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“What’s that like?Is he, like, your assistant?Or is more like he’s the Vice President?”
She chuckled.“Somewhere in between.He’s…he’s like the Hand of the King.”
“You watched GOT?”
“Micah got me into it.Every Alpha-Beta relationship is a little different, of course, because of the personalities involved, but the Beta is supposed to support the Alpha’s goals and protect their interests.Practically, that means that Dominic helped me run the resort after my husband died.He’s head chef at the restaurant.He’s my closest advisor.He’s my…” She picked up some papers, shuffled them, put them down again.“He’s my partner.”
“Sounds nice,” I said
“Most of the time,” she said.“Tell me about you.You said you work at Johns Hopkins?”
“Yes, I specialize in internal medicine.I did my undergrad at Florida State at my medical degree at Columbia.”
“So you’ve lived all over, then.”
“Yes.”Since she already knew about my father, I gave her the slightly more personal version of my history.“My mom left my dad just after I was born and we moved back to Tallahassee, where she was from.She was a nurse, and she took a lot of travel contracts because the money was better.But that meant we moved around a lot, mostly in the South.Texas, Louisiana, Georgia.We’re pretty close, since most of the time it was just the two of us.”
“Do you still live near her?”
“Yes, she settled in Baltimore when I got the job there.She’s very invested in my career,” I said, thinking that was an understatement.“She saw the doctors in the hospitals where she worked, and she knew they made better money and got more respect while doing less work than she did.She wanted that for me.”
“Is that what you wanted for yourself?”
“Of course.”Even as I said it, I wondered how true it was.“I love medicine.I love untangling the knot of someone’s illness.I can’t always help, and that’s the hard part.And in a hospital like Johns Hopkins, I don’t get to spend a lot of time with individual patients.Most of the people I work with move to another department once they get their diagnosis.”
“It sounds stressful.”
“It is,” I said.If I was in Baltimore, I would have claimed to thrive on stress.Here, I could admit that the clamp of anxiety I’d been wearing on my shoulders for years had finally loosened.“I didn’t realize how stressful until I came here.”
“This isn’t stressful?”Melinda asked with a grin.
“Well, this is a new and different flavor of stress,” I said, returning her smile.“I’ve mostly gotten over the fear that you all were going to eat me.”
“Humans don’t make for a very good meal.”I gaped at her until she laughed.“I’m kidding.I’ve never eaten a human.But some of my ancestors were hungrier and less picky, so I’ve heard stories.”
“Okay.Apparently, I have not gotten over that fear,” I said, making her laugh again.“Really, the hardest part is figuring out what I’m going to say to my mom.She thinks I’m torpedoing my career.She’s worried that I’m having some sort of nervous breakdown, just like my father.”
“Yes, but your father was right, wasn’t he?”
“Was he?”I asked the question rhetorically, but then I realized she might actually be able to answer.“He always claimed he saw a shifter somewhere near here when he and my mother were camping.This is when she was pregnant with me.My father claimed he heard wolves outside the tent, and when he peeked out he watched one of them transform from a wolf to a man.”
“That would have been during the previous Alpha’s reign,” Melinda said coolly.“The first rule I made when I became Alpha was that no one was ever to transform in the presence of a human.And I secured our land, so that trespassing campers don’t see something they shouldn’t.”
“But he saw it?”
“Most likely,” she said with a shrug.“Twisted Pines was pretty wild back then.”
I blew out a breath.“I wish I could tell my mother that.But she probably wouldn’t believe me.She’d probably take it as more evidence that I’m cracking up.”
“Isn’t it exhausting to have people worry about you?You saw what the boys are like.”
“Do you like having all your sons so close?”
“Oh, I suppose it’s another one of those shifter things.Oh, you can use the pot in the cabinet, and the little tea ball thing is—yes, exactly,” she said when I held up the metal contraption.“Because of our nature, our families stay close.There’s not a lot of places where we’re free to be ourselves.”
“So…no one ever leaves?”
“No, they do.Some kids have go off to college, but only if they have good control of their wolves.Some people move from one clan to another.That’s what I did.But it’s hard.Most of us choose to stay with our own kind,” she said, blowing steam off her cup of tea.
