Sharon's Wolves (Wolf Masters Book 10) (7 page)

Sharon gasped at the quantity of information he was spewing out into the room.

But he kept going. “No. I don’t. Plain and simple fact. I hate the idea. It makes my skin crawl. And I hate that Fate is so controlling of my destiny that I don’t have my own free will. Fuck,” he turned his gaze toward Jackson, “even Jackson doesn’t have his own free will, and the poor fucker didn’t even know it. Is that fair?” His voice continued to rise.

Sharon opened her mouth to say anything, but Cooper stopped her with a palm held out.

“Don’t. Don’t fucking tell me how to feel. I don’t want to hear it. This situation sucks donkey balls. There’s no way around it. If I thought I could escape, I would shift and run from here as fast as my legs would carry me. I’d rather hide in the wilds of Canada than let Fate control my life like this. But it’s done. She came. She conquered. She wins.”

Sharon knew he meant Fate, and he was right. It was defeating. Whoever She was, She must have been smirking down at them in laughter while watching this comedy unfold.

Cooper turned back toward Jackson again. “I’m sorry, man. Truly I am. If I could change this, I would. But I can’t. You can’t. And we have to figure this out together and make it work. Trust me. We don’t have another choice.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” Jackson said. Fortunately he didn’t put a period on that by stomping out the door.

“Really?” Cooper asked. “So your cock isn’t so hard for Sharon that you’d give your soul to have her right now?”

Jackson flinched, his face turning red.

Sharon would kill them both if they started throwing punches.

“How long have you planned this?” Jackson asked, his gaze shooting back and forth between Cooper and Sharon. “What did you drug me with?” He looked over his shoulder toward the remnants of their meal.

Sharon flinched. She hated knowing how he felt toward her right then. It made bile rise into her throat. She was hurting him. And it wasn’t avoidable.

If they let him leave, it would be so painful for all of them that she feared Jackson might get in an accident, or worse.

No. They had to make him understand.

She jumped to her feet, heedless of her fake injury. It was the least of her concerns.

Jackson glanced down at her leg and then lifted his face and rolled his eyes. He tossed his hands in the air and sighed. “Will the surprises never end?”

“Not for a while, no,” Cooper said. “The best thing to do is calm down and listen to us.”

“Why would I do that? I don’t want to become a member of your weird cult. I just want to go home. Whatever you drugged me with will surely wear off after a while, and then I’ll resume my regularly scheduled life.”

Sharon shook her head as she stepped closer to Cooper. She ached to touch him, but thought better of it. Not to mention she still hadn’t decided if she wanted to punch him or kiss him first. “It won’t wear off.”

“So you admit you drugged me.”

“We didn’t drug you, man.” Cooper spun in a circle in frustration.

“Was it the wine? Did you do something to it? Is that why you bought a second bottle of it? Did you bring it here to reinforce the ritual?” Jackson glanced past Cooper toward the door. “Where is it? Did you forget it in the car?” He chuckled sardonically.

“No one’s drugging you,” Sharon stated in a calmer voice. “It just happens. We can’t help it.”

“We who?” Jackson asked.

“We…shifters. And the ones we’re destined to fall in love with,” Sharon breathed out on a rush. It would take a lot more than that, but it was a start.

A moment of silence reigned long enough for her to catch her breath. She leaned down and tore the bandage off her leg. The wound was almost gone. It would disappear completely in a few more days.

“It heal okay?” Cooper asked.

She knew what he meant. Was there any permanent damage? She smiled. “It’s fine.”

Suddenly his gaze intensified, and he lurched forward and hauled her body against his. He wrapped his arms around her so tightly she couldn’t breathe. When he buried his face in her hair and inhaled slowly, she knew she was home. At least halfway home.

“Can you two at least try to pretend I’m not invisible?” Jackson’s voice was rough. Defeated.

Sharon wiggled free of Cooper’s clutches to face her other mate. “Sorry. We actually haven’t met before.”

Jackson blinked. He turned around to face the kitchen table, grabbed a chair, and lowered himself slowly into it. “Start talking. And don’t leave anything out.”

Headway
. Cooper took a deep breath and trudged across the room to grab another kitchen chair and sit. He left several inches between himself and Jackson, facing the man at an angle so he could include Sharon.

The woman made it difficult to think. He wished he had the balls to tell her to go put something else on, but he also wanted to see her curves and admire her full tits at the same time. It was a conundrum he hadn’t yet finished wrapping his mind around.

Instead of dealing with it, he forced himself to look away every few seconds. His cock was going to explode.

And he was so far from having sex with her it wasn’t funny. In fact he groaned at the thought of the road he still needed to pave to get under that short skirt and bury his face between her folds.

Why the fuck did Fate find it necessary to match him and Sharon up with a human? Was this Her way of making a joke, perhaps at his expense for being too stubborn to show up in Cambridge for two years?

It was certainly a possibility.

“Start with the leg.” Jackson pointed at Sharon’s calf as he leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms and closing himself off from them. “I guess I only ever saw the blood. I can’t prove it was yours.” He chuckled again in a tone that was so far from funny it made Cooper’s skin crawl.

He hoped when they got through this thing, he never had to hear that sound of distrust coming from Jackson again. He hated it.

“But why? Why the farce? Why lure me off the road to take you down to the lodge if you weren’t even injured? Is that when this started? Did you do something to me that day to make me lose my mind with lusting after you ever since?”

Cooper smiled. He couldn’t help it. At least Jackson acknowledged how he felt toward Sharon. It was a start.

Sharon shot Cooper a glare. “Stop smirking. I’m not done being mad at you.” She pointed a finger at him, and then she put all her strength into twisting a large black leather chair around to face them. When she settled in it, tucking long sexy legs that went on for miles under her, she continued addressing Cooper. “Until I’m over my well-deserved frustration with your stubborn stupidity, I suggest you not piss me the fuck off.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from chuckling at this lithe woman with the tiny waist, legs that went on and on, breasts he wanted to wrap his hands around immediately, and wide brown eyes that could bring him to his knees with a glance.

She turned her attention back to Jackson. “At no point have I or anyone else ever drugged you. So stop that insanity. Your eyes did not deceive you Tuesday. I did indeed get cut by the hoe. It was deep, and it was long. Even I was a bit nervous for a minute. Griffen panicked and sent the men working for us running in every direction to get help. You were the first to arrive.

“By then I’d lost some blood, but more importantly, I was in shock. And it didn’t help when you stepped closer and I realized it was you. The man from last Friday night. The man haunting my dreams.” She lowered her voice to add the next part, “The man I’d been avoiding for months while you stalked me at the ski resort.” She shot him a quick grin.

He gasped. “You knew that?”

Cooper desperately wanted to ask what she meant by that, but he held his tongue.

“Of course. I just never got close enough to you to prove who you were to me,” Sharon added.

“And that is?”

“My mate. Or one of them.” She was quick to hold out a hand to keep him from interrupting her. “I did not at any point in time consider I might meet and fall for two men. What I said to you earlier wasn’t a lie. I truly believed I was destined for only one man.”

“That would be me,” Cooper added.

She shot him a look that could melt steel. “Stop being an ass. And don’t sit there all cocky like you owned me.”

Cooper schooled his face, but he loved seeing her all riled up. Her face flushed a deeper shade of red, and she pulled her shoulders back, making her nipples stand out even more. He forced himself to keep his gaze on her eyes.

Jackson interrupted his reverie again. “If you thought you were destined, or whatever, to be with Cooper, then why lure me in?”

She rolled her eyes again. “I did not intentionally lure anyone anywhere. It just happened. Fate picks who we fall for in our world, not us.”

Cooper couldn’t hold his tongue. “And sometimes she seems to find some sort of twisted humor in selecting a human.”

Sharon nearly came out of her chair. “Cooper Hamilton. I swear to God.”

“Sorry. Just trying to speed things up a bit.” He held out both palms.

Jackson turned toward Cooper. “You saying you aren’t human?” The smirk on his face was evidence he found this comical. “Who do you think you are, then? Superman? An alien?”

Cooper asked for this. He glanced at Sharon to make sure she wasn’t going to throttle him and then turned back to Jackson. “We’re part human. You can see that. But we have other abilities as well.”

“Like?” The smirk grew. Jackson wasn’t going to take this well.

“We can shift into wolves.”

“Wolves,” he repeated.

“He’s right,” Sharon added. “And since he’s such a wise guy, I’ll let him be the one to demonstrate.”

“Me?” Cooper pointed at himself. He would much rather have her strip down to nothing and do the honors. Why him?

“Whoa whoa whoa.” Jackson held out a hand to stop them both from continuing to argue. “Did you say wolves? You actually believe you’re a werewolf?”

Cooper scrunched up his nose. “No. That’s a myth.”

“Oh good, because for a minute there…” Jackson’s voice was as condescending as it could be. Not surprising.

Cooper continued. “We aren’t some strange half-man, half-wolf creatures of the night that transform for the purpose of hunting their prey and going on a killing spree.”

“Oh good. That’s such a pretty picture,” Sharon said.

Cooper ignored her, keeping his attention focused on Jackson. “We shift into actual wolves. The kind on all fours. The regular kind you see in the forest. We aren’t a menace to anyone. We don’t harm or kill. In fact quite the opposite. We serve man, doing our best to preserve the human way of life and keep Nature in balance by heeding her warnings. Sometimes in the form of spirits like the one we just saw by the door.”

Jackson licked his lips. “You really believe you can become a wolf, don’t you?”

“I don’t
believe
I can. I
know
I can.” Cooper reached for the hem of his shirt and hauled it over his head. He was too fucking tired for this, but it had to be done. He stood and popped the button on his jeans next.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“He’s going to shift for you. Until you see it, you won’t understand,” Sharon said.

Cooper lowered his zipper and then stared at her as he pushed his jeans down his legs, taking his underwear with them. “You do realize how very unfair this is, right?”

“Nope.” The burning need on her face as she watched him strip was incongruent with the tone of her word, as if she were unaffected by his nudity. She fidgeted in her seat, lifting and adjusting her ass several times.

Cooper tipped his head back and inhaled her scent, her arousal filling the room now more than ever. “Woman…” He forced himself to turn back to a very shocked Jackson. “Only gonna do this once tonight, so watch carefully. There’ll be a quiz after,” he teased.

The effect was lost on Jackson, however. The man sat very still, his mouth hanging open as if to speak, but nothing came out.

Cooper lowered to all fours and closed his eyes, letting the change take over. He listened to his own bones popping and elongating, felt the hair lengthen on his body, and altered his thinking until he was fully shifted into wolf form. He lifted his gaze toward Jackson and didn’t move.

“Holy fuck.” Jackson scooted his entire chair backward and then stood abruptly, reached out, and grabbed Sharon out of her chair to haul her away from Cooper.

She barely got her legs under her, but it didn’t matter because Jackson didn’t let her feet hit the ground. He was strong. And he had adrenaline on his side. He whisked her away from perceived harm so fast, she didn’t need her feet.

When he tucked her behind him, setting her on the ground, she finally regained control of her limbs. “Jackson, it’s okay.” She wrapped her arms around his middle and squeezed while she eased to his side so her head rested on his chest. “It’s okay,” she repeated. “Soak it in. I know it’s a shock.” She tipped her head back and set her chin on his pec to face him. Her small hand found its way to the other side of his chest and flattened against him.

The jealously Cooper felt was unnerving, but he remained still. This was necessary. He needed to give Jackson a moment to internalize what he was seeing. His world, the one he’d believed to know everything about for over thirty years, had just crumbled to sand around him.

It took time to break those barriers and build a new reality. Cooper was going to have to dig deep to gather up a huge amount of patience. It was one thing when a wolf found out he was mated to a human female, but a human male? He didn’t know anyone who had found themselves in this predicament.

As he cocked his head to one side, he realized most of the work of convincing Jackson was going to fall on Sharon’s shoulders. After all, Jackson would be rock hard with the need to claim her at all hours of the day and night. He wouldn’t understand the terminology shifters used for mating and claiming yet, but that wouldn’t lessen the driving need.

When he calmed down enough to accept this new reality, he would realize he and Cooper were partners for life in this adventure, and a certain level of respect, admiration, and protectiveness would come with it. But the man would never feel the same level of drive toward Cooper as he would feel toward Sharon.