The Alpha's Choice (7 page)

The white haired giant blushed fiercely. "But
Mama said if Charlie was gonna be..."

"Maybe you better pay less attention to your
Mama's mutterings and more attention to your manners," Mrs. Martin
interrupted before Buddy embarrassed them both. "Instead of tossing
Mr. Goodman around, maybe you should have been holding out
your hand and introducing yourself to the lady."

Poor Buddy looked like he wasn't sure what to
do. He looked at his mother, looked at his hand, and looked at
Kat.

Kat took pity on the confused man and held
out her hand. "Hi, I'm Kat. It's nice to meet you, Buddy."

"Kat?" he grinned as he shook her hand, very
gently, she noted. Still shaking and grinning, he looked to his
mother. "You were right Mama. We got us another Kitty Kat." Buddy
laughed at his joke. "Our other one died," he explained to Kat,
"But I didn't eat it. We don't eat cats." He emphasized each word
with a shake of his finger as if it was another rule.

"I'm glad to hear it" she laughed.

Chapter
7

"What do you mean he's not there?"

Charles was shouting so loudly into his
phone, they could hear every word from the kitchen. He was pacing
like a wild animal held in a cage, back and forth, back and forth,
in front of the windows looking out over the patio. He'd been
making phone calls for the last half hour, becoming louder and more
frustrated each time the people he tried to contact were
unavailable.

By the sound of it, he'd gone back to the top
of his list.

"Don't give me that out-of-town shit, Henry.
We both know he's not on vacation. Saint Marshall wouldn't leave
his precious Rabbit Creek unattended." His jaw clenched as he
listened to what Henry had to say.

"Bullshit! Elizabeth'll be ready to whelp any
day now. Hell, half your female population must be ready to drop
their cubs, so you know as well as I do, nobody's going anywhere
any time soon."

Whatever was said on the other side of the
line made him grin, but no one would know it from the sound of his
voice.

"You're welcome," he snarled, "If you weren't
my cousin, I'd come down there and rip your throat out. What kind
of a Second are you? You don't know where your Alpha is. You don't
know where the goddamned kids are and you don't have a contact
number for Eugene Fucking Begley." He held the phone out and looked
at it as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing.

"I didn't call him," he yelled at the phone
in his outstretched hand, "Elizabeth did. She said she'd take care
of finding me a housekeeper for this place and a teacher for the
kids." A pause. "Yes, dammit, but she knew damn well they weren't
both supposed to come here. Shit, the teacher isn't even one of
us!"

"You know damn well what she is! Keep
laughing and I really will come down there and rip your throat out.
You tell Marshall the same goes for him and don't think that pretty
little mate of his is going to save either one of you."

He looked at the phone in his hand again and
for a moment, Kat thought he was going to hurl it into the pool,
but then he punched it with his thumb without saying goodbye and
jammed it into his pocket.

Mrs. Martin's whole head followed each
time Charles changed direction, like this was a tennis
match and his head was the ball. She pursed her lips and
sighed.

"Looks to me like Buddy isn't the only one
who hasn't changed. Listen to that language. I told his mother long
ago she should wash that filthy mouth out with soap, but poor
Emily, God rest her soul, thought he'd grow out of it. Don't
see why. His Daddy never did. He had the same foul temper
peppered with the same foul words."

"Like father, like son," Kat commented.

"Lord, I hope not."

They'd eaten lunch in the small eating area
off the kitchen, the Breakfast Room, and over sandwiches piled
impossibly high with slabs of ham and thick slices of cheese,
Kat learned that Mrs. Martin had worked for Charles' mother when he
and his brothers were boys. She'd been Mrs. Gregory then and her
son, older than the Goodman boys, had worshipped Charles, the
eldest son, and followed him about so closely, Charles couldn't
stop short without the bigger boy bowling him over.

Kat did the mental math and came to the
conclusion that Buddy, the man she'd judged to be in his twenties,
was a good twenty years older than that!

As for the grownup Charles, he all but
ignored Kat during the meal and spent his time trying to chat with
Buddy about how the other man had spent his time during the years
they'd been apart. It wasn't easy. Buddy only wanted to talk about
Kat.

"She sure is pretty," he told Charles as if
Kat wasn't in the room.

"She is that," Charles agreed, "So you say
you couldn't find much work, huh?"

"No. I think she'd make a fine Mate. She's a
teacher, you know."

"So I gathered. You think you'd like to work
for me?"

"Mama says I got no choice if I expect to
eat. You think she'd like having babies? I could help take care of
'em. I do good with babies, 'specially if they was your babies,
Charlie. Mama says it's important for a Mate to like babies and if
she's a teacher, she must like 'em, right?"

Charles was beginning to look uncomfortable
and Kat didn't feel much better. "Maybe we can go for a run later,
Buddy. Would you like that?"

"Sure would!" Buddy nodded enthusiastically.
"If Kat was the Mate, she could run with us. I bet she'd look fine
a-runnin' wild. You like to run Miss Kitty Kat?"

"I used to," Kat told him, "But mostly when I
had to catch a bus"

It was true. When she was young, she ran for
the sheer joy of it, but like so many things she enjoyed, running
was set aside because it got her no closer to her goals and running
on city sidewalks held little appeal.

"See, Charlie? Miss Kitty Kat is just about
perfect." Buddy folded his arms and sat back in his chair and
nodded, argument won, conversation over.

"You need to talk to him, Mrs. Martin."

"Indeed I do, Mr. Goodman, but you have to
understand. Buddy's not a child anymore and he has his own
opinions."

Charles spent the rest of the meal in silence
before he went outside and started making phone calls.

"Wes Goodman, Charles' daddy, was a hard man,
but a just leader and fair in his dealings with his people," Mrs.
Martin went on. "He did right by them, took good care of them and
he was soft and sweet as marshmallow when it came to Emily. It was
them boys he was tough on. Toughest on Charles because he was the
oldest and supposed to take his father's place." She glanced over
her shoulder at Kat. "You need to remember that."

"I don't see why. According to Mr.
Goodman, I don't belong here." It was like she'd suddenly
grown warts on her nose, turned wall-eyed, lost half her teeth and
contracted plague. The man wouldn't even look at her. "I'll be
leaving come morning."

"I wouldn't count on that if I were you." One
side of the woman's mouth curved up into her cheek in a lopsided
smirk that Kat already recognized as Mrs. Martin's version of
a smile. "If Eugene Begley sent you here, he must mean you to be
here."

"You heard Mr. Goodman. It was a
mistake."

"Eugene Begley don't make that kind of
mistake."

"Charles' plans for this place didn't include
me or kids. I thought he made that pretty clear."

Looking only at Mrs. Martin across the table
from him at lunch or at Buddy to his left, Charles
explained in code again (and that was really ticking Kat
off) that he'd purchased this place in the middle of
nowhere as a 'retreat' for his people, to be used mostly on
weekends for adult relaxation and pursuits, emphasis on
'adult', and not for a schoolhouse.

You didn't have to be an expert at code
breaking to understand the meaning of that! With the pool and hot
tub, food and liquor enough to stock a neighborhood bar and
six bedrooms and baths above, he was looking for party time,
not foster parent time and he had thought to begin this
week's party early with Kat. The flaw in that theory was Mrs.
Martin herself who didn't find their circumstances amusing when she
walked in on them this morning, but later nodded her head in
understanding at Charles' plan. Of course, at the time, Mrs. Martin
thought Charles was the painter and not the boss. The guy who
signed your paychecks always had great ideas.

 Kat brushed the last of the crumbs from
the counter into her palm, tossed them into the container under the
sink and came to stand next to Mrs. Martin. Together they watched
Charles look up at the gray and water swollen sky and frown.

He held his hand out, palm up, catching the
first fat drops of rain and then his hand went to his mouth and
with two fingers between his lips he issued a piercing whistle
before waving his arms to call Buddy in.

"You're supposed to be sitting down."

Kat touched the other woman's arm and
indicated the wooden rocker in the corner, mostly because she
didn't want to watch Charles' high and tight rear end move beneath
the canvas work pants. She didn't want to imagine how the muscles
of his tapered back rippled under the faded oxford shirt.

Damnit! What was the matter with her? She
didn't even know this guy and if they hadn't been interrupted, she
would have been stripped and spread after only a grunt and a nod
from him. She'd never done a one night stand in her life and she
sure as hell never felt like that about anyone, never mind a guy
she just met. After the way he'd treated her, what he'd said to
her, the way he ignored her at lunch, how could she still feel this
disgustingly insatiable interest?

"You don't belong here," Kat said aloud,
"That's what he said and he was right." He might as well have
slapped her.

She'd heard and felt those words so many
times, they shouldn't hurt any more. Repetition had taken the sting
out of those words long ago or so she thought. Kat had spent a
lifetime trying to belong, trying to have what other people had,
trying to live the way other people lived. Trying and failing.

She never belonged; not in her old
neighborhood, not in high school or college, not with her
colleagues at Greenwood Preparatory Academy and apparently not with
those of the Bastard, either.

"Seems to me, men say a lot of things they
don't mean." Mrs. Martin rocked that chair the way Kat suspected
the woman did everything, in double time.

"Trust me, Mrs. Martin, this one means it. He
wants me gone," Kat said bitterly and wondered again why it should
bother her so much.

"Don't know you well enough to trust you and
call me Tilda. I expect we'll be spending a lot of time together.
No sense being formal."

Before Kat could reply, Charles stuck his
head in the door.

"I'm going for a run," he said, "See if I can
catch up with Buddy."

At the sound of her son's name, Tilda's head
snapped up. "You let him run?"

"I did," he nodded. "He said it had been a
while and he missed it, so I let him go."

Tilda looked ready to run out the door after
her wayward son and Kat could understand why. In the few hours
she'd known them, she'd already seen that the man had the mind of a
child and was actually older than Charles though he didn't look
it.

"He can't run, not alone. He gets distracted,
confused... lost." 

"He'll be fine. He can't have gone far. I'll
call and he'll come," Charles said confidently.

"He won't," Tilda told him worriedly with a
sharp glance at Kat. "When he runs, he turns deaf. All he hears is
the wild. They'd get so mad at him, but he can't help it. The pull
is too strong, he doesn't hear."

"He'll hear me." Charles stripped his belt
from the loops of his spattered painter's pants. He crossed his
arms and gripped the hem of his shirt in that way men have of
stripping off their shirt and leaving it inside out. Arms stretched
above his head, he offered a perfect display of pectorals and
abs.

His chest was every bit as beautiful as Kat
imagined. Unprepared for her reaction, she sucked in her breath on
a wave of longing and had her arm outstretched to touch him
before she realized she'd moved. Disgusted with herself, she turned
the gesture into a comforting one and laid her hand on Tilda's
shoulder.

"I can look for him, too."

"No, you can't. I want you here, with Mrs.
Martin," Charles ordered.

"Yes, I can. I'm perfectly capable… "

The closing door told her what he thought of
that.

Being a mature adult, Kat wrinkled her nose
and stuck out her tongue at the back of the man striding away from
the door. "Asshole. I wonder if he orders everyone around like that
or just me."

"I imagine he's used to being obeyed," Tilda
observed vaguely.

She was watching through the window, eyes
squinting to see through the sheets of rain that beat against the
windows as the sky released its burden. Her thumb rubbed against
the tips of her fingers in a nervous gesture and her jaw was tight.
Even on such short acquaintance, Kat knew this woman wasn't one to
worry over trivial things. If she was concerned for Buddy's safety,
she had reason to be. A tear formed in the corner of the woman's
eye, just one tear, but it was enough for Kat to make up her
mind.

"I'm going out to look."

Poor Mrs. Martin looked truly alarmed. "You
can't. He said to stay here."

Kat grinned. "Ever hear the words you're not
the boss of me?"

"Don't claim to be, but the Al… Mr. Goodman,
he…"

"Isn't the boss of me either."

Technically he was, but at the moment Kat
didn't care. He was probably going to fire her anyway.

"You don't know these woods. You'll end up
lost, too."