Running with Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves Book 1) (7 page)

“How about I guess,” she said. “And for every right answer, I undo a button.”

“You’ll never figure out the secret one,” he taunted.

Greta turned her head toward Elliott, who was now sitting on her other side, in the couch, both hands around her waist.

“You’ll help me, right?”

“We’ll see,” he said.

“All right,” Greta said. “Cream cheese.”

Shane unbuttoned.

“Sugar, salt, eggs,” she went on, her eyes glued to his chest.

Three more buttons.

“One more,” he said.

“I think it’s two,” Greta said.
 

She looked pointedly at the button on his jeans.

“We never said it was just your shirt,” she pointed out.

“Vanilla,” Elliott whispered into her ear, the soft tickle of his lips against that delicate shell making the hairs stand on the back of her neck. “And whipping cream.”

“Vanilla and whipping cream,” Greta said.

Shane undid the final button on his shirt and the only button on his pants, and Greta almost felt lightheaded with pure desire.

In her pocket, her phone rang. A wolf howl.

“Ignore it,” she said. After three more howls, it went silent, and Shane tossed his shirt across the room, sliding back down onto the couch and nuzzling Greta’s neck.

She squealed, and then giggled in delight.

What’s wrong with me?
She wondered.
I don’t giggle.

Shane moved his warm hand under her shirt, and she giggled again.

A wolf howled from her pocket, but she still didn’t care.

“You still haven’t guessed my secret,” Shane said, his hot breath against her jaw.

“Help me out here,” she said to Elliott.

He moved a strand of hair off of her neck, then let his hand move down to her bosom, his finger just barely brushing over her nipple, outside her shirt.

Greta gasped, and Elliott grinned.

“Dunno,” he said. “I never cook.”

The wolf howled again in her pocket, for the third time, and Greta shut her eyes in irritation.

“That’s the bar,” she said. “Shit, I’m sorry.”

Elliott’s lips slid lower on her neck as she put the phone to her ear.

“I’m
busy,
” she said.

“I know, I’m sorry,” said Annika, the new bartender who was keeping the shop tonight.
 

Elliott’s lips slid lower, and he pulled the neck of her shirt down a little. Greta bit her lip.

“But there’s this guy trying to set your place on fire? And one of the regulars said I should call you instead of the police, first.”

Greta stiffened on the couch, frowning, and Elliott and Shane looked at her.

“Someone is trying to set the bar on fire? Call the fire department!” she said, her voice getting tense and high. “Don’t call me!”

“It’s not that bad!” said Annika.

Greta thought she might pop a blood vessel.

“He’s really drunk, and he’s just got a pack of matches and keeps holding one to a leg of a pool table. They just burn out. The table’s not even scorched. He just keeps talking about how he’s gonna burn this place down if you don’t come talk to him.”

“Who is it?” Greta asked.

On the other end, she could hear the new girl ask someone at the bar was the drunk’s name was.

“Ezekiel?” Annika said.

Just call the cops
, Greta wanted to say. The problem was, if the wolf cops came, they wouldn’t do anything. Zeke’s older brother was a well-loved officer. If the human cops came, they’d manage to find ten more minor violations, and then Greta would be paying fines for the rest of the month. The bar did well, but not
that
well, and she had bills to pay.

“Send someone to come get me, I am going to KILL HIM!” she shouted into the phone, and then hung up, throwing her phone into the corner of the couch.

“What is it?” asked Shane.

“Remember that asshole you got into a fight with?” Greta asked.

He nodded.

“He’s ineffectively trying to burn my bar down and won’t stop if I don’t come talk to him.”

“Call the fire department,” Shane said. “Or the cops.”

Greta gave then the rundown of why that wouldn’t work, and watched as Shane’s nostrils flared and his temples pulsed.

“Let us go with you,” he said.

“No way,” she said. She stood from the couch, not wanting to still be sitting there between two men when whoever Annika sent showed up. “I can deal with my own problem, and Zeke is definitely my problem.”

The two of them exchanged a glance that Greta couldn’t quite read, but that she was definitely suspicious of.

“What?” she asked, starting to pace the room.

“He said you were his the night that Shane and him got into it,” Elliott admitted.

“His what?” Greta asked. She cracked her knuckles, the
pop
making her feel ready for a fight.

“Just his,” said Shane, still glowering on the couch. “That we had better leave because you belonged to him, like you were just a
thing
.”

A car pulled up in the driveway, and Greta stomped toward the door.

She reached it, opened it, took a deep breath, and then turned around, trying to smile.

“Dinner was amazing,” she said. “I’m really, really sorry.”

“We’ll see you at the pack meeting,” Elliott said. “Now go kick that drunk asshole out of your bar.”

Greta and the barback, Jim, hardly spoke during the whole ten-minute drive back to her bar.

“I’m really sorry,” Jim said. He was about twenty-two and had the exact look of a wide-eyed farm boy. “Were you busy?”

Greta grit her teeth together.
It’s not Jim’s fault
, she reminded herself.
Don’t take this out on him
.

“Kind of,” she said.

One of the sexiest men I’ve ever seen was feeding me cheesecake while his mate kissed my neck,
she thought sarcastically.
Nothing I’d rather do than go kick this jerk out of my bar.

She shoved her car door open before Jim even stopped completely, and stomped through the door and into the main room before he even had the engine off. A few regulars sitting at the bar glanced up at her, saw her face, and glanced away again.

Annika just pointed at the two pool tables. Zeke was sitting on the floor, leaning his entire body against one of them, his face mashed up against the heavy wooden table. The air smelled like match smoke, and as Greta approached him, he unsteadily lit another one, then held the tiny flame to the thick wooden leg of the pool table.

Nothing happened. The table leg was just beginning to turn dark brown where Zeke had been trying to light it on fire, but it was obvious that he could light a thousand matches without causing any actual damage.

“Get the fuck out of my bar,” she said, standing with her hands on her hips.

Zeke looked up at her. His eyes seemed like marbles in their sockets, rolling around loosely.

“
Greta
,” he said. “I
missed
you.”

“Give me your phone,” she commanded.

Instead, he gestured at his body, half-slumped and on the floor against a pool table.

“All this could be yours,” he muttered. “I fuck way better than that nerd.”

Doubt it,
thought Greta.

“Phone,” she ordered again.

“You deserve a real man,” he went on, shoving one hand into his pocket. “Not some whiny baby who can’t even fight his own fights.”
 

He pulled his phone out of his pocket, and Greta snatched it away.

“You would
love
my cock!” he shouted, so loud that everyone at the bar turned. Greta’s spine stiffened and a shiver of danger ran down it as she squeezed her left hand into a fist, flipping through Zeke’s contacts for his older brother. The one in the police.

After three rings, he answered.

“Dane Sorenson speaking,” he said.

“Hi, Dane, this is Greta over at the Tooth and Claw,” she said. As she did, she turned around and watched Zeke.

His face changed slowly, from anger, to confusion, to horror.

Dane sighed into the phone.

“Can I help you with something?” he asked. From the tone of his voice, it seemed like he already knew what she was going to say.

“Your brother is drunker than a drowned mouse and trying to set my bar on fire,” she said.

“Do you want me to call the fire station?” he said. He sounded alarmed, and Greta felt bad.

“No, no,” she said. “He’s lighting matches and holding them to the leg of a pool table. The pool table is fine, I just need him out.”

“I’ll be right there,” he said stiffly, then ended the call.

He sounded
pissed
,
and Greta couldn’t help but be nastily pleased.

She threw the phone back to Zeke and it landed in his lap. He just stared at it.

“Come on,” he said. Half of his face tried to leer at her, but his eyes rolled around lazily in their sockets. “Bend over this pool table, sweetheart, I’ll show you how a real wolf fucks, not one of these pussies who couldn’t even hack high school.”

Greta was utterly furious, her wolf growling and snapping, just barely beneath her skin. She began to sweat from the sheer effort of not shifting, because what she
wanted
to do was go wolf and just tear this joker’s throat out.

He was exactly why she wasn’t mated and didn’t really like to date. It seemed like right below the surface of every wolf in Rustvale was someone like Zeke, who thought that Greta
owed
him sex, that she was something to be bargained for and won. A trophy.

He doesn’t know he almost just died
, she thought.
He still thinks that, because I’m thirty, female, and unmated, he’s better than me.

Instead of kicking his face in, she walked into the backroom office.

“Let me know when his brother gets here,” she called to Annika, the barmaid. “And Zeke’s banned forever, obviously.”

“Got it,” the other girl called.

Chapter Seven

Elliott

The alarm went off at 6:30 on Tuesday morning, but Elliott was already lying awake in their enormous bed, staring at the ceiling. Gray light just started to seep through the window, and Elliott wished that he could go back to sleep, or that classes started the next day, or
something
.

I should be excited
, he thought.
I got a tenure-track job. It’s like finding a diamond-encrusted unicorn on the bottom of the ocean. What’s my problem?

He knew his problem. His problem was Rustvale, his problem was his parents who thought that he worked on a farm.

His problem was that the school’s administration didn’t technically know he was a shifter, and a
wolf
shifter at that. His problem was that of all the students in his classes, there would be three,
maybe
four wolves out of almost a hundred students.

Elliott knew that all those problem were related. His lying to his parents about his degree was related to no wolves wanting to go to college, because wolf society discouraged college. People who got more school than they had to were considered soft and weak, and even if no one would ever come out and
say
that, it was what they thought.

He sighed and got out of bed, padding into the bathroom.

The first step is that you stop lying
, he said, looking in the mirror as the water heated up.
You put yourself through school roping cattle and doing farm work. You could kick the asses of half the wolves in Rustvale, easy.

Why not fess up about having a Ph.D.?

He stepped into the shower and let the water hit his face, waking him up instantly, and he shook his whole body a little. A dog thing, he knew, but sometimes those things just felt so good and so
right
that he did them where no one could see. In the shower, for example.

As he dried off, he remembered that they also had their first pack meeting tonight.

On one hand, they’d see Greta again, and Elliott could hardly wait.

On the other, he’d see everyone who’d bullied him in high school again. He hadn’t talked to anyone in high school — except Greta — since he’d graduated, and he’d only met Greta again a few days ago. He had no idea how he hadn’t noticed her in high school — those curves, that
laugh
— but he’d probably been too busy trying to not get beaten up.

He shook himself off again, something oddly comforting in that animal movement. Then he went back into their bedroom and began digging through a box labeled
Elliott, Work clothes, Black Pants.

By the time he walked onto campus, an hour before his first class, he felt a little better. There was always something about that first day of school: the perfect crisp snap to the air, the excited students, all the professors looking the sharpest that they’d look all year. Even in graduate school he’d looked forward to buying new pens and notebooks, and then slowly filling them over the course of the semester.

In fact, there were a couple of boxes labeled
Elliot, Grad School, Course notes
in the house. Shane wanted to get rid of them, and he had a point when he said that Elliott was probably never going to even look at them again, but Elliott just liked having them around.

The Classics Department was in a wing of the Liberal Arts building, on the third floor. Elliott took the stairs, wanting to stretch his legs as much as possible and get some of his nervous energy out before teaching.

“Morning, Elliott,” said Professor Hunt, a tweedy, older human who walked determinedly down the hall.

“Morning, Eustace,” Elliott said.

Before his first job interview, he’d taken the pictures of the other faculty from the department webpage and made flashcards, then forced Shane to quiz him.

Once a dork, always a dork, but at least now he knew everyone’s names as faces like the back of his own hands.

A head popped out of an office door, an older man with a bad dye job and glasses that might have been trendy forty years ago. Dr. Nigel, the department head.

“Dr. Whiting!” he said. For some reason, Dr. Nigel insisted on calling everyone by their title and last name. The rest of the department seemed to only use first names, so Elliott had no idea what it was all about. He chalked it up to the whole “quirky professor” thing.