“Hey, Trent!” Nick was staring at me from across the room. I realized the others had begun filing into the meet room. “Yougonna stop smiling at the phone like a lovesick cow and join us? Who is she, anyway?”
I typed,~Got to go,and stuck the phone in my pocket. “No one.”
“Didn’t look like no one. I’ve never seen you lose track like that.”
“Yeah, right.” I managed a scornful note. “Just someone I met last night, no big.”
“Hah. When I met Bianca, all it took was one night.”
I ducked past him into the room and sat in my assigned place on the floor in a semicircle in front of Alpha, between Stan, our Fourth, and Xander, our Sixth. With long practice, I locked all thoughts of Kendrick down deep in the back of my mind. No man, no sex— well, we hadn’t had any— but no interest, no attraction, no distraction. Here, I was Trent, wolf and Fifth, and my sole focus was the pack. I closed my eyes for a moment, breathed out, then inhaled the scent of pack deep into my lungs, centered, and looked at my Alpha.
Alpha swept his gaze around the room, meeting each man’s eyes. “Madison East Pack, we are met.”
“We are met.” Our reply echoed back from all our throats as one. Alpha raised his hands. Mental bonds grew, wolf to wolf, as he brought us together, one pack, one voice, one heritage. Our connections bloomed as Alpha opened the floodgates. In the darkness in the back of my mind, the silver that was my bond to Alpha glowed hot and strong, full of his steady intelligence and forceful purpose. My links to the other wolves lit up too, a steady blue that was Nick, a flicker of flame yellow leading to Garrett, dark green and light green and gold and yellow and amber with minds and bodies at the other end. Sixteen men I knew better than brothers in this way, for a moment sharing one space. Somewhere amid the bonds, anxiety flickered, someone was tired, someone had a sore leg…Hank,my wolf supplied. Stanwas mad about something… But nothing big broke the melding of spirits that made us pack.
This, this, this.For all the reasons I’d held my packmates at a distance, there was nothing like the feel, in a meet or on a run, when the pack became one. When our hearts and breathing and feet found a common rhythm, and our differences fell away in the unity ofpack.No thoughts, no words, just that deep accord.
“We are met,” Alpha repeated. For a moment, we lived in that space, breathing together. Then Alpha lowered his hands and reclosed our bonds, bit by bit, until only the normal day-to-day awareness remained. The fading of that intense connection was both an enormous loss and a relief. I’d still know if a packmate died, or if he was desperately injured or terrified, but not if he stubbed his toe. Hank’s pain thinned and vanished, Stan’s simmering frustration dropped to nothing in my head. Unless Alpha demanded it, we kept some distance between us.
Thank God.Without that privacy, day to day, I’d have been dead a dozen times before I turned twenty.
With pack bonding done, Alpha began working through the day’s business. Our pack was not a democracy. Anyone who tried for that would find their head firmly acquainted with the back of Alpha’s hand. Or maybe his fist. However, he wasn’t a despot, and he did like to get pack opinions before making decisions.
No voting, though, so unless he called on me specifically for something relating to my expertise as an appliance repairman, I could tune out and space out. And the moment I did so, Kendrick’s face floated into mind. Kendrick, and Nick saying,“all it took was one night.”
Is Nick right? Am I more interested in Kendrick than his pretty blue eyes, chiseled cheekbones, silky black hair, and perfect ass justify?Although, the complete package justified just about anything. Kendrick had pressed all my buttons years ago with a single glimpse on a crowded dance floor, and he still did.
However, I’d fucked other gorgeous men on my occasional nights out. None of them had cost me a moment’s sleep. At most, I’d felt a vague regret that a repeat wasn’t in the cards, before I moved on. So why was Kendrick different? We wolves didn’t find our mates in a flash of emotional lightning, fated like in some fiction. In times past, some men were married to their wives for years before they attempted a mate bond and brought their mate into the secret life of the packs.
Of course, back in those days, slipping up and revealing the packs to an unbonded human was a death-penalty offense. Going slow had made sense.
But even now— Nick and his one-night mate-finding dick aside— we were cautious about our bonds.
So it wasn’t as if Kendrick was somehow destined to be my mate.
Down inside me, my wolf pricked his ears.Mate?
No. Boring tax crap. Go back to sleep.
I struggled to pay attention, but it wasn’t my problem that the tax situation with regard to pack tithes had become complicated with a new law, or that the Ladies’ Auxiliary folks next door to our suburban property were complaining about the invasive buckthorn in our wild area. I trusted Alpha to deal with those things and to call on me if he needed me.
The meet lasted almost an hour before Alpha dismissed us from our places. I stood, stretching, and joined the guys filing out of the room toward the remaining food.
Yes, food is good. Kendrick fed us last night. We should bring him something,my wolf suggested.
I’m not courting him, I reminded the foolish wolf. Wolves tended to court with food, which was all well and good, but that didn’t apply here. Although I had eaten the entire container of his leftover stew, which he might have planned as anothermeal… Maybe I could bring by a supermarket roast chicken or something.
“…job for a total pussy.”
Those words from Xander behind me snapped me out of my thoughts.Who? What?I stepped out of the way and pivoted to stare at him.
Xander scooped a cookie off one of the tables and went on with a twisted grin, “I mean, anyone who can’t even beat Hank has to be queer, right?”
Alpha frowned at Xander from where he was filling a dessert plate across the room. “How is that relevant?”
“Send Charlie out to deal with the Auxiliary ladies. Let him use that gay charm on them. Old ladies love the queer boys. Kid’s gotta be good for something.”
I glanced back at Charlie who was leaving the room last, as was appropriate. He paused in the doorway. I’d never gotten a gay vibe from the kid. If he was anything alphabet, I’d have bet on asexual. Right now, his face had gone painfully red and I saw his throat work as if trying to speak. I thought his lips shaped the words, “I’m not,” but he didn’t get a sound out.
