by Holley Trent
“Me, too. You don’t know what that Jersey pack’s like. It’s fucked up. I mean, all of the packs are, but the women there, they try really hard not to let unrelated men around their kids.”
“Yep. Like that in every pack, except this one.”
“Come on.” Anton canted his head toward the house, and Nixon moved around him, happy to take the lead if walking meant an end to the conversation. With very much more talking, Anton would start asking questions Nixon didn’t have answers for—and questions that needed to be asked.
Anton would have known just as well as Nixon that Esther shouldn’t have let Nixon pick up Kevin, and she wasn’t likely to be the kind of woman who’d slack on her vigilance.
Her letting him touch her kids meant she thought he was safe…or at least, safe enough.
Very few unattached wolves ever got that designation, but for once, Nixon didn’t mind so much having someone think he was harmless.
He wouldn’t hurt her. He wouldn’t hurt any woman, but his inner wolf took a special interest in Esther. In spite of her nauseating scent of attachment, the wolf was ready to pounce.
Before someone else does, the wolf thought. Better hurry.
“You all right, man?” Anton asked.
Nixon had paused in front of the doorway, ready to argue with his inner wolf about propriety.
But the wolf didn’t give a shit about propriety. He saw an opportunity. A beautiful, unattached woman with a scent problem, and two kids who didn’t seem to think Nixon was too corny. He could have a family.
Finally.
“Nah, I’m all right,” he said.
He carried Kevin over the threshold and toward the sound of voices in the rear of the house.
Could, but you won’t.
There was no way she’d want to keep a limping wolf—not even one who should have been his pack’s alpha.
CHAPTER FIVE
As always when she woke, Esther sat up quickly to assess her whereabouts and personal safety.
And to ensure Michael wasn’t nearby.
She didn’t see Michael. She didn’t see anything she recognized. That bed with the luxurious mattress and soft sheets wasn’t hers. Her bedroom windows were supposed to have raggedy blinds, not tastefully striped linen curtains. Her apartment didn’t smell like lilacs and blueberries, and there usually weren’t people talking in her living room when she woke.
She didn’t know what sort of haze she was in, but she knew Michael didn’t like noise.
“The kids.”
She threw back the covers and scrambled out of the bed, the sheets winding around her legs and tripping her up as she moved in search of some garment to cover herself.
There was a robe hooked behind the door. Pale green, made of soft terrycloth, and exactly her size.
She shrugged into the robe, yanked the door handle—her heart beating faster than engine pistons pumped—and then she ran.
“Darla?”
She’d heard Darla talking. Michael hated hearing Darla talk so early.
What time is it?
Esther had to pause in the hall. She didn’t know the place. Her apartment in New Jersey didn’t have a hall. The bedrooms were accessible from the living room.
“Darla?”
Esther started moving again, dragging her hand along the chair rail that wasn’t hers and heading toward the sound of pots and pans being rattled and so many soft voices.
Not soft enough. I can hear. Michael can—
Michael couldn’t hear anything.
Michael was dead because Esther had pushed him off a balcony when he’d gotten too drunk to listen to the words “No,” and “Stop.”
She paused at the end of the hall, gripping the corner and letting her gaze settle on the scene she didn’t understand. The woman in the kitchen making the noise with the pots and the pans.
Darla sitting on the counter with her hair sticking up every which way, wearing pajamas Esther hadn’t bought, and holding what looked like a muffin.
A couple of women leaning against the counter from the opposite side, coffee cups in front of them, infants crawling at their feet.
Ashley was one. Esther didn’t know the other.
And Kevin was standing in the open door looking out. Esther could just barely make out a man’s foot to the left of the doorway.
Esther hurried over. She didn’t want Kevin to try the man’s patience, whoever he was.
“Momma’s awake!” Darla called out as Esther hurried through the unfamiliar great room.
“I’m awake, baby. One minute, okay?” She belted her robe tightly and then grabbed Kevin by the wrist.
Nixon smiled when she poked her head out. “I guess Colt won that pool, too.”
“Excuse me?”
Nixon was seated on a bench to the left of the door with Anton beside him and Vic leaning near the front window.
Vic.
Grown up, but she’d recognize him anywhere. He had his father’s face, but the soft smile of his mother.
“Hey, cousin.”
Safe wolf. Safe.
He wouldn’t hurt her. He and Anton used to protect her when she was little…before they left.
“H-how long have you been sitting out here?”
Anton grunted. “Aunt Lil hasn’t left since you got in. She wanted to make sure someone was in the house in case the kids got up before you did, which they did. Kevin got up three days ago. Darla woke four days ago. Little fount of energy, that one.”
“I slept for four days?”
Nixon gave his head a slow shake. “No, honey. Six. Four as a wolf, two as a lady. We figured you’d be up within a couple of days once you shifted back on your own. You should get something to eat.”
“Six days!” She needed a little more than a meal. She needed a shower and to get a freakin’ grip.
She knelt beside Kevin and started squeezing him in all the places he should have been fleshy. She pinched his cheeks and stared at his face looking for dark shadows and hollows.
Vic chuckled. “Come on, cuz. We’ve been feeding him. Ma has been, rather.”
“Why are you all sitting outside like this?” She pulled herself upright, still gripping Kevin close, and scanned the courtyard. The best she could tell by the sun’s bright, but not punishing, light, it wasn’t noon yet. No one else was out, but she imagined most of the wolves had jobs to go to.
Maybe one day I’ll have a job, too.
“Are you going to invite us in?” Anton adjusted the string of his eye patch, and although Esther tried not to stare, she couldn’t help herself.
“I still have the eye,” he said quietly. “Got scratched up pretty bad in a fight with some shifters we were tracking for a client a couple of years ago. I see out of it when I’m in my wolf form, but when I’m on two legs, the eye doesn’t work.”
“I keep telling him he doesn’t have to cover it.” The newcomer’s voice was a slow, lazy drawl. Sweet and lilting. Feminine.
Esther turned slowly in the doorway to find the tiny stranger woman there holding the chubby little girl who must have been Anton’s. Instinctively, Esther reached for the baby, and her mother relinquished her without a fuss.
“We named her after my grandmother,” the woman said in a tone that seemed almost apologetic. “Long-suffering Cecily.” She chuckled. “She had a hard go of things, but I guess everyone back at home does.”
“Where’s home?”
“Appalachia. Used to be, anyway. This is home now.” She passed her hand over Cecily’s wisps of hair and smiled at the baby. “I’m Christina. Anton didn’t know what to tell me about you. I reckon he didn’t think he’d ever see you again.”
“That’s usually the way it goes.”
Esther started to step into the house to get the baby out of the sun, but remembered the men milling about outside. She’d never known wolves to loiter like that.
“You can come in if you want,” she said. “Unless you’ve got someplace else to be.”
/> The three men shared a look.
“Am I missing something? Did I say something stupid? Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. I say stupid things all the time.”
Nixon twined and then untwined his fingers over his belly. “You inviting all of us in?”
“I mean, it’ll be cramped, but—” She looked to Christina. “I missed something, didn’t I? Are they not allowed inside the houses?”
Christina’s laugh was a bell-like titter as she retreated indoors. “We let them in more than we should, maybe, tromping all that mud inside like they all do.”
“So much damn rain,” Nixon muttered.
Esther looked down at his cowboy boots. Didn’t seem so muddy to her.
Her stomach gave an insistent growl, and all three men fixed pointed looks on her.
She pulled her head into the house before they could see the red that was almost certainly creeping into her cheeks.
Aunt Lil took Cecily from her as she approached the counter. “Kids have already eaten.”
Esther glanced at the microwave clock and let out a quiet breath of relief. Barely nine.
Didn’t sleep another whole day away.
“Need to call down to the school to see if we can go get Kevin enrolled,” Aunt Lil said. “I already warned them we wouldn’t be transferring his old records.”
“Not that there would have been very many,” Esther muttered.
She took the plate Ashley handed to her and could almost meet her gaze.
Not quite.
She wasn’t certain what their dynamic would be. Ashley was her old pack alpha’s daughter and, apparently, her cousin through marriage. That little boy crawling around the kitchen island connected them.
“Nixon’s been trying to entertain him the best he could from the doorway while you were asleep,” Ashley said, “but I think Kevin is itching to get outside and run around.”
“Nixon has been—” Esther furrowed her brow and met Ashley’s smug gaze. “I’m sorry, what?”
“From the doorway. Didn’t want to come in unless you said he could, and obviously you were in no position to.”
Esther dropped a couple of pieces of bread into the toast slots and somehow suppressed the compulsion to cover her face with her hands at the ghastly sight of herself in the toaster’s mirrored side.
She did turn her back to the room, though, to rub her eyes and pat down her hair.
Jeez. I came out here looking like that?
Ashley chuckled quietly and moved around the counter beside Esther. Leaning in, she whispered, “He’s been sitting out there for the better part of two days.”
“Who?”
“Nixon.”
“Why?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know anything. I just got here.”
Just escaped to here.
Esther dropped a couple of strips of bacon onto her plate and moved out of the way of the hot skillet Aunt Lil was tipping an egg off of.
“You still like over easy, don’t you?” Aunt Lil asked.
“You remembered that?”
Aunt Lil snorted. “You were the only one who ate them that way.” She looked pointedly to Ashley. “Used to drive my sister nuts. The runny yolk makes her shudder.”
“Ma. I need to—” Esther set down her plate in a hurry and scanned the room. Her purse had to be nearby. “I need to call my—”
Ashley gave her arms a squeeze. “Hey. I know you want to tell her you’re all right, but I don’t advise getting in touch with anyone there. Not yet, anyway. My father knows approximately where I am and so far he hasn’t sent any of his goons out this way, but I don’t want to give them any reason to come exploring, all right?”
“He said I could go.”
“And sometimes, he doesn’t keep his word. Vic and me, we can take care of ourselves, but you need some time to get settled in before you have to start strategizing about outside threats, okay? Those are the ones you need to worry about here. No one in this pack is going to hurt you. Worry about the folks outside of Norseton.”
“How do people live like this?” Esther whispered. “Why do we keep pretending that what we do is normal and that having our families constantly torn apart and uprooted is acceptable? We’re not animals.”
Ashley smiled. “Most of the time, we’re not, anyway.”
“What we do is wrong.”
“We know. Trust me. We hash out those sorts of issues at every pack meeting, but there are so many problems to tackle, and so few of us. We can’t fix everything. The best thing we can do for the time being is to make sure we don’t let those issues pervade our pack.”
“That’s not enough. I don’t think wanting my mother nearby is unreasonable. They wouldn’t let her come with me.”
Ashley pressed her lips into a flat line leaned heavily onto the counter in front of her. “No. I suppose losing one pack member whose husband paid all the dues is one thing, but losing one who pays her own is another. I imagine your mother’s employed, and you weren’t?”
“Yes.”
“There you have it. Listen.” She gave Esther’s shoulder a squeeze as Vic sidled into the kitchen and lifted the paper towel covering what was left of the bacon. “Talk about what’s got you upset at the next pack meeting. We may not be able to figure out an immediate plan, but at least we can start brainstorming.”
“We’re welcome at pack meetings?”
Vic snorted and sauntered off with one slice of bacon and a muffin. “We wouldn’t ever get anything done, otherwise. You ladies are far less scatterbrained. Why wouldn’t you be there?”
“Mommy, can I have more juice?”
Darla, standing at Esther’s right leg, thrust her cup up to her mother. Being so distracted, Esther had no way of knowing how long the child had been standing there, or what she’d heard.
Who cares if she heard? I didn’t do anything wrong.
Esther took the cup from her and started for the refrigerator.
Aunt Lil was standing beside it with the pitcher at the ready.
“I’ve got today off,” her aunt said. “Gotta go back to work tomorrow, but we’ll use today to get you settled in. We’ll go to the grocery store, and get the kids clothes for school and stuff.”
With what money?
Esther let her pour the juice, but kept her lips zipped on the money topic for the time being. “You’ve been off work since I got here?”
“Yeah, but don’t fret about that. I had the vacation time to burn.”
“Where do you work?”
“At the executive mansion. I’m the cook there. Feeding Vikings isn’t much different than feeding wolves, to be honest, except the Vikings like vegetables on occasion.”
“Hey!” Vic griped from the sofa.
Lil waved a dismissive hand at him, and then notched her fists onto her hips. “So. Eat up. You’re going to need to graze throughout the day to recover from that long sleep of yours. You don’t wanna get sick by eating too much too quickly.”
Esther concentrated on buttering her toast and giggled when baby fingers tickled her exposed ankle.
Little Adam had found his way into the kitchen, evidently wanting to be where the action was.
“Colt won a hundred bucks per kid,” Nixon said. He was leaning on the counter from the other side and looking back at Vic and Anton. “How much for Esther?”
Anton grunted. “I think the final tally was five hundred dollars. So, seven hundred in total.”
“For guessing how long we’d sleep?” Esther stuffed toast into her mouth and furrowed her brow.
“Yep,” Nixon said. “Lucky jerk.”
“Don’t hate him too much,” Ashley said, bumping Esther’s hip. “He donated all the cash to the March Preservation Fund. He makes out like the idea was Lisa’s, but I’m pretty sure he came up with that on his own. Gods forbid that anyone see him as sweet, right?”
“March.” The name left a sour taste in Esther’s mouth. The good food she’d
had on her tongue may as well have been sawdust.
Aunt Lil pressed a hand to Esther’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Mm, Christina, could you please go see if Graciella left for work? Might need her for a few minutes before she leaves.”
Christina’s nod came on a suspiciously slow delay, and she kept her gaze on Esther as she backed away from the kitchen. “I’ll be right back.”
Aunt Lil kept squeezing Esther’s shoulder, and Esther could tell that for whatever reason, she was trying extra hard to put on a happy face. Aunt Lil’s sunniness couldn’t completely balance the hostility emanating from elsewhere in the room. Anton was at the counter with Vic, and both wore scowls.
“I’m trying hard not to be indelicate, Sis, but we’ve got to clear the air on some things so we know where we’re at. Hey, Kevin?”
Kevin looked up from the newspaper comics someone had brought into the living room. “Huh?”
“You wanna go take a bath, bud? You’ve got to go down to the school today and get registered. The state likes kids to go to school, and I don’t think your ma is up for homeschooling you.”
“’Cause I drive her nuts?”
Esther pinched the bridge of her nose. “You do not drive me nuts, Kevin.” She didn’t feel she had the necessary education, and back in Jersey, she hadn’t had the luxury of pulling him out of the local wolf school, anyway. Their alpha had monitored school attendance and counted every little chick so he’d know if one left the roost without his authorization.
“I’ll get his bath started,” Ashley said. “And make sure he brushes his teeth.”
“What’s wrong with my teeth?”
“You’re such a boy. Go on. Shoo.”
Kevin grumbled his way down the hall, but he went. Ashley’s tone may have been pleasant enough, but she hadn’t left any room for argument. She was Type A, through and through. Always had been.
She watched Darla slowly sip the dregs of her juice, and then snapped her up, too. “Two bathrooms. Two baths. I bet I know who’ll smell nicer.”
“Me!” Darla shouted.
Anton had barely waited until the children were out of earshot before asking, “The kids said your mate was Michael March.”
