Jason grunted and leaned back against the tree. There was a bit of a breeze the closer to the tree that he got. A minister appeared from nowhere. Jason didn’t know the man. The funeral home had engaged his services for a nice nondenominational service where nobody would have to pretend that the King family had been religious in life or potentially—in death.
“Are you all right, young man?” The minister lightly touched Jason on the shoulder. “I believe you were one of the pallbearers, weren’t you?”
“Not anymore,” Jason grunted. Then he turned and stared at the man in his plain gray suit. “How do you do this all day long? How can you even stomach it? All these people talking about a person they don’t know and probably didn’t even like in life, but suddenly becomes the most missed person on the planet in death. Why do people do that?”
The minister’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. The man looked about sixty or more. Jason wondered if the man was affected by the fact that Mac King had been this age when he died. Did that bother the guy?
Finally the minister cleared his throat. The rest of the King brothers were nearly upon them. It was time to start the service. But the minister apparently wasn’t going to let Jason’s comment go without a response. “I’m sorry that you’ve become so cynical at such a young age. But no. I don’t get tired of that aspect. I believe that it’s a human response that has value. When we have bitter feelings about a person in life, we should be able to let go of those when the person dies. Otherwise we would be carrying around all of that bitterness without a way to resolve it. Perhaps that is God’s gift to us.”
“God’s gift,” Jason muttered. “Yeah. My mother would certainly concur that she is God’s little gift to humanity.”
The minister did not respond to this and maybe that was better. There was nothing that he could have said that would have made Jason’s mood any better. He felt black and angry. He didn’t want to talk about his father. He didn’t want to talk about his mother. He did not want to think about either of them right now and yet this was why the entire city had gathered.
Jason’s brothers carefully balanced their father’s big wood casket on a set of stands that had been erected over the open hole. Of course the funeral director had covered that gaping hole in the earth with strips of fake green grass to make it a little less stark. But the hole was there. They were about to say a final goodbye to Mac King and dump his remains into a hole. But don’t worry. The man was sitting inside a twenty thousand dollar casket made of some kind of Brazilian hardwood that Jason could not recall the name of.
“Thank you for coming today to celebrate the final moments that Mackenzie King is with us on this side of the veil!” The minister practically shouted the words.
Jason heard Zane snort. Then he heard Edward clear his throat. At least his brothers had not bought into the ridiculousness. But Orion’s stoic expression was almost more than Jason could stand. He had the most horrible urge to stand up and start shouting at the top of his lungs. He wanted to force everyone to turn and look at him. Then he wanted to point at his mother and shout something angry and probably hostile.
But what good would it do? Tisha was still clinging to Tex as though the suited rich man was her lifeline to her dead husband. Mac had barely been dead for two weeks and already Tisha had to pretend the tears. Had she ever loved Jason’s father? Had they ever really been a couple? And why hadn’t Jason asked his father that question? Mac would have answered. He didn’t shy away from anything and had been the first one to call out not only his own mistakes but those of his wife and his family.
“My father was a good man,” Orion said suddenly.
Jason looked up. When had that happened? The minister was standing aside and Orion was now standing over the casket. The thing was draped in some kind of horrible greenery that Mac King would have enjoyed poking fun at. He had hated that stuff. They should have draped the casket in hay. That was what Mac valued. Something you could sell. Hay and oil. And maybe little disc drives. Jason didn’t know. But the flowers were all wrong.
“My father was a loving man.” Orion was still talking. His somber voice carried across the cemetery as though he were shouting into a bullhorn. The man was nothing if not powerful and in this case—loud. “My father was the sort of man who makes other men jealous. It’s true. He came from money. The King family has always been wealthy in Texas. But Mac King quadrupled that wealth. He took a small fortune and made it great, and Mac King thought that hard work was the way that every man should live his life. He was a good man, a hard worker, a great father, and”—Orion glanced at his brothers—“a good teacher. As my brothers and I struggle to fill my father’s shoes you can be assured that Mac King will never be forgotten.”
Orion stepped down and Jason had the strongest urge to boo and hiss. What kind of bullshit speech was that? It wasn’t that Orion had been lying. His words were true, but why had he felt compelled to say them here in this venue? What was the purpose and who was he trying to impress? It was disgusting.
Jason wasn’t quite sure what caught his attention, but suddenly he was no longer thinking about his brothers and was utterly absorbed in the reddish gold head bowed as the young woman scribbled notes on a tablet she held in her hands. There was no doubt in Jason’s mind that this was Skye Kincaid the society reporter.
It was interesting to watch the people around her. They all kept what could be considered a polite distance while simultaneously exhibiting a bizarre desire to rubberneck in a surreptitious effort to see what she was writing. No wonder she used a tablet. It was probable that as soon as she finished a sentence the tablet hid her words just so someone couldn’t see them.
Jason could smell her. He was almost certain of it. He had caught her scent earlier. Vanilla. It was absolutely enticing. Vanilla and black raspberry. The light scent now drifted across the crowd and was somewhat dulled by the fifty thousand other colognes and disgusting perfumes worn by the sweaty crowd standing in the sun at the cemetery. But Jason did not have a regular human nose. His was that of a shifter. A wolf’s nose. And that was why he knew for certain that what he was inhaling was that vanilla black raspberry scent mingled with a very feminine scent of perspiration that made him want to lick his lips and taste her skin.
As if poor Skye Kincaid could feel him staring, she looked up from her tablet. Jason just managed to catch her gaze. It was electric. He felt almost like everyone else disappeared. There was no cemetery, no casket, no brothers, no mother, no bullshit, and nothing but the hint of a smile on those full pink lips. The woman was gorgeous and Jason wanted very much to talk to her again.
“What are you doing?” Zane was suddenly beside him again.
Jason didn’t answer. Their mother was now turning her gaze their direction and in only a few minutes she would probably be sending those looks that never managed to be spotted by anyone but her boys. They were the “I’m going to freaking kill you when we’re at home” expressions. Even at twenty-five, Jason was still subject to the fear of those looks. Mostly now because he really hated it when she nagged him for no reason. And Tisha Olivares-King nagged like a champ.
Zane seemed to follow Jason’s gaze. Thankfully Skye Kincaid looked back down at her tablet. But that did not seem to stop Zane from making some very snap observations and subsequent judgments. “You must be joking.”
“Shut up.”
“No.” Zane’s voice was so soft it did not carry past the two of them, but Orion was now glaring just as hotly as their mother. Zane did not heed the warning. “She’s the society reporter. You’re a freaking shifter. She would love to write a story to expose you. Is that what you want? To destroy us all?”
Jason did not answer. Why would he? Anything else he said would only fuel Zane’s ridiculous anger. His brother was now glowering, which of course made his other three brothers glower as well. And they were all staring at him because he was the youngest and therefore the evil bad boy of the whole clan. Sometimes perception sucked, especial
ly when it was all bullshit.
Zane roughly bumped against Jason. Now pretty much the entire assembly was beginning to stare at the brothers and not the minister. “Answer me,” Zane growled.
But Jason didn’t have an answer. He didn’t have anything to say and he didn’t even know his own mind in this situation. Yes. The woman was a reporter. She covered society page fluff and she wanted more. There could be nothing more enticing to a woman like Skye Kincaid than a story about a family of billionaire shifters. Except nobody would take the woman seriously anyway. Not without proof. So perhaps the whole thing was moot. Perhaps there was no point in arguing about it or worrying about it because any potential relationship between Jason King and Skye Kincaid was already dead before it had begun.
That did not mean Jason wasn’t attracted to the beautiful redhead. It did not mean he could turn off whatever hormones had kicked in full blast. But for right now it was time to walk away from this whole fiasco.
Without another word to his brother or another look at Skye, Jason King turned around and got on his sport bike. He fired up the engine and roared off. From the corner of his eye Jason could see his mother’s look of mortification, but he didn’t know why she would care. Jason had just made certain that the whole city of Dallas would spend the next month whispering about the King family. Wasn’t that what Tisha Olivares-King wanted?
Chapter Four
The whispers about Jason King were still on Skye’s mind Monday morning when she returned to her cluttered desk at the Dallas Star offices near the city center. The offices were busy and crowded. The paper was huge. The circulation included practically the whole city, and the only thing that was missing from Skye’s life at the paper was the opportunity to write the real news.
As she walked through the big open newsroom where reporters gathered around the clutter on their desks, Skye kept her ears open for anything that might tell her what was happening in Dallas. Of course they had the usual big city crime. Robbery, murder, the occasional home break-in, and plenty of assault and domestic nonsense.
Skye exhaled a frustrated sigh as she trudged through the newsroom to her own little cubicle at the far end of the cavernous space. There were fans whirring overhead, but they did almost nothing to get rid of the extreme heat and humidity that cursed the Dallas area pretty much all year long. Even now that it was fall the air conditioning was running twenty-four seven to try and keep things from getting too sticky and disgusting.
“So?”
Skye had a visitor almost as soon as she stepped into her cubicle. Sitting down at her desk, Skye carefully picked up a stack of notes and then opened a desk drawer to tuck them inside. She still wrote notes. By hand. Or at least on her tablet where she could then print out her scribbles so that she could scribble even more as more information popped into her head. She liked to write things in pen. She liked multiple colors of pen. And she had been known to color coordinate her pen colors with the dates that she was using them.
“Would you stop being such a pouty puss?” Carolyn Phillips was the editor of Skye’s particular section of the paper. This meant that Carolyn was in charge of food columns, recipes, a few little bits and pieces of fashion, and the society pages. It was not the most coveted position on the Dallas Star’s staff. Now Carolyn was snapping her fingers at Skye. “I want to know. Did you get photos of the youngest brother bugging out of the funeral on his motorcycle? They said he tore up the grass at the cemetery and spun donuts and knocked over a headstone.”
Skye gaped at her editor. “Who is saying that?”
“Some of the other reporters. Henry Nelson for starters.”
Henry Nelson was a sports writer. He was always seeing drama where none existed. It was actually a bit ridiculous. He kept waiting for one of the local sports teams to have a free-for-all on the field so he could get photos of blood and gore that could be published alongside his column.
“First of all,” Skye began, not bothering to hide her annoyance. “You need to stop listening to that idiot talk about things that happen in the city. He basically takes every story and then adds a potential murder. It’s ridiculous.”
“Fine.” Carolyn rolled her eyes. She was a woman in her thirties with prematurely gray hair and a very hard-edged personality. Right now she was dressed in simple khaki capris and a red blouse with matching sandals. “Then you tell me what you saw. You’re the one writing the story. And it had better be a big story with lots of drama because the readers are basically a bunch of sharks following blood in the water.”
Right. Because that was what Skye had always wanted. A chance to defame some poor schmuck so that her boss could make sure that the residents of Dallas got to hear their usual array of negativity against their neighbors with breakfast.
“Hey!” Carolyn started snapping her fingers right in Skye’s face.
Skye rolled her eyes. “Look. It’s not that simple. Yes. The brothers were obviously very irritated with each other. Jason King left the funeral home after a tiff with his brother Zane. Then Zane was pestering him at the gravesite and Jason walked away. It just so happened that he had ridden his motorcycle to the cemetery and it also so happened that the vehicle was parked right beside his father’s grave.”
Carolyn made a high pitched noise of excitement and began bouncing on the balls of her feet while clapping her hands. “So he did go roaring out of the cemetery!”
“No. He rode out of the cemetery and there’s a huge difference because there was no tearing up of the grass. No riding in circles. No knocking over headstones—which honestly Carolyn, how would you even do that on a motorcycle? There was no drama. The guy just got on his motorcycle and left. End of story.”
“That better not be the end of the story!” Carolyn snarled.
Skye drew back in surprise. Her eyes were practically popping out of her head. She could feel them getting wide because the ceiling fan positioned right over her desk was totally drying out her eyes. What was Carolyn’s problem? Did she actually want Skye to lie about what had happened?”
“I don’t want you to lie.” Carolyn pointed at Skye. “So don’t go all noble and silly with me. You got it? But you need to dress that shit up enough to make our readers wish like hell that they had been there. We want them to be dying for the next installment of the King family saga.”
“Why?” Skye put her hands flat on her desk. That way she would run less of a risk of wrapping them around Carolyn’s neck. “Why do you feel the need to drag the Kings into the limelight? Can’t you let them grieve in private?”
“Are you kidding me?” Carolyn howled. She threw up her hands and rolled her eyes. It was the most dramatic display Skye had ever seen from the cynic. “The Kings gave up their right to any kind of private grieving time when they earned their first million.”
Did Carolyn not realize what she was saying? “That’s the thing though,” Skye said earnestly. “They earned their money. They didn’t get it handed to them. I know that Mac King came from an oil baron family, but they worked for it back in the day and then kept building on the fortune. It wasn’t like they just sat back to live off the interest and never lifted a hand again. You can’t drag these people through the dirt. It will totally make us look like assholes!”
“That doesn’t matter.” Carolyn snorted and exhaled a huge sigh. “Look. You have always had a really horrible case of scruples. It’s probably your worst fault as a reporter and the one thing that will always hold you back. But I think it’s fixable.”
Skye didn’t know what to say. She finally cleared her throat and frowned. “So let me get this straight. Your goal is to—over time—get rid of my ethics?”
“Pretty much. You want to be a big-time reporter right?”
“Yes.”
“So then you need to get rid of your ideas about doing things the nice way. It doesn’t work.” Carolyn stabbed her finger toward the newsroom where a gaggle of reporters were gathered around a computer monitor watching a TMZ broadcast and laughin
g their asses off. “Look at them! Do you think they worry about what the mayor will think if they tell the whole world that secretly he likes to wear women’s shoes around the house?”
“He does?” Skye almost swallowed her tongue. “No way!”
“No. He doesn’t!” Carolyn groaned. “See? It isn’t about what’s real or true or right. It’s about selling papers. Selling papers counts, and honestly, you’re in the most lucrative job here at the paper. We are basically the muckraking section. We get the dirt and that’s what people want to hear. They like to know that the rich people in Dallas are having problems. They like to hear about those problems so they can feel better about themselves.”
“That’s a disgusting thought,” Skye muttered. “So you’re saying that the only purpose a paper serves anymore is to piss people off? It’s not to inform or provide a sort of checks and balances between the people and their government? It’s not about keeping the public informed about international events and the happenings in the greater world outside Dallas?”
“No.” Carolyn was shaking her head emphatically from side to side. “The average reader can’t actually understand the goings on in government. They don’t have the vocabulary. They watch reality television and think that their favorite TV personalities would make good politicians. They don’t know who represents them in the government and they don’t care. They just want their paychecks and their beer drinking weekends and probably since we’re in Texas”—Carolyn rolled her eyes—“they want their ATVs and their guns and their camping weekends where they roll their enormous RVs right up to the edge of a lake so they can drink beer in a whole new environment. That is what they want. They don’t want to worry about China or Russia or all that other crap. They just want to see their local celebrities behave badly in public.”
Billion Dollar Wolves: Boxset Bks 1-5 Page 3
