Her steak salad turned out to be delicious, covered with enough rare beef to make the vitamin-packed greenery go down like so much gravy. It was the conversation over lunch that threatened to give Renny indigestion.
She hadn’t been able to get it out of her head all afternoon. While she reviewed library budgets, perused catalogs, explored computer systems, and met part-time employees, her mind remained fixed on the problem of one Michael Kennedy Fischer and the electrified, barbed-wire-topped, fifteen-foot stone wall he had erected around his feelings. So far, she hadn’t been able to find any way over it, so now she supposed it was time to consider the other choices: Go under, go through, or go home.
The going home part being figurative, since her home was now beside him. And that, Renny had concluded, was what made the whole damned question so terrifying. However Mick felt about her and their mating, it didn’t change the fact that they were mates. Nothing could change that. They now relied on each other to the point where a lengthy separation would kill them, so her choice wasn’t to stay or to leave; it was to push for more or to accept what he had already given her.
Gah. It made her feel like the heroine of some Hallmark Channel afternoon movie. Desperate for the love of her man, one woman will risk it all for the chance to find the ultimate happiness. Her more cynical instincts wanted to hurl at the sap factor, but she had to admit the question wasn’t going away, and the only way to get an answer would be to take her thumb out of her mouth and ask.
Mick picked her up a little before six. With the time change not coming for another couple of weeks, the sun had already set, leaving Alpha wrapped in a cocoon of evergreen forest beneath the starry northwestern sky. For a while, Renny simply watched it roll past the truck windows in silence. A girl had to gather her courage, after all.
“I thought you’d be chattering like a magpie about your first day.” Mick’s voice rumbled into the quiet, interrupting her brooding. “Didn’t it go well, red?”
“No, it went fine. I’ve just been thinking.”
She let the sentence drop and watched his face in the lights of the dashboard. The road between Alpha and his house in the woods didn’t boast much in the way of street lamps.
“Uh-oh. That sounds ominous.” He didn’t tense up. In fact, he looked more amused than anything else. “Did Marjory spend the afternoon telling you stories of my poor manners and misadventures?”
“Of course not. We did have an interesting talk over lunch, though. She took me out to the Timber Top Café.”
“They make a hell of a steak sandwich.”
“I had a salad. A steak salad,” she clarified when he shot her a look. “It was good. More steak, less salad.”
He nodded. “They know their clientele.”
Okay, Renny decided. It was now or never. She scraped together her courage and hoped like hell that the tightness in her chest and the trembling in the rest of her wouldn’t color her voice. She was striving to sound casual here.
“We talked a little about relationships.”
“You mean about sex.”
Renny rolled her eyes. “No, Mr. Horn Dog, that’s what men mean when they say they talked about relationships. We talked about relationships. She told me a little about her husband, Harold.”
“I only met him a couple of times. He was already sick when I moved here, but I remember him as a nice guy. He let Marjory steamroll her way through everything while he just watched and smiled and found a way to work around her.” He paused. “They were good together. You could see it. She took it pretty hard when he died.”
“He had cancer?” It was one of the few human diseases to which shifters didn’t have any more immunity than any other species.
Mick nodded. “I don’t think he suffered, though. Marjory wouldn’t have stood for that. The end came pretty quick, but I don’t suppose that made it any easier.” He paused and corrected himself. “I know that doesn’t make it easier.”
And there was her opening. She thought for an instant about letting it pass, but her mouth opened before she could stop it. “Yeah, you do know. Beth’s death was sudden, but you didn’t know it was coming. At least Marjory had that.”
She looked out the windshield while she said it, but she could still feel the way he tensed beside her. The raw nerve was no less raw than before. For a while she didn’t think he would even respond, and she searched for a way to muddle forward without his cooperation.
“If I’d paid attention, I would have known,” he finally said. She almost gasped to hear his voice, gruff though it sounded. She hadn’t thought he would continue speaking. “Abraham never made any secret of how he felt about Beth. Tried to forbid me from mating her in the first place, and never let a chance slip by when he could be telling me I should get rid of her. Should have known he’d eventually decide to do it for me.”
Renny clenched her fingers to keep from reaching out and curling them around his arm or leg or anywhere she could reach. She wanted to comfort him, but she couldn’t take the chance that he’d slam this door shut again. This was the first time since she’d worked out his identity that he’d willingly discussed his past with her. Every other time, he’d cut her off at the knees.
Or, you know, someplace between them.
“No, you shouldn’t have,” she said, barely above a whisper. “No one should ever have to expect their own grandfather would have their mate murdered. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”
He snorted. “You never spent time in Abraham’s pack. It worked the way he said it worked, or it bled out.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
Mick lapsed back into silence, but Renny wasn’t ready to give up. She’d gotten this far, gotten him to at least mention the past; that couldn’t be easy for him. Maybe it was time for her to meet him in the middle and mention the thing that scared her the most.
“Mick…” She struggled for words. Goddess, this was hard. And terrifying. And why the hell did she want to go here again? “I know that what happened to you, what happened to Beth, was devastating.”
He said nothing, but she could see his knuckles turning pale on the steering wheel. She felt like she had a knife in her hand and was taking turns stabbing it into each of their chests, just for funzies.
“I can’t pretend that I understand exactly how you feel, how you felt, about it, or about the fact that you … stayed, when most wolves don’t. I can never really get that, not fully.”
She took a deep breath, or tried to, but the fist clenched around her trachea made that kind of tough. She had to settle for what air she could get, but maybe she could blame her slightly dizzy, out-of-body feeling on oxygen deprivation. You know, instead of abject emotional terror.
“But I hope you know how grateful I am that you’re still here.” She forced the words out and let them ring in her ears while she tried to get it all out into the open, instead of letting it fester in her belly. “I know you didn’t want a second mate, but you got one. I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere. I might be a second choice for you, but you’re it for me. You’re what the Goddess gave me, and no matter what happens, I’m going to find a way to do this.”
“Then tell me, red, why does it sound like you’re giving me a great big farewell speech?” His growl made the hair on her arms stand up, made her skin itch to grow fur. It made his wolf sound awfully close to the surface. “You know damn well I won’t let you run now. I already told you all this. You’re my mate now. We are mated. It’s done.”
“I know that, Mick. Trust me, I know. Like I said, I’m not going anywhere. Not ever.” She swallowed hard. “But I need to get a few things clear, because my staying isn’t an issue, but how I stay is still up in the air.”
He glanced at her, and his eyes glowed in the darkness. They weren’t human eyes anymore. His wolf stared out at her from under those dark brows. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Shoving her fear down to churn away in the pit of her stomach, Renny revealed her worst fears. She threw her heart out on the road and waited to see if he’d run right over it.
“I need to know how you feel about me, Mick, because I’m already most of the way in love with you. What I want more than anything is to know that you’re able to love me back, but at this point, I’m honestly not sure. Part of me thinks you loved Beth so much that you don’t have anything left for me. And if that’s true, it doesn’t change that we’re mates. It doesn’t change that I’m here, and I’m staying forever, but it does change how I’m going to deal with that. If you can’t love me back, I’ll be building a very different life than I will if you can.”
Mick felt like he’d just had a piano dropped on his head and a mule kick him in the balls, simultaneously. Where the fuck had this come from?
Renny wanted to know if he loved her?
Seriously, she wanted to know if he possessed the ability to love her? What the fuck did she think he was, some kind of robot? Did she think he could just ignore the mating pull and pretend the Goddess hadn’t designed them for each other? Hell, he’d tried that for about seven seconds, and it had gotten him fucking nowhere. They were mates now. They’d spent the past two weeks wallowing in each other, hands on each other more than they’d been off. Did she really think that meant nothing to him?
Was she stupid?
No, he knew his mate wasn’t stupid, but he had to wonder if she might be a little crazy. Or just oblivious. She’d have to be one or the other not to have noticed the way he acted around her. He wanted to be with her all the time, in plain sight if that was all he could get, but preferably touching if he could manage it. He craved her taste and her scent like he craved the feel of pine needles under his paws. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, even when he should be concentrating on other things, like his work, or meetings with the mayor, or keeping her safe from a pack of fucking lunatics.
Goddess, the idea of her in danger almost made him lose control. He’d have to take up fucking Zen breathing techniques to keep from sprouting fangs every time he so much as thought about the coyotes trying to hunt her down. He could barely maintain his fucking sanity, and she was wondering if he was capable of falling in love with her?
Fuck, he’d already landed on his head hard enough to cause a concussion, and he had a feeling he hadn’t even hit bottom.
He opened his mouth, feeling the way his teeth had already sharpened into fangs, and hoped he’d still be able to manage enough human language to get his point across. Then again, it might be a good thing if she couldn’t understand the first few words that wanted to come out of his mouth. ’Cause them were fightin’ words.
Mick never got a chance to insult his mate’s intelligence, perception, or instincts. He was too busy reacting to the large, solid mass that suddenly appeared in the middle of the road in front of him.
Deer.
He hit the brakes hard and jerked the wheel to the right, doing his best to avoid the stag that burst out of the tree line and across the expanse of asphalt. The truck swerved, headlights raking over the animal’s hide and revealing bloody traces of tooth and claw along its hindquarters.
That brief glance told him three things: one, that the deer bore the marks of being harried by predators, which meant it was not the only thing out in the woods tonight; two, whatever was after the deer would have been able to hear their vehicle approaching well before the deer made for the road; and three, his mate had just been endangered. Again.
Beside him, Renny hadn’t made a sound, or at least not much of one. She’d squeaked briefly at the first sight of the deer, but then she’d gotten control of herself and braced against impact. Mick managed to swerve and avoid a wreck, but he had to run them off the road to do it, narrowly missing the trunk of a massive spruce and bringing them to a jerking stop in the middle of a patch of brambles. The thorns made hissing squeals as they scraped against the metal truck.
He looked immediately to his mate to make certain she wasn’t hurt.
“Did we hit it?”
Snapping branches and rustling leaves as the buck scrambled and crashed through the underbrush answered her question, but it raised new ones for Mick. Whatever predator had injured the deer should be moving in for the kill, which meant they should be able to catch a glimpse.
Unless the deer wasn’t the real prey.
He had a bad feeling.
“Shh. Get down.” He reached over, releasing her seat belt with one hand and using the other to press her toward the floor.
“Mick, what—”
“Quiet.”
He flipped off the truck’s ignition and counted the heartbeats it took for his eyes to adjust to the dark of the deserted roadside. Three. Four.
There.
He blinked and focused on an irregular shadow creeping forward from the trees where the deer had recently emerged. His eyes registered the movement more than the shape, because nature had provided it with effective camouflage. Dense fur in the shades of forest darkness blended into the background, but the glow of pale yellow eyes revealed the stalking form of a coyote.
Yeah, a really bad feeling.
But then again, Renny’s conversational gambit had put him in the mood to attack something, and what better target than a sneaky, low-down coyote out to harm his mate? Hell, maybe his evening was looking up.
He began to peel off his shirt, ignoring Renny’s protests. “Stay here, keep the doors locked, and stay down,” he ordered, eyes fixed on the approaching shifter. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Mick!”
He ignored her shout, stripped down to skin, and climbed out of the car, hitting the door locks on the way out. He didn’t think this would take long, not the way he was feeling.
With a feral smile, he stretched his muscles and shifted.
Renny cursed a blue streak and fumbled around on the floor of the truck for her bag. Damn him, but her mate was about to get himself seriously mauled unless she did something to stop it. She’d been through this before, and she knew damned well that where one coyote appeared, others would not be far away, not when they were on the hunt.
She grabbed her purse and fumbled to free her phone. This setup had all the earmarks of a trap, and she’d nearly been caught in enough of them to recognize one when she saw it.
The deer had been a distraction, not prey. While shifter packs hunted large prey more often than natural coyotes, they still employed similar tactics of swarming the victim. Wolves would bring an animal down from the rear, attacking from behind, crippling, and then moving in for the kill, but coyotes liked to take their victims head-on, going for the head, throat, and neck. The fact that the deer that had run in front of Mick’s car had borne injuries only to its hindquarters meant that the coyotes hadn’t been hunting it; they’d been driving it ahead of them, forcing it into the road and in front of Mick’s truck. Left with no choice but to run off the road or crash into the big buck, either way, Mick would have to stop on this stretch of deserted road and give the coyotes a chance to kill him.
Well, fuck that with malice aforethought.
Renny punched a number into her phone and prayed for a swift response. She wasn’t going to let her mate get hurt on her watch.
She knew she was really worried when she didn’t even bother to drool over Mick’s naked ass during the brief moment before he shifted from man to wolf. Her instincts proved correct when just seconds later, three more coyotes leapt from the shadows at the side of the road and surrounded the lone wolf.
“Alpha 911. Please state your emergency.”
“I’m on Hidden Fork Road northeast of Browning Creek. My mate is being attacked by coyotes. Send deputies out now!”
“Ma’am, I need you to stay calm,” the voice told her. “I’m contacting the sheriff’s department, but it may take a few minutes for them to reach you. Remain on the line. Can you tell me—”
Renny stopped listening. Her eyes were glued to the motion outside the truck. The four members of the Sawmill hunting party had surrounded her mate and were circling him like furry sharks, waiting for an opening in his defenses. For his part, Mick stood tall in the center of the road, his posture stiff and challenging but not at all intimidated by the coyotes’ superior numbers.
“Stupid wolf,” she muttered, wincing when the first coyote—Bryce—lowered itself into a crouch and then sprang at the wolf’s head.
Mick didn’t fall for it. He stood his ground until the last moment, then feinted right and spun to meet Will, who had darted in to bite at his flank. A flash of fangs met the smaller canine, tearing open the skin over the coyote’s sharp muzzle. The shifter yelped, and the remaining two pack mates leapt into the fray.
“Ma’am!” came the voice from the phone, distant and muffled, but that was probably because Renny had dropped the device to the floorboards and was busy fumbling her way out of her first-day library clothes. Her mate was outnumbered.
“Shit.”
Her trousers tangled around her ankles, reluctant to come off over the low-heeled boots she’d forgotten to remove. She heard seams ripping and couldn’t be bothered to care that she was destroying one of the few suitable outfits she had for her new job. She’d work at the library naked if she had to. Mick needed her help.
It took three slaps at the button on the driver’s-side door to disengage the locks, and then she went sailing into the darkness, skin shivering into fur before her paws even touched the ground.
Instead of welcoming her, her mate snarled at her approach, opening himself to yet another attack. A tawny coyote—Tommy—darted in under his guard and managed to get a mouthful of fur before Mick shook him off and batted him away with a strike of his huge paw.
Renny ignored the sign of displeasure. One wolf against four coyotes was not good odds, especially not when the coyotes had been working and hunting together for years. Their numbers gave them too great an opportunity to surround the wolf, and even a battle-tested alpha couldn’t keep watch in four directions at once. She would have to watch his back, and if he didn’t like it, that was his tough nougat.
She dove forward to put herself between her mate and the darkest of the coyotes. Eric had thought to take advantage of Mick’s distraction and strike while the wolf was focused on his mate, but Renny put a stop to that. She slammed her shoulder into the attacking male, sending him stumbling back a few steps. A similar blow from Mick would have sent the coyote tail over ears, but her smaller size made her no larger than the males of the other species. It left them on equal footing.
It also seemed to give the pack ideas. They saw how Mick reacted to his mate joining the fight, and they immediately began to exploit that weakness. The four coyotes fell back from their attacks on Mick and began to focus their attention on Renny.
Beside her, she could practically feel the growl vibrating in her mate’s chest. He crowded close to her, attempting to herd her back toward the truck, but she uttered a rumbling protest of her own. He might not want her in danger, but she’d be damned if she’d let him face down four coyotes all by himself. She just hoped the cavalry was already on its way.
Will, his wounded muzzle still welling blood, lowered himself toward the ground and began to slink closer, as if Renny were a rabbit he intended to have for dinner. Mick snarled a warning and moved toward the threat, but Will had only been setting the stage for his cousin to strike. Tommy dove in from the right, forcing Mick not away from Renny but into her. She stumbled, thrown off balance by the impact, and Eric immediately rushed in to grab her by the scruff and drag her away. Meanwhile, Will and Tommy pinned her mate between them and Bryce began to move in for the kill.
Nothing had ever sounded so good to Renny’s ears as the shrill wailing of sirens in the distance. She dug her claws into the earth and pulled back against Eric’s grip, wincing when his teeth bit through fur to the skin and muscle underneath. Damn it, she was sick and tired of bleeding already. She hoped the deputies were playing hell with the damned speed limit.
A series of vicious snarls had her head snapping around and drove the coyote’s teeth deeper into her neck. She couldn’t have cared less, because she caught a glimpse of Mick rearing back on his hind legs, jaws locked in combat with Bryce while the Molinas attempted to bring him down with swift, diving attacks from either side.
That was just fucking cheating.
With a low huff of anger, she twisted sharply, dropping her shoulder and flipping herself onto her back. The move surprised Eric and weakened his hold on her enough that she was able to jerk free and scramble back to her feet before he recovered. She didn’t pause to take advantage of the moment, instead spinning on her heels and throwing herself at the closest coyote attacking her mate.
She sank her teeth into Will’s back, tearing him away just before he went for Mick’s exposed side. She used every ounce of her body weight to flip him to the ground, then shifted to get a better angle on his spine. She’d snap it in two before she’d let him harm her mate.
Will twisted himself almost in half and snapped back to his feet, his yellow eyes glowing wild and manic in the darkness. For a moment, they stared each other down, then the sound of rubber on pavement rose above the fighting and the glow of red and blue emergency lights began to emerge in the distance.
About damned time.
The coyotes scattered. Eric and Will spared her matching glares before bounding into the trees, and Tommy left off his attack on Mick’s flank to follow. Bryce didn’t give up so easily. He wrapped his forelegs around Mick’s shoulders and attempted to drag the larger canine off balance, using his teeth and jaws for leverage.
Mick shook him off and dropped to all fours, fangs flashing as he went in fast and low, looking to open up the coyote’s belly. Bryce might be smaller, but he was nearly as fast, and he managed to leap out of the way before Mick could grab hold. He spun in midair, offered one last bark of frustrated rage, and disappeared into the forest.
Renny dropped to her haunches and struggled to catch her breath. Damn, forget Zumba; mortal combat was apparently the true path to physical fitness. She felt like she’d just had the hardest workout of her life. If she’d been in her skin, it would be drenched with sweat.
Giving a good shake, she resettled her fur and turned to face her mate. He responded by pouncing on her and forcing her onto her back, pinning her to the rough surface of the asphalt. She felt his jaws close around her throat and the intensity of his growl against her skin and made the decision to keep very, very still. It sounded like someone was not very happy with her at the moment.
He held her pinned there, belly up and whining for mercy, while two squad cars screeched to a halt a few yards down the road. She heard doors fly open and voices shouting and felt a surge of relief that the cavalry had finally arrived. Only now, she wondered if she was the one they were going to have to rescue.