“How long is this going to take? I can wait out here.”
“No, you’re coming inside with me. You’re also going to hold my hand, and not because we’re dating, but because I don’t want you out of my sight for a minute. I trust Ivan; he’s been around a long time. But I don’t know his pack and in your condition…”
“Someone please explain what my condition is, because I feel perfectly normal. I thought only alphas could smell me?”
“We can pick up the scent when you first change over, but going into heat is something entirely different. It’s like a pheromone. It draws the males to you before it starts and once it does, the weak ones aren’t able to control themselves.”
“Maybe it’s my perfume.”
He clicked open his door. “Come on, smartass.”
Austin held my right hand and we walked up the steps to a winding porch. A small set of wind chimes tinkled in the breeze as we clomped across the hollow wood floor, announcing our arrival before any doorbell was ever rung. The door swung open, replaced by two men. One had a handlebar mustache and looked like he was short a Harley while the other was missing a surfboard and needed another bottle of bleach to touch up his roots.
“Ivan here?”
“Who’s asking?” Harley demanded, folding his hairy arms.
“Tell him Austin Cole is here. He’s expecting me.”
“Austin Cole,” a voice boomed. “Been a few years.”
Harley and the surfer parted like two lovers who were just not that into each other anymore.
Ivan’s presence made me grab Austin’s arm and curl up against him. The man had salt-and-pepper hair with about two inches of beard, but he sure as hell didn’t look like Santa Claus. More like the guy who slips into your house in the middle of the night, strings you up by your ankles, and cuts off your ears while telling a story about his time in a Mexican jail.
Austin stood his ground and made no move to coddle me in any way.
“You’ve sprouted up, Cole. Not quite the young pup I remember,” Ivan said in a gravelly, southern drawl. Not the good kind of southern drawl, but the kind you hear whenever you’re skating through those tiny towns and pull over into a truck stop to use the bathroom as fast as humanly possible.
“I’ve formed my own pack, Ivan. The Weston pack.”
“You don’t say?” Ivan put his hands on his waist and tapped his snakeskin boots against the floor. “Boys, leave us alone. Y’all come inside before the skeeters get you. Damn bloodsucking insects have been a nuisance around here since the last hard rain.”
The two men obediently disappeared. Ivan led us to a quiet sitting room full of musty old books and bizarre artifacts such as animal skulls and a tarantula in a glass orb. There were only two chairs and after Ivan sat in the red one, he began packing a pipe with a pinch of tobacco.
Austin hesitated. He still had hold of my hand and our palms were sweating.
Ivan struck a match and waited a moment before he lit up his pipe. After a few puffs that clouded his face, he extinguished the match and grinned slowly as he looked me up and down.
“Someone’s about to make you feel real good, Cole,” he said with a knowing chuckle. “Ever had one in heat? Ain’t nothing like it. Nothing in the world.” He took a few short puffs from the pipe and blew out the smoke, shifting his hips. “Have a seat.”
It wasn’t a suggestion.
Austin sat down in the chair and I jerked my hand free, wiping my sweaty palm on my shirt. He burned me with his glacier eyes, so I leaned on the back of his chair and that seemed to satisfy him.
“What brings you out here?” Ivan asked.
Austin sat forward with his elbows on his thighs. “You’ve got connections, Ivan, and I’ve got a situation. We have a woman missing—kidnapped—and I know you got men who can find her.”
Ivan listened to the details, including the fact my mother was human, which rubbed him the wrong way. Then Austin said he would be indebted to him and Ivan’s cloudy eyes lit up with interest.
He took another small puff from his pipe and set it down in a holder. “As it so happens, you can even out that debt today. I got a female I need you to take off my hands, and I’ve been knowing your family long enough that I trust she’ll be in good care with you. If she chooses to go with another pack, then you let her, but I want you to look out for her as one of your own.”
Austin rubbed his jaw and I listened to the bristly sound of his whiskers. “Who is she?”
“My daughter.”
I gasped. Just a little bit. Ivan looked up at me and I dropped my eyes to the floor.
“She’s going through the change soon and I need fresh blood in the pack. I can’t have my own flesh and blood mating with any of these sons of bitches. You know pack rules—can’t keep our girls, and she hasn’t met anyone to take her off my hands.”