When a Pack Dies (7 page)

“Helen, my best friend.”

“She’s your age?”

“Three months younger.”

“Hmmph. Is her mother smart? Level headed?”

“Definitely.” Fina nodded emphatically. “Right after I escaped, I wanted to run to her...”

Fina’s voice dropped away and Cutler felt her tremble. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder, drew her close and pressed his lips to the top of her head.

“But you didn’t because you’d endanger her,” he said with quiet surety and kissed her hair. “Set up a new email account. Make sure it can’t be traced to Wyoming. Use it to contact your friend’s mother. Let her know you’re safe but were advised to go into seclusion because of the violence. No need to tell her anything else,” he added firmly when Fina tensed. “Tell her that you’d like to contact Helen but have to be sure she’ll keep her mouth shut about it. If your friend is like any of the other twenty-year-old human females I’ve come across,” he snorted with disdain, “she’ll get so excited about hearing from you she’ll blab it to everybody before realizing she could be jeopardizing your safety.”

“My safety?” Fina blurted out. Her head popped up. “There’s no way those rogues would still be interested in me.”

“Why not?” Cutler asked coolly, holding her eyes with his and tucking his finger under her chin. “I’d never be willing to let you go.” He gave that a moment to sink in.

Fina averted her eyes. “By now they know the money’s gone.”

“There
is
that,” Cutler agreed with a sigh. “But I know I’d abandon everything I had to follow you if you left me.” He kissed her forehead, squeezed her shoulder gently then stood up. “We have to assume
that
Alpha would too.” He glanced at his watch. “Now I
am
going to be late for work.” Cutler inhaled her scent once more. “Damn I wish I could bottle the smell of your skin. That way I could take it with me everywhere.” He offered her a crooked grin and a wicked flash of his aqua eyes, turned away and headed for the front door.

Fina was still leaning against the desk and stroking her forehead absently where Cutler’s warm, firm lips had touched it when her wolf’s ears heard Ryan’s voice.

“Please, Cutler, just once,” he wheedled from the front yard.

“It scares the cattle, buddy. You know that. How about you just turn on the lights. We’ll save the siren for some other time.”

“Cool,” Ryan blurted out and she heard his canvas shoes crunch the gravel in the driveway, heard the door of Cutler’s big, sheriff’s SUV open, heard Cutler grunt dramatically and figured he was hoisting the six-year-old into the driver’s seat.

“Whew! You’re packing on the muscle, big guy. Soon you’ll be too big for me to lift.”

Fina realized she’d started to cry and she hated it...absolutely hated it. She hated the constant flux of her emotions, her thoughts.

The real reason she’d stuck her nose into Nath’s business was because it was yet another activity to escape into. When she was working, it was easy to carry on like nothing bad had happened to her, easy to deny her family’s death, her pack’s death. Sometimes the tears just started to fall and she felt dark and numb inside. Fina had gotten good at burying her face in the blankets at night and crying soundlessly. The worst part about the tears was the anger that followed. She’d get mad at herself for being weak and being alive and then she’d get mad at her pack...her father and brother and Ryan’s dad for not seeing this coming, not protecting them like they were supposed to and she’d cry even harder.

Fina picked up Cutler’s coffee mug and carried it into the kitchen. She cleaned out the coffee maker, started up the dishwasher, grabbed the bucket of cleaning supplies from beneath the sink and headed for a corner in the front hallway—like she did every day about this time—preparing to obsessively scrub the house from end to end until the phone rang or it was time to make Ryan’s lunch or drive him into town to pick up groceries or take him to a play date or mow the lawn. Anything so that she didn’t have to think.

*
   
*
   
*

Fina inhaled slowly. The first things she picked out were the gas and oil smells from at least fifty vehicles parked in the big, grassy field. Beyond that, she caught the scent of a pack—Cutler’s pack—in the forest beyond the field. The pack scent was fresh and old at the same time. It was an area wolves had used for decades...maybe a century. The sun had already set and it was almost fully dark. The full moon would be rising over the foothills in about a half hour. Fina’s wolf eyes showed her a wide trail leading beneath the trees and after Nath helped her out of Cutler’s personal, oversized and beefy SUV, he held her hand and headed for the trail. Cutler caught up to them, walked on her other side and lay his arm around her shoulder. The scents coming out of the forest clearly identified this as the pack’s running grounds. Privately owned land, probably hundreds of acres of it where the pack gathered to run and socialize in their fur.

“How many are in your pack?” she blurted out, registering the number of cars and the fact that two more were just pulling in.

“One-hundred ninety,” Cutler replied with smug pride.

“One-ninety-one,” Nath corrected him gently. “Don’t forget the Anderson’s new pup.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He grinned crookedly and gave Fina’s shoulder a squeeze. “That makes number six for them. I haven’t figured out if they’re wolves or rabbits.” He chuckled ribaldly and Fina poked him in the side with her elbow. He grunted obligingly and cradled his waist. “We’ve got thirty-two families and forty singles, most of them male.” He raised his hand in greeting as they passed two older couples walking together.

Fina felt the sadness creep in again. Her pack had been comprised of eight families only with no singles living on their own. Two of the families had been her older, mated sisters’ and even her older brother—who everybody expected to take over as Alpha when her father got too old—still lived at home. She saw that her pack had been small and wealthy, ripe for takeover.

“Hey, Fina...” Nath squeezed her hand and nuzzled her temple. “You up for this, sweetheart?” he asked quietly. Even Cutler was looking down at her with open concern and he could be as emotionally subtle as a tick with gas.

“Just...remembering,” she whispered and blinked hard. When another couple, followed by two single males passed them on the trail, she lifted her head, forced a smile and waved with her free hand. “I’ll feel better after I run. It’s been awhile. Maybe too long. I’ll be better after,” she added firmly and even Fina wasn’t sure if it was for the brothers’ benefit or hers.

The path opened out onto a big, flat, grassy clearing, roughly oval in shape. A mixed, ancient forest ringed it. Fina could smell the growing excitement in the hundred or so wolves already there. She’d never seen so many assembled at once. Cutler led them in a slow, informal loop of the clearing, greeting members of his pack and introducing Fina to the few she hadn’t met. He laughed, asked after their families or their jobs. A lot of the single males looked at her with open interest. There was a time when Fina would have blushed under the attention. Now, she physically withdrew behind Cutler and Nath’s bodies—as much as she could without being obviously rude. Cutler’s unsubtle growls whenever another male showed too much interest in her kept any of them from getting too close.

Because of Ryan, she’d met most of the families with young pups. The two weeks they’d been alone and on the road, his cognitive skills had started to retard. Fina didn’t know why but his ability to read, even his vocabulary and his ability to form complete sentences had diminished. From the first day with Cutler’s pack, she’d asked the Alpha to introduce her to families with pups Ryan’s age so he could socialize and she could watch the parents interact with their kids, hoping to pick up clues about what she was doing wrong. She really hadn’t learned anything except that Ryan needed to sit in a booster in the back seat when she drove but for whatever reason, Ryan was almost back to a full post-kindergarten reading level, could do addition and subtraction again, and he played readily and happily with other children instead of withdrawing into his electronic games.

By the time they’d completed the full loop, the perimeter of the clearing was packed with wolves.

“Time to get started,” Cutler said to no one in particular. “Any latecomers can catch up with the rest of us.” He led Fina and his brother over to an unoccupied spot and nuzzled Fina’s hair before lifting his arm from her shoulder. He began to unbutton his plain, ironed, light-blue shirt.

The rest of the wolves began disrobing.

Fina didn’t feel nervous or self-conscious being naked around others. It was something she’d been used to since reaching puberty and she lifted her lightweight sweater over her head, folded it, set it on the ground beside her then reached back to undo her bra. With puberty came the ability for a young werewolf to change into wolf form...and changing meant getting out of your clothes first unless you felt the need to shop for more to replace the shredded ones. She glanced at the brothers’ bodies and her heartbeat picked up.

Nathaniel was simply too beautiful for her inexperienced eyes to fully comprehend. His shoulders were almost as big as his brother’s and his skin from the waist up was dark gold from the sun, shimmering with health and vitality. It stretched taut and smooth over striated muscles, deep pronounced pectoral muscles and a six-pack of abs that looked ready to punch out of his skin when he rolled his torso to drop his shirt onto the ground. He started to undo the button fly of his jeans and she looked away, swallowing the hunger growing inside her that belonged more to her wolf than herself.

Her eyes turned to Cutler next and they got real round real fast. Although he was the same height as Nath and had the same chestnut-brown hair, he was just...bigger. Everywhere. Cutler’s arms were thick bands of defined muscle, his biceps and triceps huge yet managing to stay in proportion to that endlessly wide, lightly furred chest of his. Fina bit back the uncomfortable urge to rub her face all over him. Unlike his brother, Cutler folded his shirt before setting it on the ground and the movement made his obscenely wide lats fan out to dimensions that made Fina’s mouth water. She actually licked her lips before she realized she was staring.

She looked away and hurriedly removed the rest of her clothing. The fluttering in her belly was deeply unsettling and she needed to change into her fur as soon as possible to run off the uncomfortable tension rising in her. She toed off her running shoes, pulled off her jeans and panties then ran her hands over her bare arms, fidgeting and needing the run to start soon.

Cutler scented her arousal the second it started emanating from Fina’s small, nervous body. Just a trace of it. He held off unzipping his jeans when he realized his cock was starting to fill with blood. This was a pack run, not a mating run and he didn’t feel like standing around in his skin sporting a hard-on in front of his pack. Although with Fina standing beside him, he figured folks would understand.

One look told him Nath was having the same problem. His baby brother kept looking at Fina’s naked body and Cutler smelled the lust coming off him. He dared to take a quick look at her and immediately knew why. It wasn’t because Fina was physically perfect—she wasn’t. Her hips were too narrow and although her ass was taut and round like an adolescent’s, both body parts were still girlish instead of womanly. But he figured they’d fill out after she’d had a pup or two. Cutler liked a well rounded, comfortably fleshed out woman in his bed. He liked the feel of a lush ass cushioning his hips as he drove into her instead of bony, unforgiving angles. Fina’s waist was tiny but it was her breasts that drew his eye—and made his mouth open in anticipation of tasting her. High, firm and big enough to sway and jiggle enticingly when she turned and looked around the clearing or into the night sky, searching the treetops for the moon.

Mine. Wait. Soon.

His wolf’s voice was stronger than usual, sensing the rise of the full moon and the freedom that was coming. Cutler swallowed hard. He didn’t know if
he
could wait. He didn’t know if he had that much self control and he saw his hands come up, reaching for Fina, needing to pull her to him.

“Hey, boss!”

Cutler grit his teeth when that familiar, obscenely cheerful voice broke through the haze of lust that he just knew was turning his eyes red.

“
What
?” he snarled with unnecessary venom.

“Tes-ty,” the owner of the voice purred, deliberately goading him. “You know if you ate more roughage, you wouldn’t be this irritable.”

He growled and his upper lip fluttered, exposing his descending canines. “What do you want, Young?” Cutler’s voice was thick and gravelly—his wolf was very close to the surface now and the changes in his cells, the structure of his face and throat made talking difficult.

“I
want
an introduction,” she stated self-righteously and flashed a smile at Fina. “Rude-o,” she shot back in his direction.

Cutler exhaled impatiently. “Fina Whitesage, meet Officer Suzanne Young—my dispatcher.”

Fina held out her hand politely. “Ah...you’re the voice I hear coming over the radio.” Instinctively, Fina hated the woman on sight. She’d never felt that way about another woman before. The strength of her reaction startled her. Despite that, she pressed on, remembering her manners. “I swear you’re the only one I can understand. All of the men I’ve heard sound like they’ve got a mouthful of chewing gum. I can’t make out a thing they say.”

Suzanne threw back her head and laughed delightedly. Fina hated her even more. Suzanne was a sex goddess. Her laughter was silvery and musical, her teeth white and perfectly straight. She was maybe five or six years older than Fina and next to this vivacious, confident woman, Fina felt like a child. Suzanne was taller than her, with long shapely legs that rose up to womanly hips and a waist that defied physics. It was just too small to hold up the rest of her and the rest of her made Fina want to slouch, cover her own chest and skulk away into the darkness. Suzanne’s breasts were round, large and flawless. Fina bit back a growl of envy when they swayed with the woman’s laughter, displaying all to clearly that every perfect, naked inch of them was real. Her nipples were so perky and pink that Fina wanted to slap the woman across the mouth. But it was her face that
really
ticked Fina off. It was the most radiant, beautiful oval Fina had ever seen, capped with a long, silky, lustrous fall of pale blonde hair.