The Wolf's Mate Book 3: Callie & The Cats (21 page)

“Callie, what the hell is that stuff?” Eryx
demanded. His knuckles were white with tension on the steering
wheel.

“It's female pheromones. It made me smell
like an unmated female to him, one going into heat.”

“But you’re not an unmated female. We’re your
mates.” Ethan protested.

“I know that, but it’s not what I smelled
like to him.”

She suddenly felt like she was comforting
them, which was crazy because she was the one that was almost
attacked. “Look, I don’t know how she got hold of them. They have
no real use except to lure a male. Some older females use them to
excite males for sex, and years ago when it was legal to hunt
werewolves, hunters used them to set traps.

“So, every time a wolf goes into heat if
she’s unmated, then what happens?” Eryx sounded even more
confused.

“All females that are unmated take birth
control once they reach of-age. If they don’t want to take it all
the time, then there’s an herb that we can take that masks that
scent.”

“You don’t smell any different to us with
that stuff on you.” Ethan said.

She shrugged. “You’re not a wolf.”

“If you would go into heat naturally, would
you smell like that to another wolf?”

“We’re mated, so no. My body has already
changed from the marking. My heat scent will just be for you, if
you can smell it, that is.” Ethan held her tightly, the heater
cranked high, but she was still cold from the inside out. If they
hadn’t been there, Xavier would have overpowered her in a
heartbeat. There’s nothing quite as ferocious as a male around an
unmated female in heat.

She remembered once from her early teen
years, an older female hadn’t taken the herb and had been real
flighty about the birth control, and if she hadn’t been able to get
inside her home and lock herself safely in her room, she would have
been attacked by half the males in the school. As she recalled, the
female never made that mistake again. And no young female that saw
what happened ever took the whole going-into-heat-thing casually
again.

Inside the house, she made a move to go back
to the bedroom and Eryx grabbed her arm, “Wait. Are you okay?”

“I just want to take a shower, okay? Ethan,
you need to burn your shirt. That scent won’t ever come out of it.
And I’m sorry that the dress is toast.” She was trying not to turn
into a ball of weeping goo on the kitchen floor. She wanted to be
strong for them, to not let them know that she’d been shaken to the
core by the lion females’ callous disregard for her. Eryx let go of
her and she practically ran back to the bedroom, stripping the
dress off as she went. She had no doubt that Melania knew what she
was doing when she dumped that liquid on her. That she thought
nothing of her being raped? She couldn’t wrap her head around it.
She’d had people hate her, she’d had women want to beat her until
she cried for mercy, but she’d never had someone want to see her
get raped. The depths of their cruelty were never more evident.

She wasn't sure how long she was in the
shower, but Eryx opened the curtain and made an unhappy sound.
“Angel?”

She looked up at him from the floor of the
tub, where she was mindlessly rubbing a cloth across her chest. She
blinked up at him. “I don’t think it’s gone yet.”

He slammed his palm on the faucet and turned
off the water, taking the cloth from her hand and making another
unhappy sound. As he wrapped her in a towel and lifted her from the
tub, she got a glimpse of her chest and the angry red marks that
she’d given to herself as she tried to get the pheromones from her
skin. Not that it really mattered; they were already in her system
and would be there for a few days at least, but she couldn’t stop
herself from scrubbing where the liquid had touched.

With a swell of warring emotions, she did the
only thing she could do to keep her head above water: she sank her
hands into his hair and turned his head and kissed him. He stopped
walking from the bathroom and kissed her back, squeezing his arms
around her.

He pulled away with a throaty groan, “We need
to talk, angel.”

She shook her head and wriggled in his arms,
“No talking. Sex. Hot, screaming sex.”

She dug her teeth into his ear lobe and
pulled and he shivered from his head to his feet and moved into the
bedroom. Ethan was waiting to talk, but they weren’t talking
anymore. She didn’t want to talk. She didn’t want to think about
what almost happened, what would have happened if they hadn’t been
so concerned about her safety and let her wander alone. She didn’t
want to do anything, but feel their hands on her, their mouths, and
their bodies sinking deep enough inside to erase away what almost
happened from the whole night and her conscious mind.

Chapter 15

**Ethan**

Neither he nor Eryx slept well that night.
Callie was asleep between them, worn out from a mixture of making
love to both of them when they got home from the wedding and the
stress of the evening. He’d known in the back of his mind that she
was so needy for them because she’d been freaked out by the doc’s
behavior and was trying to distract herself. If that was how wolves
looked when they had plans for a female, it was no wonder she’d
been ready to leave the pack.

It just wasn’t fair to her that she had to be
subjected to this harassment, and it pained him to know he couldn’t
keep her really safe. He would have bet his eye teeth that they
wouldn’t try anything in public, around the humans, but he’d been
seriously wrong. He just didn’t fucking know what to do about it.
He didn’t want to keep her prisoner in the house, but every time
they left, something seemed to happen.

He had finally dozed off well after two a.m.
when a terror-filled scream split the quiet in the house and Callie
was thrashing between them, trying to get off the bed. They stilled
her as best they could without hurting her, both of them talking to
her and trying to keep her from hurting herself. Her eyes blinked
open and she stared at them in the light from the nightstand he’d
clicked on, and then she burst into tears. He positively hated to
see her cry; it made him feel like such a failure. While she sobbed
into his chest, he and Eryx shared a look that was one of grim
determination to see that she didn’t have any more nightmares.
Eventually she settled down, but she never really went back to
sleep again. Whatever had seeped into her subconscious had
terrified her.

“We should cancel tonight,” he said as he
scooped scrambled eggs into a bowl. Callie was inhaling the steam
from a cup of coffee, her face drawn and weary.

She set the cup down hard. She not only
looked exhausted, she had gotten out of bed angry but wouldn’t talk
about it. “No. We can’t cancel. I want to see the kids and your
family, and we only have three weeks before we’re going to be
leaving.”

He and Eryx exchanged looks and she groused,
“I really hate when you guys do that twin thing, you know.”

He put the bowl down on the table and tweaked
a lock of her hair. “Sorry, love, we’ve been doing that for a long
time. Fine, we won’t cancel tonight but I do expect you to take a
nap today at some point.”

She gave him a slight glare and then smirked,
“Jawohl, mein Kommandant.”

He and Eryx both laughed and he joined them
at the table. They discussed the move and getting the house ready.
They couldn’t take everything with them, because they were going to
have to drive both vehicles as it was, and getting a rental truck
meant that she’d have to drive, too, and neither of them wanted her
to right now. Not for such a long trip. They wouldn’t coddle her
forever about the driving, but she hadn’t made a mention about
getting another car since her meltdown in the dealership on Monday
and they weren’t keen on a repeat. They were planning to come back
later in the spring with a moving truck and get the rest of their
things.

“Well, I just won’t unpack my stuff then.”
She shrugged, taking a bite out of a piece of toast. “I need to do
laundry, though.”

“I’ll do your laundry while you rest.” He
offered.

She made a face, “I can do laundry, I’m not
helpless.”

Puzzled, he said, “I didn’t say you were
helpless. I just, I want to take care of you.”

She leaned back in her chair and there was
something distinctly unfriendly in the action. “Right, because it’s
in your nature.” She said it like it was a bad thing and he didn’t
understand that.

“Not because it’s my nature, Callie, but
because I love you. Why wouldn’t I want to?”

The silence stretched for a few minutes and
he shared another look with Eryx. Was she retreating again? This
was what they’d both feared, shared last night when they couldn’t
sleep. That she would decide it wasn’t worth it. That they weren’t
worth it. If she suddenly took off without them, they’d both be
lost.

She stood up. “I guess I’m just tired.”

Eryx grabbed her wrist, “Wait, you didn’t eat
very much. Are you not feeling well? Did those pheromones bother
you more than you said?”

“They weren’t meant for me. They didn’t
affect me, just the way I smelled to him. It was artificial. I’m
sure he feels badly about it, but,” she pulled her wrist away from
Eryx’s grasp, “it’s just a little too much like what I was used to.
If the males scented an unmated female in heat but couldn’t get to
her, they could get, out of sorts like that and unless you were
fast enough to get away, they would just overpower you.”

They both stood up. “You were raped by wolves
claiming they couldn’t control it?” Eryx nearly shouted.

She paled and took a step back. She shook her
head and said, “No, I wasn’t. I...would have been once, but Cadence
saved me.”

She took in a shaky, slow breath and then
closed the distance to them quickly and grabbed them both and they
held her between them. She seemed to be fighting not to cry, and
they soothed her as best they could when they didn’t understand
quite what she was dealing with. Her voice was small and low when
she finally said, “I just, I love you both but I hate it here. I
hate being afraid, I hate that I can’t do anything about it but sit
around and wait for them to do something else to try to get to me.
If you hadn’t been there, he could have...I mean I know that look
he had in his eyes. He thought I was in my heat and males can’t
resist that kind of thing. How could Melania think it was okay to
let me be raped? To do that to him, too? It would ruin him.” She
shivered and they hugged her tighter. He marveled at her concern
for the wolf that had the potential to hurt her.

“We wouldn’t let anyone take you from us,
Callie. If we’d needed to rip his arms off to get to you, we would
have in a heartbeat,” he promised.

“Less than three weeks and we’ll be gone,
angel.” Eryx murmured gently in her ear. “We can keep you safe
until then. We’re not going to take anything for granted when it
comes to your safety.”

She relaxed further and Ethan straightened
slightly after kissing her ear, “I’ll clean up the kitchen and get
to the laundry. Maybe you should lay down with her?”

Eryx didn’t ask if she wanted him to, he
simply swung her up in his arms and carried her to the couch. He
settled on his side against the back cushions and cradled her in
front of him, clicking the TV on and flipping for something to
watch. Ethan smiled at the scene, knowing that Eryx had often
wished to have a woman to cuddle with on the hooker-red couch.

His dad called him an hour later, when he was
separating all their clothes in the basement laundry room. “The doc
wanted to stop by the house and apologize, son, but I told him that
was probably a bad idea.”

He grunted, “Probably. Callie said the
pheromones will be in her system for a few days anyway and I’m not
sure what Eryx would do if he saw him right now. Callie had
nightmares last night because of it; she definitely doesn’t want to
see him again even though she said it wasn’t his fault. I know it
wasn’t, too, but it’s hard not to, you know, want to rip his throat
out.”

“I understand. You and Eryx were not the only
ones that wanted to hurt him because of what happened. There was a
doctor at the reception that gave him a sedative to calm him down,
but we had a hard time keeping him from going after her without
physically hurting him.” His dad sighed deeply. “I’m going to need
her to make an official statement if she wants to press charges
against Melania. Xavier is willing to add to her statement about
what the pheromones did to his mind.”

“She’s in no position to rehash last night,
Dad.” Dropping the lid of the washer with a clang, he cranked the
dial and then walked out into the main room.

“How often have we told victims that the best
thing they can do is make an official report as soon as possible?
If you guys hadn’t carted her off so fast last night she could have
done it then. I know why you did, you had to get her away from him,
but that doesn’t mean that she can skate on this. I can only hold
Melania until tomorrow night without filing against her.”

“I know, it’s just I’ve never been on this
side of it before. She just told us that what frightened her about
the doc was that it’s how males will act when they believe a female
is in heat, and that they’ll just overpower the females. Rape
them.”

His dad swallowed audibly. “Was she ever
attacked like that?”

“Her friend stopped it. The more I learn
about the pack life she was part of, the happier I am that she
left. I can’t imagine her being forced to live a life dictated to
her by ancient traditions and leaders that call all the shots.”

“Well, she’s not part of it any longer. She’s
going to have what she wants with you. Being the only wolf in her
family and loved for who she is and not forced to hold her place in
the pack.”