“It won’t be the last,” he said carefully. “Hopefully, no one thinks too much about it if they come visit you or me. This is your territory, and I’m an Alpha wolf. We need to be able to talk to each other, and hopefully, that keeps them from getting curious.”
“They’ll smell what we can smell right now, Heath. There’s no hiding we turn each other on. Well…you can hide it, I can’t.” I straightened up and yawned. His ability to mask his scent was remarkable. “And holy shit, it’s early in the morning. How long have you been out running?”
“I woke up at five and needed to clear my head. Had some…” He chuckled. “You know…dreams.”
That made my face warm. Heath was the type of man who was honest about this sort of thing. Once he’d freely revealed his attraction to me, there was no avoiding it, and he refused to let me avoid it, not that I had been trying that hard.
“Then you caught my scent,” I said, seeing how easy it would have been for the wolf’s instincts to override the man. It helped me understand the passion behind the kiss, too. Plus, it was easier to talk about the instinctual behavior than it was to talk about what his subconscious was showing him at night.
“Yeah. It wasn’t just that, but you probably don’t want the recent werewolf news,” he said, pulling out his phone to check something. For a moment, I saw how bothered he was by something before it was forgotten, and his phone was put away again.
“I wouldn’t mind hearing about it,” I said softly. He seemed surprised. Normally, I didn’t want to hear anything, but I just wanted to hear him talk. I wanted to know what would bother him. Something had to be if he was going on exhaustingly long runs, even for a werewolf.
“There’s some tension with an old pack in Russia. Since that pack doesn’t really talk to anyone, we can only watch the news and try to put it together. Recently, a young female was taken to Mygi Hospital with injuries that concerned a lot of us. She won’t talk to anyone, though. Nothing we can do unless she speaks out.”
“How old?” I asked softly.
“The girl or the pack?” Something dark flashed in Heath’s eyes.
“Both.”
“Our best guess? She's in her early twenties. No idea how long she’s been a werewolf. As for the pack? It’s had the same Alpha for a thousand years, and most of his inner circle are just as old. I don’t know his exact age. Somewhere around fifteen hundred, but I could be wrong.”
My eyes went wide, then refocused on the coffee. At my expression, Heath must have realized that was all I needed or wanted to know.
We were quiet until the coffee finished, and I led us back onto my patio, trying to get back into the clear air. We sat together and looked over my woods.
“Work on Kick Shot is coming along nicely,” he said, obviously trying to have a normal conversation after a very not-normal start to our day. “Remember, there’s a meeting on Friday to finalize your design ideas. You’ll be back up and running by the end of July if everything stays on schedule.”
“That’s wonderful. I miss it, and I’m paying two employees who don’t work.”
“Dirk and Oliver…” Heath let his head fall back. “Oliver keeps sending in new requests, and I’ve told him he needs to clear them with you.”
“He’s sending them to you because I keep telling him no,” I whispered. Dirk and Oliver were a recent addition to my life and to the lives of those in my territory. Dirk was the adopted human son of my werecat brother, Nikolaus, Niko for short. Dirk was an enigma wrapped in a cloak of anger and refusal to meet the expectations of his father, not that Niko had many for him—get an education, a good job, and stay out of trouble. Dirk had turned down being Changed into a werecat, which felt right. He was in his mid-twenties and didn’t feel like someone who should or could be a werecat, happily living a solitary lifestyle. Instead, he rebelled against his adoptive father in every way—he refused to go to college, became a bartender, and got into a fight that drove Niko to send him out of his territory to restart and get his head together.
So, now Dirk was the bartender for Kick Shot, which was funny because not long after he arrived, the bar burned down. Now he was just getting a paycheck. I had a sneaking suspicion he was moonlighting in a bar outside my territory without my permission. I had no intention of calling him out on it, though.
“Oliver…he’s a sneaky one.” I shook my head a little at the ingenuity of my manager, the young man from London. He was also optimistic, bright, youthful, intelligent, and had the self-esteem of a small child who was told he was stupid all the time. He’d shown up the same day as Dirk, all smiles and not a drop of fear or distrust in him. He had been, and still was, a people pleaser to the nth degree. He would do anything to prove his worth, and sometimes, that grated on the people around him. He constantly went behind my back to Heath to try to get upgrades to Kick Shot’s new building, so he could expand my business and prove his worth as a successful restaurant and bar manager. It all boiled down to what he most craved in life, something I gleaned from discussions with Zuri and Davor—his father’s approval.
“Carey tries the same thing, you know,” Heath finally said, giving me a chagrined smile.
“Oh, I know. I normally let her do something since I know it wasn’t what you wanted.” I grinned. “It’s always harmless.”
“Undermining my authority,” he mumbled, but I saw a hint of a smile. “She loves you.”
“I love her. That’s why she gets everything she wants out of me.” I was half-joking. Carey could ask for the moon, and I would buy her a moon rock. I wasn’t too gullible.
“So, that’s the secret,” he said with a pondering nature, giving me a side-eye glance. “I just need to steal your heart, and suddenly, I’ll get everything I want.”
“Heath…”
“Don’t worry, it’ll always be harmless.”
My chair wasn’t far enough away from him, and I certainly didn’t react in time. His lips found mine, the slow kiss tasting like bad coffee and worse decisions, need, flirtation, and forgotten boundaries.
It tasted wonderful. He always did.
It was interrupted by his phone going off, and the groan he gave was comical.
“Never get a break,” he muttered as he pulled it out. “This son of mine never gives me a real moment to do anything by myself anymore.” It went to his ear, and I heard the growl on the other end. “Yes, Landon?”
“You know you have a meeting in thirty minutes, right? You’ve been out running for nearly two-and-a-half hours. They’re going to be here soon, and you know they won’t like it if it’s only Carey and me. Are you trying to get us in trouble?”
I watched Heath pale, not a sight I believed I had ever seen before.
“I’ll be right home. I’m sorry. If they show up, tell them I had a meeting conflict, and it won’t happen again.” Heath hung up on his son and jumped up, shoving his cell phone back into his pocket. “Sorry, Jacky. I need to go—”
“What’s wrong? What’s this meeting?” I straightened but didn’t stand. “Are other supernaturals coming into my territory? I’ll need to know—”
“No, they’re humans,” he said softly, looking away. “This is just about something…”
“About what?” I frowned, watching my werewolf pull off his shirt. If he had to get back in less than thirty minutes, he was going to have to run—not on two feet but four.
“It’s…” He sighed, sagging for a moment. “It’s nothing, Jacky. Don’t worry too much about it. Your secret is safe, and there are no supernaturals coming into your territory.”
He finished throwing the rest of his clothes into my yard and Changed. His wolf form looked huge when I was human, downright massive. He cast me a glance and picked up his shorts, leaving the rest.
“I’ll run everything through the wash and bring them over later,” I said, waving. I knew how much of a pain it was to carry so much clothing. He was only taking the shorts because his cell phone and wallet were in them. It looked somewhat comical, seeing the shorts dangle from his mouth.
He nodded his big head and took off into the trees. Once he was gone, I sighed heavily.
“What a way for the morning to go,” I mumbled, going out to get his sweaty clothes. As I picked them up, I got curious. What meeting with humans could possibly give Heath a cold sweat?
I threw the clothes into my washing machine, pondering it. I knew better than to go to the house if I got curious. For all I knew, this was werewolf business, and the humans would know of me. The last thing I needed was to draw attention to myself.
It was just another way Heath and I were so different. He’d come to my small corner of the world, but it wasn’t his entire world like it was mine. I didn’t need to deal with humans knowing who or what I was. I didn’t need to deal with higher powers outside of Hasan, my werecat father. Heath was a recognized face of the werewolves who once dealt with human governments about werewolf rights and businesses. He was more than a little famous, or used to be.
Once I sat down in the kitchen, I realized there was no getting back to sleep, but I had options.
Chapter Two
Trying to put Heath out of my mind was difficult. I hadn’t heard from him as I pulled into the driveway of the small house I recently purchased only fifteen minutes from Kick Shot and my primary residence. It was already nine, and I still had no idea what sort of meeting could have driven the werewolf Alpha who let nothing bother him to go pale and run off my property like a fire was blazing at his house, not even giving me a real explanation as to what it was.
I mean, there’re a few options why he might have gotten all freaked out, but none of them really fit. What would Heath have to be scared of?
Before I had the chance to get out of my little hatchback, Oliver was coming outside.