She’d been trained to eventually become someone’s queen, and she automatically started answering their questions with warmth and patience, like she’d been taught to do from the age of four. But that kept her from going after her king. In the end, she didn’t hunt Grady down until almost an hour later. And she wouldn’t have been able to find him if it hadn’t been for her super nose. She’d guessed correctly that he’d gone back to the kingdom house, but he wasn’t in the house itself but hidden behind the barn. The barn where…
She almost didn’t go. The dread that came over her when she realized where he was, what structure she’d have to walk around in order to get to him… it nearly gutted her. Even worse than when she’d been confronted with Luke’s bedroom.
But she went to him anyway. Because he wasn’t just angry, he was in pain. Emotional pain. So terrible, she could feel it all the way from the house. And somehow knowing he was hurting even worse than she was at the prospect of confronting that old barn was enough to get her walking, out the house’s back door, through the long unused field, past Grady’s old tornado cellar. Deep breath, held for a long time as she rushed around the side of the barn. And then finally she found him.
He was in the driver’s seat of his truck, his head against the back of the seat as if he was looking up to its roof for answers. This wasn’t about her setting up Bobby Joe Jr. to die, she realized then. He wouldn’t have been all wolf-hurt over that meth head’s demise.
Tu thought of all of the princess advice her mother had given her during her younger years. The advice she’d purposefully forgotten after her first heat. But now one piece came back bright and nasty, like a forest fire unintentionally started. According to her mother, you could only be so competent with male wolves before they started feeling emasculated.
She bit her lower lip and knocked on the truck’s window.
At least he didn’t ignore her. He turned to look at her, his face morose and angrier than she’d ever seen it, and she opened the door so she wouldn’t have to talk to him through a glass barrier.
“I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” she pushed into his mind quickly, before immediately launching into her counter-argument. King Tikaani Rule of Business: if someone misunderstands your intentions, apologize quickly then explain why you’re right and they’re wrong. “Making Wolf Hole learn ASL isn’t just for your benefit, it’s for theirs. My dad makes his pack leaders learn at least one human Inuit dialect and Russian. And he doesn’t go into a meeting with someone from another country unless he knows at least a few words of their native language. That’s just good business and if these are the pack leaders we want to help cure Oklahoma’s mange, then they’re going to have to step up and learn how to be good business wolves.”
“Tu…” Grady said, shaking his head.
“You have to think of them like soldiers,” she said, desperately trying to convince him. “You’re the general and I’m your drill sergeant. I wasn’t emasculating you. I’m training them. You’re still in charge, but I’m—”
He hauled her into the truck, and then his mouth was moving over hers with such bruising force that for a moment, she thought he’d gone wolf again. But no, he didn’t smell any different. And his wolf, she remembered, was all animal. It didn’t kiss, just licked and fucked.
Grady’s hands urgently moved over her body, pulling and pushing on her until she was straddled across his lap. Her back against the steering wheel, her core against the zipper of his jeans. Then there came the sound of fabric ripping, and suddenly her panties were gone. Nothing to stop him from shoving up the skirt of her yellow wrap dress, and.... he pushed into her like a battering ram. Then he cuffed his large hand around her neck and his other arm came around her waist like a steel band. They were in the seat so tight together, she couldn’t move as he started fucking her, forcing her body up and down on his cock.
Yes, this was Grady, but there was none of his usual sweetness in this act, none of the leisurely sessions in hotel beds they’d been enjoying all week. No, this was hard, fast, and accompanied by a feeling of desolation that spilled out of him and into her, proving his human was still there.
She could have pulled him back from the brink, told him to stop this right now.
But she didn’t.
Instead she fucked him back, meeting him stroke for stroke, letting his desolation invade her heart and claiming it as her own. And she wasn’t surprised when they came at the same time, a heavy dark eruption mushrooming through them both before they collapsed into each other like two prizefighters who had gone the distance, without anyone being declared the winner.
They held on to each other, but it wasn’t a hug. At least not for Tu. It was more like a holding position while she waited to see what he’d do next.
She didn’t have to wait long before his voice finally sounded in her head. Angry and clipped.
“There. The sex is off the table. Now we can talk. Really talk.” His words were triumphant, but his tone was grim. Then he said, “I wasn’t mad because of what you did. I’m mad because of why you did it.”
21
“You’re mad because I want to help you?”
“You’re not listening to me, Tu. I’m mad because of why you want to help me. I thought you were getting better, that doing all this business for Oklahoma was actually helping you heal—that’s why I went along with it. But you’re so good at selling, I didn’t figure out what you were really doing until today.”
Now Tu started getting angry, sensing he was getting close to the truth. Too close. “Okay, I’m done with this conversation. Sit out here and sulk if you want to. I’m going to bed.”
She made a move to get up, but his arm around her waist didn’t budge. And when she looked to him for an explanation, he stared back at her with infinite sadness in his eyes.
“I thought we could wait to do this. I wanted you to get comfortable with me first. I thought we were making progress.”
Tu put everything she had into convincing him of the veracity of her next words.
“I am comfortable with you, Grady. I just fucked you in the front seat of your truck, I’m so comfortable with you. And if you don’t think all the work I’ve put into turning this kingdom around is progress, I don’t know what to tell you. Because any other mange king would be through the roof.”
Tikaani’s Rule of Business: Don’t lose. If you feel yourself losing, change the subject. Make it about something else. Deflect. Distract. Do whatever you have to do to win.
She waited for Grady to defend himself, to insist he was grateful for everything she’d done.
But just like he didn’t try to stop her from hitting him in that meadow the year before, he didn’t say anything in his own defense now. He just stared at her. So long and so tough, it felt like his eyes were burrowing into her soul.
Eventually she couldn’t take the silence anymore.
“Say something,” she said. “Either say something or let me go. I didn’t come out here for a staring contest.”
He looked away and shook his head, a heavy frown on his face, like she was forcing his hand, making him do something he really, really didn’t want to do. And for a moment, she thought he would let her go. Unclamp his arm and allow her to return to the house.
But when he raised his eyes back to hers, they shone with stubborn determination. “I thought you had accepted this, our mating, come to terms with being pregnant. But you haven’t mentioned our pup once, and every time I bring it up, you change the subject.”
Deflect, deflect, deflect… “So you’re upset I don’t get all squishy over babies? You were hoping to get Mary Poppins when you married me, too? You want a nanny? Just like Rafe and Mag got for their kids?”
Grady kept staring at her, evenly, like she hadn’t just accused him unfairly, like her words had been completely irrelevant.
“It’s time to tell me what happened, Tu,” he said. “It’s time to tell me about your miscarriage.”
Her heart beca
me a sick crow inside her chest, fluttering and coughing and falling out of the sky.
“I don’t talk about that.”
“I’ve heard,” he said. “Tell me anyway.”
She shook her head. “It’s an ugly story. A really fucking ugly story.”
He nodded solemnly. “Copy that. Now tell me anyway.”
And finally Tu admitted, “I can’t. I can’t talk about it. It’s too terrible.”
“Tu…” he said, his voice gentle but firm. “You’ve got to tell me. I’m your husband. You’ve got to tell me.”
Fuck that, she thought. She didn’t have to tell him shit. She didn’t have to…
The sadness from before was back now, constricting her heart, making it feel like she was on the verge of a heart attack.
She clutched at her chest, and Grady’s voice appeared inside her head again.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Let me help you. I’m good at helping people. Just tell me the story. You’ll feel better after you do.”
Now the sadness turned into ugly, raw, pure-grade anger.
“Fuck you, Grady. You’re a male. All you do is put your dick in things. You’ve never carried life inside of you. What the hell do you think you know that would make me feel better?”
“You’re right, I’ve never carried life inside of me. Tell me what it’s like? What does it feel like to have a pup inside of you?”
“What does it feel like to have a pup inside of you?” she repeated, mocking his solemn tone. “I don’t know, I guess like a big, fucking responsibility. Like it’s been all fun and games up until you wake up the Monday after Thanksgiving with some mange prince’s kid in your womb. And you walk out of his bedroom to find him sitting there in the living room with his friends—yeah, he’s actually invited friends over. They’re passing around a bong.” Tu shook her head, remembering. Then she said to Grady, “You know how it feels? It feels stupid. Like the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. That’s how it feels.”
“All right. Being pregnant feels stupid and that’s why you ran. Because you realized you made a big mistake mating my brother.”
“No, that’s not why I ran. I ran because Luke offered me a hit from the bong. And I realized right then and there your brother wasn’t cool or hot or fun. He was just, I don’t know, an idiot. So I told him I was wrecked and I was going back to sleep and then I climbed out the window and ran to my rental car and I got out of there as fast as I could.”
“All right,” Grady said again, like he was a cop taking her statement. “Then what happened? You went back to Alaska and my brother followed you. And he ended up dead.”
“To tell you the truth, I know as much about that as you do. I started drinking when I was sixteen, Grady. Truth be told, I can’t remember the last day that passed without me having something to drink before that weekend. I thought I could just go back to Alaska, throw myself on my parents’ mercy and they’d fix everything. But I started throwing up on the plane back to Fairbanks. Then I threw up in my cousin, Vince’s, plane…”
She remembered how angry Vince had been at her for lying to him. Back before she turned twenty-one when he’d escorted her everywhere, they’d had a deal. She could have all the fun she wanted as long as he was around to protect her. But if he wasn’t, then she was supposed to stay away from illegal substances and alcohol.
She’d stuck to his rules for the most part, but toward the end of her twentieth year, he’d become such a buzzkill, like a PSA following her everywhere she went. “Tu do you really need to drink this much to have fun? Tu, why don’t you stay in this weekend, watch a movie? Tu, you know you’re going to have to settle down soon, right? You can’t keep partying like this if you want a prince to pledge you.”
Vince used to be her best friend, her partner in crime, but she’d been so glad when her twenty-first birthday had finally rolled around, allowing her to come and go as she pleased. However, his constant badgering was nothing compared to the look on his face, when she’d met up with him in the Wolf Lake hangar, pregnant with a baby he could smell didn’t belong to the Prince of Nebraska. A look of total and utter disgust had come over his face then, like she was the dumbest she-wolf on the entire planet. A look she’d soon see replicated in her parents’ eyes.
“You’ve stopped talking,” Grady said inside her head now. “Go on. Tell me the rest. What happened after you threw up on the plane?”
She continued on in a daze of awful remembrance. “By the time I got back to our kingdom town, I was in pretty bad shape. And my parents—they were pissed. They were all like ‘Janelle was right! We should have listened to Janelle!’ I guess she’d been telling them ever since I acted a fool at her Christmas wedding that they needed to send me to rehab. But they didn’t send me to rehab, because—you know—appearances. They didn’t want Wolf Lake to know their alkie daughter had come home knocked up with a mange pup. So they just locked me in my room, and the come down… it was bad. I don’t remember much, just a lot of pain, the shakes, these weird sensations—like there were insects crawling underneath my skin. I’d be freezing one minute, and burning up the next. At least I thought it was hour to hour. Later on I found out it was more like days, and Luke was dead. My mom was more upset about the scene he caused than anything, because now everyone in Wolf Lake knew I was ruined.”
She stopped, remembering how revolted her mother had looked when she spat that word at her youngest daughter. Tu had left Alaska her mother’s favorite and had returned her mother’s biggest disappointment.
“Mama said quietly getting rid of the baby wasn’t an option any more. And that was pretty much the last thing she really said to me. After that, she sent our housekeeper up to tend to my needs, and she, um… they sent a television up to my room.”
She didn’t realize a few tears had leaked out of her eyes until she felt Grady’s thumb pads on her face, wiping them away.
“The television. Why does that make you so sad?” he asked.
“Because my dad had this rule. All my life we’d only ever had one television, because he said a real family watched TV together, not apart. You wouldn’t believe some of the fights my family used to get in over what to watch when all of us were home—I used to joke my sister Alisha left early for college just so she could watch as much History Channel as she wanted. But my dad never gave in. It was like he wanted us to live on a black-and-white TV show, and it drove me crazy, because everybody I knew had more than one television in their house, and we only had one, even though we were one of the richest wolf families in America. But I guess the joke was on me because when they sent that television up to my room, it just about killed me. They were basically saying I was no longer their daughter, that they didn’t want to see me or know me or live with me.”
Her eyes filled with tears then, and though the look on Grady’s face was sympathetic, he said, “I know this hurts, Tu, but you have to keep on going. After Luke died and after your parents sent the TV up to your room, what happened?”
“I don’t know, time passed, and I stayed in my room because everyone was treating me like some kind of leper. Even the town doctor. He came to see me like once a month, because I guess he didn’t want me spreading my ruined cooties all over his office. He kept saying everything was fine, and after a few months, all my withdrawal symptoms went away. I just wanted to try to fix the mess I’d gotten into. I broke out my Kindle—Janelle had given it to me for Christmas. She said she’d found it in Alisha’s things after she left, and thought I might like to have it since she already had one. And I was so dumb, I just rolled my eyes. Like what kind of Christmas gift is this? What am I going to do with a Kindle? I don’t even like reading that much…”
Tu shook her head, getting angry at her younger self all over again.
“But I broke it out after I got pregnant. I used the alone time to read all these books about alcoholism and recovery, childcare, business—I had this idea that after I had the baby, maybe I could convince my dad to let me work a
t one of the kingdom companies. That way I could prove to my parents I wasn’t a complete fuck up by doing my job well and raising my pup right…”
A shadow fell over her heart.
“…but then I woke up six and a half months in, thinking I’d peed myself—that used to happen a lot back when I was drinking really hard. But it wasn’t pee, it was blood and amnio fluid, because my water had broke. I was twenty-one weeks in. And it must have been bad, because my dad actually took me to the doctor’s office himself. I wasn’t in labor long. This little baby came out of me. It was a boy, and he was so small… and maybe he would have survived if we had those incubator thingies like the humans. But you know, we can’t go to human hospitals, and even if we could, there’s no way they would have been able to get him all the way to Fairbanks in enough time.”
At least that’s what her dad had said when she’d been screaming at him to do something, anything to help her little boy.
“Keep going,” Grady said, his voice quiet inside her head. “Tell me about your pup.”
Her face crumpled, the tears spilling freely now.
“Oh God, Grady, he was so small. You don’t even understand how small he was… he had no chance. You could tell just by looking at him, but he was still breathing. The nurse gave him to me to hold, because I wouldn’t let them just take him away to die by himself. And I can see it’s hard for him. Just breathing was really hard for him. It looks like it’s taking all the strength he has. But then he just goes for it. He tries to turn, like one last shot at the gold. And I want him to make it. I don’t care who his father is or how he’s fucked up my life. I just want this little cub to live more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. And I’m thinking, maybe he can make it. But halfway through, he just stops. He’s got all this soft black fur on his body, but his head’s still human. He can’t do the full transformation. He just not strong enough. And five minutes later he was dead. The end.”
Wolf and Soul (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 3) Page 15
