A Mate to Share [Wolf Pack Mates 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (2 page)

That was when she noticed a second man, behind and to the side of the stalker. Where her stalker—Morgan—was big and blond, this one was just as big, but dark. Black hair, dark eyes, and a tanned skin that looked quite delicious against the stark white of his T-shirt.

“And I should trust you because?”

This time it was the other man who answered her. “We wouldn’t be strangers anymore if you came out and talked to us. Or invited us in and talked to us.”

“Taige?”

“Coming.”

Taige came down the hallway holding her hands up in the air. Both were covered with green and blue paint, and sticky with something shiny. Possibly resin.

“Yup?”

“Do you recognize these people?”

“Yup. Jasper introduced us this morning. Let me think. Jett and Morgan isn’t it?”

Eve nodded. “Okay I’ll talk to you for ten minutes. No more. I have a bunch of deadlines to meet.”

She walked outside with them then stood right in the center of the almost empty schoolyard. The lines they’d painted on the gravel and dirt were still shiny and new. Her own car, and Taige’s, were parked at the rear of the building, near the back door they used as their main entry. The big front doors would only be opened on craft market days, or when they had clients visiting.

Eve took a moment to survey the area. It was a reasonably big yard. Not enormous, but plenty of space for the number of visitors they expected to come to their craft markets. She and Taige and Ginnie had also decided to buy some picnic tables and benches and to have a couple of food trucks come and sell their products at the craft markets, to make it a more interesting environment for the guests. Having a hot dog and some coffee might encourage them to stay a little longer and look at the displays more intently, too. Well, it was just an idea. One they hoped would work. Of course, if they’d bought the picnic tables and benches already she could be sitting in the warm sunshine now instead of standing, but likely it was good for her to stand and stretch her back after working at a desk the past few hours.

“What are you looking at? There’s just the two of us. We didn’t bring anyone else,” asked Morgan.

“We’re going to buy some picnic tables for when the craft markets start. That way people might like to have a snack to eat, and stay here a little longer. The longer they stay, the more likely they’ll be to buy something.”

“Do you want the tables bolted to the ground so they’re here permanently? Or do you want the type you can take indoors in winter?” asked Jett.

“Oh we’ll want to take them inside for winter. It’d be much easier to carry them in and out, than to have to scrub them clean all the time,” said Eve, looking at him curiously.

Jett and Morgan nodded at each other and Eve wondered what they’d agreed on. So far, the conversation didn’t seem like they were trying to pry all her secrets from her, but then what did she know about interrogation techniques? Only what she’d seen in old spy movies.

“I can borrow a truck from the community and we could be back here in half an hour to take you down to Wal-Mart or a store of your choice to pick out some picnic tables. Say half a dozen? If that’s something you’d like to do, we’d like to come and help you do it,” said Jett.

Now Eve really didn’t understand the men. “You want to go borrow a truck to take me to town to buy picnic tables and benches?”

“If that would be a help to you, yes, it’s what we’d like to do,” confirmed Morgan.

“Okay. You’ll be back in half an hour? That’ll give me long enough to shower and change. I’ll see you then.”

She turned and walked back to the schoolhouse, glancing back at them as she shut the door. Both of them were watching her, but not critically, more like watching a friend leave the room. She shook her head and went and collected her shower things. The bathrooms were a separate building out the back of the old schoolhouse. That was going to be a real nuisance come winter, but they planned to get an indoor shower and toilet installed by then. Hopefully. If it wasn’t going to be too expensive. Which reminded her, she’d need to go online and move some more money onto her credit card before she went shopping. She hated it to get too far into debt. There was no way she was paying the kind of outrageous interest the credit card companies seemed to demand if she could possibly avoid it.

* * * *

As they drove back to the pack lands, Jett and Morgan discussed whether to borrow the large truck or just a pickup. Six picnic tables and benches would likely fit on the pickup, but it might require some fancy rope tying to keep them balanced there. If they took the big truck they would have no trouble at all bringing back whatever Eve decided to buy. But the problem was the big truck was, well, big. A nuisance to park and maneuver.

“This is the first time we’ve actually spoken to her, so we can’t let her down. Besides, with two of us the big truck should be fine. It’s not like right now is peak shopping season or anything,” said Morgan.

Jett nodded. “So who’ll drive? You or me?”

“You can. I hate to admit it, but you’re more experienced with the eighteen wheelers than me.”

“We’ll grab some old blankets as well to put between the tables so they don’t damage each other when we go over potholes.”

“Good plan.”

Precisely half an hour after they left they were back with the eighteen wheeler, and a dozen blankets grabbed from the stash of old ones in the barn. That was one of the advantages of living with shape-shifters. There were all sorts of useful things stored around the community for people who might end up naked unexpectedly.

Eve and Taige emerged almost as soon as Jett had pulled into the yard. “I said half a dozen tables, not half a hundred.” But she was smiling, so he knew she wasn’t angry.

“It was this or a pickup truck. They might not have fit in the pickup. Besides, this way if you want to buy anything else you see, you can,” said Morgan.

Eve just shook her head as Morgan jumped down to help her into the cab. Taige was laughing outright. “Have fun,” she called.

It was a shame the truck was so big. He’d have enjoyed himself more in the pickup where Eve’s thighs would have been pressed against his. Instead, her lean body fit neatly inside her seat space with no reason for him to touch her even when he changed gears.
Dammit!

“Are you the kind of shopper who likes to visit lots of different stores and check out all the different items and prices?” asked Morgan.

“I’ve already checked the prices. I know exactly where to buy what I want.”

“They might have changed since you last looked,” said Jett, thinking of the long, drawn-out business of going shopping with his dad.

“Google.”

“I wish I could introduce you to my dad. The man was a terrible shopper. When we went to buy a birthday gift for Mom, first we’d go into dozens of stores looking at items and Dad would make a list. Then we’d go back again and crosscheck prices and availability and what colors everything came in. Then half the time he’d go back and look at something that he’d already crossed off his list and we’d have to go to every store again looking at that item. We’d start the minute the stores opened in the morning and half the time we’d still be walking backward and forward as they were getting ready to close for the night,” said Jett.

“How often did you come away without a gift at all?” asked Eve, staring at him.

“Never after I was about eight. When it got to around four in the afternoon and the list was down to two or three items I’d randomly chose one and insist on buying it. But even worse, was a week or two later, Dad would want to go back and check all the stores to reassure himself he’d made the right choice. I was about ten before I refused to go with him. Once it’s bought, it’s bought. If he’d been ripped off after all that searching it was too bad.”

Morgan started laughing. “I just realized I can remember that. I’m two years older than Jett, so we were always in different grades at school. But I remember you talking about it once, Jett. You’d missed the baseball tryouts and were really upset about it.”

“Hey, I remember that, too. But they were in the morning and I knew I’d never get Dad to make a decision that fast.”

“Well, we can go to a dozen stores looking at things if you want to, but I’ve got deadlines to meet and am just as happy to go straight in and out of one store,” said Eve.

“One store is fine. I like someone who can make a decision,” said Jett.

“Tell us about your deadlines. Taige said you make the huge wall hangings,” said Morgan.

“I’d like to see them when we go back to the school this afternoon,” added Jett. He meant it, too. This woman called to him in the way no other female ever had, wolf or human. He’d worked out years ago that he’d need to do what the wolves in the town did, which was marry into another species, or share a mate. That was fine by him as long as the woman was someone he was prepared to live with for the rest of his life. He had no intention of causing an interspecies war by leaving a mate alone if he didn’t like her very much.

But this woman with her lean build, cool gray eyes, blonde hair, and her aura of tidy self-sufficiency was just what he wanted. He couldn’t wait to get her handcuffed to his bed, naked, and begging him for his cock.

The quiet, restrained ones were usually the ones with the most passion. Hidden passion was almost always much more incendiary than people who ran hot and cold in public. Having to share her with Morgan was a fact of life. With so few females, sharing was logical. Morgan was a man he knew and trusted. Some of the pack members were okay, but Morgan was a man of integrity. He couldn’t agree to share with anyone who wasn’t. He wanted a peaceful, happy home life. With a woman whose body called to him as Eve’s did, and a partner he could trust, life would be good.

He kept his gaze on the road as Eve answered Morgan’s question. “My deadlines are the same as anyone’s in any job. Customers need something by a set date. I have a very large commissioned wall hanging I’m working on. I have a smaller hanging that I need to start as soon as the big one is done, and I’m also making some little items for people to buy at the craft market.”

“Yeah, I guess there’s not a lot of impulse buys of very large and expensive things. What sort of small things do you make?”

“I try to change it up at regular intervals. I have a bunch of stuff on my website people can order if they want to. But at the moment I’m making some woven covers for electronic toys. Pretty covers for cell phones, and cases for sunglasses for women, brightly colored ones for men, and also holders for iPads. Just little things like that. Impulse buys. Something to attract a person’s eye that they can afford. Then it keeps me in their mind when they’re looking for home furnishings.”

“Good idea.” Jett had never had to run his own business. He’d known from childhood he’d work with the pack. It was simply a matter of deciding which kinds of jobs suited him best within the pack structure. But what Eve said made good sense to him.

“I wouldn’t have expected a farm to have a truck like this,” Eve said quietly.

Yeah, she was one smart female, this woman. Fortunately their standard cover story worked for the truck.

Morgan answered, “Way back four, five generations ago, a group of families settled the land together. They arrived together, and bought land together, made a community together. So long ago travel was much more difficult. Basically if someone wanted to go somewhere they walked. The few horses they had they needed to work on the farms. So the kids grew up and married inside the community. It didn’t take them long to figure out if they kept dividing up the farms for the next generation pretty soon no one would be able to make a living anymore. So the land became communally owned. As tractors and other machinery were needed the community bought things as a group and shared them. The system worked, so it’s still how everything is run.”

“What happens if three people want the truck on the same day?”

“It’s not likely to happen. Since the crops are farmed jointly everyone knows when something is harvested or ready for market. But people negotiate. There’s a scheduler, so for example if I want to use something other people might want, I ask the scheduler to make a booking,” said Jett.

He liked that she was smart. That made her so much more interesting. He also liked that she was dropping the cool exterior. Not much, but just enough that he knew his assumption that under the icy exterior red-hot blood ran in her veins was correct.

As they neared town he had to concentrate more on his driving, but he felt warm and happy inside knowing his woman was sitting right next to him in the cab of the truck.

* * * *

Morgan was delighted it had proven so easy to find something they could do together which was not only of interest to all of them, but also useful. Although what his body cried out to do was take her to bed and claim her so thoroughly she’d never want to get out of bed again, logic told him any woman capable of enchanting him would not be so easy to deal with. He wanted a woman with interests of her own. A woman with her own personality, her own life, not just a pale replica who’d be sitting on his bed waiting for him when he returned home at night. A woman with no personality and no interests would bore him to death inside a week, no matter how passionate she was in bed.