Beast (Norseton Wolves #1) Read Free Page B

face, but she didn’t have the courage at the moment. What if he refused to let her get close? Her wolf needed some gentling.
    “Anton?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Where exactly are we? I slept for most of the trip from the airport in Albuquerque.”
    His eyebrows bobbed and he pushed away from the door he’d been holding up. “Middle of nowhere, basically. Hold on, I’ve got a map in here somewhere.”
    He disappeared into a back room and returned a couple of minutes later with a Southwest atlas. He turned to a flagged page and ran his finger down a longitude line to a spot that was, indeed, in the middle of nowhere. Just mountains and desert all around. “Our hosts chose this land specifically because no one would bother them out here.”
    “Hosts?”
    He grunted. “The pack made a deal with a group known as the Afótama. This is their land. In exchange for a permanent home here, we’ve agreed to do security work for them.”
    “Why would they need security?”
    “It’s a long story. Suffice it to say, they’re like us—not ordinary . They require discretion, and we’re good at that. I imagine most of the ladies will find jobs with them if they need something to do. My aunt works there, in the kitchen at the mansion.” He chuckled. “Annoys the cook and feeds people behind his back.”
    A chance at a job? He’d let me work?
    “You’d—let me earn money?”
    He turned his good eye toward her and narrowed it. “Earn it and spend it.”
    She reached for him—to skim her fingers across his bisected eyebrow and the satiny patch over his eye—but pulled her hand back. She didn’t want to offend him.
    “ Umm . Being productive is nice. I like keeping busy.”
    He grunted, nodding. “Busy is good sometimes, but sometimes comfortable is just as good. Why don’t you worry about the latter one?” He closed the atlas, returned it to its shelf, and made his way to the back room.
    Dismissed?
    She pulled out a chair from beneath the kitchen table and slumped into it. So standoffish. Well, if he thought that was going to scare her away, he had another think coming.
    She’d endured far worse.

CHAPTER THREE
    Anton had to get away from the house and the little woman in it, so he’d spent the better part of the evening tracking though the New Mexico desert in his wolf form. He memorized the landscape and its scents. Learned the noises—plucked out what was natural and what wasn’t.
    The human body he wore might have been disfigured, but his wolf form was whole. When he shifted to his animal shape, he knew perfection, and he would have stayed like that forever if he didn’t have certain obligations to his pack and family. They needed him to be a man with opposable thumbs, who could speak a complete sentence every now and then. He always regretted having to shift back, though. He used to have ambitions. But these days, ambitions were a luxury. His wolf didn’t have ambitions—just hunger, and that was easy enough to sate.
    Just before dawn, he reluctantly returned to his house, picked his discarded clothes up from the doormat, and shouldered the door open quietly.
    She had to still be asleep. She could probably sleep all day, given how busy the previous one must have been for her. And if she slept, he’d have some time to think—to figure out something else for her. He’d go crazy in his new home if she didn’t leave.
    He closed the door softly, and turned, clutching his clothes. He could probably get a couple of hours of sleep before anyone expected him to do anything for them. Even the quartermaster needed a day off every so often, and Anton had been working pretty much fulltime, every day, for six weeks.
    The floorboards creaked in the corner.
    Shit .
    He hadn’t seen Christina in his periphery because she was on his blind side. She was next to the window. Still wearing those unflattering clothes, but she’d taken her shoes off. She stood in her ankle socks, wringing her hands.
    “It’s so quiet here,”