Werewolves in Love 1.5: The Nanny Years Page 4

  “I have no idea.”

  “Goddamn it.” Michael looked around to see if anyone was watching them. They were talking very quietly, and with the table saw and lathe going, the few guys in the shop right now would have trouble overhearing them. “Lying to his Alpha? The insolent little shit.”

  “It’s probably something stupid. Remember, he’s only nineteen.”

  “Yeah, he’s nineteen, and he thinks he’s one very special goddamned wolf.” He shook his head. “I don’t know why his daddy didn’t make him do his time.”

  Most young alphas served a stint in the military. It broke them down and remolded them into people capable of living peacefully among others. Most alphas weren’t equipped, inclined or destined to be Pack Alphas. They had to learn to control their dominance. Until they did, they were like unexploded ordinance just lying around, waiting for the wrong person to kick it.

  “Okay, I’ll get it out of him.”

  “No. Leave him alone.”

  “Cade! He lied to you! He--”

  “I want to know why. I want to see if I can figure out what he’s up to, and I don’t want him on the defensive. We can’t beat the crap out of them--”

  “--every time they deserve it. Yeah, I know. I know.”

  “All right. So let’s just watch him.”

  But though they both watched him for the next couple of months, Josh did nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary again.

  Becca continued to thrive under Ingrid’s effortless care. Her grandmother – Cade’s baby mama-in-law, as Michael called her – invited herself to the ranch for a few days over Christmas, and Cade thanked God for his obviously competent and impressive nanny.

  By February, of course, he vowed he’d learned his lesson – if you think everything’s finally going great, it just means it you haven’t been paying attention.

  ****

  “Okay, so you’ll call me if you have any questions, need anything at all, right?”

  “Of course! Cade, how long have I been here? You don’t trust me yet?” Ingrid, holding Becca on her hip, smiled as she said it.

  “Of course I trust you. I just-- I haven’t been away from home much since she’s been around.”

  “Well, you need to go. Even papas need to have some fun. So.” She gestured toward Michael, waiting by the Rover. “Go have fun. I’m going out myself tonight, but I’ll be home before morning.”

  “Oh. You got a girls night out?”

  She smiled again. “Something like that. Now. Kiss mi tornado and go.”

  Michael slapped the roof of the Rover. “Listen to the nanny, Cade. Let’s hit the road.”

  They were getting a late start – it was already close to eight o’clock. It was normally a two hour drive to Denver and the weather had been cold and rainy, making the roads treacherous. They needed to get to the hotel, freshen up, have a late night dinner, find some late night women…

  “All right,” he sighed, not sure why he felt this odd reluctance to leave, like something bad was going to happen.

  Ingrid and Becca waved from the porch as the Rover drove away.

  “I love it when the new moon falls on a weekend,” Michael said.

  It was actually Thursday, but they were making it a long weekend.

  “Yeah. We need this.” They hadn’t left the ranch much in January. That month had seen eight foals birthed, a new record for RMP Nordics.

  “Wish the weather wasn’t so shitty, though.”

  Cade laughed. “What d’you want? It’s February.”

  “Yeah, and at this rate we’ll be midnight getting to Denver.”

  They never made it. Halfway to Colorado Springs, Cade’s phone rang.

  “Don’t answer it.”

  Cade looked at the phone. “It’s Roman.” He hit talk. “Hey Roman. What’s up?”

  “Sorry to bother you, Boss, but we’ve got a situation here, and—”

  Of course he immediately thought of Becca. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Well, nothing’s wrong here. It’s just that Josh’s dad called, and his mom had a stroke.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah. She’s in the hospital, and he needs to get to Chicago – but we don’t know where he is.”

  “What does he mean they don’t know where he is?” Michael barked.

  On the other end of the line, Roman said, “Tell Michael I mean, wherever Josh is, we don’t know.”

  “All right, smartass,” the dour wolf muttered. Roman was the next oldest alpha after Michael and Cade, and he wasn’t terribly intimidated by Michael.

  “And we can’t find Toby, either,” Roman added.

  “That figures,” Michael grunted. “He’s Josh’s shadow.”

  Cade and Michael exchanged a look. Michael let out a string of obscenities and pulled into a gas station to turn around.

  ****

  It was pushing ten o’clock. With Fremont behind them and the ranch ahead, Michael said suddenly, “Remember a few months ago? Josh’s truck?”

  Cade, who’d been dozing, shook himself awake and yawned. “Huh? Wha-- oh, yeah. On the way home from the Jewel. We saw his truck on the side of--”

  “Right. Parked right there on the shoulder.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So he did it again, but this time he pulled it way over, almost under—there. See it? You think he managed to run out of gas again, in the very same place?”

  Michael guided the Rover smoothly to the shoulder of the highway, coming to a stop a few feet away from the Pathfinder, which was parked almost inside the tree line. This late on a cloudy, moonless night, it was almost too dark to see, even with their wolf-keen vision.

  Michael pulled off the highway and parked the Rover behind Josh’s Pathfinder.

  They caught Toby and Josh’s scents as soon as they got out. A few seconds’ investigation revealed a break in the trees where two – or more – people had clearly passed through, making a path into the dense woods. Michael looked at Cade, Cade nodded, and they started to make their way through the mix of bare and evergreen trees.

  They’d been friends for twenty years, including six in the Army, and they didn’t always need words to communicate. Neither of them spoke as they crept silently between the trees, and when Michael threw Cade a questioning look, Cade knew exactly what he meant.

  They heard the normal sounds of the woods in winter – leaves crunching, branches cracking, a few small animals scurrying about – but of the two young wolves, they heard nothing at all. They could smell Toby and Josh, but not hear them. What were those idiots up to?

  They walked on two or three hundred feet, and suddenly Cade froze. It took Michael a few more steps to notice Cade wasn’t behind him and then he, too, stopped, looking to his Alpha for guidance.

  There was a third scent on the air, and it had been there since they’d exited the Rover. It had been tickling Cade at the back of his mind, trying to get his attention – hey! Look at me, over here! – but he’d resolutely, subconsciously, ignored it. As they drew nearer Josh’s Pathfinder, though, he couldn’t ignore it any longer.

  It was a heavy scent.

  Cloying.

  Floral.

  “Goddammit,” he murmured, staying right where he was. It wasn’t fear that held him rooted to the ground, it was…well, maybe it was a kind of fear. He just knew with a sickening certainty what was waiting for him a few hundred feet ahead.

  Michael was still watching him, waiting for his instructions.

  Cade shook his head. “Josh!” he called. He fancied he could hear Josh and Toby holding their breaths. “Whatever you’re doing, stop. Don’t move. Michael’s on his way. If you try to run, he’ll kill you.”

  “I will?” Michael mouthed.

  Cade nodded. If the two idiots had done what he thought they had, in direct defiance of his orders, then killing them was entirely at his discretion. And it would take him weeks to regret it.

  He waved a weary hand forward, but waited w
here he was. Michael disappeared into the trees.

  A few moments later Michael shouted, in a horrified voice:

  “INGRID?”

  ****

  She wasn’t mortified, or even embarrassed. She wasn’t sorry, either. She was angry. She was angry with him.

  As if fucking a couple of his Pack in the woods in the middle of the night was insufficient grounds for termination.

  “You violated my privacy!”

  “What fucking privacy? You were IN THE GODDAMNED WOODS!”

  The office door was closed, their raised voices bouncing off the walls.

  “I was performing a religious ritual!”

  “Bullshit! I know Wiccans, and they don’t fuck under the new moon!”

  “It’s not Wicca! It’s Earth magick!”

  He just knew, from the way she said it, that she spelled magic with a k on the end.

  “Goddamn it, female!” he roared. “There’s no such thing as-- oh fuck it,” he groaned, sinking into his chair. He put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands so he wouldn’t have to look at the woman who’d cared for his child for close to a year, now sitting across the desk from him wild-eyed, smeared with colored plant juices and smelling of two very stupid werewolves.

  Of course, how fucking brilliant was he, if he hadn’t had an inkling of what was going on?

  The office was silent for several long minutes. Finally he looked up.

  Ingrid was still sitting there on the other side of his desk, glowering at him in all her pissed off, sexed up, bugfuck crazy Earth Mother wrath.

  “Did you take the job just so you could fuck werewolves, Ingrid? Is that the way it happened? Cause I’m trying to figure out how you work for me for almost a year and never think to mention that you practice sex magic.”

  He didn’t try to keep the contempt out of his voice.

  “No, I didn’t do it just for the werewolves. I’m a good nanny – I take excellent care of Rebecca. My beliefs are a private matter.”

  “Not when they involve members of my pack, they’re not. And for Christ’s sake – you’re Catholic!”

  “The two are not incompatible,” she said primly.

  While no theologian, Cade was nonetheless pretty sure that Catholicism and sex magic, were, in fact, incompatible.

  She leaned forward across his desk, and he jumped back involuntarily.

  “It was just for the ritual, Cade,” she said in an almost pleading tone. “The ritual requires sex. It was nothing personal – I wasn’t involved with them, and it didn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “They’re my wolves. This is my pack.”

  “Fine. I won’t perform the ritual with members of your pack again.”

  He gaped at her. “Seriously, Ingrid? You seriously think that if you just agree not to fuck my wolves every new moon, then everything will be fine and you can just keep working for me?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s insane!”

  She jumped to her feet. “You’re a bigot and a misogynist!”

  “And you’re a deeply, deeply disturbed female who needs to get the hell off my ranch immediately.”

  “Rebecca is going to miss me!”

  “I know she will,” he said in a deadly soft tone. “And that’s why I won’t ever forgive you for this.”

  She flinched at that. Then she turned and walked out of the office. Michael caught the door as she flung it open. He sank into the chair she’d just vacated, and together they listened to her slam the front door behind her.

  When they heard her car start, Cade sighed and leaned all the way back in his chair.

  “How’re the guys?” he asked the ceiling.

  “Oh, the bunkhouses are buzzing like a middle school slumber party. Except for Josh and Toby, of course,” Michael added hastily.

  Josh was already on a plane to Chicago – his mother was expected to recover. Toby was staying with a wolf in town because Cade didn’t want to see his face for a while.

  When Josh returned, he and Toby would be summoned to the office for one more Come to Jesus meeting.

  “So you’re still leaning to Uncle Sam for the punishment?” Michael asked.

  Cade nodded. “Yep. That’s the deal. Enlistment or expulsion.”

  “Makes sense to me.”

  Every wolf in the pack had been told time and again, since they’d first hired Celine, that the nanny was off limits. No exceptions, no questions. What Josh and Toby had done was a direct violation of their Alpha’s orders. In many packs the punishment would have been fast, physical and probably fatal.

  Cade was loath to do it. Toby and Josh were young and stupid. And Rocky Mountain wasn’t like other packs – it was, in many wolves’ eyes, an artificial pack. It wasn’t the same pack Cade’s father had led, and none of the wolves had been born into it. Cade had formed it – the first newly formed North American pack in over a hundred years – when he returned to Colorado. Its members were Lones and wolves who’d left their birth packs for one reason or another to join his. And while he didn’t doubt his right to kill a wolf who defied him – and while he’d done it before – he didn’t feel right doing it to one arrogant little bastard and his hapless sidekick.

  “Yeah,” he drawled, still staring at the ceiling. “I think Josh would do best in the Army, but I don’t care which branch he joins, he just has to serve at least a four year haul.” He needed to be broken, and Cade wasn’t going to take the time to do it. “He serves his time honorably, he’s got a home to come back to. If not, he’s on his own.” He couldn’t return to his birth pack – it didn’t work like that.

  He lifted his head, which hurt like hell and felt like it weighed a ton, to look at Michael. “How’d Toby take it?”

  Toby, a beta, had been given the same choice, but he only had to pull a two year stint. And he couldn’t join up with Josh – it was his compulsion to follow Josh, instead of his Alpha’s orders, that had landed him in trouble.

  “He’s scared, but he knows he’s getting off damned light. And I think he’s secretly glad to be getting away from Josh.” After a pause he added, with a perfectly straight face, “I don’t think their cocks feel so powerful right now.”

  Cade snickered in spite of himself, remembering Josh’s anguished explanation.

  “Honest to God, Cade! That’s what she said! Our cocks are powerful, and she needed them to do her magic!”

  Josh knew as well as anyone else – anyone else except certain deluded humans who refused to believe it, of course – that there was no such thing as magic.

  But that didn’t stop him from believing his cock was powerful if a hot female told him so.

  “Michael,” Cade said tiredly.

  “Yes, Cade?” Michael asked mildly.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Are you asking why we’re having such godawful nanny luck?”

  “No. Actually I was asking if we were that bone fucking stupid at their age, but yeah – I do wonder about the nanny luck.”

  “Well – no. We were never that bone fucking stupid.” He stretched for a long minute, running his hands through his shaggy blond hair. “Then again, we didn’t grow up like them.”

  “How’d they grow up?”

  “Happy.”

  “Ah.”

  “I think a shitty childhood makes for a smarter teenager.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re probably right. Ok. So why the rotten nanny luck?”

  “That, my wolf, I have no idea.”

  “This is the second time – the second time, Michael – I’ve had a crazy female living under the same roof with me, and I didn’t catch it.”

  Michael cocked his head. “That’s the thing about crazy people, though, isn’t it? They don’t know they’re crazy. They think they’re totally normal. So you’ve got nothing weird to pick up on.”

  Cade thought about that for a minute, decided it would do. “Good. Okay, thanks. Now what the fuck do we do about a nanny?”
>
  Michael sighed and stood up. “Well, I call PPC in the morning and explain what happened. And I tell them that in light of Ms. Prieto’s actions, I think we’re entitled to a refund of our placement fee because holy fuck, do those people conduct background investigations, or do they not? And then I think I’m going to talk to Mrs. Poe again.”

  “Which one was Mrs. Poe?”

  “The old one who scared the crap out of me.”

  “The one who reminded you of Sgt. Scott?”

  “That’s the one. I don’t think she’d scare Becca. She seemed like your basic hardass redneck grandma – the kind who’d kill a wolf who pissed her off, but spoil the hell out of a baby, you know?”

  “Okay. Whatever you think. Can we get drunk now?”

  “Hell yeah. It’s gonna take a lot of whiskey to forget what I saw in those woods.”

  “If you tell me about it, you’re dead.”

  NANNY NO. 3 — MRS. POE

  Yours, Mine and Howls

  The Nanny Years, Part 4

  “Yep, it’s the U joint,” said a phlegmy tenor voice from underneath the twelve-year-old SUV. “This is all kinds of busted, son.”

  “Shit,” growled Cade MacDougall, dragging a hand through his tangled black curls with an exasperated sigh. “All right. I’ll get a couple guys to tow it into town. I better give Rick a call and tell him it’s on the way. With all the business I send that guy, he ought to be giving me free tows back and forth.”

  “Well,” grunted the voice, “if I had all my tools here with me, I could replace it myself. But I didn’t think I’d be needing all my grease monkey gear to take care of a little girl.”

  A throaty laugh turned into a hacking cough as the creeper slid out from under the truck. Cade, leaning against the front bumper, watched as a steel gray bob emerged, then a kindly, weather-beaten face crisscrossed by sixty-three years’ worth of wrinkles, and finally a sturdy, compact body, hardened and toned by thirty-five years of active military duty. The old body was in damned good shape. Even the tits—given the age of the owner, “bust” seemed a more appropriate term—were still sitting very near where nature had originally placed them.