Ryan shook his head, and I said, “Nope. The power was fine when I left this morning and was off when I got home.”
“You don’t know anyone who could or would do something like this?”
“No,” Ryan and I said in unison.
“I’m finding that harder and harder to believe, Ms. Alexander.”
“I get that,” I said, “but I’m telling you, I don’t have a clue as to who would have a vendetta against me.”
“Are the two of you a couple?” he asked us.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” Ryan said.
Sighing, I said, “No. We would like to be, but his family doesn’t approve of me.”
“And I’m telling you I don’t care what they think,” Ryan said, coming to stand beside me.
“His family doesn’t approve of your relationship, yet you two are telling me you can think of no one who has it out for you?” Dawson said.
“His family wouldn’t stoop so low,” I said.
“Besides, they are all the way across the country,” Ryan said.
“Do they know you two are here together?” O’Neil asked.
“My family and his family know where I am. I don’t know if anyone knows he is here.” I said, looking pointedly at Ryan.
“Your dad knows. My parents have probably figured it out, but I didn’t tell them,” he said.
“Why does my dad know you’re here?” I asked before the police officer could ask another question.
“I went to him after I quit my job. I needed help. He helped get me a job here and gave me money to live on until I got on my feet. I’m supposed to start paying him back in one year or I’ll lose my job.”
“He threatened you?” Officer O’Neil asked.
“Oh, no. The guy I work for is a cousin of Leigh’s dad. That was my agreement. Mr. Alexander would give me money and help me get settled. I had one year to do so before I had to start paying the money back. If I didn’t, Victor would fire me. That was the only threat.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” I asked, ignoring the police officer.
“We haven’t had much time to talk about all that has happened since you left,” he answered.
“Why didn’t you let me know when you first moved back?” I asked to the annoyance of the two officers.
“I didn’t want you to see me like that. I was basically homeless and living in a cheap motel until I could get on my feet. Your dad only gave me so much money, and I needed it to last. I didn’t know what the job would pay or what the cost of living was like here. I’ve never had to worry about anything like that before. I didn’t want you feeling sorry for me or looking down on me now that I don’t have my family’s money.”
“Do you think I care about that? Look at what I do for a living. Look at where I live. My car is ten years old. I barely make it from one paycheck to another most weeks. I would have never judged you for that.”
“I know,” he said, flopping down on my sofa. “But look at the world I come from. Nearly everyone I know would have judged me for it.”
I started to go to him when the cops I had forgotten were there spoke up. “I take it from your conversation, you left home abruptly. Possibly angering a few people as you did so,” O’Neil said.
“Maybe,” Ryan admitted, “but I honestly don’t think my parents would do anything like this to us. The worst thing they could think of would be taking my money away, and I gave it up when I left.”
“Okay,” the officer said, taking a few notes.
“What about your fiancée?” I asked, not hiding my pissy tone.
“She isn’t my fiancée, and she isn’t smart enough to do all of this,” Ryan said, sounding annoyed at having to repeat himself.
“Are you sure?” I demanded.
“Yeah. Besides, right after your sister’s wedding when I informed her, her parents, my parents, and everyone else who was standing outside the hotel that morning that I would never marry her, she left…left the country left. She has family in New Zealand, and she went there to sulk.”
My mood changed dramatically when he said this.
“She could still be a suspect and the most likely one, considering you jilted her publicly and the two of you have had some other issues. I’ll need all of her information please, so that I can look into things,” Officer Dawson said to Ryan.
Ryan nodded, and I went into my bedroom to change while the two men talked. Once I was ready and the cops had left, Ryan pulled me into his arms and hugged me for a long time.
“I’ve missed you so much,” he said into my hair.
“I’ve missed you. I started missing you the moment you left my hotel room. I hate that you and your parents are on bad terms, but I’m so thankful you’re here.”
“I love my parents, but I promise you, I’m not letting anyone stand between us.” He kissed me then. He kissed me long and deep, until my legs started to go limp and my head was swimming with desire for him.
I was seconds away from saying, screw dinner; let’s go straight for dessert, when his cell rang. Both of us tried to ignore it, but it kept going off.
Agitated, he answered the phone with a gruff, “What?”
I couldn’t hear what the person on the other end said, but I saw his body tighten in annoyance and maybe anger.
“All right, I’m on my way out to dinner. I’ll stop by and see what happened.” After another long pause on Ryan’s end as he listened to whatever it was the other person was saying, he said, “I’ll see you in a bit,” then hung up.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, knowing there was, but I felt compelled to ask.
“Yeah. I have to run by work to check on something. Nothing major,” he said, giving me a quick kiss as he pocketed the phone.
“Anything we should report to the police?”
“Nah. I just have to fax some paperwork. I was sure I emailed all the information before I left today, but somehow it got lost in the ether. It won’t take me long. Do you mind taking me by there?”
“No.” I took his hand and led him out of the apartment.
He was right. What he had to do didn’t take any more than about five minutes. After that, we stopped at an Oriental restaurant for sushi then went to a movie. I told him I was fine with Red Boxing something or ordering a movie off On Demand, but he wanted to go to the movies and have a real date. Considering that I hadn’t seen a movie in a theater in nearly a year, I didn’t argue. Before going home, we stopped for some frozen yogurt.
While we ate our yogurt, I asked him again why he waited so long to let me know he was in town. Again, he told me he wanted to be settled first. This didn’t feel completely true to me, so I pushed, and he finally relented, saying that he was afraid that if he didn’t have a job or a home first, I wouldn’t believe that he was serious about leaving his home to be with me. He wanted to be tied down to Washington so that I wouldn’t worry every moment that he could easily walk away from our life. That I understood, but it still hurt me that he had been so close and I didn’t even know it.
Knowing that I should take things slow with Ryan, but not wanting to, I invited him back to my apartment for the night. He tried not to sound too eager when he said yes.
All through the drive back to my apartment, I felt the sexual energy between us. Ryan constantly ran his hand up and down the length of my thigh as I drove, and every time I glanced his way, I saw him looking at me. The hunger, the longing in his eyes was so intense that I nearly came when he let his hand brush smoothly between my legs.
The second I pulled up in front of my apartment, he was out of the vehicle and at my door, helping me out of the car. He all but carried me up the front walk, up the stairs, and through my front door. By the time we reached my bedroom, we were nearly naked, and his mouth had kissed every inch of my exposed flesh. I was so desperate for him that I almost didn’t notice that he wasn’t wearing a condom when we fell onto the bed, and he crawled between my legs. He was about to enter me when his cell phone
rang. Ryan kept kissing me though. He was lazily running his tongue around one of my nipples when his phone stopped ringing and mine started.
“What the hell?” I said, leaning up a bit, causing him to sit back on his heels. The sight of how ready he was to take me made me temporarily forget about the ringing phone. I reached my hand out to stroke his cock and my phone stopped ringing. Perfect, I thought, now we can get back to giving each other orgasms. But the second my phone stopped, his started up again.
“Son-of-a…” he snarled and moved off the bed, making me whine with disappointment.
“Who is it?” I asked, crawling off the bed. His phone stopped ringing, and in the time it took me to grab mine to see who had called, it started again. I looked at the caller ID, but it only said unknown name and there wasn’t a number listed. Irritated, I answered the call with a brusque, “Hello.” No one was on the line. A half a minute later, Ryan’s phone began to ring. He answered in much the same way, though no one was there.
Annoyed, I turned my ringer off in time for the phone to start vibrating. I turned that off too. Ryan did the same, and for a long moment, the room was silent. I started to say that we might report the calls, but when I turned to see that the lustful look had returned to Ryan’s eyes, the thought faded.
He stalked me back to my bed. I was crawling backward across the sheets and letting my eyes go from his face to his erection and back again, when my home phone started to ring. Ryan froze with his hand on my knee and looked at me in confusion.
“What?” I asked, ignoring the ringing phone.
“You have a land line?”
“Yeah. I got a package deal with my internet and cable. I figured it might come in handy if for some reason I didn’t have my cell.
Sighing loudly, he stood straight and headed to my living room where the phone continued to ring. I followed on his heels, paying more attention to his ass than the phone.
He picked up the cordless phone and read the information on the phone. It was the same unknown name and number that came up on our cells. He hit the end button and flipped off the ringer.
“Do you have another phone anywhere?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Good. Now, where were we?” he asked, bending down to kiss me as he palmed a breast.
No sooner than we started back down the hall when what sounded like every phone in the building started going off, startling us.
Ryan cussed again but went to my bedroom to dress. Throughout the building, we heard muffled swearing and people leaving their apartments to talk to their neighbors. Within fifteen minutes, the police were back and the ringing had all but ceased. Most people had given up and turned their ringers off, but a few were determined to get an answer from whomever was on the line.
Ryan and I didn’t admit that our phones had gone off before anyone else’s. A few people told the officers that they thought they heard a few rings before the massive ring, but they couldn’t tell from which apartment, and they understood that those rings could have been a coincidence.
By the time the police left, saying that the incident was probably a prank by someone who was way more tech savvy than they should be, Ryan and I had slunk back into my apartment exhausted. The mood wasn’t gone, but we were too terrified of starting again and causing another round of commotion. We were both positive that the phones had started ringing because we were on the verge of having sex.
“Someone has to be watching us,” I said, leaning against my window frame and looking out into the night. “Someone had to know what we were about to do. The timing was too perfect.”
“I think you may be right. I’ll look into it in the morning. Come on, let’s go to bed.”
“Look into it how?” I asked, giving him a puzzled look.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll hire an investigator. All the problems the two of us have been having aren’t fluke events.”
“I don’t think so either,” I mumbled, curling up next to him in the bed. The feel of him cradling me, comforting me, protecting me was almost better than sex.
Chapter 16 ~ Frustrations
~~~Ryan~~~
I hated that the only thing we did that first night after finally reuniting was sleep. I could smell her arousal as we crawled under her blankets, but I knew she was more scared and annoyed than turned on, so I didn’t try anything. She cuddled close to me, and I knew she could feel my erection, but she didn’t initiate anything either.
I fell asleep thinking about what she had said. Someone was watching us. Her instincts were spot on. I hadn’t sensed anything until after the cops had arrived, but as we had stood outside of the building with a half a dozen other people talking to the police, I had felt eyes on us. I just didn’t know to whom those eyes belonged. Sophia would be my first choice, even if I hadn’t smelled her, but she was overseas…wasn’t she?
The first thing I did that next morning after Leigh dropped me off at home before she went to work was call Leigh’s dad to let him know what was going on and to see if he could find out who was behind it all. The thing with the cell phone had to be magic. I’m sure some tech savvy person could figure it out, but a moderately powerful witch could do it as well.
“Are you sure my daughter’s all right?” her father asked me for the hundredth time during our conversation.
“Yes, but I think she would be even better if she knew the truth…the whole truth. The cell phone thing was more than a bit suspicious.”
“No. She already feels enough like an outsider. If she finds out we aren’t human then we’ll have to tell her that she’s adopted. We’ll have to tell her the bizarre circumstances surrounding her adoption and the repercussions of her mother and I adopting a human infant, which will only make things worse...make her feel worse. She’ll never feel as if she is part of the family.”
“She doesn’t feel that way now, and she never will as long as you keep her in the dark and stay with the Pine Hollow pack.”
“I know, but we don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“We both know that is a lie. You could always go to Daniel’s pack. He isn’t that far from ours. He would take you in. He would accept you.”
I had been talking to Daniel’s son, Devan, on and off for a few months about everything. I met Devan through his brother Darius, whom I had met a few years back, and once I had understood that I couldn’t stay with my pack any longer after watching the way they had treated Leigh, I had called him. The Sullivan pack was suspicious, of course, since very few people leave a pack they’re born into, so Devan and I had been conversing almost daily while his father investigated the Pine Hollow Pack and me.
Devan had been the second person I called after leaving my pack. I had told him that I was interested in joining his pack, but I had to get my mate first. He said his father was a bit leery about me, but when Devan had told his father, Daniel, that my mate was human and told him about how my pack had treated her, Daniel had agreed to let us in on a trial basis.
“How do you know that? Just because he said he would take you and Leigh in doesn’t mean he’ll take the rest of us. I don’t know him. I don’t trust this situation. Just because you’ve heard some rumors that he has a human living with him doesn’t make it true, and it doesn’t mean he is okay with my daughter being there. I’m done watching people mistreat my daughter. No one has ever seen proof that a human lives freely within their pack. Besides that, it would start a war between the packs if we relocated. Even worse, we could anger Daniel if we told him we knew about the human and the entire thing was made up.” The man was failing miserably at making up excuses as to why he couldn’t leave Pine Hollow when it all boiled down to fear.
“It isn’t a lie. I know it isn’t. I’ve heard too many things about Dimitri’s wife to believe that he not only married human, but is also mated to her.” Devan had never confirmed or denied the allegations, and I hadn’t been brave enough to come right out and ask him.
“That isn’t possible,” Mr. Alex
ander said, sounding defeated.
“I know it is.”
“Ryan…”
“I know what I feel, sir. Your daughter is my mate.”
“But how is that possible? She isn’t a shifter. She isn’t supernatural at all.”
“It isn’t unheard of.”
“Yes, it is. We’ve heard stories that it has happened in the past. But they are stories. Nothing more.”
“Stories that I tell you are based on fact. I don’t know why we haven’t heard of one of our kind mating a human in thousands of years, and I don’t know why it is starting now, but I believe Dimitri’s wife is human and I know your daughter is my mate. All the signs are there.”
“I don’t know. I…”
“Please, sir, do this for me. Do it for Leigh. She isn’t safe here. Someone’s harassing her, and I fear it’s going to get worse. I need a safe place to take her. We both know that Pine Hollow isn’t that place. Our leaders or, at the very least, mine or Sophia’s family are probably to blame for all of our troubles.”
“Okay. Bring her to her childhood home. Not to the Sullivan pack. I’ll think about contacting Daniel once she’s safely here.”
“Fine,” I said, wishing he wasn’t so stubborn. I would have defied him and taken her to the Sullivan pack if I didn’t feel as if I owed him everything after how much he helped me get away from Pine Hollow.
“When do you plan to bring my daughter home?”
“Just as soon as I convince her to move. If I could tell her our secret that would make things easier…”
“No. Not right now. If we have to move. If Daniel lets us into the pack, then you can tell her. You’ll have to tell her. I’m sure they won’t let her in if she doesn’t know.”
“It would be easier if I…”
“I said no. She’s my daughter. I say when she finds out her life is a lie.”
“I’m her mate, her future husband, and I say she already knows her life is a lie. She simply needs someone to confirm it.”
“Ryan, if you tell her, I’ll…”
“You’ll do what? Have me fired? Go ahead. Give her another reason to hate you when I tell her the truth.”
Outcast (Supernaturals Book 2) Page 12