Page 116 of Claiming the Wolf Daddy

“Are you going to toy with me the whole time I talk to you, or are you going to actually listen to me?” I asked.

“Marley, baby, I’ve already removed myself from my own party to come and talk to you,” Curt said. “I could have just laughed in your face and told you to get the fuck out. Actually, I could have done far worse than that without anyone stopping me. I’m not someone who likes to waste my time, especially if I’m in the middle of spending that time surrounded by beautiful women worshipping me.”

“So why didn’t you?” I asked. “Kick me out, I mean.”

He gestured with a paint-covered hand toward the hedge maze. “Sit down with me like a normal person and find out,” he said, lips curving upward lazily.

I hesitated before dropping my hand from my shoulder and walking again. He waited until I was next to him before he slipped his hand into his pocket and started leading me into the maze. My stomach flipped and twisted as the humming bass of the music inside the clubhouse grew farther and farther away. Finally, we reached a quiet fountain with dim lighting and a few benches around it. Curt sat down on one of the benches, pulling his knee onto it and sprawling his arm across the back of it.

He nodded toward the small bit of space left for me, and I shuffled over, sitting as far away from him as I could. This looked like a make-out spot, and I didn’t like it. Even more, I hated that he knew how to get to it so quickly.

There was a time in my youth when an edgy bad boy like Curt would have really gotten my blood and hormones pumping. He reminded me of the emo boys I used to idolize when I was angsty about…well, everything. I tried not to look at him as I sat in silence.

In my peripheral vision, I watched him reach into his pants pocket and pull out a box of cigarettes and a lighter. He opened the dented cardboard and held it toward me.

“Take one,” he said. “We’re gonna do this over a smoke break.”

“I don’t smoke,” I said.

“I wasn’t asking,” he said. “You crashed my party and started making demands. Now it’s my turn.”

I glared over at him, flattening my lips before begrudgingly taking one and putting it in my mouth.

He huffed a laugh before lighting his cigarette with a worn, windproof lighter. After taking a long drag from it, he held the flame out for me.

I leaned forward to light my own cigarette, hands faintly shaking as I held it between my fingers. But just as I got close enough to ignite it, he slammed the metal lighter shut and closed the distance between us.

I was just about to retreat when he grabbed my wrist and held me there. He pressed the glowing end of his own smoke to the end of mine, bringing our faces uncomfortably close. I was so surprised by it that I gasped, pulling smoke from my cigarette too fast and burning the back of my throat.

He was still holding my wrist as I recoiled from the bitter taste, turning my face away from him as I coughed and wheezed. Ribbons of silver smoke drifted up into the moonlit sky. He laughed, releasing me and leaning back as he watched me struggle to catch my breath.

“Wrong pipe?” he asked.

“Fuck you,” I wheezed.

“Well, if you’re offering,” he said, taking another lazy drag as he settled back into his lounging position. “So, again, to what do I owe this pleasure?”

I held off on the urge to bark at him over his innuendo, flicking the ash off my cigarette before taking a much smaller puff.

“I have a situation, and we don’t have the infrastructure to handle it,” I said, getting straight to the point.

“Infrastructure? You mean that pitiful little daycare you guys call a pack?”

I bit my tongue and sighed. “Yes, our pack.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“Nothing. Yet. But this is one of those ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ scenarios.”

He quirked an eyebrow at me as he let out a large cloud of smoke from his nostrils, hitching an ankle onto his knee. “You came to ask me for my help?”

“Yes. Albeit begrudgingly,” I said under my breath.

“What’s going on?”

I gave him the rundown of everything: Rosie and Paulette being taken, the search parties, Cole and the rest of our strongest and most loyal members going missing at the canneries, some pack members being abducted since. By the time I was done talking, my cigarette had burned down to nothing.

I stamped it out on the stone bench while Curt lit up a new one for himself, looking thoughtful.

---