Chapter 21
Jake smelled the scent of the damn wolves before he could locate them in the woods. Peter and three other members of his pack were looking for the men who had been shooting at them. Sam had been hit, damn it.
He was sitting in the grass, holding someone’s bunched-up shirt against the leg wound. “Go,” Sam said, the bearded, burly man’s expression one of barely suppressed rage. “Find them. Get rid of them.”
Jake knew that Silver Town’s bartender, a gruff man who looked like he lived as a mountain man in the wilderness most of the time, meant for him to go after the two wolves. The others were strictly human. Probably more of Mario’s henchmen. Jake’s men would be targeting them while in their human forms. He would bet Mario was one of the wolves.
Jake was worried about Sam’s injury, though. The bullet hadn’t been silver or he could have smelled its particular metallic scent. But even so, if the bullet hit a major artery, Sam could bleed out and die before they could get him help.
“Darien’s sending Doc,” Sam growled. “Peter already called him.” Sam detested being injured like this while everyone else got to hunt down the bastards. “Hell, Jake, I mean it. I’m going to live. Quit giving me them puppy-dog eyes.”
Jake shook his head and tore off after the scent of the two intruding wolves.
Peter was the sheriff, and Heston was a new deputy. The rest of the men, even Sam, were deputized whenever they needed to go on a manhunt or wolf hunt. So there wasn’t any need to call in anyone else to apprehend the human bastards. And if they died in the shoot-out, they died. Simple as that. Lawmen had a right to protect themselves. In Silver Town, that’s just what they did.
As for the wolves…
Jake was hot on their trail. Or at least one of them.
He finally discovered the wolf backed up against a pine tree and growling at him. Jake didn’t know if it was Mario or someone else, but he didn’t care. The wolf represented trouble for Alicia and for their kind. If he was ever arrested, and since he was either Mario or one of his men and eventually would be, he couldn’t be allowed to live. Still, Jake couldn’t, with a human conscience, just outright kill without the wolf first attacking.
They’d figure out something else to do with him, but what, Jake wasn’t sure. It wasn’t the first time he’d been glad Darien and Lelandi were the pack leaders. Tom and Jake and others of the pack advised them, but ultimately, decisions of this nature were left up to Darien and Lelandi.
The gray wolf continued to snarl and growl at Jake, his nose wrinkled in a hideous display of ferocity, his canines fully exposed, the fur on his back standing on end.
Another couple of shots were fired off some distance in the woods. Jake wasn’t sure if that prompted the wolf to attack, or if Jake’s failure to look ferocious made the wolf believe Jake was not someone to fear. But the attack came and Jake tore into him, showing the wolf he wasn’t one to mess with as his teeth tore at the wolf’s neck. The villain shook him loose and skittered away with a yelp.
Then he uttered a low growl right before he dove for Jake for a second time. He wasn’t a skilled wolf at attacking, which meant he probably hadn’t used his wolf instincts in wolf-to-wolf combat much, if ever. Although some instincts would come into play in a fight to the death.
But the guy was much heavier than Jake, and the damned beast actually knocked him off his feet with the second charge. Adrenaline coursing through his blood, Jake scrambled to get to his feet, knowing he could have been dead meat if the wolf had known how to attack him just right. Not wanting the wolf to learn from his mistakes or to put Jake in too vulnerable a position again, he attacked the bigger wolf this time. But it was like slamming into a damned brick wall. Jake dodged before the wolf could take a bite. The man reminded Jake of a bully with more brute strength than brains.
The wolf looked pleased, like he was smiling at Jake, and that pissed Jake off. Sure, the guy was a bigger wolf, but he wasn’t going to win this battle. Not with Alicia’s life at stake.
And with his attack on Jake, the deal was off. The pack leaders wouldn’t decide this guy’s fate. He was Jake’s for the taking.
Jake lunged at the wolf, going for his throat again. The wolf’s and Jake’s teeth clashed in a wicked snapping of canines. Enamel hit enamel with resounding whacks, snarls ricocheting off the trees like a wolves’ warning to others to stay away. Then like two fighters in the ring, neither of them making any headway, they both fell away.
Two wolves were out here, Jake reminded himself. Two wolves and he had to get the other also. He had to end this now. Easier said than done as he again attacked and the wolf matched Jake’s skill with more brute force.
Jake whipped around in a circle, and before the wolf realized he was attacking again, Jake grabbed him by the throat. The wolf tried to yank away and nearly succeeded. But Jake held on, tightened his grip, and crushed him.
He didn’t wait to see what happened next. It didn’t matter whether Mario or the other man lay dead on the ground and would return to his human form. One was still on the loose as a wolf, as far as Jake knew. And his time to locate the bastard was growing short.
Jake tore off, trying to track the footpad scent of the other wolf who wasn’t part of their pack. That’s when he realized the wolf had gone straight to the damned front door! The shooters were the diversionary force. Damn it!
Alicia was alone and unprotected.
***
Not having time to dress any further, except for putting on the red panties and bra, Alicia dropped her jeans and looked around the bedroom for her purse, not remembering where she’d left it while everyone was still moving furniture. Kitchen? Living room? That’s where her pepper spray and stun gun were tucked away.
Jake’s gun! But where was it now? After he’d taken it into her apartment to use as protection, she didn’t remember him doing anything with it. Had he returned it to the glove compartment?
With the sudden rush of footfalls toward the bedroom, it was too late to go for the gun. She raced to the window and had only managed to unlock it when someone barged into the bedroom.
She whipped around and stared aghast at Mario Constantino. He was naked, tall, and big, but mostly naked. She was so startled at the sight of him in the raw that she didn’t react fast enough. He took two quick strides into the room and struck her in the temple with his meaty fist. A stab of pain shot through her temple before blackness cloaked her and she crumpled to the floor.
***
Jake whipped around to the back of the house and slipped through the wolf door, then raced down the hall to the bedroom where he heard someone rummaging around.
When he peered into the room, he saw a naked-assed Mario Constantino dumping all of Alicia’s things from the boxes onto the floor. Alicia was dead to the world, lying on the bed.
Jake growled low and threatening. Mario swung around, and Jake swore the bastard was about to have a heart attack. He quickly looked back at Alicia.
Yeah, you’ll pay, bastard.
Mario’s mouth dropped open as his attention returned to Jake. “Hell, you’re a wolf? The artist?”
So Mario had thought Alicia had turned into the wolf. That was the reason for him looking back at her on the bed.
Jake growled even lower, pushing Mario to shape-shift. But the bastard wouldn’t. Maybe he couldn’t. Damn him. Jake couldn’t let him live.
Jake advanced, still growling, his hackles raised and his posture as menacing as he’d ever been. Angry didn’t begin to describe how he felt about Alicia and the way this bastard had hurt her. Or what Mario planned to do with her in the future, if Jake let him live.
Mario was scowling and livid, probably because he’d been caught, but he still didn’t shift.
Jake drew closer, growling, threatening.
Mario grabbed one of the half-empty boxes and threw it at Jake. He dodged it and turned his focus back on Mario as he shape-shifted into the wolf. Like the other wolf, he was bigger than Jake, but this time Jake wasn’t going to give him time to make the first move.
He went for the wolf’s throat and sent him crashing into the closet door, but Mario somehow managed to scramble over one of the cardboard boxes and slip away. Relentlessly, Jake went after him again. Jake bit at him, got a mouthful of fur, and broke the skin on Mario’s shoulder. Mario yelped and skittered away. For being a tough bastard as a Mob leader, he was a cowardly wolf.
He probably felt much more capable with a gun in his hand. Or having others doing his dirty work for him.
Jake leaped over the cardboard box in his way, and Mario tried to reach the door.
But there stood Alicia in her red push-up bra and silky red thong, her hand against her temple, unsteady on her feet, her face pale, her expression pained. Mario stopped for an instant. With her free hand, she shut the door, sealing his fate.
Worried Mario would hurt Alicia, Jake tackled him from behind. Mario whipped around with Jake clinging to his back, holding on with both paws, trying to get a better grip on his neck.
The voices of men hollering outside caught Jake’s attention, but he remained focused on Mario and bringing him down. He heard the box springs squeak and figured Alicia had collapsed on the bed before she passed out again.
Mario was still trying to wriggle free, and Jake kept losing his grip on the massive wolf’s neck.
“Where’s Jake?” Darien hollered outside the back of the house.
“In the house,” Sam shouted back. “He’s fighting someone as a wolf.”
Not for long.
Mario stumbled over a box and got his feet tangled in Alicia’s jeans, and Jake bit him hard in the throat. Killing him. For Alicia. For her mother. For her father.
***
The next day, Alicia’s temple was black and blue from where Mario had struck her. She was seated on the couch in Darien’s home with Jake’s arm around her. Darien, Tom, Lelandi, and Peter offered her moral support as two federal agents sat down to talk with her.
One was a pretty blond with a short bobbed haircut and a smart black suit-skirt and pretty hazel eyes. The man was dark haired and dark eyed, also wearing a black suit. Both were probably in their early thirties and both professional, yet instead of appearing as though they wanted to grill Alicia, they seemed…
She wasn’t sure. Sympathetic, maybe?
That didn’t make any sense to her because she figured they would tie her into Mario’s death and his henchman’s, too. Peter had rounded up the men who had been the diversionary force for Mario at Jake’s home and turned them over to the federal authorities because they’d been involved in killings across state lines, racketeering, money laundering, and even lucrative Medicare scams. But a couple of the men had to heal from their bullet wounds before they appeared in court, Danny being one of them.
“Miss Greiston,” the woman said, identifying herself as Agent White and the man as Agent Stone, “we want to commend you for bringing Constantino and his men down.”
Alicia looked at Jake. He smiled at her and tightened his arm around her shoulder in a warm embrace.
“Your father, Antonio Frasero, started the work.”
“He… was working for you?”
“Yes, as an informant. He was working for Constantino, but only to get the goods on him. That little black book you found in your mother’s safe-deposit box? It had all the records we needed to put the whole lot away for life.”
Again she looked at Jake.
“I gave it to Peter to give to the authorities,” Jake said. “The sheriff must have turned it over to the Feds.”
“But helping you got my father killed,” Alicia said to the woman agent.
“We gave him a deal. He was working for another crime boss when we caught up with him. We had enough on your father to give him a life sentence for his own crimes. He’d only been married to your mother for a couple of years, and you were not even two years old. They agreed he’d work for us so he’d stay out of prison.”
“But my mother was dating other men.”
“Only undercover. They were Feds whose job was to make it appear Antonio wasn’t her husband or too close to her while watching out for her. We knew Mario would go after her if he thought Antonio was selling him out.”
“Which Mario did.”
The woman took a deep breath and exhaled. “She loved your father and didn’t want to see anybody else any longer. She wanted to pretend she was Antonio’s lover when she was really his wife. We couldn’t convince them how dangerous it was. Mario must have thought she knew about Antonio’s working with us and had them both murdered. Then you came along. You wouldn’t have anything to do with Antonio, so we figured you were safe. But then when your mother was murdered, you tried to arrest Mario and…” Agent White shook her head.
“Why didn’t you protect Alicia when you must have known Mario would want her dead?” Jake asked, his voice sounding irritated.
“We couldn’t keep track of her. We put bugs on her car four times, and each time she located them and put them on other vehicles. We bugged her apartment, but she never returned home. She took off from the motel in Breckenridge and vanished. We only learned of it when you had the clerk contact the police to say she had disappeared. We assumed she had vanished on her own and figured she was safe.”
“Until?”
“She was connected to Ferdinand Massaro’s murder. We learned later that he was informing her as to Mario’s locations. He was one of our informants until something happened. All of a sudden he went rogue. We think it had something to do with Mario trying to have him killed.”
Agent White cleared her throat and said to Alicia, “In any event, we just want to say that even though your father started out on the wrong side of the law, he helped to put away several who would have continued their criminal activities by keeping all the records he did. And we have you to thank for handing over the little black book that made it all possible.”
“My mother was the innocent in all this.”
“Yes,” Agent White said sympathetically. “But she loved your father and couldn’t give up on him.”
Alicia understood some of what had gone on while she was growing up. The men who had been her mother’s boyfriends had only been Feds pretending to be something they weren’t. The ones who witnessed her weddings.
Had her father ever thought she was marrying the wrong men? Her mother hadn’t. She must have thought the guys Alicia had married were good sorts because they didn’t have anything to do with the Mob. But now Alicia understood why her father had wanted to keep his distance from her, probably to keep her safe but also to keep her from learning who he truly was—all about his checkered past. And yet, somewhere deep down, she suspected he wished he could have been the father to her that he might have been, had things been different.
She cleared her suddenly gravelly throat. “Thank you for telling me about my father and mother.”
Agent Stone stood. “Just for the record, Miss Greiston, Mario Constantino and another of his henchmen were found dead in a ravine over a hundred miles from here by a group of hikers. At least that’s what the anonymous caller told us. Wild animals had eaten most of the remains. But we had enough to positively identify them. The initial coroner’s report stated that they fell off the cliff to their deaths as they were attempting to escape prosecution. If you need anything from us,” he said, pulling a card from his suit pocket, “don’t hesitate to call.”
Alicia took the card and smelled a slight scent of wolf. She looked up at the federal agent in disbelief. He gave her a wolfish smile back. But she hadn’t smelled… The air was so still in the room, and with him being such a distance from her…
She rose and stepped closer to him to shake his hand and took a deeper breath. He was a wolf.
She looked at the woman, who gave her a conspiratorial wink. They were wolves. Both of them.
“Thank you,” Darien said, and led them out of the house as Alicia collapsed on the couch.
“It’s over,” Alicia finally said.
“For us, it’s a new beginning.” Jake took her hand in his and kissed it.
“They loved each other.” Alicia swallowed hard. “I wish… I wish they could have been here to see me get married.” Then she gave a small smile. “Actually I know they will be watching over us as we get married. They’ll always be with us.”
And with that, she tugged at Jake’s hand. “Let’s go home.” To the first real home she’d ever known, ready to start her life all over again. Her father might not have been there for her, but Jake would be here for his own children, and that’s all that mattered now. “Ready to hang some pictures?”
Jake smiled back at her. “Pictures?”
The look in his eyes said hanging pictures wasn’t at all what he had in mind.
***
That day in the forest so long ago, when Jake had wiped off Alicia’s feet with his good dress shirt before he put her tennis shoes on, had made her feel like Cinderella. And now on their wedding day—since their kind never married like this, he absolutely refused to believe he shouldn’t see her before the wedding—he was helping her into her gown because, as he told her, he wanted to know how to get her back out of it as quickly as possible once the festivities were over.
She swore he was insatiable. And she loved him for it. But now he knelt at her feet dressed in his tuxedo, looking like the most handsome prince in the world while he slipped one pearl-white shoe onto her foot and then did the same with the other. When he was done, he slid his hands under her gown, up her calves and higher to her thighs, and looked up at her.
“This will be the longest day of my life,” he said.
She smiled at him. “We’ll sneak off early.” At least she hoped they could.
The fragrance of flowers perfumed the air in the forest setting as Alicia cried at the wedding. Happy tears. She hadn’t planned to. She blamed it on being pregnant. On being a sentimental sap. On wishing her mother and father could see her truly happy. But even Lelandi joined her with teary eyes, and Darien and Jake just looked at each other sympathetically.
Silva slapped Sam on the back, his gunshot wound all healed up. “Think we might do something like this someday?” she asked sweetly.
He grunted.
Lelandi laughed. “I’d be game to put on another one of these.”
Darien shook his head.
Everyone glanced at Tom, who was tugging at his cravat. “Don’t look at me. I haven’t found a girl to date, let alone mate.”
Lelandi smiled at him, the expression on her face one of calculation. Who could she find for Tom, now that Jake had gone off and found a mate all on his own?
Everyone was so busy grazing at the tables of food that no one saw Jake take Alicia’s hand and pull her away from the festivities. Or maybe they did, but she was certain no one really minded.
“We never discussed going away on a honeymoon,” Jake said, driving Alicia back to the house.
“You’re kidding, right?”
He looked at her, his expression surprised.
“I have trouble with shape-shifting,” she reminded him.
“Ah. But you won’t be able to during the new moon.”
“Can you guarantee it?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm,” she said, running her hand over his thigh. “After all that has happened in the past several months, would you think me very boring if I said I’d just like to stay at home with you? Take walks in the woods where you can show me where you’ve taken such beautiful pictures of wildflowers. Enjoy a fire and hot chocolate with whipped cream and whatever else we have in mind to occupy ourselves.”
“Skinny-dip on a night when the moon shimmers in the night sky.”
“You mentioned doing that before. Sounds like fun. Have any drive-in theaters around here?” she asked, as he drove down their long wooded drive.
“Forty-five minutes from here in Green Valley.”
She smiled. “Looks like we have the start of a wonderfully delightful honeymoon scheduled, right here at home.”
Home. It was home. And she had a man she could love just like her mother had loved her father. And a whole new family who loved her just as much as she loved them back.
And a whole mess of babies that would be here before they knew it. Triplets. She shook her head and cuddled next to Jake, her gown making her feel like she was cocooned in satin like a fairy princess. He wrapped his arm around her as they pulled into their driveway.
“What are you thinking now?” Jake asked, kissing the top of her head.
“When I first saw you, I thought you were one handsome, dangerously devilish man.” She rubbed her belly. “Boy, did I have that right.”
He chuckled, parked the truck, and carried her out of the vehicle. “I wanted to kiss you in the worst way. And that was my undoing.”
And the beginning of his life. He sighed, carried his mate and bride across the threshold, and vowed to give her the honeymoon of a lifetime, right here close to home. He would take pictures of her among the wildflowers, her hair freely flowing over her shoulders while she wore a tank top and short shorts, braless, barefoot, and pregnant, just as he’d envisioned so many weeks ago—except for the triplets part. And he couldn’t be more pleased with the way the picture had changed.