While the Wolf's Away, page 10
“Okay, thanks.”
Then she took a deep breath, thinking she needed to move off him, but he held her in place, as if he didn’t want to release her no matter what. As if he felt she would vanish if she was in the bed next to him but not touching him like now.
“We’re courting, too. I’m taking you canoeing, if it’s something you want to do. We have an island and I can take you there,” David said.
She smiled. “I’d like that.”
“And the fair.”
“If you win me all kinds of prizes.”
He chuckled.
They lay in silence for a while, until Elizabeth realized he’d fallen asleep. She slipped off him, trying not to wake him even as she snuggled against him, her arm over his chest, a leg over one of his, claiming him for her own.
He was hers, even when they slept.
Chapter 11
David stirred, the sound of an owl hooting in a nearby tree disturbing his sleep. Elizabeth had rolled off him, but she was still snuggled against his body as if she were happy to be with him, right at home. Being with her like this was absolute bliss.
When David next awoke, Elizabeth was gone. He panicked, worried he’d only dreamed she’d been with him, like he’d done on numerous occasions since she had left him. But then he heard her talking softly to Sheri in the kitchen, smelled the coffee brewing, and realized they were just having some coffee before he got his lazy bones out of bed.
He stretched, then climbed out of bed and dressed in boxer briefs and shorts and headed for the kitchen.
“Well, good morning,” Sheri said, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. “We made the coffee and hot tea and were trying to decide on breakfast.”
David ran his hand over his stubbly chin, not quite awake. “I’ve got breakfast food, but I rarely eat it for breakfast—eggs, bacon—”
“And waffles and sausages in the freezer,” Elizabeth said.
“Okay, I’ll make it—” David said.
“No, you go shave and get ready for work. We’ll get breakfast ready.” Elizabeth kissed him, and he kissed her back.
What a way to wake up: first afraid that he’d only dreamed Elizabeth had truly been with him, then this—practically having breakfast in bed.
When he rejoined them, they had scrambled eggs and sausages, tea and coffee spread out on the table. David asked Sheri, “Did you contact your family to let them know you are all right?” He kept wanting to give her the time to do it without badgering her, but he wanted to know they weren’t worried about her safety.
“Yes. Sorry, I should have mentioned it already. I called my dad, since he can be more reasonable than my mom. Or, I should say, less emotional. He said he understood, and he wished me well.”
***
Elizabeth sipped some more of her tea. She was glad David had brought the topic up and hoped Sheri had also actually talked to her mom. “And your mom?”
“She was all upset, of course. But I told them we were going to become full-fledged private investigators and finally do something important with our lives. So what could she say to that? Of course she asked if I had met someone here, and I told her there were a lot of wolves and everyone was warm and welcoming, unlike our own pack. Anyway, they said I had to live my life and they hoped I was happy. They said they loved me no matter what.” Sheri’s eyes were shimmering with tears, and Elizabeth hurried to hug her.
“What about Kintail?” Elizabeth asked.
“He’s furious. You know him. But he hasn’t made any plans to come down here, as far as they know.” Sheri sipped some of her tea.
“And your brother?” David asked.
“I didn’t talk to him. I’m sure he’s furious with me because it puts the whole family in a bad light, at least as far as he’s concerned.”
“What about Bentley?” Elizabeth asked.
“He’s been texting me constantly.”
“Still? Why don’t you just block him?” Elizabeth’s brow furrowed. “You’re not still interested in him, are you? I guess I should have worded that differently. Are you still interested in having a relationship with Bentley?” She hadn’t meant her question to sound so derogatory. If Sheri was still entertaining the notion of mating with him, she needed to let everyone in their new pack know now. It would mean her returning to Yellowknife, to her pack, because there was no way in hell Bentley would come here. And Elizabeth didn’t want him to. He would only cause trouble.
Then again, Bentley was controlling, and if he thought he had a chance to take over a pack whose members were so newly turned, he might just make a stab at it.
“No. I’m not interested in Bentley any longer.” She sounded sincere about it, though Elizabeth wondered if Sheri saw Bentley again, if he might be able to convince her to take him back.
It’d certainly happened before.
“You really did end things with him, right?” Elizabeth couldn’t shake the feeling things weren’t quite as over as Sheri was making them out to be.
“Yeah. But you know how he is. He said I just wasn’t thinking clearly about the situation and I would come around. That I just needed some time off on my own. I told him I was taking some time off, but I wasn’t changing my mind about him. All he heard was I was taking some time off and then returning to him.” Sheri rolled her eyes and shrugged at the same time.
Elizabeth couldn’t be as blasé about it. “Did you tell your parents you broke things off?”
Sheri shook her head, albeit a bit sheepishly.
David had been listening quietly, but at her answer, he set down his fork and said, “Your parents have to know that if you have no plans to return to Yellowknife, you must have ended things with him.”
“I suppose. All right.” She grimaced as if she’d just been asked to swallow a bitter pill. “I’ll text my parents and let them know, if they didn’t figure it out already. It shouldn’t be that hard, right? I mean, I already broke the really bad news to them, so…”
Still, she looked uneasy.
They finished breakfast in tense silence, then cleaned up and headed over to the office.
“You’ll both need criminal justice degrees, and you’ll need to ‘intern’ for a private investigative agency,” David was explaining. “We’ve got you covered on that. We’ll train you, and there’s a great program at a college right here in Ely.”
“Sounds like a plan. It will be fun for us to do it together too.”
“Absolutely,” Sheri said.
Elizabeth asked, “Can we get some plants for the office?”
David smiled. “Yeah, sure. That would be nice.”
She pulled up an office supply website on her phone and showed him the desks she and Sheri had picked out that morning.
“Perfect.” David placed the order. “Looks like they’ll be in on Monday.”
Cameron arrived, and David asked him if he would help him move furniture around to accommodate the new desks.
“This is going to be great.” Sheri was helping move files around, and she suggested moving the file cabinet behind the receptionist desk. “It would make it easier to get to the filing and still answer the phone.”
Elizabeth carried some copier paper into the room where they had the workstation printer they all used. “I can reorganize your supplies in here.”
“You ladies are a godsend.” Gavin came out to help. “We’ve been too busy managing clients to really organize things better.”
“We’ll take care of it.” Elizabeth was glad to be able to offer any services that would lighten the guys’ workload.
Owen finished a call and helped the guys move furniture around to accommodate the new desks.
“We’ll need to get some more phone lines in—” Cameron said.
“I’ll take care of it,” Elizabeth said.
David got her the paperwork for the phone company they used.
***
Perfect. They could handle all the changes without the guys getting bogged down in all this, David thought. “I’ll give you the password to log in to the computers and set you and Sheri up as administrators. You can field calls for the time being.”
“All right.” The phone rang and Elizabeth grabbed up the receiver. “White Wolf Investigative Services, Elizabeth Alpine speaking. How may I direct your call?”
David smiled. Man, they could have used her here when they first set up shop.
“Yes, David Davis is right here.” She handed him the portable landline phone.
“This is David Davis. How may I help you?” He returned to his office and shut the door.
“Have you found my dad yet?”
David recognized the boy’s voice. Jimmy Warner. “Not yet.”
“But you’re looking, aren’t you?”
David tried to keep his voice even. It’d only been about twelve hours since they’d last spoken, but he understood what it meant to fear for someone you loved. “Yeah, still checking airlines, bus stations, train stations, hotels, hospitals, and police reports.” He didn’t usually give a detailed list of his procedures on a case, but to reassure the boy, he wanted him to know what he was doing.
“Okay, good. I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t forgotten about him,” Jimmy said, sounding broken up.
“I promise you, I won’t forget.” David had checked Mel’s phone too. It wouldn’t be the first time someone they were looking for purposely ignored calls from loved ones but picked up for random numbers. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with Mel. His phone went directly to voicemail. Either the box was full or the phone was dead. Either way, it wasn’t a great sign. The last location they’d had on it was only five miles from the house and then that was it.
“Okay, well, I know you gotta work and I don’t want to bug you all the time, but I just wanted to check to see if you were getting anywhere with the case.”
“Not yet, but we’ll keep looking. You hang in there, okay?” David ended the call with Jimmy, wishing he’d had better news. But it was damn early in the case, and he knew he’d barely scraped the surface.
He went back out to the reception area to see if Elizabeth and Sheri needed him to move anything else.
“A new case?” Elizabeth asked.
David shook his head. “Jimmy’s case. Pro bono.”
“Do you have many of these kinds of cases? Ones you do for free, I mean?”
“Every once in a while. We try to work in the ones we know we won’t get paid for if they have a legitimate case they need looking into, especially if the police suspect no foul play and won’t bother to help out. Those are the ones that fall through the cracks. He sounds close to his dad, so I want to do this for him.”
“You’re a good man. You know that, right?”
“I try to be, but I’m not always.” His brow creased, and he took her by her shoulders, pulling her gently but firmly into his office. “I don’t worry about getting my hands dirty when the situation calls for it. When I have to, I can take down the worst of them.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck. “That makes you well-rounded. I like that you can be both. As wolves, we can’t afford to be wishy-washy or cowardly.”
Then she kissed him.
***
Personality traits were genetic, and Elizabeth couldn’t imagine having little wolf pups with a wolf who was afraid of his own shadow. They needed to live with what they were and deal with it the best they could. Which made her think of the issue of having wolf pups with David. They wouldn’t have her full royal lineage. Which meant they wouldn’t be able to keep their human form on demand during the full moon. Though until they were older, they would shift only when she did—the benefit of their genetic makeup that protected their offspring from shifting as babies at their own whim and creating havoc.
She could imagine the danger that would put them in if she had twin babies and one of them shifted into a wolf pup while she and the other baby were in their human forms out in public, like at the grocery store. What a disaster that would be.
She had to laugh at herself. She was already thinking of what it would be like to have babies with David, but that was an important part of who they were—wolves who cherished their offspring and cherished each other.
They were still kissing when Owen came into the office. “I need to have Candice come in to see me more often while I’m working so I can kiss her like that.”
David and Elizabeth smiled at him.
Owen said, “We’re so glad you’re here. You should have heard all the times David talked about you. You were our heroine, Elizabeth. Candice even wrote about you in one of her books. She dedicated it to you, but we were afraid to contact you because of the issues we’d had with your pack.”
“Oh, how lovely. I can’t wait to read it. I have to admit I was afraid Kintail would learn where David and you were and try to force you to return to the pack.”
“Now they’re down two more pack members,” Owen said.
“Yeah, they’re probably not happy about it.”
“But they were basically keeping her a prisoner there, while shunning her at the same time. That’s no way for anyone to live,” David said, running his hand over her back in a loving caress.
She leaned into his touch, loving how genuinely affectionate he was with her.
“You didn’t deserve that. The pack leader should have realized David and the rest of our friends and I are together—a package deal. Cameron would have butted heads with Kintail all the time, if he’d forced him to join his pack too,” Owen said.
“I don’t think everyone wanted to ostracize me, but they didn’t want to say so in front of the ones loyal to our pack leader. And others did see me as a traitor for doing what I did.” Elizabeth smiled. “But I’m here now and that is in the past.”
Owen said, “True. So did I ever tell you about how David saved my life when we were on the police force in Seattle?” Owen was clearly trying to prove how loyal and protective his friend was. Not that she didn’t already know that.
“She doesn’t want to hear it,” David said, looking embarrassed.
Sheri stuck her head in the open door. “I want to hear it.”
“Me too,” Elizabeth added, laughing.
“Two to one. Sorry, David,” Owen said, encouraged by their interest, though she suspected he hadn’t needed the encouragement and was going to tell them regardless. He gave David a hardy clap on the shoulder. “So, long story short, this guy pushed me out of the way when an armed robber made a dash out of a jewelry store and fired a couple of rounds at me. David took the bullet and was in the hospital for three days.”
“Is that why you left the police force?” Elizabeth asked, both proud of David and scared for him, even though it was years after the fact.
“No, we had been with the police force for several years. We didn’t want to leave Seattle, so we formed the private investigator service.”
“Well, I hope working as a PI is less dangerous than being a police officer,” she said.
“Sometimes. Sometimes we’ve had some dangerous jobs to go on, when we didn’t even realize they would be,” Owen said.
Elizabeth and Sheri were looking forward to any adventure they could sign up for.
Chapter 12
Early the next morning, David stood on his back patio, steps from the woods and the lake. A fussy breeze whipped around him, but he didn’t notice. The moon was still visible in the growing light of day, a near perfect circle in the softly lit sky. Elizabeth and Sheri were still fast asleep, unaware of the growing urge inside him to turn wolf. He knew he couldn’t hide it from Elizabeth, but he wasn’t ready to share this part of him, this lack of control, with her. Not yet.
This was going to be the hard part. Showing the women his more vulnerable side. His inability to keep his human form. He’d gone through this with Elizabeth in the beginning, much worse than it was now. But the whole situation was different back then. They weren’t on the run any longer, and this was a way of life for him. He wasn’t sure she could live comfortably with a mate who had shifting issues, a partner who couldn’t hold his human form for at least three days during the full-moon phase and couldn’t turn into a wolf to run with her during the new moon.
And their children would have the same issues. Maybe not as bad as David and his partners, and Faith and Candice, since they had been human when turned. At least their children would have one parent who was a royal wolf. But still, if Sheri and Elizabeth found mates who were royals, too, someone like Slade even, those kids wouldn’t suffer the same fate.
It was getting better, though, he thought, as he stripped out of his clothes, trying to stay quiet. He needed to get in to work, and he hoped a run in the early morning hours could knock this out of his system for the day, maybe, and then he could shift again after work tonight. In the early days, he didn’t have any choice. He just shifted when the urge came on, and he couldn’t stop it. And couldn’t return to his human form on command either.
It wasn’t like that anymore. Usually. He did have some control now. Just not enough.
David shifted, his body warming as he landed on all fours. His ears perked, and in the distance he heard Owen Nottingham and his mate, Candice, barge through the wolf door of their home. Candice always ran with Owen, even if she didn’t need to. That’s what mated wolves did for each other.
Gavin went out next. Amelia and Slade probably had flights they had to take out, so neither was with him.
David’s paws padded silently across the patio, then with a leap, he dashed into the woods, dirt churning, trees going by in a blur as he tracked the scent of his pack. It was instinctive now, his ability to find his pack, his family, so he wouldn’t have to be alone.
