It was quite a speech. Skye flopped back in her chair and exhaled a shaky breath. This was not why Skye had gone into journalism. She’d had these grand illusions about keeping public officials honest and making sure that the public knew what was in their food and their water supply. She wanted to be a person who could make a difference in the world. That was why she had become a writer and a journalist.
“You look sad.” Carolyn stepped halfway around Skye’s desk and patted her shoulder. “Don’t be. It’s not your fault. It’s the world we live in. If the news doesn’t give people what they want, the people don’t pay the bills. They will go to the next paper or gossip rag or news station that promises to do what they want and they will buy their fix there because the only thing that matters to them is making themselves feel better.”
Okay. Carolyn was not making Skye feel better. In fact, the sarcastic woman’s take on people and the world and journalism in general was making Skye feel as though she should take another look at her career track. Maybe she was wasting her time here. Perhaps she should be out there blogging or something. There had to be a way to get people to listen to reason!
“If you don’t mind,” Skye said in what she hoped was an even tone of voice. “Can I get started on my story? If you’re dead set on me making it exciting enough for you then I should probably get started.”
“Right!” Carolyn actually sounded excited. That made one of them. “I knew you would see my point. You’re a smart girl. But mostly you’re motivated by a desire to succeed in this business. So let’s be successful, right?”
“Right.”
Carolyn wiggled her fingers in farewell as she left Skye’s office. Skye didn’t start working though. She could not even imagine being motivated enough to put one word on paper. What kind of writer was she? What kind of person was she if she was allowing this to be the way that she communicated to the public? She was supposed to what? Make it look like Jason King had been unhinged by his father’s death so he picked a fight with his whole family and then destroyed a public cemetery on his way out of town? That was horrible! How could Carolyn even live with herself if that was what she was doing with her story?
With a big sigh, she twirled back and forth in her seat and struggled to try and come up with a way to meet in the middle somewhere. Yes. There was apparently some kind of friction in in the King family. How could there not be friction? They’d just suffered a horrible kind of loss when the family itself wasn’t even totally certain that their father’s death had been an accident.
So what if Skye simply alluded to some friction and drama? What if she left it primarily in the readers’ mind to decide what they believed about the King family? Wouldn’t that be better anyway? No lies. No over-exaggerating. She would just report exactly what she had seen and go from there. That would at least make her feel as though she had stayed true to her principles.
The notion gave Skye new energy. She pulled out her tablet and plugged in her little flexible keyboard. Sometimes it was so odd to realize that the days of an actual computer were long gone. She could work anywhere. Which was actually kind of a thing. Why was she here when she could have been anywhere, like a little coffee shop where she could have positive feelings all around her?
At least inside the coffee shop there were dozens of people who were reading the real news from big name newspapers from all over the country so that they could be informed. Maybe that’s what Skye needed to surround herself with. That way she would be able to see the tiny cross section of Dallas who would still be interested in her desire to become a real journalist.
With that in mind, Skye packed up her tablet and her keyboard. She slung her black bag over her shoulder and marched out of her office. It was time to leave this place behind—at least in her mind. Maybe someday she would be able to change the Dallas Star back into the paper it had once been. Maybe. But until then she was going to have to deal with the fact that nobody in the news office seemed to care one bit about the real news.
“Where are you going?” Carolyn frowned and put her hands on her hips. “I thought you were writing the story.”
“Oh! I thought I would go surround myself with the people you want me to connect with.” That was a lie. But whatever. Skye gave her editor a careless shrug. “So I’m heading to the little coffee shop on the corner to finish my story.”
“Great idea!” Carolyn gushed. “I can’t wait to see the first draft! On my desk by noon. You understand?”
“Right. Noon.” At this moment there was no doubt in Skye’s mind that Mondays absolutely sucked. “I’ll see you around Carolyn. And thanks for chatting with me. It was a very enlightening conversation.”
Carolyn was now beaming as though she honestly thought that Skye had come over to the dark side. “Great! That’s wonderful to hear!”
Uh huh. Yeah. Right.
Chapter Five
“Do you see this? Do you have any idea how embarrassing this is to our family?”
Jason was barely awake. It was Tuesday morning. He was actually still hungover from the weekend, but he wasn’t about to mention that to his mother. Besides, a shifter couldn’t actually get drunk, per se. Jason had basically spent the remainder of Saturday, all of Sunday, and most of Monday in his wolf form running wild across the three hundred acres of hunting land that the King family kept for just that purpose. At least Mac King had kept it for that purpose. There was no telling what was going to happen to all of them now that Mother-May-I was in charge.
“Would you pay attention?” Tisha Olivares-King snarled at her youngest son. She had slammed a newspaper down on the table beside Jason and now she started smacking it with the palm of her hand as though she were giving it a spanking. “This is not what was supposed to come out of Saturday’s event.”
“I’m sorry.” Jason shook his head. “Did you just call my father’s funeral an event?”
His thoughts were still a bit muzzy. When he’d been too long in his wolf form he sometimes had trouble coming back to the reality of the human world. Life often made so much more sense as a wolf. It was most definitely a far more honest existence.
“Of course I called it an event. It was.” Tisha sniffed and tossed her blonde head. Her hair didn’t move, which was a bit weird. But then the hairspray must have been working really well at the god-awful hour of nine in the morning. “Your father’s funeral was the most well attended even of its kind in the last decade of Dallas history!” Tisha crowed the words as though they were something to be happy about. “You can’t possibly understand how damaging it is to our reputation when this is what comes of it.”
Jason tried to focus his bleary eyes on the words emblazoned at the top of the society page in the Dallas Star. He vaguely registered Skye Kincaid’s byline. Beyond that he was trying to put the words together. “King family in emotional turmoil,” Jason read. Then he shrugged and glared at his mother over the rim of his coffee cup. Lupita made a mean cup of coffee. There was no doubt about that. “Why are you pissed about the headline? Isn’t it exactly what you were going for? I mean I hate to say it, but you kept talking about wanting the whole world to think that you were some kind of grieving widow who should be pitied and yet respected for soldiering on.”
“Sounds about right,” Devon muttered as he entered the kitchen.
Devon went straight to the coffeemaker as well. Lupita was their housekeeper. Even Orion, who lived in the pool house out back, came inside every morning to get his coffee and breakfast because Lupita was the best cook around.
Tisha made a frustrated noise. “Read a little farther!” she demanded. “Are you completely dimwitted? Do you honestly think I would be this upset if that was all?”
“I don’t know,” Jason muttered irritably. “Sometimes I don’t think it would matter what I did, you would be pissed.”
Tisha smacked Jason on the back of his dark head. The sudden and instant bout of rage left him breathless. He spun in his chair and glared at his mother with enough heat
to physically back her away several steps.
She tried to cover up her discomfort by pointing at the paper. “Read. Now.”
Jason did just that. Blah. Blah. Blah. “The King family seems to be struggling with emotional instability as they attempt to pick up the pieces after the sudden and unexplained death of their patriarch Mr. Mac King. The family seems to be of two minds as to the truth of what happened to Mac. The man was killed in a hunting accident, but there is division amongst the sons as to the truth of that theory. At the funeral on Saturday Dallas attendees were treated to a display of inner turmoil as the youngest King brother stormed out of the funeral as well as leaving the gravesite on his motorcycle in a very public display of his feelings of upset.”
Jason had to give credit where it was due. Skye had done a pretty decent job of riding the line of truth and fiction with a sprinkling of conjecture. It was almost as though she were trying to drum up interest and give the Dallas readers what they wanted without making a total liar out of herself.
Devon snorted and took a long swig of his coffee. “Not bad actually. I mean, it’s kind of inflammatory, but she could have been a lot meaner about it.”
“Right?” Jason felt a strange sense of appreciation for the woman’s tact. “She actually seems like a pretty straight shooter. I like her.”
“You like her?” Tisha was gaping open mouthed at Jason as though he had just announced his intention to mate with Satan’s daughter. “You cannot be serious! You can’t like her. She’s a freaking reporter. You need to hunt her down and make her remember that if she prints something else like this she’s going to get her ass dragged to court for libel!”
“Actually, Mom, I’m pretty sure that’s not libel,” Devon pointed out.
Devon had dark blond hair and a tanned complexion that made it seem like he spent most of his time on the beach, which he did not. Devon almost never left the office. The guy was absolutely married to the company. He was the first one in and the last one out every single day. The brothers often joked that Devon should have been the one to take over and not Orion since he was obviously the more dedicated. But since the hours per week difference was probably only two or three, that was pretty much a joke more than anything else.
Tisha whirled on her second oldest son and pointed at him as though she were going to try and stab her pink painted nail right through his sternum. “You keep out of this! I don’t want to know what you think you know. I know what I know! I’m going to talk to Tex about this. He’ll know what to do.”
“Why?” Jason was the one to say the word, but he could see his brother Devon looking as well. Jason stood up from the table and looked down at his much shorter mother. “Why would you need Tex’s opinion on anything? Why does he matter? Why don’t you want to listen to us? We’re Mac’s sons. We are your sons. Remember?”
“And you do nothing but screw things up!” Tisha said fiercely. She got on her tiptoes and glared up into Jason’s face. “You’re a disaster!”
“I’m a disaster?” Jason snorted. He was getting tired of always being treated like the lesser King brother. “How do you figure that?”
“Look at you!” Tisha curled her lip in disdain. “You’re a lazy layabout that we all have to pay for. I bet you spent the entire weekend running around that stupid land pretending to be a wolf!”
“Mom, we are wolves,” Devon reminded her. “It’s not like Jason is dressing up in a costume.”
“It might as well be.” Tisha put her hands on his hips. “You boys need to put that nonsense behind you and forget about it. Your father was an absolute moron when it came to that stuff. There’s no good in it!”
Jason could not help it. He was so angry at his mother for that statement that he almost could not control himself. “Are you joking? You think it’s something we can just forget? Like we can wake up one morning and just pretend that we weren’t born that way? It would be like you waking up one morning and deciding that you were a dog.”
“Excuse me?” Tisha raised an eyebrow. “You must be joking.”
“No. I’m not!” Jason snarled. “You would wake up and just start licking your ass in front of everyone and never think anything of it because you were a dog.” Okay, so that was more than a little bit mean. And he was certainly poking at her because that’s not how it worked, but seriously? She just wanted them to forget?
“Licking my ass?” Tisha smacked Jason on the shoulder. With her second swing she hit him in the face. Her hands swatted him with a series of very girlie hits that really did nothing but piss him off. “You think that’s funny? You want to be a dog? Fine! Shift and I will put you back in that kennel like I did when you were a kid!”
“What are you talking about?” Orion’s voice echoed around the kitchen like a thunderclap. “What kennel?”
Jason grabbed his mother’s wrists and held her immobile in front of him. “What, Mother? Didn’t you dish out that punishment to them like you did to me? Or were you just sick of it by the time I came along?”
“You put him in a kennel?” Devon was staring at their mother as though he had never seen her before. “Why would you do that? The kid started shifting a lot earlier than the rest of us did, but that’s not exactly a good way to deal with it.”
“Are you kidding me?” Tisha yanked her hands out of Jason’s grasp and took a step back. She used her hands to fluff her hair and push it back out of her way as though she were afraid she had just messed it up with her outburst. “Do you know how impossible it is to explain to my garden friends when they come over and suddenly we have a puppy in the house? I put him in a kennel so that I could at least have a way to keep him out of harm’s way.”
Devon glanced over at Jason. “That’s ridiculous. Is she being serious?”
“Yes.” Jason shrugged. “She told me that she did that with the rest of you until you could control yourselves.” Jason didn’t want to talk about this anymore. He didn’t want to think about it. He just wanted to move on with his life and forget that he had ever had a mother. “Dad found out about it and then it stopped. He kept me with him whenever Mom had parties. It was pretty simple.”
Orion was staring at Jason so hard that Jason nearly felt as though he were going to go up in smoke or something. It was like being a bug under a microscope. Or a better description was a bug under a magnifying glass. At some point Devon and Orion were going to start in on Jason and asking him why he’d been such an ass that their mother had to punish him in such a way.
“I’ve had enough,” Jason muttered. He pushed his way past Devon toward the hallway. “I’m getting out of here. You don’t want me around—Mother. Fine. I won’t be around. But you can be sure I’ll be at the office. I’ll be there every single freaking day so that I’ll know what’s going on with good old Tex Johnson, the super helpful not quite controlling partner in our business.”
Jason turned and walked away. He did not want any other part of this. He didn’t want to think about the past or worry about the future. And maybe that was why he spent so much time as a wolf running their hunting property miles outside of Dallas and all the drama. Wolves had no past and no future. They lived completely in the moment. It was relaxing to exist in that pocket of peace and quiet.
“Hey.”
Jason had made it nearly all the way down the hall to his bedroom. He was intending to pack up some stuff and go—well, he hadn’t figured that out just yet. But he was going somewhere other than this house. Now apparently he was going to get a lecture from big brother before he was allowed to flee the scene.
“Jason, please?”
Jason stopped walking, but did not turn around. “What do you want?”
“I want to talk to you about what you said.” Orion paused, and Jason could picture his expression without even seeing it firsthand. “Did she really do that to you? Did she actually stick you in a dog kennel?”
“Do you honestly believe I would lie about something like that?” Insulting. Absolutely insulting. Yes. J
ason was always lying in an effort to make himself look like a victim. “And I thought it was something all of us shared so don’t make a big deal about it. I always considered it a parenting fail, you know?”
Orion made a low noise of disgust. His boots moved further down the thickly carpeted hallway toward Jason. Jason could hear their swish, swish sound on the carpet. “That’s not how it works. That’s not a parenting fail. That’s an epic betrayal of a son.”
Finally Jason couldn’t stand it. He spun on his heel and glared at Orion. “That woman is not a mother so what does it matter? And if you think she’s not glad that Dad is dead, you have your head up your ass.”
“She’s not glad,” Orion said drily. “She’s just selfish enough to care more about her survival than anything else.”
“Yeah, she’s a survivor,” Jason agreed. “I’m thinking cockroach. Or maybe jackal.”
Orion grunted. “You’re just angry at her for things that happened before.”
“You do realize that our mother”—Jason pointed emphatically back toward the kitchen—“wants us to completely leave our shifter heritage behind. You get that? Don’t you? Ask Devon. He was standing right there when she said it. She hates that part of us. She wants us to forget it.”
“Because it reminds her of Dad,” Orion said quickly.
Jason shook his head. “I’ll see you at the office tomorrow. That’s when we’re officially going back to work, right?”
“Yes. But you don’t need to be there if you don’t want to be,” Orion said quietly. He had that big brother, fake father expression on his face. “You can take as long as you need to.”
“Because you would rather I stay away. I get it. Mom probably told you to keep me away from the office.” Jason was sick and tired of everyone treating him like some kind of fragile mentally challenged individual. “I’m twenty-five years old, Orion. I’m perfectly capable of being in an office and doing work. I’ll be at the office tomorrow morning at eight o’clock sharp. There’s no need to worry about me. I’ll just be doing the same work I have been for the last several years. You know, the stuff that nobody else wants to do. But that’s just fine because the person who needs to watch his back is Tex Johnson. I’ll be on him like flies on shit.”
Billion Dollar Wolves: Boxset Bks 1-5 Page 4
