Tangle of Need (Psy-Changeling #11)(18)

“My father,” Hawke said as they passed under the shadow of a towering pine, its thick trunk scarred with the marks from a hundred claws, “was a lone wolf.”

Folding his arms on his knees, Riaz continued to keep his eyes on the forest path retreating behind them, the failing light turning the trees into distant smudges. “I know.” A year older than Hawke, he’d been a gangly boy about to head into his teens when Hawke’s father was killed, the pack drenched in blood.

Even so young, Hawke had already begun showing his inclination to be at the center of pack life, while Riaz had preferred to prowl alone through the mountains. Yet in spite of their differences, they’d gotten along. Some part of him had seen in the boy Hawke had been, the man he would one day become. And when the pack almost broke under a hail of pain and violence, he’d made the decision to follow that boy rather than striking out on his own as so many lone wolves did.

“That’s why,” Hawke continued, “I understand lone wolves better than most.”

“Your father was mated.” It was the single thing that changed a lone wolf’s soul-deep need for long stretches of solitude—transforming it into a devotion so intense, they became more possessive and protective than any of their brethren. Some people said a lone wolf spent his life searching for that one person who could become his lodestar.

“He had friends who weren’t.” Hawke propped his arms loosely over his knees in a mirror of Riaz’s position. “That means I know lone wolves have friends. Who are you talking to, Riaz?” It was a blunt question. “Not Coop, or he’d be down here kicking your ass so I wouldn’t have to.”

Riaz gripped the wrist of one hand with the other, squeezed. Cooper and he had grown up together, gotten into trouble together, and made lieutenant together. The other man knew him better than almost anyone else on this earth—which was why Riaz couldn’t afford to show his face in Cooper’s sector. The only reason Coop hadn’t picked up on the fact that something was wrong when Riaz first returned home, was that he’d been distracted by his pursuit of Grace, the woman who was now his mate.

Instead of admitting the fact he’d been avoiding Coop, Riaz said, “Since when are we girls who have to have heart-to-hearts?”

His flippant answer didn’t faze Hawke. “You think I’ll let you get away with bullshit, you don’t know me.” A hard stare. “Have you even been to visit your folks?”

His parents were currently based in San Diego. They’d wanted to be closer to their only grandchild, three-year-old Marisol, the child of his younger brother, Gage. “Are you seriously asking me that?” It was a snarl of disbelief. “Of course I went. Right after I came back into the country.” If he hadn’t, his mother would’ve been knocking on his door, and there would’ve been hell to pay. No one messed with Abigail Delgado

Hawke’s shoulder brushed his as Felix tilted the vehicle to get around an overgrown elderberry bush. “I think you need to go visit them again.”

Riaz’s wolf bristled. Maybe Hawke was alpha, but Riaz was a lieutenant—that meant he had the strength and the dominance to bloody the other man in a fight. “What delusion makes you think you have the right to give me orders about my personal life?”

Hawke’s response was a harsh bark of laughter. “Fuck, you remind me of what I was like a few months back. Don’t be a stupid ass like I was.”

Riaz released his wrist. Blood began to flow again in a hot rush, causing painful pinpricks of sensation. Hawke, he thought, was perhaps the one person in the pack who wouldn’t just understand but would know what it had done to him to lose Lisette without ever having had her. Still … “I can’t talk about it yet,” he said, the words rocks scraping his throat.

“Fine,” Hawke replied, the wolf in his voice. “But, Riaz? You’re home now. The pack is only going to give you so much rope—and we certainly won’t let you hang yourself with it.”

He should leave, Riaz thought, get the hell away from den territory, from an alpha who saw too much, and most of all, from a woman who incited a raw sexual hunger that made him so angry it was a white-hot flash through his bloodstream. But the painful fact was, he wasn’t ready to walk alone again, a hard thing for a lone wolf to accept.

Maybe Hawke was right. Maybe he needed to go see his family. He’d eat his mother’s divine cooking, tease his pretty little sister-in-law, play with his dimpled hellion of a niece, drink a beer with Gage and his father, and get his head screwed on straight. The one thing he did not need to do was to give in to the gnawing compulsion to track the subtle scent of wild berries crushed in ice until he had Adria’s nude, sweat-slicked body pinned under the hard demand of his own.

ADRIA came around a cedar, its distinctive red-orange bark gray in the dark, to see Sienna waving at her. “Are you taking over my shift?” the younger woman asked.

“Yes.” Again, Adria was struck by Sienna’s youth, her instincts as protective toward the novice soldier as they were toward Evie. But she had to accept that those cardinal eyes … they were of someone far older and wiser. “Anything I need to know?”

“See that tree over there?” Sienna pointed out the huge black oak, its canopy a sprawling shadow. “Pair of nesting eagles. Steer clear—they’re being very territorial.” She tugged on her braid. “I almost lost this when I ventured too close.”