The Alpha's Daughter (36 page)

The anger and hurt she'd experienced that
morning were working their way back up to steaming. Jazz lowered
her head and closed her eyes and imagined an empty room in her
heart with one window and one door where she could throw her
tantrums without inflicting them on anyone else. Instinctively, she
knew it worked.

The room enclosed her anger but evidently not
the look on her face. When she looked up, Griz had his foot on the
first step. He was watching her with wary eyes

"Hi," he said cautiously.

"We need to talk," she replied. The look on
his face was gratifying to see. "There," she thought to herself,
"See how you like it. Feels different when the shoe is on the other
foot, doesn't it?"

"Uh, yeah, we do," he said carefully. "I
thought we'd take a walk up to the Point where we won't be
interrupted." He looked worried and Jazz was glad.

"Yeah, we wouldn't want to be interrupted,"
She parroted.

Griz looked at her strangely. "Is something
wrong?"

Everything was wrong. The earth had tilted on
its axis. Up was down and west was east, but she was the only one
who felt it.

"You tell me," she said walking past him and
down the porch steps. "Oh, that's right. We're going up to the
point so we won't be interrupted." She started walking down the
road to the path that went up through the woods.

She heard him call inside that they were
going for a walk, but she wasn't going to wait and then she paused
and turned and looked back at the house. Griz was talking to
someone in the doorway, but she couldn't see who. She closed her
eyes and concentrated on the doorway and then she knew.

Damn! How cool was that? She wasn't the only
one broadcasting. Poor Donna was worried, though, and that wasn't
funny. While Jazz could only feel the worry and not the cause of
it, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who she was
worried about. She was probably telling the Doc about the crazy
woman he had living in his house.

Jazz formed a megaphone around her mouth with
her hands. "I'm all right, Donna!" she called. Donna would feel her
calm, her confidence. Those other feelings were locked away in her
room. The window would remain closed until she decided to open it
and let her feelings out.

She continued up the trail, eating up the
ground with her long strides.

"Hey! Wait up!" she heard him call behind
her.

"Why?" she called back. "I'll meet you at the
Point. You said it yourself. We have to talk."

"What the hell's the matter with you?"

They were three quarters of the way along the
path to the Point, the outcropping of rock where she'd seen Griz's
wolf backlit by the moon. He'd looked so majestic that night, his
head thrown back in a full throated howl. He stood above the world
on that point of rock, the master of all he surveyed.

"Oh shut up," she muttered to her wolf.
"We're not going there, remember?"

"Going where? I thought we were going to the
Point." Griz's longer legs wouldn't allow her to keep the lead no
matter how fast she walked.

"According to you?" Jazz continued, answering
his first question and ignoring the last. "Plenty I imagine and you
can tell me all about it when we get to the Point." She walked
another few steps and stopped, putting her hands on her hips. "No.
You're right. Maybe we should talk about it now. You're no prize
either, you know."

"I never said I was! And you just said we
weren't going to the Point." He grabbed her hand and spun her
around. "Godammit, Hellcat, what's gotten into you?"

"You! That's what's gotten into me," she said
angrily.

"Hellcat…"

"Don't you Hellcat me. We have to talk, you
said. Well since I'm the one that's going to be sleeping at the
side of the road in a rocking chair, I get to talk first."

"Why the hell are you sleeping in rocking
chairs?" Griz asked, looking thoroughly confused.

"Because they're mine! But don't think I'm
going to leave Gilead, because I'm not. It's my home. It's my pack.
You can go running off to wherever it is you came from with your
expensive clothes and Italian shoes, but you'll regret it. I know
you will. You won't find the love and trust and loyalty you've got
here anywhere else. I can guarantee you that. You're good and kind
and trustworthy, even if you are a little grumpy sometimes and your
people skills need work. They get that and they want you anyway.
They love and care about you."

"Who are you talking about?" he almost
shouted it.

"Gilead, you idiot! You can't leave
Gilead!"

"Oh." Griz shook his head as if he was having
trouble understanding her. "That's nice to know. I guess." Then he
shook his head again. "What about you?" he asked, still seeming
confused. "You don’t want me? You don't care?"

She threw her hands in the air. "Don't want
you? What planet have you been living on, Griz? I wanted you the
first night we met or at least my wolf did." Jazz frowned and
huffed, "Okay, I was interested, too, though how the hell I could
be attracted to some overgrown caveman with hair sprouting
everywhere is beyond me. You looked like your knuckles should be
scraping the ground while you dragged your club behind you. You
should feel lucky I saw the man inside, because the outside of you
looked like shit."

"Thank you," he said.

"You're welcome," she said, ignoring the
sarcasm and continuing her rant. "And don't you dare say I don't
care about you! Didn't I clean up that pigsty you lived in? Didn't
I cook for you and do your fucking laundry? Okay," she recanted,
"Ellie does the laundry, but I helped even when I didn't have to. I
don't do that for every man I meet. As a matter of fact, I've never
done it for any man I've met." Jazz stopped to catch her breath,
but Griz's smile gave her an instant second wind.

"You think this is funny, do you? Well it's
not funny to me! I may not be one of your la-di-da ladies that you
take to the opera in your fancy clothes, but I'd like to see one of
them ruin their manicure to fight beside you when you needed
someone to watch your back. I don't see one of their fancy asses
sitting behind that clinic desk handing out lollipops to pups with
shitty pants. And that's another thing, Doctor Goodman. I may not
have a five star education, but I know how to make and manage a
buck. That clinic's breaking even, though if Millie ever charges
you rent, you're up Shit's Creek without a paddle.

"So you do care. You do want me." Griz was
trying to keep a straight face.

Jazz threw up her hands. "You're a fucking
idiot or you're completely oblivious. Did you not get the message
in the kitchen, in the bed, in the office, on that godawful lumpy
couch?" She pointed to the copse off to her left. "If I'm not
mistaken, we both did some pretty heavy wanting right under those
trees."

"I guess we did. Are you finished now?" He
asked in a perfectly reasonable tone.

"No. I'm just getting started."

He gave her a nod. "You're finished."

"Don't tell me… umph."

Jazz was up in the air and over his shoulder,
her head hanging down his back, her ass in the air. She'd been
there before. She couldn't protest because with each running step
Griz took, the air was forced from her lungs by the shoulder
pressed to her stomach. He didn't stop until he reached the Point,
where he finally set her down.

She was about to give him another piece of
her mind when he turned her around to look out over the outcropping
to the surrounding country. When she had seen him here before as a
wolf, she was looking up at him and could see nothing beyond him
but the moon.

Now she saw what he saw and it was
breathtaking. Looking out from the Point, over what seemed an
endless forest of rock and trees and running water, Jazz could see
why he chose this spot to howl his heart to the moon. Up here, you
felt like you owned the world. Jazz stared, turning her head slowly
from side to side to take it all in. Heat and anger and heartache
fled. This place, this view, took away her every care and replaced
it with peace.

She forgot her rant and stood quietly by
Griz's side, sharing this masterpiece of nature to which no artist
could do true justice. They stood that way for a long time,
watching the forest below darken as the setting sun set the heavens
afire with its orange glow. Finally, Griz's hand reached for
hers.

"Donna's back at the house starting supper,
grumbling about how we aren't back yet and wondering which one of
us got tossed off the Point," he said. "Harvey's playing with
Opal's cubs and hoping Joe mates some nice girl and gives him a
couple just like them. Tom and Ellie are arguing over Livvy and her
young man. Tom has plans for Livvy, good plans I might add. Good
for Livvy and good for the pack."

"He wants her to go to college and Ellie's
telling him to relax. It will all work out in the end. The Mate
made her promise," Jazz told him quietly and smiled when he looked
down at her. "I was there, that's how I know. But I know other
things, too, and with a little practice, I'll know more." She told
him about her conversation with the Mate. Not all of it, of course,
but enough to explain the Mate's theory about her gift as an
Alpha's daughter.

Griz listened and nodded as if he thought the
theory made sense. "No men though? You can't feel what we
feel?"

"No, thank God," Jazz said, although in
Griz's case she wished she could. She'd laid her heart at his feet,
though she realized now she'd done it like a crazy woman. "That
would only come if I became an Alpha's Mate and that's not gonna
happen."

There was only one mate she wanted, only one
man who could make her happy for the rest of her life. Her wolf was
right, damn her. She turned back to the view.

"What are you thinking?" Griz whispered,
leaning close to her ear.

"That you're like these mountains; broad,
rugged and majestic," she whispered back without thinking and
without turning her head. "I was thinking that you belong
here."

He chuckled softly. "I was thinking the same
about you."

Jazz straightened her back and raised her
eyebrows. "What? I'm broad and rugged? Thanks. You weren't kidding
when you said the family charm skipped over you, too."

He laughed a little louder. "If you want
pretty words, I'll give you my brother's numbers, but remember
they're already spoken for." He put his arm around her shoulders to
bring her closer. "I didn't mean you were broad or rugged, though
in some ways rugged would fit."

The arm around her squeezed her tightly to
prevent another protest. His free hand waved across the view before
them. "Look out there," Griz said, looking at the view and not at
Jazz. "These mountains have survived fires and storms for
centuries. They were once logged almost bare to supply the Great
Plains with wood for the new expanding country, yet here they are,
growing and green. In spite of what man and nature have done to
them, these mountains, this plateau, has endured. There's nothing
soft or delicate about this place, but there's a beauty to it
you'll find nowhere else on earth. That's like you." He placed his
knuckle under her chin and tilted her face to look at him.

"There's nothing soft or delicate about you,
either. Soft and delicate could never survive here. What you have
is like these mountains. Yours is a strong and enduring beauty that
I won't find anywhere else on earth and I was a fool to ever think
you should live anywhere else but here. You belong here, in these
mountains, with the Gilead pack, and with me."

"I'm happy you don't want you to be an
Alpha's Mate," he said and laughed when her head came snapping back
to face him in astonishment. He shrugged. "You'd be a good Mate for
Gilead, but more importantly you're good for me and selfishly,
that's why I want you."

"But…"

He stopped her words with a finger to her
lips. "Shut up, Hellcat. You've had your say and even though I
didn't understand half of it, I got the important parts. It's my
turn now." He lowered his chin and raised his eyebrows and waited
patiently for her nod.

"I was lost when I met you in that parking
lot, lost in a misery of my own making. I was biding my time,
waiting to die along with this pack. You weren't the kind of woman
I would have chosen, certainly not the kind I would have brought
home to my mother, but you made me feel things I thought were long
dead. I wanted you, Jasmine Phillips. I want you now more than
anything I've ever wanted in my life."

Jazz closed her eyes. Here it comes, the
heart crushing boot stomp that began with the word 'but'."

Griz took her hand in his and brought her
fingers to his lips to kiss them as if she was some kind of
princess and he was a prince. And he was, oh God, he was a prince
to her, a great grizzly bear of a prince.

"I want you there," he continued, "To share
my pleasure when new life is brought into the pack. I want you
there to cushion the blow when I have to say there's nothing I can
do. I want to wake up every morning with your butt snuggled into my
crotch. I want you kneeling beside that damn tin tub, washing away
my worries while you scrub my back. I want you running your fingers
over my clean shaven face and looking at me like I'm the best
looking guy you ever laid eyes on, even if my knuckles are dragging
on the ground.

"And when I climb into bed at night, I want
to know that you're willing to be possessed by my hands and mouth
and body. I want your cries and moans and whimpers to remind me
that in spite of the shit I've had to face in my life or on that
day, I'm the luckiest wolver in history.

"I want you to bear me a dozen pups and they
all better look like you. I want…"