Page 5 of Alpha Wolf’s Nanny (Silvermist Wolves #2)

She shouldn’t have accepted the job. Damn it, she should have said no.

She was hyperaware of every inch of her body as she sat ramrod straight in the passenger seat of the car, trying not to so much as breathe too loudly.

His essence was everywhere . His scent, pine and whiskey, caught in the back of her throat, making her slightly dizzy.

Was it because he was a shifter, something to do with his scent making her all nervous? Or was it just him?

He hadn’t taken his eyes off the road, his jaw tight as they drove in silence. He was so big, his presence so overwhelming. The space between them felt charged, thrumming with energy, as if one wrong move would shock them both.

Was this how it was going to be? Would she constantly be aware of him, of his every edge, his every minute movement? Surely she’d go crazy after a week!

No. It was just because they were in the car together.

The tension hadn’t broken yet. What was it he had said, something about keeping it strictly professional?

She could do that. She could be professional.

Soon their night together would be nothing but a distant memory, a funny story she would tell her friends.

Oh, him? He’s my boss. Funny story, actually, we met a few nights before I started working for him and hooked up, can you believe it? I know, right, ridiculous! You’d never guess!

He reached over to adjust the air con, and she nearly jumped out of her skin, clapping her hands over her mouth to prevent a squeal escaping her lips. He snatched his hand back as if it had been burned, finally turning to look at her, his brow etched with concern.

“Sorry,” she blurted, fiddling with her sleeves, “I was miles away.”

He raised an eyebrow, but didn’t comment, instead flicking on the radio to some local channel. The sounds of some crooning, love-sick woman filled the car, but he didn’t flip the station over. Any noise was apparently better than no noise.

Cassie couldn’t disagree. Although objectively terrible, the woman’s warbling at least allowed her brain to focus on something other than the hulking man next to her. Not man, she reminded herself. Male. Alpha.

There was one good thing to be said about this arrangement.

That feeling of safety she had felt waking up next to him, that hadn’t gone away.

For the first time in years, her nervous system actually felt close to settling.

She couldn’t remember the last time her stomach hadn’t been tied up in anxious knots, her eyes constantly flicking to the corners of her vision, always on the lookout for some malicious shadow finally arriving to catch her.

It was like that primal piece of her, the part constantly hiding from predators, was finally calm.

She now had top cover from one of the biggest, meanest predators on the planet.

Shifters weren’t to be messed with, especially wolves.

Particularly alpha wolves. As long as he was around, she was safe. At last, she was safe.

Perhaps now she would finally stop waking up in the night in a cold sweat, fear choking her, a thousand nightmares swimming behind her eyelids of all the horrible things the debt collectors would do if they ever caught her.

It wasn’t just her imagination, either. They had gone to great lengths to get the message to her several times over the years.

They could, and would, hurt her in ways she didn’t know it was possible to hurt someone.

Felix wouldn’t let them. Perhaps he had turned her down, reaffirmed all the things about herself she knew to be true. She wasn’t pretty enough, funny enough, good enough for someone like him to want to be with her. But he wouldn’t let her get hurt; she could sense that much.

Now, she just had to focus on not letting herself get hurt by doing something really stupid like falling in love with him.

“I know this is…” Felix started, his gaze resolutely on the road in front of them, his jaw working as he tried to find the words, “...surprising. I had no idea you were the nanny the agency had recommended to me before meeting you today. They’re big on maintaining privacy, which I suppose is a good thing. However, in this case…”

Cassie glanced over, waiting for him to finish speaking, but he seemed at a loss.

“Yeah, privacy,” she said, her skin growing hot under the pressure of the silence between them. “It’s worse for the nannies. Not that, you know, it’s bad ,” she winced, “just…I think they have some quite high-profile clients. Secretive types. Important. Like you, I guess.”

He huffed, the corners of his mouth turning up, but a strange tightness lingering around his eyes. He wasn’t pleased with her assessment, it seemed.

“And what exactly did the agency tell you about me?” His voice was neutral enough, but the hairs on the back of Cassie’s neck stood up with some animal instinct to run and hide.

“Um,” she said, with much less confidence than she would have liked, “just the basics. You’re an alpha.

But also, like, the Alpha of the Iron Walkers.

Wolf shifter. Two sons. The rest was more about what you would expect from me.

I mean, not from me , why would you expect anything from me?

No, I mean, of course you would, but like, as your nanny . ”

Jesus. She wanted to fling herself out of the car.

Felix let her ramble; his hands gripped tight on the steering wheel. “So they didn’t tell you anything about me personally? About who I am?”

Cassie picked at a hangnail on her finger. “Molly told me you were gentle.”

The word dropped like a stone between them. Gentle . Cassie had a sudden, all-encompassing dread that she’d said something fundamentally wrong.

“Gentle?” Felix hissed, blue eyes narrowing.

“I don’t think she meant it to mean, like…weak,” Cassie said hurriedly, panic swirling in her gut. “Nothing like that at all, I think she meant—”

“Please don’t get me wrong,” he interrupted, his voice like ice, “there’s nothing wrong with being gentle.

It’s a good, honorable thing to be. I only wish I had the luxury of being gentle .

But my upbringing, the circumstances of the pack, meant that ‘gentle’ was not something I could ever be.

Make no mistake, Cassie, I am not a good man. I have not done good things.”

Before she could stop herself, Cassie opened her mouth. “I think you’re wrong.”

“Excuse me?”

She gulped, but carried on regardless, “I think you are gentle. Whatever you were, whatever you had to do, you had your reasons. But you choose to be gentle. At least, you were gentle with me.”

He shook his head, his shoulders set. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Cassie didn’t reply. She sank lower into her seat, crossing her arms over her midsection.

Of course, he was right. She didn’t know anything about him at all, and she’d be an idiot to think she did.

She didn’t even know what had made her want to defend him, to insist that Molly had been right, that he was gentle.

Maybe it was that he was the first shifter she’d ever had a proper conversation with, and he’d been nothing but respectful and curious and fun .

Maybe it was how he treated her during their night together.

How the next morning, he had ordered them breakfast…

And then promptly rejected seeing her again.

She forced her face into a neutral expression, even as her throat grew thick and slightly painful. God, the last thing she needed to do right now was start crying. It was his presence, she decided. His scent. It was making her brain go all fuzzy and stupid. She was better than this.

Pull yourself together.

He had been nice to her. So what. Plenty of people were nice .

It didn’t mean they were good . She’d looked him up, shamefully, while locked in the bathroom back at Phil’s, and was met with loads of articles and press releases and the like on the golden boy of shifter politics.

The humanist alpha. Lots of talk about peace and coexistence and tolerance.

But not that much on him , as a person. The few online forums dedicated to tracking various famous shifters by strange, groupie-like humans had plenty of theories about how he came to lead the Iron Walkers, but nothing definitive.

Shifter culture was, apparently, very secretive indeed. No outsiders allowed. No humans .

And she was a human, and he was a shifter. He had told her as much. Two different worlds. Peace was possible, but integration? If Felix didn’t seem to think so, then who was she to question it? The sensible thing to do would be to drop it and move on.

Cassie didn’t always consider herself to be a very sensible person.

“Why me?” she asked suddenly, a bitter stubbornness emboldening her. “Why a human nanny?”

He didn’t look over as he replied, “Those’re two different questions.”

“With two different answers, I’m sure. What are they?”

He gave a surprised chuckle. “The agency didn’t tell you?

I want a human nanny for my boys because, as it is, they hardly spend any time with humans.

At school, they only really spend time with other shifter kids, and while they’re respectful enough with the humans who live in Silvermist, it would do them some good to get closer to a human.

Help them grow up without some of the prejudices we… shifter kids can grow up with.”

“Prejudiced,” she echoed softly. “Is that because of the…”

“The attempted genocide? Yes,” Felix replied with surprising neutrality, as if he were referencing some ancient piece of history instead of something that had happened in the last hundred years.

“The elders among our kind still remember the laws, the restrictions, the attacks that humans carried out. They taught their children to be wary and fearful, who in turn taught their own. You ask me, the fear goes both ways, and it has every right to. I mean, how long had humans been terrorized by stronger shifters before that?”

“I guess I hadn’t thought much about it,” Cassie muttered, a blush rising to her cheeks at her own ignorance.

“It’s okay. It’s not taught in schools. Not even really talked about in polite company.

Both humans and shifters are terrified of offending each other and breaking the fragile coexistence we’ve managed to fall into.

Well, fuck that. It needs to be talked about.

That’s what the Shifter Accords are for.

That’s what I’m trying to do. So…human nanny. ”

Cassie nodded, despite still having a thousand questions. She wasn’t sure how to ask them. I wasn’t sure if he would answer. She’d wait, she decided—find out more about Felix and his pack and everything when she was living amidst it all.

But her other question still remained unanswered. He’d avoided it on purpose, she was sure. She couldn’t really blame him. However, she needed to know. Needed to hear his reasoning before fully committing to life in his house, in his employ.

“But me,” she said, looking out the window at the trees flying past, “why me? You could have turned me down when you saw me in the office. Why did you still offer me the job?”

Felix was silent for a long while before finally responding.

“I guess I think that you’ll do a good job.”

It wasn’t a good answer. She wasn’t even sure it was true. But if the look on his face was anything to go by, it was the only answer she was going to get from him.

***

Felix lived near the center of the charming town of Silvermist in a large log-cabin style house with a wraparound garden to hide it from the noise and hubbub of life beyond.

Dark red wooden pillars stretched upwards, framing the grand triangular roof, and light glinted from the myriad glass paned windows.

The lawn beyond was scattered with various toys and climbing apparatuses, no doubt the domain of Felix’s two sons.

Cassie’s heart clenched for a moment. What would her life have been like had she grown up in a place like this?

She hadn’t seen much of Silvermist as they drove through, but she’s seen enough small towns in America to know that this one had real heart.

Soul. It was in the small things: the abundance of small businesses, the shine to the streets, the well-kept trees lining the roads. This place was loved.

Her hometown on the outskirts of the Redwood Forest was a drab, concrete smear in comparison to this place.

People had been hardened by it, and were hard in return.

Or perhaps just honest. Her scrawny limbs and raggedy clothes signaled to everyone exactly what she was, and she was treated accordingly.

Somehow, she didn’t think people in Silvermist would be like that. Then, she remembered Felix’s growled warning.

I’m not a good man. I have not done good things.

She swallowed. Silvermist was a shifter town, and she would do well to remember it. The rules worked differently here. She would have to keep her guard up.

Felix didn’t say anything as he climbed out of the car, grabbing her pathetically small bag out of the trunk and carrying it up to the door for her.

Cassie took a deep, fortifying breath and followed him.

He hadn’t told her too much about his boys, just that they were a handful and not too keen on the idea of having a nanny.

He had, however, assured her that they would be polite to her, and secretly, Cassie hoped they would warm up to her.

Life would be difficult otherwise. Besides, she’d always gotten on well enough with kids through her various diner jobs. She’d be fine.

From somewhere inside the house, a large crash erupted, followed by a series of shouts and accusations.

Felix sighed, briefly pinching his nose between his thumb and forefinger before glancing back at her over his shoulder. “Ready?”

Cassie stared at him as a moment of pure terror washed over her. But then, she remembered herself and gave one firm nod.

“Boys!” Felix roared as he swung the door open. “There better not be anything broken!”

Two boys, both with Felix’s dark blond hair, appeared at the top of the stairs before tumbling down together, each fighting to get ahead of his brother. They skidded to a screeching halt in front of their father, eyes downcast despite the cheeky glint.

“I’ll deal with whatever that noise was later,” Felix said sternly. “Right now, I’d like to introduce you to Cassie. She’s your new nanny.”

He stepped aside, gesturing at Cassie to step forward. Pasting a grin on her face, she walked forward and stuck out her hand. “Hi boys, it’s lovely to meet you. My name’s Cassie.”