by Holley Trent
___
Darius leaned against the Norseton Town Square’s gazebo and folded his arms over his chest. He watched Mrs. Carbone fiddle with her camera, trying to get the settings right, and somehow managed to block out Colt’s heckling. He’d started the moment Darius had stepped into the executive mansion’s atrium before their civil ceremonies.
“Are you letting a woman dress you now? Can’t pick out your own clothes? You might a well consider that necktie your noose, man.”
Stephanie had glared at Darius, as if expecting him to lash out at Colt, but Darius was used to the taunting. It was easier to stay away from Colt than to try to change the man’s ways, so that was what Darius did. That tactic didn’t make their occasional interactions any more tolerable, however.
And Darius was the only one in a suit. The other Pack members—excluding Beast and his mate, who for some reason, were missing—had worn their usual clothes. Well, the ladies had dressed up a little, but the guys had on their typical denim and leather. It was more or less clean, probably. Mrs. Carbone might have had a fit if it wasn’t.
Mrs. Carbone pushed Darius and Stephanie into position near the gazebo opening and shooed everyone else away. Stephanie reached up and patted down his hair, her tongue appearing at the corner of her red lips as she manipulated it. So intense, her inspection of him. No one ever looked at him like that—touched him like that. It was an odd feeling, having a woman be completely his. He both liked it and dreaded the day it would stop, which he suspected would be sooner, rather than later. He’d seen a similar thing with his parents. His mother had grown disenchanted with his father, but he wouldn’t let her leave, so she’d holed herself up into the bedroom and only came out when he left. Darius couldn’t help but think that would be his fate as well.
Enjoy it while you can.
Sighing, he draped his forearms over her shoulders and let her fondle him as she saw fit.
“You got him to put on a suit, but you couldn’t get him to brush his hair properly?” Mrs. Carbone called out.
“I did,” Darius said, probably too low for anyone but Stephanie to hear.
“He probably thinks he did.” Stephanie settled back into place beside him, slinging her arm around his waist and cocking her head coquettishly for the camera.
Oh. Pose, stupid.
“Try looking like you care, Loner!” Colt called out.
“I don’t know why you don’t kick his ass,” Stephanie said through her photo-ready grin. “And if you don’t want to smile, don’t smile.”
“I look dumb.”
She looked up at him. “What, smiling?”
He nodded.
“What makes you think that?”
“I own a mirror.”
“Obviously, you don’t know how to interpret the images it shows you, then.” She sighed. “No time to talk you into it now. How about a smirk?”
He pushed his lips into something he hoped looked like what she wanted.
Stephanie got in front of him, pressed that lush, soft body of hers against his, and used her thumbs to move his lips where she wanted them. “Don’t worry if it feels dumb. You look amazing. Hold that pose.” She settled next to him again and angled her body toward his.
I look amazing? No one had ever told him that before. A few women had made pretty close statements about his dick, but not about him in general.
Mrs. Carbone finally took the damned picture. “At least we have one couple that looks decent enough to put their picture in a frame. Back in my day, folks dressed up for their mates.”
“I want a do-over,” one of the ladies said. “Can I take him home, redress him, and bring him back?”
Mrs. Carbone groaned. “You could try, but good luck. Remember, they have to be back at work tomorrow morning, so use your hours wisely.”
Stephanie plopped her fists onto her hips and cast her gaze toward Norseton’s Main Street, then at Darius. She pushed up an eyebrow. “Can I trust you to hang those clothes?”
“You mean I have to keep them?”
“Of course you do.” She smoothed his lapels and skimmed her hands around his jacket’s waist, letting them linger at the base of his back. Pressed against him that way, her cleavage strained temptingly at the top of her dress, and he wanted to bend to lick it. He needed to act less like an animal, not more, however, so he resisted. “You look so good. You should wear suits more often. You’re built for them.”
Colt walked past them, making a whip-cracking sound, and his mate followed behind, vibrating with a frustrated growl.
Stephanie watched them leave, and turned back to Darius. “Is there some beef between you two?”
He felt stupid standing there with his arms at his side when she was holding him, so he put one hand on her shoulder, then the other. That didn’t feel too awkward. Fucking her was easy. He knew where to put his hands and body when he was having sex, but he hadn’t had practice with casual touch. Apparently, Stephanie expected some. He didn’t want to disappoint her, especially after seeing how he’d already managed to offend her once without trying. Or was it twice?
“No,” he said after a moment. “Colt antagonizes everyone, except Alpha.”
“No one’s tried to hand him his ass yet?”
“Not worth it.”
Her narrowed eyes and the aggressive jut of her chin said that she didn’t agree. It was kind of cute, her indignation. No one had ever been offended on his behalf before—not even his own mother.
“I’ve known these guys for a long time. I know how to deal with them.”
She let go of his waist and yanked her dress up by the bodice.
Thank the gods. Given too much more temptation, he might have had his mouth on her right there in Town Square. Not like he hadn’t done similar things in public before, but none of those women had been keepers, and they’d been just as eager to show his wares to the world. Intercourse in public was a sort of a pack rite of passage. They’d all done it, except for Alpha. Alpha kept his business behind closed doors. Lately, Darius tried to follow his example as much as he could.
“You’re staring at my chest,” Stephanie said.
He forced his eyes closed. Easier than making eye contact and seeing the judgment on her face. “I’m sorry.”
“I actually do believe you are, but can I ask why you’re looking?”
“That should be obvious.”
“Assumptions are going to get us into trouble, as we’ve already learned, so why don’t you just tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Seriously?” He opened his eyes only to force his eyebrows up.
She nodded.
“I don’t know what to say.” He never knew what to say.
“Start with a few words, and then give me a few more.”
“Uh.” He raked a hand through his hair, then gave it a tug. He was going to get in so much trouble with his mate. “I was hoping they’d pop out.”
“Why?”
“So I’d have an excuse to touch them as I put them away.”
“You could just ask.”
“For what?”
“To touch me.”
“Here?”
She let out a restrained laugh. “No. In general.”
She has got to be kidding me.
“Okay.” She pushed back some locks of her bright hair and straightened his lapels again. “Go hang up your suit. I’ll catch up to you for breakfast.”
This has to be a trap. He’d walk away, and she’d be pissed later for not resisting more.
She got behind him and gave his ass a push in the general direction of the wolf housing. “Go. I need to do some shopping. It’s just going to bore you.”
“You’ll need a ride back.” He was grasping at straws, and it was stupid. If she were going to run, she probably would have done it before having the chance to say, “I do.”
“Leave me the golf cart, if you don’t mind walking.”
“I don’t mind.” Still, he didn’t move.
&nbs
p; “Waiting to watch me walk away?”
“No. Just…making sure you don’t need anything.” Am I supposed to kiss her goodbye, or is that something only people on television do? He wouldn’t mind kissing her so much. Colt would probably have oh-so-much shit to say if Darius ended up with lipstick smeared all over his face, but Darius didn’t care. He wasn’t married to Colt and, fortunately, didn’t have to live with him. Living on the road with the guy for close to two decades had been torture enough. “Should I kiss you?”
She let out the prettiest little laugh Darius had ever heard and tossed her hair over her shoulder. Her hair smelled like his shampoo. He thought she must have hated that, but it made his inner wolf howl with triumph. She wore his essence mingled with the residual scent of his shampoo. It would have been obvious to anyone in the pack with a nose whom she belonged to. “Only if you want to.”
He bent down to do it, and she gripped his face, holding him back a bit. She gave him the barest skim of her lips across his, and giggled.
What the fuck?
“Run along now. Maybe next time you’ll kiss me like you mean it.”
Confused, he started toward Pack housing.
He might have put his mark on her and a ring on her finger, but even combined, he wasn’t so sure they’d be enough to pin Stephanie down. She was beautiful, smart, and social, and he’d…well, he’d been raised by wolves, up until he was nine.
He wasn’t like other wolves. Colt was right in calling him “Loner” because that was how Darius was wired. But, lone wolves generally didn’t take mates, especially not prizes like Stephanie. He could only hope that when she figured that out, she wouldn’t ask to be let out of the arrangement.
She probably would, though.
Stephanie deserved better than him.
CHAPTER SIX
A few things were becoming painfully clear to Stephanie. One, that she was mated to, and now married to, an antisocial werewolf. Second, that wolf had the social awareness of a preteen boy. Third—considering his cock’s insistent poke against her back during the Pack’s post-wedding group photos—he didn’t seem to have any revulsion to her body. She could have minimized his response by telling herself he was just a lusty wolf, and lusty wolves were always primed and ready, but she’d watched how his gaze tracked. When he wasn’t looking shyly in her direction, he was staring at his fidgeting hands or fixing his attention on whoever was speaking at the moment. It was painfully obvious he had no idea what to do with her. That suited Stephanie just fine, because she knew exactly what to do with him.
She parked the golf cart on the path winding around the back of her new home and grabbed the grocery bags out of the storage area first. She found Darius standing at the kitchen counter, tapping away on a laptop. He closed the lid, hurried to her, and took the bags.
“You didn’t waste any time getting out of that suit, huh?”
“You’ve been gone three hours.”
Was that a whine in his voice? She tucked her hair behind her ears and kicked off her high heels, studying him. His expression gave nothing away, but his energy shrank back from her. He didn’t want her to know how he felt. That was obvious. It was becoming increasingly evident to her that the mood reading didn’t work in both directions. If it did, he would have known how open she was to him. He may have been able to smell her adrenaline when it spiked or her pheromones when she was primed and ready, but he didn’t seem to feel the changes in her energy.
Odd.
Wolves tended to have different strengths—nothing was universal—but she found it unusual that upon getting her bite, she’d developed a gift that no one she knew personally had.
Where did it come from?
Alpha or Mrs. Carbone seemed to be the most logical people to ask, and she filed the question away on her mental to-do list. “I, uh, poked my head into a few shops and businesses to say hello to people.”
He furrowed his brow. “Saying hello takes three hours?”
“Well, I might have bought some things.” Grinning, she canted her head toward the grocery bags. “If you haven’t eaten, there are pastries.” She headed back to the door, and he followed.
“I ate without you. Couldn’t wait.”
“Sorry about that. I’m not usually so insensitive.”
The truth was, she’d taken so long because she asked every person she encountered what he or she knew of Darius, and the pack in general. There’d been so little information to glean about them before she’d made the trip, so she figured she should make up for it on the ground. Plus, she wanted to take a few minutes to chat, unsupervised, with the other mates. There was one who hadn’t shown up for a ceremony—Christina—who’d been paired up with a wolf even more mysterious than Darius. So mysterious, in fact, that Stephanie had yet to see him.
Full or not, Darius opened the plastic clamshell on the pastry box and plucked out a particularly succulent one in the middle.
“Just stay put,” she said. “I’ll get the rest of the stuff.”
He dropped the Danish. “There’s more? I’ll help.”
“No. I wasn’t dropping unsubtle hints. If I wanted help, I would ask for it. Why beat around the bush with a man like you, right?”
“A—a man like me?” It was as if all of the blood had drained from his face. He looked at her with a pale glower that might have been frightening under any other circumstances, but best she could tell, Darius didn’t have much of a temper. He wouldn’t growl or snap at her like some wolves. He was more like a pathetic stray pup who carried his food bowl to the corner to eat alone because he didn’t want to fight anyone for his fair share.
Poor baby.
She had no intentions of making him fight for her. She liked her curious wolf, and wasn’t going to make him work for what he already had. She did need to give him a little push, though. She wanted him to have the respect he deserved and not get teased or criticized by some dipshit wolf who had nothing better to do than taunt. Dipshit’s mate could deal with him—and from what Stephanie could tell, it was already at the top of her agenda—just like Stephanie was going to deal with Darius. A wolf’s mate was supposed to make him better. That didn’t mean changing him; rather, bringing out the best of what he already had and compensating for his weaknesses. They all had weaknesses. Being a half-breed, and a mostly useless professional artist, she sure as shit had hers.
She carried in bags of clothes—giggling at Darius’s continuing pallor—a pharmacy bag loaded down with hair preparations and assorted other toiletries, and a few odds and ends from the small office supply store. Their art supply selection had been small, but she’d managed to pick up a couple of good pads, and put in an order for canvas. She’d need to find someplace to put an easel…
“Darius,” she called from the bedroom, “what’s in your garage?”
He leaned against the doorframe and brushed pastry crumbs from his T-shirt. The shirt was printed with an advertisement for some craft festival that had taken place long enough ago that Christina had still been a child.
“Don’t answer that,” she said. “Is that your shirt?”
He looked down at it. “Yeah. Why?”
“How old are you? You would have thought I would have taken a peek at the marriage license application.” She’d been too damn distracted by the way her mate looked in a well-cut suit. The fact she hadn’t jumped his bones in the dressing room was a testament to her anal-retentive need to be absolutely punctual all the time.
It was a grown man-sized shirt, for certain. So if he’d had it that long, he had to be far enough over eighteen that she could dispel her anxiety about robbing the cradle.
“Thirty. I’m the youngest in the pack. Or was, rather, until you ladies came.”
“Thank the goddess, you’re not a pup.”
He grinned bashfully and shook his head. “Not a pup.”
“Why do you have a festival shirt?”
“We stopped there one year when we had some downtime. Mrs. Carbone wanted t
o go. The guys hated it.”
“What did you think?” If he had more than a passing interest in art, then they could certainly find some common ground for conversation. All they needed was one little spark, and she’d run with it. She just had to show him she was easy to talk to.
He shrugged. “I thought it was interesting. For whatever reason, a little old lady thought I needed to be talked to, and she, uh—” Darius furrowed his brow and pressed his lips together.
“Tell me.”
“She was saying that she didn’t have any training. She started painting these tiny little paintings, this big.” He spayed his fingers and made an imaginary square around his hand, then stared down at his feet. The tips of his ears turned red, and her heart broke a little. He was so damned shy. “She started doing them after her husband died. She said that painting was easier than finding words. I always wondered if she was right.”
She didn’t have to look at him to know he held his breath waiting for her reaction—her judgment. She could feel the utter stillness of his aura. The part of him that was wolf wasn’t good at anticipating reactions. For a man like him, everything likely seemed to be a threat.
Let it go, baby.
“I think she might be, in some ways,” Stephanie said softly. “You should give it a try.”
He let his breath out slowly and that dreamy gaze of his settled on his hands. “Maybe I will.”
She wanted to put her arms around his neck and just hug him until he was sure she was safe, but if she did that, she might not want to let go of him. “So, what’s in the garage?”
“Uh, just a gun safe.”
“Do you plan on parking a car in there at some point?”
“Not soon. Why? Do you have one that needs transporting?”
“No, I sold my car. I figured if I needed one here, I’d get something better suited to the terrain.”
“I hadn’t bought anything because everything I looked at was too tall to fit.”
“A gas guzzler.”
“It’s practical for the work I do, unfortunately.”
“Most men from my old pack who drove big vehicles were compensating for something.” She winked so her clueless wolf would know she was teasing, and he actually smiled. It was a bit crooked and sheepish, and he must have felt silly, because he cleared his throat and looked away.
