by K. N. Banet
“You didn’t bring Carey home?” he asked. I could hear his frown through the phone.
“No, I figured she would be better off staying with me for the day. I didn’t want her alone to stew.”
“I did,” he growled softly.
“Too bad,” I snapped. “She’s having a hard time.” I moved away from Carey, whose eyes went wide as I stood. “She hit that girl because the girl was saying awful things about you and Landon. She’s been bullied since the first day of school. Do you really think she needed to be alone?”
“She didn’t tell me that when the school called,” Heath said, quickly changing course. “The school didn’t tell me that.”
“We’ll talk about it when you pick her up. Or whenever you want to talk about it.”
“I’ll be there shortly.”
He hung up on me, and I glared at my phone before dropping it on the coffee table.
“Your dad is on the way.”
“You can just call him by his name, you know. He’s your…boyfriend or whatever you two want to say.”
“Right now, he’s your father,” I said, shaking my head as I went back into the kitchen. This was not how my day was supposed to go. I tracked Heath as he drove toward me, knowing he was probably on a warpath, and knew the moment he parked behind the bar. In the background, Carey was packing her bag up and cleaning off my table, a good guest, no matter what was going on.
Then he was at my door, and he didn’t even knock. When he appeared in my kitchen, his expression hard as he took in the scene, I lifted a hand.
“Before you say anything, the BSA has already called me about taking Carey out of school, asking why I had those privileges. Bethany gave me some advice on how to keep this from getting worse.”
“The only way to keep it from getting worse is making sure Carey knows she can’t, under any circumstances, retaliate against these people,” Heath snarled. “I’ve been doing this a long time, Jacky. I don’t need the BSA’s advice.”
“Wow.” I crossed my arms. “Are you mad at me, Carey, or the school? I’m not sure, but the hostility needs to drop several degrees.” I was getting a snarl of my own now. “They relentlessly bullied her. She thought she needed to send them a message. These things happen.”
“They can’t happen,” he snapped. “And she knows that. She’s seen enough kids get taken from their parents and the pack. She’s an Alpha’s daughter—”
“No, she’s not,” I retorted. “You don’t have a pack.” I shouldn’t have said it. It was a low blow because an Alpha werewolf was always an Alpha. Once they had a taste for that role and it settled on their shoulders, it wasn’t something they could shake off.
“Well,” he said, throwing his hands up. “I guess that means I don’t get to have expectations from my children anymore. I’m just some rogue werewolf who should let his children do whatever they please.”
“Heath—”
“Jacky, I love you, but this is not your fight,” he warned softly, those grey-blue eyes pinning me in place. “This is the way things are. I can’t take her out of school because they would take her away from me. She’s required to have human interaction with kids her own age in a normal setting. Beyond that, the kids are probably protected by their families and the school board itself. They’ll never take this seriously. If she gets violent, they’ll say it’s because of me, and I lose her anyway. This is the world we live in. Carey knows the stakes…or she did.” He turned to his daughter, who kept her head down.
“No.” I started to shake my head and walked between him and his daughter. “I’m not buying that.”
“You always need a fight you probably can’t win,” he said, turning his eyes to the ceiling, probably the heavens themselves, wondering what he had done in his life to deserve me.
“I don’t think Carey should have to tolerate this!” I snarled. “You shouldn’t, either.”
The glare he directed at me should have warned me off. This was Heath and Carey. He literally gave up everything so he could try to be a normal father to her. To an Alpha, the pack was everything and all that mattered. He had walked away from that for her. He would sell all his businesses tomorrow if it was the right thing to do for her.
And I was stepping on his toes in a big way.
“Do you think I was surprised when you said she was being bullied?” he asked softly. “You think I’m okay with it? Every single werewolf kid gets into at least one fight, and every single time, I’ve had to go to their schools and fight for them. Every single human kid in the pack gets into a fight, and every time, it’s for the same thing, except with the added benefit of needing to fight with the BSA to keep them. Unless the humans do something to change, there’s nothing I can do. We’re required by law to send our children to a human school. The other option is boarding school, where we would be potentially hours away, and we’d have to send the kids away from the pack. Jacky, I’m not saying it’s okay, but I am saying the only way to get through this is to just take this shit on the chin.”
“Heath—”
“I’m mad at them,” he growled. “And I’m fucking furious my daughter felt the need to hit someone. And yeah, I’m mad that she hit someone, but right now is not the time for you to try to fix it. I have a meeting with the school tomorrow, then we’ll come back to this.”
He turned on his heel and walked out of the house. Carey looked at me as she followed him.
“He’ll be fine. He always got snarly when the other kids got into fights, too.”
“You knew he would be like this,” I said, sighing as I watched him from the window.
“Yeah. He’ll be fine in a couple of days. I told you, though. I told you there’s nothing Dad could do about it.” She shrugged and started walking again.
“Is he going to yell at you?”
“No. He’ll yell, but it won’t be at me. Probably Landon. He yells at Landon about everything. I’ll tell him you grounded me, though. He’ll like that. No horseback riding for the rest of the week or something.” With that, she left me standing there and followed Heath as he walked down my drive.
I was left to the quiet of my house, wondering if I’d just overstepped my relationship with him in an effort to protect his daughter.
4
Chapter Four
I didn’t hear from Heath until late the next day, although I had felt him wandering my territory all day, heading to the school, then going on errands. Whatever meetings he had in Dallas were being handled by Landon, who had left my territory before dawn.
Aimlessly wandering around most of the day, I waited to see what would happen, my mind consumed by the situation with Carey. Dirk and Oliver had quickly caught onto the tone of the day and left me alone for the most part, except when Dirk told me he heard what happened with Carey from Landon. I wasn’t surprised. Those two told each other everything now. Landon even took Dirk house hunting with him.
I was trying to wash dishes when Heath directed his wandering toward me.
“Jacky,” he said softly as he walked into my home. I dropped the rag I was holding as he meandered into my kitchen.
“How much trouble is she in?”
“Five-day suspension. They also asked me never to send you to pick her up again. You caused a bit of a scene.” He looked at his shoes as he leaned on my counter five feet from me. I didn’t know what expression he was hiding, and his emotions were a secret to me. His Talent—a scent manipulation to hide his emotional currents—was useful for him but a pain for me and everyone else who ever met him. Not every werewolf or werecat had a Talent, but it was always possible. It was a quirk of the curse that created us and spread through our bites. Some people were just lucky.
“They were rude. I didn’t have the patience for it.”
“Neither did Carey,” he muttered as he looked at what I was doing. Slowly, he closed the distance between us and started helping me with the dishes. “I’m used to a lot of arguments from young kids in the pack. Normally, it’s
as simple as losing their temper. They just weren’t in the mood for it that day. Werewolves need to be tough, and they get a temper thanks to that need—the ability to flip a switch and go from a normal day to a violent one. Most are always trying to gain rank and need to defend their positions. This is just who we are. We fight to prove dominance and power. Most of the time with a werewolf teen, it sounds as if they’re just like the bullies. Someone tested their position in the school’s hierarchy, and they needed to prove they were the top of the food chain.”
“Where are you going with this?” I asked lightly, wondering why I needed an education in werewolf teenagers.
“Carey’s argument made her sound like you, not one of the werewolves she grew up with,” he said with a wry smile. “She sounded like you at her age, telling me all about how she needed to make sure bad people couldn’t be bad to her or the people she loves.”
“I didn’t coach her,” I said quickly. “I promise—”
“I didn’t think you did,” he said with a small smile as he looked up from the dishes. His scent started to take on his emotions, and I took a deep breath. He was amused, annoyed, and tired. There was also an undercurrent of pain, a deeply emotional one, like a wound no one could put a band-aid on, but his surface emotions were good. “I’m sorry I snapped at you last night. Every time one of these things happens, I have to consider I might lose my daughter the way so many other werewolves have lost their human children. It’s a fine line to walk. It’s fear and anger and…” He sighed, shaking his head. “I can’t lose her, Jacky.”
“I…I tried to tell her I could see where she was coming from, but there would still be consequences. These things have consequences.”
It was a difficult situation, and it wasn’t until this happened, I realized how difficult it could be. I needed Carey in my life and wanted to do right by her. She grounded me, brought me back to normal, and gave me something easy and mortal to attach onto in the same way my siblings attached to their human staff, the way Niko attached to Dirk. The way Hasan raised children. Her father was my lover, my boyfriend, my ally. We had so many things tying us together, but I was not Carey’s mother.
“From what she told me, you said all the right things better than I could. She’ll be grounded until the suspension is over. This isn’t a vacation for her. That includes no visiting you on Monday.” He backed away from the sink and let me finish up the last plate before loading it in the dishwasher. “I really am sorry about last night. I had all day to get frustrated, then you were there, saying all the things I had once tried to say. All the things I wanted to say again, but I can’t live in the fantasy that this is a fixable situation. It’s only a survivable one.”
“Why wouldn’t they let Carey skip grades?” I asked as I closed the dishwasher and got it running. “She could graduate at sixteen. I’ve seen the stuff you have her tutors teaching her.”
“I’m going to take it to the school board,” Heath said with a sigh. “I’m also going to ask CPS and the BSA if I can do one of those hybrid programs with her, where they do online most days and go into school twice a week to interact with other students and teachers. I just need to find a program like that…”
“There’s probably one in Dallas if there’s not one locally.”
Heath groaned. “And there’s the problem with the plan—Dallas.”
“How was the trip yesterday?” I was grateful for the chance to change the conversation for just a moment.
“I was greeted by Ranger. Apparently, Tywin has decided Ranger is the go-between. I was only there on business, so there wasn’t too much trouble.” Heath looked out my window. “The pack is…they’ve lost a couple of clients to my private business. I can’t make guesses. They’re still healthy, but they’ve lost some of the power I had built for them. Some of Tywin’s early mistakes are still being fixed, I think. Some of my mistakes are still being fixed. I can’t go back and fix them myself because that would involve taking the pack back. I don’t want that right now.”
Right now. But you will want it again one day.
I didn’t show how much those words scared me. Was there an expiration date on us and everything we had in my territory? Maybe there was, and I just never realized it?
“Well, you all made the decisions you wanted to make,” I said, aiming for diplomacy. “They let you walk away when they could have asked you to clean up the mess a little more. You could have sent Landon and Carey to a new home and finished up, making sure the transition was smoother. They let you go.”
I won’t.
“There were some hard feelings. My oldest son was a part of the coup against me and Tywin.” He finally shrugged. “They’ll figure it out, and they can’t stop Carey from getting an education. If I have to drive her to Dallas twice a week, it will give me the chance to be a little more hands-on with my businesses again if I stay in the city those couple days a week, then drive her home. That’s if we can’t find a closer option and if the BSA even says it’s okay.”
“Did the pack ever try this?” I asked.
“The logistics didn’t work out, and I never revisited it. I was hoping Carey, being human, might find school here easier without a bunch of werewolves around. I was hoping they would ignore me and Landon because we don’t go to many of the functions.”
“Why didn’t it work out with the pack?” I didn’t need to know what logistics he was talking about, but listening to him talk was one of my favorite hobbies.
“Parents working, there were too many kids. A healthy pack always has about ten to thirty children for the two to three hundred adults. We would have had to start our own school since we didn’t believe in separating the pack kids. If they went to public school, they went together. If they went to a hybrid plan, they would all have to do it together, and not every family wanted to give up an income so a parent could stay home and teach. It’s understandable. Some people really love their jobs and the money it affords them. I’m one of those people. No one was hurting in the pack. They all could have afforded it, but it wasn’t fair. In the end, it just wasn’t fair to anyone to ask some to give up their passions to play teacher. Would it have saved us the trouble of bullies? Who knows? The pack kids would have still had to go to some sort of school a few days a week. It might have curbed the issue, but…”
“It wouldn’t have stopped it. Let me guess…it was going to be the human spouses who had to drop their lives,” I said, crossing my arms. “Especially the women.”
Heath smiled as he nodded. “I knew you would understand.”
“It’s pretty typical. Do pack numbers include the humans?”
“Normally? No. The Dallas pack is currently two hundred and twenty-three strong in werewolves. The human numbers aren’t publicized. We don’t want to expose that vulnerability to those around us.”
I watched something in his face shift as a thought occurred to him. His scent changed into something more robust and deeper. His eyes trailed over me, and lust entered the space between us. He reached out and gently touched my hip before curling those fingers into a tight grip. I stepped closer to him as he backed into the counter.
“Now, back to last night. I am truly sorry for lashing out with you. I think it’s time I grovel and ask for forgiveness. You shouldn’t be talked to like that. I shouldn’t talk to you or anyone like that.”
“Forgiven,” I said, smelling the truth of his words. “We can skip the groveling. It’ll just make me uncomfortable.”
“My groveling won’t,” he whispered as his lips grazed mine. “I regretted the words as soon as I walked out the door.” Leaning down to kiss my neck, one of his hands went up my back and neck to tangle in my hair.
“Yeah?” I was a little breathless.
“Mm-hm, but I had to deal with the school before I could properly control my temper. I didn’t want to come back to you when I didn’t have this resolved.”
“It’s fine. It’s not an easy situation,” I said as his other arm wrapped around
my waist and pulled me even closer. “You’re doing a pretty good job at groveling.”
His masculine chuckle against my neck sent a wave of shivers through me and heat through all the best places.
“I have the rest of the day off,” he murmured. “Carey can stay home alone for a few hours. I can keep groveling if you need me to.”
“I don’t need to go into Kick Shot. I like groveling Heath.”
“Mmm, I knew you would.” He turned and pushed me against the counter. His mouth lowered onto mine, and I was lost in him. Then with the speed I was used to from him, he lifted me up and put me on the counter.
“Hey, boss—”
Heath’s growl made Dirk stop in the doorway.
“Yeah, I’ll go,” he said quickly, and my human quasi-nephew fled from the house.
“Heath.” I grabbed his shirt and made him look at me. “Really?”
“Reflex,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’ll go apologize.”
“Yeah, I should find out what he needed,” I agreed. I didn’t need it, but Heath helped me off the counter, and we both spent a moment fixing our hair and shirts, trying to collect ourselves. I left first, finding Dirk in the security building with his feet up on his desk.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” he said quickly, his feet dropping as he saw me. “You can go back to what you were doing.”
“Dirk.”
“I was hoping to ask to head out early. I want to head into Dallas for the day.”
“And hang out with Landon?” Heath asked over my shoulder. “Tell him to take you to—”
I elbowed him, and he laughed, rubbing the spot.
“Go ahead,” I said with a smile, then moved Heath and myself out of his way. Dirk moved quickly, grabbing everything he needed, then locked up the security building and gave me a mocking salute.
“Thanks, Jacky. We’ll get in touch if anything happens, and I’ll come in early tomorrow to deal with any admin I missed today.”
