Alpha Howl (A BBW Shifter Werewolf MC Romance) (Sons of Thunder MC: Book 2) (6 page)

“Of course he is. He’s rich. ‘The rich are different’.”

She gazed my way from under her mass of hair. “So do you have another date?”

“Tonight.”

Her mouth dropped open and her eyebrows ran up under her hair away from the sudden look in her eye.

“Tonight, no. Honey, you can’t cancel on Pablo.”

“What about you, Leslie. You know you can work a tablet. Live blogging is not that complicated.” I was being evil. She texted me earlier to tell me she had another date with Caden Morning.

I had sent back, “fine.”

She shook her finger at me.

“Don’t mess with me girl. You will not like the consequences.”

We know each other too well.

“Stop freaking out. My date’s dinner after Pablo’s. Don’t worry, I won’t leave the boardman hanging.”

“Just don’t call him the boring man again.” Uncontrollable laughter bubbled again. When we were college girls trying to close Sleepy Key Gear as our first client bigger than the campus newspaper, I’d referred to Pablo as the boring man at a meeting. I thought he’d left the conference room to check on a customer, but he’d been standing right behind me.

Grace saved the moment by shrieking, “Boardman! Great tagline, Grace.”

Pablo bought the dodge, and we ran our first paid ad campaign ever presenting him as the Sleepy Key boardman. The line didn’t catch on, but he’d liked us and stuck with us while we figured how to transfer the academic theories about marketing and branding we’d learned in college to real life.

“I told you, now you tell me about Caden Morning.”

Her eyelids dropped and she peeked at me through her long lashes.

“Mr. Morning done me good.” She ran her hand through her hair and sighed. “He’s kinky, in an interesting way.”

Leslie blushed.

She never blushes.

“And he wore me out. I’ve got to rest before my date with him tonight. He’s one that I have to be on my guard for. I need my…” She gazed sideways at me, “beauty sleep.”

“JeSUS, unfair, Leslie you have to tell me more.”

She waved her palm.

“Not today, babe, sorry. Don’t want to jinx it.” She bounced up and darted into her room, red heels flashing, leaving the faint scent of a sexy night in her wake.

Seconds later I heard her shower start.

I sat there breathing hard. She could make me furious. Leslie lived like Karl: she had to have her way and control those around her.

Even so, I still love her.

Maybe that says something about me. I don’t want to go there now and now it’s after six, just time to wash and get over to Pablo’s.

nineteen

Live blogging can be fun. Our company, Styles and Grace, had done a decent job promoting the launch of Pablo’s new line, which he called without a lot of originality, Sleepy Dude Shorts. Inside joke: the line has very few men’s items, the catalog’s mostly bikinis. Or rather cloth bits that might just cover your parts.

Pablo’s mostly hired skinny girls for sales clerks. They sported different items from the swimwear line, except for Amy. She dealt with the same problem as me: a normal appetite and metabolism. She and I worked the cameras, taking pictures of the beach bunnies wearing the different pieces, and the men trying to look at the girls without looking like they were looking.

I used the new wireless camera that Pablo just bought because the ingenious device could upload directly to our blog. Of course Pablo had no idea how to work it.

After some messing with network settings and passwords, I could shoot video, edit, and blog all from the palm sized camera.

I enjoyed learning to use the new toy, until I pointed the lens at the crowd by the entrance and there stood Karl’s fuzzy head. Well not fuzzy really, more like strands of sunlight woven from mountain air, but who was counting every filament in every curl on his head?

Other than me.

“Grace, get the camera out your face, and say hello to our famous guests.” Pablo twinkled.

“The pirate slayers!”

“Hello Grace.” Karl’s eyes widened, amused.

Shit. The last thing I wanted to do is get all googley eyed in front of Pablo. He’s very nosy and protective, and would unleash the full on inquisition if he suspected I had a dinner date after the show.

I lowered my camera. “Good to see you again, Mr. Norman.” I put the Canon back in front of my eyes, “thanks again for saving me.”

That shocked Pablo. Karl gave me a knowing smile. Jack seemed too busy chatting up one of the models to notice me.

Or maybe he forgot who I am.

A few minutes later Pablo walked up to me. “I thought you’d want to spend some more time with that guy. He winked. “He likes you.”

I waved my hand as if brushing away flies. “Oh you know me and men, Pablo, either I’m not good enough, or they aren’t.”

“Someday, you have to be less picky. You’ll end up all alone.” He made the face he makes when a customer tries to back out of sale, like the sad dwarf in Snow White. Weepy. “Like me.”

I gave him a hug. “Oh Pablo, you’ll find the right one soon. You’re the Boardman, after all.”

He beamed at his favorite tagline.

“I will, someday, and so will you, chica.” He pulled out his huge phone, which is practically a tablet. The ones people look crazy talking into. “How are we doing?” He hands me his oversized device.

I’ve showed him a hundred times how to see the web stats. I made him a multi-colored bar chart, updated every minute, and put an app to launch the chart on his start screen. He still needs me to work it.

I poke the icon and the graphs rendered on the screen. “The blue line is going up. That’s hits. The green line below shows conversions.”

Pablo looked confused.

“Sales.” He knows that word, and he beams. “So, people are watching your blog and buying things from the website?”

Another thing I’ve told him a hundred times. Search engines love good content, information, videos, and pictures. Despite all the emails from experts saying they have the latest tricks to get you to the top of Google mountain, the main thing is the depth of information about what you’re selling. So, I created pages of information on beachwear, how to wash it, what its sun protection factor is. Pages and videos showing how to surf and paddleboard and the site came up high in search results, which in turn sold stuff from the website. Pablo’s still amazed that people buy things without touching them first. Heck, sometimes I’m also amazed. When I first used the internet, Facebook limited itself to college students. It seems like a million years ago, not ten.

“Awesome,” he says like the surfer he still is. Then, Pablo’s eye glinted. Like he was hungry. Starving. Staring past me. “Customers. Gotta go, Grace,” and he was off on the hunt. I heard him mutter, “Gotta get more salespeople on the floor.” Pablo made a bee line for the flower shirted men wandering through the door and making goggle-eyes at the bikini models.

A high pitched laugh echoed from the checkout counter.

Karl Norman had just dropped a shopping basket full of stuff beside the register, and Jennifer, one of the more annoying thing-wearing skinny girls was about to ring him up.

twenty

All through high-school, I worked as a checkout girl. I put down the Canon and rushed to the cash register. I used some muscles I must have built by paddleboarding and with my extra padding that I made from wine and cheese, managed to hip-check Jennifer.

“Pablo wants you.” I spoke louder than I needed to.

“Excuse me?”

“At the front. He just texted me.” I showed her my iPhone. My text app always showed lots of little green bubbles from Pablo. Mainly ideas for what we could be doing to increase his sales. Jennifer blinked her long lashes at the phone. I made sure my hand shook so she couldn’t read the words, just see his face on the ‘from’ screen.

“OK, but what about him.”

“Don’t worry, I remember how to push the buttons.” I raised my eyebrows and glanced at the front of the store where Pablo was holding forth to a gaggle of bikini clad girls and Jack.

I turned to see Karl grinning at me.

“You sure you know how to push my buttons?” Karl made his eyes big and pursed his lips, making a great fake worried face.

“It’s not hard. You pushed mine.” He could take that either way. “What are you doing here?”

“Maybe I need a paddleboard.”

“I don’t recommend them, they can be dangerous. You could find yourself kidnapped by coyotes.”

And getting rescued by a sex freak wolf.

He met my eyes, and held my stare.

“Here are some things I need.”

He put his items on the counter. Nylon rope. A two foot fiberglass lobster tickler. Wetsuit bottoms.

“Lobster season’s not for a few months, you know.”

“Right.” He picked up the lobster tickler. It’s a two foot rod with a strap you can Velcro to your wrist. You use them to poke into holes and get spiny lobsters to come out into your net or your hands. We have both fiberglass and aluminum ones. Karl held a fiberglass one, long and flexible.

“I can use this now, though.” He swatted his palm with the tickler.

I gasped. A trickle wet my panties.
How does this man have such an affect on me?

“What is the rope for?” My voice cracked from my suddenly dry throat.

Karl’s sky hued eyes twinkled with sparks of emerald fire. He twisted his mouth into lopsided grin.

“I’ll show you later.” He tapped the wetsuit bottoms. “And these too.”

A moment passed where I just stared at him. My mouth hung open. “Do you have a problem with my order, Grace?”

I heard orders in plural.

“No sir. Let me put your things in a bag.”

He flashed a black card.

“You should probably charge me first,” he laughed.

My face blazed hot as the summer sun.

“Uh, yeah. Charge you. Right. We don’t give things away here.”

“Not lobster ticklers and rope, you don’t.” He handed me his card. “Other things, maybe you do.”

I covered my mouth with my hand.

Pointing to an empty margarita glass on the counter, Karl winked.

“I’ll see you at the end of your shift.”

Bagging his purchases, I said, “You sure you don’t want a top to go with your bottom?”

My voice went throaty. I was thinking about what he might want to do with the lobster tickler and the rope. I couldn’t think of anything he might want with the wetsuit bottoms.

“I just need a bottom to complete my set.” He smiled at me, showing me his mouth full of shining white teeth.

“Yes Sir.”

“I enjoy it when you say that Grace.”

Karl grabbed his bag and his card, and left me there, dripping on the floor like I’d just come back from a swim.

A handsome monster who needs to torture me to get turned on is taking me to dinner. I should’ve been calling 911 and asking for SWAT. Instead, I danced around like a schoolgirl at her first dancehall show.

twenty one

Dinner at Blue was fantastic. I ordered grouper and Karl wolfed down a steak. He drank red wine and I had white. Leslie and I had an ongoing ad campaign with Blue, and the owner let me charge the meal against our payment. Leslie would kill me when she found out, but the surprise on Karl’s face when the waiter mentioned that our three hundred dollar check had been paid made my stunt worth every penny.

“A friend has a condo down the beach a bit. A beautiful place.”

He ran his finger along the chiseled line of his cheek.

“Why don’t you come by for a drink?” Karl’s cerulean eyes caught and held mine.

Decision time. The night would end with another wild sex scene unless I ran home now.

Karl picked up his bag of purchases from the hostess stand.

“We can walk there.” He pointed down Sand Road to the beach.

I glanced at the three inch heels I’d thrown on with my little black dress before running out of Pablo’s to meet Karl for dinner.

“These shoes are so not made for the beach.”

“No problem. I’ve got a fix for that.”

Thinking with the brain between my legs, I nodded.

twenty two

The pavement ended and a sandy trail through the sea grass glowed like a magic path in the moonlight.

Karl bent to my feet. His hand grasped my ankles.

“What are you doing?”

“Your shoes.”

His fingers on my skin sent sparks up my leg. He undid the clasp at the side of my right shoe and lifted my calf. His other hand traced along the back of my left leg, and then clamped on my upper thigh, supporting me.

Karl ran his fingers over my instep, searching for the buckles of my black leather heels. My skin shivered wherever he touched me. He tugged at the straps and eased each shoe from my feet.