Instead of protesting, Marc would have upped the ante. He was always up for more. Faster. Harder. Anytime. Anywhere.
If Andrew came to the Lazy S, disaster would be hot on his heels.
How does he even know where I live? I wondered as I flipped my phone back open and navigated to the call history screen. I’d never told him, specifically so he couldn’t visit. But it wouldn’t be too hard to find out, even with nothing but my name and an Internet connection.
I pressed the call button and stood again as Andrew’s phone rang in my ear. It rang four times, and by the time his voice mail answered—in a woman’s mechanical voice—I was already pacing. When the beep sliced through my thoughts, I stopped, one hand propped on my hip.
“Andrew, it’s Faythe. Stop hanging up on me! And do not come here! I’m sorry about leaving like that, but it’s over now. You cannot come here. Please.”
I hung up and threw the phone at the wall this time, glad only in retrospect that it didn’t break. How did Andrew even know about Marc, anyway?
Sammi.
No one else from school knew about Marc, but Sammi had met him. She must have told Andrew. My heart pounding again, I snatched the phone from the floor and dialed my college roommate. But she wasn’t home, either, so I left a message on her machine asking her to call me back as soon as she could.
Then I sat on the end of my bed and forced my heartbeat to slow, my breath to come evenly. If I went out in my current state, Marc would know something was wrong the minute I entered the kitchen. I couldn’t keep doing this. It was unfair to Marc and bad for my own health. If Andrew called again, I would tell Marc the truth. I’d rather have him mad at me for a few days than taken by surprise when Andrew showed up at the gate.
At the front of the house, the doorbell rang, and I listened as Vic answered the door, exchanging pleasantries with the pizza guy as he paid for our dinner. When anger and frustration no longer pulsed through my veins, I pressed the power button on my stereo remote, shoved my phone in my pocket, and ran a brush through my ponytail, reminding myself one last time that I’d been talking to Sammi, just in case Marc asked. Then I prayed that he wouldn’t, and headed for the hallway.
In the kitchen, Marc and Vic stood guard around three open and steaming boxes of pizza, a slice in each of their hands. Marc saw me and swallowed his mouthful. “There’s your salad,” he said, barely pausing before stuffing the pointed end of another slice into his mouth.
“Thanks.” I looked where he’d pointed with a chunk of pizza crust and found a single cereal bowl full of limp wet lettuce. I laughed. I should have known. Even on two legs, Marc was a carnivore, with little use for the food groups unrelated to meat, fat, and dairy. He probably didn’t even know what else went into a garden salad. Luckily, like the rest of us, he had great metabolism.
I’d just popped open a chilled can of soda from the guesthouse when the clicking of heels on tile echoed from the foyer. My mother paused in the kitchen doorway wearing a simple but elegant calf-length black dress, accessorized only by the pearls at her throat and the matching clutch purse in her right hand. “We’ll be back in a couple of hours.” Her voice was low for a woman’s and smooth. Like butterscotch, it was sweet and deceptively soothing, which was part of what made her nagging so annoying. It was terribly hard to tune out such a beautiful speaking voice, even when it was telling you what you should already have accomplished by this point in your life.
“We’ll be at Mansion on the Hill, in case you need to get hold of us,” she continued, clearly speaking to me as her eyes roamed the junk food contaminating her pristine kitchen. “And, of course, your father will have his cell phone on.”
“Aww, Mom,” Ethan said, stepping up behind her to lay a heavy arm across her shoulders. “She may be a spoiled brat, but she’s old enough to take care of herself for a couple of hours.”
“Yes, of course you’re old enough,” my mother continued. She smiled at me and patted Ethan’s hand affectionately where it rested on her shoulder. “Old habits die hard sometimes.”
My mother was a study in contradiction. Petite, prim, and delicate, she was the embodiment of feminine grace, with a backbone of pure steel. She was both overbearing and soft-spoken, hiding the power she’d once wielded on the Territorial Council behind the facade of a cultured 1950s model housewife.
“Come on, Ethan, we’re going to be late,” Jace called from the hallway, his footsteps clomping toward the front door. He was dating again, and would smile back at me if I smiled at him first, but we were never alone together anymore, and he’d stopped teasing me entirely. Things between us had not been the same since I told him I was in love with Marc, and as sad as that made me, it seemed to be a necessary sacrifice for the peace of the household.
“Don’t forget, your father wants you both in the barn by nine-forty-five,” Mom said, trying to brush the wrinkles from Ethan’s shirt.
He frowned and swiped at her hand. “We’ll be there. Eventually.”
Jace stepped into sight behind them both and smacked Ethan’s head, sending straight black locks flying. “We’ll be early.” He pulled Ethan toward the front door by one arm, never quite making eye contact with any of the rest of us. “Save me some pizza.”
“Get your own!” Vic yelled as the front door closed.
“Pizza again?” Mom came closer to inspect. “You know, it wouldn’t hurt the three of you to take a bite of something green every now and then.”
Grinning, I grabbed my “salad” from the counter behind me and popped a piece of lettuce into my mouth, crunching it loudly as I chewed. “There.” I set the bowl down and crossed my arms beneath my breasts, leaning against the counter to smile at her. “Happy now?”
“It’s a start,” she conceded, refusing to rise to my bait. “But next time add some tomatoes and carrots.”
“But I didn’t make—”
“Karen!” my father bellowed from across the house, cutting off my protest.
“There’s no reason to shout, Greg. I can hear you even when you whisper.” My mother shot me a conspiratorial eye roll, as if we shared some kind of special experience by virtue of tolerating the male sex.
I took another bite of Marc’s pizza, ignoring her. I refused to willingly bond with her unless she could pick an activity that didn’t require me to use my feminine wiles. I’d misplaced them sometime during adolescence.
My father appeared in the kitchen doorway, wearing a black three-piece, which showed off the tall, athletic figure he’d kept even in his midfifties. The silver vest and tie brought out streaks of silver in his hair. His eyes, the same vibrant green as Ethan’s, contrasted brilliantly with the monochromatic formality.
“You look great, Dad,” I said, wishing I could hug him without getting pizza grease all over his clothes.
“I agree.” My mother wrapped her arms around him, resting her head on his shoulder as her hands snuck beneath the material of his jacket to snake around his back. My heart ached as I watched them, recognizing a pose Marc and I had struck countless times. But surely we’d never looked as in love, as picturesque, as they did.
In that moment, I was absolutely sure I’d done the right thing by keeping my mother’s secret. They should look like that forever, and her secret, while it probably wouldn’t end their marriage, would end the possibility of any more embraces like that.
“Where are you two going all dressed up like movie stars?” Vic asked.
My mother shot us a tight, suffer-in-silence smile. “We’re meeting with the head of the Dallas City Planning Commission.”
“You’ll never be back by nine-thirty,” Marc said, vocalizing almost my exact thought. “We can always meet in the morning, instead.”
“No.” My father didn’t even hesitate. “We are not going to leave a corpse to rot in the barn because of a business dinner. Any business dinner.”
I smiled at my father’s resolve, wiping pizza grease from my chin with a paper towel. His career depended upon him
making and keeping the right connections, but he would let nothing get in the way of Pride business.
“Your mother will develop a migraine around eight, and we’ll have to excuse ourselves to take care of her. So don’t risk being late because you think I won’t make it. I will.”
None of us doubted it. My father didn’t make plans he couldn’t keep. Nor did he bluff. He was a horrible poker player, but one of the best Alphas in the entire world. I should know. I’d been on the receiving end of his wisdom and guidance more often than anyone else in the Pride. He was hoping some of it would rub off.
I wasn’t holding my breath.
Nine
Three and a half hours later, the pizza was gone, the kitchen was clean, and Parker was back from New Orleans, having stashed the van in the barn without bothering to remove the body first. Not that I could blame him.
The guys and I sat in the guesthouse in the dark, passing around two huge bowls of popcorn as The Howling played on their obscenely large flat-screen television. The movie was a house favorite, and the basis for a time-honored south-central territory drinking game—a shot for every howl in the film. Hollywood couldn’t resist a good werewolf flick, and neither could we.
Marc, Parker, Owen, and I had piled together on the old brown-and-yellow plaid couch, me on Marc’s lap, facing the television, with my legs stretched across the others’ laps. Ethan sat on the floor at our feet, his legs splayed across the scarred hardwood floor, his head resting against the side of my thigh.
Across the room Vic lay stretched out in his recliner, and Jace was folded into a lumpy, overstuffed armchair all by himself. He wasn’t obviously pouting, but neither was he happy or relaxed, in spite of the fact that he and Ethan had returned from their double date half an hour earlier in very good spirits, both reeking of fruit-scented lotion and recent sex.
“There she goes.” Parker shook his prematurely gray head in disgust as the on-screen heroine pulled on her robe in preparation to leave her bungalow. Alone. In the middle of the night. “Off to check out strange sounds coming from the woods, armed with nothing more than a flashlight and a pretty smile.”
“A flashlight’s better than nothing,” I mumbled, remembering a night three months earlier when I’d left the guesthouse alone in the middle of the night, completely unarmed. Of course, I hadn’t been following some ominous howl, thus had no idea there were bad guys waiting for me in the woods. I’d just been looking for a little privacy in which to think.
“There she goes, the moron!” Vic said, leaning forward in his recliner, full shot glass pinched between his thumb and first two fingers.
I smiled. I couldn’t help it. Bagging on the film was part of the tradition. The best part, in my opinion. Someone would make fun of the outdated effects, and someone else would scoff at the heroine’s startling naiveté and conveniently repressed memory. And inevitably, during one of several low-budget Shifting scenes, one of the guys would yell at the victim du jour to attack, for fuck’s sake—after all, shape-shifters are most vulnerable in mid-Shift. No werecat worth the cost of his own upkeep would ever Shift in front of an enemy. There was no faster way to die.
Well, there was one faster way to die, though the movie industry got that part all wrong, too.
Silver bullets. Ha. Still, you gotta love Hollywood for convincing the world that shape-shifters are damn hard to kill. How disappointed they’d probably all be to find out any ordinary lead slug would do the job just fine.
I leaned back against Marc’s chest and relaxed into the arm he wrapped around me. But then we both tensed as a long, piercing howl erupted from surround-sound speakers mounted all over the room. Marc’s eyes lit up and Ethan stiffened against my leg, going completely still as he sucked in a huge breath. Then, all at once the guys joined in, throwing their heads back in sync and baying at the moon. Or rather, at the screen. They were pretty good, too, considering that cats don’t howl. At least not like dogs howl, as a primal cry of victory. Or of warning.
Looking around at them, I couldn’t help but laugh. They were all dorks. Big, muscle-bound, furry dorks. But they were my dorks.
As the last sharp, baying tones faded from my ears, Marc twisted to grab two full shot glasses from the scratched and tilted end table on his left. He pressed one of them into my hand and lifted the other to his lips. All around me, the guys did the same, tossing back shots as they had each time one of the TV werewolves howled. If they were human, they’d all be seeing double by then. But thanks to their carefully maintained tolerance to alcohol and their werecat’s metabolism, the guys were nowhere near drunk. At least, not yet.
“Throw it back, Faythe!” Parker ordered, refilling the shot glass Ethan handed him.
I hesitated, staring at the tiny glass in my hand. We were supposed to meet my father in the barn in twenty minutes to inspect the body of a murdered stray. To me, drinking seemed to be a very poor way to start such a meeting. But the guys saw the New Orleans corpse as a reason to indulge, rather than a reason not to. It was one of the ways they coped with the less-pleasant aspects of their job. A strict regimen of alcohol, anonymous sex—excluding Marc—and denial. They were keeping themselves sane.
Or maybe they were creating their very own brand of crazy.
Either way, they were determined to make me one of them, and I was less and less inclined to resist….
“Drink it!” Parker said, refilling Owen’s glass.
I glanced at Marc, my eyebrows raised. He shrugged, so I opened my mouth and drained the shot glass—my first of the night. Tequila burned like hell going down, but it was better than whiskey. Marginally.
Smiling, I handed my glass to Parker. He traded the whiskey bottle for tequila and refilled my glass. It was official. I was one of the guys, for better or for worse.
“Now, see, that’s why werewolves didn’t make it in the real world.” Vic leaned down to set a half-empty bottle of Jägermeister on the floor to one side of his recliner. “They were too damn fond of the sound of their own voices.”
“What?” I gulped from Marc’s can of Coke, trying to squelch the flames scorching my throat. “Werewolves are just stories. Hollywood cash cows. They were never real.”
“The hell they weren’t.” Vic was still smiling, but his eyes were serious. “They were as real as we are, and a damn sight more prolific than the fucking bruins.”
“He’s messin’ with you, Faythe,” Owen said, laughter shining bright in his dark eyes as he shifted on the couch beneath my calves.
Vic shook his head, brown waves flying. “I’m dead serious.”
“So where are they now?” Parker drained his new shot, apparently for the hell of it.
Vic shrugged. “‘Survival of the fittest’ turned out not to refer to them. Werewolves had no stealth, and little common sense. The damn fools started howling every time they got excited, like a pup pissing himself over table scraps. Got themselves mistaken for real wolves and hunted to extinction more than a hundred years ago, before humans ever had a chance to figure out that some of their bedtime stories were true.”
On screen, Karen White had abandoned bravery for a brief bout of common sense, locking herself into the relative safety of her bungalow. In the guesthouse, skeptical silence descended.
“Yeah, right!” Ethan scoffed, as usual, the first to voice an opinion.
“I’m not kidding,” Vic said. “Ask your dad.”
“Speak of the devil…” Owen said, twisting to glance at the front window. Light flashed across his face, bathing the room in the glow of my father’s headlights as his car pulled into its customary parking spot, alongside the main house.
“Last one to the barn unloads the body!” Ethan cried, and the guys leapt into action. Ethan turned off the TV, and Parker began screwing caps on bottles at random. Vic vaulted from his recliner, kicking the footrest into place. Owen gathered a handful of shot glasses and dumped them on the kitchen island, unwilling to leave a mess in a house he didn’t actually occupy.
>
I stood as the guys scurried around the living room, but Marc pulled me back onto the couch next to him. The gold specks in his irises sparkled with mischief. His hand slid up my rib cage, thumb brushing the low swell of my breast.
Ethan thumped across the floor toward the door without sparing us a glance. Parker was at his heels.
Marc leaned in, his gaze focused on my neck. I tilted my head back to oblige him. His lips trailed from just below my ear to the base of my throat. My hands reached for him automatically, finding their way beneath his shirt, playing across the ridges and valleys of his stomach.
“I’m not unloading that body,” I whispered as his teeth grazed my collarbone.
“You won’t have to.” He leaned in for a kiss, and my lips parted, welcoming him. He pulled me back onto his lap so that I straddled him, my mouth still on his. My fingers trailed up his arm to his neck. I pulled him closer, tilting his head to better accommodate my tongue.
Marc groaned into my mouth. His thumb brushed my nipple and I gasped.
Glass shattered behind me, and the sharp scent of whiskey rolled across the room. Pulling away from Marc, I twisted on his lap to see Jace standing in a puddle, the broken bottle at his feet. His eyes were fixed on me. On us.
Shit. I’d thought he was already gone. “Jace…?”
“I’m fine,” he snapped, snatching a dish towel from the counter. He dropped it on the pool of Johnnie Walker and stomped across the kitchen for a broom.
I got up to help him, but Marc put a hand on my shoulder and shook his head, watching Jace in frustration and obvious sympathy. He was right. Offering to help Jace would only have further embarrassed him. So we left Jace to his mess and crossed the western field well behind the others, heading for the big, red, prairie-style barn dominating the landscape.