One Very Special Woman Read online

  Even now, he sometimes thought he knew more about Benedict than the man did himself, and Ben wasn’t his sub. He wasn’t anyone’s sub. But he wasn’t a Dom either. He would be a helper, a participant, in any BDSM scenes that were played with their woman. Assuming they could find a woman they both liked and who would agree to get to know them better.

  Merek had spent hours trying to plan activities that would demonstrate to a woman how he and Ben would love and care for her always. How she’d be cherished and protected and welcomed into their pack. If she was human, there were a few other human women to be her friends, as well as Bianca, the red fox, and half a dozen female wolves. She’d have friends. She’d never be alone unless she chose to be. And she’d always be surrounded by love. He and Ben would promise her that.

  But first they had to find her. That would be hard. And then he had to find out if she’d agree to engage in BDSM sex. Something told him that would be even more difficult than just finding her. All his hopes for the future were pinned on this one week. This mating party. He’d waited a whole year for this week. A year of hoping and planning for his and Ben’s mate. It had to work out for them both. It just had to.

  * * * *

  Ebony and Ivory had arrived a quarter hour early to make sure everything was ready for their first class. The manager of the conference center was waiting for them at the door and let them in.

  The security guard checked their left hands on his scanner before admitting them into the room and said, “If there’s any trouble at all, ma’am, we’ll be here to aid you.”

  The manager repeated the same thing. “If there’s anything you want or need, just call me. Anything at all.”

  When they’d both left, Ivory looked at her. “It almost sounds as if they’re expecting trouble, doesn’t it?”

  Ebony shrugged. “I’ve never seen so much security in my life. I almost expected to see the Obamas here or something. But they had that scare last year so I guess they’re just being extra careful this year.”

  “A shape-shifter mating isn’t legal if all the parties don’t consent. So it’s not like stealing a couple of women will solve a pack’s problems anyway.”

  Ebony hugged her sister. “Exactly. I think our biggest problem will be so much testosterone in a room at one time.” She slid the first DVD into the player and they both attached headsets and microphone packs to their workout gear.

  As the first people walked into the room, the sisters high-fived each other, then Ebony moved to the left side of the room, leaving Ivory on the right side. They’d both supervise the first few exercises to watch for people who might not know what to do. After that, they’d switch out after each exercise, one watching the class as the other demonstrated what to do. That way neither of them would get too tired. Each class lasted forty-five minutes, giving the group time to exit the room and the new class to enter before the second group was due to start.

  Forty-five minutes later, Ebony was rubbing her face and neck with her workout towel and gulping down water. There’d been maybe sixty people in the class, most of whom were very fit wolves, although admittedly some still managed to confuse their right foot with their left. However, about half of them had stayed on for the next class so she and Ivory were going to have to fast-forward through the lessons as well as increase the speed of each exercise. At least the ones who did need help with dancing had all left. Likely they’d be back tomorrow, though. Meanwhile she just hoped she could remember some of the exercises she and Ivory had put aside intending to use later in the week when their class was more experienced. Looks like that little plan would all be used up on day one.

  Two of the men who’d stayed on for the second class were ones who’d caught her eye as decidedly delicious. One man had reddish-brown hair, which wasn’t all that common among wolves. But since all the men here were wolves, he had to be one as well. He’d been in the middle of the group and she hadn’t been able to see his eyes, but he was very muscular and she’d liked watching his biceps and his thighs flex as he exercised.

  His friend had shaggy brown hair that flopped over his face as he danced, making her fingers itch to brush it back out of his eyes. He was tall and lean and totally delightful to look at. Maybe she’d get to know their names if they came back again tomorrow. Or, since they were interested in taking dance classes, maybe they’d ask her to dance at one of the nighttime parties. She would certainly say yes. They were two of the people who did seem to have a clear understanding of the difference between their right and left feet.

  “Hi there, everyone. My name’s Ivory, and we’re going to start with some stretches. Make sure you can extend your arms fully without touching the person next to you. Spread out some and we’ll get started.”

  Ebony gathered her wandering thoughts. At least Ivory had her mind on the job. This was the high-speed class and she needed to get her brain into action. She put her towel and water bottle down and moved to her side of the room.

  * * * *

  Benedict wondered if he was losing his grip, but the women leading the dance class attracted him far more than the other women sharing the class with them. There were maybe fifty men and a dozen women in the class, and some of the men had, like him and Merek, stayed on from the earlier class. He’d stayed because he could do what they told him to do and because of his interest in the teachers. He hoped like hell the other men had stayed on because they needed the exercise, not because they were just as attracted to the instructors as him.

  Obviously he and Merek couldn’t discuss this in public with dozens of werewolf ears pricked up to listen to them. He’d simply stayed in the room when the first lesson had ended, and Merek had done the same, so maybe Merek did feel the same as him. Of course, a whole passel of others had stayed as well. Damn! His thoughts were going around and around in circles right now. Well, once they got back to their cabin they could talk privately. The second class had just finished and the cabin was where they were heading now.

  He draped his towel around his neck and took a big gulp of water. The water was no longer ice cold unfortunately, but he was thirsty so he drank it anyway. Merek was walking slowly so he matched his pace to his friend’s and tried to look around without staring, as the women in their pack had told him.

  Still, he was glad when they reached their cabin and shut the door. He headed straight to the bathroom, stripping out of his clothes and turning the shower on. When he came out, the sweat scrubbed off his skin and with a clean towel around his waist, he saw Merek had laid out jeans and a T-shirt to wear after his shower. Ben could take a hint and dressed to match him.

  When Merek emerged from the bathroom, he was idly watching the ball game on the TV that Merek had turned on while he waited for his turn in the shower., He switched it off straight away. “I’ve put on jeans as well, but I’d sort of thought maybe we should wear sports clothes in case we wanted to join a match on the sports court.”

  “You aren’t thinking straight, Ben. What will Ebony and Ivory do when their final class finishes any minute now?”

  “How would I know? Oh wait, go back to their cabin for a shower.” Ben grinned. He could see what was coming next. “So we walk with them and find out which cabin it is?”

  “Exactly. And invite them out for lunch unless a dozen other people have done that already, in which case we join the crowd.”

  Ben jumped up and slapped his pockets, checking he had his wallet and the room key. “In that case, let’s go. Wait. How did you know I liked them?”

  Merek was lacing his boots. “I’ll be ready in one second. And I knew because I like them, too, and we think alike.”

  “I’m glad. None of the other women in the class attracted me the way they did.”

  “Let’s go. It’s about time.”

  Ben started to worry they’d be too late. But then he thought some of the men in the class would be sure to try to talk to both women, and they’d have to take off their microphones and stuff like that. Perhaps he and Merek cou
ld offer to carry their equipment. The room they’d used would become part of the big party room at night, so it wasn’t like they could leave their things there from day to day.

  By the time they arrived back at the main building, Ebony and Ivory were just emerging, surrounded by a crowd of sweaty wolves. They’d just reached the group when Ebony put up her hand in a stop signal.

  “Ivory and I are going to have showers and get cleaned up. If you want to talk to us, we’ll be back to get our lunch about one and we’ll see you then. Now, everyone, go and do your own thing, please.”

  The two women stood in the middle of the path until the wolves drifted away. Well, damn those women were smart. They obviously didn’t want every wolf in the place staring in their cabin windows while they showered.

  Merek turned around and walked fast back toward their cabin. Benedict didn’t have a clue what he was planning, but followed him anyway.

  * * * *

  Merek hurried inside and stared around the room, sizing everything up. Finally he pulled the quilt off his bed and snatched up the blanket, folding it neatly into half, quarters, and eighths. Next he rummaged through the closet, finding the bag that he’d brought his Stetson in.

  Only then did he turn and look at Ben, hope shining brightly in his heart at the plan he’d just thought of in the last few minutes.

  “I really hope you have some kind of plan because I can’t guess what it is right now,” said Benedict.

  “We are going to set our blanket under a nice shady tree. We’ll buy food and set it out as a picnic, and then we invite Ebony and Ivory to join us for lunch.”

  “But what if they don’t like the food we’ve chosen? How do we guess what to buy? What if we get it all wrong?”

  Merek shook his head at Ben. “Don’t be such a wimp. They’re dancers, right? They must be into healthy things. Also, they’re women and the one thing every woman on Earth likes is chocolate. So we buy a range of healthy things, plus some chocolate. There has to be something there that they’ll like.”

  “As long as they agree to come sit on our blanket. If they don’t we’ll be left with a whole pile of healthy food.”

  “So what? It just means we won’t need to buy lunch tomorrow. Come on. Do you want these women or not?”

  “Which one do you want?”

  Merek stopped. Oh, yes. They hadn’t discussed that at all. “I like them both, but I’m more attracted to Ebony than Ivory. What about you?” It had just occurred to him that maybe they hadn’t agreed together on a woman yet. It was amazing enough that that they’d both been attracted to someone on the very first day of the DADISP. But what if Ben preferred Ivory?

  The huge grin splitting Ben’s face in half proved that once again they were perfectly matched with each other. “That’s exactly how I feel, too.”

  “Let’s get this set up then.”

  Merek hid his fear that Ebony and Ivory would ignore them. Surely their attention had to be caught because he’d thought of a plan, and created a pleasant environment where they could all eat their lunches? That had to be enough to sway them to agree to join them for a picnic didn’t it? Even if other people came as well he could deal with that as long as his woman was noticing him and spending time with him. How else could they get to know her properly?

  Chapter Two

  Ebony had changed her clothes twice while Ivory showered. She knew they’d be mobbed by the wolves over lunch, but sitting with a crowd to eat was fine by her. Once she got to the party each night she’d already have a bit of an idea of which men interested her more than the others. Although likely she’d end up dancing every dance anyway.

  It was kind of cute in a way. Being mobbed by men was not what usually happened to her. She and Ivory worked at a dance school and the men they saw were usually more interested in how much their daughter had learned than in the teacher as a person. Occasionally a little girl’s uncle, single-again dad, or even grandfather would ask her or Ivory out, but mostly their lives were all about the little girls they taught to dance.

  That was one reason why they’d let Marbella persuade them to be the dance teachers at the DADISP. Neither she nor Ivory had found Mr. Right in their father’s pack or in the human world. Ebony wasn’t ready to agree with her mom about settling for Mr. Good Enough just yet, but her mother was correct in saying that if she planned to find a man at all she needed to be proactive about it. And if no man here interested her, well then maybe she really was asking for far too much. Every wolf accepted to attend the mating party had passed a series of stringent tests designed to weed out those who weren’t committed to treating a woman correctly. The women as well as the men also had to demonstrate they understood the differences between humans and wolves.

  Not to mention the whole concept of two men. The more she thought about it the more she liked the idea of two men making love to her. Not that she’d ever experienced a real life ménage, but simple math calculations told her that she had two breasts and two men meant two mouths, one to suck each nipple, so how could that be bad?

  They’d left the drapes in their cabin closed, but now Ebony peeked around one corner of the curtains. No men were in sight, and the sky was blue and cloudless, so she decided to leave the lime sundress on, and added a pair of white sandals, slipping her keycard and her cell phone inside her bra.

  Ivory entered the room saying, “Mama would be pleased.”

  Ebony laughed and twirled around, showing off her bare back and a lot of her legs. “But will it be enough to catch me a man?”

  “Maybe you should have padded your bra with socks instead of a cell phone.”

  “Oh, hell yes. Remember your freshman year at high school.”

  “When Casey had put rolled up socks inside her bra and one fell out when we were dancing?”

  Ebony laughed even harder at the memory. “At least my phone should be reasonably safe if I’m just sitting eating lunch.”

  “With one hundred ninety male wolves.”

  “Most of them will be chasing the other women, I expect.” Women with longer legs and bigger breasts than hers, she guessed. Although surely here there would be plenty of men wanting to make a connection of heart and mind, not like so many human men who only seemed to want a six-foot-tall, waif-thin female, with huge silicone breasts, to hang on his arm. Were men really so stupid they didn’t know when a normal woman lost weight to get fashionably thin likely some of it would come off her breasts as well as off her belly and thighs? Well, too bad. Ebony was fit, healthy, and average weight for her height, with no intention of starving herself to become a size zero, or getting silicone implants to make her bust size bigger.

  Ebony refocused her gaze on Ivory, who was dressing in a tight white halter top and a short denim skirt, matched with denim flip-flops. “Where are you going to put your cell phone and key card?” she asked.

  “This skirt has a side pocket. Besides, one of us needs to take a wallet to pay for lunch.” Ebony had just been going to tuck a few dollars down the front of her bra, but if Ivory’s skirt had a pocket that was even better. “Good thinking.”

  “I’m ready. Shall we go?” suggested Ivory. Ebony grinned. That was the advantage of short hair. Ivory’s blonde bob neatly framed her face with little more than a flick of her head. Whereas her own butt-length black hair had a tendency to frizz wildly if not firmly braided into a plait when wet. And even that was not a complete guarantee it would look good when she unbraided it later. At least once a week she considered cutting it short, but she couldn’t seem to take the decision to do that. Somehow it seemed too final to chop off hair that she’d been growing since she’d been old enough to know that’s what she wanted.

  Ebony checked that the door had locked behind them and then they deliberately curved away from their cabin so they would arrive at the front of the main building from a slightly different direction. That was a very special link she and Ivory shared. They didn’t need to talk about things like that. They automatically thought the sam
e. Once again Ebony worried that Ivory would find a man who lived so far away from her she would seldom see her sister again. It seemed a stupid, childish thing to worry about, especially when she didn’t even have the merest hint of any man interested in her yet, but she knew she’d miss her sister dreadfully if they couldn’t see each other fairly regularly. And not just on Instagram and Facebook.

  As soon as they rounded the corner of the building, the man with the shaggy brown hair who’d been in their first two classes this morning ran up to them, stopping a few feet in front of them and smiling. “Excuse me, ladies. My friend and I wondered if you’d like to join us in a picnic.” He pointed to the gardens out front of the conference center, and there, sitting on a blanket under a shady tree, was another of the men she’d noticed. The one whose hair was almost red. Not traffic-light red, but a brownish red that was most unusual among wolves.

  She looked at Ivory and the sparkle in Ivory’s eyes exactly matched the bubble of happiness in her own mind.

  “Thank you. We’d like that.”

  As they began to walk toward the tree, the other man jumped to his feet. But several other men also hurried over to join them. Now Ebony wasn’t sure what to say. She’d told all the men after class they’d be back for lunch, yet here she and Ivory were, planning to eat with just two of the men. Yet shouldn’t she reward them for their quick thinking and ingenuity?

  It seemed Ivory was thinking faster than her. It was Ivory who said, “Okay, people. We’ve agreed to have lunch with these two men but you are all welcomed to join us in half an hour.”

  Ebony had to bite her lip to stop laughing when several of them looked at their watches or pulled out their cell phones. Apparently they were going to take the half-hour time limit really strictly. Well, fair enough. It rewarded the two men who’d thought of the picnic without making her out to be a complete liar. Although she noticed a lot of them didn’t go very far, and some who did simply reappeared a little later with their own meals. However, all had obeyed the spirit of Ivory’s words by remaining at a little distance.