Scout: Reckless Desires (Norseton Wolves #7)

by Holley Trent

  “Most folks can’t walk away from a wreck the way you and Arnold did,” Adam said.

  “That’s how you knew?” Petra’s nose crinkled when she furrowed her brow.

  Damn shame how someone so evil could be so cute.

  Not that Paul could talk. One of his exes liked to call him “The Devil Himself,” and according to his mother, he was attractive enough for women to tolerate him for at least a little while. A little while was usually all he wanted, anyway.

  “No, that’s how we guessed. We sent Nixon and Esther up to check things out, and I guess some hospitals are more than willing to transfer uninsured patients out when someone promises to pay the bill. Nixon knew what you were the moment he stepped into your room.”

  Petra whipped her head around toward her brother, who was standing in the doorway. “You let ’em take me?”

  Arnold turned his hands over and let out a ragged breath. “I didn’t see where I had a choice, P. Where were we gonna go, anyway? Start hitchhiking again? I don’t think so. Not after what happened last time.”

  “What happened last time?” Paul asked. He was in the middle of a wolf conversation and the answer was probably none of his damned business, but he needed to know just how reckless the patient in his charge was. If she and her brother had been thumbing rides across the country, the chances of her being the kind of person to adhere to a care plan were probably quite slim.

  Petra squired and tried to yank her hands away from him.

  He let one of her hands go, and leaned back just in time to avoid her fist arcing toward his nose.

  “Petra!” Arnold scolded. “That’s not nice.”

  Grinding his teeth, Paul grabbed her flailing arm, pinned her wrists once more, and looked to Graciella.

  “Sorry.” She cringed. “I got distracted. I’ll do better.” She must have pushed one of her soothing surges of magic at Petra, because the wild wolf sighed and simmered down.

  “You know, at the hospital here, they’ve got beds with straps,” Paul said to Petra. “I’m wondering if you need one.”

  “You’re not strapping me down.”

  “Stop acting like you need to be bound, then, and I won’t make any further overtures that I’ll sign off on the activity. Prove to me you’re not going to swing at me again if I let go of you.”

  She just blinked.

  “Why the hell are you swinging at me, anyway? I’m trying to help you.”

  “You’re nosy. I don’t like nosy people.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’m not here out of the goodness of my heart, precious. Your alpha called my clan’s queen and asked if there was a doctor they could send over to monitor you, and they sent me. You hear that? I didn’t volunteer. I’m getting the same paycheck I would have been getting if I’d been at the hospital right now haunting the emergency room. I’m just doing my job. Call me nosy if you want to, but I have people expecting me to do my job to the best of my ability, because that’s what I’m paid to do. You want to refuse care?” He shrugged. “Take it up with your alpha. I’m not convinced you’re rational enough to make medical decisions for yourself right now.”

  “Fuck you, dude.”

  “If you say so.”

  While he’d been telling the truth when he’d said he would have been paid the same no matter where he was working, he had to admit that arguing with a cranky, naked wolf was a lot more entertaining than bending over the nurses’ station counter filling out charts and forms ad nauseam. At least he’d have a good story to tell Chris later.

  That asshole’s not gonna believe this.

  “That guy’s not my alpha,” Petra said. “He can’t make decisions for me.”

  “For right now, he is,” Arnold said.

  “No.” She gave her head a hard shake and glowered at her brother. “We said we’d never join another pack.”

  “I didn’t see where we had a choice.”

  “We’ll pay him back whatever we owe him and go. That’s what the holdup is about, right? Always comes down to the money.”

  Arnold looked to his new alpha, who’d been very quietly waiting in the doorway.

  That was typical Adam, from Paul’s experience. He tended to wait and watch before opening his mouth, and that was why Paul liked him.

  “Told you she was gonna say that,” Arnold said.

  Adam rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms and grunted. “Debt or no debt, makes no difference to me. If she doesn’t want to be here, I’m not gonna force her to stay. The wolves here all want to be here, and I don’t stand for there being any exceptions.” He dropped his hands and then crossed his arms over his chest. “Doc, if you think she’s healthy enough to be released from care, let her go. She doesn’t have to stay.”

  “Let’s go, Arnold,” Petra said.

  She wasn’t going to go very far. Paul still hadn’t let go of her, and he still didn’t know enough to work up a medical opinion. She seemed lucid, if a bit aggressive and argumentative, but for all he knew, werewolves made bad patients in general. She was still a little banged up. Her face was swollen and bruised. He’d guessed that the lacerations on her forearms and the top of her head from her impact with her truck’s windshield were healing nicely, but he hadn’t had a chance to take a look.

  Beyond the X-rays she’d had done at the hospital in Oklahoma, she hadn’t had any new scans. For all he knew, she could have been a ticking time bomb on the inside.

  But logic wasn’t why he was gripping her wrists so tightly and unwilling to let go. That was his gut talking. It said, Don’t let her run, and the people of his clan hadn’t survived for so long by ignoring their guts. No one had better guts than Vikings.

  He pulled in a bracing breath through his nose and let it out through his mouth, keeping his gaze straight and true on her swollen face. “I think she needs further observation.”

  “You son of a—”

  Whatever toxic words she was going to spew, she didn’t have a chance to spit out. Her eyelids drifted closed and body went limp. When her body listed toward the floor, he and Graciella had to jump to keep her from face-planting.

  Graciella chuckled nervously and then cringed at Adam. “Sorry. Might have overdone that surge a little. You know, learning curve, and all.”

  Adam pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head. “Gods, girl. She’s gonna be spitting mad when she wakes up.”

  “Probably,” Arnold said quietly.

  “Hey, I won’t let you take the fall. You did the right thing, son.”

  Arnold scoffed. “Yeah, you convince her of that the next time she opens her eyes.”

  “Better for the words to come from you than for her to hear me saying them. She’ll actually believe you.”

  “Nice that you think that, Alpha, but you don’t know Petra. I did promise her that we’d never join another pack, and look where we are now.”

  Paul wanted to ask why they hadn’t wanted to be in a group, but he’d already been nosy enough, and he wasn’t even sure why he cared. He tended to keep his focus on things that actually concerned him.

  “Wolves have got to settle down sometime,” Adam said, but for whatever reason, he was looking at Paul. “We’re all compelled to situate ourselves somewhere. Trust me. Me and Lil and the boys were on the road for going on twenty years, and we were okay at first, but that contentedness changed before we realized it. You feel the call to go home.”

  Home. Yeah.

  Paul knew all about that. He’d returned to Norseton in spite of feeling like there was nothing there for him.

  Adam looked to Arnold, who was leaning with crossed arms into the doorway and staring down at his feet.

  “Can’t go back to the birthpack,” Arnold said.

  “I hope you’ll tell me why someday,” Adam said. “That’s the only thing I demand of the wolves here. Just to be honest with everyone. Honesty keeps everyone safe.”

  Arnold gave a slow nod and kept staring at the floor. “Yeah. You’re right.”

&nbs
p; “Come on,” Graciella said quietly, drawing Paul’s attention back to the unconscious wild woman. “Help me get Petra back into the bed and under the covers.”

  Petra slept with her head lolled to the side and her mouth open.

  Cute, in a snarly predator kind of way.

  He snorted and couldn’t help himself. She was like a lion with no teeth or claws. Scary in theory, but she couldn’t really do much harm.

  “None of us can go back to where we started,” Adam said as Paul examined the wounds at the top of Petra’s head. “Isn’t that right, Paul?”

  Paul didn’t answer. Adam’s observation had seemed hypothetical in tone, and Paul didn’t know the right answer, anyway.

  He rooted some first aid items out of his medical bag and went to work disinfecting Petra’s torn-up IV needle site. He didn’t want to have to re-stick her. Ideally, her next meal would be a solid one.

  Maybe she’ll be less cranky after a solid meal.

  He scoffed at himself and discarded a piece of bloody gauze.

  Food doesn’t make me any nicer. Probably won’t fix her, either.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When Petra regained consciousness, she didn’t immediately open her eyes. First, she needed to convince herself just a little bit that she was alive and not merrily prancing along down the winding path to hell. She was pretty sure that was where werewolves who hadn’t accomplished anything in life besides learning to belch the alphabet backward went.

  “Freakin’ Arnold,” she muttered. “All his fault.”

  She wriggled her toes and felt the light blanket over them.

  “Okay. Feeling stuff is good.”

  She curled her fingers and grimaced at the flex of the sore muscles in her forearms.

  “Ow. What’d I do to those?”

  She tried to make sense of the noise around her. Air conditioning. Chirping outside from some kind of bug. A television nearby.

  She drew in the scents. Spice and sweetness. Like chili and cupcakes.

  Her spine tingled with the prickle of proximity of bodies very nearby.

  They’re—touching me.

  They were in her space, and she was too out of it to have sensed them sooner.

  Female bodies. Giggling female bodies, all with similar scents.

  Family?

  She opened one eye and when her vision cleared, she found the woman who’d knocked her the fuck out sitting on the bed to her right. Graciella, she thought her name was.

  Turning her head slightly to the left, there was another woman. She looked remarkably similar to Graciella. Same sort of energy, too.

  Probably sisters.

  Petra dragged her tongue across her dry lips and tried to sit up, but the covers were clamped down too tight. The ladies were sitting on them.

  “Let me up,” she rasped, realizing that in all that time she’d been talking to herself, she’d been talking to them.

  Oh, hell.

  Both looked down at her, then at each other.

  “Let me up.”

  They didn’t move, but another woman Petra hadn’t noticed before did. She must have been sitting at the bedside or elsewhere out of view, but she moved to the foot of the bed and leaned on the wooden crossbar. Older than the other two women, but same dark hair. Same light brown skin. Same nagging energy.

  Petra had thought she’d wanted to move, but her limbs didn’t seem to have the get-up-and-go she needed to stage a decent escape attempt.

  Damned useless body. What gives?

  “Don’t feel like you need to get up unless you have to pee,” the older one said. “I doubt you do, but don’t worry. We got you cleaned up. No need to be ashamed.”

  Petra wasn’t running on all cylinders, so she needed a few seconds to grasp what the hell the woman was talking about. They’d been caring for her as if she were some sort of invalid, when she most certainly wasn’t.

  “Let me up.”

  “Just be still,” the lady said. “No need to tax yourself. It’s not like you’re getting charged by the night to be here. This is your house.” She straightened up and moved away from the end of the bed.

  Petra could then see the open armoire with the television playing some show she didn’t recognize on low volume, but she wouldn’t have recognized much of anything. She and Arnold hadn’t been in front of very may televisions in the past ten years. On the rare occasions they could afford to rent a room somewhere, they’d always been too tired to turn on the sets.

  One of the words the lady had used bounced around in Petra’s head like a paper bag in a windstorm. It didn’t make sense. She’d said home.

  “What do you mean by home? I don’t know this place. I don’t come from New Mexico.”

  “Nah, you don’t. Everyone in this pack is from somewhere else. Me and my sisters are from Delaware.”

  “Your—sisters.” Petra looked at the ladies on either side of her. The lady had two sisters. Petra had always wanted one. All she’d had was Arnold, and apparently two children had been enough for their mother. Maybe even two too many after their father had left the way he did.

  “Uh-huh. Yeah, I know. Wolves don’t generally have so many children because the pregnancies are so hard, but…” She chuckled and rubbed her own swollen belly. “Our family has always been very good at that.”

  “Understatement,” Graciella said. “Our cousins have so many kids.”

  Her sister moved to the side of the bed, likely to a chair, and Graciella’s body blocked her from view. Petra didn’t like not being able to see people talking. The disembodied voices always made her nervous for some reason.

  “I’m Lisa,” came the voice. “I was one of the first brides brought here.”

  “Brides?” Petra tried to scramble out of the covers so she could put on some clothes and flee, but she couldn’t. Just couldn’t. But she wasn’t about to be any wolf’s chew toy.

  Hell fuckin’ no.

  Lisa laughed so hard that she snorted, and her sisters took up the refrain.

  “Don’t laugh at me. I don’t see what’s so damned funny.”

  Lisa’s giggles tapered off with a light sigh. “We’re laughing because we know exactly what triggered you, and seeing that shit’s the same everywhere, no matter what packs we come out of or how long we’ve been gone from them, is funny. Relax. I wasn’t traded away by my parents.”

  “Oh.” Though somewhat mollified, Petra wasn’t quite ready to take the deep breath her body needed.

  “I volunteered to come. I’m sure you know how mate calls work, right?”

  Petra closed her eyes and scrounged around in her memory for any clue of what those were. When she and Arnold had left their pack, they’d been in early puberty. They’d missed a lot of the grown-up talk, and mostly they relied on secondhand stories they picked up here and there to know how wolves were supposed to behave.

  She sucked in the breath anyway, and let it out. She had to ask. Had to know.

  “I don’t remember what a mate call is. I don’t think our pack did very many of them.”

  “Oh,” Lisa said. “Well, alphas like Adam send out calls to all the other known packs stating that they have unattached male wolves looking for mates. Alphas don’t always post the information, but if they’re fine with getting rid of a few heads for whatever reason, they’ll let the ladies go. But, getting paired up is a crapshoot. A woman could be going into a pack even worse than the one she’s leaving, and once she arrives at her new pack, she’s not generally allowed to leave.”

  “And you wanted to stay?”

  “Yeah. It just so happens that I like my husband. Usually doesn’t work that way. Anyhow, I brought my sisters here to spare them from being matched within our old pack. Our old alpha would have demanded our father give them up on their eighteenth birthdays if I hadn’t. You’ve already met Graciella.”

  Graciella gave Petra a little finger wave and a smile. “Sorry for making you pass out. That’s a weird ability of the women in our line, and it
’s been changing lately, for better or worse. I didn’t realize how much.”

  Petra growled softly.

  Graciella patted her head. “I’ll buy you ice cream or something to make up for it.”

  “And on your other side is Leticia,” Lisa said.

  “Hi!” Leticia said sunnily.

  Sunny wolves were suspicious wolves. Petra side-eyed her. “Um. Hi?”

  “We’re just here to keep you from running off into the night before you’ve had a chance to really understand what’s happening,” Lisa said.

  “Far as I can see, I’m being held here against my will.”

  “You can go,” Graciella said. “We hope you’ll stay, but like we said before, everyone here in Norseton wants to be here. This is a young pack. Adam’s building us up pretty much from scratch.”

  “Bunch of rejects,” Leticia said with a chuckle.

  “What do you mean?” Petra asked.

  “Alpha and Mrs. Carbone had to leave their pack in New Jersey with their son and nephew because they were perceived to be a threat to the alpha there. While out traveling, they picked up a couple of other expelled, young, would-be alphas, and the six of them lived on the road for a long time, picking up odd jobs and doing security work. Then one day, they followed a lead here and got themselves permanent jobs. As soon as they got settled in, the men put out calls for mates. We’ve been collecting displaced wolves ever since. I guess that’s sort of our M.O.”

  “Not a bad one to have, right?” Graciella asked. “Everyone in this pack is a little weird. You’ll see what I mean once you’re up and about. Hi, Paul.”

  Paul?

  “Hey,” came the low voice.

  Oh, shit. Petra groaned.

  She couldn’t see the doctor who must have been in the doorway, and that meant he probably couldn’t see much of her, either. She was glad. Just making eye contact with the man put her in attack mode for some damn reason. She didn’t usually get so agitated around a stranger unless her instincts led her to believe they were going to attack first.