Yet… he wanted to hold her hand. Could feel the urge like an itch, one that wasn’t remotely satisfied when he scratched his palm instead of taking a hold of hers.
And then they were at the guest house. At two stories with a standing beam metal roof and expansive windows facing out over the main road, the modern looking three-bedroom log cabin was just as nice, if not nicer, than most of the homes in Wolf Springs.
Grady could still remember coming home with Rafe for fall break after they first met playing ball on opposite sides of the line for Denver U. He’d heard the Colorado crown had a lot more money than the Oklahoma royal family, but he hadn’t really understood how much more until Rafe brought him and Mag to a house that was three times the size of the two-bedroom farm house Grady sort of called home. Imagine his surprise when he realized it wasn’t even the main house, but simply a guest house for visitors. Now, coming to a stop in front of the familiar stone steps that led up to the front door, the house served as yet another reminder of why Grady had no business spending time with the youngest Alaska princess.
“Thank you,” she signed.
“You’re welcome,” he signed back. This was where they said goodbye. He should go now. He should definitely go.
But he didn’t. Instead, he lingered, waiting for her to say something else.
She lifted her hands and signed, “You ready kiss?”
He shook his head. “You don’t have to kiss me.”
She pressed her lips together and narrowed her eyes. “I promise you at party. I lie sometimes—don’t care. But I ALWAYS keep promise.”
“You don’t have to keep promise,” he signed back, though it was hard to concentrate on his hand movements with his wolf tingling down his lower back, threatening to take over. Grady quickly turned off his emotions and tried to focus on the image of a concrete wall in order to tune out what had come to hard life below his belt.
And then she signed. “I don’t have to keep promise, but I want keep promise. I want kiss you.”
Now his beast was howling. He shoved his hands into his pockets to cover the shaking. She needed to understand while he may be defective as far as wolves were concerned, human women didn’t care so much about all that. Especially not when it came to guys on the college football team. So he didn’t need her pity kiss, because he’d kissed plenty of women. And that wasn’t all he’d done.
But you haven’t kissed her, the beast growled inside of him.
Tu took his lack of response as an invitation to take matters into her own hands. She stood on her tiptoes and puckered her lips for what he instinctively knew would be one of those sloppy kisses drunk sorority girls used to try to give him, the ones his sense of right and wrong never allowed him to accept. In Tu’s case, though, he might have let her do it, let her kiss him however she wanted. But at the last second, his hands came out of his pockets and landed on her arms.
“Wait,” he mouthed. If he was going to let her do this, if this was really going to happen, then he wanted it to be better than the clumsy kiss she was about to offer him. He wanted it to be the best it could be, something they’d both remember for a long, long time.
He repositioned her so she stood on the first step, putting their faces at almost the same height. Then she started to dip her head towards his, quick and clumsy, but he leaned back before anything could happen. He wanted to look at her, take a mental snapshot of this moment, before… he smoothed the back of his knuckles over her cheek, and waited until her confused brown eyes raised to meet his. Then he finally took the kiss she’d been trying to give him, his mouth moving over hers, slow and unhurried. She tasted like champagne and he let his tongue delve further into her mouth like an explorer opening the doors to an ancient treasury.
Grady didn’t want to just kiss Tu, he wanted to know her. Know her lips, know the feel of her tongue against his. The erection inside his pants pulsated, and he pressed it against Tu’s stomach, telling her without words how much he wanted to know her and in more ways than one.
Tu must have felt it, too, because a shiver went through her body before she leaned back and signed, “Can’t” with an apologetic look on her face.
Grady tapped his fingers against his temple. “Know.”
Even if sleeping with an unheated she-wolf wasn’t strictly forbidden, he’d never want to rush Tu. His lower back had stopped tingling the moment their lips met, signaling that both his wolf and his human were in agreement on this. They wanted to savor her.
And maybe Tu felt the same way, because when he bent down to kiss her again, she didn’t just take his kiss, she kissed him back. Slow, sensual like he’d suddenly transformed from a novelty experiment in her mind to… to… something else.
She moved in closer, wrapping her arms tight around his shoulders, and this time her pelvis grazed against the part of him that wanted. A hot pulse of need sizzled up his shaft, causing his body to involuntarily jerk within her light hold.
She didn’t let him go, but he felt her hand stroke the back of his short hair, and she murmured something against his lips that felt like “sorry,” before readjusting her stance, so their lower bodies were no longer touching, and deepening the kiss.
For a while that was enough, but then the beast—the fucking beast inside of him. It turned on him again. Started agitating. Breathing in Tu’s scent, in a way that sent his erection into painful territory. Grady’s lower back started tingling again, which told him even clearer than the flashing LED lights on his alarm clock for the deaf, that it was time for this dream to come to an end. That if he didn’t stop the kiss soon, no matter how good his intentions toward Tu, he’d lose control of his beast—
Tu abruptly pulled away from him, her head turning toward the copse of trees that lay between the guest house and the kingdom mansion. His senses came back on line and he smelled what she’d obviously heard: her sisters were headed this way.
Tu signed “go,” and he started to leave, not wanting to but knowing he should for Tu’s sake. She came from a place where reputations were still a thing. But then she tapped him on the shoulder.
“Fun,” she signed when he turned back around, her eyes twinkling with amusement under the front house lights.
“Me too,” he signed back, before running to take cover in the copse of trees. He got there just as her sisters came around the corner.
Getting behind a tree, he watched Tu greeted her sisters as if she’d been waiting for them all this time on the front steps, innocent and alone. He thought about the way she’d looked when she’d smiled at him, making sure he knew before he left how much she’d liked their kiss.
He’d think about that moment many times over the next few years. He’d thought when she signed fun, she’d meant, “I had fun kissing you.” However, that illusion was shattered just a few hours later when he came home to the house Rafe was letting him live in, rent free, while he trained with the current beta sheriff to take over his job next year.
He’d spent the rest of the night chauffeuring party goers too drunk to walk the small distance to the residential section of Wolf Springs to their respective homes, making sure they got inside, and then doing the same for the current beta, who’d felt free to party to his liver’s content, knowing his “deputy apprentice” would handle all the not-so-glamorous bits of working security at a party filled with rich people. When Grady finally walked through his own door at three in the morning feeling like Barney Fife in a penguin suit, all he wanted was to fall into bed and dream about the kiss he’d shared with Tu.
But the first thing that greeted him was the overwhelming stench of his brother’s weed. The pungent smoke was so strong that Grady would not have been surprised if the neighbors a few miles down the road could smell it.
Leave it to his brother to use illegal substances in a law enforcement officer’s house. Fucking Luke. And after Grady had gone out of his way to get him the deejay gig at Rafe’s party! He banged on the door and pushed it open, prepared to give his younger b
rother a piece of his…
Tu was sitting cross-legged on the guest room bed, facing Luke. Still in her yellow evening gown, they looked like the perfect couple… an interracial version of the closing scene from Sixteen Candles, except they were on a bed, not a table. And getting high. And drinking from a bottle of Scotch Grady recognized as being from Rafe’s personal collection.
Tu grinned up at him like an old friend had entered the room.
“Hey!” she said, holding up her joint. “It’s the beta king! Want to join us?”
Luke yanked her hand down and shook his head at Tu. He was laughing and turned sideways, so it was impossible for Grady to lip-read what he was saying to her. But from the way Tu’s shoulders hunched and her lips tilted downwards like she was trying not to laugh as she quickly slipped the joint under her knee, he guessed Luke had pointed out that as an officer of the law, Grady probably wouldn’t be too interested in taking a hit with them.
Grady signed furiously, looking at Luke, although he knew the effort was wasted on his brother. And he was right. Luke just shook his head at his lame older brother.
“Man, you know I don’t understand all that shit you do with your hands.”
Tu’s eyes widened at Luke, and Grady guessed she was giving him a hard time about not knowing sign language. Luke just shook his head, ever the incorrigible stoner in the easy breezy movie that was his life. Grady didn’t have to read his lips to know what he was saying to Tu.
“Dude, that shit’s too hard to learn!”
Tu shook her head at him and said something back, her eyes wide with faux disappointment, even though she was still laughing. They looked like the lead actors in some sort of stoner rom-com: Baked: A Love Story.
And fuck if Grady didn’t feel that old tingle go down his lower back. His beast wanting to do things to Luke. Bad things.
He slammed out of the bedroom without even bothering to tell them to get rid of the pot or stop with the underage drinking. He knew if he didn’t get to a pair of shackles, all the work he’d been doing with the current sheriff would be in vain, because his beast would get out and then it’d be lights out on his human, on his career as Rafe’s beta, probably also on at least one of the two wolves in the guest bedroom.
He ran into his room and kicked the door shut. On the floor nearest the door were two tear-resistant, heavy-duty dog beds that had been pushed together, with some cheap sheets on top them. On the other side of the room was a mount with a long, thick chain that had a large shackle at each end, one made of silver and one of steel. He’d installed the mount himself, drilling into the wall and attaching it to the steel frame that ran all the way to the bottom of the house. But the shackles were a custom job, designed by a master craftsman to contract if the joints they were clipped around got smaller. They were actually a common safety precaution for wolves who lived among humans. However, Grady lived in a pack town where no humans were allowed. And wolf shackles were usually fashioned of steel. Grady had spent his entire first paycheck to get a silver version made.
He rushed to the silver shackle, falling to his knees as he clamped it around his dominant wrist. Then he clenched his teeth tight, because the silver against his bare skin burned like a motherfucker. His stomach rolled in a desperate attempt to lose its contents.
He needed the pain, though, to distract his beast, to keep it down. To keep it from…
Grady concentrated on his breathing, just like all those meditation books had taught him. Breathe… breathe… breathe… and eventually the tingling started to fade. He sank into the wall, sweating so much he knew the tux Rafe bought him for tonight was probably ruined. It would take another paycheck to replace it. Relief and disgust battled for territory inside his head.
Disgust won. This is why he put up walls. This is why he never let anyone in. Better they think he was an uptight prick who only lived for law and order than know what her really was. A beast barely contained.
A beast and an idiot, he realized, as he began the tedious and painful process of switching from the silver shackle to the steel one. When Tu had signed “fun,” she meant exactly that, “This was fun.” She had not meant “thank you for the fantastic kiss, I shall never forget tonight.” The kiss they’d shared was, for her, “not boring” just like meeting up with Luke to get high and drunk was also, “not boring.” But that was it. The only person who had taken that kiss seriously was Grady. The idiot.
At the end of the day, he was still a defective beta, she was still a princess, and his brother was still the most popular guy in school, the one everyone liked… the one every girl wanted to party with if given the choice. Truth was, Grady couldn’t even be mad at Tu as he laid himself down to sleep like a dog, curled up on the floor. The only person to blame for this fucked up situation was himself for thinking, even for a second, that someone like her would be interested in a useless half-breed like him.
1
Five years later, a week before Christmas
Grady smelled her before he saw her. He’d been driving slowly for hours with the window down, hoping he hadn’t been wrong about searching for Tu and Alisha and their possible kidnappers on this back road, which led from Colorado to Oklahoma, instead of going directly to the Oklahoma kingdom town to look for them there. Rafe was sitting in the passenger seat, his eyes scanning for any sign of his mate, Alisha, and her younger sister.
Alisha had been kidnapped along with Tu because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time: with Tu who was being sought out by the Oklahoma wolves who’d come to Colorado to snatch her. That was not a good thing. Tu, they’d probably keep alive for torture and punishment purposes. But Alisha didn’t figure into any of this ugly business and that made her disposable, a fact he knew must be weighing heavily on Rafe’s mind.
But then Grady picked up Tu’s scent. Alisha’s too. And remnants of the chicken blood the kidnappers had used to cover their trail after they grabbed the two sisters.
Grady wrenched the Chevy Silverado 3500’s wheel to the left, crossing the two lane back road and bringing his truck to a tire screeching stop on the opposite side of the road.
“You catch scent,” Rafe signed from the passenger seat. His hand was already on the door handle.
But Grady shook his head. “You stay car.”
Rafe signed and spoke at the same time, as was his habit. “That’s my mate out there.”
“Bad wolves maybe with.”
“That’s why I’m going,” Rafe said.
“Not safe. If bad wolves have gun, you hear shoot. Call more wolves come here. If you come with, maybe we both get hurt. No help Tu and Alisha. I go down. Smell. Text if safe. My job.”
It was a sound plan, one even Rafe in his frenzy to get his mate back couldn’t argue with. Grady technically was the wolf responsible for making sure no harm came to the Colorado king. However, Rafe had never been the kind of royal to sit back and let others do his dirty work. And though he eventually acquiesced with a signed, “Go fast,” Grady could tell the decision to stay behind didn’t sit well with him.
Grady did as he said, jumping out of the truck and following the she-wolves’ scents down the hill into the wooded area beneath as quickly as possible, hopefully before Rafe could change his mind. But when he came to the place from which their scents had been emanating, he found it empty, and the sisters’ scents were now split and coming at him from two different directions.
His eyes went to two nearby trees on either side of him, not even ten feet away, and he figured it out. They were here, and the wolves who had kidnapped them were not. But they were hiding. From him.
He could smell Alisha’s fear scent coming from the tree on his left side, which meant Tu must be behind the tree on his right side.
“Go. Leave here. Cannot stay.”
The argument he’d had with Tu the day before spiraled back to him. He’d been reading her lips from the window of the office trailer he worked out of and caught her telling her older sister, Janelle, that she mig
ht stay in Wolf Springs and help Alisha with her and Rafe’s three children. And Grady had just… lost it.
Having Tu here in his town had been bad enough, watching her sulk around the place with her all black clothes and her hair in two French braids, her eyes permanently set to haunted, like she was the one who’d died and not his brother. But finding out she planned to stay? No, he wasn’t having it. He’d gone out there to let her know she wasn’t welcome in Wolf Springs, not after what had gone down in Oklahoma, not caring that Janelle was looking on.
“What are you saying to her?” Janelle had asked. “It looks like your yelling at her. You can’t do that. Leave her alone.”
Grady, turned his shoulder to Janelle, effectively pushing the ignore button on her words.
Everyone had been treating Tu like she was so fragile now, and as far as Grady could tell, she’d been going along with them, meek to the point of concern. But wouldn’t you know it, the humbled princess act came crashing down.
Oh, how her eyes had flashed as she told her sister she could handle this and signed to Grady that she was a princess and if he had a problem with her, she could talk to his boss. Chin raised. Haughty as hell. Like what had happened in Oklahoma was a footnote in her history book and Grady no more than a speck in her eye.
Then she’d told Janelle to come on before walking away, ending the conversation about as rudely as you could with a deaf-mute. Like as far as she was concerned, he didn’t even register on the “people who matter” scale.
Wolf and Soul (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 3) Page 2
