by T. S. Joyce
“Told you what?”
Her voice turned dark, her words jagged. “That I wasn’t his. That he didn’t want anything to do with me because I had been part of the problem with his and Mom’s marriage.”
Link shook his head and leaned back into the bench cushion. Naturally, he had a shit dad who’d been put down when he was too young to remember a single good memory about him. That’s just the way it was for McCalls, but the reality of his life had always been harsh. Link had no qualms about the way he was raised. It was the same for every McCall, but Nicole…she’d had a decent life and a decent family, and then they’d betrayed her. He didn’t know any differently, but she’d had a good life snatched away in a moment.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured.
Her full lips stretched up in a slow smile. “So here I am, searching for myself in a place I’ve never been.”
“That’s pretty brave. Alaska isn’t exactly a spring break beach trip.”
She laughed a pretty tinkling sound and grinned down at her steaming cup. “I admit I was completely unprepared for this place. I mean, we have snow down in Mission, but nothing like this.”
“The bone-deep cold is hard to get used to.”
“Yes! I don’t think I’ve been fully warm since I got here. And look.” She pulled her gloves off and rested her hands on the table, palms up. They were torn and blistered, and Link winced at how painful they looked.
“Chopping wood?”
“Trying to. I’m pretty shitty at it. I even read a book on it. I bought a chainsaw from Hardware Jack today.”
When a warning snarl left his throat at the mention of that prick, Nicole’s eyes went wide. “What was that?”
Link fingered the handle on his mug, unable to look at the horror that would be in her eyes. “I told you I was bad.” He tapped his temple. “Voices.”
“In your head?”
I’m here!
Link gave her an empty smile. “I should go.”
“I won’t mention that sound again,” she rushed out as he made to stand.
Link looked down in shock at where her fingertips rested on his knuckles. Where they connected, a sparking sensation shot up his arm in waves. What the hell?
She’s touching us. Us. She knows she’s ours. Wants us to stay.
Link relaxed slowly back into the chair.
“Is that why you live way out here?”
He nodded once.
“That makes sense to me. I was confused to why a man who looks like you settled way out here.”
“A man who looks like me?” he murmured, head canted in confusion.
Nicole pulled off her scarf completely and mirrored him, head cocked as she looked at him with such a strange expression. “I have a pet wolf.”
Link froze as if he’d been electrified.
She knows.
“I’ve named him Mr. Nibbles.”
“Ha!” Link barked out a laugh louder than he’d meant too, and inside Wolf snarled his discontent with the name.
“Don’t laugh. He is very nice and brings me dead things.”
“Well, he sounds very considerate, but please remember he’s a wild animal. Let him be.”
“A wolf killed Buck. My dad. I mean a wolf killed my real dad.”
Link leaned his elbows onto the table and felt like grit. This was the part they would never get past. They couldn’t. He was related to the man who murdered her father. He was here now because of a need to repay her as much as he could for what his cursed lineage had stolen from her. “I know.”
“Did you know my dad?”
Link swallowed hard and stared at the tiny bubbles in his mug of hot chocolate. “No, but I know of him. I went to his funeral.”
“You don’t know him, but you went to his funeral?” she asked in a confused tone.
“He was buried near his trap line, and I wanted to make sure someone was standing for him.”
Her breath came shallow as she stared at him, and those beautiful brown eyes of hers rimmed with moisture. “What was it like?”
She needed closure. He got that. She had an entire biological history with a man she never knew. How did one begin to mourn someone they never knew?
“I didn’t have to worry about him being buried without someone there. He had thirty people, at least, gathered from all over this strip of the Yukon, from Galena to Kaltag. Three people spoke about how giving he was, how he always made sure the people around him were taken care of. The last one, an older woman, said he often gave more than he had, just to make sure his friends were taken care of.”
Link raised his gaze to Nicole’s, braving her tears, but he shouldn’t have worried. She’d already blinked them back.
“If you’re marked up like Buck was, you should be proud of it. You bear the mark of a good man.”
Nicole let off a tiny heart-wrenching gasp as she pressed her palm to her cheek—the one with the birthmark. “He didn’t cover his birthmark up?”
“I don’t know for sure. My guess is no. He wouldn’t have a reason to. There was a picture of him at the funeral on display by his casket. He wore a fur hat and a sweater, but nothing to cover up his neck, and no one at the funeral mentioned it. Everyone was used to it. He was smiling in the picture, holding a line of fish at his side.”
“What did it look like? His mark?”
“Have you not seen a picture of him?”
She shook her head. “Not yet.”
Link leaned forward and brushed the soft skin just under her ear, then traced down her jaw, down the side of her neck, and just barely beneath the collar of her red sweater. “Like that,” he whispered.
Nicole leaned into his palm, and he couldn’t help himself. He cupped her cheek and brushed the pad of his thumb over the color there. So fucking beautiful. Even more so now that he knew part of her story. He’d been mistaken when he’d thought her a fragile human.
She’d come out here alone, to a harsh place she’d never known, just to connect with a part of her that had been hidden away. She bore the blisters on her hands, not of a weak woman, but of a woman who had hurt herself chopping wood, then gone back out time and time again and continued to work. Continued to persevere.
As she held his gaze and rubbed her cheek against his hand, it happened.
Silence.
Beautiful silence in his mind that hadn’t been there in so long. She’d given him a gift of which she would never know the value. For a minute, she’d calmed Wolf and helped Link feel like a normal man. Like he was worthy of touching her.
She couldn’t ever know what he was or about all the horrible things he’d done in the name of McCall, but here, for a second, he could pretend he was a good man like her father had been.
Desperate to cling to the quiet in his head, he leaned over the table and stopped an inch from her lips, hesitating in case this was too much for her. Nicole leaned into him, closing the space between them. Her mouth was so soft as it pressed against his, and as she gently sucked his bottom lip, the silence deepened. Link pushed his tongue gently past her lips to taste her. A kiss had never felt like this before. Like everything. Like the moment that changed his life. He was falling, and there was no stopping it now. No telling Wolf to move on, no telling himself to let her go. She was his. Ours.
He gripped the back of her neck gently and pulled her closer as he dipped his tongue against hers again, and then she did something that shot electricity through his middle. She let off this tiny, happy sound. He’d done that. Easing back, he rested his forehead on hers, then pecked her once more.
She had a distracted smile, and her eyes were hazy when she opened them. “Wow,” she whispered. Slowly, she reached up and pulled at his sunglasses.
Link froze, terrified she would see him, terrified she wouldn’t.
No! She’ll run.
Wolf was back, and he was right. He’d lost control of his eye color months ago, and if she saw the bright silver there, she would know he wasn’t right. That he wasn
’t natural. Link gripped her wrist and stood the second she let his glasses go.
“I’m sorry,” Link growled out in the voice of his monster. He would have to leave now, but Wolf would punish him. He’d take his body for leaving her touch too early.
Wolf didn’t understand he was doing this for the good of them both. If she saw his face and how feral he looked, she would never touch them again. And right now, the thought of never having another moment of silence, punched him in the stomach and stole his breath away.
He strode out of the coffee shop and forced himself not to look back. He couldn’t witness the disappointment on her face through the window, so he climbed in his Bronco and skidded backward out of the parking space, then blasted down the main drag.
Why did you do that? Why did you leave her?
“Because she’ll forgive me for escaping much easier than she would forgive you for existing.”
Chapter Six
Nicole sat in the creaky rocking chair on Buck’s front porch, huddled under a thick blanket and cupping a warm thermos of hot chocolate between her hands. It was the powder kind she’d heated in water and wasn’t as good as the from-scratch hot cocoa Link had bought her at the coffee shop yesterday, but at least it was warm. For the tenth time, at least, she lifted her fingertips to her lips and remembered the kiss, the way he tasted and the way his mouth had moved so easily against hers. The way they had fit together, as if they’d kissed a hundred times before. She’d never had a kiss give her such a breathless feeling. It was one of those moments she would remember for always, and compare every kiss that followed.
Voices in his head or no, she had it bad for Lincoln McCall.
Her feelings she could explain. He was confident, strong, and kind with the right amount of rough edges—exactly her type, though she’d never met another man like him. What she didn’t understand was how he’d lifted that man off his feet yesterday or how he’d shoved him against the truck so hard the tires lifted off the snow. Oh, she’d witnessed his incredible strength, and she had enough confidence in herself that she hadn’t questioned what her eyes had seen.
Link had an edge of danger to him, and while her old self would’ve run from such a risky man, her Alaskan self found beauty in dangerous places. Like Buck’s land, for example. Day one here, she’d wondered why Buck would settle in such a crap-hole. But now, looking out into the vast, untamed, evergreen wilderness that surrounded the cabin, she suddenly felt very small and insignificant. She was an observer to the artistry that Mother Nature was constantly creating here, and as strange as it sounded, she liked the feeling that she’d been invited here to behold such wild beauty.
In Mission, much had been expected of her. Social engagements, charity events, and parties, and over the years, they’d begun to blend together. Each outing made her feel just as dead inside as the one before. Josey and Jeremy, her siblings—or as she’d recently found out, half-siblings—were naturals at schmoozing and charming the masses. Old money or new, it didn’t matter to them. They were friendly and jovial and said everything right at the proper time. They had amassed a following of devoted friends, but the cynical side of Nicole had always wondered, if the money disappeared, which ones would stick around? She was sadly suspicious that none of them would be the answer. And so, the older she’d gotten, the more she’d kept to herself. She’d withdrawn from the conversations everyone found so important. The ones that revolved around money, wealth, investments, success. Ego-strokers, the lot of them, and eventually, she’d yearned for someone to talk to her about something real.
Party after party, she found herself alone, out on terraces or in perfectly manicured yards, on old-fashioned balconies or garden benches, desperate to escape the stuffy confines of the massive mansions Mom and Stepdad were always invited to. Or rather, she supposed she should call Stepdad by his real name now. Roger. He’d made it clear he wanted nothing to do with her anymore.
Her stomach tightened just thinking about the day he’d told her she wasn’t his daughter. Her entire view of her life had been demolished in an instant. Not only was he not her real dad, but the man she’d grown up with now wanted nothing to do with her. For the rest of her life, she would be haunted by that conversation. She’d sought answers and apologies from Mom immediately, but she hadn’t given Nicole any such thing. It had been Aunt Rita who had called her with information on Buck when it got out that Nicole knew Roger wasn’t her real dad. And then to find out her real dad had died a year ago? Blow after blow, and she couldn’t talk about it with anyone. Her half-siblings didn’t understand. Her friends distanced themselves and made her feel like a bastard, which was ridiculous. Yeah, she got that society was all-important to those people, but this was modern times, not the eighteenth century where she would’ve been shunned. Mom had always been shit at consoling, so she couldn’t go to her with her feelings.
Nicole had done research and found out the bank was selling Buck’s cabin. It was cheap, and she was grasping for something to hold onto after being drowned in all the family secrets and lies. She bought it on the off chance that maybe she could feel like herself again someday.
In desperation to ease the pain, she wondered if Buck would have found a relationship with her so repulsive.
She tried to imagine how different her life would’ve been if she grew up here instead of the private schools and the four-story house she’d been raised in. Twenty-seven years old, and this was the first time she’d ever enjoyed something as simple as sitting on a porch, enjoying the scenery. A part of her regretted that it had taken so long to get here, to this moment.
Josey was engaged to be married, Jeremy already had a wife and young son, and they were both younger than her. And it wasn’t like she hadn’t tried her hand at dating, but the men who ran in her social circles never interested her for more than a few days. The conversations always went back to money. Wealth. Investments. Success. All the subjects she never wanted to talk about but knew, without a doubt, should she find herself on the receiving end of a diamond ring from one of those suitors, it was all she would be invited to talk about for the rest of her life.
So, her falling for Link so quickly was the least surprising decision her heart had made. He was real—a good man working and eking out a life in the Alaskan wilderness without help, or wealth, or family prestige propping him up. This right here, thinking about his kiss, sitting on the porch of her father’s house, watching small snowflakes begin to blanket the towering spruce trees around her…this was the realest moment she’d ever been a part of.
How could Mom have ever left this place? How could she have taken Nicole away from here, away from a man Aunt Rita said Mom had loved dearly?
Nicole tried to imagine Mom in the warm winter clothes she wore now instead of her sparkling dresses and fine jewelry, but she couldn’t. Mom hated the outdoors. She didn’t even enjoy being in their manicured backyard. “Too many bugs,” she always complained.
The clang of metal on metal startled Nicole, and she froze against the chair, listening. That sound didn’t belong in the quiet of her woods. In a rush, she grabbed the .30-06 that Hardware Jack had taught her how to use and checked the load with shaking hands. Lifting the gun to her shoulder, she stepped carefully around the side of the house in the direction of the noise.
The smell of oil hit her nose, and in the fresh snow, a few drops trailed from the generator to a can, laying on its side and leaking. There were boot prints in the snow, and Nicole frowned down at the scene, trying to make sense of the story the tracks told. They led off into the woods, toes dug deep like whoever had spilled the oil had been in a hurry.
The snow began falling harder now as she traced the trail with her gaze. The tracks would be covered soon, and she’d never know who had come onto Buck’s property. No, onto her property because she’d paid for this place in full and owned the deed. Before she could change her mind, she angled the gun in front of her and followed the tracks. She would see how far they led into the wood
s, make sure he was past her property line, and then circle back. It would take ten minutes, tops.
She made her way carefully past the tree line and into the wilderness beyond. With every step, the snowfall grew thicker and shortened her sight distance. There was something ahead on the ground, but as she approached, gun trained on the dark fabric, she couldn’t comprehend why on earth someone would leave their boots and clothes on the ground in the woods. There was only a thin layer of white on them, and when she poked one of the boots with the barrel of the gun, the leather moved easily. Not even frozen yet. But it was what lay beyond the pile of scattered clothes that had the hairs on the back of her neck raised from fear, not from the brutal cold.
There were wolf tracks. Just one set leading in a straight line away from the clothes.
Nicole squatted down and pulled the jacket to her nose. She inhaled and gasped, throwing the jacket away from her onto the ground at what it could mean. She knew that scent. It was Link. Shaking her head back and forth, she tried to piece together any explanation that made sense.
A lone howl lifted on the breeze, freezing her into place. With a terrified noise, she stumbled backward, almost losing her balance completely.
Link with the voices in his head. The wolf with the bright eyes, always visiting, always taking care of her in his own way. Nicole bolted for the cabin, feeling hunted. Link with the growl in his throat. She hadn’t understood the sound at first, but now it made horrifying sense. Link always hiding behind his sunglasses. Link and his superhuman strength.