Page 17 of Hexy Beast

The very fucking worst time.

The only thing that could make it worse? If Aunt Artemis decides to tell everyone Effie is my fated mate. She’s not. She can’t be. No matter how many times Artemis tells me (and she has been telling me for the past fifteen years) that fate has a plan for me and it involves a witch who will change my life for the better, I know it’s not true. Life doesn’t get better. It’s just there and you survive it until you don’t, end of story.

Nikos and his fellow usurpers in training are ready to go full-moon mode vicious in their arguments about the best way to ransom Effie Sherwood. My second-in-command is pacing the interior of the meeting gazebo, snarling and waving his hands in the air, as if the bigger production he makes of things, the more powerful he’ll appear. Yeah, maybe he looks that way to some in the pack, but it’s all just bluster.

My closest advisor, Atlas, is sitting backward on a chair off to my side, his wiry frame deceptively relaxed and his gaze focused on Main Street’s foot traffic. He might look like he’s not paying attention, but I know better. The man never misses a damn thing.

Aunt Artemis brought her tarot deck to the leadership meeting with her and is now shuffling the oversized cards but not dealing any as she watches Nikos with a steely glint in her eyes. There’s no love lost between those two, and I don’t have to think twice about whose side I’d take in a fight. The woman I’ve always called my aunt even though technically the term is ceremonial can be a lot, but Nikos is one hundred percent pure asshole.

“If we contact the Council now, we can leverage the situation so that they and the witch’s family are trying to beat each other out to offer the most money for her and the spell book,” Nikos says with a sneer as if the rest of us are too stupid to have thought of a bidding war. “Then we can get a payoff worth our time and effort.”

He doesn’t say finally, but the word’s there, hanging in the air as obvious and obnoxious as an extra-foul-smelling fart.

A witch’s jinx on our pack that has lasted four generations means money is always tight. Oh, we still have the muscle and the know-how to keep our place on top of the pecking order for the werewolf packs in Witchingdom, but it’s getting harder and harder to maintain that edge every year.

The truth is, we need the money because it’s hard to keep your people fed, happy, and secure when every big score always seems to go south at the last minute. We’ve been scrounging for too long. I’m done watching my pack survive. It’s time we thrive again. And we will. I have to believe that.

Curling up with the Council, though, is not the way to do that.

Is there an immediate benefit?

Maybe.

But long term?

Yeah, that’s how your balls get gnawed off.

“You know it’s easier to fumigate fleas from a dog bed than to get rid of the Council once they get involved in pack business,” Atlas says in his slow drawl as if he’s reading my mind. “It’s not worth it.”

The long hair at the back of his mullet sticking out, Nikos puffs his chest and shoots back with, “Just because you’re scared shitless of the Council doesn’t mean the rest of us have to tuck our tails.”

Atlas’s one-sided grin as he eyeballs Nikos from behind his sunglasses should be setting off Nikos’s warning sirens, but he’s always been more brawn than brains. If he’d been born with more gray matter, he would have known that Atlas is the strong-as-fuck kind of wiry that will always win in a bar fight.

It’s at this moment, right when I’m about to step in and stop things from escalating to Nikos getting his ass kicked in front of his boys and all the drama that would ensue, that Effie pops out of thin air, landing her plush ass right on my lap.

“Miss me?” she asks with a flirty wink that does all sorts of things to my dick—immediately.

So fast, in fact, that I can’t pluck her off my lap unless I want to let my entire pack leadership know just how much she affects me.

It’s not because of the whole hard cock thing. Unlike some folks, werewolves don’t have a bunch of hang-ups about sex. It’s fun, it feels good, and as long as it’s between consenting adults and no one gets hurt (unless that’s what they want), then it’s no big deal.

Most of the time—the exception being anything that involves a witch like the one currently wriggling against the evidence that will be held against me.

Atlas will take it as confirmation that my dick’s work ethic is more powerful than any bad luck hex a witch could throw at it, so everything is A-OK.

Nikos will take it as proof that I’m not thinking with my brain and am therefore compromised when it comes to decision-making.

And Aunt Artemis will see it as a sign that she’s right and Effie is my fated mate, just as the cards have predicted.

And I’m not just being stubborn about that, no matter what Artemis is probably thinking. I’m being practical. Maybe fated mates used to be a thing, but not anymore. And the attraction I can’t seem to get under control? Well, I challenge you to have Effie “All the Curves” Sherwood land on your lap and not be turned on.

I do not have the time or the patience to deal with anyone’s opinion about the state of my dick right now though.

So that’s why I sling my arm around Effie’s waist and hold her in place, snug against my hard cock. It’s a little bit of bliss and a whole lotta torture, but I can take it. The little witch in my lap, however, is already going all melty. Sure, she’s trying to cover it by jutting up that pointed chin of hers a little higher, but I can smell her excitement and I want to lick that scent right off her.

“What the fuck,” Nikos hollers at Effie’s sudden appearance, the veins in his throat bulging.

The wolf inside me reacts before I can, letting out a low, deadly growl that would be the only warning before I went all in.