leah will be safe because of Da—but Juste will be a good reminder.”
He pulled out clean clothes. “From the standpoint of getting a look at all the wildlings, it might have worked out better if you and Leah had been paired up. As it is, we’ll have to find a way to see all the wolves that Leah and Juste have on their list. Logistically speaking, the wildlings most likely to have betrayed the pack are in Leah’s group—because they are the most stable of the bunch.”
Anna thought about it. “I could probably get her to change it up that much.”
Charles shook his head. “I don’t think that Leah is dominant enough to get the wildlings to back down on her own, and your effect is too unpredictable.” He gave her a laughing glance over his shoulder. “And if Juste and Asil are in a car for a full day, we might be pulling out bodies. Juste has a problem with Asil.”
“Why?” Anna thought about it just a second, and said, “You mean he blames Asil for not killing the Beast of Gévaudan?” The Beast, Jean Chastel, had controlled most of Central Europe for centuries. The Moor had kept Chastel out of the Iberian Peninsula.
Charles grunted agreement. Evidently finished with the subject of tomorrow’s task, he said, “I tried calling Da before I came in. He’s still not answering his phone. I left a voice message filling him in on what’s been happening. He’d have felt Hester’s death. If he’s not getting back to me, it’s because he doesn’t want to. He’s not with Samuel, I checked. So he’s got some other game going on.”
Anna had come to the same conclusion.
“Bastard,” she said with feeling.
It made him laugh. He touched her cheek and pulled back his finger to show her the dirt on it. “Wanna shower with me?” he asked. The laughter hadn’t left his eyes, though his face was serious.
This house, she thought, was a prison in which everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Too many sharp ears and sharper noses to keep their private life private. She understood that Charles didn’t care who knew when they made love—the opposite, in fact.
But he’d taken Anna’s desires into consideration. At the Marrok’s home, they slept side by side in the guest bedroom, and all they did was sleep. Most days they stopped in to check on their own house. The horses were being fed by someone else, but they needed to be worked. Usually, they managed to sneak in an hour of privacy for lovemaking—and just being alone together.
Today hadn’t been most days.
His eyes were tired, she thought, beneath the laughter. Through their bond, she could feel his lingering sadness.
She leaned forward and took his smudged finger into her mouth, feeling his whole body jolt with surprise . . . and something else. Heat flared, brightening his eyes to gold. His breath caught, but except for that single stiffening, he didn’t move at all—a cat waiting for his prey. She let him feel her teeth while she thought about that.
No. Not prey. Playmate. Lover. But never prey.
His stillness wasn’t a predatory thing; he was waiting for a proper invitation to play. And enjoying the beginning of the game.
She sat back, satisfaction at his response sliding through her skin. She still depended upon her wolf to teach her how to play in intimate circumstances, but she no longer let that bother her—she and her wolf were one in this. She licked her lips, and said, in a voice that came out husky because a good seduction seduces both parties, “Are you, by any chance, implying I might be dirty?”
The smile that only belonged to her slid across his face and did interesting things to her insides. “Who, me?” he said in a thoughtful voice. “Maybe. But in case you thought it was a complaint . . .” He leaned forward and kissed her, touching her only with his lips because that was all he needed.
Unlike her initial move into foreplay, his kiss was as soft as a cello played pianissimo, hinting at the power of the song but lulling the unwary with its sweetness.
Her body went soft, her lips felt heavy and oversensitive as she closed her eyes to concentrate on her senses, on him. He smelled of smoke, the musk and mint that was werewolf, and the underlying scent that was his alone. Mine. All mine. All of his beauty of body and spirit was hers.
He was worth facing a little embarrassment for. Get brave, Anna, she admonished herself.
He pulled away, his lips hotter than they’d been when they first touched hers. He gave her another smile, this one full of love and kindness. People didn’t always notice how kind her mate was because he was sneaky that way.
“I need to get cleaned up,” he said. “And I need to stop this before we’re both grumpy. When we get done running around tomorrow, we should stop at home.” Where it is private, and you won’t be uncomfortable was what he didn’t say.
“Cherish” was a word often used in traditional wedding ceremonies that Anna didn’t think many people understood. They should observe Charles for a few days; they might learn something. Charles was a man who knew how to cherish the ones he loved.
Anna had always been a good student.
She said, “Are you taking back your invitation?”
He’d already turned to go into the bathroom, but her words froze him in his tracks. He looked back at her—and she could see Brother Wolf lurking in his eyes.
“No?” he said tentatively. Then he looked pointedly at the door to the suite, through which it was possible for anyone with werewolf ears to hear the chatter of a few die-hard pack members who were still up talking. “But I don’t . . .”
She pulled off her shirt. Before she’d freed her head, warm hands, his warm hands, were undoing her bra strap.
“I am,” he said, meeting her eyes as she tossed her shirt on the floor, “all out of chivalry.”
She smiled at him as he dropped her bra on top of her shirt.
“Funny,” she said. “So am—” I she would have said except that his mouth at her breast distracted her.
For a moment she let him take the lead and do as he pleased because she’d learned that pleased him, too. She gave him her stuttering breath, her hums of approval. She was very careful not to squeak because squeaking would attract the attention of the people on the other side of that door. Attract their attention sooner, anyway.
But she was simply not comfortable just taking and not giving back. Besides, his body was lovely, and she enjoyed touching him as much as she did being touched. More. So she wriggled on top of him and proceeded to give as good as she got. A small part of her was aware of when the chatter outside paused, rippled with happy laughter, then returned to chattering. That part of her writhed with embarrassment—but it was a very small part of her and easily subsumed in the emotional and physical sensations of making love with her mate.
A rather long while later, limp and breathless, Anna said, “I’m still dirty. More dirty. Because . . . sweat and stuff.”
He gave a low laugh that vibrated through her happy body. “Good to know. Me, too.” There was a short pause, and he said, “We can shower later. When I can move.”
She put her head back down on his sweaty and smoky skin, breathed him in contentedly, and said, “Okay. I can go with that.”
* * *
• • •
ASIL DROVE AS if he were a human, with human reflexes. It was nice, Anna decided, to not have to choose between driving herself or living with Charles’s sometimes-sudden decisions to drive as though a wreck could not possibly injure anyone in the car. Anna could relax while Asil navigated the almost-roads they traveled.
Since they’d taken Asil’s new Mercedes SUV instead of Charles’s truck, she could also not wince when the scrape of tree branches or rocks against the sides and undercarriage of his pristine vehicle made Asil growl. The growl was just noise, without any passion behind it. Unlike her husband, Asil didn’t love his cars. He appreciated them and took
meticulous care of them, but they were just vehicles to get him from one place to the next. He enjoyed them more if they did it with style and power, but they weren’t anything he was attached to.
Not that she wouldn’t rather be driving in Hell itself if she could do it with Charles, but she’d take the good where she found it.
They were going to see Wellesley first, and Anna couldn’t help a frisson of fan-girl excitement. Wellesley was an artist, their artist.
His oil paintings held places of honor in the homes of the pack—and she’d seen them cherished by other packs when she and Charles traveled. There were two in her living room that would be less out of place hanging in the National Gallery of Art in Washington or maybe the Met than on the walls of a modest home in the wilds of Montana.
He was an artist who should have been world famous instead of werewolf famous. She considered that a moment. Maybe he was famous, but if so, it was under a different name—because she’d looked before, to see if she could find his work in the real world.
“What’s he like?” she asked Asil, because she knew that Bran used Asil to deal with Wellesley most of the time. They got on together, and she gathered that Wellesley could be difficult.
He glanced at her as if he couldn’t fathom who she was talking about.
“Wellesley,” she said impatiently.
His eyebrows shot up. “He’s one of Bran’s wildlings. That means he’s broken.”
She growled at him, and he grinned—and the expression made his normally austere face look friendly and approachable. “I am sorry, querida, but I don’t know how to answer that. He is troubled in a way that is very like schizophrenia but is more likely a damaged interaction with his wolf. He is very shy, but I think that is a product of his condition rather than a natural tendency.” He paused. “I can tell you that you aren’t his only fan. People keep trying to get me to ask him about commissioning a piece.” He laughed. “Just this morning, Sage petitioned Leah to switch with me so she could come and meet him.”
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