Temper by Rhiannon Held

Author:Rhiannon Held
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: werewolves, were, andrew dare, anthropological werewolves, felicia dare, roanoke pack
Publisher: Rhiannon Held

* * *

The day wasn’t done with him, though. Tom made it to his truck, parked it on the shoulder of a rural side road, and collapsed on his back in the bed. He lay there for a while, glaring at the grimy ceiling of the canopy, without getting out his sleeping bag. It wasn’t that he’d enjoyed Mark’s pain, he’d just been so angry he hadn’t cared about it. He didn’t—didn’t understand how he could have felt that way, even though he remembered taking those actions in crisp detail. He’d wanted to—what? Expend the anger until it was gone? That sure hadn’t worked. Or maybe he’d just wanted to burn away the remembered helplessness of getting his ass beat by Felicia’s Spanish boyfriend. He hadn’t been helpless with Mark.

Mark had been.

His phone rang and Tom immediately felt an almost overwhelming urge to smash the phone against the metal of the truck bed lip above the liner. Hadn’t Felicia set all this in motion, by inviting her Spanish boyfriend to stay in Seattle? But Tom knew better than that. This anger wasn’t him. He wasn’t like that.

It wasn’t Felicia anyway. It was worse. Tom stared at the Roanoke Dare on the screen and then answered before he lost his nerve. “Alpha?” He flopped one arm across his eyes.

“I’m in a quandary, Tom. On one hand, I have Billings, howling to me about one of his roamers being viciously attacked and beaten half to death, and on the other, I have a pack member I’ve never known to even sprain someone’s wrist. It doesn’t match up.”

Tom fought the urge to curl into low-ranked body language. Roanoke Dare wasn’t here to see it anyway. “He attacked first. I stopped beating him when he surrendered. Then they ran off. That’s all.”

A sigh carried over the phone’s speakers. Tom supposed he should keep explaining, but he didn’t want to hear his mistakes stated out loud, stark and incontrovertible. “Why?” Roanoke Dare prompted, and didn’t sound pleased about the fact he’d had to.

“Why were we fighting?” Tom checked, then winced. Enough stalling. He knew what his alpha meant. Once he started talking, all of it tumbled out, more or less in order: the cemetery, the watch, Mark and Sean’s apparent plans for Tricia. When he was finished, Roanoke Dare was silent once more, this time wielding it like a weapon.

Tom couldn’t stand it any longer and filled it with the essential truth of all of this. “I was angry.”

Thoughtful silence, this time. “That isn’t like you.”

Tom clenched his free hand. “No fucking shit.” He coughed. “Sorry, Alpha.”

Roanoke Dare laughed rather than getting annoyed at the language. “Only you can fix that, though. Not even my daughter can. She told me that you’ve been avoiding all of her apologies.”

“I’m not ready to—deal with that yet. Thinking about it makes me angry. And then I act without thinking to get rid of the anger, that doesn’t work. It only makes things worse.” Tom cleared his throat. He didn’t want this to turn into a bunch of excuses.

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