Читать книгу Hot and Badgered - Shelly Laurenston - Страница 8

PROLOGUE

Charles Taylor didn’t realize until that moment how fast life could flip on a man.

One second he’d been listening to two crazy women he’d known for years try to talk him into taking over the Pack from the young, arrogant wolf they all hated. The next second the doorbell rang . . . and everything changed. Forever.

He’d opened the front door to the main Pack house and found his twelve-year-old granddaughter standing there with her two half-sisters.

The other two weren’t his granddaughters. His daughter had taken in the offspring of her worthless ex-boyfriend because that’s what she was like, his Carlie. She’d taken those girls in and raised them like her own. Without question. Without resentment. And because it was the right thing to do, as far as Carlie was concerned.

So when Charles opened the front door and saw those three girls standing there, dirty, bruised, with that wounded look in their eyes . . . he knew. He knew his baby girl was gone. He knew it and was devastated by it.

But what could he do? Do what his daughter would want. Take the three girls in. Raise them, even the two who weren’t only not his blood but weren’t even a tiny bit wolf. The middle one was full honey badger, like her idiot father and her criminal mother, who was doing hard time in a Bulgarian prison after a jewelry heist went bad.

The second one was half honey badger and half tiger, and his Packmates were not fans of cats. Not even a little. They didn’t tolerate the house cats that roamed around their Wisconsin neighborhood. So what would they do to this little one with the big eyes and the stink of cat coming off her?

The girls did have one thing in their favor, though . . . they were young. The oldest twelve, the middle eleven, and the baby not even eight yet.

When the two She-wolves saw the girls, they gasped and immediately ushered the children in, leading them to the living room he’d just escaped from.

“What happened?” Lotti asked his granddaughter. “Where’s your mama?”

His granddaughter looked up at him and, again, he saw the answer in her eyes. Just as he’d seen the answer when he’d opened the front door.

“My daughter’s dead,” he said flatly, still trying to process exactly what that meant.

Lotti and Jane went silent, hands stopping on the light coats the girls had worn to trek from Connecticut to Wisconsin to get to their mother’s Pack. In the middle of winter.

Aghast, the two She-wolves looked up at him, then at each other.

“Let’s . . . let’s get you girls something to eat,” Jane stuttered. “You must be starving.”

Lotti stood and softly said to Charles, “We may have a problem. . . with two of them.”

“If I have to leave, I will.” He thought of his daughter, of how she would have handled something like this. “I won’t separate them.”

Lotti pressed her hand against Charles’s chest. “I’ll go talk to him.”

He nodded and crouched down in front of his granddaughter to help take off her coat, but before he had a chance, Lotti quickly returned. “He wants to talk to them. Alone.”

Frowning, Charles looked at his old friend over his shoulder. “What?”

She shrugged.

“Forget it,” he said. He wasn’t putting his traumatized granddaughter and her sisters through that idiot’s bullshit.

“We’ll talk to him,” his granddaughter suddenly announced, sounding . . . adult. She might look like a little girl, but she’d never actually been one. Carlie used to say “my girl was born forty.” And seeing the determined look on the child’s sweet face, Charles believed it.

She stood and motioned to her sisters. “Where is he?” she asked a stunned Lotti.

“In the back. The yard. I’ll show—”

“We’ll find him.”

While the middle girl held the youngest’s hand, his granddaughter gently pushed the pair forward, and the three of them walked through the house alone.

That’s when Jane growled. “I don’t like this.”

Neither did Charles. He didn’t like it at all.

* * *

Betsey sprawled on the high branches of the big tree in the Pack’s backyard and did her best to stay quiet.

She came out here to be left alone. She was too old to hang around the other pups and too young to hang around the adults. And at sixteen, she was counting down the days until she would go off to college and get the fuck out of here.

She loved her mom. She’d done the best she could for her only child, but Betsey had never fit in with the Pack because she wasn’t full wolf. She was half wolf, half black bear. Her father had been a one-night stand her mother had still not gotten over. But being a bear among wolves was . . . challenging.

While Betsey was growing up, things had at least been tolerable. Until Billy Lewis had taken over as Pack leader. Now Betsey was praying nothing came between her and the scholarships that would allow her to go to an out-of-state college and get into a new life.

Until then . . . she’d sit in trees when she wasn’t in school and hope that no one noticed her.

Like Billy Lewis, sitting on one of the benches in the Pack’s backyard, looking over his domain like Richard the Third. But such a weak wolf wouldn’t notice that Betsey was sitting in a tree watching him unless the wind suddenly changed and he scented her.

She watched as the three little girls came into the backyard. According to what she’d heard when Lotti came to talk to Billy, their mother had been killed and somehow those little kids had made it halfway across the country to the Pack house. Remarkable, really. At that age, Betsey wouldn’t have lasted five seconds without her mother. But these girls . . .

Billy had insisted on a “private chat” with the pups, and that did not bode well. Billy didn’t like what he called “half-breeds.” An insulting term from an insulting idiot.

Sadly, Betsey had been forced to endure a “private chat” with Billy herself. It wasn’t nearly as creepy as it sounded, but it was definitely cruel. He’d told her that come her eighteenth birthday, she was out, no matter what was going on in her life or her mother’s. If her mother wasn’t happy about it, she could go with her kid, but that would be up to Betsey.

A horrifying thought since Betsey knew how much her mother loved her Pack. Leaving it, even for her only daughter, would be too harsh for her. Betsey would never ask that. So, after that “private chat” she’d doubled up on her school work, began taking AP courses, and planned on graduating when she was seventeen. Thankfully, she was smart enough to make that happen.

But she didn’t know anything about the little girls walking into the backyard to be left alone with Billy. She just knew her heart broke for them. Because no matter what their circumstances—yes, even the death of their mother, who’d been a former Packmate and daughter of the pack’s Beta—it would mean nothing to Billy Lewis. Besides, this might be the chance he’d been waiting for . . . to get rid of Charles Taylor. An old-school wolf that the adults in the Pack desperately wanted as Alpha leader, whether Charles would take the job or not.

Betsey knew, though, that Charles would never let his granddaughter go into the cruel system of foster homes and state-run lives. That was not the best world for any child, but definitely not for a shifter. And for a hybrid shifter . . . nightmares were made of how badly those situations could end.

Still, to send the other two girls away simply because they weren’t blood related or wolves . . . could Billy really be that cruel?

Who was she kidding? Of course, he could be that cruel!

The three girls stood in front of Billy now and he smugly stared at them, the corners of his mouth slightly turned up, his eyes heartless.

If Betsey had thought she could sneak away without being seen, she would. She didn’t want to watch this.

“I hear you girls have had a bad time of it lately, huh?”

The girls stared at him, but said nothing. But the middle one, she suddenly waved at him. As if in greeting. Surprisingly—and just downright annoying—Billy winked back and pointed his finger at the girl. A move he considered “sexy.”

Yuck.

He went on. “Look, I’m sorry to hear about Carlie. I always liked her. A weird wolf but fun. Ya know?”

Of course they didn’t know! They were kids! Idiot!

Billy leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands in front of him.

His “sincere” look.

“I know this will be hard for you guys to understand but . . . you can stay,” he told the oldest, an adorable brown-skinned girl with lots of curly hair and a pretty face. “But you two can’t. I know,” he continued, “I know this is hard to hear. But you might as well learn now how the real world works.”

Something told Betsey these girls already knew how the real world worked.

While Billy blathered on, the middle girl sat her younger half-sister down on the bench beside Billy and abruptly walked off.

She moved over to the bushes and flowers that had been planted around the yard wall, head down, like she was searching for something.

And while she looked, Billy talked to Charles’s granddaughter. Just like her grandfather, her face revealed nothing. It was blank. Impassive.

The middle sister, a very tiny Asian girl with black hair that had a white streak through it, picked something up and returned to her sister’s side. Together they gazed at Billy until he noticed that the middle girl was holding something in her hand.

His smirk turned into a full-blown smile. Betsey had never met someone who enjoyed bringing out the worst in everyone like Billy did. Even desperate children who’d just lost their mother! “Is that for me, sweetheart? You going to hit the big, bad wolf with that little rock?”

He leaned in and his voice became so hard. Harder than Betsey had ever heard it.

“You swing that thing at me, little girl, and you’ll be on the first bus to the closest foster agency. Maybe, after a few years, you’ll meet up with your loser mom in prison. You can have a mother-daughter reunion behind bars.”

If Billy was hoping to make the little girl cry, he failed. She didn’t cry. She just slowly blinked and kept staring at him.

Then, without a word between them, the two oldest girls faced each other.

Charles’s granddaughter nodded once and the middle girl pulled her arm back and with some mighty force for a kid, she swung her fist with the rock in it.

Knuckles made contact and Betsey blinked in shock when she heard something break in the oldest girl’s face just before she hit the ground.

The youngest glanced up at the sound, but her expression was passive as well. Billy, on the other hand, reared back in shock.

“What in holy—”

While he was busy trying to figure out what was going on, the middle girl grabbed his left hand—and now Betsey understood the weirdly timed wave earlier—and placed it on the bench. She raised the rock and brought it down hard—onto Billy’s knuckles.

Billy howled in pain as the middle girl tossed the rock across the yard. Then, as if some silent cue had been given, she and the youngest burst into copious, dramatic tears.

The kind of sobbing that would get the attention of any She-wolf in a twenty-mile radius.

All the adults at home appeared in the backyard. And what did they see?

Two little girls sobbing hysterically. Another little girl nursing her bleeding, broken cheek while bravely attempting to hold back tears, and Billy . . . with busted knuckles.

The middle girl’s knuckles were also bruised and bloody, but she held her baby sister close and had her hand curled into a fist and pressed against the child’s side, ensuring that none of the adults could see it.

Charles moved through the adults until he stood front and center. Betsey had never seen the older wolf like that. He’d always been the calm one. The rational one. He was the great peacemaker of the Pack, making sure the small group didn’t get into any fights they couldn’t possibly win against Packs bigger and meaner.

But now . . . Charles was beyond angry. His brown eyes narrow, his breathing heavy, his entire body stiff, a slight tremor running through him every few seconds. And all while he gazed down at Billy.

Searching the crowd and seeing no friends, Billy shook his head and raised his hands, palms out.

“Wait a second, I didn’t . . . it wasn’t me!”

But with his hands raised like that, all anyone could see was the blood dripping between his fingers and slowly pouring down his wrist.

Desperate, Billy pointed at the middle girl. “It was her!”

As one, the adults all looked at the little Asian girl holding onto her baby sister. And, for a split second, Betsey saw the middle girl’s face harden in a way that was a little too adult for a kid so young. The adults never saw it, though, because the youngest girl placed her sobbing face right in front of her sister’s. Done on purpose? Betsey wouldn’t have thought so. She seemed too young, but after everything that had happened . . .

“It was!” Billy insisted. “It was her! I would never hit a kid! I wouldn’t!”

With a nasty snarl from the back of his throat, Charles reached down, grabbed Billy by his leather jacket, and yanked him off the bench.

The adults dragged Billy out, leaving the girls alone.

The oldest pulled the youngest girl onto her lap, her arms loose around her waist. The middle girl moved closer, finally resting her head against her sister’s arm. For a brief moment, the girls looked their age, but they also looked weathered. Life had been hard on them already and the oldest didn’t even look thirteen yet.

Charles returned to the backyard. He was scowling and now there was blood on him. He walked up to the girls and glowered down at them as was his way. Betsey was sure he had no idea how he must look to people who didn’t know what was going on in his head. But the three sisters gazed back at him without flinching.

Sighing, he started to turn away, and Betsey knew he was trying to figure out what to do next. What to do about the two girls who were not his blood. Not related to him in any way except that his daughter had made them her own. But before he could walk away, the youngest girl reached out and gripped his forefinger with her hand, small fingers squeezing tight.

And like that . . . Charles suddenly had three granddaughters instead of one.

He reached down and picked up the youngest in his arms.

“Let’s get you a room and something to eat,” he suggested, although it sounded like the orders from a drill sergeant.

The eldest grabbed her grandfather’s forearm and the middle girl, not as tall as her elder sister yet, grabbed the chain that attached his wallet to his jeans.

Together, in silence, they headed back to the house.

Betsey waited a few minutes before she crept down the tree trunk and shifted back to human. She put on her clothes and went around the side of the house, so she could enter through the front door.

As she came around the garage, the middle girl was waiting for her. And Betsey knew she was waiting for her.

Betsey froze in mid-step, gazing down at the kid with her mouth slightly open.

The kid stared up at her for what felt like forever and then, with a little smile, she placed her forefinger against her lips and said, “Shhhhh.”

Without another word, she turned and walked away . . . and Betsey wondered if it was possible for her to take some more AP classes so she could get into college even earlier than she’d planned. Like, maybe next week . . .