2. Chapter 2
Micah
I stared out the windshield of Lee’s pickup truck, barely noticing the gorgeous Wyoming scenery.
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walked into mine… I could hear that line in Humphrey Bogart’s voice. Although in fairness, Lee wasn’t anything like a woman, and I’d walked into his town.
Lee… Pierce. I needed to use his current name.
The change was a useful reminder this wasn’t the boy I’d been connected to at the hip for my entire childhood.
Lee Waylan had been my other half for years, until one drunken night when we tested the theory that alcohol didn’t affect werewolves.
Turns out it did, if we drank it fast enough.
I didn’t have a clear memory of what I’d said or done that night.
My recollection was a heady glow of laughing and shouting, maybe wrestling, of talking about everything and nothing, with sip after sip out of the whiskey bottles until the foul taste became round and golden in my mouth and the world spun.
Then next morning, I woke next to Lee on the blankets we’d dragged to our favorite hideout, drenched in sweat, with a sour stomach and a foul, whiskey-tasting mouth.
I’d laughed and suggested a dip in the creek, ignoring the odd feeling of missing hours of my life.
We’d swum, and gone home, but nothing was quite the same between us after that.
Oh, we were friends, but that certainty of turning and finding him at my shoulder had changed.
I’d probably said something stupid when we were drunk. Maybe he’d been interested in Janet too, and I’d told him I was going to ask her out first. That was the best answer I’d come up with, because in the weeks and months that followed, nothing turned Lee cooler than me talking about Janet.
Then, after my wedding, when I was still high on the wonders of married life and sex, he petitioned to take a trip to Colorado to a trade show for logging equipment. Dad— our Alpha— said yes, except Lee mailed back a report and never came home.
He'd vanished. Dad said his pack-bond was still alive, the mental connection to his Alpha unbroken, showing Lee hadn’t died.
But when I asked about bringing him home, Dad said he wasn’t dragging an unwilling wolf back to his pack.
And yeah, the idea of me dragging an unwilling Lee anywhere was kind of laughable.
I started most of our adventures, led him into most of our trouble, but when Lee put on the brakes, he was immovable.
Now here he was, after all those years. Unmarried, when I’d spent odd moments here and there wondering what kind of woman he would choose, Janet having clearly been wrong for both of us.
Lone-wolfing, when I’d assumed he’d find a pack somewhere.
Lee’s kindness and loyalty and strength should’ve earned him a place among our kind.
The war, probably. That hellscape shook a lot of us loose from our lives and made it hard to find safe-harbor ever after.
“So what’s this job?” I asked to break the silence.
“Landscaping work for Mayor King. I’ve done most of it, but there’s a load of gravel to move and spread.” Lee grinned at me, his white smile flashing in his square, tanned face. “I hope you’re ready to use those muscles.”
“What, these?” I flexed my biceps. “Bring it on.”
An hour later, I was ready to take back my bravado. “Jeeze, this is work.” I pulled off my cap, swiped the sweat off my forehead with my wrist, and let the breeze cool my head. “You do this all the time?”
“Not really.” Lee paused where he was pushing another wheelbarrow-load of pea gravel.
“Lots of the stuff I do doesn’t take this much muscle.
Rehanging a door, for instance, or painting a shed.
This is as tough as it gets.” He braced his feet and threw his weight against the handles of the barrow, his muscles bulging.
I might’ve been pleased with the strength of my arms— years running as wolf for hours at a time had honed all four of my limbs.
But Lee? Those biceps and shoulders put mine to shame.
His thighs strained the fabric of his Levis.
I wondered how he’d look in fur these days.
Would his gray wolf, so gangly and lean when we were teens, have a matching bulk and power?
New blisters on my hands stung as I hefted my shovel, and I suddenly ached to run in fur.
The shift would heal the superficial pains and, with Lee at my side, I’d experience the thing that’d haunted my dreams through all my own lone-wolf years— that simple, perfect joy of running with a trusted packmate, matching strides, matching breath, the world a kaleidoscope of scents and sounds, the earth solid beneath our paws, our feet falling as one.
I want that with Lee. More than I want food or air…
Motivated to finish the job, I jogged over to where Lee was dumping the barrow and began shoveling the rocks, tossing and spreading them in a fairly even layer on the paths along the landscape beds. Dig, toss, scrape. Dig, toss, scrape.
I jumped when Lee grabbed my elbow, his touch hot on my skin.
“Pace yourself,” he said. “There’s plenty left to do.”
“Can we run tonight?” I asked.
His moss-colored eyes darkened, and a hint of gold told me his wolf liked that idea as much as I did. “For sure. If you haven’t tuckered yourself out.”
“Good point.” I slowed my efforts.
“How did you get into photography?” Lee shook the last gravel out of the barrow and held out a rake. “Here. You rake it smooth, I’ll shovel.”
“Not going to object to that.” I traded tools.
“Like so much else, it started in the Pacific, as the war was coming to an end. There were two journalists embedded on our ship, one a photographer. He entertained himself on quiet days taking pictures of the guys relaxing on the deck, and he taught me about lighting and aperture and so on. Took a shine to me. Then we took a hit from a Japanese Zero diving down out of the sun, mostly missed us but clipped a wing off on the railing. That hunk of plane slid across the deck and took out three men, and the photographer was one.”
“Tough times,” Lee murmured, not making a big deal out of his sympathy. We’d all lost too many friends.
“He’d left me his best camera, and after the war, I decided to see what I could do with it.”
“I figured you’d go home to the pack,” Lee noted, trundling the wheelbarrow back to the shrinking pile of gravel in the drive. “Even without Janet.”
“If Dad had lived, I would’ve. Or if Jonathan had. But Stanley was Alpha by then.”
“What happened to your father?” Lee asked. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me, but he was too old to enlist, surely. Did he get fake ID?”
“Logging accident,” I told Lee, trying to hide my bitter doubt at the words. “Dead tree came down on him.”
“You’re kidding me.” Lee set the barrow down to stare at me. “Alpha knew logging in and out, every inch of it, every kink of the chains, every creak of rotten heartwood, where to notch, where to place ropes. He was killed by a widowmaker?”
I shrugged. “So they said. Half of us were overseas fighting, including Jonathan.” I’d have trusted Dad’s Second, but he’d been young and fit enough to join the bitter fight.
“They were trying to get by with fewer men in the woods, trying to meet war demands on short deadlines. I don’t know.
Mom seemed to believe it.” But Mom had been easygoing to a fault and, with Dad gone, she had no real status in the pack.
“I wasn’t going to swear to Stanley, regardless. ”
“No.” Lee and I exchanged a glance that shared our dislike of Dad’s Third. A powerful wolf, a strong fighter, but lazy and a man I hadn’t trusted.
“What about you?” I asked him. “I expected you to find a pack to belong to. Did you try?”
For a second, Lee’s eyes held a heat I didn’t understand, but then he said, “No. Never went looking. There were a couple of other wolves in my platoon from a Texas pack, and we ran together a time or two in Europe, but they weren’t the type I wanted at my back once the Jerries stopped shooting at us. ”
“Didn’t you miss it, though?”
Lee stared at me, and I flushed. Of course he had. Just as I had. Wolves weren’t made to be alone.
Hell, I’d come within inches of accepting Stanley as my Alpha, just to fill that empty dark place in my head where my pack bonds were supposed to be.
I should’ve been able to close my eyes and see the threads of glowing light leading to my Alpha, my packmates.
I should’ve known when one of them was in danger, known when my alpha was angry with me, or pleased, by how it felt, without even looking.
When Dad died, my bonds ripped loose and went dark.
My head became such a lonely place, I’d almost let a bad man own me to fix that feeling.
And Lee had been a lone wolf a decade longer.
“Something led me here, to you,’ I said, starting to rake as he dumped fresh gravel out.
“I wonder if it wasn’t that, somehow. My wolf, reaching out for a pack and finding you.
” I glanced at Lee, figuring he might be pleased with that idea, but he scowled down at his work.
My pleasure at the thought died. Perhaps he was that rare wolf who didn’t want a pack at all.
We ate a simple lunch of bread and cheese, sitting on a stone wall under a tree near the mayor’s driveway.
My hands stung with popped blisters and Lee reached for my wrist. His touch on my skin resonated in an unfamiliar way, as if he’d run hot fingers over me from the inside.
My whole body liked that sensation, yearned toward it.
I guess I was starved for human contact.
Embarrassingly, even my groin responded and I raised one knee to hide the effect, twisting free of his grip before he could notice.
Deep down inside me, I felt my wolf lift his head, excited in his own way, searching. I told him, Shh. Just Lee. We’ll run as a pack tonight. My wolf settled, feeling pleased.