by Holley Trent
She drew in a breath and squeezed her eyes closed. Don’t look at him.
“When I go back to Wilmington, I’m taking you with me. I’m not releasing your wolf back into the woods.”
She pulled her head farther into the coat and pressed her nose against her knees. “You can’t help me,” she muttered against them. “There’s nothing to do for it. You want to get some food into me for the holiday, that’s fine, but I’m not your responsibility. Maybe you’re just bored because Ariel doesn’t need you anymore, but I’m sure you can get a new assignment. Maybe—”
He pulled the coat plackets apart and put his lips against her ear. “It’s not up to you. Listen and understand me. I’m here because I want to be. This isn’t a Good Samaritan act. I want to take care of you, and I’m going to, so stop.”
The directness of his tone made her gasp, but the rebel in her was waking up. “I’m not a pet, Angel. Find another project.”
He grabbed the sides of her face and forced her to look at him. Now it wasn’t wisdom she saw in his eyes as he loomed over her, but anger.
“I don’t want a fucking pet, Sweetie.”
Time stood still. Or at least, it seemed to. She felt like her heart stopped beating, lungs stopped inflating, and her brain just fell right on out.
“What?” was all she could think to say.
“Shit, just eat the sandwich, okay? Stop looking for ulterior motives. There are none.”
He traced along the edge of her jaw with his thumbs, and his features softened. The anger leached away and something like relief took its place. He was incapable of dishonesty, but he’d always delivered his messages—no matter how brutal—sweetly. The fact that he’d broken from that habit made him seem more human … and Sweetie wasn’t sure she liked it.
Mark was good. He was her guidepost for righteous living, and she’d always aspired to be more like him. Maybe he’d finally been corrupted.
Maybe it was all her fault. She’d tainted him.
Sweetie picked up the sandwich and took a bite. Vaguely, she registered her jaw working as she chewed, but she tasted nothing. All of her brain’s energy seemed concentrated on his lips. She watched them redden as he freed them from a tight press and let her gaze linger on the curves and swirls of his skin. She watched her index finger land on the indentation at the top of his upper lip and pulled her hand back when she realized her body and mind were no longer working cooperatively.
Laughing, he backed away from the bed and returned to the kitchen. “When you finish that sandwich, you can have your bath,” he said. He pulled a box of macaroni from the shelf over the counter and ripped off the cardboard top. “I picked up some clothes for you. Had to guess the sizes, so please don’t be offended if I got them wrong. You … well, you lost a lot of weight.”
“Do I even want to see myself in a mirror?” She took a bigger bite of the sandwich, actually tasting it this time. “Hmm. Nice bacon.”
“It’s good, right? I picked it up from one of those sketchy roving meat mongers. The guy was selling sides of beef, venison, and all kinds of stuff out of the back of his pickup truck.”
She smiled. “Way to dodge my question.”
“I’m not ignoring your question,” he smirked. “I just don’t believe there’s a good answer to it.” He poured the pasta into a pot of boiling water and moved to the fridge.
She raised an eyebrow. “You usually have an answer for everything.”
He fetched a clear bag of greens and closed the door. “Yeah, well, I’m learning that having an answer doesn’t mean it should be shared.”
“Fuck.” She slumped. “I look that bad, huh?”
He pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat at the table with the bag of greens and a big bowl. He met her gaze with one eyebrow cocked over his glasses. “I’m biased. I know how you’re supposed to look and I prefer you that way. A stranger might find your current … well, leanness, incredibly arousing.”
“Oh my God.” Grunting, she struggled to her feet and fixed the coat around her with the hand not holding her sandwich. There had to be a mirror in that corner with the bathtub. She padded over, and sure enough, found one hanging over the sink.
She gasped at the unrecognizable woman in the glass. Her bruised skin was pulled tight across her cheekbones creating shadows of gauntness. Her lips were cracked and dry, and dark circles hung beneath her eyes. She closed her eyes before her gaze could settle on the dark mass of hair that she could already tell from just her peripheral vision was standing on end.
Although she hadn’t heard him move across the old floorboards, he was there behind her. She felt his proximity the same way she always did. His energy had always licked at hers like a mothering wild animal, looking for a way to smooth all her rough spots away. His energy was protective and healing, but this time there was something else there she couldn’t identify. Whatever it was pulled at her gut and made her heart gallop.
She liked it, whatever it was.
Swallowing, she opened her eyes and turned to him. “I guess I’ve only been left alone this long because my brother’s the alpha now. Calvin would have told them to back off for a while.”
Mark wasn’t particularly prone to having visceral reactions. That was a human thing and he’d told her that even smiling took a concerted effort for beings like him. Just because he was happy on the inside didn’t mean the body he was wearing showed it. But Sweetie saw the twitch of his jaw hinges and slight narrowing of his eyes.
“Uh. Usually when wolves get to this stage … someone gets elected to put them out of their misery. It’s almost always a family member. I’m surprised Mama didn’t do it herself since I’m so fuckin’ defective.”
“The only thing defective about you is that you hate yourself so much that you’d give up.”
He stormed away, the anger hanging in his wake leaving her a bit colder, and at a loss for words.
CHAPTER THREE
“What in the hell is wrong with you?” she asked his back as he walked away.
He settled into the kitchen chair once more and got to work pulling stems off collard greens. He hoped they weren’t as bitter as the last batch he’d procured, but as he couldn’t determine the vegetable’s provenance he had no way of knowing how they were grown. That was the problem with big box grocery stores. They shipped in food from halfway around the world when small local farms had an excess of the stuff.
Pitiful.
He kept plucking stems, flinging the discards into the bowl with far more exertion than was necessary. For every one he tossed in, one flew out. He didn’t know how to process this agitation. The mix of fear and anxiety was unfamiliar to angels, but Sweetie had set off some chain reaction in him. Body and mind were telling him to just do what needed to be done—be a man and tell her the deal. Tell her that he would be her mate, and that they were going to start right now.
It’d been a lot fucking easier to be a man back when he’d been an angel. He didn’t know how to navigate his warring compulsions to both dominate her and let her walk all over him.
Something soft boinged off the side of his head. He turned and scanned the floor around him, easily finding a balled-up napkin with mustard stains.
He looked up at Sweetie who pointed her sandwich at him. “Don’t you dare ignore me.”
“Glad to see you’re getting your energy back. You’ll be back to talking shit in no time at all. Can’t wait.”
“I don’t like your mouth.”
“Well, I’m sure there are a lot more things you’re not going to like about me.”
He resumed his work with the collards.
She sighed. “I don’t mean to sound judgey. I’m just sayin’. I’m a werewolf. Cussin’ doesn’t come close to being the worst of my bad habits. I know I’m not proper, but you’ve always been and don’t go changing that now.” Her eyes narrowed, but even in his anger, taking her seriously was difficult when she had mustard from the sandwich over her lip.
God. No wonder angels wer
e barred from fraternizing with humankind. Who could think through all the emotions they ignited? He couldn’t even label all his yet.
He flicked his thumb over the same approximate area on his face. She rolled her eyes, but licked the spot clean all the same.
“Have you considered that perhaps this is the part of my personality you’re simply not accustomed to?” Just like him.
She moved toward the table, seeming to have forgotten her nearly undressed state. The coat splayed open revealing a vee of deeply tanned skin from her neck on downward. This time, he couldn’t look away. His gaze trailed down her sleekly tapered torso to the patch of hair at the apex of her thighs.
She sat and pulled her chair up close to the table, and he closed his eyes on a groan.
Bobbing his right knee, he tried to wield mastery over unfamiliar body functions and failed. He kept his hands on top of the table and not on the cock expanding uncomfortably in his jeans. He’d always possessed the sense of touch. His body could feel simple pleasures and that was a gift for angels and mankind alike. Pain, however, had been rare. Of all the things stripped from him during his fall, his resistance to pain was one of the first.
If he wanted to live like a man, he had to suffer like one, too.
His exhale came out sounding like a hiss, and he cursed the inventor of whatever fabric his boxer shorts were made of. It felt like millions of tiny little burrs on his cock. He didn’t know much about the physical aspects of sex, but he was pretty sure this was part of his penance.
“You’re looking a little pale,” Sweetie said. “Did you sit down too fast or something?”
“I can teleport. I doubt that a slight change in my body’s position would cause any distress.” Of course, on the rare occasion he teleported now, all the blood in his body didn’t pool in one particularly sensitive location.
“Angels aren’t susceptible to communicable illnesses, so it can’t be that,” she said. “What’s really going on?”
He opened his mouth, but before he could get words out, she put up her hand. “Don’t. Don’t lie to me.”
“You know lying causes me physical distress.” Or did it? He hadn’t tried since falling, and not for a long time before that.
“Okay.” She nodded and finally set the sandwich down. “Maybe you don’t lie, but you’re damn good at leaving shit out. Calvin’s lawyer calls that lying by omission. Don’t forget. Even in my human form, I have better than average smelling. I can smell distress from you. It smells like adrenaline and sweat, just like my brother’s gym bag. The Angel I know doesn’t sweat a damn thing, so tell me now what’s going on.”
“Or else what?”
Her jaw flapped a few beats and forehead furrowed. “What do you mean or else what? What’s gotten into you? Angel doesn’t talk back.”
“Like I said, maybe this is a part of my personality that you need to become accustomed to. And please finish the sandwich. I’m sure you need the protein.”
“Who the hell cares about the sandwich? Why do you—” Her words cut off with a growl of frustration and she pounded the table with one weak fist and snarled at him.
“Scary.” He tamped together a pile of collard leaves before snipping off the stems. “You know, you’re not even all that intimidating in wolf form, but maybe I’m jaded. You’re probably very frightening to the raccoons and squirrels.”
She pushed back from the table and stomped over to him. Growling again, she poked his shoulder and then shook it. “You’re trying to talk me into circles. You know my head ain’t where it’s supposed to be in the first place and I can’t keep up. What is wrong with you?”
“I ask myself that every morning. There’s always something new that’s wrong. Today, it was my hearing. Frequencies are way off. I wonder if it’s the altitude.” He threw the greens into the bowl and stood, carefully disengaging her fingers from his shoulders. His gaze was locked on her pouting lips as he reached for the coat’s zipper and pulled it up.
He turned her before she could look down at herself or him and gave her a small push toward the bathtub. “If you’re not going to eat, then bathe. That should keep you occupied for at least an hour.”
“That sounded a lot like an insult to me, Angel.” She tried to dig her heels in and hold her ground, but he picked her up by her armpits and carried her, kicking and growling to the tub corner.
While he fiddled one-handed with the tub knobs, he kept a grip on her wrist to keep her from scampering away.
“I thought it was cats that were afraid of water, not wolves,” he said.
She tried to kick him, but he moved his knee out of the way just in time.
“You’re trying to put me off, and all I want you to do is answer a damned question!” she shrieked.
“Perhaps it doesn’t suit me to answer it at the moment.” He tested the water temperature with his elbow and wondered if she’d be better off in hot water or cold.
He knew which he needed. He’d already set his mind on a brisk walk through the snow.
“Have you been possessed or something? Tell me that’s not it. Oh, shit, you’d better call Claude and let him get it out of ya.” Her eyes went wide as if the idea dawned on her as the truth and not just wild-assed speculation.
Mark turned off the water and indicated the tub. “There’re lots of towels for you, and soap, shampoo … everything you’d need. Uh … ” He hooked a thumb toward the nearby dresser. “There’s clothes for you in the top drawer.”
He stepped back from the tub and grabbed the curtain to cordon off the corner. Once she’d been concealed behind it, he added, “And no, I haven’t been possessed by anything but you.”
“What?” Her response came on five-second delay as if her brain couldn’t process what he’d said.
He didn’t respond. He just walked to the cabin door and unlocked it. He turned back to see her nudging the curtain aside so one eye and all that messy hair peeked out.
He’d need to get out of there while she bathed because he was pretty sure his dick was flawed in such a way that if it got any harder it’d detach itself and create a whole new person via asexual reproduction. And it’d have the only brain Mark had been using since he’d carried Sweetie into the cabin.
The idea of her naked and dripping wet made his balls tighten and throb. It was a wonder his incubus buddies were as sane as they were if this was the shit they endured all the time.
“Fuck.”
He opened the door only to be greeted by an embankment of powder as high as his navel. Snowed in.
He grabbed his short hair and yanked, repeating, “Fuck.”
“Angel,” Sweetie said from behind the curtain, “bring your filthy mouth over so I can introduce it to this here bar of soap.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Mark banged around in the kitchen while Sweetie drained the water from the tub. She needed a bath to clean herself up from the bath—that’s how dirty she was. As she waited for the water to refill, she drummed her fingers on the edge of the tub and tried to clear the cobwebs from her brain.
She hadn’t been lying when she said Mark wasn’t the kind of guy to sweat stuff. He had an enviable cool about him, and panicking just wasn’t a part of his nature. He claimed he hadn’t been possessed, and she’d just have to take his word for that. She didn’t know enough about angels to speculate on what else could be ailing him, but she found it hard to believe that his personality would have changed so much in six months.
Maybe he was right and it hadn’t changed, and she just hadn’t paid attention to that part of him. Hell, she didn’t know shit about what he was like when he was around just the guys. He could have been as gross as her brother for all she knew, and while she loved her big brother very much, she didn’t know if she could get with a man who could belch the North Carolina state song on cue.
“Get with him?” She rolled her eyes at her own wandering thoughts. There’d be no getting, so it’d be in her best interest to exterminate all traces of that trai
n of thought from her mind as soon as possible.
She settled into the tub yet again and slid down until her chin touched the hot water. Never in her life had she imagined that a clean, hot bath would be such a luxury. She’d miss them when she went back out into the wild.
That is, until she forgot. If it was like this last time, she’d forget everything after a while. “Whatever you’re cooking, it sure smells good, angel,” she said as she batted her fingers through the snarls in her hair.
“I bet you’d think anything smells good given your lack of options for the past several months.”
She grunted her agreement and slipped down lower into the tub to wet the top of her head. “When did you become Julia Child?” she asked.
“New hobby. You’d be surprised at how many hobbies a guy my age has burned through.”
“Jack of all trades and master of every damn one of them, I bet.”
He chuckled. “I wouldn’t say master. I get bored just like everyone else. Sometimes I let hobbies fall off and pick up new interests way before I reach expert status.”
“Like what? What kind of stuff have you given up on?” She imagined him in a number of improbable predicaments including bull running, Olympic heptathlon, and wrestling with lions. That last one made her snort. Her gentle Mark in an arena with a dirty, snarling beast? Minus the crowd and the leather gladiator attire, the scenario sounded way too familiar.
“Too many to itemize.” He rattled a utensil against a pot side, and must have dropped it in the sink because there was a hollow thunk sound right after.
“Name just one.”
“Okay. Painting.”
“Bet you were good at it.” She reached over the tub side and grabbed the curtain. She pulled it aside just enough to see him at the table pouring what looked like rum over a fruitcake. If she had to guess, she’d say it was homemade and that he’d made it. She’d never had a boyfriend who could cook.
Well, she still didn’t have a boyfriend who cooked, and probably never would. Wolf men didn’t tend to be especially domestic, and no other man she’d met from any other compatible group had indicated a keen familiarity to the workings of a kitchen, either.
