by J. K Harper
The coffee needed to be made. That was her excuse to step away from him.
One step broke whatever sort of devil-thrall he held her in. Two steps allowed her to actually think.
“No, I’m not cold. You keep it plenty warm in here.”
“I try to so I don’t have to pile so many blankets on top of Pete in the crib. Something about SIDS.” He shrugged.
“Yeah. You’re doing the right thing.”
“At least there’s one thing, huh?”
“I’m sure your batting average is a little higher than that.”
“Doesn’t seem like it most of the time. What else am I doing right?”
She sure as shit wasn’t going to answer that.
She concentrated on counting out tablespoons of dark roast. She was more of a diet cola girl than a coffee drinker—even in the mornings—but Grant didn’t have diet cola in his refrigerator. He had water, milk, and beer, and none of those were going to take the edge off her caffeine withdrawal.
“All right then, Miss Silent. Give me fifteen minutes. While I’m cleaning up, you can explain to me how you and my sister can both be honest on a subject while saying opposite things.”
Sighing, she set the carafe in the sink and turned on the cold water. “We can both be telling the truth.”
“How’s that?”
“Women—our noses aren’t like yours. We smell things in different ways.”
“And, what, Leo’s more forgiving of cow shit?”
“Probably, but even if you did smell like that—which you don’t—the scent beneath that one would be more…interesting.” Arousing.
She bit her lip.
Being Grant’s sibling, Leo wouldn’t be able to smell the pheromones. Wolves did have a few natural defenses against inbreeding.
“Hold that thought,” Grant said. “If I stand here running my mouth much longer, Pete’s gonna be up and I haven’t even had coffee yet. I’ll be right back.”
She hung her head and swore. She was going to have to explain herself, and that rarely went over well in her experience. Her mind would go blank, and she wouldn’t even be able to spew a convincing lie.
She got the machine perking, and, leaning against the counter, she pondered making a quick retreat—with or without Leo. All Angel would need to do was trudge out to the road and wait. She heard the occasional vehicle sloshing past still, so the roads couldn’t have been as bad as Arnold had feared.
“Coward move,” she muttered.
When she left Jersey, she’d promised herself she’d be brave, or at least to do a good job of faking it. She’d made it all the way to Norseton with that mindset, and being in the midst of so many strong women in the pack had only bolstered her belief. They’d made her feel like wanting more than just survival was normal, and that she wouldn’t be punished for it, but she couldn’t ignore her conditioning.
She’d been conditioned to believe she was fated to fail.
“But I don’t have to be a failure.”
She lifted the receiver of the wired phone and punched in Queen Tess’s mobile number.
“Initiative. I can take initiative. I can do something useful.”
“Are you talking to yourself again?” Tess asked in lieu of saying hello.
Angel groaned. “Shit. I’m always talking to myself. I try not to get caught as often as I do.”
“Don’t feel bad. My grandmother catches me muttering all the time, but she can’t really say anything, because she does it, too. Curse of the Hall women, I guess. Are you heading back down to Norseton?”
“Not yet. Soon, though, if the weather doesn’t turn bad. Right now, I’m at Grant Banks’ house.”
“What in the world are you doing up there?”
“Unplanned babysitting. I was earlier, anyway.”
“Huh. I didn’t know Grant had a kid.”
“Neither did Leo.”
Tess whistled low. “Well, well, well, I do love a little drama on the rare occasion it doesn’t have anything to do with me. I’ll have to get her to spill the deets later.”
“And she will, too. She was pretty mad, and was ranting for a good hour last night on the way to the motel. I think she only let the subject drop because Arnold had a caramel candy bar in his glove compartment. Listen, I was wondering if you could do me a favor and talk to Grant, maybe? He needs help, and doesn’t trust that he could ask you for it himself.”
“Why not? I’m super-trustworthy…” She added in a mutter, “For a charlatan and a hustler.”
Angel giggled. Harvey, a chieftain, made a habit of calling Tess all sorts of disreputable-sounding names, and sometimes he even sounded like he meant them. Tess wasn’t ashamed of her past, but she certainly didn’t fit the mold of former Afótama clan leaders. Even for a lady descended from Vikings, she had a notable reckless streak.
“Trust doesn’t come easy for wolves,” Angel said.
“I know. I employ a bunch of you, so I’ve experienced that firsthand. What’s the favor?”
“Arnold thought maybe you’d be amenable to sending the construction crew up here in the spring to help Grant get his house built.”
“I bet those dudes would appreciate a change in scenery. Anyone would get sick of the damn desert dust around here.”
Angel furrowed her brow. “Is that a yes?”
“Did you think I’d tell you no?”
“I hoped you’d say yes, but I figured you’d ask me a few more questions first.”
“Oh, I plan on asking you plenty of questions.” When Tess lowered her voice to that particular octave, the people who knew her tended to find something “important” they had to do very quickly.
Damn.
Angel could hardly escape the woman if Tess really wanted to find her. Angel didn’t want to believe Tess had that kind of magic, but the queen had a knack for appearing precisely when people wanted to hide from her.
“I’ll save them for later, though,” Tess said brightly. “Sometimes, these things have a way of providing their own answers in time, and I’m sure I’ll get them.”
“Sheesh,” Angel said in an undertone.
“So, how much am I in for? Just the cost of sending the crew, or are we supplying materials as well?”
“I don’t actually know. I figured I’d get your temperature on the idea before I sent him your way. Don’t be mad at me.”
“Why does everyone think I’m so petty?”
Angel rolled her gaze to the ceiling and chewed on her cuticle, choosing her words carefully. Tess might have been pretty approachable and congenial for the most part, but she was also Angel’s employer. Sometimes, honesty wasn’t the best policy when the person on the receiving end could electrocute people without even touching them.
Angel opted to skirt the question. “Anyhow, I just wanted him to know that getting help was possible, and that you wouldn’t demand he call you ‘your majesty’ and pledge fealty to you.”
Tess snorted long and low. “There’s only one person who calls me ‘your majesty,’ and on the rare occasion he does it, he has a smirk on his face and one or both of us are undressed.”
“Tess!”
“What? TMI?”
“Not that I’m a prude, but…”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ve got a queenly image to uphold and such.”
Tess’s “image” as of late was of a tired mommy of around thirty who wore a leather jacket and combat boots with laces that didn’t quite match. Her usually imperturbable grandmother, Muriel, had given up on trying to groom her. Muriel found bourbon to be a better waste of her time.
“Can I talk to the guy?” Tess asked.
“Well, he’s in the—”
“Is that coffee done yet?” Grant sauntered into the tiny kitchen with a towel fastened at his waist and water droplets still dancing down his back from his wet hair.
Angel gripped the phone’s receiver against her chest and stood catatonic, barely able to breathe, or even shift her gaze away from the substa
ntial figure in front of her.
She forced one eyelid down, testing a blink. When that was successful, she closed both, opened them again, and shook her head.
Keep gawking like that, and he’ll think you’ve never seen an undressed man before.
She certainly had. Nudity sort of went part and parcel with being a shapeshifter. While she couldn’t personally shift, she’d been in attendance at the start of enough pack runs to see clothes come off of all sorts of body types.
“Angel?”
Tess’s voice registered as a teasing echo in Angel’s brain.
Angel blinked again, and swallowed. She couldn’t concentrate on her employer’s queries and the sinful way Grant moved his big body at the same time, and all the man was doing was pouring sugar into his coffee mug.
Apparently that act required the activation of abs, pecs, and biceps, with a little gluteal action thrown in for good measure as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
Squinting, she canted her head. There are probably some very powerful thighs attached to that ass.
“Yoo-hoo, Angel?” Tess sang.
Angel closed her eyes against the cowboy vision, and put the phone back to her ear. She had to swallow twice before she could get the words out. “Um. One moment, please. I’m—having a situation.”
At the rate she was going, it’d likely turn into a medical situation soon.
“Is that Leo?” Grant prodded.
“Um. No. It’s Tess. I hope it’s okay that I called her. I figured—”
“Angel, sweetheart, hand him the phone,” Tess said reasonably. “You’re talking in that thick-tongued way my cousin Nadia does whenever one of her dudes get a certain kind of twinkle in his eye. Are you trying to get a piece of Grant?”
“No!” Angel exclaimed through a watering mouth, and thrust the phone at the alpha.
Grant, with brow furrowed and lips pressed into a tight line, hitched his towel up a bit at the hip and accepted the phone. He eyed Angel out of the corners of his eyes as he put the phone to his ear. “Uh. Yeah?”
Even with a Werewolf’s better-than-average sense of hearing, Angel couldn’t make out what Tess was saying. The volume on the old phone was set too low, and she wasn’t brazen enough to fiddle with it with Grant watching. All she had to go on were his occasional grunts, the glances he tossed her way, and the amount of aggression he used in preparing his coffee. He started with a lot and gradually tapered down.
Once his towel started slipping, Angel couldn’t concern herself with the conversation. He didn’t seem to care that the knot had come undone. The slight pop of his backside acted as a vigilant ledge, holding it up, but if he leaned just so…
He stepped away from the counter.
The towel fell, and her medical situation nearly became an emergency. Her heart was about to beat right out of her chest, and suddenly her throat had constricted, so she couldn’t swallow, much less breathe.
Oh shit!
He stalked toward her with the phone to his ear, and she shook like a leaf thinking that she was certainly about to receive some sort of punishment for ogling an alpha—not that she’d been strong enough not to.
When they were toe-to-toe, she closed her eyes, and cringed as his scent overtook her.
She saw movement through her closed lids. Sensed him reaching over her. Smelled his maleness.
“Mm-hmm,” he said.
She opened one eye and pointed it upward.
He was scribbling on the whiteboard mounted over the phone. Tess’s number, and her assistant Lora’s, too.
“You said April? Might want to push it back until May. We’re known to still get a little snow on the ground through the end of April, and I’ll probably be up to my nuts in tax paperwork.”
“Nuts,” Angel whispered.
There was a pair close enough for her to palm. One little flick of her hand and she could accidentally jostle his junk while scratching her belly or something.
She opted to keep still because she wasn’t totally insane, and thankfully, he stepped away, back to his coffee.
She breathed.
“I mean, I appreciate it,” he said to Tess. “I just don’t understand why you’d do it. You gotta pardon me for being skeptical. Most of the folks I interact with are wolves, or people who feel a certain kind of way about wolves, and wolves aren’t always angels.” He took a quick sip of his coffee and looked down at Angel, who’d knelt to scoop up his towel.
He needed to put it on for the sake of her weakling, omega blood pressure.
“That’s perfectly reasonable, but you gotta understand we’re pretty disorganized up here. I took over the pack earlier this year. I don’t have lieutenants or anything like that yet. In a pinch, I can call my brothers to help me enforce stuff, but we’re still riding out the chaos.”
Angel held the towel up to him.
He had to have caught a glimpse of the bright blue thing in his periphery, but he ignored it.
She stood and wadded the damp thing against her belly. The impulse to bring it to her nose and deeply inhale was too strong and maybe a little too weird, but when else would a girl like her get so close to an unattached alpha’s essence? It was delicious.
“Yeah, I’d like that. When you get back to Norseton after the holidays, I can try to get down there to meet up with you and your folks or, I don’t know, you could come to me. Might be easier if you come to me. The herd is small enough that I’m a one-man operation here on most days.”
He snorted at something Tess said. “What do you mean, you’ve got guys?” He covered the mouthpiece and finally looked at Angel with an eyebrow raised. “She says she’s got guys who know ranching.”
Angel swallowed and fixed her gaze in a safe spot between his chest and Adam’s apple. There was nothing interesting there, and uninteresting was what she needed. Desperately. “Um. Believe her. There are a couple of Afótama ranchers who live near Norseton. She could send you some folks for a couple of days if you need to drive down.”
“She wants to conference. Me and your alpha, plus her chieftains. Said we can talk about how we can help each other.”
“You should do it.”
“Think so?” He nudged her chin upward, which meant she was looking at his chin.
Not good enough for him, apparently. He nudged it up again.
“Come on, woman, look at me.”
“I am.”
“No, you’re trying very hard not to. Why?”
“You’re…” She glanced up at his eyes, just to prove she could, and found that spot below his Adam’s apple again. “I’m trying not to offend you. You must be cold. Do you want your towel?”
“Only if me being nude bothers you. Are you one of the rare werewolves bothered by seeing a naked alpha?”
“Um.”
Tess must have come back onto the line, or said something particularly interesting, because Grant grunted, sidled around Angel, then returned to the whiteboard.
He wrote down some dates. He struggled to cap his marker one-handedly, she turned slowly toward coffee.
“Nope, that’ll work. I’ll be in touch first week of January.” He chuckled and tossed the marker into its tray. “Yeah, I’ll try to get her back to you safe. Can’t make any promises, though. Maybe I’ll keep her. You can find some other wolf to watch your daughter, right?”
Angel was slow on the draw with the quip, only realizing that he was talking about her when he turned.
He leaned brazenly against the corner, phone to ear, smiling at her, thick cock at half-mast.
Oh, shit.
“All right, Tess. I’ll be in touch.”
He dropped the handset into the cradle, pushed away from the wall, and stepped toward her.
She yipped.
“What’s wrong, woman?” he asked.
If he were truly so concerned for her wellbeing, she couldn’t tell from the upturn of his lips, or his cocky saunter.
She took a step backward, but there wa
s nowhere to go. The galley kitchen had but one exit, and she needed to get around him to reach it. She wasn’t entirely sure that she wanted to exit, only that she probably should.
He dropped his big hands onto her shoulders.
She yipped again.
“You really want me to put that towel on, huh?”
“I’m—I’m not a prude.”
“So you don’t care?”
“Don’t put words into my mouth. I just figured you didn’t notice you’d dropped the towel.”
“I see.” He moved one hand to her center, just below her chin, and let down the zipper of her cardigan.
“Um.” She swallowed. “Wh-what are you doing?”
“You’re wearing too many layers.”
“What?”
“Take this off. The shirt, too.”
She clenched her plackets and scowled at him.
Still, his expression was epically calm. Amused, even, and she wasn’t sure yet what the joke was.
His fangs dropped and the smile fell away. “I’m going to bite you.”
“What?”
“You don’t have a mate.”
“No, I don’t, but that doesn’t mean you should be stuck with me, either.” Remembering the Wolverton Pack proclivities, however, she had a thought. “Or are you looking to, maybe, start a harem or something? That would almost make sense. That wouldn’t exactly be a waste of effort. You’d have someone to watch Pete, and—”
“What the hell are you going on about? I’m not getting into that plural wives shit.”
“You just said you wanted to bite me.”
He dragged his tongue over his teeth and sucked in some air. “Yeah. Didn’t want a mate, but you’re here, and I have to bite you.” He shrugged, as if that was that.
“I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed work.”
“That’s right. I’m supposed to wait for an alpha to give me permission to have you. Well, look around, honey. No other alphas here. I guess this is up to me.”
“Um…” Stupefied as she was, she let him nudge her sweater down her shoulders and off her arms. Let him back her against the counter, where he peeled her shirt over her head. Let him drag down the cups of her bra as his rock-hard cock saluted against her ribcage and his growl rattled her bones.
