Seer: Reckless Desires (Norseton Wolves Book 8) (8 page)

Probably, no one would have been as surprised as Arnold that he actually believed what he was saying. For ten years, he and Petra had banded together against the dog-eat-dog world and had, maybe, more than a little derision toward “normal” people. He was becoming one of those normal-enough people, and he didn’t want any other wolf to ever have to suffer the alternative.

“I want that for Kinzy,” Leo said after a minute. She pinned her gaze on the television once more, then with a final shake of her head, poised her pen over her notepad and looked to Paul. “How do I find a lawyer?”

“I know one in Norseton who’d probably be interested in the case. I’ll get you his number after lunch.”

“Make the appointment,” Arnold said to her. “I’ll go with you.”

She nodded slowly, not meeting his gaze, but that was all right with him. At least they were on speaking terms.

“’Kay. What do you want to eat?”

Four days later, Kinzy clutched to Arnold’s shirt as if he were a long-lost friend she’d been deprived of, and made cooing noises at him.

Leo sighed, crossed her legs at the knees in front of the absent lawyer’s desk, and shook her head at Arnold.

“What?”

“You’d think she gets neglected all day for how clingy she is. I happen to know the ladies in the co-op hold her pretty much nonstop.”

“Maybe that’s all it is. One warm body means pretty much the same to her.”

“I doubt that,” Leo muttered.

Kinzy put her head back and blew a raspberry at the ceiling.

“She’s getting heavy.” Arnold bounced her on her little perch on his forearm.

Kinzy opened her mouth and showed him all her gums in a smile.

“’Lil pork chop. Always wants to nurse. Keeps me up half the night. I think she’s hitting another one of those growth spurts, but who the heck can tell with wolves? The baby books say infants are supposed to have them at certain times, but Christina and Ashley both said to ignore those charts. They’re either earlier or later, depending on what’s developing.”

“Lot of up and down at night, huh? Getting up to feed her?”

“Nah. She still sleeps in my bed, mostly, so she pretty much just rolls over and latches on.”

At Arnold’s raised eyebrow, Leo pointed a finger at him in warning. “Don’t even say it.”

“Say what?”

“Don’t tell me how dangerous co-sleeping is and that I’m gonna roll over on my baby in my sleep and suffocate her. I read enough of that fearmongering on the Internet. I’ve been
trying
to transition her to the crib.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything. I think most of the women in my birthpack co-slept. They didn’t really have a choice, though. Limited space, and no money for fancy gadgets you attach to the bedside. My mother would never confirm it, but I think one of the reasons my father left was because he didn’t have enough room on the bed.”

Leo snorted, imagining what that picture must have looked like. A no-nonsense lady werewolf, two babies, and a very tired, frustrated, non-wolf father in a cramped bedroom.

She reached over and patted down a wild flap of Kinzy’s hair. “I miss her whenever I try to get her to sleep in her crib, and I think the vibes from my pitiful guilt are what keeps waking her up. She can feel them from way down the hallway.”

Arnold didn’t say anything, but his silences were generally eloquent enough. That moment was no exception. He kept bouncing Kinzy on his arm and cut Leo a sideways look.

Before she could ask him what she’d done to deserve this stink-face, the secretary pushed the door in and smiled warmly at her. “He’s coming now. He got hung up on some business for the queen that turned out to be more urgent than expected.”

“Oh, well, for goodness sake, tell him not to rush.”

“He’s done. I promise. He can wait a little while to follow up with her now that the task is done. Do you mind if his paralegal sits in? She’d be the one slinging most of the paperwork around, but if you’re not comfortable—”

“No, that’s fine. She’s Afótama, right? She knows we’re not random humans from outside of Norseton?”

The secretary made a waffling gesture with her hand. “Not Afótama, but close enough. Suffice it to say, she’s had years of experience keeping her mouth shut about things that require discretion.” She pushed away from the doorway, and said, “Here they are now.”

The lawyer stepped in first looking very un-lawyerly with his untucked button-up shirt, wrinkled slacks, and untied dress shoes.

The woman who stepped in with him, though—there was nothing unkempt about her.

For the first time since Leo had arrived in Norseton, her brain automatically associated the woman with what she would have been called a thousand years ago:
Viking
.

She had the fearsome blonde thing down pat. Leo may have been a victim of fair coloring that the Norseton sun didn’t smile kindly upon, but the lady took blonde up a notch. Her hair was so fair that it was nearly white, her eyes the palest blue Leo had ever seen, she had to be nearly as tall as Arnold, and on top of all that, she looked to have a Marilyn Monroe figure beneath her two-piece suit. Further, she had a perfect bronze tan that set off a pair of killer dimples.

Leo might have noticed the lawyer sticking his hand out to shake if she hadn’t been glowering at the smiling bombshell beside the desk.

“You okay, Leo?” Arnold asked.

She turned her head slowly toward her companion and suppressed the unusual compulsion to suck her teeth. That wasn’t one of Leo’s tics—it was one of Leticia’s. Whenever Leticia was minutely pissed at something or someone, she sucked her teeth. Leo’s inner wolf must have picked up the useless habit.

He furrowed his brow, and then canted his head toward the attorney. “He was introducing himself. That’s Sheldon Dent.”

Leo closed her eyes and gave her head a slight shake before opening her eyes again. “Sorry. Had a rough night last night, and my brain’s about as useful as a pitchfork with one tine. I’m Leonora Banks.” She shook his hand.

“Nice to meet ya,” Sheldon said. He sidled around his desk and gestured toward The Blonde.

Leo expected him to introduce her as “Gretel” or “Freya,” or something like that.

“That’s Mary.”

“
Mary
?” Leo slapped a hand over her mouth. She hadn’t
meant
to sound so accusatory. The name just didn’t fit.

Mary laughed quietly and pulled a chair over to Sheldon’s desk. “Long story, and not even an interesting one. Let’s just say that my parents disagreed on what I should be named, and I have a very long string of middle names as a result.”

Sheldon slid his glasses up his nose and pushed away some of the papers piled on his desk in front of him. “Mary’s been with us for about six weeks. She grew up in our sister group in Nevada, and had been working in Vegas for the past five years. She wanted the opportunity to work for Tess, and here she is.”

“Yep, here I am,” she said sunnily. “Trying to get my family out here, too, but they may never leave Fallon.”

“No wonder I hadn’t seen her,” Leo muttered. There was no way in hell she would have missed a lady like that, strutting around town like a Viking supermodel.

At least she’s wearing clothes.

Leo crossed her arms over her chest to hide the screen-printed kitten on her T-shirt. The ladies in the pack had agreed the shirt was cute, and they’d actually let her walk out of the store with the thing. She wasn’t feeling so cute all of a sudden, not with the way Arnold kept peeking up at Mary, and Mary kept pulling her red lips into a smile at him.

Leo sucked her teeth again, and naturally, everyone in the room turned to look at her.

She chuckled nervously and made a
go-on
gesture. “So, I guess you know about my case?”

Sheldon grunted. “Sounds like a pretty interesting situation. I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t want to take it on. Before we get started, though, are you comfortable enough having him here?” He indicated Arnold. “Is he a friend, or…”

Arnold scoffed and muttered something under his breath that not even Leo could catch with her wolf’s sense of hearing.

“Speak up a little, why dontcha?” Leo said through clenched teeth.

He narrowed his eyes at her. “You don’t want that.”

“Are you a couple?” Mary asked. “That would either complicate some things, or simplify them.”

“Yes,” Leo said.

The word came out at the exact same time that Arnold said, “No.”

Leo’s inner wolf wanted to claw her way out of Leo’s skin and swipe the guy right across his pretty jaw.

“Ohhh-kay.
Which
?” Sheldon asked.

Arnold let out a breath. “This isn’t what you want to hear, probably, but it’s complicated.”

Sheldon sputtered his lips and leaned back in his chair. “Explain the situation to me in a way that a guy who’s missed lunch would understand.”

“He’s my mate,” Leo said.

“Oh, I
am
now?” Arnold asked.

“You bit me. Remember? Have the rules changed in the past couple of months? I know I’ve been busy, but I figure someone might have passed along the news so I could behave accordingly.”

“Rules haven’t changed. Only your concession of them.”

“Oh, boy,” Sheldon said. “I said, ‘explain in a way a guy who’s missed lunch would understand.’ Remember?”

Arnold rolled his eyes and fixed his gaze on the ceiling, lips tightly clamped.

Apparently, he was leaving all the explaining up to Leo.

Ass.

She sighed, and turned her knees back toward the desk. “A lady wolf generally becomes the mate of the guy who bites her. His bite overrode my hu—” The word “husband” caught in her throat and made the taste in her mouth go sour.

Bleh
.

She swallowed hard and searched her brain for an alternative. “Uh.
Samuel
. Arnold’s bite overrode Samuel’s, so I carry Arnold’s scent, I guess. I can’t exactly smell myself to make sure, but that’s what all the ladies who aren’t Petra say. He bit me when we were both in our wolf forms, so while our wolves may recognize each other as a couple, the people halves of us—are…”

She glanced over at Arnold, and he was giving her that wicked side-eyed look again.

Help me out here, guy.

He kept his lips zipped.

Thanks a lot.

She sighed and batted a hand through her ponytail. “Still working some things out.”

“Ugh.” Sheldon winced. “Give me something I can actually put on record. Not that this would sound any better, but are you cohabiting?”

“Nope,” she and Arnold said in unison.

“Are you in a committed,
stable
relationship, at least?”

Neither answered.

Leo didn’t think there
was
a good answer.

“Come on, kids. Give me something,” Sheldon said.

After a few seconds’ pause, Arnold opened his mouth and said, “True mates almost always mate for life.”

True mates…

She turned toward him, gripping the armrest as if for dear life. It wasn’t like she was going to fall out of her chair, but her head and belly didn’t seem to know the difference. She would have thought she was falling, given how off-tilt she felt. “Is that what you think we are?”

He tipped the hand that had been on Kinzy’s back in a gesture Leo read as,
That’s my opinion
.

“Huh,” Sheldon said. “Well, I can’t write that down anywhere, either.”

“We’ll have to play with the language a bit,” Mary said, “but the gist is that Arnold is likely to be a continual influence in Kinzy’s life.”

“I’d say that’s accurate,” Arnold said.

Leo was glad he’d said it, because she didn’t have any words at all, about anything. She suspected that whatever came out of her mouth would be indistinguishable from gibberish.

Most of the ladies in the pack had gotten used to Leo’s particular brand of gibberish and knew how to translate it for the most part, but she needed to try harder for the people in that office. They didn’t know her.
Arnold
didn’t know her.

She ran her tongue across her dry lips and straightened up a bit in her seat. “Um. Yes. Kinzy adores him, for whatever reason.”

“For whatever reason, Leo?
Really
? You don’t think that, maybe, she recognizes my scent as a comforting one? Or the sound of my voice? I’m not a stranger to
her
, even if you insist on making me one to you.”

“So this is all my fault?”

Mary pointed her pen at Arnold, obviously unaffected by Leo’s tart tone. “You’d adopt her?”

Arnold shrugged. “Sure. I don’t see why not.”

Mary jotted down notes.

Leo tapped her foot impatiently and glowered at Arnold. Fortunately for him, he wasn’t looking. He was making little waves in Kinzy’s hair with his breath.

“You could certainly stave off some problems if you actually
did
get married,” Sheldon said. “I mean, legally. Your illustrious ex may contest the legitimacy of the union, but unless he’s gonna cough up some valid paperwork showing he got there first, he can’t really publicly state that you’ve stepped out on him.”

Leo cut Arnold a sideways look to see what he thought about Sheldon’s proposal.

Leo had no particular drive to be married. But then again, she wasn’t really
avoiding
the institution, either. Her and Samuel’s union hadn’t been a typical one. They hadn’t lived together most of the time. She ran her little household on her own, and spent most of her days alone until Kinzy was born.

She had different responsibilities in Norseton, though. She had a job that people gave her money to do, and she liked watching the balance tick higher and higher in Kinzy’s little college fund. She had friends who forced her out of the house to do things—
fun
things—and she didn’t need to get anyone’s permission before she went
.
There was no one giving her flack about how she’d styled her hair immodestly, or how she was drawing too much attention to herself.

Life was good.

Life was also really
hard
in a lot of ways. Finding personal balance had never been her forte, and she’d never had a good shot at practicing it before.

She fiddled with the strap of her purse and looked from Sheldon, to Mary—who was raising a querying eyebrow at her—to Arnold.

I could marry him.

She’d marry him just to get him off the market before some pretty young wolf moved to Norseton and snapped him up. Or even a pretty young Viking who smiled too easily.

Leo didn’t care if that was petty of her. Just because she didn’t necessarily want to be under some man’s thumb didn’t mean she didn’t want to have a say in who got him.

She cleared her throat and straightened up a bit. “I’m sure wolves have gotten married for far less noble reasons.”

Arnold didn’t say anything, but Leo didn’t particularly want to look and see what he was doing with his face. He wore his opinions too openly in his expressions.

“Clerk’s office is open until five,” Sheldon said. “You can get a license today if you’ve got all the right records, and then see if your alpha will do the honors for you. He’s licensed to marry people. He’s done it for some non-wolves, too. Can’t beat his rates. Last ceremony he did, he only charged the groom a tank of gas.”