Free A Mate for the Alpha and His Brothers by Cara Adams Page A

best dad, but at least he’d been there mostly when she was a small child. He’d pretty much ignored her, but she did have some memories of sitting on his knee and once of him giving her a princess tiara for her birthday. She’d been six, or maybe seven. He’d also sat by her bed and read her a story one time when she was recovering from some childhood ailment and had been awake late at night, unable to sleep. So, she supposed, in his own selfish way, he had cared about her.
    Whereas he hadn’t even stuck around long enough to find out the new baby was going to be the son he’d always wanted.
    JJ spoke slowly and thoughtfully as he answered Amory’s question. “I might not. I hadn’t seen that move. But I had been looking at moving the knight, so maybe. I’d seen that her king was vulnerable, but she’s damn good at escaping from my plots.”
    “She’s good at escaping from everyone’s plots,” said Amory. But Elsie thought he sounded happy with JJ’s honest answer.
    They’d been in the minivan moving steadily north for hours now. Elsie had no way of knowing the time, as she had no watch and her pre-paid cell phone was back at the panther headquarters. She’d only used it to put the number on her resume in case someone wanted to interview her for a job and hadn’t even bought a charger for it. When the battery had died, she hadn’t worried because she was happy working and living with Amory, Favian, and Brayden.
    Maybe once JJ was settled, she’d get a real phone, not a throwaway one, so she could talk to him. She packed the chess pieces back into the box while JJ leaned forward and said, “Tell me about the family I’m staying with. You said they had two sons.”
    Favian was driving, and Amory was sitting in the front passenger seat, an iPad on his knee. Elsie didn’t know if he was working or not, but he’d spoken to JJ first, so he couldn’t complain about being asked a question right now.
    “That’s right. The MacRae family. Roz and Josh have two boys about your age, Cal and Deke.” He turned around in his seat and faced JJ. “You’ll go to school. You’ll pay attention and work hard in class, and you’ll graduate with the rest of your class. Is that understood?”
    “Hell yes. A real school will be wonderful. My old school wasn’t fantastic, but I didn’t know how bad a school could be until we had to move. Animals in the jungle behave better than some of those kids.”
    Favian called back over his shoulder, “We’re not promising that this is the world’s greatest school either, but the pack send all their teenagers there, and they wouldn’t do that if it was a jungle.”
    “How much do you know about shape-shifters, JJ?” asked Brayden.
    Elsie tensed. She wasn’t exactly sure about the answer to this question herself. She would have liked a little time alone with JJ before the trip to make sure he understood a few things, but she hadn’t had the opportunity. Of course he knew about shifters, but…
    “Mom explained about shape-shifters when she did the whole Santa Claus, tooth fairy thing. I was likely seven, and I already knew about Santa and about werewolves. Looking back now, it was all rather weird. On the one hand, she was saying that people can turn into wolves and, on the other, that a man in a red suit who everyone had seen heaps of times isn’t real. At the time it made sense to me, though. One of the kids in my class in the first grade was a wolf. You people are the first panthers I’ve ever met that I know about, but one of the kids in the gang was a wolf. I knew the moment I saw him run away from a job. No one moves that fast and that…I don’t know, smoothly maybe? Kind of like a dancer, only running. Anyway I knew.”
    “Thank you, JJ. You’ll be fine.”
    “No, thank you. Elsie was doing her best for me, and it wasn’t mom’s fault she got sick, but that neighborhood was toxic. We were going to have to move because we couldn’t survive there. I’m