5. Cash
Cash
I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping on their conversation.
Frankly, it wasn’t any of my business what they wanted to do in the future.
Grant had marked Aleks his heir, which made as much sense as anything he’d done, as Aleks was Reeve’s son and Grant’s nephew. I didn’t know what had happened to make Grant decide to forego a mate or sons of his own, but at the very least, I was glad to have Katya back with us.
Her presence made Wildwood feel more like home, even if she’d left it long before I had.
And her sons were . . . well, they weren’t anything like I’d expected when I’d first seen them in Grant’s home with all his other goons.
I was twelve when Katya took her son and left the pack to return to Russia, and what little I remembered of Aleks from before they’d left was that he was a frightened child with enormous, doleful blue eyes.
It’d made me uncomfortable when he looked at me, not because he was the alpha’s son, but because there were truths and horrors behind those eyes that I couldn’t fathom or face knowing full well that there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to help him.
Leo was a year older than Aleks, and as much as Katya claimed him as her own, he hadn’t been born to her. Their missing brother was his twin, but that was all they’d said and I didn’t ask for more.
The point was, I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping on Aleks’s conversation with his brother. They were speculating on the future of the pack, but there was no way I’d have any part in the decision-making. I could do manual labor, but that was about as central to anything as I’d ever be.
I had no business speculating what we might build where, or where Dad’s house might fit into the configuration so he was most comfortable, or what kind of house Aleks might like.
Definitely not, because there’d be space for him in Katya’s home, and having any curiosity about him was sure to only bring me trouble.
But I’d been lost in the clouds, the drone of the chainsaw allowing my thoughts to wander toward what might be next. Surely Aleks would be a better alpha than Grant or Reeve had been. I didn’t know him well and hadn’t known him long, but that much was obvious.
I was thinking about building a whole new settlement when Aleks crashed into me with every bit of velocity and power a werewolf of his size could squeeze out. We went flying through the air, his arms wrapped tight around me, and hit the ground a second later, wheezing.
My gummed-up brain barely registered the groan of the falling tree or the crash a moment later, but when the ground shook with the force of it, my stomach twisted into a tight knot.
A tree had fallen, and my dumb ass had been in the way of it.
Aleks had saved my life.
Dumbfounded and panting, I stared up at him. A lock of his golden hair had fallen across his sweaty forehead, and his bright blue eyes were swimming with fear.
It wasn’t a look I was used to seeing on a wolf like him—big and strong and unwilling to show any weakness.
While we’d been working, he’d taken off his shirt and thrown it over a branch. At the time, I definitely hadn’t stared. Hadn’t noticed his perfect flat abs, or how well-formed his pecs were, all dense with muscle and golden from the sun.
He held his shoulders back and his chin up, and his smile when he laughed with Leo made my heart stop.
He looked like one of those men in the ads for underwear, the ones with mostly naked men walking around dramatically in front of a storm. Or like a statue, just carved perfection.
He was only twenty, and a werewolf, and looking back, I’d known other wolves like that—Jax and Seth and Kent, before they’d left—who’d grown up so staggeringly perfect that it was hard to stand beside them without feeling like you’d come up short.
Even harder to lay under them.
No, really, harder. Because every bit of my blood had gotten all shaken around by the forces at work on my body when he’d sent us flying, and now it didn’t know where to go, but it was going in the wrong direction.
I absolutely could not get hard pinned under the future alpha and Grant’s heir, who was a full eight years younger than me and already twice the wolf I’d ever be.
But then he was patting me down, looking me over, and my cock ached worse than my back where it’d hit the ground.
I squirmed, adjusting my leg so that maybe I could hide it from him. For a few seconds, all we could do was stare into each other’s eyes.
Then he reminded me that a tree had been falling at me.
A tree!
Oh fuck, and my mistake had sent him careening toward getting flattened. Aleks might outrank me in every way that mattered, but right then, it was my responsibility to keep him safe. I was the one with experience on a jobsite.
I gripped his shoulders hard, the muscle barely giving beneath my tight fingers.
“I’m so sorry,” I rasped, panicked. “I’m so sorry.
I wasn’t paying attention, but I should’ve been.
I know better. I do. I put you in danger, and I’m—I won’t.
I won’t drift off like that again, I swear. I didn’t mean to—”
Aleks’s hand closed over my cheek. His thumb brushed beneath my eye, and his brow puckered—not like he was mad, but like—
Did he feel sorry for me?
At least that meant he probably hadn’t noticed my boner, though anxiety was doing a damn good job of shutting that down.
I bit both my lips shut between my teeth and went perfectly still beneath him.
What was I supposed to make of this? Nobody’s ever just .
. . touched my face. The steady stroke of his thumb might’ve been soothing, but I didn’t trust myself to understand what he meant.
Rather than risk thinking anything, I shut down and waited, tense and nervous.
“It is fine, Cash,” Aleks said softly. “You are fine.”
I couldn’t tell if that was a question or a statement, so I nodded. “I’m okay.”
Leo, with his earmuffs around his shoulders, had turned off the chainsaw, set it down, and come over to us. He held out a hand to help Aleks up, then offered it to me as well, pulling with his full strength so I went from basically flat on my back to standing in half a second.
When I met his dark eyes, he was scowling at me. Shit, if Aleks wasn’t mad, maybe Leo had the good sense to be.
I crossed my arms, shoulders slumped and neck shrinking into them.
“Aleks,” Leo said, “you are good, yes? Not harmed?”
“Yes.”
“And Cash”—Leo turned my way—“you are also not harmed?”
“No,” I whispered thickly. “I’m—I’m fine . . . ”
“Then there is no need for—” Leo broke off and waved his hand, indicating the whole of me. “I will look out better. Is not your fault.”
It was. I was the one responsible for keeping them safe, and when I’d met Freddie at twenty-one, there was no way he’d have set me loose with a chainsaw and so little supervision.
But I wasn’t Freddie, and we weren’t human, and I didn’t have a whole crew of people to spread the work around. I had Aleks and Leo, for as long as they were willing to help and as long as Grant would allow them to.
I forced myself to drop my hands to my sides but looked away too. “No, you’re right. It was just a mistake. Ah, thank you, Aleks, for—” I swallowed hard. “You shouldn’t have had to do that, but I appreciate, um . . . Let’s get back to work, yeah? Lots to do.”
And because I was an idiot and couldn’t stand another second of either one of them looking at me without crawling out of my skin, I relegated myself to stripping bark off the logs we’d already felled.