Idler (Norseton Wolves Book 3) by Holley Trent Page B

like you is ticklish?”
    She swatted his hand away. “I’m sure you have ticklish spots. Make sure I never find them, or I’ll make your life hell.”
    “You’ve already gotten off to a good start doing that.”
    She slapped a hand over his mouth and narrowed her eyes at him. “Quit distracting me. You have something you wanted to tell me. About your scars.” She raised the edge of her hand a bit to let him talk.
    His long, ragged exhalation heated the backs of her fingers.
    She set down her hand.
    “When you called me wolf , it reminded me of when I got cast out of my pack. That’s what the new alpha called me. What he called everyone he thought was beneath him, really.”
    “Also all the wolves he thought would be a threat.”
    “I guess I never thought about it that way, but the semantics don’t change the way we were treated—like we were garbage. He didn’t care if we lived or died. This was a guy whose own kids grew up with a lot of the ones he pitched out. Their friends.”
    “Where are his children now, though?”
    “I—” Colt pressed his lips together on the thought and furrowed his brow. He’d apparently not given it any thought before that moment. “I imagine the two girls are still there. The boys, though…” He let the words trail off, as if to think.
    “Gone, like you?”
    “I bet one got sent away. He was eight or nine years younger than me when I left. He was never going to be an alpha—didn’t have the right energy for it, or the build—but even back then, he was a kid who questioned everything. Intelligent, but not so strong. I’d bet good money he grew up to be a pain in his father’s ass.”
    “Hmm.” And maybe just the right age for one of my sisters .
    “I bet I could find him. If there’s any wolf who’d try to integrate into human society, I think it’d be him.”
    “Would he come here?”
    “I don’t see the harm in trying to convince him. I will, if you want. He might be skeptical hearing from me after all this time, though.”
    “But you’d do it?”
    “If it’d make your wolf less angry at my wolf, then yes.”
    Lisa poked out her chin. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
    He let out another bark of laughter, and without the smarmy, conceitedness she’d encountered in him at first, it was a sound that sent a shiver of awareness down her spine and made her sex clench. Not every wolf could be alpha, but it was hard to deny that Colt had the makings of one. He commanded attention just by walking into a room, as did all the male wolves in Norseton. She understood why an insecure leader would feel threatened by the likes of them.
    “I really don’t,” she said.
    He shook his head and laced his fingers behind it. “Weird gift of mine, I guess. Most wolf men who could be alpha can sense how strong another werewolf is, but I can sometimes connect with that wolf part of people and suss them out. Usually, the wolf and person are in sync. I’ve got to know the person for a while to be sure of that, though.”
    “You think my wolf is angry?”
    “I think your wolf is a lot like her person.”
    “So you think I’m angry, then.”
    “Not at the moment. Right now, your inner wolf is… content .”
    She checked in with herself. Am I content?
    Well, she definitely wasn’t afraid or anxious. She was worried about her family, sure, but she thought she had a good plan for handling that—or at least a start to one. She was probably a lot less anxious now than she’d been in a very long time. And in her, anxiety almost always morphed into anger. People without options knew that all too well.
    “I’m definitely making my way toward content. I’ll concede that.” She pushed up onto her hands and knees and bent, skimming her lips across his.
    He grinned as her tongue traced the seam of his mouth.
    “Don’t move a muscle, or this stops,” she said.
    “Can I move my lips?”
    “Only when I tell you to.”
    “Okay.”
    She crawled slowly to the