Page 1 of I Hate Myself For Loving You (Wolf Mates #7)

Chapter One

“T watwaffle!”

“Tree hugger!”

“Jack off!”

“Grow up, Avery!” came a heated return response, followed by mocking laughter.

“Grow this !” she yelled back to the slam of the flimsy trailer door.

“Aw, c’mon, Avery! I don’t see how being a potty mouth is going to help us here. I mean, we want to be civilized, don’t we? Who’s going to take us seriously if we resort to name calling? It’s petty and kinda kindergarten.”

Avery Palmer gave Hector Adams a pointed look before she hung her head, rubbing her temples. “You’re right, Hector. That was childish of me.”

But she decided every once in a while, it was okay to let your inner child escape.

To prove it, she threw a pine cone at Lassiter Adams’ trailer window with fastball speed. “You hear me, you needle dick? You’re a condo loving, landfill snarfing, brick laying jerk!”

The door to the trailer remained infuriatingly closed.

Palmer versus Adams, round one bazillion and two was officially over.

For the moment.

Avery Palmer, environmental groupie, defender of all creatures great and small, had engaged in this argument with Lassiter Adams for three months now—ever since he’d parked his stupid construction trailer/bachelor pad on Adams land and declared it his.

Every bloody day for three months.

He’d staked his claim while Max Adams’ cousin, Julia Lawrence was out on a moonlit run with her fiancé, Xavier Wolf. Just showed up out of the blue with his backhoes and steamrolled his way right over her.

She giggled when she remembered Julia’s description of him. She’d called him a pasty fuck boy. Hot, but pale, and arrogant AF, which described Lassiter to a T.

Avery blew an escaping strand of hair from her ponytail out of her face. Her cheeks were flushed with anger and frustration as she stood, looking at Lassiter’s trailer door.

He peeked out the small window along the right side of his temporary quarters and waved to Avery with a smug smile, further infuriating her.

“Arghhh! He makes me insane! I just can’t figure him, Hector, you know?

He’s been here for three months, digging stuff up, and not a single apartment complex to show for it.

You’d think he’d want to get moving. Yet, he does the same thing day after day.

Dig holes and cover them back up. He’s like a dog looking for a bone who can’t remember where it’s buried. ”

Hector smiled at Avery, snickering while petting his beloved rabbit with a gentle hand. “Well, that dog is fond of your butt.”

She snorted. Lassiter Adams wasn’t fond of anything but money. The money building an apartment complex in the middle of nowhere would bring him. Young city dwellers looking for a bit of suburbia would swarm here for a taste of town and country.

Thus, killing the animals Avery fought so hard to protect. Which was why Hector had asked her to come and help him save Cedar Glen from disaster.

Defeated for today, she began the long walk back to the Adams house with Hector close behind.

Once more, for posterity, she shrieked into the now bulldozed clearing, “Animal killer!” Her vicious accusation echoed through the open space.

Hector clucked his tongue at her with reproach. “Avery, I really don’t think this has gotten us anywhere so far. Maybe you should try being nice to him? He doesn’t hate animals. He has a parakeet. You saw him talking to it through the window when we spied on him. So he must not hate all animals.”

Avery’s eyes flashed at Hector, making him cringe ever so slightly. “If he didn’t hate them, he wouldn’t want to build stupid condos on their homes. If we don’t stay tough, Hector, we’re going to lose the fight.”

His snort was all Avery needed, but he went ahead and said the words out loud anyway. “I don’t wanna be the bearer of bad news, but we are losing the fight, A.”

Turning on him, she threw her hands up in the air. “And so what? You want to just give up?”

“No.” He shook his dark head vehemently.

“I never want to give up, but how can we fight the back taxes owed on acreage this size, Avery? Max didn’t know about them and he couldn’t come up with the money to pay it, so the town took what they were offered from Lassiter before Julia even had time to make an offer.

He beat her to the punch with cold, hard cash. ”

What a mess. How could it be that the taxes had been left unpaid for so long?

The Adamses weren’t rich—well, maybe Julia was—but they weren’t poor either. So who forgot to check the little stub on the mortgage bill? According to Hector’s cousin Max, no one even knew the taxes hadn’t been paid.

Adams land had always been Adams land. Period. Which led Avery to believe the town of Cedar Glen, in the fine state of New Jersey, was dicking them around for some cash and they’d decided the first person to come up with the cash was as good as any.

And that money came from Lassiter Adams.

Greedy corporate bastard that he was, small town USA had let him grease their palms.

Yet, he hadn’t built a single thing to date.

He dug around with lots of machinery while Avery and her group of environmental activists chained themselves to bulldozers and trees to protest. His answer to that was to simply choose another portion of the vast Adams acreage to dig up, surprising them each new day that dawned with a fresh location.

It became like a daily game of cat and mouse to figure out where he’d dig next.

However, none of that explained his claim to be an Adams. Adams was a common last name—as common as Jones or Smith. So where was the proof Lassiter was an Adams at all? Of the were variety, no less?

He didn’t smell like a were. He didn’t even look like a were.

He was too pasty white. There wasn’t any proof like documentation, other than he shared the same last name.

And, due to the fact that asking Lassiter might reveal the secret about them being werewolves, a secret they didn’t want to reveal—no one said anything.

They grumbled, they shook their fists at him, but they didn’t make him prove he was really an Adams from the infamous werewolf pack, better known as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest because they were afraid of exposure.

If Cedar Glen got its hands on that information, they’d be out here hunting them with stakes and fiery torches.

And she didn’t want that because Avery had fallen in love with them.

Yes, the Adams family was rare and unusual.

They didn’t care if your mate was a penguin, so long as you’d found love.

They didn’t care if you didn’t like to hunt and run with the full moon or lived on a strictly vegetarian diet and married a cat.

They loved you for who you were, not what the typical werewolf pack thought you should be.

That was what made Avery fight even harder on behalf of the Adams, because they accepted her for who she was. An avenger of small creatures and animal lover extraordinaire.

Avery’s family couldn’t accept what they considered her quirks and so, at the age of twenty-one, she’d left. Now she only saw them occasionally, because she couldn’t accept their rigid werewolf rules and regulations.

That might have made her a rebel in the eyes of most wolf packs.

However, not in the eyes of this family.

The Adamses didn’t care that the very idea of hunting a small animal made her queasy.

Just because she was a werewolf it didn’t mean eating meat was essential to her well-being.

She was, after all, half human and found she shifted just fine on broccoli, thank you.

It was simply another factor in her quest to help the Adamses. Their unconditional acceptance of her.

And that brought her back to the stalemate they were in with the alleged newest Adams and where this land ownership nonsense remained. Lassiter dug up the surrounding acres like a kid in a sandbox and the Adams clan couldn’t stop him.

But it wasn’t for lack of trying. All of them, in one way or another, had attempted to drive Lassiter away.

Even Julia—wealthy from her designer pet clothing boutique—didn’t have enough liquid assets to stop Lassiter and by the time she was able to liquidate some of her millions, Lassiter had already beat her to the punch. The town had named their price and he’d paid it.

He was a monster.

An ass-tastic monster, but still a monster.

Avery ignored the call of her hormonal whining and the reminder that Lassiter was crazy hot, and set about focusing on her newest form of protest.

Maybe she could find all the keys to his stupid bulldozers and swallow them?

She’d shit brass for a week, but it might be worth it.

* * *

Lassiter Adams let the curtain of his window fall, shutting out Avery Palmer, and once again, set about looking at the map of the vast Adams acreage. Shit, there was a boatload of land to cover, but he’d dig and dig until the twelfth of never if it meant he’d find what he was looking for.

For the first time in the many years since he’d been searching, he felt hopeful. An end to this disaster in life he’d been dealt would be welcome.

Crossing the room, he looked into his parakeet Bud’s cage and winked. “Well, little guy, I think we shut up Avery for today. Looks like she’s off to fight another cause. Christ, I’m sick of her yap.”

“Sickofheryap. Sickofheryap,” Bud chirped back.

Though, she did have a hot yap. Lassiter rather liked to watch it move when she opened it and called him some of the vilest names he’d ever heard.

It was full, lush, ripe, very red, very kissable and in the three months since he’d been here at the Adams stead, he’d, on more than one occasion, wondered what it would be like to have them all over his body.

She was a feisty one.

A feisty pain in his long-drawn-out search for a needle-in-a-haystack ass.

He looked at Bud and chuckled. “You know, I feel lucky here, Bud. I think this just might be it.”

“Ititit!” Bud chirped back, fluttering his multi colored wings from his perch.

“Yeah,” Lassiter said out loud, more to reassure himself than anything else, “it. We’d better hope this is it. We’re running out of options.” His stomach grumbled, making him momentarily forget the shitload of work ahead of him. It was feeding time.

Pausing for a moment, he wondered what Avery would taste like. The creamy arch of her neck against his lips when he…

Rolling his head on his neck to relieve the tension Avery never failed to create, Lassiter ignored the flare up from all points tropical just thinking of her evoked and went to his fridge for nourishment, planning the next day’s dig.

And how to, yet again, outwit, outlast, outrun Avery Palmer.