Hot and Badgered. Shelly Laurenston

      PROLOGUE

      Charles Taylor didn’t realize until that moment how fast life could flip on a man.

      One second he’d been listening to two crazy women he’d known for years try to talk him into taking over the Pack from the young, arrogant wolf they all hated. The next second the doorbell rang . . . and everything changed. Forever.

      He’d opened the front door to the main Pack house and found his twelve-year-old granddaughter standing there with her two half-sisters.

      The other two weren’t his granddaughters. His daughter had taken in the offspring of her worthless ex-boyfriend because that’s what she was like, his Carlie. She’d taken those girls in and raised them like her own. Without question. Without resentment. And because it was the right thing to do, as far as Carlie was concerned.

      So when Charles opened the front door and saw those three girls standing there, dirty, bruised, with that wounded look in their eyes . . . he knew. He knew his baby girl was gone. He knew it and was devastated by it.

      But what could he do? Do what his daughter would want. Take the three girls in. Raise them, even the two who weren’t only not his blood but weren’t even a tiny bit wolf. The middle one was full honey badger, like her idiot father and her criminal mother, who was doing hard time in a Bulgarian prison after a jewelry heist went bad.

      The second one was half honey badger and half tiger, and his Packmates were not fans of cats. Not even a little. They didn’t tolerate the house cats that roamed around their Wisconsin neighborhood. So what would they do to this little one with the big eyes and the stink of cat coming off her?

      The girls did have one thing in their favor, though . . . they were young. The oldest twelve, the middle eleven, and the baby not even eight yet.

      When the two She-wolves saw the girls, they gasped and immediately ushered the children in, leading them to the living room he’d just escaped from.

      “What happened?” Lotti asked his granddaughter. “Where’s your mama?”

      His granddaughter looked up at him and, again, he saw the answer in her eyes. Just as he’d seen the answer when he’d opened the front door.

      “My daughter’s dead,” he said flatly, still trying to process exactly what that meant.

      Lotti and Jane went silent, hands stopping on the light coats the girls had worn to trek from Connecticut to Wisconsin to get to their mother’s Pack. In the middle of winter.

      Aghast, the two She-wolves looked up at him, then at each other.

      “Let’s . . . let’s get you girls something to eat,” Jane stuttered. “You must be starving.”

      Lotti stood and softly said to Charles, “We may have a problem. . . with two of them.”

      “If I have to leave, I will.” He thought of his daughter, of how she would have handled something like this. “I won’t separate them.”

      Lotti pressed her hand against Charles’s chest. “I’ll go talk to him.”

      He nodded and crouched down in front of his granddaughter to help take off her coat, but before he had a chance, Lotti quickly returned. “He wants to talk to them. Alone.”

      Frowning, Charles looked at his old friend over his shoulder. “What?”

      She shrugged.

      “Forget it,” he said. He wasn’t putting his traumatized granddaughter and her sisters through that idiot’s bullshit.

      “We’ll talk to him,” his granddaughter suddenly announced, sounding . . . adult. She might look like a little girl, but she’d never actually been one. Carlie used to say “my girl was born forty.” And seeing the determined look on the child’s sweet face, Charles believed it.

      She stood and motioned to her sisters. “Where is he?” she asked a stunned Lotti.

      “In the back. The yard. I’ll show—”

      “We’ll find him.”

      While the middle girl held the youngest’s hand, his granddaughter gently pushed the pair forward, and the three of them walked through the house alone.

      That’s when Jane growled. “I don’t like this.”

      Neither did Charles. He didn’t like it at all.

      * * *

      Betsey sprawled on the high branches of the big tree in the Pack’s backyard and did her best to stay quiet.

      She came out here to be left alone. She was too old to hang around the other pups and too young to hang around the adults. And at sixteen, she was counting down the days until she would go off to college and get the fuck out of here.

      She loved her mom. She’d done the best she could for her only child, but Betsey had never fit in with the Pack because she wasn’t full wolf. She was half wolf, half black bear. Her father had been a one-night stand her mother had still not gotten over. But being a bear among wolves was . . . challenging.

      While Betsey was growing up, things had at least been tolerable. Until Billy Lewis had taken over as Pack leader. Now Betsey was praying nothing came between her and the scholarships that would allow her to go to an out-of-state college and get into a new life.

      Until then . . . she’d sit in trees when she wasn’t in school and hope that no one noticed her.

      Like Billy Lewis, sitting on one of the benches in the Pack’s backyard, looking over his domain like Richard the Third. But such a weak wolf wouldn’t notice that Betsey was sitting in a tree watching him unless the wind suddenly changed and he scented her.

      She watched as the three little girls came into the backyard. According to what she’d heard when Lotti came to talk to Billy, their mother had been killed and somehow those little kids had made it halfway across the country to the Pack house. Remarkable, really. At that age, Betsey wouldn’t have lasted five seconds without her mother. But these girls . . .

      Billy had insisted on a “private chat” with the pups, and that did not bode well. Billy didn’t like what he called “half-breeds.” An insulting term from an insulting idiot.

      Sadly, Betsey had been forced to endure a “private chat” with Billy herself. It wasn’t nearly as creepy as it sounded, but it was definitely cruel. He’d told her that come her eighteenth birthday, she was out, no matter what was going on in her life or her mother’s. If her mother wasn’t happy about it, she could go with her kid, but that would be up to Betsey.

      A horrifying thought since Betsey knew how much her mother loved her Pack. Leaving it, even for her only daughter, would be too harsh for her. Betsey would never ask that. So, after that “private chat” she’d doubled up on her school work, began taking AP courses, and planned on graduating when she was seventeen. Thankfully, she was smart enough to make that happen.

      But she didn’t know anything about the little girls walking into the backyard to be left alone with Billy. She just knew her heart broke for them. Because no matter what their circumstances—yes, even the death of their mother, who’d been a former Packmate and daughter of the pack’s Beta—it would mean nothing to Billy Lewis. Besides, this might be the chance he’d been waiting for . . . to get rid of Charles Taylor.