Gentry (Wolves of Winter's Edge Book 1)(50)

She rolled her back against him. “Not on everything.”

“Will you leave in the morning?” he asked, his tone deadly serious.

With a sigh, Blaire turned in his arms and hugged his waist. For a few moments, she watched the water droplets racing down the contours of his muscular chest. She tried to imagine leaving but couldn’t wrap her head around this being one of the last times they shared a moment like this. “No.”





Chapter Sixteen




Blaire was going to be the death of him.

Death from acute stress.

And what could he do? He couldn’t force her to leave. Wait, maybe he could. He could drive her cute, round ass to the airport himself. Nah, she would jump out at a stop sign. His woman was feisty.

“Motherfucker,” he murmured, studying her rental car window. Roman’s handprints had dented it enough that the window pane was now stuck inside the damn door. Laugh and joke all he wanted, Roman still had the same temper.

Asher, he barely recognized anymore. Not only was he bigger with a slew of new ink, he felt different, too. Even more dominant. Even quieter. Darker. More dangerous, and Gentry couldn’t get a read on his thoughts at any given moment. Asher had one hell of a poker face now. Maybe he would show up to the Four Horsemen tonight, but probably not, as was evident from him currently shoving his duffle bag into the bed of his black-on-black Tundra.

Gentry shoved a piece of cardboard over Blaire’s window and bit off a long piece of duct tape, then began to secure it. The snow was falling steadily, and the last thing she needed was a pile of the white stuff to sit in when they took it to the auto-body shop in the morning. He could fix a lot of things, but this was out of his wheel house. No, not just this. Rangeley was out of his wheel house. What the fuck was he doing here? He could rent this place or, hell, even sell it to some small business guru who would hopefully get it up and running again. And then he could follow Blaire to her hometown and give it a go at making her happy. Or if he couldn’t manage that—and there were no guarantees because he’d never paired up before—at the very least, he could keep her safe. He could watch over her. He would be good at that. He’d trained his body for war all these years when he’d hunted the wild packs. Sure, the goal had always been to let as many survive as possible, and he’d saved a lot of wolves by taking out the problem animals instead of giving the ranchers free rein to annihilate entire packs, but he’d bled for that job. And in turn, he’d become more of a monster than his brothers or the Bone-Rippers realized.

But the Bone-Rippers were too uncertain right now for him to feel any comfort about Blaire being on the same continent with them.

Just like when he’d hunted the wild packs, it was easy to sense the problem animals. Rhett was top of that list, but who were his allies? Who had backed his play to take the pack? Gentry by no means had all the answers yet, and it would be a slow stalk until he had a better understanding of the new pack dynamics, but culling the bad wolf could potentially save the rest of the pack. Then he could leave Rangeley and hope for a life with Blaire without those pestering loose ends tripping him up.

He couldn’t have a future with Blaire until he took care of his past.

And if she wanted to see the good, the bad, and the ugly, as she’d put it, maybe he should let her stay. Blaire had told him everything Odine had said while they were in the shower, so he knew without a shadow of a doubt that Blaire was on the Bone-Rippers’ radar. Nothing happened in this town without the pack knowing about it.

They wouldn’t try anything in a public bar, and Blaire was so damn charming maybe she could sway a few of the pack members into liking her. Cause some dissention in the ranks. “Stir up the hive” as Odine had put it. That witch had her reasons for causing trouble with the Bone-Rippers, and Gentry would keep an eye on that, but his reasons for creating a buzz were different. He wanted to watch reactions, watch loyalty lines, see who could be saved, see who needed to be protected, just like when he hunted the wild wolves that were preying on ranchers’ livestock. Now he was going to hunt Rhett and unearth all the shit he’d done to steal the throne of the Bone-Rippers, formerly the Striker Pack. Formerly his father’s pack. Formerly a good, town-protecting pack.

The door to Blaire’s cabin banged closed, and she jogged down the stairs looking like a million bucks. Her dark jeans clung to her curves like a second skin, and she was zipping up her jacket over a sky-blue sweater that made her eyes look jungle green. She’d smoked up her eyes with dark make-up and wore her red-gold hair in sexy waves that were long enough to reach the bottom of those perfect tits of hers. God, he would never get tired of looking at her, but he had to play it cool. If a woman like her found out just how obsessed he was, she would run for the hills.