Something to Howl About

by Christine Warren

  Suddenly starving, Annie smiled and reached for her lunch. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  Chapter Seven

  Jonas teetered on the brink of losing his mind, and it was all the fault of one small, sexy werewolf with an oversized brain. Well, her and his bear. The two clearly conspired against him to drive him over the edge into insanity. He could find no other explanation.

  It had been a week since Annie Cryer had stormed out of the Alpha Medical Center, leaving him standing behind, a muddled mess of lust, fear, longing, panic, and confusion. Seven full days and the only communication he had received from her was an impersonal, one-line e-mail thanking him for insuring that she received copies of the medical files of his clan members.

  That was it.

  For a woman who had implied she was his mate, she had a damned funny way of showing it. She’d been ignoring him. Completely.

  His bear was close to losing it. It had been pacing around the back of his head all week, chomping and bellowing and basically making an ass of itself over her. Over a female. One female, and one they had barely even met, let alone had time to bond with, but the bear didn’t care. It wanted the she-wolf, and if Jonas didn’t hurry up and bring her to them, it was going to take matters into its own paws.

  At least, that’s what it kept threatening. Given how much of a struggle it had become to keep his fur from sprouting at odd moments throughout the day, Jonas had to concede that the bear might not be bluffing. On Wednesday, he’d sent one of the junior admins running out of his office screaming because he’d sprouted six-inch claws from his fingertips in the middle of a routine scheduling meeting.

  Now, it was Friday again, and he didn’t know how much longer he could hold on to the reins. Any minute, the bear could rip them out of his hands, force his shift, and spend the next however-long-it-took lumbering around downtown Alpha with its nose to the ground. In the wild, a male bear might stalk a female for days before she was ready for mating, following her scent trail all over her territory until she became receptive to him.

  That was all Jonas needed, to get a stalking charge slapped onto his furry ass. That would really endear him to the doctor.

  The bear insisted that she wouldn’t be avoiding them if he weren’t avoiding the truth. All he had to do was admit that the wolf was their mate, claim her, and everything would go back to normal. His bear would be content knowing their mate was marked and protected, and his human side could actually run his business without the beast’s interference.

  Except he would be a grizzly with a true mate, and that didn’t qualify as even remotely normal.

  He leaned back in his massive desk chair and brooded about it, which pretty much mirrored how he’d spent the majority of his time at work over the past week. Papers and messages had begun to pile up on his desk, but he didn’t much give a shit. Browning Industries ran like a well-oiled machine. It could survive a few days of his distraction. He had bigger things to worry about.

  Like the fact that his mother had just appeared in the doorway and stood there watching him with her eyebrows raised.

  “Hello, Jonas. I hope you’re not too . . . busy to take a minute to talk to your mother.”

  Jonas dropped the stress ball he’d been worrying—or rather the pieces of it—into his wastebasket and surged to his feet. “Mom. What are you doing here?”

  She stepped forward and raised her cheek for his kiss before allowing him to guide her to the sofa in his seating area. “Your father and I decided to stop in on our way to the airport. We’re on our way to Germany for a few weeks. The Hauptmanns have invited us for a visit.”

  “So where’s Dad?”

  “You know your father. He headed down to the mill while I came up to the offices. He can’t resist the chance to play with the equipment.”

  Jonas hovered for a moment, then turned to grab the phone. “Let me buzz Cici to get you some coffee.”

  “I don’t want coffee.” She patted the seat beside her. “Come sit. You can tell me what’s bothering you.”

  Jonas sat reluctantly. His mother might be a good foot shorter than him and his father, might have the delicate bone structure of a ballerina, and the smooth, elegant features of an aristocrat, but she had a backbone of steel. And for years growing up, he’d remained convinced she had psychic powers.

  “What makes you think something is bothering me?”

  She gave him the look. “Maybe it’s the fact that I can see something is bothering you. I’m your mother, Jonas. Do you think I don’t know you well enough to see it?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” She crossed her legs and angled her body toward him. “Tell me.”

  Psychic powers. Jonas would swear to it. What else could explain why a thirty-six-year-old man, the head of a multinational corporation, and the leader of one of the country’s oldest brown-bear clans, would feel compelled to spill his guts after one two-word command from a woman half his size and twice his age?

  He’d always known it. His mother was a witch.

  Whatever the reason, magical powers or no, Jonas found himself telling her everything, beginning with: “I met a woman.”

  Evelyn Browning listened carefully. Her expression remained neutral and her blue eyes, so uncommon among their kind, gave nothing away. Her hands remained folded quietly in her lap, and she said not a word, so Jonas could be forgiven for not expecting the speed with which one of those hands came up and smacked him on the side of the head.

  “Ow! What was that for?”

  “That was because you deserved it,” she told him, watching him rub his head with a decided lack of sympathy. “Did I really raise you to treat another individual that way? Let alone a female? A smaller, weaker female?”

  Okay, Jonas knew enough to recognize that as a trick question. “What do you mean? Should I have just gone along and pretended I believed her about the mating thing? How would that have helped anything?”

  She smacked him again.

  “First of all, don’t take that tone with me, cub. And second, who said anything about pretending anything? I know I taught you better than to lie to people. And even if I hadn’t, half the time a wolf can smell a lie on you anyway, so it wouldn’t have done you any good.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But what would you have had to lie about, hm?”

  Jonas frowned. Trying to follow his mother’s conversation was giving him a headache. “Mom, give me a break here. Just tell me what you think I did wrong so I can tell you why I disagree.”

  “You mean, so you can tell me why you’re wrong? Very well.” Evelyn tugged at the hem of her slim suit skirt and flicked off an invisible piece of lint. “Aside from your shabby treatment of a female whom you clearly found attractive, grabbing her and practically assaulting her, from the way you’ve described it—”

  “Hey, she gave as good as she got.”

  Her hot glare had him lapsing back into silence.

  “Aside from that, what you spouted off to her out of typical male panic at the thought of commitment was utter and errant nonsense. What on earth did you mean by telling the poor girl that our kind doesn’t take true mates? Where did you get such a ridiculous notion?”

  Jonas felt his jaw drop and scrambled to pick it up off the floor. “Where did I—? Mom! What the hell are you talking about? We don’t take true mates. You told me so yourself. You and Dad didn’t even meet until the week of your wedding, and you always said you barely knew him before you signed the wedding license.”

  “And what has that got to do with anything?”

  “What has it—?”

  He lifted his hands to his head and fisted them in his hair. It took all his self-control not to start yanking it out by the roots. At least the pain would be something he could understand. Unlike this conversation.

  “I can’t believe that out of all the stories I’ve told you about your father and me, that’s what you chose to build your idiocy on.” Evely
n shook her head. “Have you ever seen your father or me treat the other badly?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Have either of us ever disrespected or insulted the other?”

  “No.”

  “Have either of us ever been unfaithful to the other?”

  “No! Jesus, Mom. How the hell should I know? I hope not.”

  “Watch your language. Do your father and I love each other?”

  Jonas shifted, more uncomfortable than he’d been since his father had sat him down for their official talk on the birds and the bees. Or, as his father had put it, the bear and the bunny rabbits, which had put some very disturbing images into his prepubescent brain.

  “Mom, it’s none of my business—”

  “I think it’s very much your business. I think it would be your business even if you hadn’t bungled a situation with a young woman because of your own stupidity.” She continued to give him the mom stare—pursed lips, raised brows, hard eyes. “Now, do your father and I love each other?”

  “Well, you’ve stayed together for almost forty years, so I guess there would have to be some degree of affection—”

  “Jonas.”

  He blew out a breath. “Well, I don’t know what you want me to say, Mom. You and Dad have been together a long time, and you seem to fit each other. You’re good together. So yeah, I guess I’d assume you love each other. In your own way.”

  “In our own way.” Evelyn sighed and leaned back against the sofa cushions, her expression softening along with her posture. “I suppose I deserved that, along with your ridiculous opinions on mating. It’s all very likely my own fault.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The first thing you have to understand about your father and me, Jonas, is that we love each other very deeply. Not just ‘in our own way,’ but in every way there is. Yes, ours was an arranged marriage, and no, we didn’t know each other well before the wedding. We didn’t need to. The instant we saw each other, we each recognized the other as our mate.”

  Jonas felt the earth drop away from beneath his feet. This wasn’t possible. What the hell was going on? Had he been thrown into some sort of alternate universe that he hadn’t noticed?

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No, I can see that, which is why I’m going to explain. And you are going to listen.”

  Chapter Eight

  Evelyn stared down at her hands and worried the matching platinum bands her son had never seen her without. “Jonas, the problem with our kind has never been that we don’t feel the mating instinct the same way as other shifters. The problem for many years was that we felt it too deeply. Too violently. Back in your grandparents’ time, it wasn’t uncommon for some grizzlies to become so jealous and possessive they would kill anyone who they so much as perceived to be a threat to their mates. And yes, I used the word. I called us grizzlies, because for most of our history, we behaved that way.”

  She sighed and shifted, but Jonas made no move to rush her. He had too much to do just digesting all of this. It went so contrary to everything he’d ever thought that he couldn’t quite make any of it make sense.

  “By the time I was a teenager, it seemed as if our kind had lost all control. We might walk on two legs, live in houses, and work in businesses, but when it came to emotion, our animal sides had completely taken over. And it cost me the life of my best friend. My older sister.”

  Jonas had almost forgotten his mother had ever had a sister. He’d never known her, and Evelyn never liked to talk about her. She kept no photos of the other woman, and had a habit of changing the subject any time her childhood was broached in conversation.

  “Jeanine was eight years older than me. Not unusual for our kind, but it was unusual that we were so close. She didn’t ignore me the way most siblings would with such an age gap. She liked spending time with me, teaching me things. Brushing my hair or helping me with my homework. She was sweet. When I was fifteen, she met her mate.

  “This was in Alaska, where we grew up. There are a lot more brown bears up there. Grizzlies. Peter was from a neighboring clan. They met in town when they had both gone in to see a movie. It was the only theater for miles. They knew instantly they were meant for each other, but not everyone saw it that way. There was a girl in Peter’s clan whom he’d been dating casually. He knew they weren’t mates, but the girl—her name was Gloria. Gloria was . . . unbalanced. She had convinced herself that she was Peter’s true mate, and when she found out about Jeanine . . . well, she behaved very much like a grizzly.”

  Evelyn paused, and Jonas could see her struggling to swallow, to hold back her tears. He laid a land over hers and squeezed reassuringly. She managed a small smile.

  “It was grisly. How is that for the irony of homonyms? Gloria lay in wait for my sister in the forest where Peter and Jeanine used to meet to run together as part of their courting. Peter came to our territory, so she waited until he left and tracked Jeanine on the path back to our parents’ house. She tore her to pieces. When my father found her, he cried like a baby. I’ll never forget that.”

  Jonas plucked a handkerchief form his pocket and handed it to his mother. She wiped her eyes delicately and pressed her fingers to her mouth until she was able to continue.

  “All of us were devastated. Our entire clan was. Everyone loved Jeanine. When they discovered who was responsible for her death, we immediately went to her kin to demand she be held accountable. And she couldn’t understand why anyone was upset. After all, she had only been defending her mate. Or that’s what she said. What she told herself.”

  A sick feeling rose inside him. All of his life, Jonas had known he lived with a predator inside him, an animal capable of killing—to feed itself, to defend itself, or to defend its den or its family. But he couldn’t image doing what his mother had described, killing a rival for his mate and having no regrets for his actions.

  His bear hummed. Couldn’t he? Jonas’s human side might consider Gloria’s actions to be murder, but his bear saw them from a different perspective. It considered what would happen if another male tried to lay claim to Annie, and bellowed in fury.

  Never. No other would ever lay a single claw on what was theirs. It would kill or die to prevent it.

  “Jeanine’s death changed everything for me,” Evelyn continued. “For my entire clan. I became obsessed with keeping control of the animal, and I insisted that everyone in the clan do the same. Bloodshed was no longer tolerated, not for any reason, and my father backed me up. He’d felt the same sort of horror and rage that I had. Clan members who lost control were punished, and I made it my mission to instill human civility on a population of shifters. When it came time to take a mate, I insisted on the same from my prospective husband. I wouldn’t join a clan who didn’t agree to operate according to my notions of proper control and behavior.”

  Her mouth quirked. “Your father did.”

  “But you didn’t know him before the wedding?”

  “I didn’t meet him until a few days before, but we corresponded for several weeks before that. We knew we had certain things in common, beyond a desire to see a stop to the senseless violence. We enjoyed the same books and films, and we respected each other’s minds and morals.”

  Jonas nodded. That made sense to him. That was the kind of relationship he’d always believed his parents had. One based on mutual interests and shared respect.

  The quirk morphed into a full-blown smile on his mother’s face. “But none of that would have mattered if we hadn’t looked at each other and recognized that we were meant for each other.”

  And there she went, careening off the rails again. “You really mean that? You’re really telling me that you think you and Dad were destined to be mates.”

  “Of course we were.” She turned her hands until she had grasped his between them. “Jonas, my darling boy, do you honestly think Edward and I would have remained together for forty years if we didn’t love each other passionately? If we w
eren’t true mates? Maybe some humans can maintain fond respect for decades, but our animals won’t allow us to settle for anything so tepid. Not for the long term. They would lash out, or just wander off without a matebond holding them together. Are you really so thick in the head that you’ve never worked it out for yourself?”

  “But I’ve seen members of the clan get married and then divorced a few years later. That’s no matebond I’ve ever heard of.”

  “No, it’s not. I insist that the members of my clan not let their animals control them. I never said they couldn’t let their human sides have that power. Some people don’t want a true mate. And some get impatient after waiting for one who never appears. Some of them settle for a human-style marriage, and sometimes that marriage doesn’t work out. I don’t live the clan’s lives for them, Jonas. I just provide some basic rules they have to follow if they wish to be part of North Lake.”

  Jonas really wished he had a reboot switch on his brain, because he felt as if his operating system had just crashed. The rules he had thought made the world around him spin had all suddenly changed. In an instant. One minute up was up, but now his mother had just explained it was really sideways.

  How was he meant to deal with all that? And could it possibly begin with a very large bourbon?

  “Okay.” He took a breath and tried to force his brain to stop spinning. “So, what you’re telling me is that the woman I told you about, the wolf, Annie, she might actually be my true mate? My bear was right all along?”

  She patted his hand. “I can’t tell you if the girl is your mate, pumpkin, but I can tell you that the reaction you described to meeting her certainly makes me curious. Do you think I could meet her before your father and I leave for Germany? We have a couple of hours before we need to be at the airport.”

  “No.”

  The word came out with a bit more force than Jonas had intended. He faked a cough to cover the slip. Evelyn treated him to another mom look.