Little Wolf (11 page)

“Tonight we are going to talk,” Nathaniel told him. His tone said there weren’t going to be any arguments.

“There’s really no need,” Tim tried anyway, but trailed off when Nathaniel put back his really, truly fucking magnificent shoulders and straightened up. He was exhausted and he was going to fight with Tim about it.

“Aside from how you need the help, I think I have a right to know, now that you are under my roof.” The sleepy smiles were all gone.

Tim felt irrationally guilty about that, not that he was going to admit to it. “I could wait until you’re asleep and then leave?” he suggested.

Nathaniel took a step back. No, it wasn’t as graceful as that, it was clumsier, like Tim had shoved him. Tim shook his head. Nathaniel being clumsy in any way was too much for him to take right now.

“I’ve had a strange night, and today is probably going to be even weirder, and I don’t know how I feel about anything, but I do know that no one else around here seems to care if you sleep or not.” Tim blushed at his snippy tone, but no one was around to shut him up. So he had admitted that he cared if Nathaniel was well-rested. So that had happened. He must get off on humiliation. “Go to sleep, big bad alpha Sheriff. I have things to do.” He waved his hands in a flustered gesture meant to shoo Nathaniel away.

Instead it drew Nathaniel to the doorway to take another slow breath. “You’ll be here when I wake up?”

Tim’s toes curled. After a question like that, in a tone like that, it was his body’s only response, except for whatever made Nathaniel sniff and then hum in satisfaction. Apparently Tim’s scent had said
yes
.

“Then I will see you tonight, Little Wolf,” Nathaniel murmured and pushed himself away from the door to take off his pants.

“Now you’re messing with me!” Tim yelled at him as he closed the door, something Nathaniel evidently had no plans to do.

Tim leaned forward to put his face against the wood. If Luca didn’t kill him, living in this house with Nathaniel might.

He didn’t get to dwell on his despair or the memory of Nathaniel’s abs. Zoe called out to him from the kitchen. “I made breakfast, Littlewolf, and I don’t care if you eat it or not, you still have to do the dishes.”

“The hell I do!” Tim shouted back immediately and then froze at his own daring. He waited a second longer, but Zoe didn’t respond. In fact the only thing he did hear was a small sound that came from behind the door. It sounded like a short, genuine laugh.

Tim stared at the wood as if he could see through the door to study Nathaniel’s expression. He couldn’t, of course, though he thought it would have been a nice skill to have, especially since he wasn’t brave enough to open the door. He tried for a few minutes anyway, mostly to avoid going into the kitchen but also because he could still hear. Nathaniel was breathing quietly from not very far away, as if he was listening for whatever was going to happen, or waiting to find out what Tim might do next.

Tim put a hand to the door, aware that he was going to have to trust Nathaniel on this if he was going to stay, even if only for a few days. But…
Zoe
. Nathaniel liked her, but Nathaniel clearly had a few screws loose behind his pretty face, because he also seemed to like Tim.

Nathaniel must have been just as aware of Tim on the other side of his door. The sound of his voice made Tim’s breath hitch. “You can handle her with one arm tied behind your back, Tim.”

“I heard that,” Zoe remarked distantly, not sounding too upset about it.

Tim huffed out a breath that was
not
amused, no matter what Nathaniel might think, and stepped away toward the kitchen to face the other wolf in the house. If Nathaniel wasn’t worrying about what might happen, then Tim shouldn’t either. Much.

W
HOEVER
COINED
the phrase “wolfing down food” clearly had Zoe in mind. Not that Tim was much better. He took most of the leftover eggs from the plate in the middle of the table and was reaching for the last of the bacon when Zoe looked up from giving her coffee the Glare of Death. There were pieces of egg on her face.

Tim had come into the kitchen expecting another order to do the dishes or some other attempt to take charge, but Zoe had been sitting at the table, shoveling bacon and eggs into her face while scowling down at her plate.

There had been a massive pile of scrambled eggs in the middle of the table, along with more bacon, which had made Tim assume Zoe must have had everything ready to go before she’d gone on her run. There had also been a pot of coffee with some creamer next to it. The mugs were hanging from the bottom of one of the cabinets.

Zoe had obviously been expecting him since there had been a plate waiting for him, but she had only grunted when Tim managed a thank you. Since then, she’d been glaring at her breakfast and slurping her coffee.

“That’s Nathaniel’s,” Zoe announced, transferring the Glare of Death to Tim for a second after he took some of the bacon. Up close, the glare looked a lot like the out of focus stare of a person who didn’t like mornings; maybe that was why Tim felt like sticking the bacon in his mouth anyway.

“Is there more in the fridge?” he asked instead, wondering if Zoe always cooked, since Nathaniel had said he was bad at it. Zoe blinked at him but nodded. Tim shrugged and crunched another piece of the forbidden bacon. “I’ll make him more, then.” He would probably have to buy some more food when he was in town too. It was only fair.

Zoe’s Glare of Death faded to a Glare of Near-Death. She stared at Tim for another few minutes, which was nerve-wracking for someone trying to eat. But Zoe must have gotten bored or decided Tim wasn’t any kind of threat, because after a while she slurped down another cup of coffee and then got up to put her dishes in the sink.

Tim frowned a bit. “You don’t mind that I’m here?”

Zoe turned to squint at him. Her expression inquired if Tim was an idiot before she grunted and went down the hallway.

Tim didn’t speak grunt, so he had no idea how to take that. “Well, that was very helpful.” He didn’t care if Zoe could hear it. She was going to hear more than that if Tim stayed here. Sooner or later Tim was going to open his big mouth, and Zoe wasn’t going to feel like tolerating the smartass anymore.

It was another reason, aside from his hard-on for Nathaniel, why it was such a bad idea for Tim to be out here. Nathaniel’s reasoning had made sense, but so had leaving town, even without much money. Instead Tim had chosen to come into the wolf’s den and live with the most compelling person he’d ever met and his vaguely scary second-in-command. Nathaniel had an undersheriff, a human, but that was for the human way of doing things. In a town where there were probably several weres who would qualify as alpha types, Nathaniel moved with the confidence of the one in charge. Tim’s uncle had been like that, and if Nathaniel was the same, that would mean he had weres lining up to serve him, and one in particular to be his lieutenant of sorts.

If that was Zoe, then Tim had to ask Nathaniel some serious questions about his choices when they had their talk later, unless he could manage to avoid that talk completely. Nathaniel
had
to be able to do better than Zoe. She couldn’t have a conversation, and she wasn’t even smart enough to….

“Son of a bitch,” Tim said out loud when he realized he had been stuck with the dishes anyway. Zoe was quicker than she looked.

There was no way Zoe left the dishes out like that for Nathaniel to do, if Nathaniel even washed the dishes. Tim spent a moment trying to imagine his uncle washing dishes. He couldn’t imagine himself doing it either, at least not every night. He might be the newest one in the house, and the smallest, but he wasn’t playing along with any were hierarchical structures, thank you very much.

He leveled his own death glare down the hall as water was turned on somewhere in the house. Zoe was probably in the shower. Before he could think it through, Tim turned on the water in the sink, nice and hot, and decided to do the dishes after all.

The muffled shout through the walls brought him to his senses, and he turned the water off. “Just getting the dishes done,” he said, not too loudly and keeping the tremor out of his voice. He took half a second to reflect on the fact that for once he was living with people enough like him that even this far away they could speak to each other.

Zoe, in what must have been her native language, grunted. Nathaniel didn’t say anything, but he could have been asleep. He
must
have been asleep, or convinced that his deputy wouldn’t leap out of the shower to kill Tim for taking her hot water. If that was the case, then he was right, because Zoe stayed in the shower and actually started to hum to herself. A moment after that she started to make noises that made it clear what else she liked to do in the shower besides hum—and she knew Tim could hear her. She was such a dick.

Tim took it back; it was not interesting to live with other weres. It was intrusive and gross.

“Oh my God! You suck so much! This entire town has less shame than a single fairy!” he howled and put his hands over his ears before going outside to sit on the porch—but not before turning on the hot water in the sink and letting it run.

He wasn’t sure how to take it when Zoe never emerged in a fit of rage to kick his ass, but after a while he felt bad enough to go in and turn the water off.

He stayed on the porch until Zoe had finished getting ready for work and she and her official vehicle had disappeared down the road to town. He waited until he was sure Zoe wasn’t coming back and Nathaniel really was asleep, and then he got up to take a cautious look around.

There was the same lack of locks around the rest of the house, or at least, the locks on the doors didn’t seem used. There really wasn’t a need, Tim supposed, since it would have been hard to sneak up on one were, much less two or three. Even at a distance and with the water running, Tim had been able to hear some of what Zoe had done in the shower.

He didn’t have anything to do but unpack, and he wasn’t about to do that. So he poked through the refrigerator and then went into the living room.

The couch smelled liked Zoe and Nathaniel, but mostly Zoe, so Tim guessed the video game system was hers. He didn’t touch it, or the computer, though he thought about looking up his uncle and finding out more about the reason he’d gone to Los Cerros, or at least the reason he’d claimed.

From the glimpses Tim had caught on TV, Silas was still wearing his favorite dark double-breasted suits, though he had more gray in his hair. The sign of aging didn’t make him look any less powerful. Power was likely the main reason he kept looking for Tim; it would be weak to let Tim escape.

Imagining his uncle’s reaction the day he’d finally find Tim was enough to make Tim reconsider running, but other than the vaguest sense of
west
, Tim had no idea where he was or where to go. Tim was stuck because he didn’t know enough to leave. Nathaniel had answers, and Tim maybe, possibly, wanted to know them.

That meant giving Nathaniel some answers in return, something that made the bacon and eggs roil in Tim’s stomach as he walked the perimeter of the cabin. He didn’t go more than twenty feet from the house, a stupid habit he should have forgotten by now.

His uncle had believed in keeping Tim close. He had also believed in security, a strict view of werewolf tradition, and books.

Tim had never understood why his uncle had tolerated Luca after it had become clear Luca would tear up a book if it would sharpen his claws. Maybe that had been the point. After years of grooming Tim and hoping some miracle would make him bigger and fit to defend the family honor, his uncle had started to rely more on the guy with the brawn and the proper instincts to back it up.

The Dirus name had history after all, history that would have been tainted if the world had seen Tim. No one ever outright said that was the reason Tim had lived alone in the family’s house, but it hadn’t been hard to figure out. The Dirus were one of the oldest known werewolf families and one of the first to have made themselves known to the humans. Evidently a little
too
well-known, judging from whatever recessive gene had led to Tim, and though most of the family were distant now—weaklings and gold diggers, according to his uncle—Tim was the heir and the one who was supposed to represent the name.

“They will see you as an easy target,” his uncle told him whenever Tim complained about having nowhere to go and no one to talk to. It was a lot like what his mother had told him. Tim didn’t remember much about her except for the scent of her hair and the stories she had told him before bed every night, made-up tales of tiny heroes, because she’d said he would need them.

“Some weres, Timmy, are only about who is stronger. But that’s because they don’t know what strength is.” She’d seemed like a giant with a soft voice, the strongest person in the world. But even weres had accidents and died, sometimes even the big, strong ones. If that was power, then it was useless. His uncle and Luca, everyone in that house had thought they were invincible. But weres were vulnerable.

Even Nathaniel, the strongest of them, had to deal with Tim now because of instinct, and Tim didn’t think his uncle would take it well to find out Nathaniel had helped hide Tim from him.

Tim looked over his shoulder into the woods that were a lot more terrifying when he considered who could be hiding in them. He hurried inside at the thought, moving as silently as he could until he was in the room Nathaniel had given him. He shut the door and used the lock, though he felt like an idiot for it.

He left his bags on the floor and sat on the bed without bothering much with Nathaniel’s thoughtfully provided bedding. Nathaniel shouldn’t be welcoming him or bringing him food or sleeping down the hall from him. Tim buried himself in the blanket as though he was a child again and having nightmares about ogres.

He looked around. He was still free, even if he was in this house in the woods where everything smelled like wolf and Nathaniel. He focused on the room, the plain, undecorated walls, the sturdy furniture, the high window above the bed. He hadn’t checked the closet, but it was probably empty like the rest of the house.