“Anyone who hasn’t proved that he deserves respect,” Adam said tactfully.
“If they can’t thrash me, they are prey,” Ben said, trying to stretch the rule that had been forcibly explained to him when he’d become a werewolf into a shape that Adam would find acceptable.
Adam looked at him. “Okay. Are you my prey?”
Ben stood up abruptly and stalked to the window, his back to his Alpha because he didn’t have an expression he wanted to show him. “I’ve been a werewolf for long enough that I shouldn’t always feel like a bloody beginner.” Adam didn’t say anything, so Ben finally muttered, “I hope I am not prey to you.” Silence continued, somehow disapproving.
“Do you feel like my prey?” Adam asked, his voice quiet and a little hurt.
Ben threw away what he knew and tried to go with what he felt—which was difficult for him because facts had never failed him the way emotions had. “No.” That was right. “No.” Adam put all of his abilities, physical and mental, to protecting the pack from anything that would hurt them.
“Someone should write a book about how to be a werewolf,” Mercy, Adam’s mate, said, sailing in with a plate of brownies, which she set down on the table with a thunk and the burnt motor-oil smell that was a part of her. It used to irritate him—and now it irritated him that he associated the smell with pack and safety. “I sometimes feel like I know more about being a werewolf than all of you combined.” She sat next to Adam and looked up at Ben.
He’d asked for a minute alone with Adam, which she apparently thought she’d given them. He opened his mouth to ask her to leave, but when he spoke, it was to Adam. “So you think I’m looking at Mel as if she were part of my pack? That I’m feeling protective of that sniveling little—” He swallowed the descriptor that came to mind. “Annoying wimpy chit.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” agreed Adam. “The reason you are not more dominant has more to do with the other wolves than with you. Part of submitting to a more dominant wolf is the belief that they will protect you better than you can protect yourself. They don’t believe you’ll protect them, so they won’t yield to you.”
Ben turned back to the window and absorbed the information like a blow. He didn’t care how dominant he was, he didn’t, though he disliked obeying other wolves intensely.
Adam’s orders were the single exception because Adam would never hurt him or allow him to be hurt outside of the discipline needed to keep peace within the pack. Which sort of drove Adam’s previous point about what really made a dominant wolf right home, didn’t it?
Ben opened his mouth to swear, then closed it again.
“I didn’t know how much the willingness to protect the others beneath a wolf in the pack structure affected the position of a dominant wolf until you came to our pack,” Adam offered gently. “Until then, I was pretty convinced that dominance was about who was the better or more aggressive fighter. You are as willing as Darryl is when it comes to taking on an opponent, and not half-bad in a fight—and still Darryl is much, much more dominant because the other wolves trust him to take care of them.”
“Have a brownie, Ben,” Mercy said prosaically. “And congratulations.”
Ben turned around and dropped into an overstuffed chair with a sigh, taking a brownie almost as an afterthought. “Congratulations on what?”
“Your new upward mobility in the pack structure,” Mercy said. “They’ll figure out that you’ve changed pretty soon.”
Adam met his eyes and smiled. Ben felt better suddenly, and it wasn’t Mercy’s congratulations or the brownie that did it, but the respect in his Alpha’s face. He remembered what Adam had told him a while ago. It might be taking a long time to get out from under what the Old Man had done to him, but he had time, didn’t he? A wolf’s immortality was a gift for him to use wisely or poorly.
He finished the brownie, thanked Adam for his time, and headed back home, feeling like himself again. No. Better than that. He fed his better self a nice dinner, watched a little telly, and took himself off to bed with a smile on his face.
He’d dreamed about him that night. Woke up with the sound of his mother’s voice in his ears. “Benjamin, your father wants you to see him in the study.”
Ben sat up, so certain he’d heard her voice that he was in a cold sweat, his heart beating like a bass drum in a marching band. Hard on the realization that he’d been dreaming was the knowledge that the wolf wanted out.
He managed not to change—just barely managed. But the struggle left him with a headache and the temper of an asp that accompanied him all the way to work. He answered Mel’s cheery good morning with a growl and buried himself in his computer. He ignored lunch, which was stupid, because when Lorna Winkler came into his office without a word of warning, he emerged from coaxing a little more speed out of one of his database-monitoring programs hungry, and she smelled like food.
“Ben, I was talking to Mark Duffy about your admirable attempt to stop swearing, and he suggested that we organize something for the whole division. It would raise morale if we could encourage people not to drink, smoke, or to lose ten pounds—and perhaps lower our health-insurance costs. I’d like you to spearhead the project.”
Various responses occurred to him.
“No,” he said mildly when he was sure that was what would come out of his mouth. Then he gave her his back and started typing random lines of code.
“No?” Winkler’s voice was shocked, as if she thought she’d misheard because no one would refuse her suggestion.
He didn’t look around when he said, “I’m a DBA, not a motivational speaker.”
“Thank God,” someone said. Ben heard them, but Winkler wouldn’t have.
“But—” she said.
He slowly turned his chair around so he could see her. He met her eyes. “Ms. Winkler,” he said, “you pay me a lot of money to be a good nerd, which I am. There is not enough money in the world to make me be in charge of a company morale-improvement exercise.”
She backed away from the expression on his face and left. He wondered, as he returned to work, if he was going to be fired. He hadn’t threatened her with words, but she and he both knew that there hadn’t been happy happy joy joy in his eyes. There might have been not-human stuff in his eyes, which was something he usually avoided because he had no intention of advertising to the world that he was a werewolf. The wolves who were out were expected to be exemplary and well behaved, which he was not. But his mood was so black that he couldn’t find it in himself to care one way or the other about the job or the wolf.
He worked a while more, surfacing now and again because of the dream about his mother in a cold shaking sweat, imagining that he’d gotten a whiff of her perfume or heard her voice. But he was deep into the heart of Spock, who was at 84 percent capacity, when he was yanked out again.
“I have that address for you, Mr. Duffy.”
The voice belonged to one of the women who worked in human resources, though it wasn’t her voice, but Duffy’s name, that jerked Ben out of his databases. He blinked and saw that it was dark out. Really dark. As soon as he noticed, the moon’s song lit him up from the inside, and his monster was ready to tango.
It wasn’t full moon yet, but he usually changed for the nights on either side because fighting it was tough. No use at all fighting if the moon was full, she called his wolf right out. It was dangerous to be at work this late, this close to the full moon.
“Thank you, Karen,” Duffy said. That was the human-resources woman’s name, Karen Sinclair-Ramsay.
If Ben could trust his ears, Duffy was somewhere near the elevator. If there had been more people in the building, Ben would never have been able to hear him so clearly.
“I forgot to ask Mel before she left,” Duffy was saying smoothly, “and she said she’d get the figures worked up for me for Monday if I got her the information tonight. I think I’ll stop and get her a bottle of wine for putting up with me.”