Thanks to him, her quiet vacation was getting more and more interesting by the minute.
Chapter Eight
Gentry rattled off a snarl as he followed Nelda’s scent outside. Fucking snake in wolf’s clothing would tell Rhett he was breeding a human before the old werewolf even pulled out of the parking lot. He needed to cut her off.
“Knew you’d come for me,” Nelda bragged from where she leaned against the corner of the building.
Gentry gave a stiff smile to the human family walking past him and shrugged into his jacket for show as he settled beside her.
Nelda pushed up her glasses, which were a part of her disguise and she didn’t need, onto her fluffy silver hair and bared her teeth. “What the fuck are you doing, pup? You’re going to get us all found out.”
“It’s not what you think. She’s here for a week on vacation, and then I’ll never see her again.”
Nelda was punching something onto her phone.
“What are you doing? Nelda, Rhett won’t just kill me. He’ll kill the human, too.” God, he hated calling Blaire the human. She was so much more than that.
“I’m not texting Rhett, you dumbass.”
“Then who?”
“Your brothers. Maybe they’ll knock some sense into you.”
“Well,” Gentry said, leaning back against the brick wall beside her. “Good luck reaching them. I’ve been trying for days.”
Nelda’s phone beeped. “Roman said they’re on their way.”
Assholes.
“Look, I hate you—”
“Thanks,” Gentry muttered.
“Everyone does—”
“Is there a point to this?”
“No, just thought you should know.”
“Fantastic.”
Nelda squinted up at him for a loaded moment, then sighed. “I know there was bad blood between your father and I, but that wasn’t all my doing.”
Gentry cast her a suspicious sideways glance. Nelda and Dad had always hated each other’s guts. No female werewolf had ever given him so much trouble in his pack. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, he picked another. I was supposed to be alpha female. I was supposed to be his choice, and he didn’t want me. I never forgave him. Still haven’t. I’m glad the old coot’s dead.”
Nelda pushed off the wall and adopted her slower pace, settled her glasses back on her nose, and wandered toward the parking lot.
“But Dad never chose a mate,” Gentry said, completely confused.
“That you know of,” she answered without turning around.
What the fuck just happened? Nelda hadn’t turned him in to Rhett, she’d contacted his brothers instead, and she’d just dropped this bomb on him. Nelda and Dad? There was an unsettling thought. He’d never met anyone more manipulative than Nelda until Rhett came along. He didn’t blame Dad one bit for turning her down as his alpha female, but him choosing another? That had to be a lie. Gentry’s mom had died when he and his brothers were so young, none of them even remembered her face, her voice, anything. As far as Gentry had known, Dad had decided not to take another mate after Mom passed. So what in the actual fuck was Nelda talking about?
There was a dark-headed woman sitting in an idling truck in the front handicap parking spot. Exhaust fumes plumed across the old brown truck, but it was the woman’s direct gaze that held his attention. She had a round face, pitch-black eyes, and silver streaks in her long, black hair. Full lips, a wide nose, and delicately arched eyebrows. She was in her fifties, or early sixties perhaps. A real looker, exotic, and somehow familiar.
Chills rippled up his spine, and some long buried instinct told him to run.
Wolf didn’t like that and growled for him to posture.
When Gentry stepped away from the building and straightened to his full height, the woman pulled out of the parking spot and drove away, but he could see her gaze flick to him in the rearview mirror.
“Gentry?” Blaire asked. She stood behind her cart of grocery bags with a concerned look in her pretty green eyes. “Are you okay?”
Wolf’s snarl settled, and he grew quiet, watching her. Gentry had trouble taking his eyes off her to check the direction the brown truck took out of the parking lot. “I’m fine. I just thought I saw someone I used to know.” Or…something. The sense of déjà vu was so overwhelming he could almost see the woman’s face, twenty years younger, right there at the edge of his mind.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Blaire said from right beside him.
God, he wished he could drape his arm over her shoulder right now. He wished he could tell the world he liked her, and that she was his to protect. He wished he could wrap her in a hug until the worry left her voice. He wished he could kiss her lips until the little wrinkles of concern smoothed from her forehead.
Instead, he forced a smile and shoved his hands into his pockets to curb the urge to touch her. “I’m fine. Come on. I have some more errands to run in town, but I can load up your groceries for you.”
“Maybe I don’t need the help,” she challenged him.
Gentry chuckled. “And I like that about you. Fine, I’ll stand back and stare at your ass while you unload the groceries into your car. Better?”
Blaire snorted the cutest little sound and bumped his shoulder as she pushed the cart beside him.
Beautiful girl. Her red curls were piled up high and messy. Made him want to pull the hair band out and fuck her on her back so he could mess it up. She wore hardly any of the make-up she had on yesterday so he could see her freckles. He liked them. She’d put some kind of mango-scented lip gloss on her full lips that he wanted to suck off, and when she turned her head to check if cars were coming, he spied a tiny red heart tattoo right behind her ear.