by Holley Trent
She closed her eyes and gave her head a rousing shake. “Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering if I should keep my schedule open. Adam said he could marry us if we wanted to do the ceremony tomorrow. Just need to rustle up a couple of witnesses.”
“Not like that’ll be hard. Half the pack would probably like to rubberneck for the blessed event.”
“They meddle because they care.”
“Yeah, they do.” She kept her gaze fixed across the room at the tiny red light on the cable box. “You know, I didn’t have a copy of my own birth certificate until last week. I had to order one from Wyoming Vital Statistics. My parents had to turn my original one over to the pack alpha after I was born. He kept all the records in case folks might want to run off or something.”
“He didn’t think anyone would leave without them?”
She shrugged and swirled her fingertips around a curly loop of Kinzy’s hair. “I guess he didn’t think any of us were resourceful enough to want to try. Anyhow, I have mine now, so if we want to do the deed, I guess we can.”
“The decision is up to you, Leo. I’m not pushing you. I wouldn’t have brought the arrangement up at all if Sheldon hadn’t suggested that you being married would make your case for custody a little stronger for whenever you get around to making it.”
“Still need to make up a good story about how we met for the people who aren’t werewolves.”
“Could always lie and said we met online.”
Leo snickered and tickled the bottom of Kinzy’s chin when she stopped nursing. She was too busy staring at her talking mother to finish the meal she was supposed to be having.
When Kinzy resumed her suckle, Leo settled a little lower on the sofa and sighed. “Everyone in Wolverton would know how hard that would have been. Most of us didn’t have cell phones, and the only computer access I got had a pretty restrictive firewall. I wouldn’t have been able to get to any dating sites. Could you imagine the scandal if I’d been caught trawling around on one of those?”
“Okay. I see your point, but maybe we didn’t have to have met on a dating site. Could have been anywhere.”
“Like where?”
He tapped his chin and made a hmm sound. “Maybe we were arguing in the comments section of some stupid article, and you just couldn’t let your side of the debate drop.”
She snorted and then pinched the bridge of her nose. “So, what? I emailed you to berate you some more? That actually kinda sounds like something I would do.”
“That’s why I said it.”
“Ugh.” She reached over and plucked his arm. “Big meanie. What were we arguing about?”
“In our imaginary Internet debate?”
“Yeah. Were we arguing about anything good? Or were we wasting time on one of those trashy celebrity gossip sites?”
“I would never admit to visiting one of those. Wouldn’t cast me in the greatest light in a court document.”
“Right.” She snickered and moved Kinzy up to her shoulder. Either the baby had gotten full, or was bored. No matter which, Leo was burping her and putting her to bed. Kinzy may have thought she was too cool for schedules, but her mother didn’t agree. “So a site with legitimate news, then.”
“Hmm. Maybe something moderately political, like—I dunno. Water rights.”
“Hey, folks might buy that I would have been reading up on that. My father had some issues with one of our neighbors over the same thing.”
“Well, there you go,” Arnold said.
“So, the story is that I sent you a scathing email telling you that you were wrong about everything, and we just hit it off?”
“I’m certain that stranger things have happened.”
“Yeah, like a psychic werewolf finding me in the woods and hauling me off to New Mexico.”
“I thought we were plotting a story that we could actually tell plain-old humans.”
She shrugged. “You’ve got to admit that the werewolf-in-the-woods story has a little more pizzazz.”
“Some folks might call it pizzazz. Petra might call it ‘what-the-fuckery.’”
“That sounds like Petra, for sure. I love her. I think she’s the only person here who even begins to approach my level of quirkiness.”
“You make quirkiness sound like a bad thing.”
“Yep.” Leo clenched her teeth and got moving toward the nursery, patting Kinzy’s back as she went. “Suffice it to say that being a little weird wasn’t a valued trait in Wolverton.”
Leo was happy Arnold didn’t follow her. She needed a moment to herself to reorder her thoughts that, in barely fifteen minutes of conversation, had turned into what amounted to alphabet soup.
Arnold wasn’t hard to be around, and that was what made his presence so frustrating. She needed pushing him away to be an easier thing. With every one of his smiles, every one of his laughs, and every overlong stare, she wanted to cling even more to him. She wasn’t used to connecting to people like that—wasn’t used to the people she was attracted to being nice to her.
“I think I more than like him,” she whispered as she laid Kinzy on her back inside the crib.
Immediately, the child’s head lolled to one side and her eyes drifted shut.
“Seriously? Just like that, you’re gonna go to sleep?”
Kinzy didn’t stir.
“Any other night, you’d make me pat your belly for half an hour.”
Still no stirring from the traitorous child.
“I guess I can’t count on you for a distraction.”
Kinzy smacked her chops in her sleep, as if she were dreaming of the turkey sandwich she couldn’t have.
“I guess you’ll be up in thirty minutes, wailing away like every other time I’ve tried to put you in your crib.”
Kinzy obviously wasn’t talking back, and Leo was starting to feel pretty stupid antagonizing an infant who wore a onesie that had a huge, felt chihuahua appliqué on the front.
“I’m weird,” she muttered.
She flicked off the lamp, stepped out into the hallway, and pulled the door almost closed.
For a moment, she pondered finishing her sandwich, but she couldn’t. She didn’t think she’d be able to keep resisting the man who she wasn’t quite certain of why she was resisting in the first place.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When Leo hadn’t returned from putting Kinzy to bed, Arnold occupied himself by watching the television on low volume and swapping text messages with Jim, who was bored and growing paranoid at the gatehouse.
But when the show Arnold was watching ended and there was a lull in messages from Jim, Arnold stretched out his stiff limbs and stood from the sofa.
He had a typical wolf’s heightened sense of hearing, and had been listening to Leo toss and turn for the better part of an hour.
She was either having a nightmare or couldn’t get to sleep. Concern about either seemed to be reasonable enough excuses for him to poke his head into her room.
He knocked first, softly. “You all right?”
She sputtered her lips, and then sighed. “Yeah. Might as well come on in.”
He pushed the door in and waited for his vision to adjust to the dim light. She was sprawled spread-eagle in the center of the bed with the covers tangled all around her.
Chuckling softly, he closed the door and then sat on the bed’s edge. “Can’t sleep?”
“My body is willing, but my brain won’t let me.”
“Thinking too much?”
“Trying not to think at all.” She pushed up onto her elbows and forced her eyes open. “What time is it? Did Kinzy get up?”
“It’s around two. And, no, she’s still asleep. I checked on her a little while ago, and she seemed pretty relaxed. Very still.”
“I think this is the longest she’s slept on her own.”
“Maybe she just needed a little background noise or something. That usually does the trick for Petra.”
“What does she do? Sleep with t
he television on?”
“Yeah. Used to drive me nuts when we had to share motel rooms. I prefer silence, but she’s gotta have a little something happening. I guess silence is too loud for her.”
“Huh. I wonder if that Viking of hers is able to sleep through all the noise.”
“For all we know, he makes the noise.”
Leo flopped back onto her pillow and sighed. She didn’t close her eyes, though.
He twirled some of her loose hair around his index finger slowly. It almost seemed to glow in the moonlight against the contrast of his darker skin. “You didn’t come back to finish your sandwich,” he said. “I ate it.”
One little corner of her mouth crept up into the smile zone. “I forgive you. I figured I’d try to get a head start on getting some sleep. Kinzy went down so easily that I just knew she’d be hopping back up soon. I think I’ve gotten fifteen minutes of sleep in four hours.”
“How good was that fifteen minutes, though?” he asked.
“Sucked.”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t think I’ve slept well since I moved Kinzy into the nursery.”
“That’s logical, if you really think about it.”
“Ugh,” she groused. “I guess so.”
“Would having another body in the bed help?”
She squinted at him, and he tried to keep the smile off his face. His mother had always said that he usually looked like he was up to something, even when he wasn’t. He’d always been in trouble as a kid. He didn’t really want to be in trouble with Leo.
“Are you coming on to me, wolf?” she asked.
“Just being helpful.” He knew damn well, though, that some wolves’ idea of helpful were other wolves’ idea of lascivious. There was a slight possibility that Arnold was both.
“Yes,” he said, shrugging.
“Whatever.” She lifted the top edge of the messy sheets and sighed. “Go on and get in, then.”
“You gonna give me a little room along with that corner of the covers?”
“Jeez. You look like you take up a lot of space.”
“As far as male werewolves are concerned, that’s usually a good thing.”
“You’d take up more space than Kinzy.”
“That’s a given, Leonora.”
Yet again, she sighed. “Ugh, say my name again.”
“Why?”
“Just ’cause. If butter had a voice, it’d sound like you.”
If he wasn’t smiling before, he certainly was then. “You are a mess, you know that?”
Had Leo have been any other woman, he would have assumed she was flirting with a statement like she’d made, but Leo didn’t flirt. Leo hardly even looked at him at all.
He claimed the tiny little sliver of bed she offered him and pulled the covers snug.
She inched to the right, giving him just enough space so that his ass wasn’t half-dangling off the bed.
“Last lady I shared a bed with had sharp nails and no regard for personal space whatsoever,” he said.
“Yeah, I’m sure the trollop was all up in your personal space, and trying to take even more,” Leo muttered.
“Trollop?” He cringed. “Ouch, girl. Believe it or not, Petra and I do try to give each other a wide berth whenever we can. There’s a such thing as too much togetherness when it comes to siblings.”
“Petra. Oh, dang. Sorry. Don’t tell her I accidentally called her that.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t. You think I’d be spinning yarns about the other chicks I’ve shared a bed with? I’m smarter than I look.”
“Some men would,” Leo said sleepily. “Samuel did all the time.”
“That’s disgusting.”
Arnold felt the bed shudder slightly near the top—likely Leo shrugging. But he was coming to know something about Leo, and that was that often when she pretended not to care, she cared way too much.
He rolled onto his side and propped his head up on his fist.
Her eyes were open, but she wasn’t looking at anything in particular. The ceiling, or maybe the air vent mounted high on the wall on the other side of the room. “Not everyone wants to be mean to you, Leo.”
“I know that.” Her gaze shifted and focused onto him.
Finally.
“I know the theory, anyway,” she said.
“Hard to let go of the habits and routines you’re used to. I understand that.” He picked up an end of her hair again and plied it between his thumb and forefinger. “Petra and I could have found some place to settle down in years ago if we really wanted to. I know that’s rare for wolves, to actually find a place where they feel safe enough to stay.”
“Why didn’t you?” Leo whispered. She rolled over, too, so she was the one encroaching on his limited personal space and not the other way around.
He didn’t mind. He wanted her close enough to reach so he could touch. All he needed was an invitation. He wanted one from the lady, not her inner wolf. Her inner wolf didn’t get a say again for a while. She was half the reason they were in the mess they were in.
“Didn’t feel right,” he said as her probing fingertips traced the shape of his lower lip. The urge to grab her hand and kiss the front and back was strong, but so was his mind, for once. He resisted.
“That doesn’t mean the place didn’t seem safe,” he said. “The folks were nice. Owned a farm. They were older, and could have used a couple of self-starters like Petra and me to keep the place running. They offered us a place to stay in exchange for work and then a little money on the side. Would have been a good deal. Most folks around there would have left us alone, and not been so interested in our comings and goings. I guess the situation was as ideal as anyone could ask for.”
“Mm-hmm.” Her fingertips were grazing down his Adam’s apple, and her gaze followed them. And he watched her—curious about what she felt, wondering if she liked what she was touching.
She probed down his chest until she reached the first of his fastened shirt buttons. “Go on with your story.”
“Isn’t much of a story.” And he was far more interested in the story her fingers were telling.
“Tell it anyway,” she said. “I like when you tell me stuff.”
“I’ll tell you whatever you want if that’d make you happy.”
“As long as what you’re saying is the truth.”
“Why lie, Leo? Lying requires effort, and I’d rather use my mental energy for more productive things.”
She pushed the button through its hole and flicked his plackets a little farther apart. “Some folks are so used to the lies that the truth becomes some kind of endangered species. They’d hardly recognize the truth if they heard it. It’s like a caribou or a lynx or something. Things that were once widespread, but you have to go searching high and low for now.”
Arnold chuckled, and then quietly moaned at the press of her lips against his chest. So gentle. So curious, as if he were more an experiment than a man she should have known would have done her bidding with just a whispered command from her.
“I think you’ve been watching too many wildlife documentaries on PBS,” he said softly.
“Yup. Nice to be able to watch what I want for a change. And finish your story.” She worked her hand down farther, so slowly and tentatively that he wondered if she thought he wasn’t paying attention.
He couldn’t help but to be hyperaware. She had every hair on his body standing on end, and he kept moving his hips farther back to keep the other thing on him that was standing on end away from her body.
“There isn’t much story left,” he said. “Like I said, the place felt safe, but…”
Another kiss—right on his nipple, followed by a nibble of the same.
Drawing on a well of self-restraint he hadn’t realized he had, he managed to keep his hands off her. He kept the one that was propping up his head where it was, and balled the other into a fist at his side.
She released another button.
He swa
llowed hard and closed his eyes. He wished he could do the same for his nose. The scent of her arousal overwhelmed him, and he wouldn’t be able to hide his own attentiveness for much longer.
She was insinuating herself ever closer to him. There was nowhere to hide, unless he got off the bed, and he wasn’t so eager to give up the little piece he’d finally claimed.
His bed. His woman. He suspected that he had to wait for her to arrive at that same conclusion on her own, or she’d never buy it. Skepticism was a useful trait in female werewolves. Given the culture, they needed to question every damn thing to make sure they weren’t getting screwed two ways.
“Uh, the farm felt safe, but Petra and I just didn’t feel settled. We felt like we had to keep moving, and we both agreed we felt a little different about leaving than we ever had before when leaving a place. There was a sense of—”
She lashed her tongue across his other nipple, as she probed into the waistband of his jeans.
Fuck.
He sucked in a breath and tried to will his tense body to relax, even if he felt like he was going to explode.
Touch me, and I just might.
He usually had a little time to talk his body into behaving for him, but he hadn’t gotten into Leo’s bed looking for a fuck. He’d just wanted to hold her so she’d sleep.
“Bittersweetness,” he said through clenched teeth as she whisked her fingertips across his cock head.
“What happened to them?” She moved down, along with her hand. She was firmly gripping him as she settled her kisses lower. And yet she wanted him to tell stories. With her hand on him like that, he could barely remember what the story was supposed to be.
Shit. He gave the bed a little pound with his fist. “We—we found them someone else.” He forced out a ragged breath and closed his eyes as she pulled her clench upward. If she were going to keep milking him, story time would be over sooner than she expected. “Found them someone else, and hit the road again. We were eighteen then. Leaving felt like shit, but we both knew we had to. Getting too comfortable would have made things harder for us in the long run.”
“It’s so satiny.”
“Huh?”
“This,” she whispered as she swished her thumb around the end of him. “I would have thought it’d be hard and not so pliant, but it’s silky. Do you feel anything when I touch you there?”
