by Tami Lund
Olivia felt a stab of jealousy at the cozy little scene, and a stab of annoyance that Tanner was in there, sleeping in the same bed as Lisa. It hardly mattered that Dane and Sofia and the newborn were there too. She wanted Tanner out in the sitting room, with her.
“And then there were five,” Cecilia whispered from behind her. Olivia turned and followed her cousin away from the bedroom doorway. “At this rate, Tanner’s new pack is going to be plenty big enough to fend off the other one.”
Olivia sighed and plopped onto the sofa bed that Dane had not closed up before rushing in to help Lisa deliver her pup.
“He’s responsible for a grieving woman who now has to raise two children alone, plus his own dying, invalid mother. I hardly see how they would ever be able to fend off Quentin and his pack.” The thought was not a cheerful one.
“Which is why I think we should take them to the coterie.”
Olivia stiffened into a seated position. Her eyes flew open and widened. She stared at her cousin. “Take them to the coterie?” she repeated dumbly. Five shifters? Had the Las Vegas heat addled her cousin’s brain?
Cecilia nodded firmly. “It makes perfect sense.”
“It makes absolutely no sense,” Olivia shot back.
“They’ll be safe. Ariana said if that pack master finds them he will kill them all on the spot. Adorable little Sofia. That beautiful new baby boy.” She blinked at Olivia with beseeching eyes, as if Olivia had any control over whether Tanner and his small pack would be allowed into the coterie.
The problem was, she did have that sort of control, and Cecilia well knew it.
“They would never be accepted,” she argued, even as she thought to herself, Where else could they possibly go and be safe?
“You do not know that.”
Olivia shot her cousin a rueful look. “Have we not lived in the same coterie our entire lives? You know as well as I that our fears, our legends, and beliefs are just as ingrained as those of the shifters. To convince our fellow Lightbearers that Tanner, his mother, Lisa and the pups are all innocent and that they would not, someday, try to kill any of us—it’s a ridiculous notion.”
Cecilia refused to give up. She waved her hand at the closed bedroom doors. “You know how Dane gets. Now that he’s delivered that woman’s babe, he’s not going to just let her go. He’s going to be all big-brotherly to her, just like he is to you and I. And Uncle Sander listens to Dane,” Cecilia reminded her.
This was all true, but still, Olivia could not imagine her father welcoming a small pack of shifters into his coterie. Maybe he would accept Lisa and her children, because he was a sympathetic sort of man, and maybe he would accept Ariana because she was all but helpless, but Tanner? Not in a million years.
Unfortunately, if anyone stayed at the coterie, Olivia wanted it to be Tanner.
“His mother is getting worse,” Cecilia said quietly. “I am not a healer, but even I can tell.”
Olivia shifted her focus from the room in which Tanner, Lisa, and Dane slept, to the one where Tanner’s mother lay, dying.
“Dane is in no condition to heal her today,” Olivia said, and then with a resigned sigh, she pushed off the sofa and headed into the bedroom.
Ariana’s eyes fluttered open when Olivia sat on the side of the bed. “Lisa and the pup?” she asked in a rasping, belabored voice.
“Fine. He’s taken to the breast like a champ.”
“A male, then.”
“Yes,” Olivia confirmed. “She is exhausted, but unharmed. Dane helped her through, so she should have little discomfort. He is very good at healing.”
Ariana’s eyes fluttered closed again. “Good,” she whispered. “Lisa doesn’t deserve any more pain in her life.”
Olivia thought about Tanner, sleeping while propped up on the bed next to Lisa. He’d been in the room when she’d given birth. Judging by the bloody smears on his shirt, he’d probably held the babe minutes after he was born. Those sorts of things pulled people together, bonded them. Tanner had told her that he, Freddy, and Lisa were almost inseparable during their childhood. To Olivia, it would seem perfectly natural if Lisa turned to Tanner, now that her mate was dead.
The thought was unsettling.
“Thank you for telling me,” Tanner’s mother said, pulling Olivia’s thoughts back to the here and now, where they belonged. While Ariana lay there with her eyes closed, Olivia placed her hands gently on the woman’s abdomen and summoned her healing magic. Ariana’s eyes shot open, and the woman lay there, staring at Olivia, as Olivia tried to make sense of what she discovered inside the woman’s body.
“Poison,” she whispered without taking her hands off the woman. “He was poisoning you.”
Ariana shook her head. “No. I did it to myself.”
Olivia stared at the woman, frozen in shock.
“Years ago,” Ariana said in her wheezing, pained voice. “After Tanner was born and I finally realized what a monster his father was.” She paused, breathing steadily for a moment.
“A concoction of certain herbs. The pack midwife gave me the recipe, although she thought I was asking for someone else. If she had thought it was for me, and told Quentin...” She shuddered, clearly imagining what might have happened.
“She told me that it was meant to be a short term fix. Renders a female temporarily infertile, but long term use would poison the body. I did not listen. It has only been in the last few years that Quentin finally stopped forcing himself upon me, demanding I give him another heir.” She turned her head to the side, staring at the window, as tears dripped onto her pillow.
“You poisoned yourself so that you would not bear any more pups?” Tanner asked from the doorway. Both Olivia and Ariana looked up in surprise. He stood, framed by the doorway, looking rumpled, sleepy, and incredibly sexy, despite the look of horror upon his face.
Ariana nodded and swiped at the tears. “I worked so hard to counteract all the poison Quentin spewed at you. He knew it, too, and punished me regularly for it. I knew I did not have the strength to do the same for any consecutive children. I could not take the chance that he would have a legitimate child who would carry on his evil ways.” She took another shuddering breath before continuing.
“I knew he had plenty of paramours on the side. I’m sure you have a dozen half-siblings out there, Tanner. But I am equally as certain that Quentin is too proud to claim any of them. His heir must be legitimate, from his mate’s belly. You are his only hope for carrying on his name,” she said, lifting her tear-filled eyes to look steadily at her only son.
“I am so proud of the man you have become. I am at peace, Tanner. I know you will not be like him. I can die in peace. It’s okay. I don’t mind.” She tried to push Olivia’s hands away, but Olivia steadily refused to budge, as she continued to push healing magic into the woman’s body.
Tanner stood stock still. He did not move a muscle. The entire room seemed suspended in time, waiting for him to react. Finally, he did. He turned away from his mother and stabbed his finger at Olivia. He looked furious.
“Fix her,” he commanded. He strode from the room without looking back, slamming the door behind him.
* * * *
She was healing his dying mother. Even though he’d demanded she do it, the asking pissed Tanner off worse than his inability to resist kissing her last night. He’d only meant to thank her for healing him, but as soon as she touched him, he lost all concept of reality, of rational thought, and he simply grabbed her, pulled her to him, and kissed her as if he needed to do so in order to take his next breath.
He felt better afterward, too, which meant she’d healed him while he’d been mindlessly kissing her. At least one of them was able to keep a clear head. That pissed him off too, because he did not like the idea of being the only one who was affected by their touch. Although she responded to the kiss, seemingly wantonly, clearly she was able to multi-task, while he’d been wholly unable to think about anything else except whether they could have sex rig
ht there on the balcony without getting caught. Hell, at the time he hadn’t even been worried about getting caught.
He did not want to be beholden to the Lightbearer, and yet, he did not want his mother to die. The woman had given so much to keep him from turning into his father, the very least Tanner could do was allow the Lightbearer to do what she claimed she could do. And now he would owe her something. His life, in reality.
Although, he did save her just a few days prior, so really, they were even, right?
Not by a long shot, unfortunately.
She sat on the bed next to his mother, her hands pressed to the frail woman’s abdomen, while Tanner watched from the partially opened doorway. He’d left in a fury, but had been unable to resist checking on them a few minutes later. He needed to see, needed to be near her.
He watched as sweat broke out on Olivia’s brow, and the color drained from her face, and she still continued to pump magic into Ariana. In contrast, color seeped into Ariana’s cheeks, and unless he was very much mistaken, some of the lines were fading from her cheeks, from around her eyes. Not only was Olivia healing her, she was giving years back to the woman. When this was all said and done, all Ariana would need was a little hair dye and she would look her age again.
Olivia emitted a pained sound and Tanner shot through the door, across the room, placing his hands on her shoulders before he remembered he wasn’t supposed to touch her. As soon as he made contact, he felt that already-familiar desire course through his system, but he did not have to fight it off this time, because she slumped back against him, unconscious. He eased her into his arms and turned around and gently placed her on the bed next to his mother, ignoring his body’s protest as he did so.
He did not want to let her go. He wanted to hold her tightly while she slept, and then he wanted her to wake up and kiss him like she had when they’d been on the balcony earlier.
“Oh my,” his mother whispered, and Tanner turned away from the Lightbearer to focus on Ariana.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded.
Ariana smiled. “Nothing. Well, not as much, at any rate. I feel better than I have in years. Possibly even a decade. That woman has amazing magical abilities.” She wiggled her toes. “I think I might even be able to walk myself to the bathroom.”
“Let’s not get crazy now,” Tanner said dryly.
Ariana smiled impishly. “I’ll take it slow.” But then her smile faded. “Tanner, she doesn’t look so well.”
Tanner looked down at Olivia. She was curled into a ball on the bed, her eyes tightly closed, her entire body racked with shivers. Tanner reached down and tugged the comforter and sheets out from under her body. As he tucked the blanket around her, his hand skimmed over her bare shoulder. She turned into his touch, her face nuzzling at his hand. He froze, staring at her, until his mother spoke again.
“When you touch her, she stops shivering.”
“It’s because I covered her with the blankets,” Tanner replied, and he pulled his hand away to prove his point.
She immediately began shivering. He silently cursed.
“Touch her again, Tanner,” his mother commanded, and he obediently did so. Olivia stopped shivering.
“You have some sort of connection,” Ariana murmured. “Get in the bed,” she commanded.
“I’m not going to sleep with her,” Tanner ground out even as he continued to stare at the sleeping Lightbearer.
“Look at her. She looks almost as sick as I did, before she healed me.”
Ariana was right. The poor Lightbearer’s face was chalk white. Her blonde locks had gone lank and veins protruded from her hands, giving them an aged look.
“Get into the bed with her, Tanner.”
Damn it. How the hell was he supposed to keep himself from attacking her, if he shared a freaking bed with her?
As it turned out, it was easy. While she melted into his body as soon as he crawled into the bed, she was utterly unconscious as she did it. If the raging erection that was wedged between them did not wake her, Tanner knew any hopes for real action were a waste of time. He should be grateful for it, but instead he found himself more frustrated than when he forced himself not to touch her at all.
It was going to be a very long night.
Chapter 10
“We need to move.” Those gruffly spoken words, coming from Tanner’s mouth, were what greeted Olivia when she surfaced from sleep the next morning. When she blinked her eyes open, she saw he was standing next to the bed in which she’d apparently slept last night.
She stretched and was amazed to discover that she felt ... good. Not one hundred percent, by any means, but certainly significantly better than she expected to feel after healing Ariana until she’d passed out the day before.
Despite her father’s insistence that she not, Olivia still practiced healing behind his back, in the coterie, so she was well aware of the consequences of healing wounds as extensive as Ariana’s. Healing Ariana had been harder than healing a Lightbearer, as well, because her shifter body was foreign to Olivia, so it took more effort to figure out how to fix her in the first place.
“Are you able to walk?”
Olivia realized he was speaking to her. His tone was still gruff. The man was clearly angry about something.
She frowned. “Of course.” She turned her head and saw that Ariana was sitting in a chair near the window. She smiled at the older woman. “You look well.”
Ariana smiled back. “I feel well. Remarkable. Truly remarkable. Thank you.”
“Give me a few hours of sunlight and I will heal you more. You still have a ways to go to perfect health. You are lucky we found each other when we did. I do not think you would have made it another few weeks.”
“Enough with the chit chat,” Tanner said crossly. “Get up and get moving. We’re sitting ducks here. Now that everyone’s reasonably healthy enough, it’s time to leave.”
“Lisa,” Olivia said. “She just birthed her babe yesterday.”
“She’s fine. Dane said she was perfectly capable of traveling, so long as we stop every few hours so she can nurse the pup. Let’s go.”
Olivia frowned and tried to figure out why he was acting so gruff. Yesterday after their kiss, he’d simply done his damnedest to stay as far away from her as possible. Today, he was determined to bite her head off. What happened to change his attitude in this way?
After they checked out of the hotel, they had breakfast at a nearby diner, and then were on the road. That was when the group had their first full-blown argument of the day.
“We’re going to Tennessee,” Tanner announced.
“That isn’t where the coterie is located,” Cecilia pointed out.
“There are several shifter packs in Tennessee. I’m going to scope them out, figure out the best one to absorb my mother and Lisa and her pups.”
“You aren’t leaving me with some random shifter pack,” Lisa cried out from the back seat.
“I’m with Lisa on this one,” Ariana said. “I’ve only just healed, and I haven’t seen you in ten long years. I don’t want to start over in some strange place without my son.”
Tanner gritted his teeth and continued to head east. “I’m just going to take the Lightbearers to their coterie and then I’ll be back,” he said. “A few days. A week tops.” He slid Olivia a look. “Depending on where the coterie is located, which I have yet to figure out.”
“No,” Lisa said, more firmly this time. “You are not dumping me off so you can play hero. We’re going with you. We’re a pack. All of us.”
Olivia deliberately did not look at Tanner, but she could tell nonetheless that he was annoyed and frustrated that Lisa was disrupting his plan. It didn’t help matters that his mother jumped on that bandwagon as well.
“That includes me,” Ariana added. “Olivia says she still needs to heal me before I am one hundred percent. And I am not quite ready to let you go again.” She thrust out her chin and Olivia thought, Oh my lights, I do that sam
e thing.
“That bad pack master will find us,” little Sofia piped up from the backseat. “Daddy said the world isn’t a big enough place,” she added, speaking far too intelligently than she should, given she was only four.
Tanner squeezed the steering wheel. “Well?” he ground out, speaking to Olivia, who was seated in the passenger seat. “It’s your coterie.”
She did not need him to voice his opinion that he thought this was a lousy idea. It was plainly obvious by the rigidness of his posture, the way he gripped the steering wheel, the tick in his cheek, which was a result of his clenched teeth. They’d spent less than a week in one another’s company, and already she knew him well.
What would it be like to get to know him even better?
That errant thought drifted through her head as Dane added his opinion from the backseat.
“Lisa and her babe are my patients,” he said. “They need to still be under my care, at least for a few more days. So either we hole up in a hotel somewhere, or they come to the coterie with us. My vote is for the coterie.”
Tanner slanted another glance at Olivia. “Your call,” he said, and she did not have time to appreciate that he was leaving the decision up to her, because she was too busy thinking, What will my father think? What will the rest of the coterie think?
“We can hide them,” Dane suggested before she could even ask the question. “They can stay with me. When Lisa is well enough, they can all go on to their new pack together.”
There were no protests to his plan. Feeling trapped, because she really didn’t want to say goodbye to Tanner, yet she knew that it would be impossible to hide the small group of shifters within the coterie for more than a few days, Olivia finally threw up her hands in surrender.
“Fine,” she said. “They can come to the coterie.”
Tanner looked resigned. Lisa looked triumphant. Ariana and Dane looked relieved. Cecilia simply looked serene. Olivia wondered what she looked like. Confused? Torn?