Packed: The Enforcer: A Shifter Paranormal Romance (3 page)

They had sex, she admitted to herself baldly. Burn down the bed and the house around it sex, but love didn't enter into it at any point.

At least not for him, it didn't, she was very sure, and she had very carefully steered their conversations away from any talk of such deep emotions. She knew who and what he was, knew what his life was like when they weren't together. She knew he had other women.

Hell, she'd had other men, too, if it came to that.

But they always seemed to end up back in each other's arms at some point. And even if it was years between one conflagration and another, they just picked up where they left off, as if none of that time had passed, always just as hot for each other as ever.

She was practically babbling to herself before he finally gave his permission, sending her careening over that edge as soon as he reclaimed that private territory, making her ride every scintilla of it until she damned near fainted from it, her body a mass of automatically responding nerve endings that she had divorced from her mind.

She didn't care that she probably looked like an old whore, still splayed there like he'd left her as he'd gotten up to put away the toys, barely even noticing when the blood rushed rudely back into her crushed nipples. Or that he had arranged her in a more modest position and tucked her under the covers, on her right side, as he knew she preferred, before tugging the rest of the bedclothes up over the both of them and spooning her from behind with a thick, heavily tattooed arm around her pristine little lily white waist.

"Sleep," he growled in her ear.

And sleep she did, practically before he'd finished the word.

* * *

He'd promised himself that this time he'd exhausted her enough – between the sex and the alcohol and the spanking – that she would still be there when he woke up. But he was wrong. Granted, he wasn't much of an early bird and she was, but still. Just once, he'd like to be able to roll over and into her, first thing in the morning. His morning wood was always worse than ever the next day after he'd indulged himself with her, as if his body considered the last night – or rare nights – to be just an appetizer and had grown very hungry for much, much more of her.

He opened a bleary eye to stare at the clock on his nightstand that said it was after ten, and he knew from the fact that the other side of the bed was stone cold that she had been gone for a while. He certainly had things to do, but he couldn't quite seem to get himself motivated to do them yet, which was very unusual for him.

All Tek could think about was Mari, and he knew it would be like this for a while, until he worked her out of his system before they came together again and seared each other's souls.

* * *

Halfway across town, Mari was having much the same problem. Her interior design firm was still small enough that she really had to be on her game at all times, and right now, she just...wasn't. All she wanted to do was put her head down on her desk and sleep. Six A.M. had come much too early for her this morning, and she had cum much too late last night.

She had a sex hangover – scenes of the past evening she'd shared with him flitted through her mind at frequent and always inopportune moments, so much so that she felt as if she was constantly on the verge of orgasming, and that just wouldn't do in the middle of her office. It was all Tek's fault. She had half a mind to call him and give him a piece of her mind, but she knew that wouldn't be anywhere near enough for him and that, if she did so, she ran the very real risk of ending up back in bed with him tonight.

That wouldn't be a very good idea. Nope. Not at all.

It would be wonderful, and hot, and would go a long way towards assuaging the incessant throbbing between her legs that had her clenching them together under her big desk to absolutely no avail, but it was out of the question.

Forces beyond their control had decreed that they could not be together, and they both knew they needed to respect that.

Occasional fling notwithstanding, of course. No one had ever said they couldn't have sex together – well, her father had tried, rather weakly, she thought, but then he was sick by then and no one knew it. But even Cash, when he had taken over after the inevitable had happened had reaffirmed Father's decree that they couldn't formalize the situation between them and become actual mates.

Not that she was sure it was something he'd still consider, even if they could. They hadn't talked about the idea in years, since her father had first handed down the decision. Of all of the club members, Tek was the very least likely to "mate for life" as far as she could tell.

Mari began to bang her head against her desk, much less softly than she should have. But she welcomed the pain as a distraction both from the heartache that the reality of the situation between herself and Tek always caused her and the ever-present need. It was always a thousand times worse the next day to week or so after they'd been together – to feel him forcing her open with that thick, hard cock of his.

She shouldn't have ended up with him last night, either, of course, but she had gotten a bit tipsy at the club and he had volunteered to drive her home. Good thing her assistant didn't mind early morning calls from her boss. Renee had answered her phone just as cheerfully as always – for which Mari wanted to kill her, of course, but she couldn't since she needed her – and had arrived a few houses down from Tek's driveway within minutes. Renee had dropped her off at her car – where, thankfully, the rest of the guys and their girlfriends or mates were still sleeping it off, like Tek was, all alone in his own room.

Still, she didn't trust a one of them not to hear her throaty, electric blue GT-R, so she rolled it out of the parking lot and out into the street before she started it and drove back to her own place. As disheveled as she'd been – and that was plenty, thanks to him – she still made it to work on time, and had even made a couple sales before applying her head to the desk, then to her nicely folded arms and giving up on trying to stay awake, hoping to catch a few winks before her afternoon meeting.

Of course, that was not to be. The minute her head hit her arms, Renee buzzed her. "I have Ms. Buchanan for you."

Just what she needed. Her best girlfriend had a nose on her for intimate dirt about Mari...well, like the rest of the guys in the pack. She'd know in a matter of seconds just what she and Tek had been up to last night – there was no hope for it.

But that didn't mean Mari was just going to fess up immediately. If she could get out of it without a confrontation, simply by not bringing up the subject of who it was that she'd spent last night with, then she certainly was more than willing to take the easy way out. So she picked up the phone and plastered a fake ear-to-ear smile on her face, hoping it would be translated to her voice, somehow. "Hi, Abs, how are you?"

She'd been Abby until she'd succumbed to the latest fitness craze and had had a righteous six-pack ever since, much to her best friend's complete and total disgust. She'd often told Abby that she hoped whatever it was she had wasn't catching because the only way she was ever going to run voluntarily was if there was a Mack truck chasing her.

"Not as good as you this morning, I'd be willing to bet."

So much for the easy way.

Mari leaned back in her chair, hoping that didn't put her to sleep in the middle of this conversation, which would have been a dead giveaway as to exactly what it was she had been doing last night, and with whom. Then she swiveled around to face out the bow window that was directly behind her desk, giving her a gorgeous view of beautiful downtown Hamden, New Mexico, the little burg they all called home just outside of Albuquerque.

"I'm sure I have no idea to what you are referring." Most of the time playing innocent didn't come any easier to her – even when she really was – than it did to Tek.

"Puh-leeze. I know exactly where you were and who you were with."

This had Mari's attention. She sat up in the chair. "You do?" she asked cautiously.

"Yes. I know you left with Tek, but I'd bet anything that guy you've been seeing – what's his name…Andre – came over to take care of you once he dropped you off. So, spill."

Andre was an up and coming lawyer in town, whom she had seen very occasionally, so occasionally that they hadn't even slept together yet. It was going nowhere because of her obsession with Tek, and he didn't seem to be all that interested in pursuing a relationship with her, either, so they had both agreed to just let it lie. Abby was always in the habit of trying to get her to become more serious with someone – anyone who wasn't Tek – since she didn't seem to be interested in anyone else at the club.

Lovely. Her best friend wanted intimate details of a night she didn't have with a person she didn't love. Oh goody!

She decided not to play that game. She knew her next phone call would have to be to Tek to tell him what she'd said to Abby, so that he wasn't surprised if he got a lecture from Cash, but she hated to lie.

And it wasn't as if Abby didn't know with whom she had slept. She was her best friend, and she had stumbled upon them once. She just wasn't necessarily aware of the fact that she and Tek had a sort of ongoing thing. Mari had kind of let Abby – and pretty much everyone else – think that it had been a one-time deal. By the time she found out about it, they had already been together on several occasions, dating back to when Mari was an eighteen-year-old senior in high school and they had been prohibited from making the commitment that, at that time in their lives, neither of them was sure they even wanted.

"No, Andre didn't come and he wasn't there when we got there." Thank God, she thought to herself. Wouldn't
that
have been an interesting confrontation? One of the reasons she always kept enough money to bail Tek out of jail in a savings account that she carefully never touched in a credit union she never went near. Tek would have handed Andre each of his body parts to take home in a separate bag within a matter of seconds.

They'd never asked each other for fidelity, and, because she knew more than she might have as the former Alpha's daughter about the types of shady activities the club got up to, she knew he would probably never remain faithful to any woman for long.

And she hadn't become a nun herself, either. She'd had her share of flings, although, since moving back to Hamden years ago, she had lived more like a nun than at any other time in her adult life. She hadn't quite been able to make herself be physical with another man when Tek was always right across town.

Abby sounded concerned about that. "Oh dear, I thought he would be or I would have taken you home myself. You'd had quite a bit of tequila, if I remember correctly – not that I hadn't, too, of course. But I hate the idea that you were trashed and all alone."

"I wasn't alone," Mari explained quietly.

The long beat of silence on the other end of the phone told her that Abby had finally put two and two together. "Don't tell me that Tek stayed."

Mari cleared her throat and said right back, "Okay, I won't." He didn't. She had stayed with him. She wasn't trying to start anything, wasn't trying to be belligerent, but neither was she going to back down from the truth that they had been together.

"Mari! You know how Cash feels about you and Tek being...together."

"And I've told you before that my brother does not dictate with whom I share my bed. My father tried it, as you may remember, and it didn't work for him, either."

She could hear Abby's long-suffering sigh. "They're just trying to be protective of you, to keep you safe. You know how...wild and violent Tek can be."

Mari rolled her eyes. Sometimes Abby drank entirely too much of the pack's Kool-Aid. "It's more than that, Abby, and you know it."

That shut her up. Abby liked being wrong about as much as Mari did, and she hated having it pointed out to her even more.

"Well, when the pack leader tells you not to do something, you shouldn't do it."

Mari couldn't help laughing. "Right, and what about that antique morganite ring you bought when Cash said you two needed to buckle down so that you could get together enough money for a down payment on a house? And the money you spent at the tables in Vegas, after Cash told you flat out that he didn't want you gambling except for slots because you tend to lose your head and then your shirt? And what about the Frenchton puppy you spent twenty-five hundred dollars on when you could have saved a life and gotten a stray from the Humane Society for a couple hundred bucks? And the –"

"All right, all right," Abby said, pursing her lips in annoyance. "You've made your point. But, at least what I do just affects his pocketbook. It doesn't affect the club – the pack – itself."

"That's a very naïve viewpoint. You don't think that you spending Cash's money willy-nilly as you sometimes do, doesn't drive him to do things to make money that puts everyone else in the club in danger?"

That earned her another sigh, this time of pure exasperation. "Dammit, Mari, stop pointing out the flaws in my arguments!"

"Yeah, that'll work. It worked well, too, when I tried to get my father to get the pack to go legit. That didn't end so well, so I think I'll stop."

That was an enormous understatement, and the both of them knew it.

Mari's family was all involved in what could politely be termed a motorcycle club. Everyone very carefully steered around the word "gang," even though it fit nicely. Although the word that fit perfectly was actually "pack," since the all-male group were werewolves, every last one of them, which included Abby's husband, Cash, who was the Alpha, the head of the whole dysfunctional situation, as well as being Mari's brother, the son of the previous leader.

And, of course, Tek, who was Cash's all too eager enforcer, who was nowhere near good enough, as far as Cash and her father were concerned, for their Mari, which was one reason why their relationship – such as it was – was conducted in as clandestine a manner as possible.

To say nothing of the fact that he had caused a bit of an uproar – however unintentionally he claimed it was – when there should have been a smooth transfer of power from Alt to Cash – from father to son. Some of the men thought that Tek, being a bit older than Cash, would have made a better leader, and they backed him against Cash when members were being put up for the coveted position of Alpha.

Only Tek truly did not covet that title.

Although he was a shoo in for the vote, Cash nonetheless had offered his best friend the ability to challenge him for the position, which the popular younger man was in no way obligated to do. But that would have meant that Tek would have had to kill Cash outright, or vice versa, to earn it, and he wasn't about to do that. Besides the fact that he had never wanted the position in the first place, he could not and would not do anything like that to Mari.

So he knelt before Cash, instead, and pledged his fealty, which put that matter to rest as far as the two of them were concerned, but there were still some pack members who were more behind Tek than Cash, it seemed at times.

And that was one of the other reasons why they felt they needed to sneak around and deny themselves more often than not. If she was seen to openly favor Tek over her brother – and sleeping with him definitely qualified as favoring him as far as the pack was concerned – then it would definitely have caused dissention within the ranks. This, as hotheaded as they all could be, especially around a full moon, could easily result in the werewolf equivalent of a civil war. At the very least, the constant infighting would weaken the pack. Some of the guys – the younger ones in particular – were looking for any reason to fight and would support Tek against Cash just for the fun of it.

The potential for schisms within the group magnified a million-fold every time the moon was full, which it was tonight. Everything within them heightened during that time – all of their senses, even when they were in human form, were just that much more intense. It put the men – who were highly sexed anyway, due to their less civilized side – into overdrive. Most cubs were born nine months to the day after a full moon. When she was younger – hell, up to the point she left for college – Mari's father did not allow her around anyone but the most trusted members of the crew during that time.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Neither Mari nor Abby wanted to get into what had happened when Tek had become jealous of a D.A. who was looking a bit too closely at the group for their comfort, and who just happened to be dating Mari, to boot.

The cops – and that D.A. – had shown up at the showroom for an old Harley dealership, which the club had bought long ago. They used it as a meeting area, business offices for the legitimate companies they used to float money through from more questionable sources, and a general clubhouse with a bar, bedrooms for those who wanted to spend the night as well as showers and a pantry full of snacks – and all hell had broken loose.

When all was said and done, the eager, up and coming D.A. was dead, and Tek was in jail for his murder, where he stayed for seven years.

The club had to go underground after that, only reemerging after years of skulking around that grated on Alt so badly that he barely lasted a few months after Tek went free, and then the shit storm happened around Cash's ascension.

Mari, who many of the pack blamed for Tek's stint in jail, since it was well know that he was a jealous hothead where she was concerned, had left town not long after Tek's conviction. Her brother asked her, in person, no less, to keep away from the group once she'd moved back, at least until things had a chance to settle down.

That was almost five years ago, and she had only just begun to spend time with that very special family – one she had grown up immersed in – again. She'd almost forgotten what it was like to sit around talking with weres and their families, until Abby had thrown her a surprise birthday party months ago. Almost everyone who attended was were, or a were's human female mate, and it had hit her like a ton of bricks just how much she'd missed that particular brand of closeness. Having that kind of a secret – that some of your nearest and dearest kin wasn't quite what one expected – brought people closer than normal human bonds allowed, and Mari hadn't realized until recently just how bereft she'd felt without it.

She had cornered her brother not long afterwards and asked him – formally – if he thought she could begin to attend pack events again. He had looked surprised at her request – or maybe he was more surprised that she had actually asked him for his permission to do so, since that definitely went against his sister's grain. And it had taken him a few days to get back to her, but he'd said yes, as long as she didn't just try to jump in with both feet and kind of eased her way back in.

But he'd also reminded her – with what looked exactly like their father's index finger shaking in front of her face – that if she assimilated into the pack, then she would be under his authority, and thus would have to obey his rules. And they both knew that there was only one situation in which Cash would feel that he needed to lay down the law to his sister, and that was the relationship she was not allowed to have with his enforcer.

Mari had, of course, crossed her fingers behind her back and agreed solemnly. After all, she wasn't coming back to the pack for Tek. She wasn't. She was coming back because she missed the fellowship.

She had thought that seeing Tek would just be a very pleasant, eye candy bonus.

Last night, at the small, informal birthday party for Hoss – a long-standing pack member, older than most of them, whom Cash had come to rely on for advice as almost a surrogate father –had only been about the third time she'd been there with everyone else. And, although some of the members who had held a grudge against her – Alpha's daughter or not – were gone, a few remained, and they had memories like elephants, these werewolves. They were quick to anger and positively glacial about forgiving.

And they all knew that she and Tek were not supposed to be seeing each other. Abby, as the Alpha's mate, pretty much had to toe the party line, even when it went against her best friend's interests – not that she saw it that way in the least.

"You shouldn't have come to the pot luck."

It was as close to an accusation as Abby had ever gotten, and it wasn't like it was something that Mari didn't already know.

But it hurt to hear, nonetheless, coming from her best friend. She had made her preference for living outside of the confines of that heavily regulated group the day she had announced to her father that she intended to go to college and get a degree, then move to Los Angeles to pursuit her interest in interior design.

Alton had been all for it. He had seen how independent his daughter was and had encouraged her at every turn. Pack life wasn't right for everyone, and – even after their mother died suddenly when Mari was just fourteen, of a heart attack, which devastated them all – he had never tried to force her into doing something she didn't want.

But Dad was gone now, and she wanted back in with all her heart. When all was said and done, though, Cash was the Alpha, and what he said, went, no questions asked, and he wouldn't hesitate to discipline any pack member who stepped out of line. She knew that didn't stop at her, or his wife, either – although he didn't beat them into submission like he did with the males, but he did spank her when he felt she needed it, just as their father had spanked them and their mother, and their grandfather had done the same thing, back as far as anyone could remember.

They were still close, though; keeping in touch when she was living elsewhere by phone, text and email, and then slipping right back into that closeness once she'd moved back home. Mari, Cash and Abby, before she had decided that she wanted to get back into the fold, had met separate from it, sometimes for an early morning breakfast, sometimes for a dinner at his and Abby's home.

She had treasured those times together, but also had come to look forward to becoming more active within the pack, although it looked from the sounds of it as if Abby didn't particularly want that.

Mari wondered if she'd said that out loud when Abby came out with, "Look, Mari, I'd love to have you get in touch with that part of your heritage. The pack was a part of your life for a long time before you left. You grew up with it." Abby hadn't, and Mari had sometimes wondered if she was a bit jealous of Mari's long ancestry with it.

"But neither Cash nor I will allow you back in if you're going to cause problems."

Mari was taken aback. "Cause problems? All I did was –"

"All you did was ignore a direct order from the Alpha – from the pack leader."

She snorted back at her friend. "Well, if that was any reason for someone to get huffy then I would have been shunned a long time ago! I ignored almost everything my father ever said to me from the time I was twelve or so until I left for college!"

"You were a child then," Abby shot back. "You're an adult now, and what you do or don't do, whether you like it or even realize it or not, affects the group. You're either going to live within the structure of the pack, or you're not, Mari. You need to decide which one it is."

With that, the phone went dead in her hand and Mari felt a chill run through her body. Abby had never, ever, hung up on her. They were best friends, weren't they? Their loyalty had always been to each other, through thick and thin, bullies and mean girls, being stood up for dates and worrying together while waiting for the results of a home pregnancy test.

Mari's head sank to her desk again, and she had to stop herself from wondering how the day could get much worse, knowing that would be all the signal karma needed to rain Armageddon down on her.

* * *

The answer to her unspoken question arrived on her doorstep just after she'd finished an early dinner, in the form of her brother, who spoke to her while keeping a weather eye on the rapidly descending darkness.

He refused to sit when she offered him a seat, and she nodded her understanding. Times like this – just before the sun set on the nights of a full moon – no wolf could sit still. He took up pacing across the living room as he spoke, much like their father would have. "Look, I'm here because Abby told me about your conversation this morning."

Mari had thought as much, although she still felt weak kneed enough that she sat herself down on the big ottoman in front of her easy chair. She may have been female, and not subject to the change, but she had enough wolf blood in her that she recognized the solemnity of his visit. He wasn't her brother now, he was the Alpha, and she had to think that coming to her so close to the point of no return tonight wasn't necessarily an accident on his part.