He held his arms out, palms up. “Showing you what I have to offer.”
“Why me?”
“You’re different, Alexia. You don’t act like the other bitches.”
My face tightened. “Don’t call me a bitch.”
His brows pinched together as an indulgent look crossed his face. Lorenzo closed in and threaded his fingers through my hair on one side. “If you don’t like the word, I’ll stop using it,” he said with a heated breath against my ear. “But you’re still the only bitch I want coming in my bed.”
Two seconds later, all hell was about to break loose when Austin’s car roared around the corner.
He didn’t bother to shut his door, just ate up the lawn with one hell of a stride. Made me want to curl up beside him.
I knew that look on Austin’s face and he wasn’t about to have words with Church. He was about to break bones.
These were two alphas, and I didn’t know the rules when it came to fistfights.
“Evening, Cole,” Lorenzo greeted him. “Still mad about Winnie, I see. She made a great bitch, but I had to pass her off to one of my packmates. Turns out she wasn’t up to my speed.”
So that’s what it was about. Bad blood my ass; Cole hated Lorenzo because of girl trouble.
Austin took my left hand and held it tight as Lorenzo posed a question.
“You have no official claim on her, Cole. So tell me what your intention is?”
I looked up expectantly.
“She’s always been my pack,” Austin said in slow, threatening words. He surprised me. I thought he’d pull a Beckett and go at Lorenzo with fists flying. But he maintained his composure and stayed in control, which made him even scarier.
Lorenzo brushed his long, straight hair away from his eyes. “Tell me why a Shifter was living with a human family.”
“That’s why I’d like to find my father,” I interrupted. “Only he knows where I came from.”
Some of that fire extinguished from Lorenzo’s eyes and they skimmed over me. “You don’t know your real parents?”
I shook my head. Austin inched so close I could feel his body heat.
“How old are you?” Lorenzo asked.
“Twenty-seven.”
Lorenzo reached in his shirt pocket and lifted a box of cigarettes, pulling one out and lighting the end with a red plastic lighter. “That’s interesting.”
Austin picked up on it too. The way Lorenzo said it wasn’t conversational; it was the way you sound when you know something.
“What’s interesting, Church? She’s not yours.”
He chuckled and savored another drag of his smoke. “Perhaps she is, more than you know.”
I yanked my hand free and stepped forward, feeling Austin hook his arm around my waist. “What do you mean by that?”
Lorenzo nodded, staring at the stars with a contemplative look on his face. “My uncle was a Packmaster years ago. There’s a family secret we kept for a long time, but he’s dead now so it doesn’t matter. My aunt had a baby and then a few weeks later, she was murdered and the baby went missing. There were territorial disputes over a large piece of property at the time and two names were on the deed—my uncle’s and an old friend of his. We were told the baby was found dead and my uncle buried her on that property, where our pack belonged.” Lorenzo drew in a deep breath and sighed, tossing the cigarette in the grass. “One night, I overheard my father talking and found out that my aunt had been cheating on her husband—the Packmaster. The baby was not his. To add further insult, the father was a drifter from up north—not one of our people.”
“What does this have to do with anything?” I said, hoping he’d get to the point.
“My father suspected he had hired someone to take out his wife and baby, then pinned it on the neighboring pack. Two problems solved. No more cheating wife and no infant to remind him of the affair, and an end to a dispute which had been going on for decades. My uncle challenged and killed that Packmaster, reclaiming his property. We sniffed around that land over the years. Never picked up the scent of a dead baby.”
His eyes lowered and memorized me on the way back up.
