Quest (Shifter Island Book 4)

by Carol Davis

  It just wasn’t possible.

  “Tomorrow,” she told him. “Tomorrow, we’ll… do whatever we have to do. I have no commitments at all. But I have to go now. I made a promise.”

  “Go, then,” he told her.

  That didn’t free her nearly as much as—well, as much as Julie probably had in mind. Really, she didn’t feel freed at all. Something told her that, despite what he’d said, Luca was going to sit here on the bed, fiddling with the TV remote, until she got back—even if that was in the wee hours of the morning.

  He was going to sit here and stew, the same as he’d apparently done for the last four years.

  The thought of that startled her. Did she want to be with someone who’d act this way when she tried to do something on her own? It seemed to suggest that he’d get even worse over the years, not better.

  “I have to go,” she told him.

  Five minutes later, she was driving away from the motel.

  “It does look better in the daylight!” Gina squealed. “See? I told you it would!”

  She hovered around Allison like a frantic puppy, tugging at Allison’s dress, fussing with her hair—she even spit on her fingertip and used it to smooth the line of Allison’s lipstick. She was still happily, eagerly, in charge, and she spent the entire “getting ready” session bossing around the hairdresser, the photographer and his assistant, the other bridesmaids, and even Julie and her mother.

  Allison couldn’t find the will to argue with Gina, or even try to get out of her way. This would be over soon, she told herself; one way or another, the day would go by, and she could retreat to the motel.

  All she had to do was keep breathing until then.

  It helped that she didn’t need to make a decision any more complicated than “I need to take a minute to go to the bathroom now.” For most of the day she was herded around, tweaked and poked, told to smile for the camera, to eat something that was held in front of her so that she wouldn’t feel lightheaded during the ceremony. Her phone was nowhere nearby, so she couldn’t call anyone or check for messages.

  Along with the others, she was herded into the church and into a too-small room where Gina supervised last-minute checks of hair and makeup and dresses. Then she was herded out into the sanctuary and positioned at the foot of the aisle. They’d practiced that oh-so-important walk the day before—with Gina barking “suggestions”—and she was able to repeat the short journey without stumbling or, like Pats, bursting into tears. No thinking, she told herself. Just walk.

  It was like being in a play. Every line, every step, laid out for her.

  When she reached the altar, she moved into the spot Gina had designated for her the day before (doing everything but putting little pieces of colored tape on the floor, as if this actually were a play) and turned to face the people who had come to watch Julie and Matt exchange their vows, arranging her expression into a calm, placid smile.

  There, at the back of the church, was Julie, holding on to her father’s arm.

  And sitting at the end of a pew a few steps away from them…

  Was Luca.

  His shirt was a little wrinkled, but his hair was carefully combed and he was wearing a tie. He’d found himself a seat next to a gray-haired woman Allison didn’t recognize—a woman who seemed to feel compelled to keep patting his hand. He went from murmuring something to her to taking a look up into the eaves, and then, finally, he met Allison’s gaze.

  He smiled, just a little, and nodded.

  She couldn’t afford to focus on him, because Julie and her father were coming down the aisle, so she returned the nod, then fell back into the “just do what Gina told you” mode she’d been floating through all day. Everything seemed to go perfectly: no one other than Pats did any ugly crying, neither Julie nor Matt messed up their vows, and everyone cheered and applauded happily when the pastor introduced the couple as Mr. and Mrs. for the first time.

  Everyone began spilling out of the church once Julie and Matt had taken up their positions in the receiving line, and within a minute or two the vestibule and the front steps were crowded with bodies. Gina did her best to herd everyone in the wedding party into the receiving line, but Allison managed to evade her and began to look around for Luca.

  To her disappointment, he was nowhere in sight.

  Would he have left? That was certainly possible. It was one thing to sit in the back of the church for a few minutes, and another thing entirely to spend two or three hours partner-less at the reception.

  Still, she wished he’d said something.

  As soon as there was a gap in the crowd clustered around the door, Allison slipped outside, still careful to avoid Gina. A couple of the other bridesmaids weren’t in the line either; she saw Pats sobbing into a handful of tissues at the edge of the walkway, and Donna Marie was talking on her phone. The photographer planned to take more pictures after everyone had given the bride and groom their best wishes, and judging by the state of the line, that was maybe ten minutes away. Allison took advantage of the reprieve and headed down the walkway, looking around for Luca.

  There.

  He was standing over at the edge of the parking lot, looking down the street. Planning his escape route, maybe?

  “Allison. Allison! Where are you going?”

  Damn.

  She turned around to smile at Gina. “Nowhere. I’m here. Are we doing pictures now?”

  Damn…

  She did her best to put Luca out of her mind. He was giving her the space to participate in Julie’s day, hadn’t even suggested that she shouldn’t, so she told herself to accept that and focus on her friend.

  She felt genuinely pleased standing beside Julie for the pictures, and her smile wasn’t forced. They posed for what felt like several hundred pictures, then they were all bundled into the limo for the ride over to the reception venue, a small but pretty country club in the rolling hills at the edge of town.

  There, she caught another glimpse of Luca.

  And another.

  And finally, after everyone had milled around for an hour sipping—or chugging—drinks and nibbling hors d’oeuvres and had been seated for dinner, she saw him again: sitting beside that old woman from the church, who seemed delighted to be paired with a handsome young man.

  She also seemed delighted to give him her prime rib.

  Not until after the dancing had started was Allison able to get away from the head table. Because it was hard to see Luca’s table once people had crowded onto the dance floor, she skirted around the edge of the room thinking that when she got there, he would have already gone.

  But no, there he was, all by himself.

  “Where’s your friend?” she asked him with a bit of a grin.

  “She went to the toilet,” he said. “Her name is Eloise. Twice widowed and once divorced. That’s a little alarming.”

  “I guess so.”

  He got up before she could say anything else, and nodded hesitantly toward the dance floor. “Is this something you’d like to do?”

  “Maybe one song.”

  Her satin pumps had been torturing her toes all day long, and truth be told, what she wanted most was to soak her feet—and the rest of her body—in a Jacuzzi, no matter what she needed to do to find one. Then she noticed that several women had discarded their heels and were dancing barefoot. Her grin got wider as she kicked her shoes off and pushed them underneath Luca’s chair.

  Then she was in his arms, being swept around the dance floor.

  It was a very loud, up-tempo song, and most of the other couples were dancing with some distance between them, but Luca ignored that and held on to her as if it were a waltz—or maybe a tango. He paid almost no attention to the actual rhythm of the song, as if he were in a world all his own.

  When she looked into his eyes, he drew her into that world, and the music faded into something far away, almost unnoticeable. All she was aware of was his arms around her, the expression of deep pleasure on his face, and the s
trength with which he guided her around the other couples.

  That song ended and another one began, and they kept dancing.

  Until someone interrupted.

  It was Ernie, Matt’s cousin, her partner for the evening. He stood there sizing Luca up for a minute, then put together a grin.

  “My turn,” he announced.

  He’d been polite, if a little loud, up till now. But she’d watched him gulp down three or four drinks and fumble his way through the best man’s toast, and he was clearly past the point where he’d graciously accept being told no. She did owe him a dance, she supposed—and she could see the photographer looming nearby, wanting to take a picture of the two of them dancing together.

  “Just this one,” she told Luca.

  Only the fact that she’d had a couple of drinks herself saved her from walking away from Ernie once they’d started dancing. She had no idea whether or not he’d been clumsy to begin with, but the alcohol definitely didn’t help. He stepped all over her bare feet, stumbled a couple of times, and burst out laughing for no good reason. She was aware of the photographer’s flash going off half a dozen times, and thought with an inward groan that these particular pictures weren’t going to be keepers.

  The song came to an end, and she tried to step away, but Ernie clung to her arm and said, “Nah.”

  “My—” she started. “I need to—”

  “You’re my date,” Ernie said loudly. “How ’bout you act like it?”

  She looked around for Luca, hoping he’d sweep her up and carry her away, but he was nowhere in sight.

  Sixteen

  Going outside accomplished very little; even with the door closed behind him, the music pounded the air around Luca, and he wondered how far away he would have to go to find some silence. The wolf was straining inside him, begging to be released so that they could run far from this place—but there was nowhere nearby with enough cover. There were a few trees at the edge of the property, but beyond them Luca could see a lot of lights.

  He could leave for a while, he supposed. Allison seemed to be enjoying herself, and the party was likely to continue for another several hours. In that amount of time, he could walk to the edge of town, shift and run free for an hour or so, then come back. She might not even notice he had been gone.

  And what would that mean? If she didn’t miss him?

  With the heavy beat of the music echoing inside his head, he walked over to the low wall that surrounded the parking lot and sat down. To soothe himself, he started to think of all of his favorite places on the island: spots where he could look out over the ocean and watch the surf, or where he could lie in the sun and rest.

  The chair in front of the fireplace in his parents’ house.

  His bed.

  These past few days had offered very little rest; even when he was in bed with Allison, sleepy and sated after mating with her, the unfamiliar smells and sounds, and the knowledge that humans were nearby, had kept him close to wakefulness. He felt the strain of that now, felt as if his body had been stretched and pulled in a thousand different directions. It was taking its toll on the wolf, as well. They were both worn out.

  A burst of high-pitched laughter brought his attention back over to the doors, where a man and a woman were stumbling out into the parking lot. Giggling and clutching each other, they made their way over to a big SUV, and the man fumbled open a door to the back seat. The woman crawled inside, then the man.

  They didn’t bother to close the car door.

  The sounds and smells of their mating weren’t hard to pick out. It tempted Luca to open his pants and relieve some of his rising stress—he would have done exactly that back on the island, and no one would have cared—but here, that would be inappropriate. Possibly even dangerous.

  He couldn’t even lie down on the other side of the wall, where the grass looked to be very soft, and sleep for a few minutes. That, too, would have been fine on the island. But here…?

  There were too many rules. Too many foolish rules.

  He had to settle for closing his eyes and thinking of the island. Running and playing with his brother. Helping the adults in the gardens while he was growing up, and taking responsibility for his own plot on the day he turned twelve. Wondering which of the young females would one day be his mate.

  Talking, and sometimes arguing, with his father. Helping his mother with her chores.

  Did they miss him? he wondered. Or had they simply gone on with their lives?

  “Hey.”

  The voice made Luca open his eyes. There was a man standing a few steps away, fists braced on his hips. He wavered a little, which seemed to indicate he had already drunk too much alcohol, and the look on his face said he didn’t intend to be friendly, that he hadn’t approached Luca to chat.

  “What’re you doin’ with my car?”

  The car that seemed to be in question was a good eight or nine feet away from Luca. “I’ve done nothing with your car,” he said.

  “Then what’re you sitting here for?”

  “I came out to get some air.”

  “You’re right next to my car.”

  It looked to be an expensive vehicle. It was spotless, and had been diligently polished. Brand-new, Luca supposed. Black. Mammoth, and doubtlessly very heavy. It, and the way the man was brandishing the keys he’d pulled out of his pants, said a lot about the man himself.

  “You know how much I paid for that? Do ya?” the man demanded.

  Far too much, Luca supposed. “A great deal, I imagine,” he said quietly.

  “What, are you some kinda priss or somethin’? ‘A great deal, I imagine’? What’re you, the queen?”

  There was no winning this, Luca understood. The man needed to humiliate him, and the reason for that had nothing to do with Luca or that huge black car. Something had happened to this man—possibly inside, at the party; possibly somewhere else—and the need to exert his dominance had taken over his ability to think clearly, to act reasonably. Being near the wolf always made that sort of thing worse.

  The wolf would be glad to fight with him, if Luca set it free.

  That was tempting. The animal was still stinging from Micah’s attack; it hadn’t had a chance to assert itself in weeks. They had both come very close to death, and now they were trapped among the humans, suffering all this noise, these bad smells, the crushing lack of freedom.

  If there had been a way to shift where the man wouldn’t see it, and then confront him, scare him a little…

  “Hey! Hey, Greg, man! What’s goin’ on?”

  Luca risked a glance in the direction of the building’s front doors. Three more men had come out and were drifting toward him and the angry man, whose name apparently was Greg.

  “Asshole’s loomin’ around my car,” Greg said.

  Two of the men were dressed in tuxedos. They were members of the wedding party, Luca noted. Friends of the groom. As they came closer, he saw that one of them was Ernie, Allison’s “partner,” the groom’s cousin. They all looked to have been drinking too much, and seemed anxious to take part in whatever sort of skirmish Greg had gotten started.

  Four against one. Those weren’t good odds, if Luca couldn’t turn the wolf loose.

  “You got a problem, pal?” said the groomsman who wasn’t Ernie.

  “Way too close to my goddamn car,” Greg said, fondling his keys. The points were sticking out between his fingers. He was clearly turning them into a weapon, something he could use to gouge and scrape. “And he’s not wantin’ to back off. Told him, and he’s just sittin’ there. And—” He paused, giving his friends a meaningful look. “He’s pretty full of fancy talk.”

  Ernie snorted a little. “I know him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Didn’t even have any friggin’ clothes for a wedding, Matt said. He was gonna wear jeans and a t-shirt or some such shit. To my cousin’s wedding.”

  Earlier in the day, Ernie had been polite and reasonably friendly. Now he was anything
but, and that was certainly due to the presence of his easily riled friends. And the alcohol, of course. The wolves of Luca’s pack had a good many stories to tell about alcohol-fueled fights—how too much drink could turn a reasonable person into a bully. Jedediah, one of Luca’s father’s closest friends, had a number of scars from just such a fight, one he’d blundered into during a trip to the mainland.

  Luca figured he had enough scars already, thanks to Micah.

  But he knew he couldn’t just walk past these men. They were too stirred up now; they’d never let him go. One of them would feel obligated to push him, maybe shove him to the ground.

  They might hold him there for a while.

  One of them might be drunk enough to decide to piss on him.

  And all of this at a wedding. At the celebration of Matt and Julie’s marriage.

  Because he had little choice, Luca pivoted on the wall, swinging his legs over to the other side. That put the wall in between him and Greg’s gaggle of friends. It wasn’t much protection, since it was only hip-tall, but it was better than nothing. It would slow the others down long enough for Luca to get away if he moved quickly.

  They wouldn’t chase him. Their mates were still inside the building. They wouldn’t risk being spotted by someone who’d call the police.

  Or would they?

  “You gonna run now, fancy-pants?” Greg jeered.

  That almost guaranteed that they intended to chase him if he ran. If he walked, they’d probably settle for jeering him until he was out of sight—and they’d keep an eye out for him, to make sure he didn’t come back to damage Greg’s car.

  That would mean abandoning Allison.

  For a little while, he told himself. If she realized he was gone, she’d know he’d gone back to the motel.

  The question was, would that be all right with her?

  Another wolf would understand.

  But Allison was human.

  Before he could make a decision, a flash of bright color drew his attention back to the doors once more. One of the bridesmaids had come out, and her obvious anger made Greg look like a child fussing over a broken cookie.