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“Titus?” Benny said quietly. “You kick that rock?”
“Sure did,” he said without turning around. “I gave it a kick and made sure she could see me do it. Not my first rodeo, boss.”
“Why?”
“She saw to my needs last night,” Titus said. “Made me shift when I was too messed up to know I should. Cleaned me up, fed me by hand. I owe that gal. It was the least I could do.”
Benny watched him as he continued on to the pickup. Well, that was interesting. He looked at the others. “So whose turn is it for guard duty?”
And slowly the men sorted them themselves out. Benny glanced after his brother and his mate and shook his head. He wished he had cell service. No one was going to believe this. He considered opening his link with Abby, but he’d tamped it down because he thought she might need to claim distance from what happened out here. And that hadn’t changed just because he had good gossip he was badly wanted to share.
Chapter 6
Ryder was running flatout and he was still having a hard time catching up with Jessie. Where did she go? She’d gone up the hill to the flat mesa above them, but it was amazing how difficult it was to spot a wolf among the sagebrush and rocks.
His wolf huffed. And Ryder caught a whiff of dumbass. No, he said firmly. That wasn’t going to be his wolf’s third vocabulary word. Benny’s words had a way of doing that. His last foray with the club had resulted in ‘don’t be a stupid shit’ becoming pack lingo. Ryder wasn’t sure Benny hadn’t been behind the ‘on it, boss’ phrase either.
Benny’s stories had become more powerful too. He needed to catch up on what exactly Benny had been up to these last few months. Last he’d heard, he was a fitness coach at some resort! Ryder was willing to bet it had been something more devious than that. Probably their father was behind it, too.
Go to Alaska for six months, and the whole world blows up. He shook his head.
But right now, he needed to find Jessie.
His wolf huffed again: mate.
Oh. OK, so he was a dumbass, he conceded, and focused on the link. There. And the path forward had a rightness to it. He gave more control to his wolf, and his wolf ran faster.
Mate. His wolf said again.
Yes, Ryder agreed. Really, how could he argue it? Mate.
They ran flat out across the sagebrush flats.
There, Ryder thought, spying the gray-and-brown wolf—perfect colors to disappear among the sagebrush. He, on the other hand, was a dark brown wolf, better suited for the pine woods of the Okanogan. He probably stuck out like a sore thumb here —more bear-like than anything else. Well there were black bears in this region, although not in this habitat. He was much too large to be mistaken for a real wolf. Still, humans thought real wolves were larger than they really were. He wondered if some shifter had managed that misinformation campaign generations back.
But his own people, the Colvilles, had shifters in their pantheon. Coyote, of course, was famous, but there were others too. A lot of the tribes, indigenous to this land, carefully looked away from the things that went bump in the night.
