by Alyssa Day
He would make her his, and soon. He couldn’t continue to draw breath if he didn’t. But until then, the anticipation was enough. It would have to be enough.
Grace laughed at something Tiny said, and then she glanced up and caught sight of Alexios. Something tangible sizzled through the air between them, as if she’d aimed one of the arrows from her quiver straight at him.
He closed his eyes, shaking his head. Great. Arrows and quivers. Next he’d be the one singing “Feelings.” She was turning him into some kind of wimp.
Ven would have a field day.
He opened his eyes when he heard her footsteps approaching, and the smile spread across his face in spite of himself. She was so unbelievably beautiful.
His smile faded. So beautiful, and so far out of his league.
She’d showered and changed into a dark green shirt and clean pair of blue jeans. Her hair lay in long damp strands on the shoulders of her leather jacket. It suddenly occurred to him that he’d never seen her in anything but jeans. Not that he was complaining, but he wondered what she’d look like in Atlantean silk.
She tilted her head and smiled up at him, but there was a measure of reserve in her expression. Distance. “That was an interesting smile,” she said “Penny for your thoughts?”
“Trust me, they are not worth nearly so much.” He lifted a hand to touch her face but she moved, almost imperceptibly, but enough so that she turned away from him and stood staring out at the sunrise. He let his hand fall back down to his side, while his heart sank to the vicinity of his boots.
So. He wasn’t the only one who’d decided she was out of his league, perhaps. He shoved his hands into his pockets, ready to walk away.
But injured pride gave way to honesty. He’d seen inside Grace’s soul last night, and nowhere had there been arrogance or presumption. Maybe this was just a healthy dose of caution.
“What happens next?” She glanced back at him. “Tiny said Sam was contacting Smith’s and Reynolds’s families. It was something I should have done myself, but Sam said he has way too much experience at this horrible duty.”
Alexios nodded. “He would have. He was a soldier and a leader of men. With that responsibility comes many terrible obligations.”
She lifted her chin. “Do you think I’m falling down on mine?”
“No, I do not. I think that Sam is older than you, and so his presence will likely be more of a comfort to the families. Part of leadership is knowing when to delegate.”
She brushed her hair back from her face and sighed. “Maybe that’s true. But Sam didn’t give me a chance to delegate before he took it on himself. He was trying to protect me, just like you do. Everybody does, even though I’m supposed to be the one protecting the men and women under my command. There’s something wrong in that.”
Before he could think of an argument she would accept, a loud thundering noise to the south caught their attention. Approaching low, at a height that surely must violate human flight regulations, a sleek helicopter zoomed toward them. Alexios immediately put himself between it and Grace, and she shoved him with her left arm.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” she said, almost shouting to be heard.
Before Alexios could explain why he would never, ever stop protecting her—or else forget explanations and just throw her over his shoulder and start running—Bastien’s voice sounded in his head.
Stand down, Goldilocks. It’s just us.
Call me Goldilocks again, and you’ll find that my boot fits your ass juuuust riiiiiight, he sent back, folding his arms over his chest and grinning.
“It’s okay, Grace. The cavalry has arrived.”
Grace watched the shiny silver-and-red helicopter land expertly on the gentle grassy slope. The logo on the side, a running panther, raced across the top of the words BIG CYPRESS, LTD.
When the engine shut down and she could be heard again, she jerked her head toward the three people climbing out. “Friends of yours?”
He nodded. “Well, the tall one is. Bastien, of Atlantis. He, too, is one of the Seven of High Prince Conlan’s elite guard. I haven’t met the others yet.”
She suddenly realized she recognized them. Not the Atlantean. The other two. They were the engaged couple she’d seen on the news the other day.
“We need to go down and meet them, Grace. Bastien said Ethan has quite a surprise in store for us.” He held his hand out and she clasped his fingers with her own before thinking. It felt somehow exactly the right fit, as though even their hands belonged together.
Dangerous thoughts. She pulled her hand away and pretended not to see the disappointment on his face. “Okay, let’s go meet the nice panther shifter,” she said brightly, heading for the stairs. If she kept herself so busy she didn’t have time to think about what had happened between them the night before, it would be easier to push it out of her mind.
Tiny met them at the bottom of the stairs, and he didn’t look happy. “Nobody told me anything about a helicopter. Do you know these people?”
“I’m sorry,” Alexios said, stepping forward. “I just found out less than an hour ago, but I should have notified you immediately. These are friends who will be able to interrogate our prisoner more effectively than we can.”
Tiny scratched his chin through his beard with a dinner-plate-sized hand. “Oh, I don’t know about that. Done asked me a few questions in my day. You could ask Sam about that sometime.”
Grace put a conciliatory hand on Tiny’s arm. “I’m sure you have, but this is Ethan, an alpha panther shifter. He’s going to have methods we couldn’t possibly match.”
Tiny nodded and patted Grace’s hand. “Well, then. That changes everything. Let’s go meet these folks.”
They walked out and met Bastien, Ethan, and the blond woman from the ranger station, who were walking up to the front entry. Grace noticed that two men, neither looking quite like a tourist, were standing at opposite ends of the parking lot. She wasn’t surprised when Tiny gave them each a signal and the men wandered off, probably to circle around the back of the fort.
“Hello, I’m Grace Havilland,” she said, stepping forward and holding out her hand. Trying to act like she was in charge again, even though it felt artificial and false.
She knew the Atlantean right away, of course. Even if she hadn’t seen Ethan and the woman on television, she would have known which one was from Atlantis. He had the same beautifully sculptured face as Alexios, but where Alexios was golden, this one was dark. Black hair framed incredibly blue eyes, and he was so beautiful she almost didn’t notice that he was nearly seven feet tall.
“You must be Bastien,” she said, grinning in spite of the circumstances. She turned and beckoned Tiny forward with a gesture. “Tiny, you should meet Bastien. Maybe you two could start a basketball team.”
Tiny threw back his head and laughed that wonderful Santa Claus laugh, and Bastien smiled down at Grace. “I had heard that you were as lovely as you are lethal, Lady Grace. I see that the rumors were not wrong.”
The lady ranger, tall and lean, with gorgeous tawny gold hair, and dressed in blue jeans and a sweater, walked up and punched Bastien in the arm. “Look, buddy, just because I agreed to marry you doesn’t mean you can take me for granted and flirt with other women right under my nose,” she said good-naturedly, flashing a smile at Grace to show she wasn’t serious. “Kat Fiero, by the way.”
Alexios let out a whoop. “Married? Now you’re getting married? I had heard you two were serious, but this is amazing.” He bowed low to Ranger Fiero, his eyes sparkling with some unholy glee. “Please accept my sincere condolences, Kat.”
The other one—Ethan, Grace remembered—shouted out a laugh. “Finally! Finally, I meet someone with sense.” He shook hands with all three of them. “Other than Marie, most Atlanteans don’t seem to be big on brains. I can see you’re going to be different.”
“Marie?” Grace felt like she was a step behind. She’d thought from the excerpt on TV that
Ethan and Kat were the ones engaged. “Who’s Marie?”
“We’ll fill you in on that later, I promise,” Alexios said. “Right now, I think the best thing to do is tell them what happened here last night and see what they can get out of our prisoner.”
The moment of levity faded, and Bastien nodded. “Ethan can find out.”
As Grace led the way back inside the fort, she noticed that Bastien gave Alexios a quick, hard hug. “How have you been, my friend?”
She snuck a glance at Alexios, curious to hear his response. But he caught her looking, because he was staring right at her, his face grim.
“Not good,” Alexios said. “Not good at all.”
Chapter 19
Grace stiffened her spine and led them through the courtyard to the prisoner’s cell. Tiny told her that one of his men had relieved Donaldson, and then he headed off to do whatever it was he did. Sam still hadn’t called in yet today, and Tiny was hanging around until he heard otherwise from Sam.
They reached the cell, and Grace nodded to the guard that he could go.
“Good luck. This one’s a piece of work,” he said, disgusted.
The shifter was yelling obscenities and banging something metal against the walls. The noise was so loud that Grace wasn’t sure he’d be able to hear them call out to him.
“Do you want me to unlock the door?” She directed the question to Alexios, not particularly caring if it were proper hierarchy or not. Ethan might be the alpha panther, but Alexios was the one who’d had her back the night before.
Alexios held out one hand for the keys. “I’ll do it. You can delegate to me, until your ribs heal up a little.”
She smiled a little at the reminder of their earlier conversation, and she handed him the keys. He was right. If the shifter came fast and hard at whoever opened the door, they were better off if it were Alexios, Bastien, or one of the shifters.
“Sometimes it sucks to be the only human in a roomful of superheroes,” she said, only half joking.
Kat shot a narrow-eyed glance her way. “Oh, honey. You have no idea how much I agree with that.”
Kat didn’t elaborate, but Grace noticed that Bastien reached out and briefly touched his fiancée’s shoulder. Another story there, probably. Maybe she’d even get to hear it one day.
But not today.
Alexios fitted the key in the lock and looked at Ethan. Bastien and Kat moved back out of the way, as did Grace. Ethan stepped closer to the door and then nodded.
“We’re coming in,” Alexios shouted. “Back away from the door.”
There was a moment of silence, and then the shouting and banging started again, more loudly than ever. Ethan’s face hardened, and then he tilted his head back and let loose with a huge roaring sound that Grace had never before heard come from a man’s throat.
She knew where she had heard it before, though. She’d heard it last night, coming from those panthers.
The silence was immediate, and the noise didn’t start up again.
“That’s better,” Ethan said. Then, his voice growing until it filled the entire corridor, he continued. “I am Ethan, alpha of the Big Cypress pride, and I’m coming in, so you’d better back the hell away from this door.”
Ethan nodded again, and Alexios turned the key in the lock and swung the door open.
Grace had to admit the prisoner was nothing like what she expected. He’d been somehow larger and more imposing in her memory. Perhaps because she’d seen the cat first, and the unconscious and battered man after.
Still, the man huddling at the back of the room, snarling and hissing at them even though he was in human form, wasn’t exactly a sweet little kitty cat, either.
“I know him,” Ethan said. “I can’t believe it. He’s not part of my pride, but his grandmother is. He mostly hangs out with a bunch of college kids in Miami. He has never hurt anyone before, ever, as far as I know.”
Ethan stepped into the room, and the man hurled himself into a corner, cringing and snarling unintelligible sounds. It was as if he’d gone temporarily insane. For some odd reason, he reminded Grace of Renfield from the Drac ula movies.
“If he starts eating bugs and calling for his master, I’m so out of here,” she muttered.
Alexios and Bastien just looked puzzled, but Kat started laughing. “You are definitely a girl after my own heart,” Kat said.
Ethan advanced into the room toward the crazed shifter. “Eddie, what are you doing? You know me. What would your grandmother think about this?”
But there was no spark of reason in Eddie’s maddened eyes. Not even a glimmer of recognition on his wildly grimacing face. When Ethan took yet another step forward, Eddie threw himself on the ground clutching his head, and screaming his first coherent words. “No! No closer. You’ll kill me. They’ll kill me. My head—it’s in my head.”
Ethan looked a question back toward Alexios and Bastien, but they simply shook their heads. “I gave him a pretty bad beating,” Alexios admitted. “He hurt Grace. But, as you can see, the Change healed his injuries.”
It was true. The man was still naked, though there was a neatly folded pile of clothes just inside the door. For a moment, bitterness washed through Grace’s mouth like acid. How nice of them to give him warm clothes to wear. After all, it’s not like he’d tried to kill her or anything. It’s not like his buddies had killed two of her people.
For a moment, she was tempted to retrieve her bow and put them all out of Eddie’s misery. But she was supposed to be in charge. She was supposed to have a level head.
So she ought to act like it. “Isn’t there some super-duper alpha power thing you can do, Ethan?”
Ethan flashed a grin at her over his shoulder. “Wow. First I have a man who recognizes Bastien’s shortcomings, and now I find a beautiful woman who can tell I’m super-duper. This is a good day.”
“If you are lucky, my sister will only use her magic to hang you from a tree by your feet, and not any of your other body parts,” Bastien said mildly.
Alexios and Ethan both flinched, but then Ethan laughed. “I don’t think so, Brother. Ask her some time about creating homemade thunderstorms in my bedroom.”
“We are so not going there, now or ever,” Kat said, grimacing. “And if you boys are done being boys, we have a problem here to deal with.”
Ethan held his hands out at his sides and slowly shook his head. “No, we do not have a problem. Eddie isn’t going to be a problem at all, are you, Eddie?”
The captive showed no sign of comprehension, but Ethan started toward him anyway. A sound unlike anything Grace had heard before rose in the room, centering on Ethan. No, strike that. It was actually coming from Ethan. If someone crossed the purr of a jungle cat with the roar of a motorboat engine, that might describe the sound. It was a low, primal rumbling that somehow managed to insinuate itself into the marrow of Grace’s bones. She felt almost light-headed as Ethan continued calling out his alpha dominance to their captive.
Kat shifted restlessly next to Grace, and Grace glanced over to find that the ranger’s entire body was straining forward toward the room and Ethan. Kat’s eyes had changed, too; the pupils had narrowed and were beginning to look more feline than human. Evidently the alpha’s call affected the other shifters in his pride very strongly, whether it was directed at them or not.
Grace’s skin tingled from the inside out, and she realized that shifters weren’t the only ones affected. Bastien stepped closer to Kat and pulled her into his arms, and Grace noticed that his eyes had gone from clear blue to almost black. A muscle in the Atlantean’s jaw clenched, and she wondered if there were some history between Ethan and Bastien that wasn’t as rosy as it might appear on the surface.
At the doorway to the cell, Alexios stood sideways, turning his head back and forth, dividing his attention between Ethan and the prisoner on his left and Grace on his right.
Grace stepped forward, almost involuntarily, but Alexios held up his arm to block her from enterin
g the cell. She glanced up at him, but she was still caught in the thrumming rhythm of the alpha’s insistent call, and it was as if she suddenly saw him through different eyes.
Through a prism of sensual hedonism.
The drive to take—to mate—burned through her until the feel of her clothes on her body was irritating enough to make her want to tear them off. The bandages itched, and even the silk of her underwear felt heavy and unwanted against her skin.
She stepped into the circle of Alexios’s arms and he automatically closed them around her, his eyes widening. “Grace, what—”
“Haven’t we talked enough? I’m tired of talking,” she said, curving her fingers and running her fingernails down the front of his chest through his shirt. He inhaled sharply and his eyes flashed hot like the eyes of the man who wanted a woman. She needed to be that woman.