by R. E. Butler
Dante looked at his brother. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Now go get some sleep. You’re a real asshole when you’re tired.”
Snorting, Dante shook his head at Cairo and said goodbye. When he was alone again, he stood at the back door for a while longer, picturing a future with a wife and kids. The pictures faded in his mind as the sun rose, and he turned from the back door and went to bed to get some sleep.
Later that day, Dante called his youngest brother Mason into his cramped office in Stone’s Gym. Mason had put out an ad for a new receptionist.
“Any luck?” Dante asked, swiveling in the desk chair.
Mason leaned his bulky body against the doorframe. “No answers so far.”
Over the last few months they’d had a number of problems strike them one after the other, like missiles. First, the human female that they were romancing to become their hyena clan bride had gotten snagged away at the end of the summer. She’d gone to join a werewolf pack thirty minutes to the south. Then, Cairo had lost an underground boxing match to a man that he should have easily beaten. That loss had damaged Cairo’s reputation as a trainer, and that had hurt the gym’s reputation as well. They were fairly certain that the winner had cheated somehow, but they had no proof. Add to that their receptionist quitting and walking off with their customer list, and they were losing business hand over fist.
All of these things paled in comparison to how he felt inside. A few months earlier, he and his brothers had tried to move things forward with a human female who had been their group fitness trainer. He’d liked her, they all had, but she wasn’t a good fit for them. Even when he’d pushed to take things further with her, it hadn’t ever felt entirely right. He knew it was for the best that she’d left. He couldn’t stand to be faced daily with a reminder of just how poorly he’d chosen. His brothers didn’t hold it against him, but as eldest in the clan, they trusted him to choose the right mate for them. Hyena clans always had three males and one female. She would be their shared bride, and they would worship her and take care of her. There were not very many hyena clans in the States, and more and more the clans took brides from humans or other were-groups, which meant their kind were pretty much going the way of the T-rex. He didn’t necessarily care about that, but he did care about going to their underground den this winter without a bride. Again.
“Just... run the ad again, Mase.” He focused on the problem at hand. “Add another grand to the salary, and moving expenses, too. Someone will answer, I’m sure. I’m just tired of one of us sitting out there when there’s so much else to deal with.”
Mason gave him a crooked smile. “We’ll find our bride when the time is right, Dante.”
Sometimes, his brother could be right on about things. Most of the time, he was an idiot.
“Yeah. I know.”
He turned back to the computer monitor as his brother walked away, and the first thought that crossed his mind as he stared blankly at the spreadsheet on the screen was that he was thirty-one. Thirty-one and alone.
* * * * *
Changing into cut-off sweats and carefully wrapping his hands, Cairo hit the heavy bag to work off some of his sexual frustration. He knew that Dante thought that their former group fitness trainer had been the girl meant to be their bride, but he’d never bought it completely. There was something about her posture whenever they were all with her at the same time — she definitely wasn’t one of those girls who harbored four-way fantasies. Also, she was pretty, but too muscular for his tastes. He liked natural girls with plenty of curves. He didn’t want to be comparing abs with his bride, and he sure as hell didn’t like fake girls, either. The bleached-blonde tramp set that pawed at them when they were out on the town did nothing for him at all. Nothing.
“You working, Cairo?” Denny, one of their human trainers, put his hand on the bag to stop the swing.
“I’m…thinking, I guess.”
“Ah. Well, I’m heading out for the night then. See you tomorrow.”
He grunted a reply and went back to working the bag. He had another match in two weeks. Unfortunately, the winner of the last match had declared he was retiring, which meant he wouldn’t get a rematch. Somehow, he’d cheated. Cairo wasn’t entirely sure how, except that he’d not been able to focus mid-way through the match, and his vision had blurred a few times. Dante had insisted he go to the ER and get checked out, and a couple grand and enough radiation to cook his beans later, they said he was fine. His blood test showed nothing suspicious in his system. It just didn’t make sense, and he hated things that didn’t make sense.
At twenty-nine, he was ready to hang up the towel and focus on the future. Dante wasn’t the only one who wanted to find a woman to balance out the softer edges of their hard lives. He wanted someone to care when he was hurt, even if that made him the biggest pussy in the universe. She was out there somewhere. He just hoped to hell she showed up soon.
* * * * *
“When can you come in for an interview?” Mason asked the woman who had answered the ad. The only one to answer at all. He called her as soon as her emailed resume came through, thinking the best thing to do was offer her the job sight unseen, but Dante would bust his head if he did that. Especially after the last receptionist had taken a third of their clients to the competition. He was just so damn desperate to fill the desk. Dante was on his ass constantly.
“Is tomorrow too soon?” Her name was Alyssa Morgan. Twenty-six, some college, mostly customer service jobs.
“No, that’s great. Anytime after six would be fine. Just come to the desk and ask whoever is there for me, if it’s not me.”
She laughed. He liked the sound. “How will I know it’s not you?”
He snorted. He must sound like an idiot. “Sorry. Um, I have black, curly hair and I’ll probably be wearing a black tank.” Then again, so would most everyone else there. But he was the only one of his brothers that let his hair get long enough to curl. Dante kept his in a military style, and Cairo shaved his head completely.
“Okay, Mason. I’ll see you tomorrow after six.”
“Sounds good, Alyssa. Take care.”
He hung up with a satisfied smile. Hell, if only finding their bride were as easy as placing an ad. He could picture it in his mind:
“Three horny hyenas seek one very, very willing female to be their clan bride. Must be willing to four-way on occasion, not averse to oral, and eager to be treated like a queen. Please send naked picture and list of favorite sexual positions. No uggos.”
Ah, hell. Ever since Dante had picked their group fitness trainer as a potential bride and they’d invested all that time with her, Dante was so gun-shy that he hadn’t tried to even have sex with a female. Hyenas were generally very sexually driven, so for him to deny himself even casual sex spoke to just how upset he was by the whole thing.
Mason didn’t fault him, but he was twenty-eight, and that was just two years away from thirty, and he really didn’t want to start his thirties off being an old maid. Or whatever the male version of that would be.
Chapter 3
It wasn’t that Alyssa expected Bethany or any of the she-wolves she had counted as friends to cry when she announced that she was moving, but still, some sort of emotion would have been nice. They had simply asked her what she thought she was going to accomplish by becoming a rogue wolf and going off on her own. When she went to Monica, the female alpha, and told her she wanted to be released from the pack, Monica gave her a long, quiet look and then shrugged. “It’s cool with me, but pass it by Martin to make sure.”
The statement was made with almost no thought at all, as if Alyssa were of no value. She was mid-ranked with the females. She should be missed. Someone should have asked her to reconsider. After all, it wasn’t as if she had anything to go to; she was just taking a gamble on this job interview tomorrow night in Dalton.
Too depressed to follow them to the bar after dinner, she headed home to finish packing. She knew that she shoul
d have gotten the job first before she moved away, but she was desperate for a fresh start, and leaving Havers was the first part of that. She had wings to spread and a new attitude. No more fake. No more shallow. And definitely no casual sex.
She might not be a virgin, but she was not a whore anymore. She wouldn’t bounce from bed to bed forever; she had to respect herself more than that.
Fortunately she’d been doing a long-term temp job at a customer service center, so there wasn’t anything to quit. Her apartment came furnished, so the only things she had to pack were some knickknacks and her clothes.
In the morning she went to the temp agency to collect her final paycheck, to the post office to stop her mail until further notice, and then to the hair salon.
Jen, who had been doing her hair for years, looked at her in surprise. “You sure about this?”
“Yes. I want the blonde gone.”
“You’ve been bleaching since you were a teenager, Alyssa. It’s not as if I can strip the bleach.”
“I know that. I want to have my natural color again.” Alyssa held a picture in her hand that she had found tucked in an old yearbook, which showed her hair before she began to bleach it. It was medium brown. She’d always thought it looked mousy and ordinary, but now she thought it was perfect for her new life. Simple. Honest. Or as honest as she could get, considering she’d bleached her hair for ten years.
“This will take a while and you’re going to lose some of your length. I have to dye it red first and then brown, but I should be able to get it very close to your original color. If you’re sure?”
“I’m positive.” Alyssa stared at the picture of her fifteen-year-old self and smiled.
Shrugging, Jen snapped gloves on and got to work. Alyssa knew her hair would be dried out, that she’d lose some of the middle-of-her-back length, but she was changing her life and that meant getting rid of the stuff that made her want to throw up now.
As the strong chemicals sat on her hair, she reflected on her life. Her mother had left when she was eighteen, following an alpha wolf somewhere out west. She hadn’t asked Alyssa to join her, and that had cut at her. Alyssa and her mother were never really all that close, but they were family and that should have counted for something. Alyssa never heard from her. Her older sister Marie called once a year to wax poetic about her life. She was married with kids, to her high school sweetheart who was also second-ranked in their pack.
She’d left a message for Marie last night that she was moving. Alyssa was glad not to talk to her, because she was certain that Marie would’ve just told her she was being stupid. That it was foolish to leave her hometown and pack, go rogue, and try to start a life somewhere by herself. It was risky and frightening, but not stupid.
A second-hand store took most of her club clothes and gave her a little bit of cash. She only kept one sexy top, one pair of leather pants, and one mini-dress. Just because she wasn’t going to be trampy didn’t mean she couldn’t dress cute. Not that she planned to have a social life at all — ever since she went home with Ben in July, she’d decidedly turned off that part of her brain. No man — no matter how cute — would sway her from the path to her new life. Alyssa Morgan was celibate and loving it! Well, loving it might be a stretch, but she was happier than she’d been in a while, and it had only been a few months.
Several hours later, Jen snapped off the hairdryer and turned her around in the chair. Alyssa stared at her reflection in shock. The color was almost exactly what she remembered her hair looking like before she started bleaching. It was perfect.
Jen fluffed her hair. It was now up to her shoulders, straight and boring. “Well, you lost a good eight inches of hair, but it’s pretty healthy, considering. A year and you won’t know it happened at all.”
Alyssa thanked Jen as she paid her, feeling lighter, freer than she had in a long time. Back at her apartment, she dressed for her job interview in an outfit she’d picked up at a boutique store in the mall; a grape-colored skirt and matching short-sleeved sweater. She left her hair down and added some light makeup. After one last pass through the apartment to make sure she hadn’t left anything behind, she dropped off the keys with the apartment manager and got in her Camaro.
In the trunk she had two small boxes, her grandmother’s quilt, and one suitcase. In the tiny backseat she had two more suitcases and a pillowcase stuffed with clothes. The front seat contained her purse, a box of bathroom things, and the directions to Stone’s Gym.
It was nearly dinnertime, but she didn’t want to get anything to eat until after her interview. Mason had said she could come by anytime after six, but she wanted to be punctual.
When she peeked at herself in the sideview mirror before going into the gym, she thought, “Now there’s a girl who’s got her head on straight.” The image made her happy. She looked sweet. Like the person inside, who’d never had a chance to come out. Like a bad, muzzled dog in the corner that no one wanted to play with, Alyssa kept her true personality buried underneath all the fakeness, because she wanted to be popular. Some things you get over after high school, but she never did.
She’d always been fascinated by music when she was younger, but by the time she reached high school, it was clear that ‘band was for nerds’, and ‘nerds’ didn’t get dates. Her sophomore year of high school, when she was an awkward, gawky fifteen-year-old, she wanted to do whatever she could to fit in, and that was the first time — but not the last — that she didn’t do something she enjoyed because she was afraid of how others would view it. She didn’t join the debate team or participate in student government, because all the kids she admired for being cool and popular laughed at it. In the dog-eat-dog world of her high school years, the kids that were the most popular were athletes, so that’s what she did. She became a cheerleader, she starved herself so she could fit into her uniform and not be the token fat girl, and she only dated wolves who were also football players. Her whole world had narrowed down to only doing what others thought she should do, until she felt like less a human being and more like a robot, unable to think for herself. If she could go back in time, she would tell her misguided self that she should do what she loved. Play the flute. Debate the hell out of school uniforms. Run for class president. Do something. Be someone.
She had wanted to be admired and wanted back then, but now she knew better. Her so-called friends had spoken just as harshly about her behind her back as they did about the others in their group. And the men who had been with her, they didn’t see her as relationship material. She was convenient. The girl you fucked, not the girl you took home to mom, or even out on a real date. The permanent booty call. The last chance for the night when no one else was available.
Not. Any. More.
Her small purse dangled from her fingertips as she opened the door to the gym and walked inside. Immediately the masculine scent of the place permeated her nose. She’d always enjoyed that very male smell. The man behind the desk was on the phone, his back to the door. He had very curly black hair pulled into a short ponytail at the back of his neck.
Gathering her courage, shoving her lustful side away into the darkest corners of her mind, and ignoring all the scents around her, she lightly rapped her knuckles on the top of the desk and the man spun around in the chair to look at her.
And what a sight he was.
Chapter 4
Someone knocked on the desk as Mason waited for the contractor to take him off hold and talk to him about the work on the electrical system of their lap pool. He turned abruptly and dropped the phone. Who the hell was this beauty?
He made a grab for the phone and smacked his head on the desktop. “Ah, shit!”
“Oh! Are you okay, Mason?” she asked, and he knew immediately it was Alyssa. He would recognize her voice anywhere.
Rubbing what would surely be a bright red spot, he said, “Yeah, just embarrassed.” He hung up the phone, planning to call back, and stood up. Her eyes followed him up and he couldn’t stop smiling. She w
as short and cute. Not just cute, but fucking beautiful. She had brown hair falling to her shoulders, soft brown eyes, and a perfectly shaped mouth.
“No worries, I did just the same thing earlier today,” she said, shaking the hand he offered.
“Really?”
“Nooooo.” She laughed, and he chuckled, too, as the tension eased away from him.
Feisty minx. “Come on, we’ll go talk in the back.”
He didn’t have an office because he wasn’t a desk guy. He’d rather sit on a couch with a computer in front of him than at a desk. His hobby was computers, which put him firmly in the geek department, but he also liked working out. So when Dante and Cairo wanted to open a gym, he’d been onboard for it. But now he was embarrassed that he didn’t have a desk, didn’t have anything in the gym that was his.
