Scout: Reckless Desires (Norseton Wolves Book 7) Read Online Free

me up .”
    They didn’t move, but another woman Petra hadn’t noticed before did. She must have been sitting at the bedside or elsewhere out of view, but she moved to the foot of the bed and leaned on the wooden crossbar. Older than the other two women, but same dark hair. Same light brown skin. Same nagging energy.
    Petra had thought she’d wanted to move, but her limbs didn’t seem to have the get-up-and-go she needed to stage a decent escape attempt.
    Damned useless body . What gives?
    “Don’t feel like you need to get up unless you have to pee,” the older one said. “I doubt you do, but don’t worry. We got you cleaned up. No need to be ashamed.”
    Petra wasn’t running on all cylinders, so she needed a few seconds to grasp what the hell the woman was talking about. They’d been caring for her as if she were some sort of invalid, when she most certainly wasn’t .
    “Let me up.”
    “Just be still,” the lady said. “No need to tax yourself. It’s not like you’re getting charged by the night to be here. This is your house.” She straightened up and moved away from the end of the bed.
    Petra could then see the open armoire with the television playing some show she didn’t recognize on low volume, but she wouldn’t have recognized much of anything. She and Arnold hadn’t been in front of very may televisions in the past ten years. On the rare occasions they could afford to rent a room somewhere, they’d always been too tired to turn on the sets.
    One of the words the lady had used bounced around in Petra’s head like a paper bag in a windstorm. It didn’t make sense. She’d said home .
    “What do you mean by home? I don’t know this place. I don’t come from New Mexico.”
    “Nah, you don’t. Everyone in this pack is from somewhere else. Me and my sisters are from Delaware.”
    “Your— sisters .” Petra looked at the ladies on either side of her. The lady had two sisters. Petra had always wanted one. All she’d had was Arnold, and apparently two children had been enough for their mother. Maybe even two too many after their father had left the way he did.
    “Uh-huh. Yeah, I know. Wolves don’t generally have so many children because the pregnancies are so hard, but…” She chuckled and rubbed her own swollen belly. “Our family has always been very good at that.”
    “Understatement,” Graciella said. “Our cousins have so many kids.”
    Her sister moved to the side of the bed, likely to a chair, and Graciella’s body blocked her from view. Petra didn’t like not being able to see people talking. The disembodied voices always made her nervous for some reason.
    “I’m Lisa,” came the voice. “I was one of the first brides brought here.”
    “Brides?” Petra tried to scramble out of the covers so she could put on some clothes and flee, but she couldn’t. Just couldn’t . But she wasn’t about to be any wolf’s chew toy.
    Hell fuckin’ no .
    Lisa laughed so hard that she snorted, and her sisters took up the refrain.
    “Don’t laugh at me. I don’t see what’s so damned funny.”
    Lisa’s giggles tapered off with a light sigh. “We’re laughing because we know exactly what triggered you, and seeing that shit’s the same everywhere, no matter what packs we come out of or how long we’ve been gone from them, is funny. Relax. I wasn’t traded away by my parents.”
    “Oh.” Though somewhat mollified, Petra wasn’t quite ready to take the deep breath her body needed.
    “I volunteered to come. I’m sure you know how mate calls work, right?”
    Petra closed her eyes and scrounged around in her memory for any clue of what those were. When she and Arnold had left their pack, they’d been in early puberty. They’d missed a lot of the grown-up talk, and mostly they relied on secondhand stories they picked up here and there to know how wolves were supposed to behave.
    She sucked in the breath anyway, and let it out. She had to ask. Had to know.
    “I don’t