She would have caught up with the Lycan if Grant hadn’t stopped her. With strength more than double her own, her protector dragged her to a stop before they had reached the rocks at the base of the mountain range and spun her around so abruptly, she fell onto her back.
Straddling her on his knees, with his hands on her shoulders, he looked down at her with his handsome human face, the face she loved and needed to see because of the beauty of the humanness in it.
Grant was panting, his bare chest rising and falling with effort. His magnificently sculpted abs rippled as he bent low over her. The shaggy auburn hair she wanted to run her fingers through stuck to the sides of his face.
“Paxton,” he said with his mouth inches from hers and as their gazes locked. “Change back.”
She didn’t fight. In truth, there wasn’t much fight left in her. So she did what Grant asked and willed herself to be the person she had always believed she was. And when she lay beneath Grant, with the sand at her back and his body’s warmth inviting her to relax, Paxton nodded her head, took a deep breath and began to cry.
Chapter 30
Watching tears track down Paxton’s cheeks drove a nail through Grant’s heart. He was sure that heart would break.
His lover was going through something he wasn’t able to follow. She was experiencing an emotion hidden from him, and he had a good idea what that might be. Paxton’s world had changed forever. Her future was murky and vague. Her new life experience would be positive, if he could help her see it that way.
But first he had news to share that he dreaded. Not concrete news. Not yet. It was just a feeling in his soul, the little spark of an idea that had come to him while he watched Paxton fight. Later, Grant told himself. Wait for the right time.
He ran a gentle thumb over her cheek to capture a tear and looked deeply into her eyes.
“You’ll do,” he said.
Such a simple statement for the immensity of his feelings for her. For sure, he was no damn poet.
She blinked back more tears and refocused on him before wiping her cheeks with an open palm. After studying her hand, she spoke. “Because we’re two of a kind?”
Grant shook his head. “Because you are here in answer to my prayers.”
Her eyes widened. “You don’t know me.”
“Don’t I?” Grant countered. “Tell me, do you know me? Do you know my secret, my objectives and why your father left Desperado to me? Haven’t you had your hands on my body, felt my breath in your mouth and experienced the same kind of pleasure I did in that bunkhouse?”
Trapped by his body, she made only one half-hearted attempt to move. That alone spoke volumes about her intrinsic need for this conversation.
“Yes,” she said. “I know that much.”
Grant nodded with satisfaction. “And do you feel anything for me, after such a ridiculously short time together? Answer truthfully.”
She bit her lower lip with tiny white human teeth before replying reluctantly, “I’m sure plenty of females would answer that question in the affirmative.”
“How about this one?” he pressed.
She blinked again, slower this time.
“How about you?” Grant asked.
“Will you let me go if I answer?”
“No. Not until you promise not to go after the other Lycan.”
“Then, yes. Okay, I won’t go after the other one. And in answer to your question, I might have a crush on you. But there are more pressing issues on the table.”
To hell with the other issues, he thought. “Crush, is it? After what we’ve shared?”
Her expression was guarded as she said, “I’m not sure what else you might call this kind of attraction.”
“I’d call it fate. Two beings meant to find each other. Although that would make your father a master designer, wouldn’t it, since he brought both of us here?”
He watched her think over his remark. Once she had, her amber gaze again met his.
“What is it you see when you look back at the past? Who is there?” he asked.
The question was difficult for her, but she said slowly, “Werewolves.”
That answer surprised Grant. He had to wonder how far back in memory she had gone. Bypassing the desire to probe that revelation, he said, “Is that all?”
“Vampires. The vampires were there,” Paxton replied with her hands on her face.
Grant lowered his voice to gentle his tone. “The memories are from when you were a kid.”
“Yes.” The word resembled a hiss.
“Werewolves and vampires.”
Her eyes didn’t stray from his. “Yes.”
“So you knew about this all along. About us and about those fanged freaks.”
“I didn’t remember until minutes ago. I…” Her remark trailed off, incomplete.
“What, Paxton?” Grant asked. “Tell me what you are reluctant to say.”
The amber eyes narrowed as she said, “They didn’t believe me. Told me I had made it up. I had to trust them in order to survive. In order to tame the nightmares.”
“Nightmares starring vampires and furred-up beasts?”
The look on Paxton’s face put another nail in his heart. Her pallor was as white as the monsters that, by her admission, had haunted her early on. Someone had lied to her when she was a kid, without realizing that other species existed. Those nightmares had returned tonight, and she was personally involved. Hell, if Paxton wasn’t a Were, and a tough one, he might have feared for her ability to take a next breath.
But she was a Were, and more. Paxton was a Lycan.
She was his Lycan.
“What else?” Grant asked. “I can see there’s more.”
Paxton turned her head to break eye contact, her gaze sliding to the desert beyond them. Grant felt the first breath of dawn on his back and rolled his shoulders to absorb the relief he felt.
Possibly Paxton sensed dawn coming the same way he did and also was relieved that any minute now they’d be free of vampires and fights and big scary rogue werewolves for a while. Back at the ranch, where he’d take her, Paxton could safely rest in his arms. He would whisper softly to her about their future together and pray that she agreed.
They would make love and satisfy the cravings so easy to read in Paxton’s face amid the horror of everything else. Perhaps it would take days, weeks, for their passion to allow a slower exploration of what their bodies were capable of. At that moment, however, as Paxton tore her gaze away, Grant realized there was a little way to go before his dreams came true. Paxton had to trust him first. She had to believe in him. And, along with everything else, they had to find the truth about her mother and her father.
Getting to his feet, he held out a hand to Paxton, trying not to look too long at the way her beautiful body glowed with the fine layer of perspiration left over from her efforts. With the special gift of sight he had been given, he was able to clearly see every detail of her slender, nearly bare torso and the small quakes running through her.
If she accepted his offer and took his hand, whether or not she needed to, it would signal a positive first step toward the future he had mentally outlined.
She was still looking at him when she sat up. Even after all the fighting and shifting, the filmy lace thing covering her breasts was intact. He had to marvel at that. Her jeans, cut low enough to expose a portion of her flat, toned belly, were dirty, and her shoelaces were untied. Blond hair, lighter in color than Paxton’s she-wolf version, hung in matted strands over both of her shoulders.
All of this was so damn hard for him to resist, and at the same time it was heartbreaking. Paxton lacked the knowledge he’d had about what he was. Her heritage had been sprung on her without any sort of advance notice.
She didn’t torture him by showing further hints of the rebellious streak he had witnessed tonight.
She took his hand.
Her fingers were long and delicate. Grant felt the throb of her pulse in her soft palm. As he
pulled Paxton to her feet, she said one more thing.
“I take it back.”
The remark could have meant anything, but Grant sincerely hoped it dealt with her earlier comment about him not taking her to bed again. The Over my dead body remark she had thrown at him. Because vampire dust had to be put behind them for the night, and the rogue Lycan would be impossible to track after sunrise. That left just one more thing to fill his mind.
Paxton, in his arms.
Rest.
Comfort.
Safety for the time being.
And the chance to be together.
*
With her hand in his, Paxton stood upright, considering how long it would take Grant to figure out that the rebellious streak he was thinking about hadn’t gone away. Rather, it was rising like an internal storm to impel her to take action.
She had to find that rogue Lycan with or without Grant’s assistance, and in spite of what she had said. What was left of her sanity depended on it. Everything she had been told not to believe hinged on locating him. And though she desperately wanted to go with Grant and find a temporary respite from the night’s bizarre events, she would never have a moment’s peace unless she put the ideas she was forming to the test.
Only by seeing that Lycan in human form would she be able to understand the familiarity she felt in his presence. That familiarity had a taste, a smell and an uncertain texture that came at her in a jumble without translating into anything tangible.
She thanked the stars still twinkling overhead that Grant didn’t fold her into his arms the way they both wanted him to. She’d be an idiot if she didn’t want closer contact with something so fine. She longed for his mouth on hers and to hear his whispered assurances.
Yet accepting pleasure from her lover would postpone what had to be done. Finding that damn Lycan felt like a necessity. If Grant loved anything about her, he’d have to let her solve the mystery of Desperado.
And there were plenty of mysteries to go around. Chief among them was the ambiguity of that all-powerful fate Grant had mentioned, and how her father could have planned all of this down to the minutest detail. She had heard Grant’s thoughts on this.
“You are adept at hiding things from me,” Grant said as she pondered those things.
She knew, because he did not hide the thought from her, that he wanted to brush the sand from her back, but refrained.
“You asked if I knew you after our short time together,” she began. “It’s weird that feel as if I do. Physical intimacy aside, if werewolves can read the minds and thoughts of other werewolves, every one of them is deeply exposed to everyone else. I guess this makes werewolves closer to each other than any group of humans could ever be.”
She hadn’t included herself in that statement, using them, instead of us, as if she had not fully accepted her own situation.
She went on. “Thoughts and emotions become intimate, possibly speeding up the process in a…”
“Relationship,” Grant finished for her.
His eyes were luminous. She was a sucker for looking into them.
“That barely scratches the surface of what we feel—what I feel,” he explained. “I can’t hide that from you. So you are the question mark here. And our close bond tells me you’re planning something.”
“Then I suppose I’m not hiding things very well,” Paxton said.
“I can’t just let you go after that rogue, Paxton. What kind of partner would I be if I believed danger wasn’t an issue?”
“Don’t you mean alpha? What kind of alpha would you be?”
“Partner,” he reiterated with a crisp head shake. “You won’t find anything out here in the daylight. I can promise you that.”
“Then I’ll wait.”
He shook his head again. “There’s going to be a full moon tonight that complicates things.”
Paxton felt the dawning of a new day without searching for the sunrise. She felt the last of the stars disappear. “Will you lock me up in that cage again, or try to?” she asked with the tone of a dare.
“What I will do is ask that you include me in whatever you have in mind to do, so you’re not doing it alone.”
“And if you don’t approve?”
“We’re way past that, I think,” Grant said. “Aren’t we?”
He was right, of course. They were past having arguments over secrets both of them wanted exposed. Grant couldn’t hide from her his wish to find out who the rogue was. He wanted that nearly as badly as she did.
“We’ve been chasing that Lycan for four months. What makes you think you would be able to find him?” he asked.
“His eyes.”
In silence, Grant waited out the time it took for her to explain the remark. She knew he was hoping she’d bring up real feelings. True feelings. But how was she to talk about a secret that had been buried so deep inside her, and for so long, that it had taken on the aspects of any other dream?
“I’ve seen the big Lycan before,” she confessed, hating the wobble in her voice, loving Grant even more for not arguing about how impossible her statement was.
Paxton doubled back over the automatic, uncensored, term she had used for her feelings for Grant. Love. Was it possible to fall in love in one incredibly long, seemingly endless day? Surely people recognized the difference between love and lust and animal magnetism. Because who would believe in love at first sight, especially with all the wolf issues attached to it?
Maybe what she felt had to do with jealousy. Envy for a man who’d had the pleasure of remaining in the West and who had carved out a life for himself here. A man with a family. A pack.
Her own guardians, substitutes for her missing parents, had died several years back, leaving her stranded without emotional ties of any kind.
Grant seemed to understand her vulnerabilities when he really knew nothing concrete about her life. She hadn’t shared any of it. Strong arms waited to encircle her. All she had to do was take one step. And he knew nothing.
Paxton had never loved his face as much as she did right then. Grant’s liquid blue gaze contained the power and the voodoo to chase away pain and nearly everything else. Looking into those blue depths distanced the mystery of the rogue and made jumping into Grant’s arms doable.
Animal magnetism.
Yes.
Love?
“Soon,” he whispered to her. “After we rest we can talk it all over and formulate a plan.”
“Before the next moon rises,” she said.
His nod caused a lock of his hair to fall becomingly across his forehead. And yet this gloriously capable, sublimely sexy creature who was picture-perfect in all ways, if no one held the werewolf part against him, would always be dangerous. Being in his world meant chaos might rain down each time the damn moon got near to showing her freaking face.
“We rest first, Paxton. Do we have a deal?”
What Grant was saying made sense. Rest. Food. Daylight for decisions. It made all the sense in the world. Besides the God-awful aches, she was bone tired, trembling and didn’t remember the last meal she’d had.
“Fries.” Grant supplied the answer to her unspoken thought with a smile so dazzling, so inviting after the night they’d had, Paxton wanted to forego real food and eat him up.
Chase away the bad thoughts…
Replace mystery with the warmth of Grant’s arms.
Damn it. Damn all of this.
Paxton took a step toward him, almost ignoring the rustle in the brush beside them.
Chapter 31
Instead of slipping his arms around Paxton, Grant spun her behind him and took a fighting stance. He was there? Maybe the damn rogue had returned after all, with dawn on the doorstep.
No. Maybe not. There was no scent. No feel of Were presence. This was something else.
The sky was pink with a yellow glow. Mountains rising above them cast long shadows over the wash in a last mingling of dark and light. Grant’s skin chilled as he faced the rustle of n
earby brush. His muscles corded in anticipation.
“You are an idiot. More of one than I had previously presumed,” he said, in case he was wrong about the rogue and Paxton’s delicious scent was overpowering the rest of his senses.
Behind him, Paxton was shaking with fatigue, and he couldn’t help her with that. It appeared that he had been wrong about finding nothing out here in the daylight. Even with the sun not fully up, their sandy surroundings would now have been visible to anyone.
The next surprise was a shock that made his nerves sing. Out of the shadows, a woman appeared. Almost a woman, Grant’s senses immediately corrected, because the filmy apparition hovered over the sand as if slightly suspended from it.
Of course, a voice in the back of Grant’s mind warned, that assessment couldn’t be right. This wasn’t a wolf and couldn’t be vampire this close to daylight unless stories about bloodsuckers had gotten the facts wrong.
“Stay back,” he warned, tired enough to hear the wariness in his voice, worried that any opponent would pick up on that, too.
The woman didn’t speak. Grant didn’t actually see a mouth from where he stood. He felt her eyes on him without seeing them, either. The closer he looked, the more he strained to fill in the features of a diaphanous face, the harder it was to make out anything at all…which made him wonder if he was finally losing it.
There was no real contact with this being. Without acknowledging that she actually saw either Paxton or him, the creature turned away. After gliding several feet from them, she stopped again. Grant took this as an invitation to follow her, whoever and whatever she was.
Paxton seemed to understand this better than he did. Possibly he had grown too cautious in his alpha job because he could not fathom what kind of opponent was left after rogue werewolves and vampires.
“Follow her,” Paxton said. “Please.”
Obviously Paxton saw the creature, too.
“Please,” she repeated, leaning against him with her hands on his shoulders. Her hands were cold.
“Do you know what it is?” he dared to ask her.
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