Running With Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves Book 1)

by Dakota West

  Greta blew a strand of curly hair out of her face.

  “Tell me about it,” she said. “I do run a wolf bar. It’s kind of what we’re known for.”

  He half-smiled. “We don’t have to be complete animals, though.”

  She eyed his face. His nose was swelling quickly, and it didn’t look good.

  “You want some ice or something?” she asked.

  “I’ll just do it when we get home,” he said. “We’re close enough.”

  Greta stood up straight and held out a hand for the clothes that Elliott had collected.

  “I can go toss ‘em in the dumpster,” she said.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “I should go collect him anyway. I’m not sure he knows the way home yet.”

  Greta handed them over and looked at the bar that no one was tending.

  “So you moved back?”

  Elliott nodded. “Bought a house and everything. I got offered a job at...”

  He trailed off and swallowed for a moment.

  “At a ranch the next county up. I’m managing their thoroughbred program.”

  Something just went weird in his face, Greta thought.

  Maybe not. I don’t know him that well, after all. It’s been a long, long time.

  “Well, welcome back,” she said. “And tell Shane welcome, if he can control himself in polite society.”

  “Will do,” he said, then raised the handful of clothes in a goodbye wave. “Thanks for not blacklisting us just yet. I swear we’ll be better behaved next time.”

  Then he turned and walked through the rear exit of the bar.

  Next time, Greta thought. A shiver of excitement worked its way through her body.

  Chapter Two

  Shane

  Still in wolf form, Shane trotted back to where they’d left the car, a few storefronts down from the bar. Everything else on the street was closed, but the Tooth & Claw cast its warm light over most of the block. He trotted back and forth, still feeling jacked up and antsy from the fight, like he was electrified in a way he couldn’t quite describe.

  You shouldn’t have gotten into a bar fight your first day in town, he thought.

  He shook his head and trotted back and forth a little more, trying to get the last of his energy out. As he did he raised his snout and sniffed the air: notes of asphalt and popcorn, probably from the movie theater. Gasoline. Beer. Pine trees and the slight scent of dirt carried on the warm wind from the south.

  He sniffed again. Blood. Zeke had gotten him somewhere. It didn’t hurt, but he could detect the metallic scent in the air.

  Shit, he thought.

  He looked at the car, sighed, and sat on the sidewalk.

  I hope Elliott gets my keys and wallet out of my pocket, he thought. I don’t want to have to show my face there again tomorrow.

  Shane looked around the sidewalk. Two people walked down the street on the opposite side, and if they thought it was unusual to see a wolf waiting outside a parked car, they didn’t show it.

  Still no sign of his mate as Shane watched the door of the Tooth & Claw intently. Now, the adrenaline rush over, the guilt started gnawing at Shane.

  You probably just got Elliott’s nose broken, he thought. You don’t deserve him, you know. He could do a lot better.

  The thought of a life without Elliott felt like a knife through the heart, though. Shane put his head on his paws and kept waiting on the cold sidewalk.

  At last he saw Elliott’s familiar face coming down the sidewalk, and he perked his ears up, his heart skipping a beat. The same thing that happened every time he saw his mate, no matter what.

  Elliott stopped on the sidewalk in front of him, looking down. His nose had stopped bleeding, but now it was swollen and cut across the bridge.

  Shane sat up and hung his head, and Elliott crouched down in front of the wolf so that they were eye-to-eye. Then he sighed, leaning his forehead against Shane’s furry one.

  “It’s all right,” he said after a long pause. “It’s not broken, just swollen. I’ll be fine.”

  Shane licked Elliott’s face in apology, his dog nature getting the better of him for a moment.

  “Come on,” Elliott said, standing. “I think there’s still a blanket in the trunk.”

  Shane followed his mate behind the car and watched as Elliott grabbed the old fleece blanket and shook it out. It wasn’t the first time that Shane had shifted in public and torn his clothes to pieces, so they came prepared.

  He looked around the street quickly and shifted back, wrapping the blanket around himself.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  Elliot half-smiled, his face looking a little funny with his swollen nose.

  “It’s been a while since you needed the emergency nudity blanket,” he said. “You were on a pretty good streak there.”

  “I know,” said Shane, squeezing his eyes shut. A breeze blew down the street and he pulled the blanket tighter around himself. “I shouldn’t have done anything, I should have just left and taken a walk. Or counted to ten, or done anything but punch that guy.”

  Now it was Elliott’s turn to look guilty, and he brushed some dirt off of the blanket.

  “If you hadn’t, I might have,” he admitted. “Did you hear how he talked about Greta?”

  “Like she was a fire hydrant he’d claimed by pissing on?” Shane said, feeling the spark of anger in his chest reignite. “Yeah, I heard that.”

  “He got what he deserved,” Elliott said, then pointed one finger at Shane. “You didn’t have to be the one to give it to him. But he deserved getting punched right in the face.”

  Shane grinned.

  “You could look a little less pleased,” Elliott teased, closing the trunk. “At least try for being sorry.”

  Shane rearranged his face into the most serious expression that he could. When Elliott looked at him, he burst out laughing.

  “You’re a terrible liar,” Elliott said, and kissed Shane on the mouth. “Come on, get in the car.”

  At their kitchen table, Shane sat very still, shirt off, while Elliott squirted saline solution into a gash on his arm from a squeeze bottle.

  “Ow,” said Shane.

  “He got you pretty good,” Elliott said. “Sorry, I just want to wash it out. No telling where that mouth’s been.”

  Shane shook his head, sighing.

  “I deserved it,” he said. “That’s what I get for fighting strangers in strange bars. I don’t even know Greta.”

  His heart did a flip in his chest when he said her name, though.

  “If it helps, I didn’t get the impression that she was a fan of it, either,” Elliott said. “Take a deep breath.”

  Shane did, and squeezed his eyes shut as Elliott quickly spread his wound wider, shining a flashlight into it. This part always hurt so much more than getting the wounds in the first place.

  “You’re good,” Elliott said, letting go. Shane exhaled and looked down. The blood had slowed to a small trickle, mingling with the saline that Elliott had used to clean the gash out. “I’ll just wrap you up and call it a day.”

  “Did you talk to her after I left?” Shane asked.

  “Not for long,” Elliott said. “You washed your hands, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Squeezed these edges together while I wrap you,” Elliott said.

  Shane knew the drill.

  “What did she say?”

  “Well, she said not to start fights in her bar, for starters,” Elliott said, flicking his gaze to Shane, who made a face. “But she also said that we could come back as long as we didn’t.”

  Shane felt a quick thrum in his veins, a surge of hope springing through him.

  “Greta’s cute,” he said.

  He knew full well that cute wasn’t the word he meant. What he meant was something like looking at her makes me feel like my bones are melting or I would fight a bar full of drunk grizzlies to talk to her again, but it was the first word that came to mind.

/>   Elliott chuckled and fastened the bandage, then leaned over Shane’s shoulder, his face an inch from the other man’s.

  “Cute?” he asked, a smile lighting his eyes. “That’s the word?”

  “We’re not all over-educated,” Shane said.

  He laughed and kissed Elliott on the mouth, playfully at first, but then the kiss deepened. He could feel the hunger inside Elliott and pushed against his mate.

  “Ow,” Elliott said, breaking the kiss. He touched his nose gently.

  Shane felt awful right away.

  “Shit, I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’ll live,” Elliott said, tentatively scrunching his nose.

  “Go put some ice on that,” Shane said. He reached out and very, very tenderly touched Elliott’s nose. “It’ll help. Trust me. I’ll clean up in here and then come join you.”

  “Thanks,” Elliott said. He took an ice pack from the freezer, then walked out of the kitchen and sat on their couch, his head tilted back, feet up on a box labeled Elliott’s Books.

  Most of the living room was piled high with boxes that said Elliott’s Books.

  Shane hoped again that moving to Cascadia hadn’t been a bad idea.

  Sure, Oregon hadn’t been great. Once the people there found out they were wolf shifters, everything got harder: finding work, finding a place to live, even finding a pizza place that would deliver. While bear shifters had mostly integrated into modern society, and the lion shifters had managed to win a sort of grudging respect from humans, nobody seemed to like wolf shifters.

  They had a reputation for being short-tempered and prone to violence, and they ran in packs. He’d thought that living in Cascadia, one of the states formed explicitly for shifters, might be better, but he was starting to worry.

  Well, if this doesn’t work out, there’s two other shifter states, he thought, half-jokingly. If Elliott found a tenure-track job once, it should be easy to do again, right?

  Shane found a trash bag, then tossed some bloody paper towels into it.

  They’d been trying to move to Cascadia for almost two years, and even then, they almost hadn’t come. Elliott had serious reservations about moving back to the town where he’d grown up. For starters, he swore he’d been a serious nerd in high school, the kind that got beaten up and stuffed into lockers. Shane had a hard time believing that, especially since the first time they’d met, Elliott had been heaving hay bales onto a tractor all by himself, making it look effortless.

  But Elliott swore that all that had happened in college, when he’d joined the rugby team and suddenly filled out, packing muscle onto his once-skinny frame. He wouldn’t even show Shane pictures of himself as a teenager, no matter how his mate goaded him.

  He was still a total nerd, though. A hot nerd for sure, but after getting a college degree in Classics, he’d gone on to get a Ph.D., and now he was an associate professor with a fancy title at Cascadia State. Half his books were in Latin, and the other half were in Greek.

  Even though getting a tenure-track job was pretty much like finding a unicorn in a sewer, Elliott had almost turned it down. His parents still lived in Rustvale. Both of his fathers were officers of the Rustvale wolf pack, and though Shane had only met them once or twice, they were both hardworking, salt-of-the-earth types who believed that a stiff drink and a good day’s work could solve just about anything.

  They didn’t know Elliott had a Ph.D., or that he was a professor. They still thought he had a BA in Agricultural Management and had taken a job at a horse breeding farm in the county to the north. According to Elliott, for his whole life, they’d made it abundantly clear that intellectual pursuits weren’t for wolves, and they’d outwardly scorned him when he got good grades and read books.

  Shane couldn’t blame Elliott for not seeing his parents very often, or for not telling them what he really did for a living. Besides, he hadn’t talked to his own parents in nearly five years, so it wasn’t like he had room to criticize.

  As he washed out the bottle that Elliott had been using, Shane felt his thoughts slide to Greta again. He hadn’t talked to her for more than a few moments, but those moments were crystal-clear in his memory, like all the background noise was cut out.

  He liked her curly, wild hair, the no-nonsense way she ran things. He really liked the shape of her body underneath her clothes, those curves perfect for grabbing onto and burying himself in...

  Shane tossed his hand towel onto the counter and went to sit on the couch, next to his mate.

  Chapter Three

  Elliott

  Elliott leaned back on the couch, the ice pack carefully balanced. His nose still throbbed, but he was starting to feel better.

  Shane’s getting better, he told himself.

  It was true. God knew it had been a long, slow process, and there had been hiccups, but Shane’s temper was slowly improving. Yes, he’d gotten into a bar fight — one he’d shifted during, no less — literally his first night in a new town, but he hadn’t started the bar fight.

  And, if Elliott was being honest, if Shane hadn’t punched that guy, he probably would have, for talking about Greta like she was just a thing, something that he owned.

  Something that he thought he had a right to.

  Just remembering it, Elliott felt his wolf rising, scratching at his skin to get out.

  He shook his head, then rearranged his feet on the box in front of him. This one was labeled Elliott’s Books: Roman History, and inside was the complete Livy, several volumes of Tacitus, and a dollop of Suetonius for good measure.

  It wasn’t the only box labeled that.

  He felt like Greta could have knocked him over with a feather. He remembered her from high school, of course, but he hadn’t really noticed her before. When they were teenagers, she’d always been nice to him, probably because the same jocks who beat Elliott up for being a dork made fun of Greta for having an ugly name, though she didn’t get it nearly as bad as he did.

  Besides, he’d always liked the name Greta. It wasn’t one you heard every day.

  Plus, she’d grown up into a seriously hot woman, with those eyes so dark blue they looked purple, curly near-black hair that bounced past her shoulders, and those curves. When she’d turned around to pour a beer, Elliott had nearly drooled at the way her ample butt looked in her jeans, not to mention the way that her generous bust was offset by a narrow waist.

  Shane walked in and sat on the couch next to Elliott.

  “Ice working?” he asked.

  Elliott shrugged. “I can never tell,” he said, taking the ice pack off his face. “Does it look better?”

  “A little,” said Shane.

  “I can tell you’re just saying that,” Elliott said.

  Shane kissed him on the temple as a response.

  “I hope I’m better by the time my classes start next week,” Elliott said. “Otherwise I’ll be the bar brawl professor forever.”

  “It’ll make them respect you,” Shane said. “I’d have done way better in school if I thought my teachers could kick my ass.”

  Elliott snorted.

  “Just tell them they should see the other guy,” Shane said.

  “It isn’t the students I’m worried about,” Elliott said. “It’s the faculty and the administration.”

  “Just tell them,” Shane said. “They know your whole life story. I’d bet you fifty bucks that they’re already pretty sure you’re a wolf.”

  Elliott made a face.

  “We should go see my parents while we’re both beat up,” Elliott said, sounding a little annoyed. “They’d be pleased as punch to find out that we’re already drinking and getting into bar fights. That’s how wolves act,” he said, his voice taking on a mocking tone.

  Shane slumped on the couch and put his feet up next to Elliott’s, denting in the top of the box. He leaned his head against his mate’s shoulder.

  “It’s not actually a bad idea,” he said. “We do owe them a visit, now that we’ve moved back. And it
’s not like we can ask them over to dinner.”

  Elliott turned his head and looked at his mate, frowning.

  “Why?”

  Shane chuckled. “Because you’ve got a room full of books in dead languages? Because there’s a picture of you in your doctoral hood leaning against the mantle downstairs?”

  He paused for a moment.

  “What would happen if you told them?” he asked. “Seriously?”

  “I don’t know,” Elliott said. “They basically told me it was my fault that I got beat up for eighteen years,” Elliott said. “I used to come home bruised and bloody, and they’d tell me that I should man up, stop whining, quit reading so many books, and fight back. Guess how well that worked out for me.”

  He went silent for a moment.

  “I know it’s stupid, but I still want their approval,” Elliott said. “I can’t help it. When I was a kid, before everything went south, my Papa was my hero. He could rope cattle and ride a horse so fast, and once I watched him pick up my mom with just one arm. When I was four, one of the ranch hands decided it was a good idea to let me ride a horse all on my own,” Elliott went on.

  Shane grimaced.

  “The horse started trotting and I fell off,” Elliott said. “I broke my collarbone, and even though I was lying on the ground, screaming in pain, the thing I really remember is Papa hauling off and just slugging the guy who put me on that horse, and that second, I was so proud to be his kid. But that’s kind of fucked up, right?”

  “It’s understandable, though,” said Shane.

  “Yeah,” admitted Elliott. “But still, I just don’t want to let them down.”

  Shane just nodded.

  “I get it,” he said.

  Chapter Four

  Greta

  Elliott and Shane didn’t show up again for four days after the fight. Even though Greta knew better than to hold out hope that a hot, new-to-town bachelor pair might be interested in her, she still got a little more bummed every day that they didn’t show up.