later.” He stood upright, shot her a smile, and then the playful, tender look on his face disappeared and the Beta mask slid right back on. Her Dante was gone. Without a second look at her, he grabbed his coat and jogged away.
Slipping her arms into her jacket, she fought off the chill she felt at the loss. Not just of his body heat, but of him— Dante the person as opposed to Dante the Beta. Intending to go for a quick shower before breakfast, she began making her way back to the caves. Halfway there, her cell phone rang. She smiled when she saw that it was Ivy. “Hey, bitch, what’s up?” A pause. “Um…Jaime, I…”
The croaky sound had Jaime halting in her tracks. “Ivy? Ivy, is everything okay?”
“One of the dogs, Jaime…”
Ivy didn’t have to say any more for Jaime to understand. No matter how prepared they were for the dogs being put down, it always hit them hard. “Who?” No answer. That said more than words could, but still Jaime persisted, hoping that she wrong. “Who was put down, Ivy?” A long pause. “Ben. I’m so sorry, honey.”
Emotion clogged her throat, but she held back the tears. “What happened?”
“He attacked one of the staff last night. He hurt him really badly, Jaime.”
“But Ben wasn’t a violent animal.”
“You know as well as I do that just because he never hurt you doesn’t mean he’d never hurt anyone else. If we don’t know their histories and what’s traumatized them, we don’t know what might trigger them to snap. I really am so sorry, Jaime.”
“I’m fine,” she lied, her voice unsteady.
“Take today off. You really don’t want to be here today.”
No, she didn’t, because although she understood that the staff member wasn’t to blame, she would undoubtedly find herself wanting to kill him. “See you tomorrow. Take care.” It was only a second after she ended the call that the tears came. Yeah, she should be used to this by now, but it was always a blow to her system when one of the dogs she cared for had to be put to sleep. At some point the same thing could happen to her—something could act as a trigger for her wolf and give her enough strength to surface. And then God knows what her wolf would do. Jaime just hoped that someone dealt with her before she could hurt anyone.
Suddenly feeling the need to be held—dominant female or not, she wasn’t made of stone—she instinctively called Dante. No answer. Five minutes later, she tried again. No answer. After another fifteen minutes she tried again, and again, and again. Soon three whole hours had passed and he hadn’t responded in any way to her attempts to call him. She knew there was no pack emergency, knew his meeting with Trey had ended two hours before. She even knew where he was—his damn office. But she wouldn’t chase after him.
When he didn’t appear for lunch, her sense of desolation increased. Again, she tried calling him, but nothing. When he didn’t turn up to the evening meal either, she was so down on herself that even her wolf was feeling depressed. Down because of Ben, down because she could soon be just as dead as he was, and down because the one person she needed wasn’t there. So she did what she always did when she wanted to forget about something for a little while. She made it her mission to get drunk.
The knock on his office door made Dante groan. It was now ten in the evening, and all he wanted to do was hunt down Jaime and take her to bed. He knew she’d been trying to call him, but he had been so damn busy. First he’d had to have a meeting with Trey to discuss a possible alliance with another pack; Trey had wanted him to do the necessary research into the pack before a decision was made.
Then Dante had had to see some of his own pack individually to go over issues they had raised. Then there had been phone calls he’d had to take or make, and a lot of paperwork to mill through. As much as he’d wanted to talk to Jaime, the last thing he’d needed was to hear her husky voice and have her distracting him.
“Come in.” He was surprised to see Trick enter with a smile on his face.
“D, um, you might want to see this.”
“Later, I’ve got a lot of stuff