Free This Weakness For You (Entangled Select Otherworld) (Taming the Pack) by Wendy Sparrow Page A

progress.” He glanced out the back window again. “I’d asked him to come stay with me, thinking maybe I could repair our relationship before it’s too late, but having him around now would just complicate everything, and this is already difficult enough.” He turned back to her, but his gaze was considering and not as hopeful and excited as she’d have preferred.
    Tilting her head, she said, “You say the sweetest things. First, I’m trouble. Now, our relationship is a difficulty.” She glanced around pointedly. “What in here don’t you value should it suddenly attain terminal velocity? That statue over there looks cheap.” It didn’t. Nothing in the whole place looked cheap. It simply looked easier to throw at this head.
    He picked the statue of a wolf off a side table, turning it so she could see the two kids underneath the wolf. “This one? It’s not cheap, but it’s not an antique. It’s a bronze reproduction of the Capitoline Wolf , which is said to be from the Middle Ages.” He pointed at the infants. “Romulus and Remus.” He snorted, setting it down. “My mother wanted to name my brothers Romulus and Remus. That would have been hell down the road.” He looked over her shoulder with a half smile before nodding toward the door. “Come,” he said as he passed by her.
    She glared at his back. Okay, the commands weren’t going over well with her, but she was curious what he wanted to show her. Following him, she checked out the house as they headed through a kitchen and a great room. This was a mansion. Why did one person need so much space? They ended in a game room dominated by a pool table. He went to a trophy case and pulled out a ceramic blob the size of a football and threw it to her.
    She caught it and held it up.
    “What is it?”
    “Hell if I know. My mother says I gave it to her for Mother’s Day when I was five. She says she knows what it is, but she won’t tell me. She gave it to me a couple years ago before they moved into a condo and told me it was my turn to have it. I’ve considered breaking it so I don’t have to display it when she comes by. My brothers think it’s hilarious that I have that thing and that she asks me about it. I think she insists I have it out to keep me humble. So, yeah, I’d welcome that being thrown at me. Have at it.”
    “Oh, so you’re going to ask me to break it, and then blame it on me?”
    His grin was half boy and half wolf, and all Jordan. He thought he was so clever.
    She stared down at the lump, running her hands along the curves and the point. Huh. Funny. Jordan was clever, but perhaps not creative—not just because this lump was a bit of a mess. He was five; this wasn’t bad for a five-year-old. No, he couldn’t see beyond the blobbishness of it.
    “You’re smiling. Why are you smiling? Do you know what it is?”
    She snorted a laugh. “Poetic.”
    “Yeah, I was a real master of clay. What is it?” It annoyed him not to know everything. Dane was the same way.
    She held it up, looking at him over the top of it. Only a man could fail to see what it was. “You don’t have any sisters, do you?”
    “No.”
    “It’s a heart. You’ve twisted it a bit and the point is all crooked, but that’s clearly what it is.” And he’d just given it to her. He’d given her his heart. It was so sappy that she felt the bile rise a bit in the back of her throat, even though her X chromosomes said “Aww.”
    Jordan frowned. “And she’s making me display that? I’ve been telling everyone for years it’s a skull.”
    Actually, it did sort of look like a skull. The indentations were right even if the shape was wrong.
    “Why would a five-year-old give his mother a skull for Mother’s Day?”
    “I don’t know. I’d given her a live snake the previous year. I’d had it in my sock drawer for two days. A skull seemed about right.”
    “Maybe it’s both.” It was a heart, but his poor Alpha brain could never handle that. Besides, if a