“I’m not sure it bodes well, if you’re already tired,” Michael teased. He, like her mother, was aging well. Unlike her mother, he was Pack, and Pack always aged well; it was written into the genetic code. There were grandfathers on the Cape who occasionally got carded. (“We card everyone, though,” was not reassuring to a species trying to stay beneath the radar.) There was no gray in his deep brown hair, and not many lines on his face. Only his eyes changed with age: their startling gold color—like Baltic amber, like old coins—deepened each year. Her mom good-naturedly complained it was like staring into a road hazard sign.
It was a good life, and her parents were smart enough or humble enough to know it. They looked great, they were rich, they had decades ahead of them, their cubs were grown (“Note we didn’t say out of the nest, because they’ll never leave.”), and so Michael and Jeannie Wyndham were doing something no alpha couple in the two-million-year history of the Pack had done.
Retiring.
CHAPTER THREE
SIX YEARS EARLIER
“But we don’t do that. Alphas don’t retire.”
“We can. We just haven’t.”
“Mike—”
“I hate when you call me Mike.”
“—I say this with love and respect and as your best bro and as someone who has killed for you and would probably die for you, probably: you’re out of your fucking mind.”
“I also hate when you come into my house long enough to raid my larder, tell me I’m insane, goad my daughter into ever more juvenile delinquency, speculate on whether you’d die for me or not, and then . . . whoosh! Off to cause chaos somewhere else. You’re like a blond Loki.”
“Completely thoroughly out of your fucking mind. Do I smell brownies? And when’s Lara get home? I might die for you. I’m almost positive I probably would.”
Lara nearly tripped over one of the benches for joy as she came in through the mansion’s east entrance. It was her favorite, because that side of the mansion saw high traffic. The people who lived there—her parents, her little brother, herself, other Pack members, assistants, cooks, and people who worked there (cleaners, drivers, gardeners, etc.)—avoided the north door because of the incredibly polished (read: slippery) front hall and intimidating (read: old, four-foot-circumference, about eight-thousand-dollars-per-prism) chandelier that loomed overhead.
Thus the east entrance was cluttered, with muddy floors and dirty windows and boots in winter and tennies and sandals in summer and things hanging on hooks and beach towels laid out on benches to dry and a half-full bag of birdseed slumped in a far corner (though they had no bird feeders), a partially deflated basketball, two bottles of plant food, a small baggie filled with Phillips Head screws and a flat-head screwdriver, and sand everywhere, everywhere. “It’s too big to be a mud room,” was the general joke, “so it’s the mud wing.”
Though her father was on the north side of the mansion, she could hear and smell him, and better yet, she could smell Derik Gardner, her father’s best friend and worst enemy. So she dumped her overstuffed backpack on a bench that was already groaning with beach towels, swim shoes (heedless of damage to paws on all fours, Pack members were oddly fastidious about getting their pink hairless feet dirty), and umbrellas (though it hadn’t rained in three weeks). Then she unslung her purse from around her neck, tossed the purse by the backpack and the car keys on the purse, and wasted not one more moment.
She hurried through the long halls, past enormous windows overlooking the grass ocean and wood so old and tended so long it was black with age and polish buildup. Her home smelled as it always did, a delightful mishmash of Pack members and food and furniture polish and dust and hunger and love.
She burst into the main hall beyond the north door and instantly slipped. Both feet went up in the air, but from long experience, she tucked and saved the back of her head from a teeth-rattling rap. A startled grunt (“Nnnnff.”) was forced out of her, but that was okay because Derik heard her coming and—
“Jeez, how many times, Lara? Seriously. Before you get bored or die?”
—knew she’d be sprawled on the floor. “Hiya!” she cried, holding up a hand. He pulled her to her feet with an effortless tug and she threw her arms around him. “You never call, you should have said you were coming, you never do and I could have skipped school!”
“You couldn’t, actually,” her father said from the doorway to the north receiving room, but he was smiling.
“Why would you assume I’d have any interest in spending time with you?” His hug belied his words. “And I didn’t know myself we were coming.”
A lie. But one told in kindness. Derik had alpha tendencies, but the Pack already had one. Rather than give in to instinct and tradition to fight his best friend to the death, orphan his children, and make a widow of Jeannie, Derik had left the Cape. Sometimes he came back and stayed for months; sometimes he dropped in for an overnight and was gone by dawn. At no time did he courteously call ahead. It was a deliberate slight to the Pack leader, but Derik was so well loved, Michael let it go and would hear no words against his friend. “We have forty bedrooms. We have a kitchen so large it can feed a small country, and the food supplies to go with it. What’s the problem? Are you afraid he’ll have to sleep on a couch and hose himself down in the side yard, and eat crackers for breakfast? Or fall over the kitchen cliff when he’s looking for the bathroom in the middle of the night?”
(The kitchen cliff was the steep bank about thirty meters from the kitchen porch, which due to the design of the mansion and the placement of the Atlantic ocean, led straight down to the water. So if you hated what was on the breakfast menu, you could theoretically walk out the kitchen door and kill yourself.)
“Why d’you think Dad’s out of his mind this time?” She followed them into the receiving area, a large room splashed with sunlight and furnished with sofas and chairs that were as comfortable as they were elegant. The hardwood floor gleamed (thus the slipping) and the many rugs, supposedly hauled over on the Fortune, which landed at Plymouth Colony about a year after the Mayflower, were Savonneries and worked in deepest blues and golds and greens.
“I’d tell you, except it’s so weird you won’t believe me.”
She nodded. “Is it the retirement thing?”
Derik sighed and glanced at Michael. “Unless he’s discussed the subject with his heir like a sensible madman.”
“He’s for sure sensible. If Dad retires and I’m Pack leader, can you come back and live here for good?”
Derik’s blond brows arched and her father frowned. “Lara. Absolutely none of your business and inappropriate besides.”
“Okay, but can you?” She knew she could push things with her father; he expected her to be aggressive and not easily backed down. They all did. But she also knew there were limits. “Derik? And your wife and cub, too?”
“I . . . don’t know, hon. I hadn’t thought about it. Your dad just now sprung this on me.” He glanced over her head at her father. “I hope—Michael, I hope that wasn’t a factor in you coming up with this idea. The problem’s mine, not yours. The Pack’s yours until you’re dead; we all know.”
“It’s just something Jeannie and I have been kicking around. She’s got fresh perspective, something I lack.”
“Oh, that’s not all you lack,” Derik said cheerfully, his momentary concern gone with the wind. Derik’s moods were weathervanes, and it was always windy. “But I don’t have that kind of time; you’ll have to think up your many thousands of shortcomings on your own. Meantime, you and Jeannie want to join Sara and me for dinner? No kids, though. I can’t stand yours, and mine can’t stand me.”
Another lie, Lara figured—hoped, at least. Derik’s son was so quiet and introspective—a radical departure from both parents—it was hard to picture him hating anyone.
“Speaking of,” Michael said, his head cocked to the left in what her mother teasingly called his Petey the Dog expression. They all heard the polite one-rap knock, and then the door opened and Jack Gardner stepped into the entry.
He saw them at once and inclined his head. “Sir,” he said to her father. “Miss.” To her. “Captain Weirdo.” Derik.
“This is why I knocked up your mother?” Derik mock bitched. “To be hung with humiliating nicknames?”
“It would be nice”—Jack sighed—“if we could go one entire day without you saying knocked up and mother and hung in the same sentence.”
“It’s Michael and Lara,” her father said, “you’re practically family, Jack; you must know it.” His tone was light, but Lara knew he was a little taken aback at the teenager’s formality. And maybe a little hurt, too; none of the Wyndhams saw as much of the Gardners as they would like. To be treated as a stranger by the son of the man he considered a brother was hard. “My God, you’ve gotten huge.”
“I was gonna tell Lara the same, but simple self-respect prevented it,” Derik said. “It’s so embarrassing; I hear myself saying all the stupid things that annoyed me when adults said them to me: Look how you’ve grown. You’re a young man already. When I saw you last, you were only yea big. Don’t eat that; I dropped it on the floor.”
“The golden days of childhood”—Michael sighed—“gone forever. And you still eat things off the floor.”
“Don’t judge me.” Derik sniffed. “Floor jerky is perfectly good, as is floor bread and floor yogurt. We don’t all eat off gold plates, y’know.”
“It’s nice to see you,” Jack soberly told her. “You get prettier all the time, which I always think is impossible, and then you top yourself.” All said in the tone of a boy reading a computer printout.
“It took you that long to think of something to say?” Lara teased. Often he didn’t speak at all after nodding hello.