Leader of the Pack (17 page)

Rissa’s exasperation was baffling to Aislinn.
Just one more thing I’ll have to figure out,
she thought. Then something occurred to her,
wolves, rub scent in faces?
“Uh, you don’t mean that literally do you,” she asked.

Rissa’s amused smile grew impossibly wide. “
What
literally?”

Aislinn cleared her throat. “The scent rubbing in faces part.”

The other women present smiled and chuckled a bit, but for the most part the question was taken far too seriously for Aislinn’s comfort. “Why? Where did he put his scent?” Rissa responded with a sparkle in her eyes that told Aislinn she had just said something far more interesting than she should have.

“Okay, Rissa, speaking as friends,” Aislinn said, and Rissa nodded confidentially then moved in closer. “I don’t have any idea what’s normal around here. Think in human standards, which you seem to be familiar with, and then put me in your context. I don’t really understand most of this. The mating ceremony, okay I kinda caught it in the middle. All the innuendo about what I should and shouldn’t have managed to do around here is a little lost on me. Why don’t you give me a couple hints about what you
really
are looking for me to tell you and maybe we can get on the same page.”

Rissa took that as an invitation to get the dirt she was looking for one way or another. At least if she gave enough details that humans shouldn’t know, and which might shock Aislinn, then she might find something out. “Well if you missed the beginning of the mating ceremony, then you missed the part where everyone would have presented themselves to Lord Arnauk. If you caught the middle then you know how that goes. The end would involve,” she grinned as though this was the important part, “well, it’s kinda like dogs. They’d shift to either their hybrid forms or their wolf forms. You ever watch the discovery channel?”

“Again with the discovery channel,” Aislinn said in exasperation. She was more than a little shocked by the frank way Rissa was putting it, and from the look on Aislinn’s face Rissa figured that whatever happened upstairs probably wasn’t as good as she had originally thought if this info was new to Aislinn. Rissa figured that Lord Arnauk must have remained in his human form for whatever happened at least. “You can’t be serious. You’re just trying to mess with me now,” Aislinn said angrily.

But the raised eyebrows on everyone’s faces at her reaction had Aislinn feeling as though she had just said something relatively racist. “Nope, I’m not kidding,” Rissa said with disappointment. She wasn’t offended. She was just upset that she wasn’t going to find out anything good. “A lycan in a form other than human will behave more animal than you’re probably used to. And his,” Rissa thought for a moment before coming up with an appropriate word, “genitalia will behave more like his wolf than human. They would have shifted, if all the assassination stuff hadn’t interrupted things. He would have mounted her, swelled inside her while they had sex, they’d have gotten stuck together. He’d come inside her, and bite her hard enough to scar her. When they were finished the rest of us would have acknowledged what had happened while they were joined together. They’d be stuck like that for most of the rest of the night. If things were planned right, it would happen while she was in heat so that she’d end up pregnant as a result. Mating accomplished. Then usually the new couple disappears for a week or so to get it out of their system. The wolf does tend to get riled up when it claims a mate. And really that’s the watered down version. Lord Arnauk never got past the human form part though. Really, they didn’t come anywhere near finishing things. To some extent they never really even got started.” Rissa grinned. “Then he came back here and took you to bed.”

Aislinn was speechless. Her brain was trying to grasp what Rissa had just told her. Rissa continued in the silence. “But the men around here, especially Lord Arnauk refrain from any number of things if they aren’t serious about a woman. Take Lord Arnauk for example.” Rissa thought she’d approach things a little differently. She figured that there really wasn’t any way all of the mating stuff had happened, but everyone knew Lord Arnauk’s normal habits. If he had taken her up to his room, there had to be more to it than the two of them just having a nap in his bed. There was so much of his scent on her that she could almost be mistaken for him. And from the smell of things she had a shower before she came down. “Lord Arnauk never takes women to his room. He almost never takes all his clothes off. He tends to like women who are strong, intelligent, and show as few signs of remaining interested in him as possible. He never sleeps with the same woman twice in a row. He tends to make it short and sweet, with as little affection in it as he can manage. He’s always on top, usually with the woman on her hands and knees regardless of the form he’s in. And probably the most important thing is that he never marks women. He’ll come on the floor before on a woman if he can help it. He never comes inside a woman. And if he does accidentally get some on someone he sends her to the showers immediately.”

Aislinn couldn’t believe how much Rissa seemed to know about Cullen’s bedroom habits. She held herself in check.
Different cultures
, she reassured herself.
“So do you know details about the sex life of everyone around here? Or have you experienced him first hand?”

Rissa saw the hurt look on Aislinn’s face and realized she might have gone too far. Besides, her tactics didn’t seem to be working. “No, Ais, I’ve never been with Lord Arnauk. He’d never lie with a theta,” she said with a guilty tone. “But we do tend to be relatively open about this stuff. I could take you down the hall and show you a room where people who’ve gotten bored with waiting have started to entertain themselves in the mean time. We don’t hide sex the way humans do. I mean we’ve all seen him with the women he beds. Like I said, he doesn’t tend to take it private. That’s why we’re all so curious about you. It looks a lot more serious than he tends to get.”

Aislinn nodded and bit her lip. On the list of things that Cullen supposedly didn’t do, she’d managed to break the standard on more than half of them. Something about that brought a secretive smile to her face that had Rissa’s curiosity back in full swing. Given what he’d said to her in the shower, she really didn’t think she had the right to hold his past against him.
I guess maybe I shouldn’t be too bothered by what she’s saying. If this is the way they are at least I’m finding out before he wants to bend me over in the middle of the great room. God, he might want to bend me over in the middle of the great room. I guess we’ll see if he wants me again. I mean it’s not like I’m in love with him right? I mean right now we’re just having a little fun. Right? No need to get panicky or jealous or bothered by the way things are around here.
At the same time, something about the idea of being ‘mounted’ made Aislinn a little heated.

In the brief silence, a woman who had been standing off against a wall and just listening stepped in. “Perhaps she has nothing to tell.” The woman was one of the stand outs from before. She had three other women with her. She was the angry one while the others looked amused. She would have been easy to spot one way or another. She was blonde with green eyes in a room full of dark hair and brown eyes.

Rissa shifted uncomfortably. “Aislinn, this is Meredith.” Aislinn smiled at the woman, but didn’t respond.

“Perhaps,” Meredith reiterated. “Lord Arnauk took her up to his room for some reason other than what everyone is assuming, and the girl has nothing to tell.”

“He gave her the key to the penthouse Meredith,” Rissa defended.

“So he’s protecting her for some reason. That doesn’t mean he’s fucking her.” Meredith walked over to the seating area. She looked down her nose at one of the women in a chair across from Aislinn, and the woman did the head nod thing, jumped up from the chair, and allowed Meredith to have it.

Aislinn couldn’t help the amused scoff and eye roll that followed. She had no intention of falling into a who-fucked-Cullen-better argument with this woman. Besides, from what Rissa had said, Aislinn was fairly confident that she’d win hands down. Just knowing that gave her a little more confidence in dealing with this bitch.
Bitch,
Aislinn smiled,
oddly appropriate.

Meredith tilted her head in a superior fashion so that she could look down on everyone even from her sitting position. “I’ll ignore that seeing as you’re probably ignorant of the way things work around here, this time. But for future reference little one, I’m a beta. That means that everyone less than that gets out of my way when I want. You don’t have any rank at all.”

Aislinn caught the implication, but was not about to bow to this woman. She’d lost just about everything over the last seven years, except her pride, and she wasn’t going to give that up now. Aislinn met the woman’s gaze dead on as she talked. “I don’t think that I’ll be giving up my seat to you. But thanks for the warning just the same.” Rissa gave Aislinn a warning look. Her eyes were like saucers and a little scared.

Aislinn’s comment dropped the smile from Meredith’s face. “I don’t think you realize what you’re dealing with here, little one.”

Aislinn ignored Meredith and looked over at Rissa questioningly. “Okay that’s several times I’ve been called ‘little one.’ Is that supposed to be an insult?”

Rissa swallowed and looked over at Meredith who was now fuming. “Yeah, uh, you are a little petite to be much of a threat to anyone Ais. Meredith is a beta.”

Aislinn heard the warning in Rissa’s voice. But she just didn’t feel threatened here. For seven years she had been warned ahead of time if she was in danger. She had yet to get any warnings about this place or these people. Not to mention, they had no idea what she was capable of. “Big things come in small packages,” she answered Rissa, and then looked back over at Meredith. “Did you want something? Or are you just in the habit of interrupting conversations you’re not invited to?”

Meredith sat forward in her chair. “You must be pretty confident in your abilities to think you can speak to me like this and not have to worry about retribution.”

“I guess you could say that,” Aislinn answered. “Or you could say that it’s hard for me to not be amused by the fact that someone so grand and mighty as you seems to be threatened by little old me. If you were confident in your position, you wouldn’t be bothering to try and find out who or what I am. You’d have moved on with your life, believing that no one like me could get in the way of whatever you had going on with Cullen. I’m guessing that you must not be that important around here or you’d be in that meeting that Cullen called. So no, I’m not all that worried about you. It doesn’t add up in a way that would make me.”

Rissa couldn’t believe what she was listening to. She had to admit that she didn’t really know much about Aislinn. She knew that Aislinn had been nice and had learned her job quickly at the Taigh-O

sda. She knew that Lord Arnauk had shown some favoritism toward Aislinn from the beginning, and there were rumors that he had gotten her the job in the first place. Rissa knew that Aislinn had a weird scent, and she didn’t think that Aislinn was human, even though that was the way she talked. But if she wasn’t human Rissa didn’t know what she might be. She had never actually had a personal conversation with Aislinn beyond the random chat in the break room or while waiting tables. This was definitely not something she had expected. She just hoped that Aislinn could back up what she was saying. Rissa certainly didn’t think that Aislinn looked capable of it.

Meredith’s eyes virtually bulged out of her head. “Have you no respect for Lord Arnauk? You’ve no right to use his name.”

Aislinn looked over at Rissa, who was wincing a bit and looking at her as though Meredith was right. But Rissa was keeping her mouth shut on this one. “Well,” Aislinn said, “he told me to use his name. What? You slept with him and you never earned the privilege?”

Rissa leaned in conspiratorially. “You didn’t tell me you could use his name.”

Aislinn shrugged. “What’s the big deal?”

“No one but a few of the elders get to call Lord Arnauk anything other than Lord Arnauk or General. He’s the alpha Aislinn,” she said as if Aislinn had missed something very important about the word alpha.

“Okay, but I’m new at this. I don’t get all the rules here. I just do what he told me to do. He’s never once told me to not call him Cullen. Frankly if I slept with someone,” she added looking at Meredith incredulously, “and he didn’t let me use his first name, I wouldn’t be continuing to sleep with him, whatever he was.”

Meredith couldn’t take the condescending tone any longer. “That’s enough. If you don’t adjust your attitude, then his scent that still clings to you won’t be enough to keep me from teaching you a lesson about pack etiquette.”

Aislinn shook her head. “You don’t intimidate me. Either do what you think you want to do or go away.”

At that Meredith began growling. Aislinn just continued to glare at her sharply. With no warning Meredith shifted into her hybrid form, and then leaped at Aislinn where she sat. Aislinn only had a second to contemplate the change she saw with fascination before the woman was on top of her. Rissa barely managed to get out of the way as Meredith grabbed hold of Aislinn on the couch. The force of the attack caused the couch to vault backward and both women went rolling to the floor. A circle cleared around them in the room.
Great,
Aislinn thought,
Cullen tells me to avoid fighting, and the first thing I do is get into a fight.

With that thought in mind Aislinn used the momentum from the roll off the couch to continue the roll until she was on top of Meredith. The shocked lycan pushed Aislinn off, and then got to her feet turning to continue the attack. Aislinn was on her feet as well. Faster than any of the people in the room expected, Aislinn launched her own attack. Meredith was thrown completely off guard as the smaller woman began a volley of punches and kicks that quickly had her backed against the wall.