Free Scion (Norseton Wolves Book 4) by Holley Trent

anything.” He cringed. What he said wasn’t quite true, and he didn’t want to perpetuate the notion that she counted in that “anything.” His father was right—Vic had to try . He’d wanted a partner, and Ashley was the mate the goddess had approved for him. It was up to him to figure out how to make it work. He wasn’t the only injured party, and he had to keep reminding himself that she’d been fucked over, too.
    Watching him wordlessly, she gripped the coat hanger a bit more tightly in her fist, and shifted her weight. The dressed she held was some kind of belted, sleeveless sheath. Not fancy, at least in his opinion, but he knew fuck-all about women’s clothing. It had probably been expensive.
    He leaned against the doorframe and hooked his thumbs into his belt loops. “Where do you work?”
    “Um.” She bobbed her eyebrows and sputtered her lips. “I guess I’m kind of a high-end babysitter.”
    “You’re a nanny?”
    She held the dress against her waist beneath her forearm and used her now-free hand to make a waffling gesture. “Not exactly. My job is to get Ótama up to speed. She doesn’t know anything about the world.”
    That was probably as close to an understatement as a person could get. Ótama was the progenitor of the Afótama clan. For nearly a thousand years, she’d been confined to a Purgatory-like place, and recently, the old Viking gods saw fit to return her to the land of the living. She was a powerful witch and an efficient diplomat, but incredibly naive. It wasn’t her naïveté that had killed her the first time she’d been alive, though.
    Childbirth had done that.
    And that reminded him… Shit. Can Ashley even carry a kid? Moon shifter birth rates were low in comparison to Vic’s ilk. When a mother shifted, the fetus got tangled up.
    Does she know that?
    She furrowed her forehead, probably growing annoyed at his inability to hold up his end of the conversation.
    He cleared his throat. “Uh, that’s a pretty sweet gig.”
    Ashley shrugged and backed into the closet. She turned the light on and closed the door almost all the way.
    Dammit . Vic blew some air through his lips and let them flap. He didn’t know how to make peace with her. With the guys in the pack, it was easy. They argued and fought just like any close group of friends who every now and then annoyed the ever loving shit out of each other. In the end, they always figured out ways to shake off the frustration, whether it meant having a scuffle in their wolf forms, or some passive aggressive shit like “forgetting” to relieve someone of his guard duty.
    “I think Lora tapped me for the job because I’m qualified to carry a firearm,” Ashley said. The rustling noises from the closet were probably her slipping into that fitted dress. His mind wandered to that place of curiosity—of imagination. He wondered if her body looked exactly the same as it had a month ago. How pregnant is she? He was pretty good at math, but his biology knowledge could probably use a refresher. “Or was , rather,” she added. She stepped out of the closet wearing the knee-skimming dress and tightened the belt around her trim midsection.
    Nothing to see there.
    “I need to get credentialed for New Mexico. Probably won’t be a problem.”
    Vic pushed up both eyebrows.
    “What?”
    “I dunno. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you know how to manage a handgun.”
    “You mean, given who my father is, right?” She slowly, calmly wadded her wet towel into a bundle and kept her gaze locked on him.
    He pushed a hand through his uncombed hair and grunted.
    “It was a necessary evil. You can’t be a woman my age who can’t shapeshift unless you’ve got some other way to protect yourself. My father wasn’t always going to be around to protect me.”
    “If what he did even qualifies as protecting.”
    “Fine. I’ll let you have that one, because you’re right.” She tossed the towel into the corner hamper and stepped into