Alpha Curves (Paranormal BBW Shifter Romance): Wolf Clan Book 3 (8 page)

Of course, his command had come before she clumsily insinuated he was nothing more than an animal. Now that she had stuck her foot in her mouth when he was so emotionally vulnerable, she doubted Cade would ever want her surrender.

Searching for the last line she had read in Oscar's file, Iris buried a sudden rush of disappointment, reminding herself that a little pain now was better than the lifetime of anguish both she and Cade would experience if she let him claim her as his mate. He wanted a wolf, she wasn't one. Even that little wolfling who had brought the clothes to Cade's house would make a better mate for him. And Iris truly did want him happy, even if it meant she would live the rest of her own life alone.

Hearing a vehicle pull in front of the cabin, Iris reached toward her right hip out of habit before remembering her gun was long gone. Cade had thrown her service revolver out the van’s side door before the driver had even finished pulling away from the Hunters shooting at them. It would be a cold day in hell before the shifters allowed her a new firearm.

Dana must have caught the intent behind her gesture because he snorted. "Relax, it’s just Esme."

Craning her neck to see through the open curtains, she confirmed he was right. "Why didn’t the bells ring?"

"Their her bells, she knows when she's coming up her own drive." His eyes rolled up as if explaining something to a child.

Iris mashed her lips together, crushing the retort that skated across the surface of her tongue. She was wrong about him explaining it as if she were a child. He seemed to like children -- at least cubs. Iris, on the other hand, he didn’t like at all.

She caught Dana studying her as his soon-to-be-wife stepped onto the porch.

"What?" Iris bit out as he rose to meet Esme at the door.

"You would have sensed her long before you did if it wasn’t for that damn silver you’ve got in your flesh."

Forcing down the angry blush that threatened to singe her cheeks a bright red, Iris flipped to the next page in Oscar's folder. There was no use arguing with the big wolf, but she’d been wearing silver to protect herself almost as long as she had been off clan lands. She had never had a problem smelling or otherwise sensing danger before it manifested. Even the wards she carved in her skin only affected her abilities for a few minutes. And she had steered clear of more than one shifter over the last dozen years before he’d had a chance to scent her.

So it wasn't the silver dulling her senses. Her brain kept going into a fugue state that her ability to smell and hear things couldn’t penetrate. Her thoughts tumbled from the attempt on her life and Joshua's death to Cade in the shower that morning and then in her bed, his hands and mouth on her, the warm secretions of her body fading to the wet slurp of Harper's brains splattered against her cheek.

Not that she could or would ever explain any of it to the smug, know-it-all shifter who, at that moment, was bending to kiss his mate on the lips as he took the heavy box she carried.

"What’s this?" he asked after the kiss ended.

"Artifacts," Esme answered, her voice faltering as she reached the end of the word. "Mostly."

"Mostly?" Iris prompted. The witch seemed to wear her heart on her sleeve, making her an open book at times. Whatever "mostly" involved, it or something related clearly made the woman uneasy.

Directing Dana to the couch with the box, Esme smiled, both lips twisting nervously at the corners. "I went through some of my witchy notes last night," she started to explain.

"That’s a lie," Iris interrupted, "But go on."

Dana’s muscles flexed at the accusation that his lovely mate had just fibbed. Iris tacked a warm smile onto her face. Not for Dana’s benefit, but Esme’s. She sensed the witch had a good heart and any lie, while likely misguided, was told with the best of intentions.

"Well," Esme blushed. "There are charms that a shifter can wear to cloak his or her presence. It’s worked to keep the Hunters from catching us off clan lands."

Iris nodded. "Are you saying I won’t be able to sense Cade if he is wearing it?"

"It works that way for latents, but not between shifters." Another nervous smile twitched its way across Esme’s face. "But I actually want you to wear it and to also let me sew a few things into your clothes and teach you the incantations to do the rest of your clothes. Basically, I’m trying to shield you from wolves as if you were a latent and protect you from Hunters as if you were a wolf."

Iris started to protest until she caught the glare in Dana’s eye and the crestfallen look surfacing on Esme’s face.

"I know you don’t believe you are either," Esme continued. "To me, you feel like both, and it seems silly not to try. It’s just a little time and some silver and witch’s lace."

Iris gave a curt nod, only half relenting. She would do it, but only to appease the witch and her mate, she told herself. Neither potion nor charm would work and she wouldn’t be any closer to discovering what she was.

"Great!" Esme beamed at her and began to move the contents of the box around.

"You mean right now?" Iris stammered, her heart suddenly knocking hard and fast against the back of her breastbone. Annoyance flared in her chest, the extra adrenaline only further accelerating her pulse. There was no need to fear such a rapid confirmation of what she already knew to be true. Whether the witch wanted to test her theory one hour or a hundred hours from that moment didn’t matter. She didn’t need time to mentally prepare for what she knew to be inevitable.

Esme handed Iris a small pouch made of linen, symbols sewn into the fabric with thin strands of red silk. Bringing the bag to her nose, she sniffed. Anise mixed with bloodroot and the smell of charred cypress.

"That will shield you from Hunters." Taking a spool of silver thread from the box, Esme inserted one end through the eye of a needle. "Jet will be here soon as security for when Dana leaves, so we also need to get at least a little witch's lace sewn into your clothes. I brought a camisole to put the first bit in, the closer to your body, the better."

Iris shook her head, the words coming before she could stop them. "Cade won’t allow Jet..."

Tears quickly rose to brim Esme’s eyes. Iris smelled them before she saw them and immediately looked away, silently damning the tenderhearted witch for what those tears meant.

Cade wasn’t coming back and he didn't give a damn who watched the woman he had called mate just that morning.

Clamping her teeth together, she slowly counted to ten as she brought the pain under control. If she joined Esme in crying, she would likely find the woman’s arms around her in a consoling hug. She didn’t need a hug. She needed to find the Hunters who had killed Harper. Once she had those bastards, she could leave clan lands once and for all and return to the life she had built in Columbus.

She didn’t care that Cade wasn’t coming back, but there would be no convincing Esme if water started leaking from her damn eyes.

Exhaling slowly, she turned back to the witch and her mate. "Did you give Jet the same potion you gave Cade? Because it didn’t work all that well on him."

Esme lowered her gaze to the floor, her smooth, creamy cheeks suddenly glowing a bright pink.

"You did give Cade the potion, didn’t you?" Iris blurted the question then dismissed the idea that Cade had spent the night with her without any assistance from Esme’s magic. "I saw him drink it..."

"You saw him drinking the last of a cup of coffee," Esme admitted, her cheeks burning brighter. "He had been trying to talk me out of the potion before you came in and...well, you seemed disappointed when you thought he had taken it, so I didn’t tell you the truth."

Iris almost flew off the couch as Dana snorted more derision. She managed to return the thick file she had held throughout the conversation to the box without crumpling it in a fit of rage at his attitude. Still searching for some measure of calm, she wiped imaginary dust from the surface of the table the box rested on.

After a few more seconds, she managed to squeeze just two words through her tight throat and past her clenched teeth. "You’re mistaken about any disappointment."

"Someone certainly is." Dana folded his thick arms across his chest, his topaz gaze glittering with a fresh challenge. "You keep trying to convince yourself it’s not you. Might work eventually."

Iris dropped her chin, her eyes still glaring upward at the big wolf. She felt the zip of witch light up her spine and down her arms, her fingers beginning to tingle and sizzle as her anger mushroomed. At the same time, she noticed subtle changes in the big wolf's body that signaled an impending shift to his were-state. The fine blond hair covering his arms coarsened. His muscles grew more sinewy and the distinct pop of joints echoed in Iris’s ears as Dana became slightly taller.

Esme spun toward her mate, her delicate hands knotting in his shirt as she dragged him off the couch and pushed him toward the cabin door. "Why must I continually kick you out of my house?" she chided.

Iris felt the anger leave her as Dana gave his mate an incredulous look. His lower lip trembled in what seemed like exasperation. Iris had to keep her own mouth from curving upward in a grin as she witnessed the big bad wolf being pussy whipped by his soft, fluffy wife.

Almost grudgingly, she admired the witch. Like Iris, Esme had grown up within the clan but entirely separate from it. Like Iris, she also had never looked like the wolves around her, her body too plump and curvy to blend into the background. Yet Esme had not only survived, she had thrived and was a mere formality away from officially becoming the local clan leader’s mate.

And she had Dana wrapped around her little finger.

"Baby..." He half-begged, seeming to forget that he and his mate had an audience. "You know better than anyone why she needs to take that silver off--"

Esme silenced his protest with a gentle kiss, her lips lingering over his as she spoke. "I also know better than anyone why she wants to keep it on."

The kiss or her words took all the fight out of him. Offering one last defiant eye roll at Iris, he stepped onto the front porch and pulled the door shut behind him.

With her mate out of the room, Esme settled onto the couch next to Iris.

"Sorry about that," she offered with a blushing smile as she resumed threading the needle.

Iris released a sigh, knowing the witch was going to make her ask what Dana had meant. She tried to hold off, to force Esme into speaking first, but Dana’s words knocked around in her skull until she lost control of the question.

"What did he mean by you knowing better than anyone else?"

Esme gave a little dip of her head, put the needle and thread down and retrieved some loose witch’s lace from a plastic bag.

"Well," the witch started. "What I’m about to teach you is something I had to do for almost a decade to hide what I was--"

"Everyone knew you were a witch," Iris interrupted. "I mean, your mom’s a witch and you started casting early if I remember correctly."

"Your memory is solid. I healed my first tumor at nine." Esme responded. "But I’m also a latent. My mother had been sewing the silver and witch’s lace into my clothes since I was a baby to hide that fact. She also basically forbade my being naked beyond a two-minute shower. Staying clothed was deeply ingrained in me before I was ever old enough to consider taking them off for...other reasons."

Esme looked at her mate on the porch, her eyes glistening with the threat of fresh tears. "I didn’t know about my being a latent until it was too late. I wanted children and, because I wasn’t a wolf, Dana didn’t think he could give them to me."

It was Iris’s turn to nod. Hank Mercer had tried to give her a violent lesson in the breeding of wolves, taunting her the entire time that, if Cade took her as his mate, there would be no children and the entire clan would suffer from having one less mating pair.

"So, Dana pushed me away," Esme continued, her hands starting to shake as she worked the witch’s lace. "I lived every day in pain -- so did he. We were at each other’s throat more often than not. All of it was wasted time."

"What ended the charade?" Iris asked.

"Leah," the witch answered.

Confusion puckered Iris's face. "Another woman?"

"Another latent," Esme laughed as she tied off the silver string binding the witch's lace. A wrinkled frown punctuated a moment's silence before she started to explain. "Believe me, there were a lot of 'other' women in Dana's life, and Leah is Seth Gladwin's mate."

"Dana's foster brother," Iris nodded, old memories surfacing of when Seth had visited her clan along with other unmated wolves for an annual spring gathering. "How did he meet Leah?"

"Searching for Hunters who were searching for wolves," Esme answered, another laugh escaping her. "The Hunters must have caught her signal because there were no wolves that we know of in that area."

Pushing aside the very top layer of items in the box, Esme removed the black camisole and began attaching the witch's lace she had bound with more silver thread. "I would say it was pure serendipity that he discovered her, but it seems like Leah was intuitively inching closer to clan lands as soon as she was old enough to be out on her own."

Finished attaching the witch's lace, she handed the camisole to Iris. "Best to get this on before Jet shows up."