Call of the Wild (6 page)

As for this Alex character, he would make sure this “mate” of hers had what it took to protect her and keep her safe. And if he didn’t Aaron would do it for him. Because Laura had paid her dues, she would have a perfectly happy life. Aaron didn’t really care who he had to kill to make that happen.

Now that he had his head in the right place, he had a few questions for this guy. The two of them sure had gotten together fast, too fast. Laura was innocent. Hell, she’d never even had a boyfriend or gone on a date. By the time they reached Laura’s house, Aaron had worked up a good head of steam. He parked the SUV in Laura’s large garage; someone had left a door open for him. When he started up the broad path to the house, he noticed Greg was no longer with him. The other man had silently gone into the woods.

Aaron reached the door, it opened before he could knock. He looked around but didn’t see anyone.

“Are you going to come in or did you intend to stay outside?” asked a disembodied voice.

“Who said that?” he asked, stepping through. The door closed behind him.

“I’m Maggie House, the operating system for this domicile, Aaron Donahue. Your pulse and respiration have adjusted to normal levels. Would you like me to direct you to your quarters? Are you hungry?”

“I need to see my sister,” he interrupted. “And my father,” he added.

“They are in the gymnasium. Pass through the foyer to the hall, turn left and take the stairs down two levels. I will give you further instructions from there.”

Hmm, Laura has the house fully monitored. It makes sense, especially if she didn’t know her paralysis would be healed.
He also wondered about the security, though he knew better than to ask Maggie House.

Aaron followed the instructions, building a map in his head as he went along. He hadn’t really needed Greg to show him the way back to Laura’s. He’d learned over the years never to let anyone know all of his abilities. Laura had brains, no doubt about it. She was smarter than any of them had realized. He wasn’t the only one with secrets; the difference was—his often kept him alive. Most of the time, it was brains, not muscle, that led to success on his missions.

Down a hallway, then another shorter flight of stairs, he was directed to a set of double doors. Opening them, he stepped into a fully outfitted gym. He looked around until he spotted Laura working a weight machine under the supervision of what appeared to be a personal trainer or physical therapist. Their dad was sitting on a nearby weight bench idly doing curls with a free weight as they spoke.

As he walked closer to them, his dad looked up with a frown. “Is your head still stuck up your ass? Or are you ready to behave rationally?”

Aaron remembered that he and his dad were supposed to talk Laura into returning to the NSA. From what he could see, his father still had an agenda. Well there was no way a walking-in-the-sunshine Laura could return to Maryland—that surprise present wasn’t going back in the box.

“Yeah, went and saw Laura’s pack alpha, Marc Hunter, he was able to pull it out for me. Where are the guys?” Aaron asked, referring to his brothers.

Laura finished her reps and then picked up a water bottle. “They’re on the basketball court with Sasha playing a game of three on three.”

“Shit, a basketball court. Why did you put that in? And all of this other stuff, you’re better equipped than most fitness centers.”

Laura blushed. “It wasn’t all here when I first moved in, just stuff for me. I planned the basketball court and a lot of the free weights for you guys. I wanted to provide extra incentives for my family to visit.”

“And you wanted to show us you were dug in so we wouldn’t try to convince you to come home?” Aaron shrewdly guessed. Laura’s deeper blush gave him his answer.

Brushing that aside, she went on the attack. She’d learned that particular skill a long time ago. With six older and very overprotective brothers, it was the only hope she had of coming out ahead. “So, are you gonna tell me why you were such a butthead yesterday?”

Aaron hung his head for a minute. It wasn’t often his baby sister got one over on him. He could tell she was enjoying this. He hated to ruin her morning with a story of death and innocence lost. Unfortunately he was about to do just that.

“Yeah, but I’d rather only say it once. So we should bring the others in first.”

Doug Donahue knew his son. He knew this was going to be a revelation. He put down his free weight but before he could get up and leave his oldest and youngest children alone together, Joanne Walker, Laura’s therapist, offered to go and get them. Doug then remembered they could have just requested Maggie House to relay the message, so he nodded at Joanne appreciating her discretion and insight. She had been so quiet he’d forgotten she was there until she spoke.

“Hey, and if Marsha is watching the game, send her in too,” said Laura.

“Who’s Marsha?” asked Aaron. Doug gave his daughter a look and just shook his head and chuckled.

“You explain,” said Doug, waving a hand in her direction.

Picking up a towel, Laura wiped the sweat from her face to buy herself some time. She knew her brother was a player. He was thirty-seven years old and had never been in a serious relationship. Maybe he didn’t want to find his perfect match.

“Well, do you remember the large cougar following you around when you first arrived? Don’t you remember me introducing her to you?”

“Yeah, since the cat followed us up to the house, I figured it was a guard of some type. I don’t remember an introduction though.”

“You didn’t notice the way she rubbed up against you and practically crawled into your lap?”

“I did. I also noticed when it, I mean she, batted the back of my head.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ve heard about instant attraction. Shifters have heightened senses. They can literally scent when a person is a likely match. As I understand it, the better the smell, the closer the match. When I first arrived here, knowing so much about shifters, I was a possible threat. After I fell asleep, Mara grabbed some of my dirty laundry and cut it up. She basically mailed my scent overnight all over the U.S. trying to find a shifter husband for me. They could have just married me off to someone local, but they wanted to give me a shot at finding my soul mate.

“I ended up meeting Sasha for different reasons but it was a viable solution to the problem at the time. We didn’t know then that I was a changeling.”

Aaron was starting to get the idea of what she was saying. And there was all the purring, he remembered the purring. That almost constant rumbling under his hands had helped him keep it together. Before he could say anything, though, a door slammed open at the back of the gym. His brothers had arrived, just as noisy as they’d always been. The tall guy with them was Alex Marasov; they had been introduced yesterday. Marc Hunter had filled him in on the guy. He was the Supreme Alpha for North America, kind of like the shifter president. He looked young for having such an important position. Aaron planned to put the guy through the brother gauntlet anyway. From the way he and the others looked, his bros had already gotten a good start on it.

It was on the tip of his tongue, the snarky remark to his sister about her mate, when his attention was torn away to the woman who stepped out from behind Alex and was now walking beside him. Aaron was poleaxed, his world narrowed and his vision tunneled—lush, curvaceous, and mouthwateringly sexy, this was a woman he instantly wanted to know better. Aaron had never liked skinny women. He wanted to snuggle up to soft flesh and round curves. He appreciated an ass he could get a grip on.

Laura saw her brother’s attention lock on target and looked over to see what had snagged his attention. Ah, Marsha. She must have been watching the game after her own workout. It looked as if he were going to get an up close and personal experience with shifter pheromone attraction. She wouldn’t need to explain it anymore. She and her father exchanged a look and she gave him a smile and a nod.

Aaron didn’t notice—all he saw was the woman laughing at something his brother said. He wanted her to laugh again; she had a great one. She didn’t have some wimpy girlish giggle. Her head swayed back as she let out a laugh using her entire body. The movement of her head caused the ponytail at the back to swing around and he got a look at her hair. Blond, but not like his sister’s nearly white ashy blond. Hers was like a fall of honey. Damn, when it was down, it probably skimmed her ass cheeks. He suddenly pictured her naked with that hair,
damn
.

All of his man parts took notice, too. The sudden discomfort in his jeans and his automatic move to adjust himself broke his frozen stance. Still, he couldn’t take his eyes from the woman, even though he regained awareness of everyone else in the room.

They were closer now and Steven had spotted him. “Hey, bro, what cave did you crawl out of? You done with your hissy fit?”

“Why, did I miss the sleepover? Did you paint each other’s nails while you braided hair and ate s’mores?”

Of all his brothers, Aaron had the closest relationship with Steven. They were the two oldest, had shared a room growing up. They even went into the Army together and made Delta Force together. So even as they trash talked, Steven was taking a close look at his only
older
brother. He could see two things. The signs of strain left over from his outburst yesterday were still there. What he also saw was the beginnings of acceptance and peace. His brother was going to be fine, which was really good because Aaron’s reaction to Laura’s revelations yesterday had been way over the top.

Still, Steven could see Aaron had come to terms with whatever had caused his strong reaction yesterday afternoon.

What was really interesting, though, was the second thing Steven noticed, and that was the way he’d locked target on Marsha. Steven wondered if Aaron knew Marsha was the mountain lion he’d pissed off the day before. This was going to be really fun to watch.

Marsha Brady—and yes, she’d already heard every joke there was, thank you very much. Her name was the result of what happens after forty hours of labor. Her mom was still out cold when it came time to fill in the birth certificate. Then her dad had picked a name that sounded familiar. Especially after hours and hours of having his hands crushed and his manhood threatened for being the cause of so much agony!

Marsha was grateful to Steven for the distraction when she saw that Aaron had returned to his sister’s house. She needed a moment to get herself together. Even though every fiber of her body yearned for him, he had already proven to be a jerk and an ass. No way could he be her soul mate, she had a narrow escape. She wanted nothing to do with him.

Yeah, his scent hit and had a predictable instant effect on her girly parts. But to use a male idiom, she didn’t let her little head do the thinking. Meaning her clit in this instance, since her panties were growing damp and her clit was beating in time with her heart as it became swollen and needy.
Thump, thump, thump
.

Alex Marasov gave her a sympathetic look as he stepped over to his mate’s side. She knew he’d scented her arousal. Thank the Goddess the jerk couldn’t. Marsha took great pleasure in glaring at him when he tried to smile at her and then turned her back on him to smile at Laura.

Laura had been collecting information on shifters for years. Ever since she had discovered they actually existed. What she had also been gathering and analyzing was information on shifter enemies, The Society and the Shayatin. Marsha had come to Montana as one of the leaders of what was being called the SDL or Shifter Defense League. Go figure, Laura was a geek and loved Marvel comics.

When she needed to dampen jerk boy’s effect on her hormones, she simply went over some incident reports in her head. There, arousal gone. Now all she had to do was stay away from his panty drenching scent!

While she had been concentrating on work, Steven and Aaron had kept up their smack talk. She tuned back into the conversation in time to hear their father, Doug, interrupt his two sons.

“Alright, Aaron, you want to do this here?” Doug asked.

Aaron looked around. There was workout equipment but no real place for anyone to sit. He grabbed onto the excuse to delay spilling his guts. He also wanted to maneuver his way next to the gorgeous blonde. No one had introduced them. From her glare, he guessed she was really the shifter cat who’d sat on his lap only yesterday. She already knew about his bad reaction the day before. He was kicking himself now for making such a bad impression on a woman he wanted, no needed, to get closer to.

“This is going to be uncomfortable enough. We might as well be someplace where we can sit and get something to drink. I could use another cup of coffee,” said Aaron. They followed Laura from the room, because after all it was her house, her gigantic house, and they were still learning their way around.

“Maggie, would you ask Lola to bring refreshments to the man cave?” said Laura.

“Of course, dear, right away,” said a disembodied female voice with a British accent.

“I’m going to take a quick shower. Sasha can show you where to go,” Laura told her family.

“Are you sure you don’t need my help?” Alex asked her. Sasha was the Russian nickname for Alexander and he loved hearing Laura use it. Anything that underscored to her family that he was there to stay was a good thing.