Chapter Six
Diesel
Carver and Aries told me that any time I wanted to step back from being the brawn of our pack and club, I could.
I’d never cared about it before. My wolf had a sense about people. He could smell creepy intentions. Any night I took door duty, no trouble occurred on the property.
But I couldn’t work every night, and sometimes I wanted to be inside.
The thought of paperwork and sitting at a desk made me want to crawl out of my skin, but there were times I felt on the outside, and not just physically.
Plus, until very recently, I enjoyed the attention from the females who came in. Most flirted. Some outright offered themselves to me. Touched my muscles. Fawned. Sighed. Smiled. Batted their eyelashes.
My wolf and I soaked it up. Maybe me more than my wolf, but he wasn’t opposed to pretty females spending time with us.
Then Josie stumbled into my life, eyes wide, looking like a lost deer. She came with nothing. Even the clothes she wore held a different female scent. My beast and I wanted to wrap her up, carry her home, and take care of her, keep her safe from whatever made her startle so easily.
The three of us had created hypotheses about her fears but they were just that, theories. Until we heard the explanation from her, it was all we had to go on.
We took care of her from afar. Thea provided for some of her needs by proxy, and we brought her food and claimed it was from a meeting or someone had ordered too much. We got the look from her, the one that told us she knew we were making it up, but Josie scarfed down the food all the same.
I itched to go back to the other side of this club, the one where no one entered.
For some reason, Carver wanted to keep the laundromat attached to the club.
It made good money, for what it was, but it was a strange setup.
A laundromat attached to a somewhat underground para club/bar and a motel.
I think my pack brother kept the laundromat and the motel for nostalgia at first. His grandfather ran those businesses. But it worked for us.
And we wanted a way to help people. The money from the club and the laundromat funded the motel, and that shelter was our way of contributing to the community. It wasn’t much, but it was important, more to me than the rest.
My mother died at the hand of my father.
He abused her when I was small, and I tried to stop him, get in his way, stick up for my mom, but I’d always been too small.
Too weak. I left the pack one summer to go to a camp for shifters and got a call only a few days after arriving that she was gone. He’d killed her in a fit of rage.
If I had been there, maybe it wouldn’t have happened, and I would live with that guilt for the rest of my life.
That was when I got strong. Started lifting weights. Working on myself. The alpha of our pack executed my father according to pack rules, but I swore that I would never allow a female to get hurt again if I could prevent it.
Now, my build served me and apparently drew in the females.
A soft hand grabbed my biceps while I was checking an ID. “I bet you could pick me up with one hand.” I turned to see a wolf shifter woman wearing leather pants so tight, everyone would know why no panty line showed.
“I’m sure I could. ID?” I checked her license and let her in.
She rose on her toes and whispered in my ear, “Come find me if you want to find out for sure, big guy.”
“No, thanks. Have a good time in there.”
Tara, her name from the ID, huffed and went inside after rolling her eyes.
“I’m going to the other side. Take over, Jake.”
The other bouncer took my place. Inside, the music was loud and there were people laughing and dancing. I loved the club we’d built, but there were days when I longed for quiet. Slow days on the couch, homemade meals, peace.
For the last few days, those fantasies included being cuddled up on the couch with our mate. Cooking for her. Watching movies or just sitting together.
I made my way to the storage room that separated the club from the laundromat and found Carver and Aries both there.
We had it bad.
“Something up?” Aries asked, turning slightly away from the two-way mirror. Josie had all our attention.
“No. Needed a break.”
Carver was sitting on my stool. I pushed him off, making him chuckle. “You know,” he said, “I’ve noticed something the last few days.”
“What have you noticed?” I took the bait knowing it was going to hook me into some bullshit. Carver and I thrived on razzing each other.
“Every girl I’ve seen hit on you since Josie arrived has been turned away. Last night you physically removed a girl’s hand from your chest.”
I snorted. “So?”
He shrugged. “So nothing. Just an observation.”
“She’s ours. All that ended the moment she walked in.”
Aries offered me a fist bump and Carver sighed.
“She’s doing well in there,” Aries offered. “I don’t know how to approach her. She zips around the place like slowing down would end her. I wonder what’s going on in that head of hers.”
He wasn’t the only one. What I wouldn’t give to know how our female ticked and do my best to get rid of anything that bothered her. Except Carver. He was probably going to drive her nuts, but he was pack and she belonged to all of us.
I planned on rescuing her from his nonsense as often as needed.