by V M Black
Harper glanced back at Levi at the trucker’s mention of him. He bent as if he were adjusting his shoe, and as he straightened, he casually slid a hand under the edge of the trailer, just for a moment.
Bingo.
“You’re probably right,” Harper said. “I’m sorry. And now I’ve just taken up your time for no reason at all, too.”
“Well, thanks for your concern, miss,” he said. “And I really don’t mind at all. It’s just that not everybody’s going to be friendly, you know.”
She nodded earnestly. “Well, I’m glad we stopped, anyway. Gives us a chance to put the top down, right? And it’s such a pretty day.”
There were hands on her shoulders then, and she looked back to see Levi standing behind her.
“Come on, sis,” he said. “Stop bothering the guy and get back in the car.”
Harper rolled her eyes dramatically for the trucker’s benefit. “Yes, sir,” she said sarcastically.
Levi looped an arm around her shoulders and hustled her back to the car. His arm around her felt anything but brotherly.
“You think he bought that?” he muttered.
Harper turned the full force of her gray eyes up at him, making them as big and sweet as she could manage. “Wouldn’t you?”
She felt his body stiffen in automatic reaction. “Damn, girl, you’re good.”
She smiled smugly. “I know.”
They were at the Mini Cooper now, and Harper turned back to give one last wave at the trucker before circling around to the driver’s side.
Easy peasy.
“Why don’t I drive?” Levi suggested.
“I stole the car,” Harper said. “I get to drive. Anyhow, who’s the better shot? You need your hands free.”
With her snub-nosed revolver versus his nine mil, there was no question that he’d be able to hit a target at a farther distance. She’d challenge anybody with a better gun, but Levi didn’t need to know that.
They got inside, and Harper started the car and hit the button for the soft top to fold up on itself at the back of the car. The warm midday sun slanted down on their heads as she pulled back onto the road, shifting through second into third. The trucker smiled from his cab and raised a hand in salute as they drove.
It had worked. They were free of the GPS tracker and back on track. She could hardly believe it. Maybe now things would finally go smoothly.
“Sunglasses,” Harper ordered, holding out her hand.
Levi, in the passenger seat now, twisted around and pulled her purse out of the back to dig them out.
“They are mine, you know,” he said mildly, handing them over. Damn but he looked good sitting there, next to her. His unshaven scruff was beginning to shade over into a short beard, but he looked no less handsome for that, with his bright white teeth in his tanned face.
“So?” Harper shoved the shades on and checked her reflection in the mirror. “I think they look better on me.”
Which was a complete fabrication, but she felt like teasing him. She felt suddenly, ridiculously lighthearted. They were still driving an absurdly conspicuous stolen car, and they were no closer to getting anything off the SD card, but now at least they knew how they’d been found so easily before and they’d dealt with that. It seemed like progress, and right then, she’d take what she could get. Levi would get the SD card to his friend, get the data off it, and then they’d part ways. Forever.
And she was entirely okay with that. Really, she was.
Her gaze slid over to Levi in the seat beside her. He’d pulled the plastic box of stew from her purse and was eating it greedily—with one of Aunt Tiff’s spoons. She frowned. She hadn’t put that into her purse.
“Your nose is already burned,” Levi said conversationally, catching her gaze.
She looked in the rearview mirror, then prodded it gently with her fingertips. Pink, yes, but not yet tender. “It’ll be all right.”
He shrugged. “It’s your nose.”
“Do you really want to stop to put the roof back up?” she asked. She was enjoying the feel of the wind on her face and her hair streaming behind her.
He shrugged, then shook his head.
“Anyhow, I was thinking that if people are looking for us, we’re a lot more obvious as a red car with a white roof than a red convertible,” she said.
He snorted. “This isn’t a proper convertible any more than a Vespa is a motorcycle.”
Harper smiled. “So what kind of car is a proper convertible?”
“A 1958 Corvette,” he said. “With the last hint of fins replaced with the sleekest body you’ve ever seen, and the scoops that go from the front wheel across the doors.” He dug in the bag at his feet and came up with a Subway sandwich. Wordlessly, he pulled it out of the plastic sleeve and passed it over to her.
“Hmm, classic car buff,” she said, spitting out her gum into a corner of the sub wrapper. “I’ve always dreamed of owning a ’50s Lincoln Continental, totally tricked out.”
“So why the Skylark?” he asked.
“I told you, my brother bought it for me,” she said, taking a big bite of the sandwich. All this running away was making her hungry, and breakfast had been a very long time ago, before dawn.
“A fan of My Cousin Vinnie?” he asked. There was a scene in the film that prominently featured a Buick Skylark.
“Oh, LOL,” she said. “I totally haven’t heard that one before. No, he got it because it was a classic and something we could actually fix up for not too much money, and it was cheap for the condition it was in. Six hundred bucks. He made my other brothers pitch in a hundred each since it was my sixteenth birthday, so it cost him four hundred, and he got a buddy of his to tow it over.”
She smiled at the memory. Neither Braden nor Austin had been happy with that, but they’d done it. Even Christina did what Cory said. “Cost me a hell of a lot more, of course. Three grand, when it was all said and done. He said I could sell it for eight or ten, pocket the difference, maybe take some classes with it.”
“But you didn’t,” he said.
“It wasn’t about the money,” she said. “We rebuilt it together, all four of us. And even Christina would come out into the barn to hang out sometimes and watch us work and not pick a fight.” She cast her eyes sideways at him. “How big’s your family? You say brothers and sisters, you say clan, you say all kinds of things, but you don’t say anything more specific.”
“It’s big,” he said. “Most werewolf families are.”
“How big is big?” she prompted. “I’m one of five.”
“Well, I’m the fifth of nine,” he said.
She whistled. “You aren’t kidding about big.”
“Yeah, and I’ve got hordes of cousins and nephews and nieces and aunts and uncles, never mind the second cousins—”
“I get the picture,” she said. “So you left all that? Did you just want to, you know, get away?”
Harper could understand that, to a point. While a family was a place where you always belong, it was also where you were stuck in the place you were given. Her role was that of the baby sister and baby cousin—even now, at the age of twenty-one, she got put at the kiddie table at half the family gatherings.
Levi shrugged. “When I was a teenager? You’d better believe it. Plenty of people hate being a teen, but it’s worse for a werewolf, going through shifts and never quite knowing when you’re going to suddenly sprout hair. Regular guys worry about getting a surprise stiffy. Werewolves have to worry about surprise fangs.”
“Okay, that does sound like it sucks,” she agreed, suppressing a smile.
“And of course, even now, I don’t really care to live under the collective thumb of the clan council, with no say in anything.”
She gave him a sideways glance—and immediately, a strand of hair got caught in the wind and whipped across her face into her mouth. She it spat out and turned back to the road. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why don’t you have a say in anything?”
�
��Got to be the head of a household to be on the council,” he said. “If you’re not an alpha, you don’t get a vote.”
“Alpha?” She openly grinned at the word. “Sounds like a code name.”
“It sounds stupid,” he returned. “Long time ago, they were just called the primes—before that, the princips. But I guess we’ve been watching too many wildlife shows, so now it’s alphas, more often than not.”
“By head of the household, do they mean men?” Harper asked, wrinkling her nose.
Levi chuckled. “Come on, Harper. We’re xenophobic bigots, not sexist bigots. They mean werewolf shifters. If both partners are werewolves, then they each get half a vote. But if they’re another kind of shifter or a human, they’re not allowed on the council.”
“So why aren’t you on it now, Mr. Werewolf Shifter?”
“Family household,” he clarified. “No family, no household, at least as far as they’re concerned. Got to have kids and your own house on a hunk of land to get a vote.”
She raised her eyebrows at the idea—and at the hint of outrage in Levi’s voice. “No wonder you have so many cousins. No one listens to you until you do.”
Levi lifted one shoulder. “Not even a little bit.”
“And they get to make the rules.”
It was bad enough when her family all got together. Sure, they loved each other, but there was plenty of infighting between relatives. There were a couple of aunts who hadn’t talked in decades, and Harper wasn’t sure if anyone except for them remembered why anymore. She would rather not imagine what it would be like if they could make decisions for everybody else.
He ran a hand through his tousled hair. “The big rules, yeah. And if you don’t follow along, you get kicked out. Declared an outlaw.”
“So are you…?”
He barked a laugh. “Not yet. See, my approach was to fly under everybody’s radar—the clan’s, the bloodsuckers’, everybody. Worked until now. In another week? If this SD card doesn’t pan out, yeah, I’ll be an outlaw for sure, but it won’t much matter because I’ll also be dead.”
“That’s a healthy way of looking at it.”
“A regular Pollyanna, I am,” he said.
Harper blinked at him. “Who?”
“Never mind.”
“Anyway, that sounds really harsh,” she said, redirecting the conversation. “I mean, families are supposed to help each other.”
He nodded at her phone, which dangled from the charger. “So why aren’t you calling anyone up for help? Aside from the whole tracking thing.”
Harper shook her head. “I’m not dragging my family into this. Even my country cousins don’t have the firepower to face down these guys, and they don’t deserve the trouble it’d bring.”
“Exactly,” he said. “I can’t blame the clan for shooting my idea down. I’m not happy with it, and I’m going to prove them wrong, but I can’t blame them. They have a lot of people to take care of, and they don’t like risk.”
“Well, that’s big of you.”
He flashed a toothy smile. “Not really. When this works, I’m going to rub it in their furry faces.”
Harper snorted a laugh. “Now, that’s the Levi I know.”
“If we’re going to make it, though, we need to find a place to hole up while Mortensen is busy chasing down the semi and the police are looking for a Mini Cooper,” he said. “We’re pretty conspicuous in this car.”
“Just say the word,” she said. “But no more barns, okay? I’m kind of over places with only one entrance.”
“All it takes is one little grenade, and you’re all jumpy.” He shook his head in mock disgust. “Picky, picky.”
Harper slid her eyes over to him. He somehow managed to sprawl even in the small passenger seat, all casual loose-limbed indolence, with his rough-hewn features and the contours of his chest standing out under his gray tee.
“Yeah,” she said. “Picky. That’s me.”
Chapter Three
They ended up parked in a field behind a tumble-down house. The trees and shrubs that had been planted around it a century ago formed a thick wood that reached the shoulder of the back road Levi had directed Harper down. Even Levi couldn’t make out the county road through the tangle, and although it was only midafternoon, the trees were tall enough to cast their shade across the small car where it rested in the high grass. The quiet buzz of grasshoppers was cut through by birdsong and the sound of the occasional car flying past on the unseen road.
“I always wonder who used to live in places like this,” Harper said, nodding toward the bulk of the house as she folded the sunglasses and set them on the dash.
Levi surveyed it. The windows were broken out, the roof sagging dramatically, the blistered paint worn away from the weather-silvered siding. Small trees grew up through the boards of the porch that was slowly pulling away from the house.
Harper inspected the remains of her sub. “There were a few houses like that near my Nana’s place. We used to sneak inside even though we weren’t supposed to. One of them still had all its furniture. The old Boyd place, it was called, but nobody remembers who the Boyds were.”
“Huh,” Levi said, pushing the passenger seat all the way back and reclining it slightly to stretch his legs out. “I can’t say that I’ve ever thought much about it.” He took another bite of his sandwich.
“That seems like a terrible way to go, you know? You move away or die, and there’s not even anyone who cares enough to claim the quilt your mother made,” she continued.
Harper bent to dig in her purse until she came up with two warm beers. She passed him one, pushing her hair back over her shoulder as she straightened.
He popped the tab. “Why’s it so terrible that nobody’s sad? If I die, I don’t want anyone crying for me or divvying up my stuff.”
Harper frowned deeply at that, her plump lips drawing into an irritated bow. “The only reason your mother and brothers and sisters and anyone else who cared about you wouldn’t be crying is if you broke their hearts too many times first.” Her next bite of her sandwich looked savage.
Ouch. That hit a little too close to home. He took a bite of his own sub to avoid coming up with a response.
They lapsed into silence until they’d finished their meal, splitting the third sandwich between them. The air between them crackled with all the things that were left unsaid, but Levi didn’t know how to say them—or if he wanted to.
He tried to come up with a list of reasons why he definitely wasn’t attracted to her: she was bossy; she was impulsive; she wasn’t like any of the other women he’d known. But all of those just made him like her more. Which did nothing for the state of his mind or, well, his dick.
The most primal parts of his brain were still sending him those same damned messages, even in human form, now. It was bad, really bad. All werewolves surrendered to it eventually, the urge to settle, his brother Holt used to groan with mock-despair, looking at his wife with fond eyes.
All other werewolves, maybe. Not Levi.
When they were finished eating, Harper collected all the trash in the bottom of a plastic bag.
“Are you always so neat?” Levi asked, finally breaking the silence with what he hoped would be tension-dissolving small talk.
“What?” She blinked at him.
“You. Are you always so neat?”
She looked down at the plastic bag in her hand, to which she’d added the empty beer can that she had brought from the boat. “I guess so.”
“It’s cute,” his mouth said—and his brain immediately regretted it, because that was definitely not the sort of thing he should even be thinking right now.
She stiffened. “You’re not allowed to have an opinion on the cuteness of anything I do. You gave up that privilege, if you ever had it.”
“Well, it is,” he said, spreading his hands defensively.
She let out a huff of air, rolling her eyes, but she relaxed slightly. “Well, if you think it’s so cute
, I bet you’re a pig.”
Levi shrugged, making a pretense at light humor. “Outdoors? I’m pristine. No littering, leave no trace, all that. Indoors? I guess it depends if someone’s coming over.”
Reluctant amusement glinted in her eyes. “And do they?” She added quickly, “Not that it’s any of my business.”
“Well, aren’t you a nosey parker,” he said. “Not like you mean, no. That ‘it’s me, not you’ speech? I really meant it.”
“Whatever,” she shrugged, her eyes sliding away.
Her bitterness stung him. It shouldn’t. He had no right to feel anything about it at all—in fact, he’d explicitly refused any right he might have pretended to.
But it seemed like the rest of him missed the memo. And before he could stop himself, he said, “Look, if things were different, maybe—”
Harper’s head snapped around, her gray eyes blazing. “No maybe. That’s what guys say when they don’t mean it. That’s what they say before the turn around and walk out and never come back, okay? So don’t you maybe me. If you meant anything at all, those maybes wouldn’t matter. No ifs, ands, or buts. You ever heard of that phrase? I know what you are, and I’ve said it’s fine, all right? Just don’t pretend you’re anything else.”
“No, it’s not fine.” The words escaped him before he could stop himself, words he’d never meant to say. “I’ve hurt you, and I’m sorry, but I’ll just go on hurting you, and I don’t know how to stop because if I try, I’ll just end up hurting you worse—”
And then she kissed him. The bag of trash crinkled between them, digging into his stomach, but her mouth on his was hot and desperate, as desperate as he felt. And he leaned back against the chair, pulling her on top of him with an arm around her waist until she straddled his legs with the bag trapped between them. Her free hand was on his face, on his cheek, her fingers sliding up into his hair. She tasted like cheap beer and Subway sandwiches and a hint of mint gum and like everything good he’d ever wanted in his life.
And when she pulled back, she said, “I’m a big girl. I make my own decisions. Even the bad ones.”
