“Whatever gets your rocks off,” she said and squeezed his cock tightly inside her. “Go on, Vic. You wanna act like a porn star, go on and do it.”
“You’re asking for trouble.”
“You assume that anything you can do to me would be a surprise. Think again. I’m not a sheltered as you seem to think. Just because you’re my first and only mate doesn’t mean I haven’t had plenty of practice. You couldn’t even scandalize me by shoving it into the wrong hole. Been there—” One more squeeze just to taunt him, and it set off another small orgasm for her that had her squirming beneath him and biting her lip. “Done that.”
“You—fuck!” He twitched inside her and pinned her very flat, holding her very still until his cock stopped moving.
Score. She smiled ruefully as he pulled out of her until he gave her ass a hard swat.
“Do you ever stop talking shit?”
“Do you ever stop being a shit?” Growling, she pushed up onto her hands and knees and crawled toward her underwear. Risking a glance over her shoulder, she found Vince tucking himself back into his boxers. Still hard. Of course he would be, though. She’d never known a wolf like him who wasn’t ready to go again within a few moments. All that testosterone was good for something.
Well, not good for her at the moment. Contrary to what had come out of her mouth, she didn’t think she could handle another round just yet. The adrenaline was crashing and her body was starting to report in to her brain with all the aches and sensations that had been stifled beneath the pleasure. Even with her superior werewolf healing, her hips would probably be aching for days.
“You could probably never go home now, even if you wanted to.” He pulled open the truck door and leaned into the crew cab. After some rustling, he drew out a raggedy towel of questionable cleanliness tossed it to her.
She cringed, but since beggars couldn’t be choosers, she used it to clean her sticky thighs the best she could before slipping her panties on. “Why can’t I go home?”
“You reek of Carbone now. You’ve got one for a mate and one for an alpha. That’s not gonna sit well with your folks back east.”
“Why not? Enough with the insinuations. Out with it, already. Obviously you know something I don’t.”
He stood in front of her with his arms crossed over his chest and drummed his fingertips against his biceps as he stared at the sky. “If you still had a phone, I’d tell you to call your daddy and ask him why your pack shrank so much when you were a little girl. Hell, I’d lend you my phone so you could do it, but I don’t want my number traced. I know your daddy is good at that. So—hmm. How about this?” His pale brown gaze fell to her face.
She would have bet her heirloom gold cross that at that moment that he had a bit of the devil in him. She wasn’t so afraid of the devil himself, but of the truths he told.
“Why don’t you ask one of the women in the pack if you can borrow her phone? Maybe Stephanie or Lisa. Ask your daddy what happened, and then tell him who your new mate is. That is, if you haven’t talked to him already.”
“Why, so he can rescue me?” The suspense was killing her. What does my father know? No, what does Vic know? Obviously, too much. Does that mean Alpha knows it, too?
Frustrated, she twisted the end of her ponytail into a knot she’d probably have to cut out later.
“He’s not gonna want you back, unless he’s become a hypocrite in addition to being a cheat. Say whatever you want to him, but I’m gonna listen in on the call. I would strongly suggest you not clue Daddy Dearest in on your location, because if you do, you’ll regret it.”
“Because you’ll hurt me.”
He furrowed his brow and took a step away from her. “I may dislike who you are, but I don’t hurt women unless they try to hurt me first, and mortally. You are my mate. There may be absolutely no affection between us at the moment, but I will protect you to the best of my ability, and make sure you’re provided for. I can’t make any promises beyond that, but I won’t hurt you.”
“You won’t love me, is what you’re saying.”
She didn’t know where the words had come from. Love seemed a petty concern at the moment. Maybe it was her inner wolf speaking through her human half, or maybe it was just her sex-addled brain making her spew gibberish. Either way, she did want to know the answer.
He was quiet. His expression gave nothing away, and his body language remained closed off. Cold as ice.
“Listen, the other mates might be at home now. You should be able to catch one.”
Now it was her turn to be silent. She didn’t think any of the ladies would have a problem loaning her a phone. They were probably going to ask her why she needed it, but that wasn’t a big deal. Ashley had always been able to come up with a good lie in a pinch. The thing that scared her more was the possibility that Vic’s taunts and jeers were founded in something other than just outright meanness. There might have been some truth in them. She’d never known the promise of truth to be such a frightening thing.
Holding her head up high, she walked around to the other side of the truck and got in. She’d done nothing wrong. She wasn’t going to start acting like she had.
___
Ashley thanked Stephanie for the use of her phone, and the other woman waved her off. The redhead backed down the path toward Darius’s house with heavy shopping bags dangling from her forearms. “Just hold onto it until I see you again. No need to bring it back in a hurry.”
Ashley nodded and glanced toward Vic’s house.
He waited in the doorway with arms folded over his chest. She didn’t want to be closed into that house with him again, so she headed for the bench she’d sat on during the mate-matching ordeal.
She pulled in a long breath as she dialed her parents’ home phone number, and then froze before putting in the last digit.
Maybe calling Daddy isn’t a good idea.
Her father would be suspicious if she called out of the blue and started asking questions. Or perhaps, he might have been expecting it and already had answers queued up and ready for her. That would be bad. She would learn exactly what kind of liar he was, and confirm that what Vic was saying was the truth. The really fucked up part was that she wasn’t quite sure who’d she prefer to be the liar—her father or her mate. Either way, she didn’t expect to have a smile on her face when all was said and done. She was screwed.
“Fuck.” She cleared the digits and put in her mother’s number instead. Her mother answered on the third ring.
“Hi, who’s this?”
“Ma, it’s Ashley.” She looked over her shoulder and found Vic headed up the path, likely to supervise her call. Just like he said he would.
“Ash? Why’d you skip out on us like that? That’s some crazy stuff you did. You’ve got your father all in a panic.”
“I bet,” Ashley said dryly.
“When are you coming home? Did you get bitten, or what?”
Ashley pinched the bridge of her nose. “Yeah, I got bitten. I stink of my mate, but that’s not important right now. I need you to tell me the truth about something.”
“Getting a bite’s not important? One that you hightailed it out of here without a word to get? Come on, little girl. Really, Ashley, what’s wrong? You need your dad to come get you? Where are you?”
“Leave Daddy wherever he is for now. I’m okay. It’s just a simple question or two.”
“Is it about what happens after a woman gets her bite? Honey, that’s normal. It’ll pass. You won’t be so—well, amorous forever.”
Ashley rolled her eyes. She certainly hoped not. Being as horny as a teenager with her only outlet for relief a mate who looked as though he could set her on fire with his gaze wasn’t her idea of a good time, and even if Vic was an epic dickhead, she wasn’t a cheater. She’d just have to suffer—and perhaps buy a vibrator and lots of rechargeable D batteries.
“What’s he like, this guy? Better than you would have gotten here? I don’t think so. None are better
than here.”
False.
Vic plopped onto the bench next to her and leaned his forearms onto his knees, watching Ashley through the corners of his eyes. She was grateful he didn’t look her straight on. He was too intense—hard to look at for too long without her questioning her worth. And she did question it.
Might as well come out with it. She pulled in a bracing breath and fiddled with the wrinkled fabric of her dress. “You remember when I was around—gods, I don’t know—eight or nine, maybe? A bunch of folks left the pack in a couple of days. I remember the gatherings were smaller for a long while. Why was that?”
Her mother always had a response, and usually a quick one. For once, she was silent, and that scared Ashley. If it weren’t for the ubiquitous classic rock her mother always kept playing on the radio in the background, Ashley would have thought the connection had dropped.
“Ma?”
“Hey, maybe you should talk to your father about that. Why are you bringing that up now? Where are you?”
“Oh, gods. Why can’t you just answer the question? It’s simple enough, right?”
Ma groaned. “Look, sometimes, packs just need to be culled.”
“I understand that. Packs send boys away all the time, but we lost a lot of folks at once—adults, too.”
“They left on their own.”
“Really?”
Vic shook his head and scoffed. He whispered, “If she believes that, she’s deluded.”
Of course he could hear her. He could probably hear a pin drop on the moon. Ashley was grateful for it, though. He might learn that she really had no clue about most of the things going on around her, and that she hadn’t lied about not telling her parents where she was.
“Why are you asking? It was so long ago. Don’t you have more important things to worry about? Tell me about your mate. What’s he like?”
“Actually, he’s the one who told me to call. I think he’s under the impression you might know who he is.”
Silence again. Ashley counted off seconds in her head. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen.
“Well, who is he?”
Ashley pressed the phone between her ear and shoulder and pinched off a cuticle that was peeling back toward the painful danger zone. “Last name is Carbone.” She cut her gaze to Vic, who raised an eyebrow. “That name familiar?”
“God damn it, Ashley. Somehow I always knew you were gonna get us in trouble.”
“Us?” Ashley squeezed her bleeding digit between her thumb and forefinger and pulled the phone back from her ear.
Vic rolled his hand in a Go on, keep talking gesture.
If only I knew what to say.
He made the gesture again.
She closed her eyes and groaned. “I take it you don’t like the sound of that name.”
“Let me get your father. Just—”
“No. Tell me now what you need to tell me, or I swear to any god who’ll hear the oath that you will never hear from me again. You’ll never know if you end up with one of those granddaughters none of my brothers have managed to give you so far. You’ll be totally in the dark, especially since all the bugs you planted in my shit don’t work.”
“It wasn’t me, Ashley. It was your father!”
“So you admit it? You bugged me and my bags, and had my mate distrustful of me before I could even say fifty words in my own defense? Fuck, Ma. I haven’t even been here a full day yet, and he hates me. I mean, literally, hates me. He hated me from the moment my name popped up on the respondent list, and that’s not fair for me. You tell me why, and now. What happened? And tell me everywhere you’ve got tracking devices attached to my belongings, and I mean everywhere.”
“As far as I know there were just the three. One in your earrings, one stuck to the bottom of that lipstick your father replaced for you two weeks ago, and one in your phone.”
Vic nodded. “That’s all I found.”
Ashley didn’t buy for a minute there were only three. She couldn’t trust a damned thing that came out of the woman’s mouth. How could she? Ashley had no way of knowing just how many lies she’d been fed during her life. Everything she knew was probably a lie. “Tell me the rest. What happened?”
“It was a treaty issue. It’d been made by the alpha from a bunch of generations ago when we first started colonizing this place. He absorbed the Eurasian wolves into his pack in exchange for their protection. When shifted, they’re so much scarier than the rest of us. You’ve seen ’em by now, I’m sure.”
Ashley looked to Vic. He shrugged.
Ashley couldn’t remember what he was like as a wolf. She couldn’t remember shit from when she’d shifted.
“The treaty had been in place for a long time, and it got renegotiated every ten years or so. At the time of our little drama, Adam Carbone was the contact.”
“He wouldn’t negotiate?”
“He would, but he wanted your father to change some things. Your father didn’t like it.”
“What kind of things?”
“It was—oh, I don’t know, Ashley. Ask your father.”
“No, I’m asking you. You know what it was, so tell me what was bad enough that they made them leave with all those fuckin’ kids. Go on. I’m dead curious.” Her foot tapped out an impatient rhythm on the stone walkway, and her back molars ground. She just knew shit was going to get worse and worse, and that Vic was going to be justified in his revulsion of her. She could feel it in her bones, just like every time she knew when someone was going to win a huge Powerball payout.
“I think it was about dues or something.”
“Dues? You’re saying you expelled pack members because they wouldn’t pay dues?”
“It wasn’t that they weren’t paying them, but—jeez, I dunno.”
“Don’t pull that on me, Ma. Don’t do that submissive alpha’s wife shit. Don’t act like you don’t know what’s happening in your own household and in your own pack. You kept me in the dark well enough that you certainly had to know what it was I needed to be shielded from, so fuckin’ tell me now.”
“All right. Gods, the mouth on ya. Fine. Adam didn’t like what the money was being spent on, and he and your dad had it out.”
“They fought?”
“Yes.”
“And Adam lost?” It just didn’t seem possible. Having been in touching distance of both her father and her new alpha, Ashley was convinced of which of them had more power, and it wasn’t her father. It practically poured off of Adam and took her breath away. Power didn’t always mean that a wolf would win a fight—especially if their opponent played dirty—but the odds were stacked very high in Adam’s favor.
“No,” Ma said. “He didn’t lose.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It was a mess, that’s all I can say. Adam didn’t want the pack, so the only reason behind the ass-kicking was to prove a point.”
“Which was, what? That Daddy was the weaker wolf?”
“Yeah. Basically. And that got people questioning things, and all sorts of stuff came to light.”
“I didn’t know any of this.”
“Your father has good enforcers. They made it so no one can even remember what the truth was, after a while. But, in the end, Adam left because the enforcers made him. They ganged up on him.”
“You mean, challenged him?”
“No. Threatened to beat him down if he didn’t go and take his kind with him.”
“Daddy has five enforcers. That wouldn’t have been a fair fight.”
“I never said it was fair, Ashley.”
“Shit.” Ashley pressed the meat of her palm to her eyes and rubbed. Vic had been right. He was probably right about everything. “What am I supposed to do now, Ma?”
“I don’t know what to tell you. But are you all right? You feel safe?”
“Oh, I don’t know. What does safe feel like? I always thought I had a good idea about that, but that was just smoke and mirrors, wasn’t it? All an illusion you set u
p to shield me from the truth and from the way the outside world truly operates. You screwed me, Ma. You and Daddy. Half the packs in the country probably wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me.”
“Sounds about right,” Vic muttered.
She balled her hand into a fist and let her nails dig into her flesh. The sharp pain took the edge off her anger, and in its place came a rush of fear. In two days, everything she’d thought she’d known about herself had turned out to be lies. She wasn’t sure who she was, or even what she was supposed to do to find out.
“Don’t tell Daddy I called, okay? Just—don’t even try to get in touch. Delete this number from your phone and pretend I never called.”
Ashley disconnected the call, cutting short her mother’s rebuttal in the process, and added her parents’ numbers to Stephanie’s blocked callers list.
She needed to say something to Vic. That was the obvious next order of business. Meeting his gaze shouldn’t have been so hard, though. She’d never been afraid to look people in the eye and tell them what they needed to be told, but she stared at the phone in her hands, and crossed, then uncrossed her ankles again and again.
She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t think there was anything she could say that would make a difference.
“I’ve got stuff to do. See ya.” Vic stood, and by the time she could muster up enough courage to look up, he was rounding the corner of his house. A moment later, his truck’s engine roared to life, and gravel churning as he backed onto the street.
And still, she didn’t move. She had no rudder, no purpose, and a mate who despised her.
She couldn’t fix that. It used to be that she relied on her father to fix things for her.
That didn’t seem to be such a good option anymore.
CHAPTER SEVEN
There were only a few people Vic allowed to give him unsolicited advice, and at the moment, he didn’t particularly want to hear what any of them had to say. Still, he clenched his jaw, tightened his fingers around the steering wheel, and said nothing in retort as his father talked at him.
“A month’s too long,” his father said.
Scion (Norseton Wolves Book 4) Page 5
