by Lynn Howard
“You sure?” she asked, a perplexed frown on her pretty face. The face that had both haunted his dreams and occupied his every waking moment for the past two weeks.
What the hell was wrong with him? Since when did he wax poetic?
Brax leaned back and crossed his ankle over his knee. Then dropped his leg, spread his knees, and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. He couldn’t get comfortable.
No. It wasn’t that he couldn’t get comfortable; it was that he wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He’d been so confident in the fact he’d make Campbell fall for him he wasn’t sure what to do now that he was welcomed into her space.
Brax turned his head to look at Campbell; she was squinting down at her phone.
“Do you wear glasses?” he asked.
“No. The screen is a little fuzzy.” And so were her words. The painkillers were kicking in.
“Here. Let me help.” He reached his hand over and Campbell set her phone in his hand. No menu. Only a phone number. “What do you want me to order?”
“Large pissa. No. Two large pissas.” Pissas? Oh yeah. The drugs were definitely kicking in. “Lossa of pepperonis. And mushrooms. And black oliffs.”
Brax tried. He really did. He pressed his lips into a thin line as he listened to her give him her order.
Nope. No way he could hold it in. A laugh burst from his lips and he held his hands up when she turned a glare his way.
“Can you hear yourself?”
“Of course I can,” she said, lifting her chin and sniffing indignantly.
His smile was still wide as he shook his head and hit the number for the pizza place on her phone screen.
“You’re slurring.”
She needed food. It would keep her from getting nauseous and bring down the buzzed feeling the meds were causing her.
Once the guy answered the phone, Brax relayed Campbell’s order then pulled his card out of his wallet. He didn’t have any cash, so he’d have to tip on his card. He made a mental note of how much he’d be spending today and what that was going to leave him in his account. An account he shouldn’t have in the first place as a Shifter. There was simply no other way for him to have lived across the state from where he’d grown up and survive.
He might have super strength, speed, and healing, but he still had to eat.
“Pissas are on the way,” Brax said, winking at Campbell.
“Pissas?”
“That’s what you called them.”
She put her fingertips to her lips. “Am I slurring?”
“Yep. It’s kind of cute.”
“You think I’m cute?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then why did you run away?”
He frowned. “I didn’t run away.”
“When you were shecking my leg, you jerked away and ran across the room.”
“I…” What was he supposed to say? He couldn’t tell her the truth. Well. He could. But it would freak her out. “I didn’t want you to think I was seducing you.”
“You don’t want to seduce me?” She narrowed her eyes on him in an attempt to look…what? Intimidating? Angry? All it did was make her look adorable.
“Do you want me to seduce you?” He laid his arm across the back of the couch and leaned a little closer.
“I…don’t know what I want,” she said and dropped her head against the couch and rolled her eyes closed. “You confuse me.”
Brax frowned.
She kept her eyes closed, her head leaned back, and shook her head. “You confuse me a lot.”
“How? How do I confuse you, Camp?”
Her eyes fluttered open and she rolled her head to look at him. “You called me Camp. That’s what my family calls me.”
“You don’t like it?”
“Didden say that.” She was looking right at him but her eyes looked unfocused.
She didn’t say she didn’t want him to seduce her. She also didn’t say she wanted him to, either. He confused her. Confused her how?
“Camp?”
“Yeah.”
“How do I confuse you?”
She rolled her head to look at the ceiling again. “I don’t know. I shoulden like you. But I do.” She looked at him again. “I shoulden like you.”
“Why not?”
“Because you killed my sister,” she said as her eyes fluttered closed and her breathing became even.
Had she just passed out? He wasn’t sure what she’d taken, but he didn’t think it was strong enough to knock her out. Maybe she was simply a light weight. One of those people who only took a few beers before she was drunk.
Someone had killed her sister. It sure as fuck wasn’t him. Or anyone he knew, either. No one in his life would hurt anyone, especially a woman.
A loud knock on her door jerked Campbell awake. She sat straight up, her eyes going wide as she looked around in confusion. “Shit. Did I fall asleep?”
Brax patted her arm as he stood. “Just the pizza.”
She nodded as he crossed the room and let the guy in.
“Thanks, man,” Brax said after filling out the tip line and signing his fake name.
Carrying the pizzas into the kitchen, he rifled through the cabinets until he found plates and a roll of paper towels. He set a few slices on each plate and carried them back to Campbell. She was sitting up and leaning forward, her eyes on the plate. She’d requested two large pizzas. He assumed so she’d have leftovers for dinner and breakfast the next day.
He was wrong.
Campbell devoured almost an entire large pizza on her own while Brax finished half of the other one. His mate had an appetite. With her slim figure, he had no idea where she kept the food.
Didn’t matter; he loved a woman who could eat.
“Feel better?” he asked when she wiped her mouth with the paper towel.
“Yeah,” she said around a bite of food in her mouth. “Less loopy.”
Should he bring up the conversation they’d had before they’d eaten?
Yep. No way could he let that go. Not when he was alone with her.
“Hey, Campbell?”
“Yeah,” she said, dragging her legs under her on the couch and covering up with the blanket she’d used to cover her underwear two nights ago.
“Who killed your sister?”
Campbell slowly turned her head toward him. “What?”
“You said I confused you. That you shouldn’t like me because I killed your sister. You and I both know I didn’t. What happened?”
Brax’s heart shattered as her bottom lip quivered and tears welled in her eyes. And then one fell over her lashes to trail down her cheek.
“Shifters. Shifters killed my sister, Brax. They stole her from the sidewalk when she was walking home. When she was walking here.” She waved her arm to indicate the very house where they sat. “And when she fought back, they killed her and threw her body in the river.”
Chapter Seven
Campbell didn’t want to talk about this. She really didn’t. But her tongue was wagging and her lips were moving without her brain being a part of the conversation.
“I’m so sorry,” Brax said softly, reaching over to take her hand.
She pulled away from him. She didn’t want his comfort. Didn’t need it.
Liar.
Campbell squeezed her eyes shut. It wasn’t that she didn’t need someone to hold her. She’d pushed every emotion except anger so deep into a box she was afraid his touch would release Pandora and all the wicked shit that came with her.
She expected Brax to be upset she wouldn’t let him touch her. Instead, he looked understanding, compassionate, sad for her.
“This was your sister’s home?”
Campbell nodded.
“That explains the extra scent.”
Narrowing her eyes on Brax, she asked, “You can smell Caren?”
“That was her name? Your sister’s name?”
“Yeah. My parents planned on naming all their kid
s with C’s, but they stopped after Caren. I don’t know if the two of us were too much of a handful or if they decided they no longer wanted a stereotypical Catholic family of eight.”
Brax chuckled. “I used to want a big family. But one would be fine with me, too.”
“You want kids?” she asked, surprise making her voice a little high.
For some reason, she hadn’t pictured any of the Shifters having families. But they’d been born like she had. They had moms and dads and brothers and sisters like her. Daxon was Brax’s brother.
“Do you have any sisters?”
“Nah. Mom and dad couldn’t handle any more after the two of us. Daxon was…how do I put this...he kept my parents on their toes.”
“Oh. And I suppose you were an angel,” Campbell teased. She still felt a little on the loopy side, but at least she could think clearly.
“I’m still an angel,” he said, grinning wide and making a halo over his head with his hands. The smile began to fall little at a time. “I’m sorry about your sister.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, dropping her eyes to her legs.
“So that’s why you hate us so much.”
“I don’t hate you,” she said, raising her gaze to his face.
“I’m only one person. There are thousands of Shifters out there. Only a tiny fraction of that population would ever hurt a human. I hope you believe me.”
Campbell nodded.
More and more she was beginning to believe she’d had it all wrong about his species.
More and more, she was beginning to trust Brax.
“You started going after traffickers because of your sister?”
Again, Campbell nodded. “At first, I was only looking for the son of a bitch who killed her. Turned out there was more than one. There was a group of these guys who were stealing women from the street, their homes, wherever they could find them. I killed them one by one,” she said, sneaking a look at him to gauge his reaction to her admission.
He didn’t bat an eye. In fact, he held what looked like respect all over his ridiculously gorgeous face.
“We’ve been trying to find their leader for a couple of years now. They even had a woman working with them at one point.”
Disgust turned Campbell’s already upset stomach. “Why the fuck would a woman help those pieces of shit destroy other women.”
“It’s amazing what money can make some do.”
His eyes darted to the side then back as if he were hiding something from her. Only she didn’t know what.
“Did you know her or something?”
Brax’s head wagged side to side. Then he lifted his hand and chewed on the skin around his thumb. After a few minutes of some kind of internal struggle, he dropped his hand and turned his upper body toward him.
“Okay. Listen. You’ve kept our secret for a year. And if I tell you something else, you have to keep it just as close to your heart.”
Campbell’s brows lowered. “What?” she asked softly.
He wasn’t about to tell her there were vampires, as well, was he? It was bad enough she had to learn humans weren’t the top of the food chain on the planet. She wasn’t sure she could handle hearing vampires walked among them, too.
“The woman wasn’t human. She was a Fairy.”
She blinked at him. Then blinked again. “A Fairy. As in Tinkerbell.”
“Do I remind you of the creatures from a horror movie?”
“What?”
“Do I look or act like the werewolves from the movies?”
“No.”
“You’ll have to lose any preconceived notion of any nonhuman you’ve ever read about or seen on TV. Fairies look like humans. Only other nonhumans can usually tell they’re anything other. They don’t sparkle or fly around. Only the earlier generations had pointy ears and pale hair and skin. Although they are remarkable to look at, they’d look like another beautiful person to you.”
“A Fairy. There are Fairies,” Campbell said rather than asked. She wasn’t really asking him to repeat himself, merely trying to convince herself she’d heard him correctly.
Brax watched her with narrowed eyes. “You can’t tell your mom or dad or any of your friends.”
“Don’t really have many friends left, anyway,” she muttered as yet another piece of what she thought she knew about the world imploded.
“You have me,” Brax said.
She glanced up at him. His face had softened.
“You want to be my friend?” she asked, not bothering to hide the suspicion.
“Of course. I mean, if you can get over the fact you’re obviously in love with me. And that I turn into a big cat on occasion.”
Campbell snorted out a laugh and shook her head. “You’re not full of yourself at all,” she said. She’d intentionally ignored the whole cat thing because part of her was tempted to ask him to Shift and show her his panther. But that wouldn’t go over well with Polo sitting at her feet.
“Did you kill them all?” Brax asked after a few quiet moments.
“The ones who killed my sister?”
“Yeah.”
“Yep. Every one of them. And then I couldn’t stop. There was no way I could let someone else go through what my family is still going through every single day. There’s not a minute of the day where I don’t miss my little sister. When I don’t wish I could see her face or call her to hear her voice.”
“Were you close?”
“Not when we were kids,” Campbell said on a sad laugh. “We fought like typical sisters when we were younger. But then, when we hit our teens, we were pretty much inseparable. She moved down here for school and ended up getting a full-time job she loved and dropped out. Never moved back home. I stayed in St. Louis. But we talked every day.”
“How old is she?”
“She was twenty-three when she died. She would’ve turned twenty-four next month.”
Sadness washed over Campbell and clenched her heart in its cold hand. This would be the first birthday after Caren’s death. They’d already endured their first Thanksgiving and Christmas without her.
“It never gets easier,” Brax said, reaching for her hand again. This time, she let him take it. His fingers were warm and calloused and gentle as they closed around hers.
“I figured.” Turning her hand over, she threaded her fingers through his and accepted his comfort and drew from his strength. “So…”
“So?”
“Why do you do this? What made you guys forgo an easy life to hunt down these bastards?”
“We happened upon a woman being kidnapped when were on vacation. We went out to Kansas City for the clubs and to visit some old friends. It was outside a bar downtown. After a little digging, we found out he wasn’t some regular fuckwad out to kidnap and rape a drunk woman. He was taking her for someone else. We stayed out there for a while. But when Aron got word the same shit was happening in our own area, we decided to head back. We’ve only been home for about two months.”
“He was going to sell her,” Campbell said. She didn’t need to ask. She’d learned more than most Americans would ever know in the year since her sister’s murder.
“Yep. He was the first and only asshole we actually let go after getting some information and beating his ass. The next time we caught him, we put him down.”
“You make it sound like you’re euthanizing an animal.”
“Pretty much the same thing, isn’t it? What happens to a rabid animal? Same thing that happens to an evil piece of shit Shifter.”
Brax’s eyes flared with that pretty greenish-gold glow and Campbell realized they did that with any rush of emotion. He hated them as much as she did. Brax hated the Shifters responsible for the trafficking, the kidnapping, the murders as much as Campbell did.
And it made her attraction toward him grow that much more.
“How do the people buying the women not realize they’re not dealing with other humans? Your eyes get this, like, iridescent light to th
em any time you get upset or…” She decided to let that last part of the sentence go. “Are they selling them here or taking them overseas?”
Brax stared at her for a few moments. As those minutes stretched, Campbell began to grow uncomfortable. He looked like he had something to tell her but would rather not. As if telling her would ruin the friendship they were building.
“What?”
He inhaled deeply and ran his fingers through his long hair, pushing it away from his face.
“They’re not traffickers. Not the kind you’re used to reading about, Camp. They’re not being sold off to some sex trade.”
“Bull shit. What else could they be doing?”
“These traffickers? We call them rogues. Because they’re going against our laws.”
Brax inhaled again, then told her about the laws that had only been in place for a couple of years. He told her about how female Shifters had previously had no rights to their own lives, that they could be claimed by any male, taken as their wife, even if they already had several. Only he called them mates, saying the word through clenched teeth as if the word tasted bad on his tongue.
“They know the risk if they swoop into a Clan or Pack or Pride. So they started taking human women. They force an animal into them. Only, there’s no guarantee a human will survive their first Shift. It’s not like on the movies where a werewolf bites you and, suddenly, you turn into an animal on a full moon. We’re born this way. Turning a human is risky and painful and too fucking dangerous.” The next breath Brax took in was shaky. “I don’t think they killed your sister because she fought back. I think they tried to turn her and she didn’t survive her first Shift. I’m sorry,” he said, whispering his apology.
“They took my sister to turn her into an animal,” Campbell choked out. They were going to force her into some kind of arranged marriage with a Shifter. They were going to force her to carry their children. “Why? Why would they want so many damn wives?”
“Mates. We call them mates. Although a few of my friends had a ceremony similar to a wedding.” He waved his hand at his last sentence, like that part didn’t matter. “They’re hope is to grow their numbers. They want to build their own Packs or whatever group they’re in so they can take over our Council, force their own laws and rules on others, mainly females. They don’t hold women as highly as my friends or my Pride. Panthers in particular see females as royalty. You’re Queens to us. You are the only way the human and Shifter race can continue.”