Werewolves in Love 1.5: The Nanny Years (5 page)

“
INGRID?”

****

She wasn’t mortified, or even embarrassed. She wasn’t sorry, either. She was angry.
She
was angry with
him.

As if fucking a couple of his Pack in the woods in the middle of the night was insufficient grounds for termination.

“You violated my privacy!”

“What fucking privacy? You were IN THE GODDAMNED WOODS!”

The office door was closed, their raised voices bouncing off the walls.

“I was performing a religious ritual!”

“Bullshit! I know Wiccans, and they don’t fuck under the new moon!”

“It’s not Wicca! It’s Earth magick!”

He just knew, from the way she said it, that she spelled magic with a k on the end.

“Goddamn it, female!” he roared. “There’s no such thing as-- oh fuck it,” he groaned, sinking into his chair. He put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands so he wouldn’t have to look at the woman who’d cared for his child for close to a year, now sitting across the desk from him wild-eyed, smeared with colored plant juices and smelling of two very stupid werewolves.

Of course, how fucking brilliant was
he
, if he hadn’t had an inkling of what was going on?

The office was silent for several long minutes. Finally he looked up.

Ingrid was still sitting there on the other side of his desk, glowering at him in all her pissed off, sexed up, bugfuck crazy Earth Mother wrath.

“Did you take the job just so you could fuck werewolves, Ingrid? Is that the way it happened? Cause I’m trying to figure out how you work for me for almost a year and never think to mention that you practice
sex magic.
”

He didn’t try to keep the contempt out of his voice.

“No, I didn’t do it just for the werewolves. I’m a good nanny – I take excellent care of Rebecca. My beliefs are a private matter.”

“Not when they involve members of my pack, they’re not. And for Christ’s sake – you’re Catholic!”

“The two are not incompatible,” she said primly.

While no theologian, Cade was nonetheless pretty sure that Catholicism and sex magic, were, in fact, incompatible.

She leaned forward across his desk, and he jumped back involuntarily.

“It was just for the ritual, Cade,” she said in an almost pleading tone. “The ritual requires sex. It was nothing personal – I wasn’t involved with them, and it didn’t have anything to do with you.”

“They’re
my wolves
. This is my pack.”

“Fine. I won’t perform the ritual with members of your pack again.”

He gaped at her. “Seriously, Ingrid? You seriously think that if you just agree not to fuck my wolves every new moon, then everything will be fine and you can just keep working for me?”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s insane!”

She jumped to her feet. “You’re a bigot and a misogynist!”

“And you’re a deeply, deeply disturbed female who needs to get the hell off my ranch immediately.”

“Rebecca is going to miss me!”

“I know she will,” he said in a deadly soft tone. “And that’s why I won’t ever forgive you for this.”

She flinched at that. Then she turned and walked out of the office. Michael caught the door as she flung it open. He sank into the chair she’d just vacated, and together they listened to her slam the front door behind her.

When they heard her car start, Cade sighed and leaned all the way back in his chair.

“How’re the guys?” he asked the ceiling.

“Oh, the bunkhouses are buzzing like a middle school slumber party. Except for Josh and Toby, of course,” Michael added hastily.

Josh was already on a plane to Chicago – his mother was expected to recover. Toby was staying with a wolf in town because Cade didn’t want to see his face for a while.

When Josh returned, he and Toby would be summoned to the office for one more Come to Jesus meeting.

“So you’re still leaning to Uncle Sam for the punishment?” Michael asked.

Cade nodded. “Yep. That’s the deal. Enlistment or expulsion.”

“Makes sense to me.”

Every wolf in the pack had been told time and again, since they’d first hired Celine, that the nanny was off limits. No exceptions, no questions. What Josh and Toby had done was a direct violation of their Alpha’s orders. In many packs the punishment would have been fast, physical and probably fatal.

Cade was loath to do it. Toby and Josh were young and stupid. And Rocky Mountain wasn’t like other packs – it was, in many wolves’ eyes, an artificial pack. It wasn’t the same pack Cade’s father had led, and none of the wolves had been born into it. Cade had formed it – the first newly formed North American pack in over a hundred years – when he returned to Colorado. Its members were Lones and wolves who’d left their birth packs for one reason or another to join his. And while he didn’t doubt his right to kill a wolf who defied him – and while he’d done it before – he didn’t feel right doing it to one arrogant little bastard and his hapless sidekick.

“Yeah,” he drawled, still staring at the ceiling. “I think Josh would do best in the Army, but I don’t care which branch he joins, he just has to serve at least a four year haul.” He needed to be broken, and Cade wasn’t going to take the time to do it. “He serves his time honorably, he’s got a home to come back to. If not, he’s on his own.” He couldn’t return to his birth pack – it didn’t work like that.

He lifted his head, which hurt like hell and felt like it weighed a ton, to look at Michael. “How’d Toby take it?”

Toby, a beta, had been given the same choice, but he only had to pull a two year stint. And he couldn’t join up with Josh – it was his compulsion to follow Josh, instead of his Alpha’s orders, that had landed him in trouble.

“He’s scared, but he knows he’s getting off damned light. And I think he’s secretly glad to be getting away from Josh.” After a pause he added, with a perfectly straight face, “I don’t think their cocks feel so powerful right now.”

Cade snickered in spite of himself, remembering Josh’s anguished explanation.

“Honest to God, Cade! That’s what she said! Our cocks are powerful, and she needed them to do her magic!”

Josh knew as well as anyone else – anyone else except certain deluded humans who refused to believe it, of course – that there was no such thing as magic.

But that didn’t stop him from believing his cock was powerful if a hot female told him so.

“Michael,” Cade said tiredly.

“Yes, Cade?” Michael asked mildly.

“What the fuck?”

“Are you asking why we’re having such godawful nanny luck?”

“No. Actually I was asking if we were that bone fucking stupid at their age, but yeah – I do wonder about the nanny luck.”

“Well – no. We were never that bone fucking stupid.” He stretched for a long minute, running his hands through his shaggy blond hair. “Then again, we didn’t grow up like them.”

“How’d they grow up?”

“Happy.”

“Ah.”

“I think a shitty childhood makes for a smarter teenager.”

“Yeah, I think you’re probably right. Ok. So why the rotten nanny luck?”

“That, my wolf, I have no idea.”

“This is the second time – the
second time,
Michael – I’ve had a crazy female living under the same roof with me, and I didn’t catch it.”

Michael cocked his head. “That’s the thing about crazy people, though, isn’t it? They don’t know they’re crazy. They think they’re totally normal. So you’ve got nothing weird to pick up on.”

Cade thought about that for a minute, decided it would do. “Good. Okay, thanks. Now what the fuck do we do about a nanny?”

Michael sighed and stood up. “Well, I call PPC in the morning and explain what happened. And I tell them that in light of Ms. Prieto’s actions, I think we’re entitled to a refund of our placement fee because holy fuck, do those people conduct background investigations, or do they not? And then I think I’m going to talk to Mrs. Poe again.”

“Which one was Mrs. Poe?”

“The old one who scared the crap out of me.”

“The one who reminded you of Sgt. Scott?”

“That’s the one. I don’t think she’d scare Becca. She seemed like your basic hardass redneck grandma – the kind who’d kill a wolf who pissed her off, but spoil the hell out of a baby, you know?”

“Okay. Whatever you think. Can we get drunk now?”

“Hell yeah. It’s gonna take a lot of whiskey to forget what I saw in those woods.”

“If you tell me about it, you’re dead.”

Yours, Mine and Howls

The Nanny Years, Part 4

“Yep, it’s the U joint,” said a phlegmy tenor voice from underneath the twelve-year-old SUV. “This is all kinds of busted, son.”

“Shit,” growled Cade MacDougall, dragging a hand through his tangled black curls with an exasperated sigh. “All right. I’ll get a couple guys to tow it into town. I better give Rick a call and tell him it’s on the way. With all the business I send that guy, he ought to be giving me free tows back and forth.”

“Well,” grunted the voice, “if I had all my tools here with me, I could replace it myself. But I didn’t think I’d be needing all my grease monkey gear to take care of a little girl.”

A throaty laugh turned into a hacking cough as the creeper slid out from under the truck. Cade, leaning against the front bumper, watched as a steel gray bob emerged, then a kindly, weather-beaten face crisscrossed by sixty-three years’ worth of wrinkles, and finally a sturdy, compact body, hardened and toned by thirty-five years of active military duty. The old body was in damned good shape. Even the tits—given the age of the owner, “bust” seemed a more appropriate term—were still sitting very near where nature had originally placed them.

“Tell you what. Next time I visit my daughter in Denver, I’ll bring my toolbox back with me.”

Cade smiled. “That would be great. Thanks, Mrs. Poe.”

****

“That’s so cool,” laughed Michael Wargman, Cade’s best friend and second in command. “You’ll have to give her a raise if she starts taking care of the cars, you know.”

“Gladly.”

Michael took another swig of beer and laughed again. “We got ourselves a nanny-slash-mechanic. I told you the third time would be a charm.”

“Hey!” Roman said from across the woodshop. “Either of you want in here?” He indicated the three round tables in the middle of the shop floor, where several of Cade’s pack and a few guys from town were playing poker.

Cade waved a hand. “Nah. Too tired. I’ll just sit here and drink. You wanna play?” he asked Michael.

The big wolf shook his shaggy blond head. “Nope. I’m fine here.”

Michael had interviewed Mrs. Poe three years earlier, when Cade brought Rebecca home from Savannah. At the time, neither of them had realized how difficult it would be to find a normal, qualified nanny.

Much to their surprise, there weren’t a lot of experienced nannies with solid resumes looking to live on an isolated horse ranch full of single werewolves. They had a choice between young and inexperienced or old and ready for retirement. Michael chose to go with young and inexperienced. That was a mistake—an understandable mistake, in Cade’s view, but a mistake just the same.

Celine, the first nanny, was way too interested in Cade. The next one, Ingrid, was older and more qualified than Celine—but she seduced a couple of Cade’s wolves into her hippy dippy sex magic cult.

After that, they decided to give old and ready for retirement a try.

So Michael called Mrs. Poe, only to find that she’d accepted a position with a young family in Durango. They spent months vainly searching for someone else, until Cade said to hell with it.

He knew he and Sindri, the four-hundred-year-old brownie who’d raised Cade and his older brother, could raise Rebecca by themselves. But he couldn’t ignore the threats of Rebecca’s maternal grandmother, who’d visited the ranch all of one time and declared Cade incapable of providing a stable home life for his little girl. Family courts weren’t kind to single werewolf fathers of females.

Then one day, out of the blue, Mrs. Poe called Michael. The Durango family had moved overseas, she didn’t want to be so far from her kids, and was their position still open? Cade hired her over the phone and hadn’t regretted it for a moment.

Though the thirty-five-year US Army vet bore a disturbing resemblance to his and Michael’s Ranger instructor, she’d turned out to be a wonderful nanny.

“Hey,” Cade said to Michael now. “I’ve been thinking. She’s been with us for more than a year, which is a pretty big deal. And she’s doing a great job. So I was thinking of taking her to dinner as a way of saying thanks. Some good food, good wine, show her she’s appreciated. Wanna join me?”

“Sure. But I bet she likes hops better than grapes.”

“So I just said, ‘Well, never mind, then,’ and got the hell out as fast as I could!”

“And you never found out why the colonel was buck naked?”

“Nope, and I wasn’t about to ask!”

The three of them erupted into raucous laughter for the fourth or fifth time that night, drawing another round of annoyed glances from their fellow diners at El Rincon.

As it turned out, Mrs. Poe, despite being exactly the type of woman for whom the terms “broad” and “dame” were invented, drank neither wine nor beer. She gulped down several glasses of iced tea during dinner, politely declining Michael’s repeated offers to buy her a drink.

“Well, boys,” she said as their favorite waitress, Kelly, cleared the last remains of desert, “this has been a hoot, it really has. Thanks for showing an old lady such a nice time.”

“You deserve it, Mrs. Poe, and more,” Cade replied. “Hiring you’s the best idea Michael has had in years.”

“Aw shucks,” said his second. “Hey, are you sure you won’t have a drink with us?”

“No thanks, boys, I’m too old to drink anymore.”

“Bullshit,” scoffed Michael. “I bet you’re a hell of a lot of fun when you’re ripped!”

Cade rolled his eyes. “Do we really want to be getting the nanny shitfaced?”

Mrs. Poe’s raspy, booming chortle rang out again. “Oh, hell. I won’t sit here and get snockered, but I don’t suppose one drink could hurt me, could it?”

Michael beamed. “Course not! What’s your poison?”

“Well, back when I drank, I liked a good cab.”

“There you go!” Cade exclaimed.

He ordered a bottle of Harlan Maiden—because she was worth it—and when they each had a glass in front of them, Cade raised his. “To Mrs. Poe!”

“To Mrs. Poe!”