by J. K Harper
“Not even sure if the call is connecting,” she said in an undertone, perhaps not intending for him to hear at all. “I can’t hear anything. No clicks, nothing.”
“Reception is bad way out here, even when the weather is optimal. I use the landline.”
Cringing, she glanced at him and peeled the phone away from her ear. “Oh. I forgot they were a thing.”
“I imagine a city girl like you wouldn’t have much use for old-fashioned contraptions like landlines.”
She curled her lip and held her phone in front of her face. “I’m not so city. The Jersey pack was only an hour away from New York City, but I never set foot into it. We were very isolated. Some folks with special privileges got to explore. I wasn’t one of them. I didn’t even have a cell phone until I left. I didn’t rate high enough to have one.”
“That’s bullshit. How’d you get in touch with folks?”
She slid her thumb across the phone screen and dialed again. “No one wanted to call me, Grant. I didn’t have anyone except my mother, and we lived together.”
He pulled the ottoman out from in front of the armchair and straddled it. “What was that like?”
“What? Not going anywhere?”
“All of it. Being so stifled.
“I’m sure your sister could tell you.”
He cringed. She was right, of course.
Women in Wolverton had always been mostly free to move around, but they couldn’t go very far without driver’s licenses and cars. Most didn’t have them because their husbands held on to their vital records.
He rubbed his chin, thinking.
Need to do something about that. They need their own stuff.
He made a mental note to look into that after the holidays. The ladies needed to feel like they could leave if they needed to, and from what his sisters had told him, plenty wanted to go. He wasn’t going to stop them. Packs made of unwilling members were discontented packs. That hadn’t mattered to Mitch. Like most alphas, he’d only worried about the happiness of the men. The women couldn’t run if they had no resources, and those were always restricted. Wolf culture was a garbage can, plain and simple. Grant didn’t care how small a pack he ended up with by the time all was said and done, but he wasn’t going to pour more poison into the works.
“Yeah,” he said. “Leo could tell me. I’m curious about your old pack, though. I know about Wolverton and Norseton. Why were things so bad in Jersey?”
“It wasn’t so bad for everyone, I guess. I think my mother and I were a little more repressed than most. Maybe things seemed worse than they really were.”
“Why would you and your mother get singled out?”
“We were easiest to push around. My father got what he wanted out of my mother, and then moved on when I was three. Without a man in the house, we were vulnerable, and had to depend on whoever would help us out. I started working very early to help my mother pay her pack dues.”
“How young?”
“Twelve. Used to babysit—if you can call it that if you’re doing it nine hours per day.”
He whistled low, and she finally met his gaze.
She looked so tired. He wanted to fold her onto her lap and rock her like he did Pete, but figured that would be entirely inappropriate behavior if he hadn’t bought the lady dinner and drinks first.
He jammed his hands into his pockets and gave himself a mental pat on the back.
“People paid me off-the-books,” Angel said. “As afraid as they were of the alpha, they didn’t rat me out about the money.”
“Did they at least pay you minimum wage?”
Her smile was wan. She didn’t need to answer.
“Shit, woman”
“It was all they had, I guess. Everyone had to pay the dues, so there wasn’t a lot of money left over for expenses.”
“I just realized, in all these months, I haven’t assessed dues. I probably should.”
“If you think that’s best.”
“No, I don’t think it’s best, but the thing about Wolverton is that the alpha is also the de facto mayor. Dues here double as property tax, and the town needs a little money for basic services.”
“Everyone in Wolverton is a wolf?”
“Yep. Wolf, or what Leo likes to call ‘wolf adjacent.’ You know, folks who know about us but aren’t shifters. Human mates and whatnot, not that there are so many of those.” He added in clenched teeth, “Most don’t want to stick around.”
“Hmm.” Angel pressed her lips tightly together again, and tucked her phone into her shirt pocket.
He wanted her to feel like she could ask him some questions, too, but he wouldn’t poke her. She might have felt, to the wolf in him, like his everything, but he was just a reluctant alpha who sometimes responded to the name “Chunk,” and she didn’t owe him shit.
“Giving up on calling?” That seemed a benign enough question, in his opinion.
“For now. I guess she’ll have to keep an eye on the sky and just run out here if she thinks it looks too bad.”
“Weather can turn bad fast around here.”
“You think I should try her from the landline?”
“Eh.” He thought she should just hand him her phone for safekeeping, and then walk her sweet ass into the living room to take a load off. He’d make the snow his concern…by not thinking about it at all.
But that was the horny wolf in him talking, and not his better judgment.
Actually, his human judgment wasn’t doing much better than the wolf at the moment. The man part of him was coming around pretty fucking fast to the idea of having a pretty little mate. If no one else wanted to take care of her, he sure would.
“If you decide you want to call”—he pointed toward the kitchen—“it’s on the wall beside the fire extinguisher.”
“It’s not rotary, is it?” she asked with a quiet chuckle as she walked and swayed, and for the second time in a day, Grant must have lost consciousness or gotten hypnotized by her hips or something, because the next thing he knew, he was staring at the empty kitchen doorway and Angel was well into her conversation.
On a delay that was too damned long, he said, “Ha ha,” then rolled his eyes at himself.
“If it looks dangerous, don’t try to drive,” she said into the phone. “Even this morning when there was only a little snow on the ground, I was having a hard time telling the road from the ditches.”
Grant ambled into the kitchen and leaned against the counter. He was being brazen and probably a lot rude, but he didn’t care. He would have heard her just as well from the living room. Being a wolf, she had to know that.
“No. Just give me a call in an hour and let me know the plan. Maybe Grant could drive me halfway, or something. Okay. Bye.” She hung up, and turned slowly toward him.
“Well?” he asked.
She twirled some of the wiry curls in her ponytail and brought her gaze up to him.
Don’t be shy, honey.
She grimaced. “They’re going to try to hold out a little while. Leo said your mother was waiting for one of your sisters to swing by, and your mother didn’t want Leo to leave before then.”
“Ah. Well, just let me know. Feel free to make yourself at home in the meantime, such that it is.”
She narrowed her eyes a little and canted her head. “You really don’t like it?”
“The house?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “I guess if Pete hadn’t been around, I would have liked it a little more. It just doesn’t seem like it’s enough.”
“You’ve got a good roof and insulation, and it’s warm in here.”
“But every time thunder rumbles anywhere within twenty miles of here, the house shakes.”
“But it’s enough.”
He turned his hands over in acquiescence. He hadn’t meant to sound ungracious. “Yeah, I guess so. It’s enough. That may be the first time I’ve ever heard that phrase come through a woman’s lips.”
“I d
on’t believe that.” Angel grabbed the container of powdered formula either she or Ma had left on the counter and tucked it back into its cupboard. Then she picked up the dishrag and started rubbing at some stain on the counter that he knew wouldn’t ever come up. It was a cigarette burn left behind by the last cowboy who’d hunkered down in the house—a ranch hand who’d since moved on to greener pastures.
“Hey.” He put his had over hers and stopped her from scrubbing. “You don’t have to clean my house.”
She flinched, and drew away. “Sorry. I’m not usually so skittish.”
Before he could get a word out to contest what was obviously a lie, she amended, “Okay, maybe I am. But, just around some people.”
“Why me?”
A soft titter fell from her mouth—an incredulous laugh. She folded the wet rag into thirds and draped it over the faucet. “Do you…want me to call Tess for you?”
“What? No, I want you to answer my question.”
“Maybe I don’t have a good answer.”
“So, just give me the truthful one. I’m sure you can manage that. I know wolves have to be masterful liars just to survive a thing as minor as a trip to the grocery store.”
Canting her head, she peered at him out of the side of her dark gaze.
So pretty.
But so damned skittish. He had to get her comfortable, and soon. He didn’t like ladies being afraid of him. After all, he was just Grant.
“Would you recognize the truth if you heard it?” she asked with only the slightest note of incredulity.
“I’d like to think so. Leo’s never lied to me, best I can tell. Neither has Ma. The rest of the folks gave me good practice in discerning what’s what. The biggest liar in town was Leo’s ex.”
That factoid made her cringe. Leo probably wouldn’t have wanted the pity, though. “Okay, well—your energy is…” Her gaze went to the ceiling and her hands to her belly, where she kneaded the lower edges of her cardigan.
“It’s what?”
“I don’t know. Instinct tells me to move away. That doesn’t have anything to do with you personally, just the way the wolf energy hits me.”
“That’s an excuse I haven’t heard before.”
“You probably haven’t encountered an omega wolf before.”
“Seriously? Omega?”
The expression he wore must have been telling, because she squeezed her eyes shut tight and said in a whisper, “Of course you haven’t.”
“Maybe I don’t believe they really exist. I mean, there’s all kinds of lore about them and what they mean to wolfpacks.”
“If it’s good lore, then it’s not true,” she said. “We’re not special. We don’t do neat tricks. Just like natural wolves, we’re just bottom-of-the-barrel pack members who’ll never amount to anything. We’re not leaders. We’re never very intimidating. Most of us don’t even survive into adulthood.”
“You look healthy enough to me, woman.”
Her eyes were a little wild-looking when she opened them, and that likely had something to do with the unintentionally lascivious timbre of his voice. It was almost wolfish, and for a very good reason. The beast inside Grant wanted to be let out to play, and his new favorite toy was standing three feet away.
Rein it in, dog.
He dragged his hand across his mouth and counted five breaths before speaking. “You say you’re an omega, but you’ll have to pardon me because I’m just not used to the concept.”
“Okay. Consider this. If werewolves strictly adhered to survival of the fittest, I’d be in deep trouble. I’d be the last up to the food trough. I’d be the weakling who gets starved out because I wouldn’t be aggressive enough to take what I needed. I’d let everyone else go ahead, and I’d convince myself that’s simply the way of things.” She shrugged, as if to accept that she had to accept things that way.
Not with him, she wouldn’t.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “What good is that role in a wolfpack?”
“No good at all, but you should always know who the most expendable in your group is.”
“Yeah, but only so you can shore them up and make them stronger. I don’t like the idea of letting anyone go when they can’t help being what they are.”
“You make a very strange alpha, Grant.”
“That’s ’cause I wasn’t born one.”
“Weren’t you, though?”
“I don’t get what you mean. You sound like I told you a lie, but I didn’t.”
“Never mind.” She fiddled with the ragged threads at the end of the rag and then took a deep breath. “The offer still stands if you’d like me to call Tess.”
He crossed his arms, and stared at her. In his opinion, they hadn’t quite finished talking about the last thing. He didn’t appreciate her skipping ahead to the next one.
She shifted her weight and shoved her hands into her pockets. “I should call her, anyway, and let her know I’m okay. She worries about us.”
“Worries you won’t come back?”
“No, she just worries in general. Worrying is her job, I guess. I think that’s ninety percent of her job description.”
“Sounds stressful.”
“She has lots of people around her who make sure she doesn’t get in over her head. When she interviewed me for the nanny job, the only question I had for her was why she’d waited so long to fill it.”
“She said she didn’t need one?”
“Yeah. She has a hard time relinquishing responsibilities once she takes them on, and the people who work for her have to know how to navigate that. I try not to make her feel like I’m doing something she wasn’t equipped to do, but that I’m just helping her extend herself and her chieftains.”
“Oh, that’s right. She’s got two of ’em. Leo told me.” And he’d quickly brushed the fact from his mind after deciding that if he couldn’t stomach having one mate, then Queen Tess must have been completely unhinged to have two at once.
“I think that made her feel even more guilty,” Angel said softly. “Between the three of them, she figured they’d have childcare covered, but the nature of their jobs means they can all be called away from Norseton unexpectedly. I’m there to add stability in the little way I can.”
He scoffed. “Little way. Right. Don’t talk down what you do for a living. Taking care of kids is no easy feat. If it weren’t for my mother, I would have lost my mind within two or three days of Pete arriving here.”
“I really doubt that.”
He chucked her chin, because she wouldn’t look at him.
She still didn’t look at him, but did bless him with the quickest, prettiest grin—that she promptly hid by turning her back.
Damn, woman.
“I mean it,” he said, wringing his hands so he’d keep them to himself. “Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been around a lot of kids. My parents had a busload of them, and of course, most of them have kids now, too. I just never had the right sort of instincts to know what to do, and when. Maybe I’m not empathic enough.”
“Or maybe you just needed a little hands-on practice.”
“Maybe so. The males here aren’t expected to pitch in with the kids, but I didn’t have a choice. I hope Pete grows up believing he doesn’t have a choice, either. That’s why wolves are so fucked up, isn’t it? Because too many opt out of doing the hard jobs.”
“I’m not afraid of hard work.”
He turned her around, slowly, and waited for her to look at him.
He waited a long damn time, but she did it, and she held the gaze.
Good.
“You’re not afraid to work,” he said, “but are you afraid of me? From where I’m standing, that doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
Chapter 4
Angel ran her thumbs along the stitches on her knit cardigan’s slit pockets and stared down at Grant’s chest. She didn’t want to be afraid of him. She wanted to brazenly flirt and giggle like other women did, but she’d been conditioned her
entire life to cower. He had no idea how hard it was just for her to stand that close to him. She could hardly even take a deep breath.
He laid his hands atop her shoulders, and when her body’s immediate response wasn’t to flinch, she smiled at herself.
“Can you make a pot of coffee?” he asked. “I’m gonna hop into the shower. I probably smell like what the cows step in.”
“You smell amazing.”
Ugh.
Ducking out from his grip, she reached for the coffeemaker’s plug.
Just don’t talk.
“Leo probably would have agreed with my assessment. Are you telling me I’ve been wrong all this time, and that my baby sister is a liar after all?”
He’d asked her a direct question. She couldn’t exactly ignore him without seeming rude. In spite of what she was, she believed manners mattered.
She groaned inwardly and dropped a filter into the coffee grounds’ basket. “No. I’m not calling her a liar.”
“Well, come on, then.” He raised her chin again, because of course he wanted to be looked at, and he should have been. His face somehow managed to be rugged and refined at the same time—like an actor who only played a cowboy on TV. She liked looking at him a little too much, and getting caught staring usually got lesser wolves like her into trouble.
“Come on, Angel,” he drawled. “Give me a few more words. I feel like you always leave stuff half-said. I guess that’s what you’re used to, but you don’t have to do that around me. I don’t mind if you’ve got stuff to say, assuming you don’t talk as much as Ma.”
Angel cringed. She didn’t think anyone talked as much as Mrs. Banks, though she’d never say so aloud, and certainly not to Grant.
Yet again, he tucked his fingers beneath her chin, but didn’t let go. “Is she a liar, Angel?”
His thumb danced along the line of her chin, arousing the fine hairs on her face and neck and sending tiny jolts down her spine that made her shudder.
“You cold?”
The pad of his thumb was rough against her skin, but she leaned into it, craved it, even though she knew she shouldn’t have. She shouldn’t have been standing so close to him, shouldn’t have been arousing his attention in the slightest bit.
