Scout: Reckless Desires (Norseton Wolves Book 7) (9 page)

Nadia put up her hands. “Wait. I think this is where we’re gonna have an impasse.” She looked to Petra. “He couldn’t possibly know that. Maybe it’s instinctual to you, but he doesn’t have a wolf’s instincts. He has Afótama instincts.”

Queenie cleared her throat and muttered through the fingers she held over her mouth, “We’re usually pretty clingy with our matches, too.”

Paul groaned.
Thanks a lot, Queenie
.

“He’s fighting the pull,” Petra said, and she seemed to be truly hurt by the idea that he’d avoid her.

He
didn’t
want to avoid her. He just needed to make sure they both knew what they were getting into. He wasn’t an easy person to live with. He was a dick. If anyone would want to leave the relationship, the runner would probably be
her
.

“He doesn’t want to be with me. That’s why he’s trying so hard to buck it, but I—” Her knees wobbled beneath her, and Nadia grabbed her by the arms.

“Whoa,” Petra said after a gasp.

Paul took a step forward to take Petra, but she waved them both away.

“I’m all right.” She held up her hands as if to dissuade anyone from getting closer, but she couldn’t get another word out.

Her legs faltered again and face froze in some pained expression as a croak sounded in her throat. He didn’t understand what was happening until the trembles started.

He barely managed to get in front of her before she crumbled to the sidewalk.

A seizure.

He scooped her up and headed straight back to the hospital with her, Queenie and Nadia at his back.

“That’s why you totaled your truck, isn’t it?” he whispered into Petra’s hair.

“What?” she asked sleepily.

“Never mind. Hold tight.”

Arnold seemed a little less bony than usual. On the very regular occasions when Petra had to share a bed with her brother, she tended to wake with bruised ribs and shins. He had pointy elbows and knees.

Must have put on some weight in the past week.

Eyes still closed, she patted down his chest and poked at his leg with her big toe.

She didn’t remember him being that wide.

And he didn’t smell quite right.

She sucked in some air through her nose and itemized the notes of the scent.

Not wolf.

Viking
.

Vikings smelled like too much coffee, wood, and leather, for some reason.

She withdrew her hand and opened one eye.

Paul chuckled. “I was wondering where you were going to put that hand next.”

She sat up too quickly, head spinning like a merry-go-round fueled by Pixy Stix and speed.

She tipped backward, but thanks to Paul putting an arm up behind her, she didn’t crack her skull on the headboard.

“What happened?” she asked.

The last thing she remembered was arguing with him on the sidewalk downtown. Somehow, she’d gotten back to her room.

A glance downward confirmed she was in the same clothes, so she couldn’t have slept too long. At least, she didn’t
smell
like she’d slept all that long.

“Careful.” He leaned her back so her spine was against the headboard and pulled his arm away. Then he tossed the book he’d been reading onto the nightstand at his right and folded his hands atop his belly. “I’ll call Adam and let him know you’re awake. He told me to let him know first thing, but take a minute to get your bearings before I do.”

“What happened?” she repeated. Him not having immediately responded wasn’t a good thing, in her estimation.

“I think you had a seizure. Your temperature was through the roof, probably from your body working so hard to heal itself, but I can’t be sure. Your physiology isn’t quite like that of anyone else I’ve ever treated.”

She suspected that healing probably wasn’t the only reason she was running a fever. The mate bite likely had a little something to do with that, too. She’d felt the flaring heat in her body before she’d gone to sleep and knew with an unusual certainty that
he’d
caused it…or rather, what she’d told him to do. She wished her mother had been around to explain things to her when she’d come of age. She hated feeling like she was stumbling her way through life. Things were easier for Arnold.

“A seizure…” she whispered, staring as his socked feet at the end of the bed.

“Got you a second opinion. He also thought that’s what happened, but he’s going to call in a specialist. They’ll likely want to do some tests on you, and hopefully soon. Most of the medical practitioners here are generalists, so we have to call outsiders in to treat specific conditions. Hard sometimes to find folks who will be as discreet as we need them to be, but we’ve got a pretty good referral list.”

“You gonna find me a werewolf brain doctor?”

“Nah. No need. We’ll just tap into our network of psychic friends.”

She snorted, in spite of herself. In spite of how
pissed
she was at him.

But she didn’t know what else she could do. When he’d said “seizure,” she’d taken the news with her usual stoic bracing, but the longer the word sat at the forefront of her mind, the more frightened she became.

Why me? And why now?

She turned to him, tangling the covers around her body and swatting them away with impatience. “Is there something in my head? A tumor, or—”

“
Shhh
. No, no. Don’t worry about that. We got you into a CT machine after you blacked out. No signs of tumors. There are a lot of reasons people could have seizures.” He flipped his phone in the air, easily catching it again and again without looking. “Some people have predilections for them and they just don’t become apparent until there’s some precipitating factor.”

“Am I going to die?”

He chuckled.

“Don’t laugh at me. Don’t treat me like I’m stupid.”

“I’m not. I’m laughing because I know how pissed you’re going to be when someone suggests that you shouldn’t drive anymore.”

She rolled over onto her hands and knees and pounced at him, but apparently Viking reflexes were better than wolf reflexes—at least at the moment—and he caught her by the shoulders before she could sic teeth, claws, or anything else into him.

“See what I mean?” he whispered.

“Put me down.”

“Are you going to behave yourself?”

She scoffed, but
did
retract her fangs.

He still didn’t put her down. He held her up at arm’s length as if she were a rag doll he wanted to examine from a distance.

“Are you going to be nice?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“Awesome. You and my mother will get on swimmingly, I bet. She’s very territorial. And opinionated.”

Petra squirmed in his iron-strong grip and kicked her legs a bit beneath her.

He clucked his tongue and narrowed his eyes. “She likes to tell people everything they’re doing wrong. She maintains a written list of all my deficiencies. Recites items from it every time I walk home.”

“Well, at least you have a mother.”

“Yep. I’m grateful she exists. She’s a good woman, if a bit tactless, but she’s persistent in the way Afótama mothers are. She’s already figured out something’s not quite right with the web around me. She’s been texting me endlessly for the past three hours, which is impressive, seeing as how dawn is approaching. She’s normally in bed by nine.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.” She squirmed again. Her neck was starting to hurt from being held up at that angle away from him, and if she let her head loll, she wouldn’t be able to keep staring him down.

Not that he seemed all that affected by her stare, anyway. He wasn’t afraid of her. In the past ten years, she’d gotten used to men quickly backing away immediately after approaching. She was very good at making herself seem like she wasn’t worth their effort.

Paul was putting in a lot of effort, but he hadn’t indicated that he thought she was worth it yet.

“You sure you weren’t the one raised by wolves?” she muttered.

He grunted. “Actually, my mother is incredibly uptight, and my father doesn’t talk about anything except stock prices and baseball scores. You may not agree that I am, but they’re perfectly civilized.”

She sighed, finally gave up, and let her head loll. She couldn’t keep straining her neck. “Put me down, Paul. My neck hurts.”

“Okay.” He lowered her atop his chest and patted her head. “Better?”

“No.” She closed her eyes and inhaled. “I want coffee now. You smell like coffee.”

“I imagine most doctors do, and I imagine the scent is preferable to disinfectant or several other alternatives that could get transferred onto a person during a long shift.”

She knew about some of those scents. They’d clung in her memory long after her mother had died in the hospital, all sickly and frail. A woman laid low by an aggressive illness not even a wolf of their strong line could fight. The doctors said it was cancer, but cancer may as well have been black magic for how quickly it spread.

Petra feared that one day, she’d be the one in a hospital bed whispering instructions to whoever was left to give a damn about how to handle her remains.

She closed her eyes and tried to push the thought away with happier ones. That usually worked, but for once, it didn’t. She couldn’t shake the feeling—the dread and hopelessness she’d felt as a girl about how much worse her life would get after her mother passed. Life hadn’t been all that great when she was living, but at least they were together.

“Hey,” Paul whispered. “You’re sad. Why are you sad?”

Stinking psychics.

She shook her head against his chest and successfully chased away morbid thoughts with curiosity. There were still so many questions she needed answered, and the answers would spark more questions. If she didn’t have time to think, she wouldn’t go back to that dark place in her past.

“How long did you have to go to school to be a doctor?” she asked. “I dropped out at fourteen. I feel bad about that.”

Probably thinks I’m an idiot.

“I don’t think you’re stupid. Undereducated? Maybe. Not the same thing.”

“Get out of my head.”

He let out a breath and rubbed the middle of her back.

She was like putty under his touch. Her body felt like it was melting into his. Werewolf frosting on top of a Viking cake.

She sighed and wished he didn’t feel so good. She’d be able to roll off him and go seize the day or some such shit if he didn’t.

“I had four years of college,” he said, still rubbing. “Three years of med school. Then I held a residency at a hospital for several years.”

“Here?”

“No. I lived outside the community from the time I turned eighteen up until last year. For the most part, we don’t stray far from the community.”

“Why is that?”

“We’re psychically knit to each other by Queen Tess and all the queens who came before her. Being closer to the group will always make us more comfortable than being away. What helped me not to feel so restless, though, was that Chris was going through all the same paces at the same time. We went to the same university, the same med school, and even did our residencies at the same hospital.”

“You came back at the same time?”

“Yeah. At this point, I can’t remember who brought up the idea of us coming home, but as soon as one of us did, the other knew he’d have to go, too. Certainly, we could have survived without the other. Afótama are living out in the wider world now, but I’m sure they all feel the urge to come home.”

“
Home
…” She tasted the word in her mouth. Let the magic of it thrum through her. Like some sort of trigger, the word “home” sent soothing vibrations through her whole body, starting at the ear pressed to his chest, down to her toes.

She curled her fingers into the fabric of his shirt. Clung to him, really. She didn’t want to get off.

She didn’t know if that was typical mated wolf clinginess or if she was just needy and broken. Either way, she was having a hard time convincing herself to move. She’d never had a mate before, and he felt nice—like he stood between her and everything that was wrong with the world.

“I never feel like that,” she said after a few minutes of kneading him like a cat. “Like I want to go home, I mean. Except on the anniversary of my mother’s death. That’s the only time I want to go back to Oklahoma. Maybe Arnold and I left too early, and that if we’d stayed longer, I’d feel differently. But I’m not used to thinking of any place as home.”

“And now you’ve been given one.”

“Yeah, and I don’t understand that. These folks don’t even know us.”

“They’re trying to grow their pack. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, from Adam’s perspective.”

“What do they get from taking in two wild wolves? And where the hell is Arnold, anyway?” She tried to sit up, and regretted moving the moment she did. She’d felt like a rubber band had stretched and nearly popped in her chest, and whatever the sensation was, Paul must have felt it, too, because he winced.

“Just be still for a bit,” he said. “That should stop in time.”

“What was that?”

“Afótama shit. Autonomic response to you moving.”

“Speak English.”

He chuckled and smoothed down her hair in the back and massaged downward from her uncovered neck. “Just a reflex. You moved, my brain didn’t like that, and my heart stuttered a little. That’s all.”

“Then why did I feel it?”

“Like I said. Afótama shit. We connect to our partners in different ways, but folks in most fated couples tend to knit psychically into each other. Of course, most Afótama pair off with other Afótama, so I’m not exactly sure how this is supposed to work.”

“You don’t think it’s supposed to work at all.”

“I never said that. If anything, I said that I was surprised that I had a match. I’m not exactly the easiest man for women to get along with.”

“’Cause you’re so damned unapproachable?”

“Pot, meet kettle.”

She blew a raspberry of protest, but she wasn’t ready to let the subject drop. She sat up a little, enough to prop her chin atop his chest, and stared at his jaw. That was easier than meeting the intensity of his gaze. “What’s supposed to happen now? You say I’m attached to you on this—psychic web thing?”

“
Mm-hmm
. Anyone close to me would know something’s different. Some will figure out why more quickly than others. Obviously, Queen Tess and all the folks in her tier of magic have already worked out the change. And my parents. And Chris, because we know each other so well. He’d be one of the first to notice that my buzz on the web was a little different.”

“Do they care that I’m not like you?”

“No.”

“Do
you
?”

He didn’t answer. His hand stilled on her neck.

She brushed it away and tried to scramble off him for good, but his other arm clamped down over the small of her back and kept her pinned.

“Be
still
,” he hissed.

“No. You’re just tolerating me right now, and fuck that. I’m not gonna be that chick.”

“I assure you that I’m doing a little more than tolerating you right now.”

He pressed her down even harder against him and arced his hips upward.

Hard steel probed between her thighs and his rapid heartbeat pounded in her ears.

“Give a man some time to think before he talks,” he whispered. “If you jump to conclusions about me, you’ll find yourself angry every time.”

He slid his hands down her back to her ass and cupped it, tugged her up higher, evidently so he could better see her face.

“You want to think I’m pushing you away, don’t you?” he asked. “If things go wrong, you want everything to be my fault. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I’m not the easiest man to get to know, but what about you, huh? You want me to be your mate, but at the same time, you don’t want to tell me anything. You’ve got to tell me things.”

“What’s the point if you’re going to run away?”