Talking Trouble

by Barbara Elsborg

  She tugged out of his grasp and he let her go. Jinx wobbled but stayed on her feet.

  Morrison smiled. “All that silver and you’re still standing? Call me impressed.” He wrinkled his nose. “You smell fucking terrible.”

  “I’ll ask for my money back,” Jinx forced out. “The sales assistant said it would make me irresistible.”

  “You’re irresistible without that crap and unmistakable with it.”

  Oh damn. Instead of flying under their radar, the overpowering scent had made her stand out. Stupid mistake.

  His eyes darkened as he laughed. “I knew you’d come.” He looked her up and down. “You smell vile, but you’re very beautiful. Just like your mother.”

  He knows exactly who I am. Jinx gave up all hope of pretense. She’d walked into a trap and it bloody well served her right.

  “Is she really dead?” she asked, hope flaring for just a moment.

  “I’m afraid so. I should have thought of doing this before. A miscalculation. Won’t happen again.”

  She didn’t like the way he was looking at her. She’d have coped better with anger than raw lust. He should have been angry. More than angry. Furious. Wolves weren’t supposed to leave their pack without permission—especially twelve year olds who hadn’t even gone through their first shift. But then, he didn’t know for sure that she’d ever shifted. Did he? Her scant knowledge of wolf ways worried her. She’d learned the basics with the pack but not everything.

  “I’m surprised you’re not more incapacitated.” Morrison raked her with his gaze. “Interesting.”

  She didn’t want to be interesting.

  What do you want?—seemed the obvious question, but it had an obvious answer. She only knew of one reason why the alpha might want her—the same reason that had driven her away when she was twelve.

  Mourners gathered around them, some looking curious and others, mainly women, resentful. There was no sign of the priest. Jinx wished she’d shifted when she’d had the chance and be damned with the consequences. Now the silver collar stopped her, though it also acted as a werewolf repellent. Everyone apart from Morrison’s enforcers kept their distance.

  “What do you call yourself?” Morrison asked.

  Not yours, arsehole. She pressed her lips together.

  “We know you changed your name. We looked for you and there’s never been any trace of Lizzie Cole. What are you called?”

  The stupidest person in the world?

  “Your mother pretended you’d wandered off. Said you must have been abducted. She cried for weeks. We even involved the police until we found someone who’d seen you getting on a train. Your mother didn’t know anything. Well, I accepted that eventually.”

  Jinx curled her fingers into fists. I want to kill you.

  “When we realized a quantity of gold had gone, she told us your father, who wasn’t dead after all, must have come and taken you and the gold as well. The fact that she’d stayed behind made us believe it. What a conniving bitch. It was only when she was dying and delirious did we learn she’d sent you away with the gold and lied about your father. She told us other stuff about you as well.” He growled. “Fascinating details.”

  Jinx clenched her teeth.

  “So,” Morrison smiled at her, “your name? And where’s the gold?”

  Everything would unravel if they knew her name. They’d trace her back to the city she lived in, to her flat, to her job. Even if she escaped, she’d have nowhere to go back to. As for the gold, it had gone on making a life for herself once she was out of local authority care.

  “Cat got your tongue?” Morrison signaled to Stephan, who was the same age as her. He’d always scared her with his nasty tricks and sharp blows when they were kids. She guessed he was now Morrison’s beta.

  Stephan grabbed the hair of the woman next to him and put her in a hold where one quick twist would snap her neck. The woman’s face flooded with terror.

  “She’s of no value to me, but you are,” Morrison said. “Consider this your first lesson in how to make yourself popular with the pack. Give me your name or she dies.”

  Life as she knew it was over. No point holding back. “Jinx Weston.”

  Stephan let the woman go and the bitch turned to grin at Morrison. Fuck. Why didn’t I lie? All those years she’d dreamed about being a spy and she’d cracked in seconds. She couldn’t stand the idea of anyone being hurt because of her.

  “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Morrison asked. “Why did you pick Jinx?”

  “Because I felt like the unluckiest person in the world.”

  “Well, your luck just changed, sweetheart.” He looked round the group. “Everyone, meet my mate, Jinx Weston.”

  What the fuck?

  They weren’t mates and surely the pack could see that. There was instant connectivity between mates, immediate lust, urgent desperation to be close. She wanted to get as far away from Morrison has she possibly could, or alternatively near enough to rip out his throat. If she could get rid of the collar, she could do it, morph only her hand, let out her claws, but she’d get torn to shreds. And let’s face it, I couldn’t do it. No matter what the prick plans to do, I can’t kill him.

  Her bewildered confusion and the depressive influence of the collar allowed them to maneuver her into a black BMW without too much trouble. Well, it took two of them and she landed a few well directed kicks at a couple of groins that had to hurt at least temporarily, but it made no difference. They dumped her to sit alone in the back of the car and her mind raced so fast, her head felt about to explode. Or maybe that was because of the suffocating collar or the even more suffocating stench of the perfume in a confined space. Morrison sat in the front, his head hanging out the window while Stephan drove with his window also rolled down. She’d have sniggered if she hadn’t been in such a mess.

  “A shower is a priority,” Morrison said.

  “I’d noticed there was a terrible stink coming from your direction,” she muttered.

  He chuckled.

  Jinx pretended to rub her neck as she checked the fastening on the collar. Even lifting her hand to it was hard. Her fingers burned. There was no way she could remove the damn thing without inspecting the clasp in a mirror.

  Morrison had taken her purse and she watched him go through the contents. At least she’d had some sense. Enough to bring nothing that related to where she lived. She’d disposed of the train ticket from Bristol at Harrogate station and had intended to buy another single to make the return journey. She’d left her mobile, and everything personal back at her flat. An ache started in her chest as she wondered if she’d ever see her home again.

  “Everyone’s been looking forward to meeting my mate.” Morrison grinned at her.

  She was pissed off that he’d been so sure she’d come. How she wanted to smash those shiny white teeth down his stupid throat. “I’m not your mate.”

  “Yeah, you are.”

  Not.

  She watched the road rushing past and considered throwing herself from the car. They’d child-locked the door, but maybe she could ask for the window to be lowered and squeeze out. Most injuries would heal, though not fast enough for her to get away. She had to accept it was too dangerous to risk damage when she couldn’t shift. But then, maybe she didn’t need to. A bad enough incident would draw the emergency services.

  Jinx swallowed her sigh. As if the pack would allow the police or medics anywhere near her. Even so, if they went through a town, she’d try something—putting her hands over Stephan’s eyes, maybe kicking the back window out if she could. She ran through ideas in her head, hoping for help from her wolf, but came up with nothing. The silver had pushed the animal deep.

  “I expect you have lots of questions,” Morrison said.

  Yes, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of asking them.

  She inwardly railed at her stupidity, but it was pointless wasting time on regret. She needed a plan, but she could barely think, let alone bre
athe. Jinx swallowed repeatedly, but it felt as if she was being slowly choked.

  The sacrifice of fifteen lonely years spent away from her mother had been wasted by a moment’s weakness, a pathetic need to say a last goodbye. Did her mother have any idea how hard her life had been? Jinx understood the reasons for sending her away, but it didn’t make it any easier to bear.

  I’m never having children. Never, never, never. She knew her mother had been faced with an impossible choice. Whatever decision she made was both right and wrong for both of them. Stay with the pack and be trapped. Leave the pack and lose her mother.

  Jinx had not been happy through her teenage years. She’d lived in a variety of children’s homes because entering the care system at age twelve had given her no hope of adoption or even foster parents, especially when she’d refused to speak. Knowing she wasn’t to tell anyone where she’d come from or who she was, it had seemed safer to say nothing at all. Brought up by people who were paid to take care of her but not love her, she’d turned into a mouse, creeping around, trying to stay unnoticed. But it had been hard to stay silent and the questions had still come once she’d started to speak, though she was strong enough to keep her secrets.

  The day she’d been allowed to leave local authority care, she’d returned to where she’d hidden the gold and cried when she found it still there. It gave her the new life she needed and she realized then, the extent of the sacrifice her mother had made.

  “Have you changed?” she asked.

  Morrison started at the sudden question. “Do I look as if I’ve changed?”

  He gave her a sly glance and she fought hard not to shudder. She’d been ten when the alpha she’d known all her life had his throat ripped out by Morrison in a leadership challenge the whole pack had been forced to watch, even the youngest children. Her mother said it was the wolf way, that new replaced old, strong replaced weak, but the new guy was a very different sort of wolf—hard, cruel and controlling. Morrison lacked the fathering instinct of his predecessor, didn’t possess his fairness, his wisdom, his kindness.

  Some wolves had left, others tried to leave, but when two turned up dead, no one else attempted to quit the pack. Her mother had been talking about going but had left it too late. Even without her mother telling her, Jinx instinctively knew she needed to stay out of the new leader’s sight and when he’d come sniffing around her mother, she’d hidden.

  Jinx spent her childhood hoping she’d be able to shift when her time came. Not all pack children did and her mother had warned her it might not happen, but Jinx had always felt her wolf growing alongside her. Once Morrison became alpha, her mother told her she hoped she never shifted and Jinx hadn’t understood until a girl two years older than her called Katie had transformed for the first time. Jinx was declared old enough to watch and she’d been excited and afterwards scared to see the way Katie turned into a wolf with screams and high pitched yowls. But then Morrison shifted and fucked her, followed by anyone else who wanted her. When she’d morphed back to her human form, the men took her again. Jinx watched Katie’s eyes change and afterwards, Katie hadn’t wanted anything to do with Jinx anymore.

  “This is not the wolf way,” Jinx’s mother had told her. “I won’t let him do that to you.”

  So they’d run but were caught and beaten. She shivered as she remembered Morrison whipping her mother while she’d watched, then he’d whipped her. And when Jinx had healed much faster than her mother, her mother had told her to pretend she still hurt. They tried again, run to another pack where her mother pleaded for them to be taken in, only for them to be sent back to Morrison and beaten once more. The final attempt came on her twelfth birthday.

  “We can’t delay any longer,” her mother had said. “You’re going to shift at the next full moon. I feel it. He feels it. I can’t let him see what you’re capable of, that you’re different. We need to go now.”

  But she hadn’t realized her mother wouldn’t go with her and hadn’t fully understood what she’d meant about being different. Still didn’t.

  Jinx stared out of the car window as they left settlements behind and headed deeper into the countryside. The collar made her feel sleepy and ill. They’d been nowhere near a town. They turned off the main road onto minor country ones hemmed by trees. At the end of a lane running alongside a reservoir, they pulled through iron gates onto a drive and she spotted a dark, sprawling mansion in the distance. Other cars stopped behind them on the gravel. Morrison opened the rear door and Jinx staggered out. This wasn’t the time to be awkward. She needed the collar off.

  He dragged her by the arm to the rear of the property. “Strip,” he said.

  Now was the time to be awkward. “No.”

  “You’re not going into my house stinking of perfume. Take your clothes off or I’ll rip them off.”

  Jinx gulped and unfastened her blouse. She let it fall to the ground and kicked off her sandals so she could remove her jeans. It was like moving in treacle, every shift of her body slow and heavy. She stood there in matching black lacy underwear, lifted her hands to her hips, trying to strike a defiant pose, though she didn’t feel very brave, and watched him stare at her.

  “Thank fuck you take after your mother. Let’s hope you’re hotter in bed.”

  Bastard. She took a step forward, but a blast of cold water slammed her to a halt and she gasped in surprise. Morrison took the hose from Stephan and aimed the jet at her breasts. Jinx sucked in a breath as her nipples pebbled.

  “Turn round,” Morrison ordered.

  Jinx turned, wishing she was wearing granny pants instead of her thong.

  “Shiiiit,” both guys said in unison.

  “Fuck,” she muttered.

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  About the Author

  Barbara Elsborg lives in West Yorkshire in the north of England. She always wanted to be a spy, but having confessed that to everyone without them even resorting to torture, she decided it was not for her.

  Vulcanology scorched her feet. A morbid fear of sharks put paid to marine biology. So instead, she spent several years successfully selling cyanide.

  After dragging up two rotten, ungrateful children and frustrating her sexy, devoted, wonderful husband (who can now stop twisting her arm) she finally has time to conduct an affair with an electrifying plugged-in male, her laptop.

  Her books feature quirky heroines and bad boys, and she hopes they are much fun to read as they were to write.

  Email: bjelsborg@gmail.com

  Barbara loves to hear from readers. You can find her contact information, website and author biography at http://www.totallybound.com.

  Also by Barbara Elsborg

  Starting Over

  Perfect Trouble

  Totally Bound Publishing