Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Grayson
Standing in the doorway, I watch my son sleep.
His chest rises and falls in the soft glow of the nightlight.
His teddy bear is tucked under one arm, and there’s still a faint smear of peanut butter at the corner of his mouth that I’m only now noticing.
He must have sneaked another sandwich into his pockets.
I should have known something was up when Miranda winked at him as we were leaving.
The corner of my lip twitches reluctantly as I think of the sharp-tongued nurse. With me, she is all thorns and bristles, but when it comes to my son, she’s sweet as can be.
You have absolutely no concept of my actual life.
Her words from this evening wipe the smile from my face.
The bitterness in her tone and the weary look in her eyes.
She called it charity, but I don’t see it that way.
Life dealt her an unfair card, so why can’t I help her out of it?
I don’t see it as charity at all. I purse my lips together.
I looked into the loan shark she’s indebted to.
It wasn’t that hard to find his name, especially since she had some of his information in that beat-up car of hers.
Kozlov is a violent man, and he is known for fronting women loans and then dragging them into sex work to pay it off.
It doesn’t matter if Miranda is an educated woman, a nurse.
To him, she is just another woman he can use.
He has a nasty reputation. I wanted to tell Miranda that today, but Ethan interrupted us.
She should know this. She must have known it when she took on that debt.
How does she expect to pay it back? For a woman who’s so smart, she’s not acting like it.
My jaw tightens, and I gently close Ethan’s bedroom door, padding downstairs to the kitchen. I grab a beer from the fridge, step out into the garden, and drop into a chair. The night is clear, the mountain air cool against my skin as I sip my beer, irritated.
I should be thinking about Derek coming back. About what I’m going to say when I see him for the first time in four years. Can I even look at him without everything I’ve buried clawing its way back up?
Instead, I’m thinking about a woman who threatened to permanently damage my ability to have more children. She’s violent with her words, sweet when she’s pressed against me, and I really want to just bite her.
My mouth curves before I can stop it.
She’d had her hand flat against my chest in that locker room, trying to push me back, and she’d been shaking. Not from fear. I know what fear smells like. This scent had been warm and sweet, and she’d hated every second of it. The flush spreading down her neck. The way her breath had gone uneven.
My nurse is very pretty when she’s losing control.
I catch myself. Roll the phrase back.
My nurse.
I frown at my beer bottle.
She’s not mine. She’s an ER nurse with a mountain of debt and a spine made of iron who likes my son and barely tolerates me. That’s all.
The locker room was stupid. I know it was stupid.
The moment I had her against those lockers, I knew I was pushing too far, and I pushed anyway because I could smell exactly what it was doing to her, and rational thought just vanished.
Maybe I haven’t been with a woman in so long that the smell of her arousal made me go a little overboard.
But then no woman has roused my interest in a long time.
I take a long drink.
I just find her interesting because her temperament is similar to that of a female wolf shifter’s. That’s it. There’s nothing more to it than that. I grimace.
If I’ve scared her off this job because of what she called my ‘locker room stunt,’ Coach will have my head.
He’s going to beat me black and blue. I’m not looking forward to that.
Maybe I’ll go to Miranda to get some pity points so she can join the team then.
I almost laugh into my beer just thinking about it.
She holds herself so tightly. Every wall up, every door locked, all that sharp humor she uses like a fence to keep people at a distance.
And then something pushes open that fence just slightly, and underneath there’s this person who cut Ethan’s sandwich diagonally and warned him about burning his tongue and looked at him with a softness that she would never ever aim at me.
I don’t understand why Ethan took to her so fast. He barely tolerates Linda most days, and Linda’s been with us since he was six months old. But this woman he met in a park three days ago, he’d draped himself across her like she was furniture he’d owned for years.
I watch the tree line as something catches my cycle of repetitive thoughts.
A wolf steps out of the darkness, big and dark. It begins to walk toward me, its gait predatory, and I lift my beer. “There’s nothing in the fridge, Coach.”
Leon shifts at the edge of the patio. He straightens, rolls his shoulders, and reaches for the folded pants I keep in the box by the back wall. Tugging them on, he disappears inside without a word.
When he comes back, he’s holding two beers. He drops into the chair across from me and takes a long pull from one before setting the other on the table between us. “Yours is nearly finished.”
I grin. “I told you there was nothing.”
“You had beer.” He lifts it in the air as if checking the brand. “I’ve hired Miranda Carver.”
“Yeah, she told me.” I drain my beer and pick up the second one.
“She’s coming to sign the contract in two days. After that, she’s on site for every practice session for the next six months.”
“Six months?” I glance at him. “Is that how long this will be? I thought she was just going to be here for a month or two.”
“I checked the regulations,” Alpha Ramirez says heavily. “She needs to observe the players for six months, check for steroid use and all that garbage humans put in their bodies.”
“Ah,” I murmur. We sit in silence for a while, each lost in his thoughts, and then I ask, “What do you think of her?”
My alpha is quiet for a moment. “She minds her own business.” He takes another drink. “I offered her good money, and she accepted without negotiating. She also didn’t flinch once during practice.” He glances at me. “That counts for something.”
“Yeah,” I say.
He gives me a look. “Be honest with me, Grayson. What is actually going on between the two of you? And don’t use Ethan as a reason for anything you tell me.”
I feel the irritation spike immediately. “We already had this conversation.”
“We did,” he says. “And now she’s going to be inside this pack’s operations for the next six months, so we’re having it again. Do you want to sleep with her?”
“I want her to be part of Ethan’s life.” My jaw tightens. “She’s good with him. He asks for her. That’s what this is.”
“There are eligible females in this pack who would be more than willing to step into that role. Women who already understand what we are, who wouldn’t need to be managed or—”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
He stops.
“I’ve had enough experience with pack females.” I keep my voice even, but there’s an edge underneath it that I don’t bother hiding. “I’m not doing that to my son again.”
“That situation was dealt with, Grayson.” His voice drops. “What she tried to do won’t happen again. Nobody in this pack is going to move against Ethan or you.”
“I respect you,” I say. “You know I do. But I’m not gambling on that. Not with him.” I lean forward, elbows on my knees. “Miranda is safe. She has no stake in pack politics. She’s not positioning for anything. She likes Ethan, and he likes her, and that is, genuinely, all it is.”
He watches me for a long moment.
“I’m not going to sleep with her,” I add because I can see him building toward it. “I don’t want to ruin this. Ethan needs someone like her in his corner, and if I make it complicated, she walks. I’m not doing that to him.”
Silence.
Then, very carefully, Coach says, “So that’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“So explain to me,” he continues in the same measured tone, “why the locker room smelled the way it did this afternoon.”
I go still. Fuck.
“I was messing with her,” I mutter. “She walked in on me, and I was messing with her. That’s it.”
“Messing with her? The woman you say you want to look after your son, the one you don’t want to sleep with? That woman?”
His tone has my wolf on edge. He’s not happy.
“It won’t happen again.” I scowl into my drink.
When he doesn’t say anything, my eyes flit toward him.
He’s watching me thoughtfully, and then he says, “She minds her own business, and she’s good at her job.
That’s why I hired her.” He takes a drink, then glances at me sideways.
“If something happens between you two, it happens. I’m not your father. ”
He sets the bottle down. “But don’t let it become anything more than that. She is human, and she is going to be inside our operations for six months. The Accord doesn’t bend for circumstance, and it doesn’t bend for you.” He squeezes my shoulder in warning once before letting go. “Keep it simple.”
He finishes his beer and walks away through the garden without looking back. I watch until the darkness swallows him.
Then I slump in my chair and stare up at nothing.
“Keep it simple,” I say to the empty garden.
I think about what simple looks like with Miranda Carver and almost laugh.
Then I push up from the chair and head inside.
My wolf stirs as I cross the threshold, a low and satisfied hum moving through my chest that makes absolutely no sense given that I’m going to bed alone in an empty house.
I ignore it.
I head upstairs.
The hum doesn’t stop.
Practice is loud and fast, the scratch of blades on fresh ice cutting through the arena, and I should be focused entirely on the play.
I’m not.