Josh gaped at him, and Nero could hear the tick, tick, tick of the Josh time bomb speeding up. His eyes flashed fury, but he didn’t talk to Nero. Instead, he turned to his family and spoke slowly and clearly. “I was not hospitalized.”
“Technically, you were,” Nero added.
Josh shot Nero a glare. “I was—”
“Resting and recovering from the stresses of your program of study.”
“Bullshit!”
His mother tsked sharply. “Mind your language,” she said, though the words sounded like a reflex rather than intention.
Josh didn’t even look her direction. “I was not hospitalized,” he repeated loudly. “I was—”
“Performing a classified task in a classified facility.”
Wulf, Inc. had a protocol when a recruit was introduced back to the family. The idea was to confuse the nearest and dearest with as much bullshit as possible such that no one knew what was real and what was teasing. And this was a game that Nero usually played to perfection.
He smiled genially at everyone. “Hello. I’m Nero Bramson, and I’m Josh’s friend. He’s not ready to drive yet, so I thought I’d help him out and play chauffeur.”
“Not ready to drive!” Josh sputtered, and Nero flashed him a megawatt smile. It was the absolute truth—not because Josh was incapable but because they weren’t going to let him escape yet. Not before the demon that was eating Wisconsin was destroyed.
Josh knew this, and it clearly pissed him off. But it was also a moment for the man to choose. Did he give the truth to his family—in which case they’d all be converted to werewolves and they’d see who survived—or go with the cover story that they so obviously believed?
Tick, tick, tick.
Josh picked the cover story. “Yeah,” he said, bitterness heavy in his tone. “Nero’s my driver.”
“I prefer chauffeur.”
“I prefer asshole.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Nero teased as he waggled his eyebrows, which was a really dickish thing to say. But it was the kind of thing that guys said about one another all the time, and Josh had long since proved that he could sling the shit along with everyone else.
Except Josh didn’t react as usual. His face burned red-hot, a telltale sign of truth if ever there was one. There was a moment of stunned silence all around, and then his father abruptly growled, “It figures.”
Obviously Dad was a homo-hater. No big surprise there. What did startle Nero was Josh’s mother, who turned white as a sheet. She gaped at Josh and had to steady herself on the wall.
Ivy groaned, “Oh, great,” and then she grabbed her mother’s elbow and steered the woman into the kitchen. “Let me help you with the green bean casserole.”
Bruce was the only one who appeared unaffected. He stood there, his gaze heavy as it hopped back and forth between Josh and Nero. It was a shrewd look, and Nero became aware that Josh wasn’t the only smart one in the family. And what was Josh’s reaction to all this? Nothing except for the heat from his bright red face.
A beat. Then another. And then his father turned and thudded to his seat at the head of the dining room table, dropping into it with a grunt. Without looking up, he poured diet soda into his glass, crushed the can with his bare fist, then banged the can down on the table in one of the best displays of passive-aggressive fury Nero had ever seen. All the man had done was pour his soda and crush the can, but every action filled the air with hatred. Then he looked up at Josh with a hot stare and gestured to a seat at the end of the table.
“Pull up a chair. Tell us how the stress of not working a damn day in your life has turned you into someone who sucks dick.”
“Dad!” Bruce huffed out in a fair imitation of his mother’s admonition, but Mr. Collier turned his darkening eyes on his elder son and merely glowered. To Bruce’s credit, he held his ground with a raised chin. “That’s not how it works.”
“Really?” his father drawled. “Then tell me how it works, Josh,” he said, completely dismissing his eldest son. “Sit down at my table in my house, eat my food, and tell me how you ended up gay.”
Ouch. And didn’t that make Nero feel like shit? He’d just been stirring the pot, throwing all sorts of things at the family to keep them confused. That was protocol. But he hadn’t realized how badly everyone would react.
Hell. He’d screwed up big time. He should have realized that here, in the heart of the Midwest, Josh’s family might be more homophobic than Nero’s own relatives in Florida. And he should have realized that just because werewolves were very open sexually, it wasn’t the same among vanilla humans. That was part of the reason he avoided time among the vanilla. He forgot how narrow-minded they could be.
He had to fix this fast, and the only way he could think of to do that was to confess the absolute truth. “We’re a secret military organization, and we needed Josh’s help. We abducted him, trained him, and now he needs your help to save the world.” Not an exaggeration and definitely going to get his ass in deep shit if any of the higher ups found out what he’d said. “Everything else was bullshit. That’s the truth.”
Josh gaped at him, clearly understanding how many rules Nero had just broken. “You can’t tell them that.”
No shit. But he didn’t say that. Instead, he shrugged and tried to communicate without words how very sorry he was.
