Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Grayson
The water hits the back of my neck hot enough to scald a human, and I rest my forehead against the tile. My ears are still ringing from the buzzer with the crowd noise running underneath it, and all I can think of is how sweet Miranda tasted.
My wolf is purring under my skin, smug as a cat on a windowsill.
The way she pulled me back in for a second kiss, my blood is still stirring. That woman really knows how to drive me crazy.
She’s still punishing me for whatever happened the night we slept together, and it’s kind of cute.
I’ve wracked my brain, but I can’t remember anything.
And that really pisses her off. Not that I mind.
My wolf enjoys it when she bosses us around, her sulky temper tantrums. She’s so endearing when she’s trying to let me know she’s in a bad mood.
I normally hate anyone telling me what to do. But when it comes to Miranda, I’m beginning to learn I’m a complete sucker for her.
Smiling to myself, I turn off the shower and step into the locker room, toweling off. Brody is at the next stall, tape between his teeth as he wraps his thumb.
“Miranduh.”
“What about her?”
He pulls the tape free. “Miranda seemed a little off out there. Before, I mean.”
I stop with my hand halfway to my hanging shirt. “Off how?”
“She was fine until she saw Vanessa. After that, she got quiet, kept fussing with her clothes and hair.”
I don’t put the shirt on, confused. “Why?”
Brody stares at me. “I keep forgetting you haven’t had that many women in your life. She was underdressed compared to Vanessa. What do you think she was feeling? Man, you’re dumb.”
He wanders off, shaking his head, and Samuel slides onto the bench, one towel around his neck and another around his waist. Samuel is one of the few people who knows about the arrangement. His voice is low. “You are an idiot, though.”
“What did I do?” I scowl at him.
“You brought her to the first public game where she was going to be photographed and you didn’t let her dress up? Didn’t you think she was going to run into Vanessa? Vanessa always dresses like she’s about to go to some charity gala, and your girl was in comfortable wear.”
“I didn’t tell her to wear that,” I mutter. “And there was nothing wrong with her clothes. She looked gorgeous.”
“Yeah.” Samuel rolls his eyes. “That’s the problem.”
The look he gives me is the one he reserves for plays where I’ve missed the obvious assist.
“When was the last time you took your fiancée shopping, Wolfe?”
I open my mouth and then close it again. “Why would I take her shopping?”
Samuel groans like I’ve personally wounded him. Brody is wheezing, and Eric is openly listening from where he’s lacing his shoes by the door.
“Why,” Samuel repeats, “would you take the woman you’re engaged to shopping when every camera in the building has been trained on her for weeks?”
“Vanessa hated when I came along. She always said shopping was a woman’s time,” I protest.
“Vanessa was a sociopath.” Samuel says it like he’s noting the weather.
Brody chokes on his own spit.
“How you’ve maintained your playboy image all these years is beyond me.” Samuel shakes his head. “Women are simple, more so if you have money. You take her shopping. You tell her that she’s important to you so you want to spend your money on her. You spoil her.”
“I’ve never stopped her from going shopping with my card,” I mutter.
Brody points out, “She’s not Vanessa, you moron. She doesn’t seem to be the type to spend your money by herself. Do you even know what to do with a woman, Grayson?”
“Fuck you.” I flip him off.
“My point is that she was probably down because she saw your ex and started comparing herself to her.”
The idea doesn’t sit well with me. “So I should get her clothes? Better clothes than Vanessa so she feels good about herself?”
“You take her shopping, you idiot. The point of if it is she’s wearing what you bought her, reaching for it in her closet, walking around in it. She knows it, you know it. It’s also marking territory.”
From the showers, Eric calls over his shoulder, “Or you could just pee on her leg. Same thing, but I don’t think she’ll like it as much.”
The locker room loses its mind.
Samuel knocks me on the shoulder. “I know she has clothes. Women say they have no clothes when they have closets full of them, but if she and Vanessa are going to be crossing paths, new, fancy clothes are going to be your girl’s armor.”
I think about Miranda’s belongings at my place.
Her clothes barely take any room in my closet.
She has three blouses, two pairs of jeans she rotates, two sweaters, boots with salt stains, and that’s everything she owns.
She’s been wearing my T-shirts to bed because she doesn’t own pajamas she wants me to see. She doesn’t have any jewelry either.
I’ve never noticed. Her clothes are all clean and presentable but simple. She’s never mentioned going shopping for more. If I get her clothes, stuff that closet, have the dressing table in our room covered in her jewelry, have her sit there, getting ready…I like it.
I want her to wear the clothes I chose for her, covered in jewels that I bought her. Everything on her body should be something from me. Mine.
She, her body, her clothes, all mine.
My wolf growls, darkly possessive, enjoying the image.
I pull the shirt over my head and decide to look for some good boutiques in the area. I’m reaching for my jacket when I hear a faint sound.
Everything in me stops.
It comes distantly through concrete and a closed door, but the pitch is one I would know in a stadium of screaming children. The voice is Ethan’s.
I’m moving before I know it.
My vision narrows to a tunnel. The wolf is rising inside me, shoving against the bones of my face. I round the second corner, and the scene resolves into something my body responds to before my mind does.
Vanessa stands with her hand raised, teeth bared, claws extended dark and slick.
Miranda is curved over Ethan on the bench with her back to the strike, her shoulders rigid for impact, and a red, wet line runs down the inside of her forearm. The whole world falls into a hushed silence around me, my eyes fixed on that line of red.
My shoulder catches Vanessa center mass.
The impact is not a man hitting a woman. It is something larger than either of us, my wolf already half through my skin, and she goes airborne backward into the plexiglass hard enough to crack a panel.
I land between her and the bench, chest heaving.
A snarl tears out of my throat, low and continuous. My claws have come through my fingertips without permission, and the tunnel light catches them.
Vanessa is on the floor twenty feet away, propped on one elbow with her mouth open and blood at the corner of her lip.
The wolf inside me doesn’t care that she looks shocked.
A small sound at my back pulls my head halfway around.
Just my eyes turn, because I can’t make myself break from the threat yet.
Miranda is lifting her face. Her cheek is streaked, her braid is half undone, hair is stuck to the corner of her mouth, and her good arm is curled around Ethan’s small, shaking shoulders.
She looks up at me.
Her lips part on a breath.
Color drops out of her face in one slow drain, and I know exactly what she’s seeing without asking because the gold has burned through whatever amber she was used to.
She’s looking my wolf in the eyes.
My throat won’t sound a human word right now. The human in me is hanging on by a tendon. Only the warmth at my back stands between Vanessa’s body and a corpse.
Miranda’s eyes hold mine. She doesn’t flinch, but her body is frozen in place.
I drag in a breath and force my hands to relax until the claws slide back under my nail beds. “Are you hurt?”
My voice comes out as gravel.
She wets her lips, and her chin lifts a quarter inch. “I’m okay.”
“What about Ethan?”
“He’s not hurt.”
I close my eyes for one second.
Behind me, Vanessa is getting up.
I turn back to her, slowly, deliberately, putting my body between her and the bench.
She’s on her feet now. Her lip is split where she bit it on impact, and blood is running down her chin in a thin line she doesn’t bother to wipe.
“You hit me,” she hisses.
“You attacked my fiancée,” I snarl at her.
Her eyes narrow. “You dare to hit me over that pathetic human whore?”
“Watch your fucking mouth.”
The words come out quiet, and they cut harder than a shout.
The team rounds the corner at a run. Samuel reaches us first, then Brody, then three more behind them. Coach trails somewhere in the back. They fan into a loose half-circle, none of them stepping past me without an order.
Vanessa isn’t stupid. She steadies her shoulders anyway.
“That is my son.” Her voice climbs, pitched for the witnesses now. “I will not allow a human to raise him.”
A laugh barks out of me with no humor in it.
“You’d rather he be neglected? You’d rather he be left alone in a house for three days while you fuck your way through a hotel? He nearly starved, Vanessa. You didn’t care, remember?”
“He was fine.”
“He was six months old.”
She lifts her chin. “He’s fine now.”
“He’s fine no thanks to you.”
I take a step forward, and Samuel’s hand lands on my shoulder, the touch of a man saying not yet. The grip stops me, but only just.
“Miranda being human is not an issue. You took this to a human court,” I say, my voice colder. “So I will deal with you through them.”
“I’m his mother!” Vanessa says through gritted teeth.
“Miranda is more of a mother to him than you were in six months.” My lip pulls back. “He calls for her in his sleep. Your name has never once left his mouth.”
Her expression tightens. “He’s four years old. He just doesn’t remember me.”
“Exactly, and he never will.”
Her hands curl into fists. The nails are still half extended, partial shift slipping in and out of her control. She tries to force them back and fails.
“You can’t separate a mother from her child.”