Vic drummed his fingers against the wheel and kept his gaze on the road. They were picking up a couple of Afótama VIPs from the airport and needed to be waiting when their planes landed so bogus representatives didn’t intercept them. The Afótama had way too many enemies, and those enemies were stunningly proficient at keeping their identities under wraps. If they weren’t, the wolves would have rooted them out months ago and neutralized the threat. They were usually better at that.
“Your mother thinks you need to go back to your own house.”
“To do what? Stare at that woman and try to force myself to say one kind thing to her?”
“She’s your wife, Vic. She hasn’t left. Doesn’t that tell you she wants to try to make it work?”
“No, it actually doesn’t. Where could she possibly go? No one else would have her.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Another pack might be hesitant to welcome her, given the dirty tracks her father has left all over the country. That doesn’t mean she can’t go off on her own, if she wanted to. If she needed a bit of money to hide out somewhere in a little apartment, me and your mother could probably come up with some.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because in spite of everything, I’m her alpha. I’m charged to take care of her, just like it’s my responsibility to take care of you.”
“I’m thirty-five years old. I think I’m doing okay.”
“Are you, though? Look, I knew we were going to have some issues the moment it was clear to me that you two were a match. But the thing is, you’re not gonna stop being a match. You don’t get another try unless she dies. I don’t imagine you wish death on her.”
“Of course I don’t. What kind of asshole do you think I am?”
“The same kind you’ve always been.”
Vic rolled his eyes and steered the truck onto the highway off-ramp.
“And you don’t really want to imagine her moving on to someone else, do you? She could always shack up with a human guy or some other kind of shifter. Your bite wouldn’t matter so much that way. They wouldn’t be able to discern your scent.”
Of course Vic didn’t want to imagine that. He’d been imagining nothing but that for the past month, thanks to his inner wolf’s constant the sky is falling agitation. The emotions were too confusing to sort out. There was a beautiful woman in the house he hadn’t used for much more than a closet in the past month—a woman who represented everything that had made the past two decades of his life a living hell. The logical part of his brain understood that not everything—or anything, really—was her fault. She was trying to fit in. She’d made friends with the other ladies, and they trusted her. That should have counted for something, because Vic trusted them. They were good women, all of them fit to be an alpha’s wife in their own ways. Sure, they had a collection of neuroses that could have broken even the best psychiatrist’s brain, but they were all so smart. Just by being there, they made the pack better.
“I honestly think the best thing you can do is sit down and have a meeting of the minds,” his father said. “Hash out all the tough stuff and figure out what you want from each other.”
“I have no idea what I want from her.”
“I imagine you’d want the same thing from her that you’d want from any other woman you’d consider settling down with. You weren’t one of the holdouts when we held the vote for me to do the call. Obviously, you had to have some idea in mind of what you wanted.”
“I wanted a partner. I wanted what you and Mom have.”
“You think it’s always been a walk in the park for us?”
“You make it look so easy. So yeah, I guess I assumed that.”
“We make it look easy because we let ourselves care about each other. You gotta get all the other shit out of the way so you can do that. Everything else will fall slowly into place afterward.”
“I can’t imagine you and Mom ever having problems.”
“Fuck, Vic, we went at it like feral cats, fighting over everything and nothing, just because we had to.”
“What do you mean?” Vic waited for the light to turn green and made a left turn onto the airport road.
“It’s natural. When a guy with an alpha’s level of power takes the right mate, that lady isn’t going to go to him meekly. She’s gonna give him hell, and he’s gonna give her hell, because maybe he feels a little threatened by her. A good alpha pair always manages to find the right level of give and take, and the lady always makes her man better.”
Vic just couldn’t see it. “Then why are there so many screwed up alphas? You can’t say the Madeira lot isn’t completely fucked up.”
“I keep telling you boys that there’s alpha, and then there’s capital-A Alpha. Just because you’re capital-A doesn’t mean you have the right stuff. We’re talking about nature, not titles. Nature has a funny way of giving us what we need if we know how to listen to it. So listen to it.”
“Listening is easy. Obeying isn’t.”
“I never said it was easy. Stop thinking shit’s supposed to be easy. That way you’ll be less shocked when it’s not.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Walking into his house for anything beyond grabbing a change of clothes felt like an intrusion to Vic. He hadn’t been there for more than five minutes at a time in a month, and had limited most of his visits to points when he was nearly certain Ashley wasn’t there. She’d taken a job somewhere. He didn’t even know where. He hadn’t asked—hadn’t really allowed himself to care.
He was curious, though, and wondered what a pampered wolf prima donna would do to earn money. He didn’t even know if she’d ever had a job before. He didn’t know anything about her at all, really, besides who was in her family tree and that her middle name was Raquel. That’s what their marriage certificate said, anyway.
He closed the screen door softly behind him, and took a moment to assess the state of his house. Although he’d been living there for about six months, he hadn’t done much in the way of personalization. During his brief visits, he hadn’t noticed that Ashley had done any either, but obviously, he hadn’t been paying attention. He’d been too busy trying to hurry in and out like a coward.
There was more furniture than there had been before. Little things he hadn’t seen because of his tunnel vision. Side tables. Bookshelves. She’d left a ring of upholstery fabric swatches on the table near the door. He picked it up and idly thumbed through them as he made his way farther into the house. She wasn’t in the kitchen, but some new canisters and a drying rack were. He paused to lift the lid on the largest of the containers and found it filled with sandwich cookies. He set down the swatches, grabbed a couple cookies, and moved farther into the house.
She wasn’t in the guest bedroom, but the curtains—apparently, I have curtains now—were thrown open and closet door ajar.
Curious, he poked his head in to find her luggage and some organizer baskets, which he quickly learned contained spare linens—apparently, I have spare linens now—and a few random AC adapters and surge protectors. Probably a better place for them than the kitchen counter.
She had to be home. The front door had been unlocked and her purse was dangling from the back of one of the kitchen chairs.
She wasn’t in the bathroom, but she’d left the light on. There was still some moisture in the air from a recent shower, and toiletries crowded the countertop. He’d never lived with a woman besides his mother, so the clutter intrigued him. He stepped into the small room and took stock of it. Moisturizer, de-frizzing serum—whatever that is. Toothpaste for sensitive teeth. Some kind of scissor-handled torture tongs. He picked them up and accidentally knocked the toothpaste over the counter’s edge. Bending to retrieve it from the trashcan, he froze with his hand extended and tried to make sense of the white cardboard box within.
“What’s that for?”
Stupid question. He knew what it was for. Living on the road for so many years hadn’t prevented him from seeing his fair share of tho
se “One line means no, two lines mean yes” commercials. He just couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that she would need the product.
Swallowing, he pulled the toothpaste tube from the top, set it back onto the countertop, and pulled the trashcan closer.
The telltale clicks of sliding coat hangers against the bar in the master bedroom’s walk-in closet gave him pause, but he had to assuage his burning curiosity. He lifted the box, and a couple of open foil packets fell out of the end and clattered against the rim of the metal trashcan.
Two of them?
“Hello?” Ashley called out.
Shit. He quickly plucked out the two discarded sticks and turned them over, window-side up. “Fuck.”
“Hello?” she repeated.
“Yeah. It’s Vic.” He stuffed the wands back into the bin and covered them with the box. “Fuck,” he repeated. Mine?
He hadn’t lived to age thirty-five without having a pretty good idea of what could happen when a man and woman had unprotected sex. But apparently, for the few minutes they’d been going at it, he’d forgotten that the rules of nature applied to him.
He rolled his eyes at himself, and pulled his body up to standing. Of course the kid is mine. If she’d already been pregnant, he would have known by her scent, and the chance of her having a “close encounter” with another man in the same time period was just too fucking small given the travel time involved in moving to Norseton.
“Well, that complicates things.” He started down the hall, and stopped halfway to the bedroom door. “Or maybe not.” Maybe it makes some things easier.
“Wow. A baby.” Statistically speaking, the pack was long overdue for someone to have one. Before the women had arrived, the youngest person in the pack had been Darius, who was nearly thirty-one. The fact that none of them had an accident up to that point—that any of them had fessed up about, anyway—was a testament to the consistent use of prophylaxis and staying the hell away from women who smelled like they were ready to be mamas.
He continued to the bedroom and paused in the doorway right as Ashley stepped out of the closet with her towel still tightened around her torso.
Spotting him, her hand went, seemingly reflexively, to the towel’s knot, and her cheeks took on a dark hue.
He put up his hands placatingly. “It’s all right. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I’ll be out of here in a minute. I need to get to work.”
“No hurry. I didn’t need anything.” He cringed. What he said wasn’t quite true, and he didn’t want to perpetuate the notion that she counted in that “anything.” His father was right—Vic had to try. He’d wanted a partner, and Ashley was the mate the goddess had approved for him. It was up to him to figure out how to make it work. He wasn’t the only injured party, and he had to keep reminding himself that she’d been fucked over, too.
Watching him wordlessly, she gripped the coat hanger a bit more tightly in her fist, and shifted her weight. The dressed she held was some kind of belted, sleeveless sheath. Not fancy, at least in his opinion, but he knew fuck-all about women’s clothing. It had probably been expensive.
He leaned against the doorframe and hooked his thumbs into his belt loops. “Where do you work?”
“Um.” She bobbed her eyebrows and sputtered her lips. “I guess I’m kind of a high-end babysitter.”
“You’re a nanny?”
She held the dress against her waist beneath her forearm and used her now-free hand to make a waffling gesture. “Not exactly. My job is to get Ótama up to speed. She doesn’t know anything about the world.”
That was probably as close to an understatement as a person could get. Ótama was the progenitor of the Afótama clan. For nearly a thousand years, she’d been confined to a Purgatory-like place, and recently, the old Viking gods saw fit to return her to the land of the living. She was a powerful witch and an efficient diplomat, but incredibly naive. It wasn’t her naïveté that had killed her the first time she’d been alive, though.
Childbirth had done that.
And that reminded him… Shit. Can Ashley even carry a kid? Moon shifter birth rates were low in comparison to Vic’s ilk. When a mother shifted, the fetus got tangled up.
Does she know that?
She furrowed her forehead, probably growing annoyed at his inability to hold up his end of the conversation.
He cleared his throat. “Uh, that’s a pretty sweet gig.”
Ashley shrugged and backed into the closet. She turned the light on and closed the door almost all the way.
Dammit. Vic blew some air through his lips and let them flap. He didn’t know how to make peace with her. With the guys in the pack, it was easy. They argued and fought just like any close group of friends who every now and then annoyed the ever loving shit out of each other. In the end, they always figured out ways to shake off the frustration, whether it meant having a scuffle in their wolf forms, or some passive aggressive shit like “forgetting” to relieve someone of his guard duty.
“I think Lora tapped me for the job because I’m qualified to carry a firearm,” Ashley said. The rustling noises from the closet were probably her slipping into that fitted dress. His mind wandered to that place of curiosity—of imagination. He wondered if her body looked exactly the same as it had a month ago. How pregnant is she? He was pretty good at math, but his biology knowledge could probably use a refresher. “Or was, rather,” she added. She stepped out of the closet wearing the knee-skimming dress and tightened the belt around her trim midsection.
Nothing to see there.
“I need to get credentialed for New Mexico. Probably won’t be a problem.”
Vic pushed up both eyebrows.
“What?”
“I dunno. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you know how to manage a handgun.”
“You mean, given who my father is, right?” She slowly, calmly wadded her wet towel into a bundle and kept her gaze locked on him.
He pushed a hand through his uncombed hair and grunted.
“It was a necessary evil. You can’t be a woman my age who can’t shapeshift unless you’ve got some other way to protect yourself. My father wasn’t always going to be around to protect me.”
“If what he did even qualifies as protecting.”
“Fine. I’ll let you have that one, because you’re right.” She tossed the towel into the corner hamper and stepped into a pair of sandals.
“Look, I didn’t come over here to insult you.”
“But you can’t hold your tongue, right?” Since she was bent at the waist, fastening the strap of her shoe, her voice came out in the muffle.
He pushed away from the doorframe and slowly closed the distance between them.
She peered at him out of the corners of her eyes as he approached.
He leaned his butt against the dresser’s edge and crossed his arms over his chest. Then he changed his mind and pressed his hands to the dresser. Confrontational body language wouldn’t help his cause, whatever that was. He still wasn’t sure what his cause was. It was an amorphous thing swirling in his head, bits and pieces that didn’t quite congeal, but that were all important individually.
He needed to connect with his mate—that was for certain. The wolf part of him was becoming increasingly anxious about the separation. All of the members of the pack were charged with doing all they could to ensure the health and wellbeing of the group, and a big part of that was keeping their exchanges positive and respectful. He didn’t know who had started the lie that a bunch of could-be-alphas couldn’t get along in the same group, but it was pervasive. Most big packs sought to eliminate their strong young men as soon as they could because the leadership felt threatened by them. The higher-ups were concerned with job security and lining their pockets, and not doing what was right.
Every man in the Norseton pack had been sent away from his birthpack in one way or another because of that fear, but they’d proven they could get along—and that a pack was only as stro
ng as the weakest wolf in it. Strong was good, and there was room for them all.
That included Ashley.
He didn’t know how to express that. She wasn’t Anton or Colt, so he couldn’t just say, Are we cool, man? and expect that she’d shrug off the hurt. And he knew he’d hurt her.
She straightened up and fixed her gaze on him. She said nothing, but her expression was easy enough to read: Well?
He turned his hands over. “Look, do you want to get dinner or something?”
She stood, brushed the wrinkles out of her dress, and gave him another sideways glance. “Dinner?”
“Yeah, something in Norseton. Pretty sure you don’t want me to cook.”
She entwined her fingers in front of her belly, drawing his gaze down to it. Distracting him with his own questions and worries. “I don’t think I’m going to have time today.”
He cringed and righted his stare. Her cheeks glowed a soft pink he was pretty sure he had put there. With her scent being muddled due to her changing hormones, guessing her mood would take some practice. Not that he’d had much practice at it before she was pregnant. It might have been easier if he had. “Tomorrow, then?”
She gave her head a slow shake and twirled her thumbs. “Uh—tomorrow isn’t looking so great, either. Still playing catch-up for the two evenings last week I lost to battling the full moon.”
Battling. Right. Pregnancy and moon shifting were incompatible. He didn’t want to let on yet that he knew why she hadn’t shifted, though. “Just tell me when.”
She shrugged and strode to the door. “Maybe sometime next week.”
“Seriously?”
She gave no response.
The soft pads of her sandals slapped against the wood floor as she walked farther and farther away. Past the bathroom, even, and he stood there like a dumbass.
By the time he got his feet in motion, she was at the front door and pulling her purse onto her shoulder.
No words came out as he leaned against the counter. He watched her leave, not certain what else he could do.
He was a wolf dancing on eggshells, and hated the feeling—like no matter what he did, he’d break something.
Scion (Norseton Wolves Book 4) Page 6
