“I’d be jealous if I had the slightest notion you swung that way, Quetzalli” Galena called across the garden beds, and it took me a minute to realize she was talking to the swooping kisser.
“I’m Galena’s partner,” the second woman explained to me with a smirk, breaking the kiss but continuing to tease me by trailing a finger over Wolfie’s chest. The alpha leaned into the woman’s touch, and to my chagrin my wolf growled more loudly, prompting Wolfie and Quetzalli both to laugh at my reaction.
Again, it was Galena who pointed out that I was being played. Walking around the garden bed to join us at last, she slapped the alpha lightly on the chest, right where her partner’s fingers had been just moments before. “Play nice, Wolfie,” she admonished, her voice light and with no hint of the jealousy my wolf was feeling. She didn’t bother to chastise her partner, merely taking the other woman’s hand and dimpling as she offered up her own mouth to be kissed.
“Just seeing if Terra likes me,” the alpha rumbled in reply, but he lowered his head in submission to the tiny werewolf. Despite my wolf’s reaction to Quetzalli’s game, I couldn’t help smiling to see such a massive alpha letting the minuscule woman boss him around, and my mood mellowed further at the real show of affection between Quetzalli and Galena.
“You can walk her through our suite if she wants to see what it’s like,” Galena continued, letting her partner go with a smile and heading back around the raised bed so she could heft a bundle of weeds into a wheelbarrow. Just glancing around, I could tell the greenhouse was a serious effort of space-saving food production, and this duo seemed to be the wolves in charge. So far, I liked what I saw … especially once it became clear that these bronzed beauties weren’t really interested in the alpha.
“Do you?” Wolfie asked, raising that sexy eyebrow at me, and it took a second for me to realize he was asking if I wanted to see their suite.
“If you’re sure they won’t mind?” I answered, and Wolfie led the way across cobblestones and through sliding glass doors into the couple’s quarters.
It was hard to tell that the suite was half of a single-wide trailer since the space had been completely gutted and rebuilt, one room turned into a bedroom and the other into a private studio, sitting room, and seed-starting zone. Wolfie waved a hand at a row of sticks poking out of pots by the windows. “If the green thumbs were here, they would tell you those are grape cuttings.” He went on to explain that the seedlings were kale, tatsoi, and tokyo bekana, ready to go into outside beds, and I was surprised that an alpha cared enough to learn the specifics of his wolves’ trades. We walked back through the atrium and into the suite opposite, which was full of another surprise—banks of computer equipment.
“What’s all this?” I asked, startled. Werewolves tended to stick to the past—I knew a lot of adult werewolves who never learned to drive, preferring horses and buggies. Similarly, cell phones, computers, and other modern gadgets were generally ignored, but Wolfie’s pack seemed to be high-tech, even by non-werewolf standards.
“This,” Wolfie said, gesturing at the rows of monitors, “is how we pay the bills. We provide computer security for big companies. Chase and I do a lot of the heavy lifting, but even the yahoos you saw changing in front of Keith put in a few hours a week on the simple stuff.”
I was starting to relax, since this date looked like more of a pack tour than a social outing, but Wolfie liked to keep me on my toes. “And this,” he added, “is where I give you the kiss your wolf keeps asking for.” He tilted my head up to meet his lips, and if I’d been a werecat instead of a werewolf, I would have purred.
***
“Are you ready for your next lesson?” the alpha whispered in my ear as he pulled back out of our kiss. I had no clue what kind of lesson Wolfie was talking about, but I was wobbly enough from the lip lock that I just nodded and allowed him to pull me out the door on the opposite side of the computer lab and into the outdoors.
“It’s your choice whether you’d feel more comfortable working on your shift outside or inside,” the alpha said, bursting my blissful bubble. “My room is over here,” he added, pointing away from the common area to a door on the far corner of the compound. “Or we can head back up onto the mountain if you want even more privacy.”
I tensed up immediately. This wasn’t the kind of lesson I was interested in at the moment, and my wolf agreed. The two of us had finally come to the conclusion that Wolfie was a good guy, and we were interested in seeing more of his bare skin, not in working on changing forms. I hadn’t allowed myself to have sex with anything that didn’t plug into the wall since leaving Haven, and now that Wolfie had woken up my sexual side with a kiss, I was having trouble putting it back to sleep.