And brag about it to Oscar. Her stomach clenched. She wouldn’t let them hurt her. What would Oscar think of her if these two idiots bested her? If he thought she’d betrayed him and his Pack had punished her?
“What made you think it was your place? To help the selkie?” Red touched the corner of a painting. It wobbled while he held Monica’s gaze. “She’s a wild nobody, just an animal. Our Alpha would have tamed her, if anything. We all know she needs it.”
Her heart lurched into her throat, the urge to jump forward and grab the precarious painting nearly overwhelming. They were going to destroy her studio and all her work. What could she tell them that they would accept? That she’d done it to keep Lia out of the position that belonged to her? It was obvious that they thought nothing of her. Loyalty was worth more than her personal desires.
She wanted to howl, to lash out and push them away. It was clear she was no longer safe in her own Pack. They’d found her out and her decision, no matter the reasons, would haunt her each time she walked past one of her own packmates.
“Not all women are animals, asshole.” The words tumbled out of her. She wanted to clamp her hand over her mouth in fear, but she couldn’t afford to show weakness. Part of her wished Nikolai would arrive, bent on enacting another prank, so that she wouldn’t be alone.
Yet, she was alone.
“Lia didn’t want any of the packs. She didn’t want any Alpha dick. It’s not up to you to capture someone and tame them when they don’t want you. Get over yourselves.”
“You do realize you’re talking about Oscar, not us. Right?” Jorge added.
Her stomach dropped.
She tried to keep her chin high in defiance, but her confidence was slowly deflating. The words had tumbled out with thought of what they might mean. She wasn’t trying to undermine Oscar. Instead, she wanted him to be the best Alpha he could be for them—as long as it was her by his side. She knew that was selfish. Perhaps it was wrong, but she wouldn’t admit that. Monica would keep working until she claimed the title of his mate.
Then, these shifters would have to bow to her. They wouldn’t barge into her workspace as if they owned it, threaten her as if they were some sort of secret police, and try to convince her of her own betrayal. She loved Oscar, adored him. She would never betray him.
“Get out,” Monica commanded. She pointed a paint smeared finger toward the open garage door.
Both of the men smiled, curling grins that spoke of darker things. Her heart flipped. For a moment, fear crushed her. Then they turned to leave. They’d dredged up everything she’d done wrong in the past weeks and left her to deal with it. Everything was in her hands, all she had to do was make something good of it.
Screw it, she thought. She was done beating around the bush and denying what she wanted. She would go to him, to Oscar, and see if she couldn’t get things started. If she wanted Oscar’s attention, all she had to do was try.
Monica set aside her tools and rescheduled her work. She knew of one person who might listen to her, who might forgive her if she could tell her side of the story. It scared the hell out of her, but at this point, it might be her only choice. Monica could hit two birds with one stone, if she was lucky.
All she had to do was hope that Oscar could see the truth behind her intentions. In a perfect world, he would yank her into his arms and tell her she was right, she’d been the shifter he needed all along. Not Lia and her sealskin.
Just Monica.
Her car smelled faintly of Nikolai, sandalwood clinging to the things he’d touched when he put the dildo on her dashboard. It brought a smile to her lips until she shook her head. She had to remember herself, what she really wanted. An infatuation wasn’t it.
Her time with Nikolai had been fun, but it wasn’t the mate bond she needed. It was a moment of fun and laughter in her life. Even as she repeated these words over and over in her mind, images of Nikolai’s toothy grin made her stomach flutter. It was the panther, feeding her images. She knew it, but she couldn’t stop it.
By the time she arrived at her destination, her mind was a mess of indecision. Her mind knew one thing, but her body rebelled for another. The damn panther wasn’t much help, either. It was wild and convinced of its own desires. Why couldn’t she see what Monica was trying to do for them. She was a majestic and powerful creature, she deserved another powerful creature as a mate.
Yes, a big bear of a man. Sharp-toothed, blonde bear.
Monica groaned.
Oscar’s house was a small ranch. The windows on the front were gleaming with white trim, new from bottom to top. It had to have cost him a pretty penny. Monica had been appalled when she learned of what Lia did. Of course, she heard the other side of the story from Lia and almost wanted to agree with her. Honestly, she was grateful Lia still had her head.
She’d been too valuable to the packs, all of them fighting for the coastal territory that she could grant them, for anyone to hurt her. The fact that no one had sought revenge after the fact was surprising. Perhaps more of them had seen Miles fight than she thought. That, or stories of Lia’s new mate had gotten around, and everyone decided not to screw with him.
Either way, Lia was safe and Monica was wading waist deep into trouble. Everything she’d done to help the selkie was catching up to her. She now had to watch every step she made, including the times she saw Nikolai. Sitting in her car outside her Alpha’s house, Monica realized she couldn’t see Nikolai again.
The daydreams of their truck-shaking sex would never come to fruition. She needed to keep her head straight and remind Oscar that she was loyal. Visiting the Alphas of other packs didn’t quite give off the right vibe.
She was so caught in her own thoughts that when there was a knock on her window, she shrieked and jumped. It was only Oscar, peering into the car with his night-dark eyes. Tattoos ran down his neck, curling smoke and jaw bones. He was frightening to behold, and yet he looked at her with warmth. Her Alpha made a motion of rolling the window down.
Instead, she opened the door. He stepped back, giving her room to get out. Before she spoke, she glanced around to make sure no one else would hear. This was her story and if she was going to pay the price for it, she’d rather it be in private.
Her hands shook as she carefully shut the door behind her. This was her moment. Confess how she stopped him from gaining Lia’s skin and hope he could see the truth behind it, the truth she wasn’t sure she could say.
“To what do I owe this visit? It’s not often that I see you here.” Oscar’s voice was gentle. He might have been the strongest Alpha she knew, but the tenderness she saw in him always cut her to the core.
Thoughts of Nikolai were shoved aside as she turned a small smile upon her Alpha. “I thought I should come and issue my own apology.”
“Is that so?” His hand tightened around a pair of gardening shears she was just now noticing.
Her stomach clenched. This was her future mate, she reminded herself. He would forgive her, and they would all move on from what happened. She had to believe that. It was the only way everything she planned would work.
When their eyes met again, her heart gave a small thump. It was nothing like the racing feeling when she was near Nikolai, but it was gentle and welcome after the morning she’d had.
“Look, I helped Ophelia get her sealskin back from Nikolai. I also… I also tried to get her to go back to the sea before that.” The words tumbled from her shaking core. If Oscar decided that she’d betrayed him… she shuddered to think of what would come from her. All she had was the hope that love would save her. “I did it… I did it for us, for the Pack. The war was tearing everyone apart. It was causing fights everywhere. It had to end.”
“Correction,” Oscar said as he held up the shears like an exclamation point. “The war was causing fights between the other two packs. Our pack was doing fine.”
Monica licked her lips. How long would it have been until their Pack joined the fray? Until everyone had been wor
n down to nothing but stubs while they fought over sand?
“I’d been willing to sit it out and let the other two packs destroy one another. This space is far too small for so many packs anyway. Patience would have allowed us not only the coast, but the rest of the Monterey area, too, for the Alphas might have killed each other and then I could have claimed their packs.”
His words were raw and brutal. Oscar was a quiet strategist, his plan for the long run always in place. It always seemed at odds with the brash and violent way he kept his Pack under control. Though, Monica thought, she’d never seen him hit anyone. The threat of violence, the stories of what he’d done to the gangs in the area, were enough to keep everyone trembling in fear.
“Truth be told,” Oscar said, looking back at his house, “the selkie might have been more trouble than she was worth anyway. I don’t blame you for helping her, but you should think twice before doing something like that again. Putting your gender before your Pack will lead to the fall of all of us. Do you understand?”
Monica bristled. Fear was pressed aside, and anger reared its ugly head. “So, I should think less of how the packs were treating someone and more about the overall state of my Pack?”
She could barely believe what she’d just said, but it all came out and there was no putting it back in. Oscar’s gaze sharpened, eyes narrowing at her. The smoke tattoos seemed to spin and dance along his neck, as if her world was already burning.
Perhaps that was the best way of explaining what she was doing: burning every bridge around her. This was her Pack, her family. They were the people who stayed up all night to help another through a rough time. Oscar was the man who’d plucked a panther out of the gutter and taught it to be something between animal and human.
He’d been the first one to buy her a can of spray-paint.
She blew a breath out her nose and apologized, lowering her eyes to the ground. She couldn’t see Oscar, couldn’t tell what he was preparing to do. The conviction of her words still stuck in her heart, but fear of losing everything that meant something to her still wrapped her.
***
“Why, might I ask, did you buy four shifter sized boxes of ball-pit balls?” Regina asked from the front door, squeezing past the boxes in question.
Today, she wore a simple, polka-dot sheath dress. It floated around her body, barely skimming her hips and floating over her pointed nipples. There’d been a time when they’d lost themselves in each other’s bodies, but that time was over. They quickly learned there was no space for romantic love between them, and the sex had fallen flat.
He knew that despite being a quiet librarian, Regina still had enough sex appeal to stop traffic. There was a vixen inside her, quite literally.
“Can’t I just hide for a few days? Why does everyone need to be at my house?” Nikolai rushed to hide the beer bottles that had been gathering between ordering the balls and the overnight shipment.
“I thought you wouldn’t mind knowing some of your shifters still like you.” Regina glared at the last box in the hallway before backtracking and slipping through the kitchen and into the living room through another door. She let out a sigh of relief before turning up her nose. “Why does it smell like a brewery exploded in here?”
Her eyes narrowed in on him, slipping to the bottles he’d failed at hiding. “You can be pathetic sometimes.”
He didn’t argue. He felt pathetic, unable to be anything when all he’d ever known was being his father’s son. There was a fork in the road before him, paths that split between becoming the conqueror his father wanted and the kind of man Nikolai himself would be proud of. There was an odd sense of fealty to his father that trapped him.
“Go take a shower,” Regina commanded. Her voice was solid, leaving no room for argument even though she spoke to her own Alpha.
Nikolai sighed and did as she said, if only because he knew he stank. The buzz he’d had while ordering four boxes of colored balls had been gone for a while, but he hadn’t had the will to clean, himself or the house. When he dried off and dressed, he came out to find that Regina had done it all for him.
He owed her a lot more than she got, even if he suspected she’d been the one to let slip that he had Lia’s sealskin. It had been useless anyway. Lia proved that the magic of it only worked when she gave her sealskin willingly. Stealing it in the night while she and her mate were fornicating in the sand wasn’t the same—not in the least.
Not in the least.
Part of him thanked Regina for saving him from becoming his father. He’d been rampaging down that path for a while, being bullheaded and power hungry.
“What do I do now?” he asked, as if Regina had any idea of what he was talking about.
“Probably something with these damn balls. I mean, seriously! What the hell are they for?”
His cheeks warmed. Regina caught the flush of blood on his face, and a smile split across hers. Her eyes flashed with a knowledge she could hold over him. Perhaps their past sex-life was coming to bite him in the ass, making her feel closer to his level than was good—for his sanity, that is.
“I won’t say I understand what a bunch of balls has to do with a crush, but I’m willing to go along with it. Is it Farrah?” Her lips twisted to the side as if she considered what she’d just said. “Nah, not Farrah. And it definitely isn’t Brigid. Could it be Teagan?”
Nikolai grunted and waved her off. While he started moving the boxes of balls out to his truck, Regina lingered behind him. He heard her shuffling through things. It wasn’t until he returned for the third box that he saw the light in Regina’s eyes. They glimmered with awe, her mouth in a surprised O until it fell into a smirk.
“Monica? Seriously? I will admit I never saw that coming. Are you sure?”
No, he wasn’t sure. It seemed wrong, to keep courting a shifter from an enemy pack, especially when his own Pack was in such unrest. The thought of her gave him a small happiness, one that kept him from burning everything to the ground and starting fresh with his Pack. And so, he carted the last box out to his truck even though he knew he should stop.
Regina followed and hopped into the passenger seat when he turned over the engine. He should have kicked her out, but the company, knowing someone in his Pack didn’t want his head on a stake, felt nice. On the way to Monica’s house, Regina filled him in on all the gossip wandering through their Pack.
It was hard to listen to, but he absorbed every bit of information she had for him. It turned out that Brigid was causing more trouble than he thought. The rave in his yard had been her idea, as if it might shake him and throw him off guard.
If he wasn’t careful, Brigid would take the Pack from him. Nikolai clung to the thought that he was good for his Pack. He just needed to figure out what he could do that was good. He was certain it didn’t involve boxes of balls. It would mean finding another outlet for his Pack, one that pulled them away from this power mentality and put them to good use.
They needed to feel like a family, not a troop. He knew that was in part his father’s fault, but he’d fostered it. He’d sent his Pack to the coast after claiming Lia’s sealskin and asked them to fight for it. Now, he wanted to ask them to become a thing they’d never known.
Seeing that Monica’s car was gone, he parked out front and hauled the boxes toward her house. Regina was distracted by something else, if the shout of surprise behind him meant anything. When he came out, Regina waved the dildo in the air, her eyes as wide as saucers. The silicone monstrosity wiggled in a manner very strange for a dick.
“Is there something you need to tell me?” Regina laughed as she spoke.
“Help me dump these balls in her bedroom and I’ll tell you the story from the beginning.”
“You have a deal.”
Chapter Six
Monica didn’t understand what Regina’s problem was. Every time Regina looked in her direction, she smirked and smothered a laugh. Monica was ready to challenge her to figure out what was so funny. She’
d lost count of how many times she’d checked her reflection in the sliding glass door at Miles and Lia’s beach house.
The air was filled with the scent of charcoal smoke and fish. Monica hadn’t wanted to come, hadn’t felt like she was part of the group, but after the day she’d had, being surrounded by the packless shifters and Regina felt more like home than anything else.
Eventually, Regina stopped laughing. Instead, she lay in the sun, wearing nothing more than a little bikini top and a pair of cut-off shorts. Regina was classically beautiful, all porcelain skin and freckles over her upturned nose. She was also part of Nikolai’s pack. Monica found herself jealous.
Not only was Regina beautiful, she was closer to Nikolai than Monica would ever be. The barrier of their packs separated them. Monica knew she shouldn’t see Nikolai anymore, not if she wanted to regain the trust of her own pack. Yet, the thought of Regina hanging off Nikolai turned her stomach.
Monica told herself, repeatedly, that it didn’t matter. She would get her place by Oscar’s side, but each time she tried to imagine such a future, Nikolai took Oscar’s place. She shook her head to expel the image, but it popped up time and time again against her will.
“Do cats even like the ocean?” Regina asked as she sat across from Monica and Nessa. She raised a fish taco to her mouth, not once breaking eye contact.
Nessa pulled her lips back in a silent hiss while Monica shrugged. The thought of Nessa’s tiny cat form in the waves was an alarming image while Monica’s much larger panther loved to play in the crashing waters.
“What brings either of you to the Californian coast, then?”
“Stray cats are everywhere,” Nessa said. “It’s not that strange to see cat-shifters on the coast. There’s enough mice and fish for everyone.”
Monica gagged at the thought of eating a mouse. Regina caught her reaction and laughed, spraying out little bits of cabbage. Both Monica and Nessa laughed at Regina.
Her True Alpha Mate Page 4
