by Sara Summers
He hung up without saying goodbye.
Beth’s phone slipped out of my hand and crashed to the floor, and with my improved hearing, I could actually hear the screen shatter. I fell to my knees and choked back the shocked tears trying to make an appearance.
In the other room, Beth took a few steps toward the bathroom and then hesitated. She only waited a second before rushing inside.
When she saw me on my knees on the floor, she dropped down beside me and wrapped her arms around me.
“What did she say?”
“It was my dad. If I don’t convince Cody to sign away his rights in the next two months, they’re going to cut me off. They won’t even see me as their daughter anymore.”
My entire body was tight with horror.
“What are you going to do?” She let go of me and met my gaze. Her moment of anger was long gone, and she was back to being the incredibly supportive best friend she had always been. I wouldn’t forget what she said though; I would be a better friend if it killed me.
“I don’t have a choice.” I closed my eyes for a second and pushed away every romantic feeling I’d had for Cody Burgandeau. “I’m going to make him hate me.”
“You’re going to fall in love with him while you do it.” Beth warned me.
I could already feel regret for things I hadn’t even done yet filling up inside me.
“I already am.” I lifted my palms to my eyes and pressed them in, taking a few moments to let my heart break.
And then I dropped my hands and stood up.
“I’ll have someone bring you a new phone as soon as they can. I have to get out of town for a while, so you and Garrett will have the apartment to yourselves.”
I gave her the biggest fake smile I could muster. I’d always been good at fake-smiling, though the look in her eyes told me she could see right through it.
“Great.” Beth didn’t bother forcing a smile.
All wasn’t well in her love-land, but it hadn’t been for a while.
“We’re going to talk about why you’re not excited to be alone with your man for hours with your favorite ice cream tomorrow, but right now, I have to see a man about a tattoo.”
I stepped back inside the shower and turned off the water.
“Fine, but I’m not lying to Cody for you.” She called.
“Don’t worry, I’m perfectly capable of lying to him myself.”
Cody
The feeling of Quinn moving away from me yanked me abruptly out of sleep. The GPS in my head that constantly told me where she was may as well have been going off like a fire alarm.
I jumped up out of bed and went to yank the door open. Just as my hand hit the doorknob, I noticed a note taped on the door at my eye-level. It said:
At a meeting. Be back soon. Text me at 103-555-8797 if you get cavemanish.
I pulled the note off my door and grabbed my phone off the dresser, sending a text to the number immediately to make sure she hadn’t decided to give me a fake number or something. Ignoring the dozens of texts from my family’s group chat, all of which were pointed at me, I texted Quinn.
Me: You okay?
Quinn: Already a caveman? Geez.
I rolled my eyes and sat down on the edge of the bed. It definitely wasn’t a fake number. When I didn’t answer right away, she sent another text.
Quinn: I sent you a present ;)
Something about that put me on guard. She was up to something.
Me: ???
Quinn: It’ll be there soon, don’t worry. Gotta go, but have fun!
When she sent me the smirking emoji, I started to sweat a little. After shifting together the night before, I assumed things were good between us and that she wasn’t going to fight me anymore. It seemed like she’d come to terms with what we were to each other.
I’d been relieved that the drama was over.
I had no idea that it was only beginning.
A knock at the front door pulled me out of my confusion, and a sense of foreboding filled me.
“Beth?” I called out, hoping she was there to be a buffer between me and whatever Quinn’s “present” was.
No one responded.
The “present” knocked again.
I groaned and trudged through the apartment. Dirt followed me down the hall and through the living room, and I could feel it caked in my hair. I was used to being covered in dirt sometimes, it was just a part of life as a shifter, but whoever was knocking on the door of Quinn’s high-class apartment probably wasn’t going to think it was normal.
When I pulled the door open, the last thing I expected to see was a woman in less clothing than Quinn had been wearing that first night I met her.
She gave me a sultry smile, and I just about shut the door in her face. I could imagine my mom lecturing me about judging someone for how they looked, though, so I tried to assume that she wasn’t a call girl.
“Are you going to let me in?” She bit her lip, reminding me way too much of Quinn the day before.
The suggestive tone in her voice told me that my first thought had been correct: My soulmate had paid a hooker to come to my door. That only confused and frustrated me.
“Nope.”
I noticed the pile of cash on the table beside the door and grabbed a few twenties off the top and handed them to the scantily-clad woman.
“Don’t come back.”
Then, I closed the door and locked it just for good measure.
With a groan, I rubbed my hand over my face and trudged over to the bathroom. It looked like the day wasn’t going to go as well as I thought.
Quinn
“I’m sure it’s beautiful, Karim. Thank you. I had a great time catching up.” I gave my old friend, who happened to be a tattoo artist, a quick hug before handing him a big wad of cash. “And thanks for squeezing me in last minute. I really appreciate it.”
My parents had always made it clear that tattoos would make me less desirable, so I’d never gotten one before. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, I discovered, but I had to do what I had to do.
“Are you sure you don’t want to look at it?” Karim checked. He had already asked me a dozen times.
“I’m positive, but thanks.” I gave him a quick smile before I left his studio.
I hadn’t expected the process to be emotional for me. I’d only had the mate mark for 36 hours or so, and I’d only glanced at it a handful of times. When I’d parked in the garage at Karim’s building, though, I’d stopped to really look at it.
It was beautiful. A blue so dark and rich it was almost black, the shimmering marking swirled around the skin behind and underneath my right ear. It looked like the magical tattoo everyone thought of them as, and I loved it.
I’d snapped a picture of it with my phone and wiped away a few tears as I got out of my car and forced myself into Karim’s studio. After I told him to cover up the cotie with something classy, and to make it a surprise, I’d spent the rest of the hour and a half fighting off tears.
There was no question; the wolf in me hated what I was doing. I almost felt like my wolf was mourning the mate mark. Because she was me and I was her, we understood that we had to do this for the sake of our family, but it didn’t make it easy since she felt that Cody was our real family.
My next stop was at the hair salon. Cody had mentioned how much he liked my blonde hair after the party the night before, so I dyed it black—temporarily of course, just to prove a point. It would wash out as soon as I washed my hair.
As I stepped out of the elevator on my floor, I fluffed the side of my hair that the hairdresser had left down, so I could show off both my tattoo and my “new” hair. I steeled myself for a yelling match, because when Cody saw the tattoo, he was going to be pissed.
At least, I hoped he would be. The other option was hurt, and if I saw him hurt, it would make me hurt.
It drove me crazy that I felt so connected to him already, but I did and that was that.
I turned the corner a
nd barely bit back a gasp when I saw him leaning on the wall outside the apartment with his arms folded over his chest. Wearing a white t-shirt that did wonders for those bulging muscles of his and a pair of jeans that made me look at denim in an all new way, he looked pissed.
And he hadn’t even seen the tattoo yet.
Dread filled me, but I marched up to the door like he wasn’t even there and grabbed the doorknob.
“A hooker, Quinn? Really? I thought we were past that.”
Ah, yes. I knew Cody would turn her down faster than I could find an actual hooker, so I’d just offered a girl I knew from the club a few hundred bucks to pretend. I hadn’t sent a hooker because I expected him to invite her in, I sent her to make him more annoyed with me.
The more annoyed he was, the more easily he would be annoyed as I continued to try to bother my way out of his heart.
It would be better for us to part because of irreconcilable differences than because I broke his heart, after all.
I pushed the door open but didn’t respond immediately, and he followed me in.
“You know how important us being soulmates is to me, right?” Cody grabbed my hand, and I pulled it away.
“Of course. But we never made a rule against hookers, or one night stands.” I flashed him a devious smile and waited for the wolf to come out.
Instead of yelling or swearing or growling, Cody took my face in his hands and kissed me.
Wow that man could kiss.
His kissing ability must’ve been a gift from God, because he hadn’t learned by kissing anyone else.
I pulled away after a second and stepped back. He looked and felt and smelled too good, I needed to get away from him before I forgot that I was trying to make him hate me.
“I need to get out of town for a while.” I said sharply. “Are you going to let me leave alone, or are you going to be a caveman about it?”
Spinning away from him and walking quickly toward my bedroom, my heavy-feeling hair brushed against just the one side of my neck. I heard a sharp intake of breath, and then a snarl tore through the room.
“What did you do?”
His hands were on me instantly, yanking me close so he could see the tattoo on my neck that I hadn’t even seen.
I swallowed those stupid emotions that had been giving me grief all morning and put on my brave face.
“I didn’t like it, so I had it fixed.” I lied. I couldn’t tell if my voice was shaking, but Cody was pissed enough that it didn’t matter because he wouldn’t notice.
“You don’t fix a cotie. They’re the physical tie between us and our wolves, not some tattoo you can just cover and change.”
“I told you yesterday, I don’t want to know your shifter slang. This is still my life, and I get to decide what I do with it. I covered the mate mark with a tattoo because I didn’t like it, which is my right. This discussion is over.”
I forced myself to walk at a normal pace, like my heart wasn’t pounding and the wolf in me wasn’t howling at the fact that I’d hurt our mate.
Cody grabbed my hand and spun me around.
“What are you doing?” He demanded. His eyes were wolfy again, and I could practically feel the anger rolling off of him in steaming waves. “We were good last night, what happened?”
His eyes faded back to human, and that massive mountain of a man started to look sort of vulnerable.
Something inside of me wilted.
I couldn’t do it anymore, I wasn’t strong enough to watch his heart fall to pieces while my own was already in a pile of dust on the ground. I had to tell him the truth.
“What happened is that I’m going to be engaged to Travis Childers by the end of the year. How much money will it take for you to sign a document saying that you won’t come after me again, and that I can marry whoever I want?”
The look in his eyes was incredulous.
“Are you kidding me?”
“No, actually, I’m not. Everyone has a price, Cody. What’s yours?”
He let go of my hand and folded his arms.
“If I walk away from you I’ll spend the rest of my life fighting my wolf side until the animal in me gets too strong and I go rabid. Do you really think any amount of money is worth dying for?”
I wasn’t going to be able to argue that point, so I ignored it altogether.
“You have two options here. Either you sign the paper and walk away with millions of dollars in your pocket, or I make your life a living hell until you hate me so much that you want to sign it. It’s your choice.”
I started toward the bedroom again, and Cody followed me. When I tried to close the bedroom door in his face, he caught it and held it open.
“You’re assuming that you won’t fall in love with me before you convince me to leave you.”
“My feelings have nothing to do with the situation. And I hope you’re still packed, because we’re leaving town. Where did you say you live again?”
I watched the emotions in his eyes go from determined to cautious. The question had been for his benefit because my dad had texted me his address already, which he’d found through one of his sources.
“I’m not taking you home while you’re determined to get rid of me.” He sounded sure.
It was time to pull out the big guns. As much as I didn’t want to use his family against him, it was the tool that would work the fastest and hurt me the least. Since my hair and the tattoo hadn’t made much of a dent, I didn’t have a choice.
“You don’t have to. I already bought a house in Mount Edge, right on the mountain in the center.”
Cody
Quinn didn’t make any sense to me. One night she was kissing me like I was the best thing that ever happened to her, the next day, she was coloring her hair and tattooing over my marking on her neck.
And then she wanted to go to Mount Edge and use my hometown to convince me to let her go? Didn’t she realize that it was full of shifters who knew me and would try to convince her that she should be with me?
She’d made it clear that we were going to Mount Edge whether I liked it or not, so when she locked me out of the bedroom, I stepped out into the hallway and called my brother.
“Hey, man. Has Quinn come around yet?”
I grimaced. I’d texted him a little since I’d found her, but hadn’t told him everything.
“I thought so, but now she’s decided I need to sign some paper saying that she can marry whatever human she wants. I guess she’s determined to make my life a living hell until I agree to let her go.”
“What? That’s insane.” Tanner protested.
“Yeah, well part of her plan to get rid of me includes Mount Edge. She bought a house on the mountain.”
He was silent for a moment.
I understood why. My parents’ wolf pack was on the mountain in Mount Edge, and about two months ago, Tanner had challenged my dad for his place as Alpha. When he won, Tanner took all of the young people out of our dad’s pack. We were living in a college town about twenty minutes from the middle of the mountain called Edge Valley.
While we weren’t technically living in Mount Edge, we were close enough that it didn’t matter.
“Are you sure it’s on the mountain?”
“Positive.” I grimaced. Quinn had practically rubbed that fact in my face, like she was proud of it.
If she’d known that the reason I wasn’t living on the mountain was because of the shifters in my dad’s pack who had tried to kill Tanner’s soulmate for being born a human, she wouldn’t have been so excited.
Because I was not only Tanner’s twin but his second in command, there were plenty of people in my dad’s pack who hated me. I could protect myself, but Quinn? She would be an open target.
“I’ll try to work something out with dad. Call me when you’re getting close. Good luck, man.”
“Thanks. See you soon.”
I hung up and stepped back inside the apartment. Immediately after, Quinn flung the bedroom door o
pen and sent a suitcase rolling down the hallway. Her hair was wet and blonde again—so she’d only done that to get a rise out of me—and she looked frustrated.
“Put that in your truck, mountain man!”
A smile tugged at my lips, brought on by both the nickname and the command. Even if she was set on convincing me we weren’t meant to be together, the wolf in her knew that I was hers. Whatever her thoughts, she was attracted to me and felt the same connection between us that I did.
I just had to figure out a way to get her to admit that, and to decide it was more important than whatever had her so set on that political marriage.
Quinn
“Ooh, I love this song!” I leaned over to turn up the music on the radio, and caught the ghost of a smile on Cody’s face. That man was so into me it was ridiculous.
I wished I could say I wasn’t equally interested in him, but that would’ve been a lie.
We’d been in the car for twenty hours, and still didn’t really know anything more about each other than we had when we drove away from my apartment. He’d dodged my questions and I’d dodged his, so we had to settle for talking about favorite colors and what foods we hated and liked.
Favorites were safe. Feelings and pasts were not.
So I sang and danced when I liked the music. Sometimes, I did it just to see that smile in Cody’s eyes.
I was a little ashamed of that fact, but the wolf in me had to assert herself somehow I guess.
The GPS said we were about twenty minutes away from the house I’d bought when Cody turned at a stoplight we were supposed to drive straight through.
“What are you doing?”
It was the middle of the night, so we weren’t stopping for food. Other than a late-night Walmart run that we didn’t need, I couldn’t think of any other reason we were going off path.
“I can’t go into another pack’s territory in the middle of the night, so we’re spending the night at my place.” Cody said it like it was non-negotiable.
I wasn’t about to spend the night in his apartment, where I would see all of his stuff and photos that might make me rethink my plan to break his heart.