Wolf and Soul (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 3) (19 page)

And for the first time, a wave of sadness unrelated to what had happened five years ago passed over her.

“Hey, what happened?” he asked. “Why are you sad all of sudden?”

Ugh, the emotional connection that came with mating. Tentative at first, but still there, especially if you were feeling what you were feeling hard enough. And Tu guessed she must have let her sadness get out of control again.

She pushed it down and smiled back up at him. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

He stopped dancing all together, his eyes searching her face, reminding her of the skeptical beta sheriff he used to be.

“It didn’t feel like nothing, Tu.”

She was on the verge of making something up when a smell surprised her out of their mental conversation. Grady must have smelled it, too, because they both looked in its direction at the same time.

The wolf standing there was taller than Tu but shorter than Grady. Wider than Tu, but not nearly as big as Grady. You couldn’t see any muscles through his hunting jacket, and the hair peeking out from underneath his black skullcap was brown—not short like Grady’s, but not so long as to seem rebellious, like Rafe’s. And as for his looks, he had an oval face—he wasn’t cute, but he wasn’t ugly. If she’d seen him under any other circumstance, she would have dismissed him as average and moved on. There was nothing special about him.

Except his eyes and his smell. His brown eyes glittered with ambition. And he smelled like Wolf Hole, born and raised.

Tu only got to look at him for a few seconds though, because she was soon facing a now familiar sight: Grady’s back as he got between her and the wolf.

The music came to an abrupt stop. Someone must have pushed pause on the smart phone that had been set up next to a large pair of speakers outside the gazebo. In the silence that followed, she could feel the eyes of their fellow dancers on the three of them.

“Grady…” she pushed into his head with a mental sigh. “Relax. I was totally expecting this. Just not so soon.” Then she leaned to the side, pushing Grady’s tree trunk of an arm down with both of her hands to address the wolf.

“Hello, Wolf Hole,” she greeted. “What brings you to our kingdom town?” she asked like she didn’t already know.

“Was you serious about that car dealership?”

Tu tried to keep the smug smile off her face, but doubted she was doing a good job. “Totally serious,” she assured him.

“I heard you been all over the state promising pack towns a bunch of things. Got a brother in River Wolf. He says they own their factory now. That true?”

“We haven’t finished signing the papers yet. But it will be true in another month or so,” she answered. “Why do you ask?”

“Cuz if you was tellin’ the truth about that dealership, we want it.” He stood up straighter. “Wolf Hole wants it.”

“Wolf Hole wants it?” Tu repeated, putting on her best confused look, even though she wasn’t the slightest bit confused. “But that’s not what your pack leader said.”

“The old pack leader’s dead. I kilt him in a challenge fight last night. I’m the new pack leader now.”

Ding-ding-ding!
Tu thought to herself even as she said out loud, “I see. I hadn’t heard. Well, it appears congratulations are in order.”

“Yeah, well. I figured I’d do a better job than some meth addict who never gave us nothing.”

“I’ll bet,” she answered.

The, as it turned out, not-so-average wolf’s eyes went from side to side.

“So how about it?”

“How about what?” Tu asked, feigning ignorance.

“You going to give us that dealership you was talking about or are you full of shit?”

Grady’s bicep tensed beneath her hands.

“Calm down,” she said inside her mate’s head. “Tikaani rule of business: stay in charge of all provocations. That means you do the provoking and you never let yourself get provoked.”

Out loud she said to Wolf Hole, “I suggest you watch your language with me, Wolf Hole. I personally don’t give a fuck if you curse or not, but our king has a different opinion about how I should be addressed.”

Wolf Hole glanced at her hulking mate, who wasn’t as easily quelled as a paranoid meth addict, and then back at her.

“Oh, hey, I didn’t mean nothing by that, I just… I just wanted to make sure you was on the up and up. I been driving all day to get here. Sorry for forgetting my manners, ah… ma’am… queen… I don’t know what I should call you. I never met a queen before.”

“How about Tu,” she answered, brightly.

And he smiled, relaxing a bit. “Okay, Tu, is that car dealership still on the table?”

“I have no idea,” she answered. “You’ll have to ask our king about that.”

The wolf’s eyes went to Grady again, but only for a second, before they skittered back to her.

“But he cain’t hear.”

“No, he can’t.”

“Or talk, I thought.”

“Oh, he can talk just fine in ASL. Do you know ASL?”

“Why the he—I mean why the
heck
would I know ASL?” he asked, looking at Tu like she was crazy.

And she threw that look right back at him adding, “Because our king is deaf and doesn’t speak,” like he was not only crazy himself, but also an absolute idiot. Then she raised her voice, so everyone in the rapt crowd would heed her words. “And I know no one would be stupid enough to approach our king to do business if he or she didn’t have at least a basic grasp of American Sign Language.”

An “oh shit” look erupted across not only Wolf Hole’s face, but also the mugs of several kingdom town wolves at the party—the ones who had probably been planning to do just that when they submitted their business proposals in January.

“I— I…” Wolf Hole must have been a lot smarter than his predecessor, because instead of getting mad, he actually stopped and thought her words over. “I guess I should come back when I know some American Sign Language?”

Tu was her father’s daughter, and like him, business brought out her wolf. Her smile was positively feral when she answered, “Yes, Wolf Hole. Why don’t you do that?”

Then she shouted at the top of her lungs. “And why doesn’t someone turn up the music. This celebration ain’t over yet!”

Right on time, Gretchen Wilson’s, “Here for the Party,” came blasting out of the speakers. And everybody started dancing again.

Everybody except for Grady. She turned to him, happy about the Wolf Hole triumph experienced even sooner than expected. But the look he met her with was so cold, it froze her to the spot. And the anger coming off of him… it was palpable. He was furious, and there was no mistaking who with. It was her. He was beyond furious with her.

“What?” she said inside his head. “Why are you so angry? If it’s because of Bobby Joe Jr., listen, dude was a racist prick. I picked him for the job of dying for a reason and I’m not going to apologize for that—”

He pushed past her, walking out of the gazebo without another word, telepathic or signed.

What the hell
, she thought, watching him go. But then before she could go after him, Wolf Hole and several other wolves started peppering her with questions about ASL. “How are we supposed to learn that hand language? That something we can get off the internet? How long do it take to get basic? You think I can do it by January? How long did it take you?”

She’d been trained to eventually become someone’s queen, and she automatically started answering their questions with warmth and patience, like she’d been taught to do from the age of four. But that kept her from going after her king. In the end, she didn’t hunt Grady down until almost an hour later. And she wouldn’t have been able to find him if it hadn’t been for her super nose. She’d guessed correctly that he’d gone back to the kingdom house, but he wasn’t in the house itself but hidden behind the barn. The barn where…

She almost didn’t go. The dread that came over her when she realized where he was, what structure she’d have to walk around in order to get to him… it nearly gutted her. Even worse than when she’d been confronted with Luke’s bedroom.

But she went to him anyway. Because he wasn’t just angry, he was in pain. Emotional pain. So terrible, she could feel it all the way from the house. And somehow knowing he was hurting even worse than she was at the prospect of confronting that old barn was enough to get her walking, out the house’s back door, through the long unused field, past Grady’s old tornado cellar. Deep breath, held for a long time as she rushed around the side of the barn. And then finally she found him.

He was in the driver’s seat of his truck, his head against the back of the seat as if he was looking up to its roof for answers. This wasn’t about her setting up Bobby Joe Jr. to die, she realized then. He wouldn’t have been all wolf-hurt over that meth head’s demise.

Tu thought of all of the princess advice her mother had given her during her younger years. The advice she’d purposefully forgotten after her first heat. But now one piece came back bright and nasty, like a forest fire unintentionally started. According to her mother, you could only be so competent with male wolves before they started feeling emasculated.

She bit her lower lip and knocked on the truck’s window.

At least he didn’t ignore her. He turned to look at her, his face morose and angrier than she’d ever seen it, and she opened the door so she wouldn’t have to talk to him through a glass barrier.

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” she pushed into his mind quickly, before immediately launching into her counter-argument. King Tikaani Rule of Business: if someone misunderstands your intentions, apologize quickly then explain why you’re right and they’re wrong. “Making Wolf Hole learn ASL isn’t just for your benefit, it’s for theirs. My dad makes his pack leaders learn at least one human Inuit dialect and Russian. And he doesn’t go into a meeting with someone from another country unless he knows at least a few words of their native language. That’s just good business and if these are the pack leaders we want to help cure Oklahoma’s mange, then they’re going to have to step up and learn how to be good business wolves.”

“Tu…” Grady said, shaking his head.

“You have to think of them like soldiers,” she said, desperately trying to convince him. “You’re the general and I’m your drill sergeant. I wasn’t emasculating you. I’m training them. You’re still in charge, but I’m—”

He hauled her into the truck, and then his mouth was moving over hers with such bruising force that for a moment, she thought he’d gone wolf again. But no, he didn’t smell any different. And his wolf, she remembered, was all animal. It didn’t kiss, just licked and fucked.

Grady’s hands urgently moved over her body, pulling and pushing on her until she was straddled across his lap. Her back against the steering wheel, her core against the zipper of his jeans. Then there came the sound of fabric ripping, and suddenly her panties were gone. Nothing to stop him from shoving up the skirt of her yellow wrap dress, and.... he pushed into her like a battering ram. Then he cuffed his large hand around her neck and his other arm came around her waist like a steel band. They were in the seat so tight together, she couldn’t move as he started fucking her, forcing her body up and down on his cock.

Yes, this was Grady, but there was none of his usual sweetness in this act, none of the leisurely sessions in hotel beds they’d been enjoying all week. No, this was hard, fast, and accompanied by a feeling of desolation that spilled out of him and into her, proving his human was still there.

She could have pulled him back from the brink, told him to stop this right now.

But she didn’t.

Instead she fucked him back, meeting him stroke for stroke, letting his desolation invade her heart and claiming it as her own. And she wasn’t surprised when they came at the same time, a heavy dark eruption mushrooming through them both before they collapsed into each other like two prizefighters who had gone the distance, without anyone being declared the winner.

They held on to each other, but it wasn’t a hug. At least not for Tu. It was more like a holding position while she waited to see what he’d do next.

She didn’t have to wait long before his voice finally sounded in her head. Angry and clipped.

“There. The sex is off the table. Now we can talk. Really talk.” His words were triumphant, but his tone was grim. Then he said, “I wasn’t mad because of what you did. I’m mad because of why you did it.”

21

“Y
ou’re mad because I want to help you?”

“You’re not listening to me, Tu. I’m mad because of why you want to help me. I thought you were getting better, that doing all this business for Oklahoma was actually helping you heal—that’s why I went along with it. But you’re so good at selling, I didn’t figure out what you were really doing until today.”

Now Tu started getting angry, sensing he was getting close to the truth. Too close. “Okay, I’m done with this conversation. Sit out here and sulk if you want to. I’m going to bed.”

She made a move to get up, but his arm around her waist didn’t budge. And when she looked to him for an explanation, he stared back at her with infinite sadness in his eyes.

“I thought we could wait to do this. I wanted you to get comfortable with me first. I thought we were making progress.”

Tu put everything she had into convincing him of the veracity of her next words.

“I am comfortable with you, Grady. I just fucked you in the front seat of your truck, I’m so comfortable with you. And if you don’t think all the work I’ve put into turning this kingdom around is progress, I don’t know what to tell you. Because any other mange king would be through the roof.”

Tikaani’s Rule of Business: Don’t lose. If you feel yourself losing, change the subject. Make it about something else. Deflect. Distract. Do whatever you have to do to win.

She waited for Grady to defend himself, to insist he was grateful for everything she’d done.

But just like he didn’t try to stop her from hitting him in that meadow the year before, he didn’t say anything in his own defense now. He just stared at her. So long and so tough, it felt like his eyes were burrowing into her soul.