Grady looked at her like she was crazy. “I could have hurt you. I could have hurt the baby.”
“I don’t think so. Your wolf didn’t do me any bodily harm.” She thought of the way Grady had looked, his head dipped between her legs. “In fact, he did the opposite of hurt me,” she told him with a wry smile.
“This isn’t funny, Tu.”
For the first time in what might have been years, Tu found herself fighting off laughter.
“It kind of was. I mean, you bringing me into your creepy kingdom house and then you’re all like ‘Run, Tu, run!’ before going straight up wolf pilot. You can’t tell me it’s not a little bit funny…”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you,” he said, staring down at her like she’d gone insane. “There are shackles everywhere for a reason. My beast is dangerous. If he gets out—”
“He may lay it on me real good? Like crazy, intense good?” Tu asked him. She then projected his own voice back with an extra dose of Dudley Do-Right. “Tu, the next time I go on wolf pilot, make sure you tranq me. Otherwise, I might eat you out and make you come several times, and we both know you don’t want that.” She lost her battle with laughter and waved him off. “Wolf, relax. I’m cool—as long as you don’t ever get your jizz in my hair—I am still a black woman.”
“Seriously, Tu…” Grady began. But then he dissolved into laughter, too. Big, silent guffaws that made his shoulders shake, even as he said. “This is your problem. You never could take anything seriously.”
And her laughter suddenly disappeared.
“No, that used to be my problem. It’s not a problem anymore. Hasn’t been for a while.”
The laughter died in Grady’s eyes then, too. And now it was Tu who felt embarrassed.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?” he asked inside her head.
“Like I’m a broken toy,” she answered. “All the adults in my life have been looking at me like that for years and I hate it. You have no idea how much I hate it.”
“I think I do. You should see some of the pitying looks fuckers throw at me when they find out I’m deaf.” He lifted her chin, so she could look up at him. “And this look in my eyes? It’s not pity. It’s me being sad because you’re sad. You want me to say it again?” he asked. But then he didn’t give her a chance to answer before telling her, “You’re not broken. You’re not ruined. I know that, even if you and your family don’t.”
Tu shook her head, the old sadness nearly overwhelming her. She wished she could believe him. But she couldn’t. When she thought about what she’d done… it just hurt so bad, like her heart was being squeezed like a rotten tomato.
Grady pulled her into his arms, shielding her from the cold in his warm embrace. “It’s okay,” he said, his lips pressed against the top of her head. “You don’t have to believe me. I’ll believe in you enough for the both of us until you can do it yourself, okay?”
She nodded against his chest.
And he took her face in his hands, his eyes as somber as a grave when he asked inside her head, “You’re sure you’re all right?”
“Yes,” she told him.
“I didn’t hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt me.”
He looked at her for a very long time, as if checking what she was saying against his own gut-based lie detector. Then he said, “Good,” and kissed her on the forehead, before tucking her under his huge arm and turning them both to look at the house. “I’m thinking we should use the money I saved up to add another section on to the house. We’re going to need a nursery—”
A nursery… before another wave of sadness could pass over her, she asked, “How much money do you have saved up?”
He told her. And she had to work hard not to snort. The amount was less than the Alaska budget for the annual Christmas party, just enough to add a solitary room onto the house. Maybe.
“And how much do you have in your kingdom house budget?”
A confused look came over his face.
“My kingdom house budget? What’s that?”
“A pot of money set aside for the upkeep of your kingdom house,” Tu answered carefully.
But that only made him look more confused, like she was talking about something only aliens did on a planet he’d never heard of before. And that was when Tu realized the Oklahoma crown didn’t have a kingdom house budget. Exactly how poor was the state pack? Her mother hailed from a mange state, but that didn’t mean they were poor, per se—it was just that their wealth came from mostly illegal sources. The King of Detroit still had a kingdom house budget along with enough money for flashy cars and other luxuries, which her mother had grown up accustomed to.
“I guess I should be asking how much you have in your kingdom budget, period,” she said to Grady now.
The look on his face was not good. Not good at all. And Tu said, “Um, maybe you should let me see your books.”
GRADY HAD THOUGHT the worst thing in store for him that day would be facing Tu after going into beast mode on her the night before, but he had been wrong. Watching her sitting on his bed, her legs crisscrossed beneath the laptop he’d given her, going through the accounts he’d opened up on it, was way worse. Her face was grim as she scrolled up, then down, then back up again with a frown, and another wave of mortification passed over Grady. At least his wolf was physically powerful. But this… this was the very definition of powerless.
Surprise, honey, you just married a king without much of a kingdom.
Tu snapped the laptop closed and informed him, “Okay, well, you’re totally poor.”
“Yeah, Rafe told me a version of the same thing when I saw him in Colorado.”
She shook her head. “Most she-wolves can handle quaint,” she said indicating the farm house. “This is quaint. That’s cool. But poor… like Mag’s always saying, it’s not a good look.”
Grady went still. “Tu, I may be poor. But I’ll do what I have to do to take care of my family. You don’t—you don’t have to worry about that. You don’t have to divorce me because I’m poor.”
Tu looked at him like he was crazy. “Who said anything about divorcing you? I’m telling you your kingdom is broke, Wolf. And a king’s only as good as his kingdom. So we’ve got to fix this. As soon as possible.”
Now Grady was just confused. “How do you fix being broke? ASAP?”
Tu held out her hand. “Could you lend me your phone?” she asked.
He pulled his phone out and handed it to her and she stared down at it like she was running a calculation in her head.
“Okay, what’s the most racist pack town in Oklahoma? I’m talking virulently racist, like no black folks living there. No Native Americans or Hispanics—like they still have sunset laws racist. I mean just ridiculous. Do you have any towns like that?”
“That would be Wolf Hole,” he answered immediately. “That’s where I found the bodies of the three wolves who kidnapped you. Their last pack leader, Bobby Joe Adolphus, used to be in the human chapter of the KKK before the Lupine Council made him quit. And the current one, Bobby Joe Jr., isn’t much better. Plus, he’s a drug dealer—a bad one, I’m thinking, since he’s also a meth head.”
“Is his pack as poor as Wolf Haven?” she asked.
“Way poorer,” he answered, trying not to feel offended by her assessment of Wolf Haven’s finances. When did he start identifying with his kingdom town? Most of Wolf Haven didn’t even like him, and though he’d dutifully attended every council meeting, he’d sensed his presence was just barely tolerated. But he did feel a little better when he compared the kingdom town to Wolf Hole. Broke or not, they were a long ways from being Wolf Hole.
“Bobby Joe Jr. owns a gas station right outside the town, I think, to launder the money he makes off his drug business. And a bunch of his pack members work over at the human-owned rebar factory in River Wolf. But other than that, Wolf Hole doesn’t have much money flowing through it.”
“
Perfect,” Tu said like he’d told her nothing but good things about the place, her thumbs flew over his phone. “Bobby Joe Jr… I’m texting him now…”
Grady frowned. “If you’re thinking about charging them more to rent on our land, it’s not going to work. Half of them live in the trailer shanty town right outside of Wolf Hole. And the ones who do live in houses on kingdom-owned land can barely afford to pay us the rent we’re charging them.”
“No, I don’t want to raise their rents,” she said, still texting. “I’m telling Bobby Joe you just got married, and you and your new bride want to pay the town a visit and talk to all of them tomorrow.”
Grady’s brain hiccupped. “You told him what?”
“That we want to pay Wolf Hole a visit.” She held the phone up to show him the sent text. “I told him we’ll be coming through around seven p.m. tomorrow and to make sure the whole town was there.”
“You’re kidding,” he said. Why would anyone want to purposefully go to Wolf Hole? Especially a black she-wolf who’d probably done a pretty good job avoiding virulent racism up to this point in her life? “You’re kidding, right?”
“Look at me, Grady. Look at me.” She pointed her first two fingers from his eyes to hers, like a sergeant addressing a new recruit. “I joke about a lot of things, but not money. Never money. I’m from one of the richest packs in the nation. We never, ever joke about money.”
“I don’t see how you going to Wolf Hole is going to make the state pack stop being broke. Plus, it’s dangerous—”
Tu held up a finger to stop him. “Really important question: what do you think I should wear to this town meeting? I don’t think jeans would be appropriate.”
“No, I don’t think you understand what I’m saying here, Tu. You’re not going to Wolf Hole. I not going to let you risk your—”
“Ooh, I know…” Tu raised up to her knees on the bed and pulled her new thermal shirt off, over her head. She then unhooked her bra at the back and let it slide down her arms. “A cowboy hat! We’ll buy one on the way down to Wolf Hole. And some wrap dresses.” She wiggled out of her jeans and panties, then threw them in a corner. Her heavy socks soon followed. “My Mama says there’s no problem on this earth the right wrap dress can’t solve.”
The sight of her completely bare shouldn’t have affected him like it did. He’d seen plenty of naked women before, and with the state of the internet these days, you didn’t have to look far to find a woman who looked like Tu. He knew because there had been a few cold winter nights when he’d found himself clicking through site after site for naked girls with natural hair and small athletic bodies. Girls who, if you squinted hard enough, would suffice for the fantasy inside of your head while you beat yourself off, thinking about a she-wolf you had no business dwelling on, much less fantasizing about.
But she wasn’t one of those internet girls. Or even a memory reconstruct he’d done up in his mind. No, this was Tu. Naked, her pussy exposed and pulsing out her arousal scent, even after what he’d done last night.
She still wanted him. Even though he was defective. Even though he still wasn’t wolf trained and might never be.
His dick punched out against his jeans, hard and stiff, and he had to forcibly push his beast down before it took over again.
“Tu, I know where you’re going with this, and it’s not going to work. I’m not taking you to Wolf Hole.”
She smiled at him and walked across the bed to him on her knees, her eyes hooded with desire.
“I’m not taking you,” he told her again.
She reached down, unzipped his pants, and his dick sprung out, swollen and rigid, already dripping with pre-cum.
“Hello, Wolf,” she said, her voice husky and knowing inside his head.
16
At 6:20 the next evening, Tu and Grady pulled into a small, dusty town that brought to mind a word he’d read often in books set in the wake of a future apocalyptic event: desolate. Wolf Hole had one road, pockmarked with potholes. Squat yellow brick houses sat on either side with overgrown yards. And at the end of the road, right before you got to the Ouachita Mountains, there were a bunch of trailers scattered about with no rhyme or reason, like they had rolled to a stop in this place to give up and die. Nothing in this area had been touched since the eighties, back before the meth boom, and the whole place reminded Grady of those “Life After People” shows he’d seen on cable. The ones that talked about how everything would break down, degrade, and go to shit if people weren’t around to do any upkeep.
Except there were people here, peeping out of their windows and, in a few cases, coming to stand out on their porches to stare hard at the truck driving slow as could be down their stretch of residential road. The residents weren’t much better than the town. They all looked like the road. Hard and torn up by their personal potholes. Even the kids. The entire place felt like a rash to Grady, their reluctant king, the kind of thing you covered up because you sure as hell didn’t want to look at it too long. You didn’t even want a doctor to see it. It was that embarrassing.
But Tu leaned out the passenger seat of his Silverado, waving like a princess on a parade float, while she shouted something at the rednecks staring at her on both sides of the road. When they got to the shanty trailer town at the end of the road, he turned the truck around and let her princess wave to the other side of the road. And soon the looks on the town folks’ faces went from scowling to confused.
Grady couldn’t blame them. He was confused, too. Had no idea how he’d let Tu sucker him into bringing her here. Actually, he did know how that had come to pass. Could still feel Tu’s mouth, warm and wet on his cock, her tongue swirling around its hood as she asked ever so nicely inside his head if he would do her the favor of escorting her to Wolf Hole.
At that moment it had seemed wrong to deny her anything she wanted, do anything that might bring her displeasure, especially considering how much pleasure she was bringing him. But now he was kicking himself as ten different kinds of fool. At best, this Wolf Hole situation was going to get awkward. At worst, it was going to get downright ugly. And then grisly if anyone threatened Tu and he couldn’t keep his beast down.
Having reached the other end of the residential patch, Tu sat back down in the passenger seat, taking off the red mittens she’d bought earlier in the trip because “waving looks better with red mittens—I don’t know why, it just does. It’s like a fact of life.” She put her hands against the grated vents on either side of the glove box.
“I’d forgotten how cold it gets waving at people from a moving vehicle. But hey, still better than Alaska.”
She was dressed in a bright green wrap dress with an electric blue leather jacket and cowboy boots. She’d gotten the whole ensemble at the place they’d stopped at to get her hat, which was electric blue, too, and Grady had to reluctantly admit it was a good look on her. Not like the designer mini-dresses she used to wear, but still better than all that grey and black crap.
Unlike him, Tu didn’t seem to be running several different doomsday scenarios in her head. Instead she appeared cheerful and refreshed—like visiting a hick town in the middle of nowhere made up of downtrodden factory workers and meth addicts had been on her bucket list.
“This place is so retro,” Tu enthused, looking around at the brick buildings that made up the small business district. They’d seen better days and were mostly either boarded up or on their way to falling apart, including the town hall which had a few bricks missing from its façade, like a toothless Okie. But you could still see some of Wolf Hole’s original, fully planned out, early eighties charm shining through.
Tu pointed to a two-story house with peeling paint that sat next door to the town hall building. It was the only two-story structure in the entire town.
“Bobby Joe Jr.’s house?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered, but he didn’t look to see where she was pointing. No, he kept his eyes on all the townspeople already gathered outside the town hall. G
awking and openly pointing at Tu as they filed through its double doors, which had been propped open.
That was when Grady realized what Tu had been shouting as they drove up and down the residential road.
“You made sure to invite everybody just in case Bobby Joe hadn’t.”
“Yeah, of course,” Tu answered. “We’re here to talk about the town’s future. Why shouldn’t everybody get a say? That’s how we do it for the really big stuff in Alaska. Like when we’re trying to decide who really won that ear pull or which hunter gets to keep the moose head, when two of them shoot it down at the same time.”
She was teasing. At least he hoped she was teasing.
“Tu, Oklahoma pack towns… they’re not like Alaska. The pack leader’s God here in Wolf Hole. They don’t have cozy little chats about shit. What Bobby Joe says just goes.”
Tu tucked her mittens into her new jacket’s pockets. “Then we had better say the right thing.”
She put her hand on the door handle, but Grady said, “No, hold on. I’ll come around and let you out.”
She grinned at him when he got around to her side of the truck and yanked open the door.
“Wow, you’re all kinds of chivalrous. Who knew—”
He cut her off, snatching up her purse and quickly depositing a tranquilizer gun into its confines before she could protest.
“Anybody comes at you, I want you to use that. No talking. Just shoot, no hesitation.”
“I won’t be needing that. You don’t have to—”
Further proving just how not chivalrous he was feeling at the moment, he all but hauled her out of the passenger seat, grabbing her by both arms and pinning her with a more than irate look as he said, “This is stupid, Tu. One of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen anybody do. And I’m stupid for going along with it.” He let go of her arms and pulled off his jacket, revealing the double chest holster with matching Smith and Wessons he was wearing underneath. “I said I would, so I’m going to take you in there to let you do this stupid ass thing. However, I’m looking for a reason, any reason to call this off. And you not doing exactly what I say while you’re carrying my cub around inside of you. That feels like a reason I could run with. So are you going to carry this tranq gun in your purse or can I call this stupid shit off now?”
Wolf and Soul (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 3) Page 11
