by Anna Lowe
“Best wraps, too,” the man ringing up his purchase added.
“Can’t go wrong there,” a third man agreed.
Anna sure hoped so. She’d tried settling her nerves, but it just didn’t work. Especially not after a marathon drive with only short catnaps in the back seat of her car. Her back ached, her fingers twitched, but her hopes soared dangerously high.
It might not even be Jessica. And even if it was, she might not know anything about Sarah. Still, Anna felt one step closer to finding out some detail of her cousin’s fate.
“Better hurry, though,” the man added. “They close soon.”
It was all she could do not to run, though she managed to keep to a race-walk. Every nerve in her body hummed with tension, and she clenched and reclenched her fists. She nearly walked into the wrong place, because there was a bar with a carved sign over the door that read, Blue Moon Saloon. She paused with one hand on the swinging doors the second she realized she’d stopped one door too soon.
The saloon doors burst open, and a man nearly bowled her over. She stumbled backward, and he pulled up, barely catching himself — and her — before sprawling to the ground. He clutched her by both arms and settled her hastily on her feet.
“Sorry,” he said. Nearly shouted, in fact, the way a person wearing headphones shouted instead of using a normal speaking voice. His eyes flashed, and—
Anna froze as he hustled onward at a hectic trot.
Blue. His eyes were so blue.
She stood like a deer in headlights, stuck on that one thought that echoed over and over in her mind. Like a broken record, it circled around and repeated again and again. Blue. So very blue.
A thousand synapses fired, but none of them set off a rational thought.
Those bright, beautiful eyes that were so familiar. So honest. So true. Where had she seen him before?
She turned slowly, watching his broad back as he hurried across the street.
“Watch out!” she shouted.
A truck beeped and hit the brakes, but the man didn’t even turn his head.
Wait, she wanted to yell after him. Wait.
She didn’t even know what she wanted him to wait for. Only that it seemed imperative that he didn’t leave now. She even took half a step in his direction before catching herself. What was she doing, following a stranger when she was supposed to be—
The saloon door swung outward, nearly clipping her in the ribs, and a woman burst out.
“Todd!” She knocked into Anna as if she didn’t see her there, and just like Anna, she took one step toward the street before stopping and giving up her chase.
Anna glanced over. No wonder the woman hadn’t seen her. Her eyes were full of tears.
The woman turned and noticed Anna for the first time. “Oh, sorr—” She broke off with a choked, squeaking sound. “Anna?”
Anna gaped. “Sarah?”
They stood there, staring at each other, before falling into an embrace.
“Oh my God, Sarah,” Anna murmured, hugging her tight. “It’s you. It really is you.”
Sarah clutched her close, and tears wet Anna’s shoulder. “Anna? Anna?”
Neither of them could eke out a coherent word. Anna let Sarah go just long enough to check that she wasn’t dreaming. It was Sarah — Sarah with her emerald eyes and fiery red hair. Anna pulled her cousin close again and hugged her tight. God, Sarah was alive. Alive! She looked good, too — tan and bright and healthy. Maybe even better than she’d ever looked before.
“Sarah, I’m so glad to see you. God, am I glad to see you. Everyone said you were dead.”
The saloon doors stirred, but Anna didn’t move. Whoever it was could wait. Her cousin was alive!
A baby cooed, and Sarah pulled away quickly to reassure it. A big man stood taking up most of the space in the saloon doorway, making the baby in his arms look positively tiny. His stony face was terrifying to behold, though Sarah didn’t seem intimidated. She murmured something as she took the baby and wiped the tears from her face.
“Anna, believe me, I’m so happy to see you. But I need a minute. Just a minute. We just got some pretty shocking news, and…”
Anna looked from her cousin to the man and the baby then back again. Wow, Sarah had a baby. And wow, Sarah had Soren, the man she’d loved for so many years. Which was great, but why did they both look so stricken?
“Sure,” Anna managed. The air practically crackled with tension, and she backed away. “No problem. I’ll just…um, wait in the park.”
There was a park just across the street and down the block, a swath of green in the midst of a parched western landscape.
Sarah caught her by the arm and gave her a quick hug before letting her go. “I’m so sorry. I’ll catch up in a minute.”
“No problem.” Well, obviously there was some problem, but the main thing was that Sarah was alive. And not only alive, but a mom.
Anna headed to the park, reeling inside. Had Sarah been in Arizona the whole time?
She looked around. It was a town right out of an old Western movie, full of boxy buildings with false fronts. Towering elms shaded the park, and Anna half expected the rattling sound coming down the street to be that of a covered wagon. It turned out to be just a dusty pickup piled high with bags of feed, but that fit, too. A bronze statue of a horse and rider stood at the head of the park, looking ready to bolt into the hills. They were so lifelike and full of energy she looked twice. An imposing stone building took up the center of the park, surrounded by a sea of green dappled with golden light.
The saloon she’d bumped into Sarah at wasn’t the only old-fashioned place in town. There was a whole row of bars and stores, including a barbershop with a striped pole. Flags hung from lampposts — American flags alternating with the starburst flag of Arizona — all rippling gently in the breeze. At street level, the air barely stirred, but there was still a fresh, mountain feel to each breath she gulped, thanks to the surrounding hills thick with a forest of pines.
If it hadn’t been so strikingly pretty, Anna might not have registered the town at all. Her mind was too busy with the thought of her cousin.
Sarah. Alive, one part of her brain repeated time after time.
All that blue. That bright, bright blue, another part whispered.
She didn’t try to make sense of it all. She just walked and let snippets of emotion zip through her head.
Sarah. Baby. Soren.
And blue. That incredible blue.
It was lunchtime, and the park was dotted with people. Some in skirts or suits, others in cowboy hats. Walking on autopilot, she sat down at the end of a bench and stared into the distance.
If Sarah was alive, why hadn’t she been in contact? Could it be that Sarah didn’t want the world to know?
Anna looked around. Maybe she was just paranoid. Maybe there was a perfectly good explanation for all this — one Sarah would share just as soon as she sorted out whatever problem had cropped up.
She closed her eyes and tilted her head up toward the sky. Maybe that was the blue her mind was obsessing about. If she cracked her eyelids open just a bit, she could see patches of it through the trees.
A car backfired somewhere down the street, and she whipped her head around. The leaves rustled, and she took a deep breath, trying to settle her nerves. She’d just driven two-thirds of the way across the country. She’d just found her cousin. She could finally calm down, right?
But there was something making her jumpy. Something that wouldn’t let her soak in the peace radiated by the trees.
She’d been vaguely aware of the man sitting at the far end of the bench when she sat down, but she only glanced over now. He was hunched over, his head hidden by his knees. Not so much in a drank-too-much-yesterday position — more like a quarterback after a play gone wrong. He barely moved except for his left boot drilling into the earth, grinding pebbles into dust. The plain gray T-shirt he wore stretched across his broad back, and his hands clutched at his h
air.
Apparently, her cousin wasn’t the only one having a rough day.
“Are you okay?” she ventured, relieved to pull her thoughts out of the seething cauldron of her mind.
The man didn’t move, which ought to have been her signal to leave him alone. Even when she tore her gaze away from the thick lines of muscle bunched under the shirt, something pulled her back, and almost without realizing it, she scooted closer along the bench.
“Hey,” she said softly, leaning out to catch his gaze.
His hair was short and sandy brown. Almost golden brown, in fact, like the leaves overhead. It was just long enough to give his fingers something to hang on to. Mussed, too, as if he’d worked through the night and hadn’t gotten around to checking how it looked. And his hands — man, they were the size of bear paws. Big and clenched tight, like he didn’t want to relax in case it meant losing his mind.
It made her ache just to see a man as anguished as that, and without thinking, she laid a hand on his shoulder. Which would have been asking for trouble if he’d been one of the down-and-out types who ghosted through public parks. But he was too young for that, too clean. He smelled of the woods, not alcohol, and the slump of his shoulders said he’d just received terrible news. A friend killed in a car accident, perhaps? A buddy killed far away in a senseless war?
“Are you okay?” she repeated.
His shoulder was round with muscle, and her hand just about slipped off. Then he looked up, and her breath caught.
It was the guy who’d nearly bowled her over at the saloon door. The one with incredible blue eyes. She’d barely gotten to process them before, but she was swimming in them now. They pulled her gaze in and wouldn’t let go.
Warm, her mind decided. Safe.
Her thoughts were reduced to single-word sentences, and three more observations hurried on the heels of the first. Sad. Betrayed. Hurt.
And then came the one that made her heart skip. Mine, her mind announced. Mine.
Chapter Three
When Todd first sat down on that park bench, he’d sat down hard.
A son. He had a son?
The air whooshed out of his lungs, and his gut folded in on itself. Even sitting there on the park bench, he couldn’t get his lungs to function properly. One breath would tangle with the next, just like the blood rushing through his veins.
He had a son, but he didn’t have a son. The baby was Soren’s now.
Jesus, the past two hours seemed so surreal. One minute, he’d been lumbering through the woods alone. The next, Soren had coaxed him out of bear form, into some clothes, and driven him into a dusty western town. Todd barely noticed the scenery, though, with his thoughts focused entirely on what he’d say to Soren when he had the chance. How the hell did you tell your cousin you accidentally slept with his mate?
As it turned out, Soren did most of the talking — aloud and into his mind at the same time — and Todd was the one who’d been swaying on his feet, unable to believe.
A year ago…East Coast… I missed Sarah so much that I couldn’t help thinking about her… I never thought the old legends were true…
It sounded a lot like an apology, which had confused the hell out of him. Why was Soren apologizing?
His cousin had still been stumbling from one breathless explanation to the next when Sarah came into the room with a baby in her arms. At first, her face brightened with joy and gratitude, but then it clouded with concern.
Nice baby, he’d said, wondering why the tension in the room was crackling as wildly as an approaching thunderstorm. Wondering what Soren was getting around to. Congratulations.
Soren looked at Sarah, and Sarah looked at the ground.
We named him Ted, Soren said, running a hand over the baby’s back in a gesture that was one hundred percent fiercely protective Papa Bear. Almost as if warning Todd off, which was crazy because Todd would never do anything to harm any child, let alone a member of his clan. He’s four months old.
Nice.
Four months, Soren repeated slowly. Born in July.
Todd had never seen his cousin looked so pained. Was something wrong with the baby?
Soren swirled a finger in the air, telling Todd to do the math. Four months old and born in July meant the baby had been conceived back in…
His mind clicked over months and landed in October of the previous year.
October. Soren nodded, looking decades older than ever before.
At first, Todd wondered why the date mattered so much, and then it hit him.
Holy shit.
Todd locked his knees before they gave out from under him. Last October, Soren had been away, and he’d given Todd the task of keeping Sarah safe. And he had. He’d given up everything — his usual routine, his friends, his working hours — to keep his promise to Soren. And while he liked Sarah, he’d never regarded her as anything but his cousin’s mate. She was totally off-limits — limits he would never dare cross and never had been interested in crossing.
Except that one night when something had gotten into Sarah, and by the time he got her away from the techno bar he’d pulled her out of, that something had taken over him, too. One minute, he was in man-on-a-mission, bodyguard mode, and the next…
He closed his eyes, wishing he could will reality away.
The next minute, he wasn’t in charge of his body any more. He was vaguely aware of what was happening — and utterly, painfully aware of how wrong it was — but he was powerless to stop. Like a marionette, he followed the commands sent to his body by some outside force and marched straight over the invisible line he’d sworn to never, ever cross.
Afterward, he barely remembered the act, only snapping out of it and all but dying of shame.
And now, a situation that couldn’t possibly be worse had just flipped right over to…to…this. He hadn’t just screwed his cousin’s mate. He’d fathered her baby. The baby cooing so innocently in her arms.
His baby.
He stared at the threadbare carpet in the back room of the saloon. He scratched at the jeans Soren had loaned him, wondering what to do or say. Finally, he forced himself to raise his eyes to Soren and face up to facts like the man he’d been raised to be. His jaw was locked, but even that didn’t leave him with a way out because he could send his thoughts into his cousin’s mind. He had to. He’d done wrong, and the only thing left to do was own up to it. Not to make excuses but somehow try to explain.
But how the hell would he explain, when he didn’t understand it himself?
I never meant for it to happen, Soren. And it wasn’t Sarah’s fault, either. It was like something—
He’d expected Soren to cut him off with the outraged bark of an alpha, not with a single word whispered in his mind.
Moonlust.
Todd took a step back and stared.
Moonlust, Soren said again. That night, I was thinking about Sarah, and somehow…
Moonlust? Todd swayed a little on his feet. Moonlust was one of those legends old folks loved to talk about. The power that mates had to reach out to each other over great distances to touch and love and unite. When a wish became an action that played out not just in the mind, but in the body. When two lovers could feel each other, hear each other, and reconnect.
I never knew it could influence someone else, Soren said. I shouldn’t have let it happen.
Todd stared. His cousin really was apologizing.
It was my fault, Soren went on.
Mine, too, Sarah added, her voice tight and trembling in his mind. She clutched the baby harder, and the shadow of fear colored her face.
Fear? Why would she ever be afraid of him?
One look at Soren, whose face had folded into fierce lines, told him why.
They’re afraid we’ll want the baby, his bear whispered inside.
I love this baby, Soren all but roared. He didn’t say it aloud or voice the notion in Todd’s mind, but his body sent out ferocious vibes all the same. I’m never giving him
up.
Todd didn’t want him to give up the baby. Why would he? That baby was theirs. A baby born of Soren and Sarah’s love. He was just the…the…
Jesus, what did that make him?
Nobody, not in an equation of one plus one makes three.
Pain deeper than any he’d ever felt from any wound seeped into his bones. That baby wasn’t his in the way that truly counted. He hadn’t even known there was a baby until now. And yet, it felt as if something had been ripped from him. A piece of his soul, taken away.
I owe you everything, Soren said, shedding some of the tough alpha veneer he carried around like armor. You saved my mate. You gave us a future we never thought we’d have.
Soren didn’t actually say, You helped create the son I adore, but Todd could see it in the lines of his brow. Along with the worry. Please, please, don’t try to take him from me. Don’t make this a fight it doesn’t have to be.
What was he supposed to reply? That all the fight had gone out of him? That it would never have occurred to him to claim that child? He would never, ever break up a family. And hell no, he wouldn’t pick a fight with Soren. Soren was family, and Sarah was Soren’s mate. Todd had had no business getting between them in the first place.
Besides, what did he know about babies, other than the fact that they belonged with their parents?
Doesn’t take much, he remembered his grandmother saying. A little feeding, a lot of holding. A lot of love.
Yeah, well. He was pretty sure it wasn’t that simple. And deep inside, he knew that, even if Sarah slipped Teddy into his arms now, holding him would feel wrong. That was Soren and Sarah’s child, not his.
“Todd,” Soren called into his mind.
He shook his head and studied the diamond pattern in the faded rug. Clearly, he should have died when he’d had the chance. Why was fate toying with him? Why make him endure a months-long trek here, only to be treated as an outsider? Worse, as a threat to his own clan. Why?
Without thinking, he started for the door. Fate had taken everything away from him. His family. His home. His purpose. A big chunk of his pride. It had permanently scarred his body. And as if that wasn’t enough, now fate was taking away what he didn’t even know he had.