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Jobe had no scent.
Everyone had a scent so Wesley breathed in again, sure his worn-out body had simply missed the obvious. But while he had no trouble scenting the items in the room, bits of the fresh trees, moss, and earth wafting in through the walls, and even traces of others who previously had been in the space, he detected no scent from the shifter in front of him. He wanted to ask how it was possible for a shifter to smell like nothing, but he knew how much he resented being the subject of uncomfortable questions and not so subtle whispers because of his physical anomaly.
It had struck Wesley as odd that Brian Berger liked Jobe enough to spend his last night in Red River with him, yet he hadn’t been willing to be his mate, even though it would mean leading his mysteriously prosperous home pack. But Wesley knew better than anyone that shifters didn’t deal well with oddities so he now suspected that Brian had been unwilling to connect himself in even a fabricated way to a man with Jobe’s idiosyncrasies and abnormality, despite his being the Alpha’s heir. Maybe Jobe would eventually broach the topic of his scent, and in the meantime, Wesley would get a handle on what the shifters for whom he was now responsible needed.
“Does, uh, Mother Nature provide for the pack in a particular way?” Wesley asked, forcing himself to focus on their conversation rather than on Jobe’s lack of scent.
“We live entirely off our land.”
“You mean you grow your own food? Like the herbs and fruit trees you mentioned.”
“Yes.” Jobe nodded. “Our food grows on our land, both plants and animals. Generations ago, our people built an irrigation system to transfer water from our river into our homes and over time, we’ve modernized the filtration process. We have panels on our rooftops that collect enough energy from the sun to support our homes and our shops. And for anything we want to buy from the outside, we use the money earned from our oil and gold operations.”
Blinking, Wesley processed everything Jobe had said. His description of Red River was an incongruous combination of an environmentalist’s dream and a capitalist’s fantasy.
“This land has gold and oil?”
“Currently, yes,” Jobe said with a dip of his head.
“Currently?”
“The form of our blessings has changed over time, but not the source.”
After taking a moment to consider Jobe’s words, Wesley said, “The source is the land and the form is gold and oil, but it used to be something else?”
“That’s right. The minerals and gems don’t always stay the same. During my grandparents’ youth, for example, Mother Nature provided diamonds.”
When his uncle had pushed Wesley to attend college, the reason had been to put space between himself and the pack with the hope that they’d then accept him more easily. Because his pack didn’t need him to learn a specific trade, he had used the time to study a subject that intrigued him: environmental engineering. While he hadn’t been able to apply his knowledge to his work at Purple Sky, he had remained interested in the topic, so over the years, he had kept up with the field through journal subscriptions and internet articles. A relatively small area that produced diamonds, gold, oil, and, if he was understanding Jobe correctly, sundry other riches, was unheard of. It was also desirable to the level of being dangerous. If others, whether shifters or humans, knew of the wealth in the Red River territory, the pack surely would face endless challengers.
“We keep to ourselves, both with our bodies and our information. Nobody in Red River will tell an outsider about our customs or our land.”
Jobe’s ability to discern his unspoken concern surprised Wesley less than the man’s easy willingness to share the potentially dangerous and, up until then, well-guarded secret with a person he had known for less than an hour. That, more than anything else, showed him his standing in Red River, or at a minimum, his standing with the Alpha’s son. Either way, he felt more respected and valued in that moment than he had at any time during the thirty-three years he had devoted to Purple Sky.
Relieved and grateful, Wesley released some of the anger and resentment he had been carrying since the day his uncle told him he would be leaving his home. Also for the first time since that moment, he thought about the other person directly impacted by his arrival at Red River.
“Let me ask you something,” Wesley said, focusing on Jobe’s face. He waved his hand back and forth between them. “Does this bother you?”
A flicker of hesitation crossed Jobe’s face and Wesley was again struck by a flash of familiarity. “Does what bother me?”
“As an Alpha, my duty is to protect my pack, but why did you agreed to…” Even with his uncle’s explanation, he didn’t understand how two shifters could mate, as if it was an act or decision rather than a description of a fated connection. But belittling a tradition Red River clearly valued wouldn’t endear him to the shifters he would be leading, so Wesley decided against finishing his question even though he very much wanted to know what Jobe thought about being tied to another man, to him, in Red River’s version of a mating.
