Dreaming of the Wolf (29 page)

She cleared her throat and held herself stiffly on the couch. “Mario had my mother murdered because she was seeing a man named Tony Thomas. Mario had him murdered as well. Why? I don’t know. I speculated it was because Tony was either copping a deal with the Feds, incriminating Mario in his sordid operations, or trying to go into business for himself.”

She sounded as if the notion didn’t make any difference. Only the end results mattered, maybe because that’s all she dealt with in her line of work. The reason
why
the perp didn’t show up for trial or see his or her parole officer wasn’t important. Nor was the reason he had committed the crime. All that mattered was that the person was returned to jail.

Suspecting he already knew the answer, Jake ran his hand over hers in an attempt to put her at ease. “Why would Mario want you dead, too?”

“I planned to put him behind bars. Then I turned him in to the cops.”

That was what he’d thought. “Since Danny came after you, the police must not have incarcerated Danny and possibly not Mario, either.” That thought gave Jake major heartburn. These men seemed intent on getting to Alicia, and she wouldn’t be safe until they were stopped.

Alicia dropped her gaze to their locked hands. “Maybe my mother knew something about Tony’s business or Mario’s. Maybe something was going on.” She didn’t say anything for several minutes. Then in a voice that was hollow with defeat, she said, “Then again, I hadn’t wanted to know. I reasoned that the less I knew, the better. But now…”

She took a deep, shaky breath and met his gaze, her eyes swimming in tears. “Maybe if I had known more of what was going on in my mother’s life, I could have put Mario and Danny in prison. Maybe I could have stopped Danny from murdering her.” She looked weary and overcome.

Darien wanted to drop the subject, to give her time to deal with the changes in her life, but they had to know if something her mother had in her possession might further incriminate Mario. If the man was only human, they could turn the evidence over to the police. If he was one of the wolf kind, that could be a different story. But Darien wanted to know if there was more of a connection between Alicia and Mario, and that’s why Mario continued to target her.

“What kind of relationship did you have with Tony? Your mother’s boyfriend who was murdered. How well did you know him?”

Alicia’s jaw tightened as she stared at the coffee table. Jake wondered if there was more to the story than she had let on.

“Sometimes… sometimes I thought he was trying to be the father I never had. I thought maybe he was planning on marrying my mother.” She shrugged. “I didn’t need a father. Hadn’t had one all those years. And at my age, why now? But at other times”—she looked up at Jake—“he would distance himself as if he was afraid to know me. Like he was afraid for me to know him. Which was probably because he was tied to the Mob.”

“Was Tony ever jealous of your relationship with your mother?” Jake thought that could very well be the case.

Alicia shook her head with conviction. “No. That was the oddest thing. He seemed to appreciate my close relationship with Mom. As if I was good for her. I often wondered why he wouldn’t resent that she and I were such good friends. Instead, he seemed to admire our relationship. I don’t know. Maybe he’d never had a mother or father who was there for him growing up. Or maybe he’d been close to his mom and understood.

“He wasn’t exactly like the other men she dated. They were… never intimate with her like Tony was. He tried to hide his affections for my mother when he was with her around me. But even so, I’d catch a shared kiss. Him holding her hand. A warm embrace. The other men were just… there. Accompanying her. I never saw any sign of affection or intimacy.”

That seemed strange to Jake. “Where are your mother’s things? Did you go through them?”

“In my apartment. She’d had a furnished apartment in Dillon. She didn’t have many personal effects. And mostly at the end, she’d been living with Tony in his condo. I gave away all her clothes to the women’s abuse center. There wasn’t much left. I didn’t really take time to look through her things. I never thought she might have anything incriminating against Mario. I… I haven’t returned to my place for the past month, afraid these men would know I’d lived there, and one of them would be waiting for me to show up. So I’ve just paid the bills and stayed clear of the place.”

That was why Jake dreamed that Alicia was in different beds when they made love in their dream states every night. He looked over at Darien to get his okay for what he was about to do next. Darien nodded, giving him his consent.

“I’ll take you back to your apartment,” Jake said. “We’ll see if we can find anything, evidence, something that will clue us in if there was more of a connection to you than you believe. I have a sneaking hunch that Mario coming after you has more to do with you than your attempt at putting him behind bars. And I halfway suspect when we arrive at your place, it’ll look like a tornado hit it.”

***

The drive to Alicia’s apartment seemed to take forever as Jake chauffeured her in his truck, while Peter and Tom rode in Peter’s Suburban as their backup guard. Pete wore his sheriff’s uniform, although he’d be out of his jurisdiction.

Their presence was more than comforting, especially since Alicia couldn’t take her gun with her since the police still had it. But she was armed with a can of pepper spray.

She’d been alone for so long that she enjoyed the sense of belonging that Jake’s pack members had offered her. She still hadn’t come to complete terms with being mated to Jake forever or all the strange things she was learning about her werewolfism and pack-member politics. She could only swallow the news in little bites.

But the worry of what she might find at her apartment was overshadowed by the concern she might be pregnant. She clenched and unclenched her hands, then finally said, “Can we stop at a drugstore? There’s one in the strip mall on the corner before we reach my apartment.”

She figured if she had to shop at a drugstore in Silver Town, the whole pack might know what she purchased. That was one bad thing about the closeness of a pack, she was learning. And Lelandi had said most of the businesses were werewolf run. Alicia imagined even Lisa, the manager of the lingerie shop, might have told everyone what Jake had bought for her there. Lelandi wouldn’t have, though. Alicia felt Lelandi was one person who wouldn’t give her secrets away. Unless keeping them might harm the pack.

Jake was silent for so long that Alicia thought she’d spoken so softly he hadn’t heard. But with their wolf hearing, she decided that wasn’t it. She assumed he was trying to figure out why she needed to stop at the drugstore.

He finally nodded and grabbed his phone off his belt and punched a button. “Tom? We’re making a stop at a corner drugstore.”

“They don’t need to come inside with us,” Alicia quickly said. She didn’t need the whole world to know what she was up to.

He glanced at her, then said to his brother, “You can wait outside for us. It’ll only take us a minute. Right.” Then he put his phone away. He didn’t say anything for a moment, but she could tell by his furrowed brow that he was bothered by her request. Then he said, “What is it that you need?”

She raised her brows at him. “Is nothing sacred?”

He gave her the wolfish grin that melted her insides to mush. “Not between us. Not now that we’re mates.”

“Ah, so if I wanted to probe into your deepest, most private fantasies or past history, you’d freely tell me about all of it?” she asked.

He reached over with his big hand and squeezed her thigh in a way that made her shiver with interest. “You only have to ask.”

“All right. Well, I want to get a pregnancy kit, and I don’t want anyone else in your pack…”

“
Our
pack.”

“
Our
pack knowing about it. They might get the wrong notion.” Like it was Jake’s child, if she were pregnant. She swallowed hard, hating that she’d have to admit if she was pregnant that it was Ferdinand Massaro’s child.

Jake ran his hand over her thigh in a tender caress meant to console. Then his mouth curved up and his hand slid to her belly. “When Mary called from the gallery with the news you were pregnant, I was angry. I thought you had another man in your life and hadn’t told me. But I couldn’t be more pleased if you’re having a baby.”

“Most men wouldn’t like it if it was some other man’s baby,” she said, trying not to sound so disconsolate.

He drove into the parking lot of the strip mall and parked, then rested his hand beneath her chin and lifted and turned her to face him, his eyes pinning hers with resolve. “I love you. And if you’re pregnant, the baby’s ours. I’ll raise her as my own.”

“Her?”

“Werewolves in our pack statistically have fewer females. So we’re always hopeful we’ll have a few more females—keeps the males from getting too rambunctious.”

She chuckled. “I never thought I’d hear a man say he’d rather have a little girl than a boy.”

“Having two brothers probably had something to do with it.” He cut the engine.

She knew he was teasing. By the way he spoke to his brothers, she could tell he was really close to them. She had barely opened the truck’s door when Jake hurried around the front of the vehicle to help her down.

“I’ll have to add running boards,” he said, as he held her hips and helped her hop down to the pavement. “If you are pregnant, you’ll never be able to climb up into the cab.”

“Not without a forklift,” she teased, trying to feel better about it.

He smiled down at her but then said, “Would you agree to see Doc Weber? He’d be discreet.”

“And what would people think who saw me join the pack, then immediately see the doctor?” She shook her head.

Peter drove up beside them and parked, and Alicia suddenly was aware that he and Tom were watching them both. She hoped the guys couldn’t read lips or hear their conversation through the Suburban windows.

“Be just a minute,” Jake said to Tom as he rolled the window down.

“Sure you don’t want us to watch your backs?” Tom asked, his expression concerned.

Alicia was touched by the way he genuinely seemed worried about her, but she quickly shook her head. “We’ll be right out.”

Tom gave Jake a look, and she couldn’t tell if it was because she was making the decisions without allowing Jake to have a say or because Tom suspected something else was going on. But it made her even more self-conscious, and she hurried Jake into the drugstore before her whole heated body gave her away.

***

Tom watched Jake and Alicia head into the drugstore as Peter leaned back against the driver’s seat of his Suburban and said, “Wonder what
that’s
all about that she didn’t want us to see what she had to purchase.”

Tom didn’t want to speculate, but he couldn’t help it. Alicia was definitely anxious about something. He’d never seen a more expressive woman, unable to hide her feelings like his kind normally could do. He supposed it was because they’d been born as wolves.

After seeing how much Alicia had gotten under Jake’s skin, how much he really cared for her, Tom was damned worried she was going to get herself killed over this situation with Constantino and his thugs, though.

He couldn’t help worrying about both Alicia and Jake, and how Jake would deal with losing her again, if it came to that. He’d been unable to focus on work or anything in the pack during the last several weeks after he’d lost Alicia. But Tom assumed Jake had continued to believe she was all right. Then there was that damnable business of chasing after her without any pack backup when she was in trouble in Crestview. Hell, Darien had curbed his anger, wanting everything to turn out for the best, but he’d been furious with Jake for not waiting for Tom and Peter to catch up to him. Jake wanted her to be safe, sure, but Darien didn’t want to lose his brother in the process.

If anything happened to her now, Jake would be devastated. And Tom couldn’t let him down.

“I’ve never seen Jake allow a woman to order him around,” Peter said, his tone solemn. “I’ve never seen him fall so hard for a woman. She’s something special.”

Those were Tom’s sentiments as well.

Peter glanced at him. “You seem awfully quiet, Tom. What are you thinking?”

That the woman had gotten under Tom’s skin, too. How could she not when Jake had fallen in love with her? Lelandi had found a new friend in her also. Alicia’s sadness concerned Tom, and he wondered whether she’d be happy with their pack. It didn’t even matter that Alicia was new to being a werewolf. They’d make sure she felt she’d been with them forever. But something was the matter, and he suspected there was more to the story than just the trouble with Mario and his gang.

Tom cleared his throat when he realized Peter was watching him, waiting for a response. “Maybe Jake felt we didn’t need to go in. He might have thought we’d be more protection if we watched the front door while they went inside.”

But Tom knew that wasn’t the case. Sure, Jake had to have felt it was safe enough for Alicia since he hadn’t insisted that Tom and Peter come inside even if she objected. But Tom couldn’t for the life of him think of what had her so bothered that she would be afraid for others in the pack to know. Maybe it was a female thing.