by Dannika Dark
“You okay? Shit, I’m really sorry, Lexi. I haven’t been the most sensitive person with everything going on.” He set down his rib and wiped off his hands. “Ivan should be calling me tonight. He said if I didn’t hear from him by midnight, then either he was dead, or Hell had finally frozen over.”
“I hope so,” I said.
“He’ll find her,” Austin reassured me. “And if he doesn’t, I’ll find her myself.”
“I think my boss is sick,” I finally said, taking a long sip of my glass of beer. “A neighbor said he has cancer and went to the hospital. That’s why the bills haven’t been paid on the store. I didn’t know it was that bad.”
He sighed, rubbing his clean-shaven jaw. The talisman around his neck was tucked inside his white shirt and he had styled his hair handsomely. He still looked like he could drag anyone in the parking lot and kick their ass, but I didn’t see that side of him when I looked into his eyes. I just saw Austin.
I still wanted to mess up his hair with my fingers.
“Don’t worry about the store. I sent the twins over to clean up.”
“You what?”
“You shouldn’t be doing all that work yourself.” Austin glanced at his watch. “They’ll be there until one o’clock and then head back to the house. I keep a tight watch on my pack.” He turned his fork between his fingers and set it down. “Don’t look at me that way, Lexi. Just accept my help.”
And I did. I accepted it because at this point, my only support system was a bra. “Thanks. I hope April knows what’s going on; she might have a problem with two strange men showing up to clean.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” he said, eying my plate. “They took Ivy with them. Women are more trusting when another woman is around.”
“Lovely. You sent Ivy into a sweatshop environment to scrub a dirty floor? She’s really going to want to stay with you now,” I said sarcastically.
The coleslaw was just as good as I remembered and I must have cleaned it off my plate in five scoops.
“Never did know where you put it all,” he murmured, setting down his fork.
“Well, you can probably tell now. I’ve put on a few since you last saw me.”
He snorted and stuffed a roll in his mouth. “In all the right places.”
There was that tingle again.
I wrapped my lips around the prongs of my fork and looked up. Austin wasn’t just watching me, his eyes were glued to my mouth, and I became self-conscious when a piece of cabbage stuck to my bottom lip. My hand flew up to cover my mouth and the awkward moment passed. The music changed over to a song by Pink (“Try,” I think it was), and a paper wrapper from a straw sailed by us and landed on the floor.
Austin smiled nostalgically and rapped his knuckles on the table to the beat of the song, lost in his thoughts. “This is nice,” he finally said.
“Yeah.”
I think I knew what he meant. We were always linked by Wes, and it was getting easier to be together without his ghost hovering between us.
We talked about old times and I asked stupid things like if he still had his old leather jacket and why didn’t he join a rock band with Jericho. Austin could carry a tune, but he said it wasn’t his thing. Now that he was a Packmaster, his responsibility was maintaining stability within his family and the Shifter community. They would get jobs and help bring in money as well as assisting other packs as needed, but Austin had acquired a lot of money from his jobs over the years. Evidently, his work paid well. Money wouldn’t last forever, so he encouraged them to find something they enjoyed doing. Jericho sang, Denver worked as a bartender four nights a week, and Reno… well, Austin didn’t mention what exactly Reno did. Ben and Wheeler were out of work and looking.
After another tall glass of beer and a few sips of Austin’s root-beer float, I decided it was time for us to head home.
“Big girl’s room,” I declared with an impish grin.
Austin chuckled and stretched his arm across the seat, watching me get up. He might have been sly about stealing glances, but I noticed his eyes sliding down to my ass. As I walked by him, I bent over and squinted. My face was numb, one of the telltale signs I’d had too much to drink.
“You have something… right here,” I said, tapping my chin with a lazy smile on my face.
A sexy smirk tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Then lick it off,” he teased.
Never one to turn down a dare, I bent forward and sucked on his chin. In my defense, I was drunk. I would never have done anything like that in a sober state of mind, but the tingly feeling of beer slid through my body and made me lose those inhibitions. It also shocked the hell out of Austin because I felt his entire body tense up, which I noticed because my hands were resting on his hard biceps.
I moved my mouth slowly, swirling my tongue over the dab of sauce, and suddenly there was a moment, even if only a brief second, where something fired up between us. His bristly chin had the first hint of stubble, the tang of barbecue sauce awakened my taste buds, and his shallow breath heated my cheek.
Had a sharp wolf whistle across the room not snapped me out of it, I might have even slid my lips over to his… just to see what would happen.
Austin was real smooth about it, too. When I pulled back, he lifted his left arm and touched my nose, dabbing a dollop of sauce on it. Maybe he was being funny, or maybe it was a dare on his part, but I wiped it off and left the table before discovering what base I could get to with Austin and a bottle of barbecue sauce. He laughed and stretched back in his seat.
Damn. He still had a great laugh.
I went to the restroom for a very long pee and decided okra and beer got along. In fact, they were so in love they were doing the tango and making me queasy. The bathroom also served as a temporary hiding place since my slutty behavior planted serious doubts I could ever look him in the eye again. I never behaved that way with other men, but something about Austin drew out a sexually aggressive side that made me want to slap myself.
I’d never felt so conflicted with a man as I did with Austin. Part of that had to do with the fact our relationship was wrapped up in years of history, combined with years of separation.
Still, it was a fantastic dinner and had almost felt like a date. He took my mind away from all the worry and stress about my mother, and somehow I just knew he would make sure everything turned out okay. The strange part was how quickly my perception of Austin was beginning to change. He continued stepping up to help through every situation and never asked for anything in return.
Not a kiss, not a check, not a single favor.
He’d matured into the most selfless man I’d ever met.
I emerged from the restroom marked “Cowgirls” and stared at our empty booth. Then I spotted Marcy Robertson, the former head cheerleader at my old high school. I hid my face and dashed toward the front door before she noticed me. Those chance meetings were so uncomfortable because I had to explain what I did for a living. It was like a competition to see who had succeeded in life. Most of the girls knew who I was back in high school, even if I wasn’t the most popular, because they all used to crush on Wes.
The balmy June air smelled clean compared to the heavy aroma of grilled meat from inside the restaurant. I glanced around and wondered where he parked the car, because when we got here, Austin had dropped me off at the door so I could get a good table.
I stepped down on the curb and took a seat—my beers had been served in tall glasses and I had always been a lightweight when it came to drinking. My eyes were losing focus and God, how embarrassing was that? Here was Austin, trying to show me a good time, and now I was sitting on the curb because I couldn’t hold my liquor.
Still, I’d had fun. Hanging out and talking with Austin was so effortless now. He could spin a good yarn, and he attentively listened as I filled him in on some of the things I’d done in the past few years. While we still felt like strangers, an indefinable intimacy existed between us—one that happens with those who h
ave seen you at your worst and remember you before all the big events in life happened.
A car engine prowled closer from the street entrance, growing louder by the second. My eyelids drooped and I closed my eyes, deciding I was going to crash on the sofa when I got home.
And then I blacked out.
***
The minute Lexi closed the bathroom door behind her marked “Cowgirls,” Austin slid down in his booth and rubbed his face.
Holy shit. He hadn’t felt so alive by a woman’s mouth on him since he kissed her seven years ago. All that time he wondered if he had built up their kiss in his mind to something it wasn’t. Even the brief interlude in Jericho’s bed didn’t confirm anything because he’d just woken up and wasn’t thinking straight.
No, now he knew it was more than the kiss. It was her.
Austin had thought it was going to be tough going back to The Pit—facing all the old memories of him and Wes bonding the way friends do. Losing Wes nearly broke him. But it felt good going back to their old hangout, like he was putting to bed all that anger he had carried with him over the years. Everyone has that one place from their youth that transports them back to an earlier time. The Pit was that place. It’s where they’d scoped out girls, talked about muscle cars, and where they fell in love with old-school rock instead of the current stuff on the radio. It was a rustic joint with personality, ambiance, and initials with hearts surrounding them carved on the wooden tables. It was the kind of place you could smoke a cigarette and no one would say anything as long as you kept it hidden.
After cleaning their plates, he decided to bring the car around front and save Lexi the walk of drunken shame. Austin smiled, thinking about how she had asked him to order her dinner. “I trust your choice,” she’d said, which was code for, “I want to see if you really remember a damn thing about me.”
Of course he did. He even knew she liked a cup of sauce on the side to dunk her roll in. Why he remembered stuff like that was crazy, but he’d thought about her a lot over the years.
Except in those thoughts, he’d imagined Lexi had already settled down with a man and had kids. Her being single made no sense to him. Then again, it was for the best considering she was a Shifter. He also noticed nothing had changed in regards to how men’s eyes were all over her. Lexi had always possessed a natural beauty and he didn’t think the Shifter allure was behind every roving eye.
When Lexi rose from the table and bent over to mess around with him, Austin’s eyes skated to the left and caught a guy checking out her ass. That’s when a possessive feeling took hold, but it didn’t make him want to pound the guy’s face in like he might have ten years ago. Austin wanted to grab her ass and claim her as his woman, just to rub it in.
Funny how being around her made him feel young and stupid again.
He even let her talk for five minutes with a piece of coleslaw stuck to her cheek because he thought she was too damn cute to spoil the mood by embarrassing her. He was afraid she’d eventually discover it and scold him for not telling her, so he’d cleverly pinched her cheeks in the middle of a conversation about how Wes used to call her chubby cheeks when she was a toddler. The topic was a diversion that allowed him to brush the coleslaw away without her knowing.
Austin wouldn’t allow their night to be tainted with bad memories. He remembered all too well an incident when she was a young teenager that left her crying on the curb outside The Pit. Some of Wes’s friends were real dicks and teased Lexi a lot, but what she didn’t know was that they did it because they liked her. They just didn’t want Wes to find out.
Austin twirled his keys around his finger as he walked out of The Pit. He thought about how amazing Lexi’s slim legs looked in those Capri pants and liked that casualness about her. Not once during their talks did he think about Wes, and wasn’t that a strange thing?
When Bonnie had come up to their table and hadn’t mentioned Wes, it had become the elephant in the room. He knew damn well she remembered who Wes was because she dated him for about a month. It must have stung Lexi to hear that. Everyone knew those two were best friends. When he saw her gazing somberly out the window, he reached out and took her hand. Maybe she didn’t understand why, but he wanted to console her. It felt instinctive.
When Austin walked outside after their meal, he closed a chapter of his life. It was time he found a new joint to create memories. Maybe the Dairy Queen where he first saw Lexi the day after he arrived in town, or the bar where Denver worked. It was time for change.
He lifted his chin and scoped the parking lot, jingling the coins in his pocket. Something felt off. An icy chill skated across his skin and the metallic tang of adrenaline settled on his tongue. Instead of walking directly to his car, he dodged around the back end of the building and approached it from behind.
That’s when he saw Beckett standing by his Dodge Challenger, holding a wooden baseball bat in his hand.
***
“Wake up, Nashoba.”
I wrinkled my nose at an unfamiliar scent, rubbing my eyes and peering through my lashes. Animal fur covered me and I looked around to find myself in a stranger’s bed. Lorenzo was standing beside me with his brown arms folded. Directly over the bed, a large mirror captured my stunned reaction.
I scrambled beneath the covers, fearing I had shifted and was lying naked beneath his silk sheets. Thankfully, my Capris and stretchy tank top were still accounted for.
A smile curved up one cheek and he lifted his brows. “You growl a little in your sleep.”
I sat up, looking at my surroundings. “Where am I?”
“My home.”
“And why am I in your bed?”
Then his face tightened so that his cheekbones appeared to be carved out of wood and his lips pressed into an angry line. “Because that alpha you were with left you alone—intoxicated and passed out in a parking lot. If you were in my pack, Alexia, I would never leave you unprotected. I make sure my women are properly looked after.”
I ripped the blankets away and rubbed my eyes.
Wow. Lorenzo was loaded. The canopy bed had four posts with detailed designs carved into the wood. Native American artifacts and paintings decorated the spacious room. The ceilings stretched higher than fifteen feet, the floors were polished wood, and the window view made it seem like we were in the treetops.
His bedroom alone was a fully functional apartment, equipped with a small bar, a sitting area with cozy chairs, and a fancy bathroom farther down on the right. All I could make out was an oversized Jacuzzi with two steps to get in. But what really made the whole thing breathtaking were the windows that lined the walls in front of me, all the way down to the Jacuzzi. The golden light of sunrise shimmered on the glass.
Lorenzo played statue on my left by the door, watching my appraisal of his living accommodations with avid curiosity. Then I saw one of those fancy hotel carts with silver trays and food on it.
“Why did you bring me here?” I hopped out of bed, looking for my shoes.
“You would have rather I left you passed out in the gutter?”
“Austin was coming for me.”
“And how do you know this?”
My hands rested on my hips and I carved him up with an intolerant glare. “Why are you trying to plant doubts in my head? I know Austin better than you do, and he was coming for me.”
Lorenzo nodded and walked around the bed. “Ah, but I was there for you.”
“To show off your swanky place? Sorry, it doesn’t erase the fact you’re my cousin,” I murmured, lifting the covers and looking under the bed. “Where are my shoes?”
“If you keep saying that, I’m going to take you to my father and have him explain why we’re not related by blood,” he said in a clipped tone.
“No,” I almost shouted. “I’m not meeting your family. Tell me what you did with my shoes because I have to go home.”
“Home to what?”
I shoved his chest. “My baby sister, you idiot! I left her alone all
night with my neighbor.”
The humor melted away from his face. “Which neighbor? I’ll bring her here. Why would you leave a child with someone who is not family?” he hissed.
“Because I was kidnapped?”
He lifted his phone and dialed a number. “It’s Church. You know the young wolf’s apartment you’re watching? Her neighbor—”
I snatched the phone and hung up. “Don’t you dare send one of your men to get my sister! You’re having me watched?” I stuffed the phone in my back pocket. “Take me home, right now,” I said in slow words.
He chewed on his lip for a moment, considering my request. “I’ve had my men on you since one of them first spotted you at the cemetery. He sensed you were a Shifter and word spreads fast when it comes to rogue females.”
That damn dog really was a wolf.
“Tell your friend the next time he chases me up a tree and tries to gnaw on my leg, he’s going to end up tangling with the wrong wolf. I bite back.”
Lorenzo moved forward and lowered his chin. A dark intensity flickered in his eyes. “He did what?”
“I guess your pack isn’t so loyal, after all. If you don’t give me my shoes, I’m walking home barefoot.”
“Then you’ll end up hiking over sticks, and I won’t have that. If you insist, I will see that you’re safely escorted home. But you will not be permitted to leave my house until you are well fed. There is breakfast on the tray. Use my phone to make any calls you need to.” Lorenzo made no attempt to brush away the long strands of hair that fell in front of his right eye. “My home is always open to you,” he said, inching closer so that our bodies bounced heat off each other. His mouth brushed against my ear. “And my bed is still open whenever your legs are open, my sweet Nashoba.”
I drew in a sharp intake of air and stumbled back before he got me worked up again. There was no doubt that alphas had an undeniable magnetism that lured you under their spell.
