Scout: Reckless Desires (Norseton Wolves Book 7) (2 page)

“I still don’t understand,” Petra said.

“That’s because he’s not explaining it very well,” Graciella said.

“No. He’s not.”

Graciella, gnawing on her lower lip as if she were trying to choose her words carefully, settled onto the edge of the bed beside Petra. She started to rub slow circles onto Petra’s upper back, and Petra let her.

Petra probably didn’t know why she was submitting to the touch, but Paul suspected the friendly wolf was pushing magic through her. He’d been around the wolves enough in the past seven days to have picked up a lot of trivia about their magic. Like Afótama magic, the various kinds of wolf magic seemed to be necessary for maintaining pack order. Unlike with the wolves, though, Afótama magic was a needy sort of phenomenon. It needed constant feeding.

Interaction
.

That was the hardest part for Paul. He’d moved back to Norseton because he’d had to. Their queen connected the Afótama psychically. Being at a great distance from the network was incredibly disquieting, though had been mitigated somewhat for Paul by the fact that Chris had been with him. They’d had a tiny network of two when they’d been away. Magic had pulled them both back to the clan in the past year. The disquietude was gone, and in its place came discontentment.

So much about the clan made him fucking miserable. When he’d first gotten back, he put on a good front that he’d reformed and turned into a nice person, in spite of the hostile treatment he’d endured from some of his peers as an adolescent.

Most folks knew better. Lately, he’d stopped pretending to be pleasant.

He didn’t have any choices. Couldn’t leave—not without a huge psychic wound—but he wasn’t happy, either. Mostly, he just tuned out and ignored the magic around him. He didn’t think he’d be able to ignore it for much longer, though. Magic had a way of invading one’s dreams.

“I think it was Christina’s idea initially,” Graciella said quietly after a minute of silence. “She’s one of the wolves who’s been here longest, and her job is finding people. Normally, she’s looking for specific people for the Afótama, but she tried something a little different for the wolves one day to see what would happen. The good thing about being in a group like this is there’s always someone around to brainstorm with. Someone suggested that we could probably find some homeless wolves to shelter if we started calling around to hospitals and places like that querying about John and Jane Does who don’t seem quite right. Hospitals don’t generally want to give you any information over the phone, but we have ways of putting clues together.”

“Most folks can’t walk away from a wreck the way you and Arnold did,” Adam said.

“That’s how you knew?” Petra’s nose crinkled when she furrowed her brow.

Damn shame how someone so evil could be so cute.

Not that Paul could talk. One of his exes liked to call him “The Devil Himself,” and according to his mother, he was attractive enough for women to tolerate him for at least a little while. A little while was usually all he wanted, anyway.

“No, that’s how we
guessed
. We sent Nixon and Esther up to check things out, and I guess some hospitals are more than willing to transfer uninsured patients out when someone promises to pay the bill. Nixon knew what you were the moment he stepped into your room.”

Petra whipped her head around toward her brother, who was standing in the doorway. “You let ’em take me?”

Arnold turned his hands over and let out a ragged breath. “I didn’t see where I had a choice, P. Where were we gonna go, anyway? Start hitchhiking again? I don’t think so. Not after what happened last time.”

“What happened last time?” Paul asked. He was in the middle of a wolf conversation and the answer was probably none of his damned business, but he needed to know just how reckless the patient in his charge was. If she and her brother had been thumbing rides across the country, the chances of her being the kind of person to adhere to a care plan were probably quite slim.

Petra squired and tried to yank her hands away from him.

He let one of her hands go, and leaned back just in time to avoid her fist arcing toward his nose.

“
Petra
!” Arnold scolded. “That’s not nice.”

Grinding his teeth, Paul grabbed her flailing arm, pinned her wrists once more, and looked to Graciella.

“Sorry.” She cringed. “I got distracted. I’ll do better.” She must have pushed one of her soothing surges of magic at Petra, because the wild wolf sighed and simmered down.

“You know, at the hospital here, they’ve got beds with straps,” Paul said to Petra. “I’m wondering if you need one.”

“You’re not strapping me down.”

“Stop acting like you need to be bound, then, and I won’t make any further overtures that I’ll sign off on the activity. Prove to me you’re not going to swing at me again if I let go of you.”

She just blinked.

“Why the hell are you swinging at me, anyway? I’m trying to help you.”

“You’re nosy. I don’t like nosy people.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m not here out of the goodness of my heart, precious. Your alpha called my clan’s queen and asked if there was a doctor they could send over to monitor you, and they sent me. You hear that? I didn’t volunteer. I’m getting the same paycheck I would have been getting if I’d been at the hospital right now haunting the emergency room. I’m just doing my job. Call me nosy if you want to, but I have people expecting me to do my job to the best of my ability, because that’s what I’m paid to do. You want to refuse care?” He shrugged. “Take it up with your alpha. I’m not convinced you’re rational enough to make medical decisions for yourself right now.”

“Fuck you, dude.”

“If you say so.”

While he’d been telling the truth when he’d said he would have been paid the same no matter where he was working, he had to admit that arguing with a cranky, naked wolf was a lot more entertaining than bending over the nurses’ station counter filling out charts and forms ad nauseam. At least he’d have a good story to tell Chris later.

That asshole’s not gonna believe this.

“That guy’s not my alpha,” Petra said. “He can’t make decisions for me.”

“For right now, he is,” Arnold said.

“No.” She gave her head a hard shake and glowered at her brother. “We said we’d never join another pack.”

“I didn’t see where we had a choice.”

“We’ll pay him back whatever we owe him and go. That’s what the holdup is about, right? Always comes down to the money.”

Arnold looked to his new alpha, who’d been very quietly waiting in the doorway.

That was typical Adam, from Paul’s experience. He tended to wait and watch before opening his mouth, and that was why Paul liked him.

“Told you she was gonna say that,” Arnold said.

Adam rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms and grunted. “Debt or no debt, makes no difference to me. If she doesn’t want to be here, I’m not gonna force her to stay. The wolves here all want to be here, and I don’t stand for there being any exceptions.” He dropped his hands and then crossed his arms over his chest. “Doc, if you think she’s healthy enough to be released from care, let her go. She doesn’t have to stay.”

“Let’s go, Arnold,” Petra said.

She wasn’t going to go very far. Paul still hadn’t let go of her, and he still didn’t know enough to work up a medical opinion. She seemed lucid, if a bit aggressive and argumentative, but for all he knew, werewolves made bad patients in general. She was still a little banged up. Her face was swollen and bruised. He’d guessed that the lacerations on her forearms and the top of her head from her impact with her truck’s windshield were healing nicely, but he hadn’t had a chance to take a look.

Beyond the X-rays she’d had done at the hospital in Oklahoma, she hadn’t had any new scans. For all he knew, she could have been a ticking time bomb on the inside.

But logic wasn’t why he was gripping her wrists so tightly and unwilling to let go. That was his gut talking. It said,
Don’t let her run
, and the people of his clan hadn’t survived for so long by ignoring their guts. No one had better guts than Vikings.

He pulled in a bracing breath through his nose and let it out through his mouth, keeping his gaze straight and true on her swollen face. “I think she needs further observation.”

“You son of a—”

Whatever toxic words she was going to spew, she didn’t have a chance to spit out. Her eyelids drifted closed and body went limp. When her body listed toward the floor, he and Graciella had to jump to keep her from face-planting.

Graciella chuckled nervously and then cringed at Adam. “Sorry. Might have overdone that surge a little. You know, learning curve, and all.”

Adam pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head. “Gods, girl. She’s gonna be spitting mad when she wakes up.”

“Probably,” Arnold said quietly.

“Hey, I won’t let you take the fall. You did the right thing, son.”

Arnold scoffed. “Yeah, you convince her of that the next time she opens her eyes.”

“Better for the words to come from you than for her to hear me saying them. She’ll actually believe
you
.”

“Nice that you think that, Alpha, but you don’t know Petra. I did promise her that we’d never join another pack, and look where we are now.”

Paul wanted to ask why they hadn’t wanted to be in a group, but he’d already been nosy enough, and he wasn’t even sure why he cared. He tended to keep his focus on things that actually concerned him.

“Wolves have got to settle down sometime,” Adam said, but for whatever reason, he was looking at Paul. “We’re all compelled to situate ourselves somewhere. Trust me. Me and Lil and the boys were on the road for going on twenty years, and we were okay at first, but that contentedness changed before we realized it. You feel the call to go home.”

Home.
Yeah.

Paul knew all about that. He’d returned to Norseton in spite of feeling like there was nothing there for him.

Adam looked to Arnold, who was leaning with crossed arms into the doorway and staring down at his feet.

“Can’t go back to the birthpack,” Arnold said.

“I hope you’ll tell me why someday,” Adam said. “That’s the only thing I demand of the wolves here. Just to be honest with everyone. Honesty keeps everyone safe.”

Arnold gave a slow nod and kept staring at the floor. “Yeah. You’re right.”

“Come on,” Graciella said quietly, drawing Paul’s attention back to the unconscious wild woman. “Help me get Petra back into the bed and under the covers.”

Petra slept with her head lolled to the side and her mouth open.

Cute, in a snarly predator kind of way.

He snorted and couldn’t help himself. She was like a lion with no teeth or claws. Scary in theory, but she couldn’t really do much harm.

“None of us can go back to where we started,” Adam said as Paul examined the wounds at the top of Petra’s head. “Isn’t that right, Paul?”

Paul didn’t answer. Adam’s observation had seemed hypothetical in tone, and Paul didn’t know the right answer, anyway.

He rooted some first aid items out of his medical bag and went to work disinfecting Petra’s torn-up IV needle site. He didn’t want to have to re-stick her. Ideally, her next meal would be a solid one.

Maybe she’ll be less cranky after a solid meal
.

He scoffed at himself and discarded a piece of bloody gauze.

Food doesn’t make me any nicer. Probably won’t fix her, either.

When Petra regained consciousness, she didn’t immediately open her eyes. First, she needed to convince herself just a little bit that she was alive and not merrily prancing along down the winding path to hell. She was pretty sure that was where werewolves who hadn’t accomplished anything in life besides learning to belch the alphabet backward went.

“Freakin’ Arnold,” she muttered. “All his fault.”

She wriggled her toes and felt the light blanket over them.

“Okay. Feeling stuff is good.”

She curled her fingers and grimaced at the flex of the sore muscles in her forearms.

“Ow. What’d I do to those?”

She tried to make sense of the noise around her. Air conditioning. Chirping outside from some kind of bug. A television nearby.

She drew in the scents. Spice and sweetness. Like chili and cupcakes.

Her spine tingled with the prickle of proximity of bodies very nearby.

They’re—touching me.

They were in her space, and she was too out of it to have sensed them sooner.

Female bodies. Giggling female bodies, all with similar scents.

Family?

She opened one eye and when her vision cleared, she found the woman who’d knocked her the fuck out sitting on the bed to her right.
Graciella
, she thought her name was.

Turning her head slightly to the left, there was another woman. She looked remarkably similar to Graciella. Same sort of energy, too.

Probably sisters.

Petra dragged her tongue across her dry lips and tried to sit up, but the covers were clamped down too tight. The ladies were sitting on them.

“Let me up,” she rasped, realizing that in all that time she’d been talking to herself, she’d been talking to
them
.

Oh, hell
.

Both looked down at her, then at each other.

“Let me
up
.”

They didn’t move, but another woman Petra hadn’t noticed before did. She must have been sitting at the bedside or elsewhere out of view, but she moved to the foot of the bed and leaned on the wooden crossbar. Older than the other two women, but same dark hair. Same light brown skin. Same nagging energy.

Petra had thought she’d wanted to move, but her limbs didn’t seem to have the get-up-and-go she needed to stage a decent escape attempt.

Damned useless body
.
What gives?

“Don’t feel like you need to get up unless you have to pee,” the older one said. “I doubt you do, but don’t worry. We got you cleaned up. No need to be ashamed.”

Petra wasn’t running on all cylinders, so she needed a few seconds to grasp what the hell the woman was talking about. They’d been caring for her as if she were some sort of invalid, when she most certainly
wasn’t
.

“Let me up.”

“Just be still,” the lady said. “No need to tax yourself. It’s not like you’re getting charged by the night to be here. This is
your
house.” She straightened up and moved away from the end of the bed.

Petra could then see the open armoire with the television playing some show she didn’t recognize on low volume, but she wouldn’t have recognized much of anything. She and Arnold hadn’t been in front of very may televisions in the past ten years. On the rare occasions they could afford to rent a room somewhere, they’d always been too tired to turn on the sets.

One of the words the lady had used bounced around in Petra’s head like a paper bag in a windstorm. It didn’t make sense. She’d said
home
.

“What do you mean by home? I don’t know this place. I don’t come from New Mexico.”

“Nah, you don’t. Everyone in this pack is from somewhere else. Me and my sisters are from Delaware.”

“Your—
sisters
.” Petra looked at the ladies on either side of her. The lady had
two
sisters. Petra had always wanted one. All she’d had was Arnold, and apparently two children had been enough for their mother. Maybe even two too many after their father had left the way he did.

“Uh-huh. Yeah, I know. Wolves don’t generally have so many children because the pregnancies are so hard, but…” She chuckled and rubbed her own swollen belly. “Our family has always been very good at that.”

“Understatement,” Graciella said. “Our cousins have
so
many kids.”

Her sister moved to the side of the bed, likely to a chair, and Graciella’s body blocked her from view. Petra didn’t like not being able to see people talking. The disembodied voices always made her nervous for some reason.

“I’m Lisa,” came the voice. “I was one of the first brides brought here.”

“Brides?” Petra tried to scramble out of the covers so she could put on some clothes and flee, but she couldn’t. Just
couldn’t
. But she wasn’t about to be any wolf’s chew toy.

Hell fuckin’ no
.

Lisa laughed so hard that she snorted, and her sisters took up the refrain.

“Don’t laugh at me. I don’t see what’s so damned funny.”

Lisa’s giggles tapered off with a light sigh. “We’re laughing because we know exactly what triggered you, and seeing that shit’s the same everywhere, no matter what packs we come out of or how long we’ve been gone from them, is funny. Relax. I wasn’t traded away by my parents.”

“Oh.” Though somewhat mollified, Petra wasn’t quite ready to take the deep breath her body needed.

“I volunteered to come. I’m sure you know how mate calls work, right?”

Petra closed her eyes and scrounged around in her memory for any clue of what those were. When she and Arnold had left their pack, they’d been in early puberty. They’d missed a lot of the grown-up talk, and mostly they relied on secondhand stories they picked up here and there to know how wolves were supposed to behave.

She sucked in the breath anyway, and let it out. She had to ask. Had to know.

“I don’t remember what a mate call is. I don’t think our pack did very many of them.”

“Oh,” Lisa said. “Well, alphas like Adam send out calls to all the other known packs stating that they have unattached male wolves looking for mates. Alphas don’t always post the information, but if they’re fine with getting rid of a few heads for whatever reason, they’ll let the ladies go. But, getting paired up is a crapshoot. A woman could be going into a pack even worse than the one she’s leaving, and once she arrives at her new pack, she’s not generally allowed to leave.”

“And you wanted to stay?”

“Yeah. It just so happens that I like my husband. Usually doesn’t work that way. Anyhow, I brought my sisters here to spare them from being matched within our old pack. Our old alpha would have demanded our father give them up on their eighteenth birthdays if I hadn’t. You’ve already met Graciella.”

Graciella gave Petra a little finger wave and a smile. “Sorry for making you pass out. That’s a weird ability of the women in our line, and it’s been changing lately, for better or worse. I didn’t realize how much.”

Petra growled softly.

Graciella patted her head. “I’ll buy you ice cream or something to make up for it.”

“And on your other side is Leticia,” Lisa said.

“Hi!” Leticia said sunnily.

Sunny wolves were suspicious wolves. Petra side-eyed her. “Um. Hi?”

“We’re just here to keep you from running off into the night before you’ve had a chance to really understand what’s happening,” Lisa said.

“Far as I can see, I’m being held here against my will.”

“You can go,” Graciella said. “We hope you’ll stay, but like we said before, everyone here in Norseton
wants
to be here. This is a young pack. Adam’s building us up pretty much from scratch.”

“Bunch of rejects,” Leticia said with a chuckle.

“What do you mean?” Petra asked.

“Alpha and Mrs. Carbone had to leave their pack in New Jersey with their son and nephew because they were perceived to be a threat to the alpha there. While out traveling, they picked up a couple of other expelled, young, would-be alphas, and the six of them lived on the road for a long time, picking up odd jobs and doing security work. Then one day, they followed a lead here and got themselves permanent jobs. As soon as they got settled in, the men put out calls for mates. We’ve been collecting displaced wolves ever since. I guess that’s sort of our M.O.”

“Not a bad one to have, right?” Graciella asked. “Everyone in this pack is a little weird. You’ll see what I mean once you’re up and about. Hi, Paul.”

Paul?

“Hey,” came the low voice.

Oh, shit.
Petra groaned.

She couldn’t see the doctor who must have been in the doorway, and that meant he probably couldn’t see much of her, either. She was glad. Just making eye contact with the man put her in attack mode for some damn reason. She didn’t usually get so agitated around a stranger unless her instincts led her to believe they were going to attack first.

And he probably wasn’t going to attack her. She
knew
that. But she was wound up all the same.

“Came to do one last check before I head home for the night,” he said. “I may not be back tomorrow.”

“Why not?” Leticia asked.

Petra imagined Paul shrugging. He seemed like the smug, shrugging type.

“Probably won’t be necessary,” he said. “Is she awake?”

“Yes.” Leticia scooted to the left edge of the bed, freeing the tension on the covers and allowing Petra to sit up.

Since Petra seemed to be wearing pajamas and not just one of those dinky open-backed gowns, she sat up, too, and nearly passed out.

“Shit.” She slapped her hand down on the mattress when she swayed left and someone, probably Graciella, grabbed her arm and straightened her up.

“Go slow,” Graciella said. “You haven’t had a solid meal in forever, and you’re probably a little anemic. I think the hospital you were at had to give you blood.”

And people blood wasn’t wolf blood. Arnold may have been her twin, but they were obviously fraternal. They had incompatible blood types. He would have probably been happy to open a vein for her, but her O- didn’t like his B+.

“Still don’t even know what caused the wreck,” Petra said. She rubbed her eyes and then fixed them on the doctor in the doorway.

Jackass.

He just looked to her like the kind of man who thought he knew everything—high and mighty in his scrub pants and expensive-looking, gold-framed glasses.

She squinted at him.
Wait. Did he have those on before?
She could admit she’d been a little distracted the last time he’d been in the room, but she would have remembered him wearing glasses. She’d gotten a
damned
good look at him and his sea green eyes.

“You weren’t wearing glasses before. Could you even see what you were doing?”

He made some sound that
could
have been a laugh, but she wasn’t sure. He’d barely opened his mouth to make it. “Running gag around here. Curse of the contact lenses. One of mine always falls out at the worst possible time.”

“Have you looked into LASIK?” Lisa asked.

“
Mm-hmm
. My optometrist referred me to have the surgery done. There’s just the matter of getting the time off from work and driving into Albuquerque. Chris and I are the new guys at the hospital. We don’t have any seniority as far as vacation time scheduling goes.”

“Who’s Chris?” Petra found herself asking. Not that she cared at all, but sometimes when she lacked information, her mouth worked without the say-so of her brain and tried to acquire facts. Useless shit she didn’t need cluttering her mind.

“Chris was my roommate, but I moved out when his girlfriend, now wife, moved in.”

“You’re not still bitter about that, are you?” Lisa chuckled.

He grunted. “I wasn’t bitter. I like her. I was just surprised that things happened the way they did. Shocked the hell out of me.”

Leticia tossed the remote control onto the edge of the bed and bent. When she picked up her heel, Petra realized she was putting on her shoes.

Don’t go! Don’t leave me here with him.

“Where are you living now?” Graciella asked.

“Same building, just in a smaller unit. It’s not like I could ever actually get away from Chris. We lived together for too many years. We wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves if we weren’t bumping into each in hallways all the time.” Paul took Leticia’s former place at the bedside and leaned onto the edge, canting his head.

Ohhhh boy.
She felt like a socially inept specimen, and he was some cross between a Ken doll and a nearsighted Mel Gibson playing Mad Max. He probably hadn’t had a haircut since the last time Mel Gibson was on a movie poster.

And he was perfect-looking. She wanted to punch him right on his square jaw, but instead, her mouth started moving again.

“You don’t look very old for a doctor,” she blurted, and then looked away with shame burning her cheeks.

Like you’re so good at guessing, anyway.

If she stared at him a little longer, she might be able to make a good guess, but he was hard to look at. His gaze was too intense—threatening, maybe—and there was judgment laced into his raised chin and flaring nostrils.

He doesn’t like what he’s seeing? Well, right back at ya, dude.

“I’m assure you, I’m old enough,” he said. “I’ve probably got T-shirts older than you.”

“I doubt that,” she muttered.

She looked young, maybe, with her general lack of fat in places most women over eighteen had mounds. Puberty had been over for seven years, and she had barely any curves to show for it. That had likely been partly due to starvation when she and Arnold were on the road. Their mother had been a vibrant, voluptuous wolf. She didn’t know about her father—couldn’t remember him. He’d bounced when the going got tough, and she did the best she could not to think about him. That was why she didn’t claim his name.

She scoffed, and didn’t realize she had until everyone else in the room turned and stared at her.

She grimaced and cleared her throat.

Then her stomach growled.

Damn it.

“Good timing,” Leticia said. “I was going to go see if dinner was ready. Esther was cooking us something.”