Page 2 of I Hate Myself For Loving You (Wolf Mates #7)

Chapter Two

A very cooed at baby Quinn, shoveling another spoonful of goop into his mouth. His gummy smile gave Avery a reason to smile, too, rather than hang onto her anger.

“He’s a messy one, huh?” Derrick Adams remarked while grabbing a roll of paper towels to clean the floor surrounding Quinn’s high chair.

“He’s definitely a team player when it comes to messy,” she giggled, taking some of the paper towels and wiping at her jeans.

Derrick ran a hand over Quinn’s head with fatherly affection. “He gets that from his mother. Have you seen her eat?” he joked.

“I heard that, Derrick Adams, and I’ll have you know, cats are the cleanest creatures on earth.

You dogs are another story altogether.” Martine sat on the chair opposite Avery and grinned at Quinn.

Tucking her long, graceful legs under her, she folded her hands and placed them on the wooden table.

“And even if his eating habits were from me, it’s very obvious, wolf man, his looks are, too. ”

Derrick put an arm around his wife’s shoulder and kissed the top of her sleek black head. “Yeah, I guess I have to credit you with those.”

They made a great couple, Derrick and Martine. They were another example of how accepting the Adams pack could be. Baby Quinn was proof that the Adamses were good people. He was, after all, half domestic cat and half werewolf.

Cat-dog, as Martine had explained with a laugh. Little Quinn was the apple of everyone’s eye and certainly would grow up with a healthy attitude toward diversity.

“You’re good at this, Avery. You really ought to have one of your own,” Martine said, taking Quinn from his high chair, bringing him to the sink for a wipe-down.

Hah! At this stage in the game, Immaculate Conception was her only alternative.

Unless her vibrator could father children, Avery was SOL. A twinge of motherly dreams gone astray hit her, but she shrugged it off in favor of being a pseudo aunt and caretaker of stray animals.

“Avery? How did the rumble for wee animals in the jungle slash potential Netflix special go with you and Lassiter today?” JC asked, stirring something that smelled delicious on the stove.

Avery’s snort was derisive. “It went like it always does. He digs. I hurl epithets at him for being an animal killer while he does it. He doesn’t budge, he doesn’t flinch, he just keeps on going. Nothing ruffles that man?—”

“And it’s starting to piss you off, eh?” Max interrupted, kissing JC’s cheek as he cupped her burgeoning belly. “How’s Max junior in there today?”

JC smiled warmly, but reminded him, “We don’t know if it’s a junior or a juniorette, farm boy, and the baby is just fine.”

Though it looked as if JC were due at any moment, her pregnancy wasn’t quite what the alpha Adams, Max, had expected.

In a human pregnancy, JC was but three months along. However, seeing as the sire of this particular offspring was a werewolf and the mother a human, no one knew what to expect. Apparently, each half human, half werewolf pregnancy was different.

“I can tell you this, snookums. It might be a while before I let you knock me up again. I have human friends who were pregnant and they don’t look like this—” she pointed to her belly and snorted, “—when they’re only three months along.

What I don’t get is how I feel like I’ve been pregnant forever.

It’s the damned pregnancy of the millennium, for gravy’s sake,” she complained.

“It’s sturdy seed I planted, eh, wench?” Max nudged Derrick and snickered like a school boy.

Turning, both hands on her wide hips, JC narrowed her eyes and pointed the spoon she had in her hands at them.

“Sturdy my eye, Don Juan. It’s demon seed, buddy, and don’t you forget it.

It keeps me up at night. It makes me puke all day long and worse still, it’s given me split ends.

” With that, JC trudged off to the freezer, waddling as she went.

“So, Avery? Make any headway with Lassiter today? Or are we still where we were three months ago?” Max asked again.

Sadly, Max’s defeated look made Avery’s daily report even bleaker. “Well, I did call him some new names today, if that means anything.”

“Look, Avery. You’re not getting anywhere here. I feel like we’re just wasting your time, not to mention the time of your organization. I don’t want to give up but Lassiter is shredding our land acre by acre, and neither you nor I appear to deter him.”

Avery looked up into the handsome, rugged face of Max Adams and for the first time since she’d begun this project to save his land, she felt all hope slipping away.

“I can’t give up, Max. I feel like it today, but I can’t and neither can you. Don’t you want your baby to someday be able to run under the moonlight on Adams land? Don’t you want that, too?” she asked Derrick pleadingly, turning to face him and Martine.

“Yes, Avery,” Max assured her. “It’s what we all want, but we’ve used up a lot of your valuable time.

There’s no talking to the man, no reasoning with him.

He bought our land right out from under us and with no explanation.

It doesn’t matter if he’s an Adams, according to the town.

They just like the fat account they have now because of him.

So what else is there? You can’t go on day after day calling him names and throwing foliage at him.

Not to mention, you can’t continually hide who we all are forever.

He’s going to catch us one of these days, and lose his damn mind. ”

Hiding the fact that they were werewolves definitely wasn’t easy. But they’d done it for three months now. A couple more wouldn’t break them.

“I know you miss the freedom of your shift, but let’s not forget, the people in Cedar Glen don’t know about us either, and you’ve managed to keep them at bay,” she reminded him.

Max nodded. “That’s true, but we’ve been here for hundreds of years.

There’s a semblance of respect amongst everyone in Cedar Glen, human and otherwise.

The humans stay in town, and we stay here.

But that’s not what I meant. I meant, you had a life before our cause and you should be able to go back to it. ”

If only the life part of that impassioned speech were true. Avery’s life was the animal rights organization she worked for. Save the Tails was all she had and truth be told, she’d be really sad to leave the Adams, even if they did find a way to stop Lassiter.

“So are ya kicking me out?” she half-joked, half-wondered out loud.

“Are you kidding? Who would teach us new and inventive ways to say shit stain, if not for you?” Martine asked.

Her smile was sympathetic and so genuine it made Avery’s teeth hurt.

“We just feel guilty, Avery. We know the money for this cause you’ve taken on is long gone by now.

Your paycheck stopped coming three weeks ago. Hector told us.”

Foiled again. Indeed, her paycheck had stopped coming because Save the Tails couldn’t justify the kind of money needed to stop a company as large as Lassiter Adams’. It was a non-profit organization. Their salaries came from donations. The pay was little, but the work was rewarding for Avery.

It didn’t matter that her pay was inconsequential. It was never very big to begin with. Avery just barely got by on her salary as it was. She couldn’t afford to live without it permanently. She’d be high and dry if not for her trust fund.

“I’m okay, Martine. I really am. I want you all to have what you deserve, and Lassiter Adams has to shit or get off the pot someday. He can’t just keep digging forever. We have to figure out what he wants and try to offer him something.”

Damn, she hated the failure of her voice in her own ears. Fuck Lassiter Adams the defenseless animal killer.

“Just give me a couple of more weeks and let’s see what happens, okay?

I’ve been in a tangle or two with the likes of worse than Lassiter.

Unless I’m imposing…” She let her words trail off.

Maybe they were just sick of her interfering in their lives?

Avery could be very single minded when it came to the environment.

When she was off trying to preserve something, she forgot much else.

Like her nails.

Looking down at her hands, she realized they were in need of a good manicure.

Everything went by the wayside when she had the environmental bug up her ass.

“Avery can stay as long as she wants. Got that?” JC called from inside the freezer. “She’s the only other person in this house who hasn’t made fun of me because I’m worried this baby created by my farm stud is going to be born with better hair than me.”

Max’s chuckle was playful when he crossed the kitchen to swat at JC’s backside.

“You can stay as long as you like, Avery. You’re no imposition. We feel like we’re imposing on you.”

If only Max Adams knew how good his family was for someone like Avery.

Someone like her who didn’t have the support of her own family, but had found it with these people.

Her reluctance to give up bolstered.

Lassiter Adams could kiss her hairy lupine ass.

And why did the very thought of that give her chills?

And not the kind that were unpleasant.

* * * * *

Avery rapped on the thin, white door of Lassiter’s trailer. Trees whipped with the nippy breeze, the air was clean with the scent of freshly dug dirt. The night was chilly, calling to her to shift and roam freely over the hills and valleys of the Adams farm.

But you can’t do that if Lassiter is going to be hot on your ass with his bulldozer, now can you ?

That was the very reason Avery was here. To try one last ditch effort to talk him out of keeping the land. Maybe she could talk him into allowing Max and his family to pay back the money he’d forked over. Like easy lifetime installments on a monthly basis.

“Ah, the tree hugger,” Lassiter mocked, opening the door to reveal the brick shithouse hard body he was.

His voice was like brown sugar melted with butter, thick and bubbling sweet. He grinned in that smug, disarming way that made her furious and tingly at the same time.

Avery let out a loud, exasperated sigh and bit her tongue. “Yes, it’s me. The tree hugger. I’d like to talk, if we could.” She was shooting for amicable, but saying the words through clamped teeth might ruin the effect she was aiming to achieve, so she loosened her face into an almost smile.

“Shouldn’t you be off trying to save the almost extinct tsetse bat in Zimbabwe or something?” he taunted.

Folding her hands in front of her, she clasped them together to keep from clocking him in his perfect chops.

Pleasant. She could be pleasant. She had to be pleasant if she wanted to try and find a rational end to this.

“I don’t think Zimbabwe has tsetse bats.

I could be wrong, but last I checked, no tsetse bats. ”

Lassiter’s jaw twitched and his hands rested on his lean hips. “Well, there must be a better cause than this. Go find it, Avery, and leave this cause alone. It’s a dead issue. I’m not leaving.”

Sucking in her cheeks, she tamped down the ire swirling in her throat, working its way to her sharp tongue.

“What is it you want, Lassiter? You haven’t built anything, but you keep digging up stuff and ruining perfectly good wilderness.

Why can’t you just let the Adams be and go dig somewhere else? ”

“Because you’ll just follow me to ‘ somewhere else .’ I figure I’m hiding in plain sight here.” He chuckled, probably because he thought he was clever. When really, he was just a shithead.

Ohhh, that smug, arrogant tone of his chewed at her ears, making them burn. Shoving her hands in the pockets of her jeans, she plodded on. “I don’t follow you, Lassiter. I follow a cause ,” she said with a calm she didn’t feel.

Rocking forward on his toes, Lassiter positioned his body close to hers without actually touching it. The heat he emanated was sexy and daring, and Avery’s nostrils responded in kind, flaring to the musky, male scent. “Your cause won’t stop me from doing what I need to do, Avery.”

And what the hell was that exactly? What did he need so desperately to do?

Avery looked into his dark brown eyes, staring down at her, and narrowed her own.

“You never change, Lassiter Adams.”

His breath fanned her cheeks, warm and smelling faintly of something sweet.

“Neither do you, Avery Palmer,” he said with sinister glee before hauling her to him and pulling her into the trailer, shoving the door shut with a booted foot.

Avery hung in his arms, neither allowing nor preventing her capture. Calling Lassiter large was, by far, understating his bulk. The arms that held her tightened, holding her much smaller frame close, allowing her a sampling of his thickly muscled thighs.

And what hung between them.

Some things, like the hard thing between Lassiter’s legs, never changed either.