Wolver's Rescue (38 page)

“
This is
important.”

And because she knew he really, really meant
it, and because he’d use the huffy-puffy thing if she didn’t, she
clamped her lips together and listened.

Bull nodded, satisfied. “I’m taking you
home...”

“
But you just said...” she
interrupted and felt a trickle of power wash over her. “Bully,” she
muttered before clamping her lips shut again.

“
To my home. It’s fairly
isolated and there’s plenty of room to run.”

He wanted to take her home! Her sudden
excitement was just as suddenly dampened. She wouldn’t leave the
others to fend for themselves. She couldn’t.

“
Home. Mate.
Home
.” Her wolf spun in circles, then
snarled when she spoke.

“
But...”

“
I swear to God, spitfire,
I’m going to buy you a gag,” Bull muttered, but he didn’t look
angry.

Her wolf started prancing again, and feeling
outnumbered, Tommie subsided.

“
There’s room for all of
you. It’s temporary,” he warned. “After what they did last night, I
can’t leave them behind. Besides, they’ll probably get caught doing
something stupid, like stealing those SUVs because, what the hell,
they were already stolen, and the whole damn thing will start all
over again.”

Now Tommie’s feet were dancing too. She was
bouncing from one foot to the other. Her hands were clenching and
unclenching in her need to speak.

Bull started to laugh. “For God’s sake,
spitfire, go ahead and let it out.”

“
Bull!”

She leapt at him, laughing at his startled
shout when she threw her arms around his neck and wrapped her legs
around his waist. He laughed harder when she smothered his face in
kisses.

“
I love you. I love you. I
love you, and now I know why. You’re the most wonderful wolver on
earth.” She kissed him again. “I love you.”

Tommie pulled away in sudden concern. Bull
had stopped laughing.

“
I love you, too,” he said
quietly.

And everything she’d felt the night before
came back tenfold.

~*~

Tommie got out of the truck and just stared.
She looked up at him with her mouth slightly open and then back at
the open land and the mountains beyond.

“
Finally,” Bull laughed, “I
found something that leaves you speechless.” It didn’t, she just
needed a moment to catch her breath.

“
It’s beautiful,” she
breathed. “I don’t think I’d ever get tired of looking at that.
Wouldn’t you love to own all of it, so you could keep it just the
way is?”

“
I do own it, or five
thousand acres of it, give or take.” He laughed when she looked up
at him again. “I’m not kidding. I told you I had room for them to
run.”

“
Oh, Bull, they’re going to
think they’ve died and gone to heaven. I know I do.”

By the looks on their faces, Tommie’s
prediction wasn’t far off. Like Tommie, their heads swiveled
between the view and him. And the looks on their faces when they
looked at him made him feel like a king. It was a moment before he
realized that a few of them were crying. Samuel was one of
them.

“
This is for us? You mean
it. You aren’t pulling our legs? This is for us?”

Bull meant to remind him that it was
temporary, but what came out was, “For you. This is your home if
you want it.”

Then before he could correct it, Tommie was
in his arms again, kissing him again, and telling him she loved
him. Again. And like the view, he thought he’d never get tired of
it.

“
This is where I grew up,
Tommie, just a few miles down the road. This is the land I ran as a
cub. This is the land I ran as a wolf. After my pack was gone,
there were no wolvers here. I guess this place was my way of
proving that one of us survived.”

“
Survived and thrived. Just
look around you, Bull. What once was lost, is now found,” she
paraphrased the famous hymn. “I think your pack would be
pleased.”

Bull smiled at her and looked around at his
ragtag mob of wolvers. After all the years of trying to right the
wrong that had been done to his pack, he finally felt like he’d
succeeded.

Everyone stood around ooh-ing and ah-ing and
smiling until one of the pups said he had to pee. The comment
seemed to bring them all back to reality and there was a burst of
chatter and plans with Tommie at its center.

They toured the house, all of them following
behind him like he was a museum guide.

“
I didn’t choose the
design,” he told them. “What the realtor called the bunkhouse was
already there when I bought the place. The house was only under
roof. I lived in the bunk house until I got the place livable and
the rest I finished off over time.”

“
How much time?” Tommie
asked.

“
Eighteen years. Every time
I came up here I finished off a little more and I came up here
every chance I got.” He shrugged. “There’s a lot of down time
between jobs, and I didn’t have much else to do. Do you like it?”
he asked because that suddenly seemed important.

“
The roughhewn beams, the
hardwood floors, the tile, and oh, my God, the windows, those huge
windows, Bull, they’re beautiful. It’s all beautiful. It’s
perfect.”

With Tommie in it, Bull thought it was
perfect, too. He looked around at the assembled group and down at
her. “I got them here, the rest is yours. You sort out where to put
them all, but,” he warned her with a finger to her nose, “the
Master bedroom is ours. No rugrats on pallets in the corner. No
Sarah and Shorty need the room. Understood?”

She gave him a salute. “Yes, sir. Big bed is
ours. No pups under foot. Anything else?” She was bouncing with
excitement.

“
Yeah, check out the
bunkhouse. It’s more like four little apartments, two rooms, bath,
and a tiny kitchen in the corner. The guy who owned this place
before me was some rich dude from California. I think bunkhouse was
somebody’s cutesy name for guest suites. I think it was his wife’s
idea and he dumped it to pay for her divorce settlement. Her loss,
our gain. I’ll be in the office. I need to make a few phone
calls.”

The first was to his Alpha, who still wasn’t
answering the phone. Bull left a message saying the job was done,
because as far as he was concerned, it was. When Eugene mailed him
the check, he’d mail it right back. He told his Alpha he was
available for another job, but since this one was a tough one, he
wouldn’t mind a few weeks off. It wasn’t a lie.

The second was to his human partner who took
care of the land and Bull’s small herd of cattle when Bull wasn’t
there in exchange for grazing his own cattle and a share of the
profits.

He was amazed at how quickly everyone settled
in. They were full up and crowded, but no one seemed to mind.

“
We’ve lived most of our
lives in tents, campers, and school buses,” Cora told him. “Having
two whole rooms to myself is the lap of luxury. I don’t even mind
not having a TV.”

Tommie pulled out the list she carried in her
pocket and added TV.

A week later, after making love in their king
sized bed, Tommie curled against him and drew circles on his
chest.

“
I have to go back, Bull.
The list of things we need is growing longer by the minute. I have
money in the bank, not a lot, but some. It’s what my parents left
me. There’s a house full of furniture that we desperately need, a
car in the garage, and the place needs painting before it’s
sold.”

“
If you’re going to do all
that, then I guess we ought to make it official.”

~*~

“
Make what
official?”

“
Us. I want you for my mate,
Thomas Mortimer Bane.”

“
Like married?” she squealed
and climbed over him to straddle his waist. She leaned down to kiss
him. “Okay. When?”

He oomphed when she bounced and held her hips
still. “Yes, mated. But there are things we need to talk about, so
I want you to listen before you agree. I won’t be here all the
time, spitfire. I’d come as often as I could. Sometimes there’s
months between jobs, but when there’s a job, I’ll have to go. It’ll
be hard being so far apart. Painful, I mean, truly painful.”

“
I’ve dealt with painful for
half of my life.” She could endure anything just as long as he was
hers. “At least with this, I’d know the reason. I’m stronger than I
look,” she repeated what he always said of her. “And I’d have Cora
and Molly to look after me.”

Molly, who’d become more and more depressed
the farther they moved from the campground, was looking and feeling
better every day and Tommie suspected that Eli, impossible as it
seemed, had managed to follow them. Molly, more than any of them,
would understand the pain of separation. She and Molly could lean
on each other.

“
I can’t leave my Alpha or
my pack, Tommie. There are few enough who do what I do, but that’s
only part of it. Like you just pointed out, we need the money and
the job pays well. I won’t be getting paid for Thomas Mortimer
Bane,” he said, kissing her nose, “and that was the money I needed
to pay this place off.”

“
Oh, Bull, I’m
sorry.”

“
I’m not.” Bull laughed and
gave her a squeeze before he became serious again. “It wouldn’t
matter if the place was paid off or not. We’d still need the money
to eat and to build a decent sized herd. We need buildings and
clothes and papers so they can find work. None of those things are
going to be cheap and even when we’re running at full capacity, the
cash from the herd won’t cover it all.”

“
I can go back to work. I
have a degree. I can...”

“
Ride herd on this bunch
while I’m gone,” he finished though it wasn’t what she was going to
say. “You’ll be needed here twenty-four/seven. I love them, but
it’ll be a while before I’ll fully trust them, except when it comes
to you and your safety. That’s something I won’t worry about when
I’m away. Someday, when we’re financially stable, I’ll retire and
spend every moment with you. I’ll make it up to you, spitfire, but
right now that’s the only way I can think of to make this thing
work.”

He was going to say more, but Tommie had
heard enough. She put her fingers to his lips. “Shut up, Bull. I
get it. My wolf gets it, and if I don’t agree to it, she’s going to
chew me up from the inside out. So, my answer is yes. I think we
should make it official, too.”

He kissed her then, and it was the best kiss
yet, filled as it was with the promise of a future.

“
Are you happy now?” Tommie
asked her wolf, though not out loud.

“
Happy.
Mate.
” The she-wolf settled in a contented
heap, then just as quickly jumped to her feet. “
Pups! Pups!
”

“
One thing at a time, wolf,
one thing at a time.”

Tommie could feel Bull’s big brown wolf
chortling along with hers.

Daniel entered the kitchen, breathless from
running. “We’ve got company.”

“
Damn it to hell. What now?”
Bull turned to Samuel. “The place is already in an uproar. If I’d
known there was going to be such a production over this mating, I
might have thought twice before I asked her.”

“
It’s been my experience,
son, that when women start fussing and decorating and getting all
primped and curled, it’s best just to stand back and let them have
at it.”

“
Whoever it is has the
coolest truck I’ve ever seen.” Cory had followed on Daniel’s
heels.

“
Don’t even think about
stealing it.”

The cub grinned. “You’re making this clean
and honest shit pretty boring.”

“
Good,” Cora called from the
other room where she was adding the final touches to the table
decorations. “Boring is what we’re looking for. And don’t let me
hear you say shit again.”

Cory leaned in to confide. “She wouldn’t hear
it if she wasn’t listening in on every conversation. I thought old
people lost their hearing.”

“
Watch who you’re calling
old,” Cora threatened. “Samuel, get in here and help me carry these
out.”

“
Stretch,” Helens voice
boomed from the vicinity of the kitchen, “These table cloths are
going to blow right off if we don’t find something to hold them
down. Don’t know why we can’t eat in the house now that we’ve
finally got one,” she grumbled.

Bull left them to it and went out to meet
their visitor. He had to admit, the cub had good taste. The big
dually coming up the long drive looked to be tricked out with every
add-on available. The truck made it less of a surprise when Bull
saw who was driving. Eugene Begley liked shiny toys.

“
Where the fuck have you
been,” Bull greeted his Alpha as he stepped down from the big
truck. “I must have called you a hundred times. Don’t you listen to
messages?”

“
Well howdy-do to you, too,”
Begley answered. “Heard you had some good fishing up here and I
thought I’d stop by. I got your calls all right, but each one had
you hollerin’ about some new problem, so I figured you took care of
the old. No sense me callin’ about what’s already been said and
done.” He didn’t look at Bull, but past him. “Pretty view. Let’s
take a walk. You can show me around. You three there can take a
look at my truck,” he called to the cubs hiding on the other side
of the porch. “You take turns drivin’ up that there lane, but you
put a scratch on her and I’ll have your hides a-hangin’ on my
wall.”