Chapter 3: Wolf Like Me

Ivy

This shifter, the hottest male I had ever laid eyes on, was supposed to be my mate.

I struggled to gather my thoughts into words.

Liam, to his credit, did not push me away or move much at all while I stood nearly pressed up against him. Looking up at the slight smirk on his lips made me think that he clearly knew what response his appearance was evoking from me.

I scrambled back away from him, my claws painfully retracting back into human nails. The discomfort was one all shifters knew well, it never got easier to deal with but after a lifetime of shifting forms, it was a familiar sting.

“Sorry, I’m just a little.. surprised. No one told me anything about you. I’m Ivy-”

“I know,” he interrupted. “Ivy Lynnd. Five foot six. Twenty-three. Born March 21st, making you an Aries. Year of the Rabbit.”

I blinked, staring blindly at this man - he knew so much about me already and I had only just learned his name. Clearly, someone had briefed him on me before he came out here and I felt my anger toward my mother bubbling up again.

I wondered if she had even known who it was that I had been matched with as a mate and if she had, why hadn’t she bothered telling me anything about him?

Liam leaned back against the counter while I continued to stare at him dumbly. He looked down at the Rolex on his wrist and frowned a bit before glancing back down at me. “You’re a bit late.”

“Late?” I asked, snapping out of my shock. “What do you mean late?”

“Your arrival.”

“No one told me what time I was supposed to be here,” I countered.

Liam shrugged his broad shoulders. “Well, you knew today was the day that you were expected, I assumed you would arrive before dark.”

“Oh, yeah? And what time did you get here?” I shot.

“This morning,” Liam replied, gesturing around us. “I had more than enough time to clean and organize some things for the house.”

Heat rushed to my cheeks, embarrassed by the fact that this stranger had handled today so much better than I had.

“While I appreciate that, today was kind of hard for me. You certainly made yourself comfortable.”

“Hard?” he asked, ignoring my last remark. “Did no one help you pack and gather your things?”

“What? No, that’s not what I meant.”

“Then what exactly was so hard about it?”

“Leaving my best friend? My pack? My childhood home?” I offered. “Wasn’t that hard for you too?”

Liam watched me for a moment without answering. His good looks, as enticing as they were did not fully distract from the complete expressionlessness of his features.

If he was thinking anything, feeling anything, his face did nothing to allude to it. He uncrossed his arms. “No. Not really. I didn’t live with my pack.”

Now that was something that I had never heard of before. Every pack I had ever encountered was a tight, close-knit community where every member lived in the same neighborhood on the same land.

The idea of living outside of those circumstances was often impossible for any shifter to imagine. Why wouldn’t Liam want to live with his pack? I opened my mouth to speak but the sound of a roaring engine cut me off.

Both Liam and I turned to look out the large window in the kitchen and saw a pair of headlights zooming down the long dirt road toward the house.

A low, guttural growl that went straight to my core sounded from Liam, if I had doubted him being an Alpha before, I knew he was now.

He moved in front of me as he cast another glance out of the window.

“Stay here, Ivy,” he said, heading toward the door. “I’ll handle it.”

The wolf in me longed to obey, keen on pleasing her Alpha. But he wasn’t my Alpha, not yet at least and this was my house, so I was free to do what I liked.

I followed Liam out of the house. He turned back to glare at me “I thought I told you to stay in the-”

“Li!” called a booming, male voice from out of the window of the speeding car.

The car, a grey pickup truck with a howling wolf on the dashboard had parked next to my Jeep and the engine kicked off. A tall, muscular man with a body built like an oak tree and blonde, shaggy hair hopped out of the car.

He was wearing an olive-colored sleeveless shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. I thought Liam had been big but this man made Liam look like a child. Huge was an understatement.

There was no way that he didn’t make a habit of lifting cars for fun. Like Liam, his eyes were such a light shade of blue that they were almost silver. He smelled not only of shifter blood but Alpha blood as well, the scent of pine and bergamot followed him.

Liam glared down at the cheerful blonde as he practically bounced up the stairs to meet us. If looks could kill, this wolf would have dropped dead where he stood.

Liam’s shoulders tensed and he scowled. “I told you not to call me that,” he grumbled.

“What are you doing here?” the man sang to Liam, clearly ignoring him as he forced him into a hug. When the man finally let him go, Liam looked as though he was going to swing at him.

Even though I hardly knew him, Liam didn’t seem as though he were the type of man who would get into a fistfight. I couldn’t imagine someone’s blood on his designer clothes.

All of that cool disinterest that he had worn before in the kitchen was gone, replaced with what seemed like the deepest annoyance.

Glancing between the two of them, the similarities in their features and their facial structure were indisputable. Between the nearly matching features and the clear familiarity between them, I realized that they must have been related.

“Funny, I was about to ask you the same thing,” Liam spat.

“Do you two..know each other?” I asked, glancing between them.

The man laughed and patted Liam on the shoulder hard. If he noticed Liam’s clear annoyance with him, he pretended not to. Was he doing this on purpose?

“I should think so. He’s my little brother!” he exclaimed.

Liam stepped out of his brother’s grasp. “We’re the same age, you idiot.”

The man didn’t seem phased at all by his brother’s dower demeanor and clear irritation with his presence. “You and your technicalities,” he said, rolling his eyes before turning to me.

“Are you guys twins?” I asked, still staring between them. They had to be.

“Yup!” the man said as he flashed me a brilliant grin. “I took my first breath a few seconds before he did so I’m the eldest.”

“Just because our father told you that doesn’t mean that’s how it actually works, you know,” Liam sighed and I felt as though I was walking in on an old argument. “We were born at the same time.”

The man ignored Liam and turned his attention to me. “You’ve got to be Ivy, right? I”m Garrett. Garret Anderson. My Dad told me a bit about you but definitely forgot to mention how pretty you are. I love a girl with curves!”

He reached for my hand but Liam stepped between us. I blinked.

“Careful, Garrett,” he said with an icy calm. “You would do well not to flirt with my mate.”

“I’m not your mate yet,” I declared.

“She’s not your mate,” Garrett echoed, the warmth draining from his features like water circling a drain. He took a step toward his brother, glaring down at him, the size difference between them both flared to life.

“Listen, ‘little’ brother. As happy as I am to see you, don’t think for one moment that I will allow you to take my mate from me. Dad told me that I was meant to be her mate.” Garrett snarled.

Liam stared up at his brother, seemingly unfazed by him. “He told me the exact same thing,”

Garrett narrowed his eyes. “You’re lying.”

“Have I ever been known to tell lies?” Liam asked, raising a brow.

Garrett’s gaze seemed to search his brother’s for a moment before he conceded. “Why would he do that though?”

“He probably wants us to fight it out. Test our merit or something,” Liam shrugged.

What the hell? What kind of father would make his sons fight one another to prove something?

Garrett cracked his neck. “Fine by me. It's been a few years since I beat your face into the dirt.”

His eyes flashed and brightened as the musky scent of wolf thickened in the air. He was going to shift. Right here on the stairs of my new home, out in the open.

This was not how I wanted my first night in my new house to go.

“We aren’t children anymore. You’ll find that I’m not so easy to beat,” Liam growled.

“Wait a minute!” I tried to wedge my way between them and pull them apart. “Let’s just talk this out - fighting isn’t going to solve anything!” An arm yanked me back from between them.

“Stay out of this, Ivy!” Liam snapped at me.

“Don’t touch her!” Garrett snarled, lunging for Liam. But before he could do so and the fight could fully ensue, from the end of the dirt road, a single headlight shone.

A motorcycle sped down the path and pulled up beside Liam’s black BMW. Liam sighed and stared up at the sky in exasperation. “You’ve got to be kidding me..”

Garrett scrubbed a hand through his shaggy hair, grinning as he turned to the new player that had just entered the stage.

The motorcycle rider dismounted his bike. He slid his helmet off, exposing his shoulder-length, jet-black hair, and a face that looked eerily similar to the two men I stood next to.

He smelled of sandalwood and ink oddly enough but under that smell there lay the unmistakable scent of a wolf.

“Dad has got to be playing a prank or something,” Garrett said more to himself than the two of us. “There’s no way that he would do this to us.”

I looked between them both. “What? Who is this?”

“Damien,” Liam sighed, a hand moving to massage the bridge of his nose. “Our other brother. We aren’t twins, we’re triplets.”