by Ava Benton
“He was staring at us. At you, too.” Her eyes touched mine for a second before moving back over my head, watching.
“Me? Why me?”
Compared to them?
In whose fantasy world did that happen? Not even in mine. I wasn’t delusional.
“Why not you?” she asked in a distracted voice.
Her baby blue eyes were wide with fear. She was afraid. A girl like her, with all the confidence and personality in the world.
A tremor ran through me. This dude had to be bad news.
And that pissed me off.
“Who is it? What do we have to do to get rid of him?” I hissed as I turned my head to look toward the door.
“No. It’s not like that,” Nia whispered.
“Then what?” I asked. “There are safety patrols all over the place. This guy has scared the shit out of you, it’s obvious.”
“You don’t understand,” Layla murmured. When she shook her head, beads clicked together.
“So, tell me. You’re all scared out of your wits and I’m right here with you, so I think I deserve to know.”
“We’re not scared out of our wits.” Nia’s voice was a little sharper than it had ever been before.
I had pushed too far.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to insult you.”
“You didn’t,” Daniela murmured before grabbing Layla’s arm. “There. They just came in.”
“They?” I looked again and could almost understand their worry, even though I didn’t know who the two men were.
They were built like brick shithouses, massive in the shoulders and arms. Just like most of the guys in the group, I thought with a note of surprise.
All of them looked like they’d just stepped off the cover of Men’s Health. The most beautiful group of people I had ever seen.
It was obvious they were brothers. Maybe even twins. Both tall, with the same dark chocolate-colored hair and eyes the color of black coffee. Both with the same strong features, too—chiseled jaws, square chins.
Any girl’s fantasy, really. But the girls I was with obviously didn’t think of them that way.
I wondered why.
Maybe they used to be part of the group? That made sense, since they were just as beautiful as everybody else.
One of them stood slightly in front of the other and they murmured back and forth, eyes scanning the shop. Something about the way they held their heads high, like they were looking down their noses, pissed me off.
Who did they think they were?
I wasn’t afraid of them.
They were just two meatheads, two no-neck thugs. I was already halfway across the shop before I realized I had started walking toward them.
I barely heard Nia hissing at me to stop. It was too late, anyway—my feet were moving and I was glaring at the two dark-haired thugs.
There was no pretending I wasn’t heading straight for them.
“Can I do something for you?” I asked the first one, the one standing slightly in front of the other.
They even dressed alike, both in jeans and dark t-shirts.
I wanted to ask if their mother planned on ever dressing them as individuals, or if she’d dress them as twins for the rest of their lives.
He blinked down at me before his full lips curved into a semi-contemptuous smile that made my blood boil. “Excuse me?”
I put my hands on my hips. “Ignorant and deaf, too. Sucks to be you.”
“What’s your question?” the other one asked with a straight face.
So, he was the more serious one.
The other was still smirking, and I still wanted to cold cock him for it.
“I could ask if your mother dresses you like twins, but let’s go with the question that’s still waiting for an answer. I asked whether there was something I could do for you, since you’ve been following me and my friends. And staring. Didn’t anybody ever teach you how rude it is to stare?”
“Have you left third grade yet?” the smirker asked.
“What?”
“You sound like a little kid. Don’t you know how rude it is to stare?”
I recoiled. Was he serious? Then I opted to ignore him and continue my line of questioning. “Well? Don’t you? You’re a creeper, and I don’t have time for creepers. Go pick up some skanks on the boardwalk and leave us alone before I find a patrol officer and tell him to kick your trashy ass out of here.”
“Whew.” The serious one chuckled, shaking his head.
The smirker didn’t react.
Why couldn’t I get him to react? He thought I was a joke, which only infuriated me.
And then he stopped smirking. “You think we’re creepers?”
“You act like creepers. What would you think if you were me?”
The fact that he was so calm took a little of the wind out of me. I wanted a reason to scream and thrash around and he wasn’t giving me one.
“I don’t know, Alice. Nobody ever followed me into a record store before.”
I took a step back.
Alice.
How did he know?
My heart ran out of control, and tiny beads of sweat ran down the back of my neck even though the shop was cool.
I looked from him to the guy who was probably his twin, then back to him again as I shook my head.
“You have the wrong person. Leave me alone, you psycho.”
He took a step toward me. “Alice, don’t make a scene. We’re not here to hurt you, but you could get into trouble if the wrong person noticed you.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Me? In trouble? I’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket.”
“This is about a lot more than that.” He glanced in the direction of my friends, who had banded together in the back of the store.
I told myself it was only my imagination that made them look like feral animals, ready to attack.
“What’s it about then?”
“About your writing. We need to talk to you.” He looked at the girls again. “You don’t know who they are, but other people do—and they’ve been reading your articles. We’re not here to hurt you, I swear. We’re here to help you.”
I trembled all over. I couldn’t stop trembling. And I wanted to tell him he was wrong, I really did.
He couldn’t be right. Nobody read my damned articles. I only got paid for them and for the time being, that was all that mattered. They weren’t even published under my actual name.
But they had found me, hadn’t they? And he sounded serious enough to cut right through my heart, didn’t he?
“What do you want from me?” I whispered.
“Just to believe us and listen to what we say. That’s all.”
Oh. As simple as that. “Tell me your name, at least.”
He let out a breath that sounded like it wanted to be a laugh. “Carter. My name is Carter.”
4
Carter
She was something.
When the guy down on the beach mentioned her red hair, something in the back of my mind told me to watch out for a temper.
And I wasn’t wrong.
She looked and sounded like she wanted to flay the skin right off my body—before I said her name, of course. After that? A different story.
And I felt sorry for her when she started trembling.
Stupid kid didn’t know what she got herself into because somebody lied to her—or didn’t tell her the full truth, rather, which was just as dangerous.
Meanwhile, the three in the back of the store who had spotted me and Drew from a distance still didn’t know what to do.
We had them cornered—not that we wanted to hurt them, but they didn’t know that.
I looked over my shoulder at Drew, and he nodded.
When he went to the other girls, I turned my attention back to Alice.
She had the most vivid green eyes, almost unreal. Probably Irish.
“I didn’t mean to freak you out,” I said.
She burst out laughing, which surprised me. It was a high, nervous laughter. “I would hate to see if you had meant to freak me out,” she gasped.
“Yeah, sorry. Diplomacy and gentleness aren’t my strong suit. I’m good at finding people, but not so much with what to do with them when I do find them.”
“You find people for a living? So, I guess I understand how you found me, even though I use my initials.”
“We have our ways.” I looked back to where Drew was talking with the girls.
They had relaxed. Good thing. We needed the group on our side.
She looked around, surprised, like she had forgotten we were in public. “The owner is watching us,” she whispered.
“Yeah, I guess he would. We should get out of here, anyway.” I motioned to Drew and he gathered the girls together. Alice looked back at them.
“You said I don’t know who they are,” she murmured.
“Come on. We need to go. Look casual, like—I don’t know—like we just met and we’re sorta into each other.” I shrugged.
“Do me a favor and try not to sound like that’s going to be such a stretch.” She raised a brow.
“Typical woman, taking everything I say the wrong way.” I slid an arm around her waist and felt the way she went stiff. “Who’s acting like it’s a stretch now?” I murmured in her ear as I led her out of the store.
“I wasn’t expecting physical contact,” she muttered out of the corner of her mouth.
“Yeah, well, a lot of unexpected things are about to happen,” I muttered back.
We stepped out onto the boardwalk and I could breathe again, but just barely. She shook herself free of me but stayed in step as we walked in the direction of the cave.
“What’s this all about, then?” She looked up at me.
I noted how she didn’t have to tilt her head very far back. It was new, being around a woman who was almost as tall as me.
“It’ll be easier to get back to the others and talk about it there,” I said as my eyes swept over the hundreds of people walking back and forth.
She seemed like a strong girl, and smart, but even the strongest and smartest person was bound to lose their shit when they found out they had been hanging out with a bunch of dire wolves. She was sweating a little, and the pungent scent of distrust and confusion wafted off her in waves.
“How do I know I can trust you?” she murmured, looking over her shoulder to where her friends walked with Drew.
“They trust him,” I pointed out.
I wondered what he had said to earn that trust. I could probably learn a little about diplomacy from my brother, even though I would never admit it out loud.
“Is he your brother?”
“My twin, yeah.”
Her creamy skin went pink.
“And no, our mommy doesn’t dress us like twins,” I added, and her skin went even darker red. I couldn’t help it.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” she muttered.
“Don’t be sorry. It was a good line.”
We reached a set of wooden stairs leading down to the sand and walked down. She bent to take off her sandals.
“I get a little bitchy when I feel threatened,” she admitted with a shrug. “And I still don’t know what you want with me, so I’ll probably be bitchy again. I would say I’m sorry…”
“But you’re not. I get it.” I chuckled and shook my head. “You’re different. I got to give you that.”
“Different?”
“You say what’s on your mind.”
“Oh, I see. You’re tired of women playing word games, right? They say one thing but mean another. Bitches be crazy.” Sarcasm dripped from her voice.
I rolled my eyes. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re wrong.” One hand flew to her hip, she cocked her body at an angle as she looked at me. “Easy. You’re wrong.”
“You don’t know a lot of women, then.”
“Nobody knows women better than women,” she countered. “I’ve been observing women my whole life. If the only ones you know are the ones who play games and say things they don’t mean, that’s your fault for going after the wrong women.”
“Ouch.”
“It’s true. There are millions of quality girls in the world who don’t play games because it’s a waste of time. But they’re probably not the ones you go after. You go after the hot ones, the sexy ones.”
“You make it sound like a crime.”
“It’s stupid is what it is,” she muttered. “Keep complaining about the same things over and over but never once consider that you might need to rethink your approach.”
I was about to argue the point when I noticed how far off-topic we had gotten.
Roan would have my head if he knew I was talking about dating with the girl, when we should’ve been talking about arrangements for keeping her safe.
Instead of telling her off for calling me stupid, I asked, “How long have you been writing for the paper?”
If the sudden change of topic surprised her, she didn’t show it. “Oh, gosh. I’ve been working there for three—no, four years. Time flies,” she said with a slight smile.
“You’ve been writing for them all this time?”
“No, no. I’ve been working there for all this time. I’ve been writing since a few weeks ago. Up until this point, I was researching and doing light proofreading for my editor. Nothing major, but it was a paycheck. This is my first series and I’m really loving it.”
I nodded, pensive. She was loving it. The girl didn’t have the first clue, and she called me stupid.
“What gave you the idea to write about them?”
“I noticed them on the beach one day, in a big group. They’re kind of hard to miss. They’re all so beautiful, you know?”
I shrugged, and she turned her face away from me to look out over the water.
“Anyway, I couldn’t help but watch them. I didn’t even go into it wanting a story—I mean, who could imagine a story coming out of a bunch of people on the beach? When I saw them congregating around that cave, I knew there was something going on. I couldn’t help but watch more closely. I watched on and off for three days and got a hell of a sunburn,” she chuckled.
I guessed with skin like hers, she would burn to a crisp.
“Who did you approach first?”
“Nia.” She jerked her head back in the direction of the girls. “The really tall, beautiful one.”
“She’s sort of the leader, isn’t she?”
“Of the girls. How did you know?”
“Sometimes you just know.”
Nia reminded me of Roan in a way.
I thought back to the record store, the way she stood in front of the other two girls like she was protecting them. She had tried to stop Alice from approaching me, too, but Alice didn’t listen to an alpha. Why would she, she was human after all, and therefore wasn’t party to wolf hierarchy.
“I guess I knew, too,” she admitted. “She was the one who drew me in. She has a lot of confidence.”
And Alice admired her for that. I heard it in her voice, saw it in the way she still wouldn’t look at me.
“And she let you spend time with them?”
Her head snapped around. Her eyes blazed. “What? Am I not good enough?”
I frowned. “Huh?”
The girl had a split personality. It was the only reasonable excuse for going back and forth between hot and cold.
“You sound like you don’t believe it. Am I not good enough to hang out with them? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Slow the hell down,” I snapped. “Listen to the question I asked and think about it for a second. They’re a group of people who travel in a tight pack, all over the continent. They probably keep to themselves for the most part. But they brought you in. I only thought it was interesting that they let their guard down to you—especially since you’re a journalist.”
The fire in her eyes died down. “I didn’t t
hink about it that way.”
“I was only surprised.”
“Gotcha.” She looked down at the sand. “I told myself they wanted people to know about their story and their adventures. Was that naïve?”
Yes. Naïve as all fuck. “Maybe a little.”
“Did I get them into trouble?”
Yes. You did. And you could get them killed next. “It’ll be all right. I think we got here in time.”
“I would never be able to forgive myself. They’ve been really nice to me.”
“I understand.”
We were within shouting distance of the bonfire, or what would be a bonfire if it ever got lit.
I wondered whether they had forgotten about it, now that we’d made an appearance. I also wondered if they would even spend the night. And what Alice would do when she found out she had driven them out.
We stopped and waited for the others to catch up.
The girls didn’t look as upset as I thought they would—if anything, they looked like they felt sorry for Alice. I guessed they liked her, and they shouldn’t have opened their mouths when they knew it could’ve gotten her into trouble.
They knew better. She didn’t.
Nia gestured toward the cave with her thumb. “I guess your cousins are in there, talking with Lance and the others.”
I could see how she drew Alice’s attention. She was gorgeous and confident and made a person want to look at her—not because of her beauty, but because she sort of glowed from the inside.
I wondered if Drew realized his eyes kept drifting in her direction.
“Yeah, I guess so. Lance. Is that the tall, blond one?”
She nodded. “He’s not our leader, but he’s filling in for now.”
“Who’s the guy who normally takes care of you guys?”
“Nobody takes care of us,” one of the others chimed in. A girl with beads and feathers braided into her hair. Her skin was the color of caramel. “We take care of ourselves.”
“I mean, your leader. There has to be a leader.”
The third girl put her hand on Caramel’s shoulder. “Yeah, there is. He’s out, scouting our next location.”
“So, you were planning on moving on soon?” I asked.
“That’s usually the way it works,” Nia explained. “By the way, this is Layla and Daniela.”
