Read Online Single Wolf Female (Midnight Liaisons) by Jessica Sims - Free Book Online Page A

quiet.”
    I didn’t want to go to dinner. Not with the Alliance, who were a bunch of busybodies that stuck their noses in where they didn’t belong. My pack didn’t need the Alliance. That was for shifters that didn’t have pack support. We had everything we needed now that Jackson had arrived to lead us.
    Except my new leader? Had some ideas I wasn’t keen on. I glared at him again, and found him giving me a challenging stare. An alpha stare. I continued to glare at him, not willing to break gaze. The first one to look away would lose the challenge.
    “You’re about to run over that mailbox,” Jackson murmured at me, eyes still locked with mine.
    Shit. I broke gaze, righted the truck on the road, and gritted my teeth. “We’d love to go to dinner.”
    “Perfect,” Bath said happily.
    We made plans for over the weekend. A double date (god) over dinner. When the conversation ended, I clicked off my phone and tossed it into my purse, glaring at Jackson out of the corner of my eye.
    “Challenging me while I’m driving is totally not playing fair.”
    “The Alliance would be good for the pack,” he said.
    “I disagree.”
    “And that’s why I had to challenge.”
    “Yeah, but while I’m driving? Not cool.”
    “I guess I could have used other methods of persuasion,” he said in a husky voice. “Would you prefer those next time?”
    A ripple of awareness ripped through me, and I remembered his mouth on my neck, licking my skin. I sucked in a breath, my nipples going hard. “A challenge is fine,” I said flatly.
    He laughed.
    A few minutes later, we pulled into a tiny suburb sprawl in the midst of nowhere. Jackson gave me a curious look when we took a right on Alice Lane. “Is that a coincidence?”
    “Nope,” I told him. “I own all these houses.”
    He looked impressed, staring out the window at the small ranch-style houses, neatly lined up on acre plots. “How many are there?”
    “Fifty-six,” I told him. “I wasn’t joking when I said I was a slum lord.”
    He chuckled. “These aren’t slums to me. They’re nice houses.”
    They were. I was proud of them. “My dad was a builder,” I told him. “Worked for other people for the first twenty years or so, and then came into some money when his father died, and left him a couple hundred acres out in the country. My father decided that he’d do something with that land and that money, and built a bunch of houses so he could rent them out to people that needed housing but couldn’t really afford it.”
    “Your dad sounds like a great guy,” he murmured, still looking out the window.
    “He was,” I said, my throat getting tight as I thought about my father. Gone five years now, still missed him every day. I swallowed and cleared my throat. “We could probably get a grand a month for each of these houses, but we only charge three hundred. Everyone that lives here needs some sort of assistance. We have a lot of single mothers, elderly, disabled, you name it. Lots of shifters, too,” I said, glancing over at him. “Gotta look out for our own people.”
    “Of course.”
    “Anyhow, our pack does fine with what we bring in a month. Fifty-six houses at three hundred a month is still a good living, and we’re helping people out. I can’t bring myself to do it.”
    I’d argued with Cash about it time and time again, too, because he didn’t have the same generous spirit that Dad had. I got a vague pang of worry about Jackson. What if he thought the same way that Cash did? That fifty-two grand a month instead of fifteen was worth putting the squeeze on our poor residents?
    But he only looked over at me. “You got any plumbing issues? I’m more than happy to help out.”
    And that was why I was starting to think that maybe this could work, despite our issues. “All the time,” I admitted with a smile. “Summer tends to be heavy on electricity issues, though. Air conditioners going on the fritz and such. I do a lot of quick maintenance