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Chapter Twenty-Three
Charlie
I hated to admit it, but shopping with Johnny had been fun—and not just because we were sure to piss Kane off with the number of bags we had. I’d never splurged like this before, even when my dad was footing the bill. There was something absolutely freeing about it. And Johnny had expensive tastes. He’d bought a pair of silk socks that cost two hundred dollars, claiming they were hand-stitched or something like that. Freakin’ comedian.
We made it back to the mansion before it was time for my meeting with Levi, so I took a few minutes to dump the bags I’d gotten onto my bed then slid onto the mattress as well.
Johnny made it easy to get distracted. He was a charming man—pushy as fuck, and sneaky, too. A lot of shit in my bags wasn’t chosen by me. He slipped things onto the counter, selected for me among his purchases, so I was sure I didn’t really know what each bag contained. I looked them over with resignation. We’d done damage, for sure. I chuckled a little and a fizzy feeling in my gut that had been hitting me all morning and that was not indigestion, made my thoughts turn back to Johnny. Sauvé, sexy, incorrigible Johnny.
He hadn’t hinted that he had any memory of my dream from last night but at some points this morning, I’d caught him staring at me in a way that made my cheeks burn—open lust pouring right out of him so hard that they might as well have been drooling stares. Nothing he said would have indicated that he remembered, but those scorching glances, stolen when he thought I wasn’t looking, made me feel like he was stripping me down and getting ready to eat me up.
And I wasn’t going to lie… I didn’t hate it.
Not at all.
I was wary, though, not that I wasn’t already, but because he’d basically confirmed that there were more things going on behind the scenes than I knew about. It was obvious that Johnny wanted me to figure things out on my own so he wasn’t blamed for spilling clan intel, but I had to wonder if this was an attempt at leverage. If I wanted to know the inner workings of the clan, then I’d have to become part of the pack.
And the only way to truly do that was to take a bite—or, I guessed, bend a knee, and I wasn’t willing to do either of those things anytime soon, if at all.
The bite itself was some Capital-C commitment right there. A werewolf mark lasted a literal eternity, and since we aged much slower than humans, that could mean centuries of bonding. Unless, of course, premature death happened, but if that was the only alternative, I wasn’t too keen on signing up. Plus, you know, heart-shredding grief at losing a bonded mate wasn’t fun.
I didn’t even know these guys, not really, but thanks to my fucked-up dreams, I felt like I’d known them for years.
And all this shit about Andrew had me worried for Ruby. I’d sent her a quick text earlier, telling her to stay away from my apartment, just in case she did try to stop by and check on things. I’d told her the landlord was fumigating, which should keep her away. She hated the idea of bugs, even if they were being murdered.
If Andy had tried to capture me via his scummy thug robber, then he might know about Ruby, too, and how much she meant to me. I’d feel better if I could be there with her to keep an eye out for my stepbrother, but I also knew that my presence might put her in more danger.
Her immediate response of “Eww…yeah, I won’t be heading to your place anytime soon” gave me reassurance that she was okay, but I was going to be edgy until I knew Andy had been tracked down and captured. If that didn’t happen soon, I was going to have to take things into my own hands.
I was willing to give Kane a little bit of time.
But not much.
I found it funny in a not-funny way that my first response to what Johnny had told me about Andrew going to Toronto was that my stepbrother had come to warn me, rescue me. As if! Why would he do anything for me when the entire time we’d been siblings he’d only done what had been convenient for him? I could be so naïve sometimes. It was like I had this innate need to always think the best of someone, when I knew how werewolves worked. Family or not, they were scum… Well, most of them were, anyway.
These brothers? They weren’t giving off the shit vibes like every other male werewolf on the planet. Each of them, in their own way, reminded me of my dad…and not in an ‘ick, you have daddy issues’ way, but in an honorable, decent, protective way. Despite my hesitation, I did trust them…mostly.
Levi had said we were having a working lunch, which I took to mean sandwiches or something easy to hold while reading, so I was pleasantly surprised, and very impressed, when I walked into the library to find a hot-table trolley set up, complete with steaming pasta, meatballs, garlic bread and a Caesar salad that had just the right amount of garlic wafting off it. Vampires beware, I was going to be oozing the stuff out of my pores.
“I thought you’d like something hearty,” Levi said as he looked up from his stack of books. He was seated at the head of a large oak table that had legs the size of tree trunks. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so I figured we could stuff ourselves with carbs to keep the energy up.”
“Until we’re both clawing at the door to be let out.” I laughed. Carb overload worked a little differently for werewolves. We still felt the rush, and we burned through it quickly, but we didn’t get the crash like humans did. Instead, we got a build-up of energy, and the best way to get that out was by running…or, I guessed, any kind of intense physical activity, sex included—which was totally not what was going to happen, no matter what went down in my dreams.
My mind did linger on that a little longer than I was comfortable with—Levi pressing me up against that table, my leg hooked around his hip, his fingers caressing my… I snapped my focus onto the food and tried to get my brain out of the gutter.
My life was complicated enough, thanks to my dreams that were not dreams, so I wasn’t going to bring that shit to real life and add more chaos.
“We’ll stretch our legs when we need a break later—tour the perimeter, give you a sense of the compound boundaries and the forest.” Levi nodded to a stack of photos. “You can start there once you’ve loaded a plate.”
He was all business right now, but I got a sense of his underlying effort to hide his excitement that I was there. Not to be cocky, but Levi’s heart rate had ramped up as soon as I’d entered the room, so I knew he was fighting to keep his tone even and his back to me.
It made me feel like I should say something. Thank him for taking care of my stomach again, but I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea—not that I really knew what idea I had about him anyway.
Ugh.
My head was full of confusing debates and my stomach fluttered like I was lovesick. Throw a little attention my way, and I was all hot and bothered. I was fighting what felt like a losing battle against the magnetic pull of these guys, each of whom had a different approach to battering down my willpower. And providing me food? Well, somewhere in my primordial werewolf brain, that was equivalent to saying ‘I love you’ over and over again.
“What smells so delicious in here?” Johnny poked his head around the doorframe, his nose leading the way. “Levi, you hound, you didn’t tell me you were making your specialty.”
