Doubly Protected [Werewolves of Hanson Mall 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (3 page)

By the time those kids were sent on their way back home, another group was trying to climb the back wall of the complex to abseil down from the dome. He called the police this time. These kids were older and came equipped with ropes and crampons and other gear.

No sooner had the police taken them away than some stupid kids were throwing pumpkins from the top deck of the parking lot at passing cars.

“Jeez, Louise, is it end of semester break or something? Hasn’t anyone taken their medication tonight?” Dakota complained as they ran up six flights of stairs.

He called a cleaning crew and stood over the kids as they scrubbed the mess off the roadway. He wasn’t sure if he could legally do that. The mall didn’t own the roadway, but none of the kids was prepared to bitch to him, so he hoped they’d learn their lesson and be glad not to have to call their parents to bail them out of the police station.

By the time his shift was over all he wanted to do was sleep. He’d think of a date to take Hawthorne on tomorrow. He might even ask Dakota what she thought Hawthorne might enjoy. Hawthorne, so sweet and beautiful, yet sharp. He’d been surprised by what she said and what she wanted to do a few times yesterday and he liked that. He rather thought a woman who was totally predictable might become boring after a while. No way could he ever imagine Hawthorne being boring.

It’d been amazing when she’d asked to go to the adult shop. His dick had almost driven its way out of his pants as he walked through the store with her. Which reminded him, he needed to buy some chocolate condoms. And a few other things she’d looked at as well. Those fluffy handcuffs. Oh yes. And maybe that really short little nurse’s uniform. He could imagine a nice game of doctors and nurse with himself, Dylan, and Hawthorne. Hell, yes.

* * * *

Hawthorne was excited to see there was a Zumba class at the fitness center, and she’d even met the woman who was the trainer for it and the aerobics classes. She was tiny, and Hawthorne was sure she was a wolf. But all Marbella had said was, “Honey, when you’re as short as I am, you need to be fit enough to run away from trouble. Ain’t no way you’ll ever be strong enough to fight it off.”

That seemed like good advice to Hawthorne. After all, running away had worked for her. The problem was, when she’d run away she’d filled her backpack with clean underwear, a pair of boots, a couple pairs of jeans, and a sweater or two. No running clothes, sweat pants, or even shorts. Oh sure she could buy whatever she wanted. She was effectively living in a mall. And since her sister was mated to the managing director of the mall, getting credit was a done deal as well.

But it just seemed wasteful, somehow, to buy an entire wardrobe of new clothes when she had a closet full of perfectly good clothing at home.

Apartment 7C had been one of the werewolf pack’s guest apartments for when visitors needed a place to stay. When she and Willow had arrived they’d been placed there with the mall’s nurse to help them and watch over them. But once they’d both settled in Nurse Eilidh had returned to her own apartment and the smaller bedroom that she’d been using had been turned into an office. The walls were covered with pinup boards of family trees. Both Willow and Hawthorne were trained in genetics and they were assembling all the data other teams had collected on werewolf family histories. When shape-shifters married other shape-shifters, after several generations, girls become scarcer, with most babies born being male. But when a shape-shifter mated a human, the birthrate returned to half boys and half girls.

Hawthorne and Willow were collating data from the family histories to try to determine if this was a new phenomenon, or whether it had always been the case. Hawthorne was still sleeping in the larger bedroom that she’d originally shared with her sister, but now Willow was living with Rhion and Cadfael in Cadfael’s top-floor apartment.

When Willow arrived to start work the next day, Hawthorne was sitting, thinking, at the small table in the living area.

“Is something wrong?” Willow asked.

“No, but we do need to talk.”

“What’s up?”

Willow sat beside her and took her hand. Hawthorne smiled. That was so characteristic of her sister. She was always caring for Hawthorne and putting her first.

“I’m fine, truly. I was just thinking that now that Bailey’s in jail we really ought to take a road trip back home and clean out the house, collect all our possessions, and put the house up for sale. I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to hate every T-shirt I’ve brought with me.”

“I know how you feel. This is no longer my favorite sweater.” Willow pulled at a loose thread on the cuff of her sweater and Hawthorne laughed.

“So when can we go? Can we borrow a car? I mean, does the mall even have vehicles? Does Cadfael have a truck or something we could borrow?”

“I don’t know. It’s not something we’ve ever talked about. But it’s definitely time for you and me to be moving on. I don’t think we need to keep any of the furniture. It might be better to sell the house furnished. It’s not like there are any antiques or things handed down for generations. There’s not even anything I particularly want. What about you?”

“I’ve been sitting here thinking and nothing there has special meaning for me. I expect we’ll keep the photograph albums, but Dad was such a terrible photographer we’ll likely end up throwing away most of the pictures anyway.”

“God, yes. There was either two-thirds of the picture showing the sky with you and me cut off at the eyebrows—”

“Or a hell of a lot of grass and us cut off at the knees. He never ever figured out how to frame a shot properly.” Hawthorne laughed.

Willow went into their office and came out holding a notepad. “Okay let’s do this properly. If we buy a whole lot of trash bags they’ll do for throwing away the things we don’t want and for holding our clothes and things that won’t fit in the suitcases. There’s what, five, six suitcases at home?”

“Six. One each for the four of us and the two new ones Mum and Dad bought before they went to Florida that time. I think that the clothes I want to keep will fit in three cases, but trash bags are a good idea. Multipurpose storage, as it were.”

Together they thought through the contents of each room, listing the few things they would want to keep. Some gadgets from the kitchen, some pictures, some books, some DVDs, a few childhood mementoes. “That should fit in a regular car with just the two of us. Now when do you want to go?” asked Willow.

Hawthorne shrugged her shoulders. “It really doesn’t matter. Any day is pretty much like any other day. But the two of us can easily deal with this ourselves. I’ll Google the realtors and as soon as we’ve tidied the house and removed our things they can put it on the market. We can sign the paperwork while we’re there.”

“Oh, we need to bring with us a small gift for the neighbors who’ve been watching the house for us.”

“Good point.” Hawthorne giggled, wondering if they’d appreciate something from the adult shop. She really liked those fluffy handcuffs.

They went through the lists again, both mentally picturing each room as they “walked” through the house, then Hawthorne went back into the office to check on realtors, while Willow ran upstairs to ask Cadfael about borrowing a truck.

Hawthorne was startled when Willow returned with Cadfael, Rhion, and Dylan. She looked from one to other and stared at Willow, who raised her hands and shoulders in a helpless gesture.

“You women are not going alone,” said Cadfael.

“Don’t you understand that Jackson Hamilton is still out there?” That was Rhion.

“So what? He doesn’t care about me. About either of us.”

“You don’t know that. Just because he wasn’t as stupid as his brother doesn’t mean you’re completely safe. Especially if you’re heading right back into his territory. At the moment likely he doesn’t know where you are, but once you start cleaning out the house and putting it up for sale he’s bound to find out,” said Dylan.

“Just tell us what you want to keep and I’ll get a team to clean the place for you,” said Rhion.

“Thank you, but I’ll choose my clothes myself.” Willow crossed her arms and glared at Cadfael and Rhion.

Hawthorne leaned back in her chair as her sister and her two men fought a verbal skirmish. It was becoming increasingly obvious that no one was going to win, so Hawthorne waved her hands at them. “Willow and I are both going. If you don’t like that, why don’t you send a couple of burly men with us? They can protect us and carry the heavy stuff as well. At least that way they’ll be vaguely useful.”

“We can’t both leave the mall,” Cadfael said to Rhion.

“No, but if you both stay, Maelor and I can go instead. There are plenty of other security people who can cover for Maelor, and Rhion can do my job for a few days.”

“As well as my own? Thanks.” But Rhion wasn’t really arguing with Dylan. Hawthorne could tell he was going to agree because he trusted Maelor and Dylan to look after Willow and her. Actually Maelor was so big likely he could protect them all by himself. However, she wasn’t going to argue either.

“Good. Now that we’ve gotten that settled, when can we leave? I suppose tomorrow is too soon for everyone to get organized?” asked Hawthorne.

“Tomorrow? Fucking hell, woman, what have you been drinking?” Dylan stared at her.

“If I contact the realtor today, and if we leave first thing tomorrow, we should only need to stay two nights. Three at the most. You do know how to scrub and sweep, I hope?” That last line was just to tease them, but she did expect them to help, at least a bit.

“Yes, I know how to clean a house. And move furniture. Wait until I text Maelor and tell him instead of a nice cushy early morning security guard shift he’s scheduled to be your personal slave for the next couple of days.”

“What time do you plan to leave tomorrow?” Rhion asked Willow.

“What time does rush hour start around here?” Willow replied.

“Six forty-five maybe. Definitely before seven.”

“We’ll leave at six. We want to be right out of town before the traffic slows down. The earlier we leave the more likely we are to arrive home before rush hour as well,” said Hawthorne.

Cadfael and Dylan discussed which vehicle they’d take, Rhion promised to see it was gassed up and the tires checked, and Dylan was already tapping out a text message to Maelor. Hawthorne hid her grin and headed into the office. She needed to spend some quality time with Google Maps and the list of realtors. She was surprised how easy it had been to gain their consent. And she wasn’t complaining about having to take the men. Although she didn’t believe for a moment Jackson Hamilton cared at all about her, she was more than happy to have a couple big men to carry out the trash and scrub the bathroom. Ha! She wondered if Dylan had guessed she was serious about making them work. Well she was. They’d be sweeping, scrubbing, and carrying for three days. And likely taking turns at driving as well.

* * * *

Maelor woke up at 10:00 p.m. as he usually did when on the early shift, and got everything ready for his day. His final piece of preparation was usually to run up and down the stairs of the professional suite in wolf form as he’d been doing the time he’d frightened Hawthorne. But when he stripped his sleep shorts off and picked up his cell phone to turn off his alarm, he noticed a message waiting for him. Curiously he tapped it and found out he and Dylan were escorting Hawthorne and Willow back home to prepare their house to be sold. “But I don’t even know where they live, far less how to get there?”

More importantly, he had to swap his sleep patterns back to the more normal way of sleeping at night instead of in the afternoon. His usual method of doing this was to stay up as late as he could manage to remain awake, and go to sleep in the new time setting. That was out. He’d already had seven hours of sleep. Well, he’d go back to bed and try for another hour or two. He reset his phone alarm for four just in case he did fall deeply asleep, before climbing back into bed. He lay there for an hour or more thinking about Hawthorne and imagining all the interesting things he could say and do with her by his side twenty-four-seven. Maybe he and Dylan could even entice her into their bed despite her sister being present.

Maelor surprised himself by managing to doze and drift restfully for another couple hours, before taking his wolf run up and down the stairs, showering, getting dressed, and packing a small bag for the road trip.

At five thirty he texted Dylan.
Where are we meeting?

Reception.

Maelor took the stairs down. He, like most of the managers who had apartments in the professional suites, was on the eighth floor. Running down to the fourth floor seemed like good exercise to him, even though he knew most of the other people here always took the elevator. Apart from Cadfael. Their Alpha was notorious for making everyone walk.

Maelor was the first one to reach the foyer of the professional suites. He leaned against the wall, figuring likely he’d be stuck in a car sitting for most of the day so he might as well stand now. Once again he wished he knew where they were going so he could look up the best route to follow. He understood that his romance—if it could even be called that when they hadn’t been on a real date yet—with Hawthorne was in its very early stages, but still, it seemed a fault on his behalf that he didn’t even know where she lived. Or used to live.

The elevator dinged and he turned then hurried across to hold the doors open. But Hawthorne had only her backpack and it wasn’t even as full as when she’d arrived.

“You haven’t packed very much,” he teased her.

“It seemed stupid to bring clothes with me. I’ll use the ones there. I’m really tired of the T-shirts I have here. I’ll throw them in the trash as soon as I have the rest of my clothes.”

“I guess. I can see you must be tired of them after a few weeks. I usually get sick of living out of a suitcase by the time my vacation is ending.”

Willow arrived next, escorted by both Cadfael and Rhion, and Maelor hid a grin to see them appear in the elevator. That was one change Willow had made. Rhion had never been able to convince Cadfael not to take the stairs, but it seemed Willow had managed to do so.