by Holley Trent
He nestled her purse onto a shelf of the bookcase cluttered with various gun accessories, then turned slowly to him. Her lush lips flattened into a tight line and her small hands fluttered up to her shirt buttons. She deftly unfastened them all, and he simply stood there, mesmerized by her efficiency…and was desperately aroused by the beaded pink nipples and high, round breasts she exposed when pulling apart her shirt’s plackets.
She managed to stay still as she twisted her shirt in front of her belly and stared at him.
The fact that it took him so long to work out her motives frightened him. Already, he wanted her too much, and she clearly wasn’t horny. She was simply waiting on her bite.
He groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose. It was the wolf way. Females were bitten by their new mates right after they were matched. Not only did the bite imbue her mate and protector’s essence into hers, broadcasting to whoever was sniffing that she was off the market, but also the enzymes shuffled her DNA around a bit. Female wolves didn’t shift until they’d been bitten—until they were prepared to breed and protect their young.
He closed the distance between them, took her shirt, and pinned it up against her naked breasts. Out of sight, out of mind. “You don’t have to do that,” he barked.
A lovely red flush spread up her neck to her cheeks. “I-I don’t understand.”
Groaning, he raked a hand through his hair and turned from her. The more he looked, the harder it would be to let her go. “I don’t know what kind of information Adam put out there or what you were expecting to find here.”
“There’s never much information,” she said quietly. “Only how many females are needed and how far away the men are.”
Anton sighed and fixed his gaze on the stun gun that needed repair. Anything but her. Women really drew the short straws when it came to being matched. That was the way it’d been done for as long as anyone could remember, but it didn’t seem fair to him. It wasn’t enough for a woman to just smell right to the alpha. Chemistry still counted for something. And attraction. It shouldn’t be so one-sided.
“Please don’t send me back,” she whispered. “I can’t—won’t—go back there.”
He closed his eyes and clenched his hands to fists. Knew it—she’s desperate. A few deep breaths didn’t ease the roiling in his gut any, so he turned and walked to the door. “We’ll find you somewhere else. I promise, it’ll be somewhere where you won’t get beat up.”
She flinched, and her mouth opened, but he was out the door before she could get any words out.
He didn’t want to hear her tell him that it was okay and that she’d get used to him. He didn’t want that kind of pity.
___
My man is so fine. But he sure was confusing.
Christina stood in the doorway of her mate’s house, holding her shirt over her chest, and looked the big werewolf from head to toe as he conferred with his alpha. Their alpha.
“That one’s mine,” she whispered to herself. She could hardly believe it was true. He was tall and broad, like all the wolves in their little enclave seemed to be, with dark hair that skimmed his jaw and didn’t quite completely hide the black patch over his left eye. He looked a bit like a rakish pirate, but was outfitted in blue jeans and motorcycle boots.
She giggled.
He was so confused. She could sense his hesitation. Female wolves didn’t have many courtship advantages when compared to the males, but they had good noses. Good guts. His hormones had spiked the moment she walked into his house. He wanted her. Wanted to take care of her. She could tell. But, something was holding him back. Whatever it was, they’d get past it—as long as he didn’t make her leave.
She pushed her arms back into her shirt’s sleeves and pulled the plackets together as she sat on his sofa.
Moments later, he returned, expression drawn and skin pale. He leaned his back against the door and tipped his head down. His hair fell into a curtain over his eyes and he drummed his fingers against the doorframe.
Certainly a man like him has had some experience with women, so what’s the issue here?
“Adam says he’s not sending you away.”
“I’m glad. I don’t want to be sent away.”
There went another one of those wild hormone spikes. This one tasted of anxiety and fear. She furrowed her brow.
“You don’t have to say shit like that. I know you girls are trained to tell us what we want to hear, but you don’t have to waste your breath on me.”
“Oh.” She pushed her top button through its hole and stared at her lap. “I’m actually not that clever. I’ve never been any good at comebacks or flirting. I tend to—to speak plainly, I guess.”
He was quiet for so long that she risked a glance up at him.
He’d turned his head slightly and eyed her through that veil of wild hair. She sighed. The wolf needed grooming. She’d put that on her task list for right after she got her bite and papers: bathe him well, then—she scanned the room around her and what she could see of the kitchen—organize his life. If there were a filing system for weapons, she’d figure it out and implement it.
“You the quartermaster?” she asked.
“Yeah. Most of the guns belong to the other guys. I can’t see worth a shit to shoot anymore. I used to be a two-eye shooter, and my blind eye was my dominant one. Need more range time to adjust for it.”
The injury must have been recent.
She pulled her feet up beneath her on the sofa and licked her dry lips. Keep him talking. She patted around in her head for conversational tidbits. She hadn’t been kidding when she’d said she was no good at flirting. Some of the girls she knew would have foregone the flirting altogether and just taken their clothes off. Well, she’d already tried that. Obviously, her mate—
Wait, what’s his name, again?
She thunked her palm against her forehead. Duh.
“I’m Christina,” she said. “Christina Stilton.”
He straightened up a bit at that, so he seemed to be looking down at her now. Of course, from his height, he’d always be looking down at her. He’d probably have to hunch just to put his arms around her. The wolves were shorter where she came from.
“Anton Denis.”
Anton. His packmate had called him “Beast.” That wouldn’t be happening anymore. Not on her watch. There was nothing beastly about him, as far as she could tell. She was usually pretty good at reading temperaments, if not intents.
“So, where are you from, Anton?”
He scoffed. “Everywhere, lately. Adam splintered us from a group that got too big, just before we were going to be expelled, and we haven’t stopped moving since.”
Typical. Packs always sent the strong boys away before they could become threats to the alphas and betas. Stupid practice. It left the packs unbalanced with a few strong wolves, a bunch of weak males, and—well, a bunch of girls and women. “How old were you?”
One of her brothers had left at sixteen. She hadn’t heard from him since, and he’d left ten years ago.
“Fifteen, I think. But Adam is my uncle through marriage, so it’s not like I got tossed out with a stranger.” He crooked his thumb in the general direction of Alpha’s house. “My aunt lives with him.”
“Oh. That’s reassuring. Knowing there’s an experienced woman here.”
He grunted, and that curtain of hair fell over his face again. She wanted to go over there and tuck it all behind his years so she could get a good look at that handsome, scarred face, but she didn’t have the courage at the moment. What if he refused to let her get close? Her wolf needed some gentling.
“Anton?”
“Yeah?”
“Where exactly are we? I slept for most of the trip from the airport in Albuquerque.”
His eyebrows bobbed and he pushed away from the door he’d been holding up. “Middle of nowhere, basically. Hold on, I’ve got a map in here somewhere.”
He disappeared into a back room and returned a couple of
minutes later with a Southwest atlas. He turned to a flagged page and ran his finger down a longitude line to a spot that was, indeed, in the middle of nowhere. Just mountains and desert all around. “Our hosts chose this land specifically because no one would bother them out here.”
“Hosts?”
He grunted. “The pack made a deal with a group known as the Afótama. This is their land. In exchange for a permanent home here, we’ve agreed to do security work for them.”
“Why would they need security?”
“It’s a long story. Suffice it to say, they’re like us—not ordinary. They require discretion, and we’re good at that. I imagine most of the ladies will find jobs with them if they need something to do. My aunt works there, in the kitchen at the mansion.” He chuckled. “Annoys the cook and feeds people behind his back.”
A chance at a job? He’d let me work?
“You’d—let me earn money?”
He turned his good eye toward her and narrowed it. “Earn it and spend it.”
She reached for him—to skim her fingers across his bisected eyebrow and the satiny patch over his eye—but pulled her hand back. She didn’t want to offend him.
“Umm. Being productive is nice. I like keeping busy.”
He grunted, nodding. “Busy is good sometimes, but sometimes comfortable is just as good. Why don’t you worry about the latter one?” He closed the atlas, returned it to its shelf, and made his way to the back room.
Dismissed?
She pulled out a chair from beneath the kitchen table and slumped into it. So standoffish. Well, if he thought that was going to scare her away, he had another think coming.
She’d endured far worse.
CHAPTER THREE
Anton had to get away from the house and the little woman in it, so he’d spent the better part of the evening tracking though the New Mexico desert in his wolf form. He memorized the landscape and its scents. Learned the noises—plucked out what was natural and what wasn’t.
The human body he wore might have been disfigured, but his wolf form was whole. When he shifted to his animal shape, he knew perfection, and he would have stayed like that forever if he didn’t have certain obligations to his pack and family. They needed him to be a man with opposable thumbs, who could speak a complete sentence every now and then. He always regretted having to shift back, though. He used to have ambitions. But these days, ambitions were a luxury. His wolf didn’t have ambitions—just hunger, and that was easy enough to sate.
Just before dawn, he reluctantly returned to his house, picked his discarded clothes up from the doormat, and shouldered the door open quietly.
She had to still be asleep. She could probably sleep all day, given how busy the previous one must have been for her. And if she slept, he’d have some time to think—to figure out something else for her. He’d go crazy in his new home if she didn’t leave.
He closed the door softly, and turned, clutching his clothes. He could probably get a couple of hours of sleep before anyone expected him to do anything for them. Even the quartermaster needed a day off every so often, and Anton had been working pretty much fulltime, every day, for six weeks.
The floorboards creaked in the corner.
Shit.
He hadn’t seen Christina in his periphery because she was on his blind side. She was next to the window. Still wearing those unflattering clothes, but she’d taken her shoes off. She stood in her ankle socks, wringing her hands.
“It’s so quiet here,” she said softly, after a moment. “So quiet it’s almost loud.”
Yeah, he’d thought the same thing once. He gripped his wadded-up clothes against his midsection and scanned the visible surfaces in the room. Where was his patch? He’d taken it off…somewhere. Between the kitchen and front door, maybe? No way to search for it discreetly. He shook his head so his hair fell over his face. “Uh, couldn’t sleep?”
She shrugged. “I came out of the bathroom from washing up, and you were gone. I thought maybe you’d be right back.”
“You waited up for me?”
“I tried to sleep, after a while, but I couldn’t nod off.”
“Because it’s too quiet?”
She nodded.
He grunted, tossed his shirt onto the coffee table, and stepped into his pants. He didn’t think she could see anything worth noting. Their eyes weren’t so good in the dark in their human forms. She’d just see shadows, and even if she saw more than that, he didn’t really care. If he sent her along to the next guy with her having only been minimally scandalized, Anton would consider it a victory.
“Go on to sleep, little wolf. Nothing’s going to happen to you.” Including him.
“You’re in for the night—err—morning?”
“Yeah.”
“All right.” She may have said it, but she made no motion to move, aside from wringing her hands some more.
“You can have the bed. Sheets are clean. I haven’t had a chance to sleep on them, so you don’t have to worry about fleas or anything.”
Was that a joke? Had he really just made a joke? He couldn’t remember the last fucking time he’d done that.
Her laugh reminded him of wind chimes tinkling. Organic and unforced. She moved slowly into the hall. “Are you coming?”
“Uh, no. I’m gonna stay up for a while longer. Catch up on some things.”
“You’re behind because of me?”
He shook his head, but realized she probably couldn’t see it. “No. I just always have a lot to do.”
“Okay.”
The floorboard creaked yet again as she departed. He heard the mattress springs creak as she climbed onto the bed, and the rustle of sheets as she pulled the covers over herself.
He stood there listening until there was nothing left to listen to. No more movements came from the bedroom. Just her soft sighing in sleep. He had to have been standing there for a solid ten minutes.
What’s wrong with me?
Well, he knew the answer to that. She was wrong with him—and wrong for him—and yet there she was, sleeping in his house.
He grabbed the afghan off the back of the sofa and settled down into the chair. He curled up as best he could under the insufficient cover and closed his eyes. He’d figure out how to get rid of her in the morning, once he’d slept some and could think straight. He’d never had such a problem with thinking before, but he knew for sure what had caused the dysfunction.
___
Anton was pretty certain he was dead. Either that, or he was on those fucking painkillers again—the ones he’d taken after that fight when he’d been mauled so badly. The damned pills had him seeing things that weren’t really there. He’d heard things that no one else had. Music. Voices. He’d been tripping, and his packmates had thought that was a goddamned hoot. He still hadn’t gotten them back for that.
He pushed his eyelids open, ready to meet either his maker or see the hospital room he had to be in if he was on that shit again. Only angels sing like that.
His vision cleared and came into focus on the hunched figure of a pretty little woman in a flower-print dress. She was matching his socks atop the coffee table. She rolled two together and reached into the laundry basket for another pair. Her gaze fell on his face, and she stopped singing, slapping a hand over her mouth.
“Don’t stop on my account. The singing, I mean. You don’t need to do my laundry, though. I was going to get around to it.” Eventually.
“It’s a habit. Sorry.”
“Doing laundry?”
“No. Singing to myself when I’m working. I’d almost forgotten you were in the room. You’ve been deathly still.”
He closed his eyes, rubbed them. Shit, the patch. He sat, holding his hand over his eye and scanning the room. Had to be around somewhere. He needed to keep better track of the damned thing or buy more of them. Except that he barely even had time to buy groceries, or cook them, for that matter.
“Are you—are you looking for—” It seemed
she didn’t know how to phrase her question tactfully. Too sweet to know that tact wasn’t even required.
“My patch. You’d think I’d have more than one. Add another thing to the to-do list.”
“You left it hanging on the bathroom doorknob.”
He started for the hall.
“You don’t have to wear it on my account,” she said in a rush.
“It’s one thing to look at me when both my eyes are closed. But I know what I look like when they’re open.”
“I—” she sighed, cutting off her own statement.
Just as well.
He grabbed the patch off the knob and fastened it around his head, scenting the air in the process.
Piney.
He sniffed again.
Bleachy.
Cleaning stuff. He tapped on the bathroom light and practically lost his good eye to a blinding brightness. The bathroom hadn’t been so clean since he’d moved in, and he was the first owner. He whistled low. She’d even cleaned the baseboards and shower curtain. How fucking long had he been asleep?
He turned off the light and returned to the great room. He squinted at the clock on the satellite dish receiver box. 12:30. He hadn’t slept that late in months. He turned to her next. She’d gone back to rolling his socks, and he wondered how he’d ended up with so many pairs.
Oh. Right. He didn’t do laundry. Ever.
“Nobody came by?”
“It’s been pretty quiet. I saw a couple of your packmates passing through the courtyard, but it seems like folks have been keeping to their own houses. Your aunt did come by early. Brought an egg casserole. It’s in the kitchen.”
“What’d she say?”
“That she was sending your uncle over as soon as he finished meeting with your bosses.”
Anton sighed and headed into the kitchen for some of that casserole. He bet he knew exactly what Adam would have to say. Auntie had probably told him that Christina didn’t have her bite, and he was going to visit to bitch at Anton.
Well, Adam had obviously been off his rocker, putting the woman in his house in the first place.
