Alec (Keepers Of The Lake Book 3)

by Emilia Hartley

  Charlie groaned and yanked open the nightstand drawer. It snapped in her hands and her stomach hit the floor. She would have to buy a replacement because no amount of wood glue was going to fix that drawer.

  Just like she thought, Norman’s number flashed across the screen. The picture she’d given him was a house on fire. That’s what it felt like living with him. Everything was an emergency. If his dragons didn’t react fast enough, he would flip out on them. Usually her. Because she was alone, and everyone knew it.

  Her parents were human. They couldn’t swoop in and save her from Norman’s abuse. Not that he ever hit her. His abuse was more subtle. He was a snake with a forked tongue. She’d been lashed by it too many times.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he snapped as soon as the phone stopped ringing.

  Charlie swallowed her sigh. “Sorry. My car broke down. I needed to stop for the night.”

  “Where are you? I’ll send someone out to fetch you.”

  “No,” she nearly shouted. She placed her palm over her heart and willed it to slow. The thought of Norman’s dragons coming to take her away from her home sent her into a panic. Her beast dug in its claws, holding onto the ground beneath them. “I’m okay. I’ll be home in a couple of days. I wanted a vacation, right? I guess I was meant to add a couple of days to it.”

  Norman made a sound on the other end. It was somewhere between mumbling and growling. She could never tell if he was actually saying anything when he did that. Norman was an old dragon. He had lived through nearly a century. The world had changed a lot in that time, but Norman hadn’t.

  He wanted the women to make dinner, clean his house, do the laundry, and be there whenever he needed them. There were a few women that Norman had brought into his bedroom. Those were the dead-eyed shifters Charlie saw around the house. She feared the day that Norman turned that kind of attention on her. So far, she’d escaped it.

  This vacation she had bargained for might drag her closer to that fate, though. She owed Norman for the small respite. He would make sure to call in on the favor. She hoped he thought she would be too feisty to break yet doubted that he considered anything too much for him.

  Charlie didn’t want to go back. The Pacific Northwest was beautiful, but that wasn’t where her heart was. She’d left it here, on the shores of this lake. Now that she was close to getting it back, she knew that going back to Norman and his clan would destroy her.

  This was her last chance. It was happily ever after or a soul-crushing life.

  “I want you home by Wednesday.”

  “But that’s only two days away! I can’t…what if the car…” Charlie rushed to find an excuse, any to make the week last a little longer. If she was going to make it back to the clan, she would have to drive all day and night Tuesday.

  It was already Saturday evening. There wasn’t enough time. Charlie wanted to scream and shout, but Norman’s silence gave her nothing to fight against. He didn’t give her a chance to change his mind.

  “Alright,” she muttered. “Wednesday.”

  She hung up before Norman could make more commands. He would send her a berating text after, since his younger dragons had shown him how to use that feature on a smart phone now. She could ignore it.

  Two days were all she had. She wasn’t sure if it would be enough. She was tempted to stretch it into two, to tempt fate and Norman’s patience. If Alec could fall for her in that time, then she would never have to go back. She would have not only a new clan, but a mate to protect her. Norman didn’t touch the women with mates.

  Back in the kitchen, she saw that the sun had gone down, but there was still a light glowing outside. When she peeled back the curtains, she saw Alec bent over her car. He looked greasy and sweaty and absolutely delicious. Her mouth watered.

  When they were younger, Alec had been a scrawny boy with enough wattage in his smile to convince everyone otherwise. The man she watched take her car apart piece by piece had muscles. They stretched and bulged as he moved. Oh, and that ass. Charlie wanted to worship those butt muscles.

  She grabbed the hard cider, popped the cap, and went outside. In the bubble of light, it was just the two of them. The outside world didn’t exist. She sat on the lawn beside the parts that Alec had pulled from her car. He didn’t notice her at first, so she had a moment to pretend that nothing had changed, that they still knew each other. They were strangers now, though.

  Alec knew nothing about her wild youth or Norman and his clan. Charlie could only wonder what happened to the clan here. Everything had changed, but in this quiet moment, they were two friends against the world.

  “Are you going to sit there and watch me work all night?” Alec asked, though there was no hint of annoyance in his voice. If anything, he was playful.

  It made her heart flutter with hope.

  “Are you going to waste your night away, working on my car?” Charlie shot back.

  “I just might. This car is in great condition. It should start, but it won’t.” Alec shook his head at the car.

  All Charlie could do was shrug. She had a million funny things she wanted to say, but she couldn’t say them out loud or Alec would catch onto her lie. The car wouldn’t start because she was a tinkering fool who thought she could force fate to do her bidding. It’d been too long since fate gave her anything good. She was owed a happily ever after.

  “Where did you get the scars on your wrist from?” Alec asked.

  When she looked up, she found his gaze fixed on her arms. She wanted to hide them but forced herself to raise her chin instead.

  “After I was made…things weren’t easy. At first, I wanted to die. Then, the other scars are from the times I just wanted to be the cause of my own pain.”

  There was a low growl in the back of his throat. It satisfied her, in a strange way. Alec, even if he didn’t recognize her, seemed to care about her already.

  “Don’t ask me about the rest of my life. It’s been a wild ride and I could keep you up all night.”

  Alec glanced over his shoulder, in the direction of the lake. He rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand and left a black smear of engine grease. “I don’t think I could sleep anyway.”

  She wanted to ask why, what was going on, but he didn’t remember her. He didn’t know that she had a foot in his world. Charlie was so desperate for Alec to come to his own realization, that she didn’t want to give him any hints.

  But, maybe, she could tell him a bit about her life.

  “If you want the long story, I guess I could give it to you.”

  Alec didn’t look at her, but he nodded.

  Charlie spent the last hours of the night and the first hours of the morning regaling Alec with the crazy things she’d done to get in trouble over her first seven years in the Pacific Northwest. She’d played the distraction for her friends to rob convenience stores, had even gotten caught when they left her behind. She told him about her first tattoo and how it meant nothing anymore. It was just a reminder to never go back to a life where it held meaning.

  Through all of it, Alec was quiet. He began to slowly and carefully reassemble her car. She only quieted when he got behind the wheel and tried to turn the key again. The engine didn’t turn over. Nothing at all happened. Alec scowled at the steering wheel.

  Where were the bright smiles she remembered? The ones that said anything was possible. She needed them right about now. The way Alec’s eyes kept flicking to the lake, she wondered if they had drowned. This man wasn’t the same boy she remembered.

  What if the dream she’d held for so long was gone? The boy she wanted to love her had died somewhere in the past fifteen years and was replaced by a surly, brooding man. She didn’t think she would be trading one abusive dragon for another, but this wasn’t her Alec.

  She pushed off the ground and hesitated. Two days was all she had. Wednesday was coming far faster than she wanted to admit. If she was a witch, she would have cast a spell to make Sunday and Monday stretch
into infinity. She would put this night on repeat so they could sit here and talk until the sun pressed against the horizon again and again.

  But Charlie was none of those things. She couldn’t command time or stop the sun from rising. She was just a woman, desperate to find a fix for the life she was trapped in. Alec seemed like the right thing, but she was afraid that she would never get what she needed out of him.

  “If I can’t get this fixed, we will arrange for you to get home. One way or another.”

  She knew Alec was trying to be reassuring, but the words were needles in her heart. They pinned her to the life she was desperate to leave behind. She felt like a butterfly, flapping its fragile wings in a futile attempt to escape death. Running her hands over her face, she then offered Alec a tight smile. It probably didn’t reach her eyes, but she doubted he could see that in the dark.

  “I wouldn’t mind sticking around,” she supplied. “This is…it’s a nice place.”

  His sigh was heavy, laden with things she couldn’t decipher. “It used to be a nice place. A lot has happened here. I plan on changing things, but I don’t know if I can pull them off.”

  “Then, wouldn’t you need help?”

  “No,” he said too quickly. “No. You should go home. Where you’re safe.”

  Charlie snorted. That drew Alec’s attention to her. He studied her for a long moment, making her feel like he was peeling away the layers she had built around herself. He saw through the badass she tried to portray. He cut away the hard layer of uncaring she’d carefully cultivated.

  Could he see the scared little girl beneath it all? The one torn away from the family she should have been a part of? The one forced to be a servant in a loveless clan? She wished he could. She wished he could read all that without speaking the words aloud. She wasn’t strong enough to acknowledge them. It was as if speaking her pain would make it permanent.

  She didn’t want to tie herself to this life. There was an illusion of freedom that she was clinging to. One that meant she could just leave, and Norman wouldn’t send people after her.

  “The lake isn’t safe,” Alec said without meeting her eyes.

  The moment was gone. Alec had seen nothing. He didn’t know that she was breaking apart, that she was begging him for release, or that the last thing she wanted to do was get back in that car and drive to Washington.

  Charlie got to her feet, said a quiet goodbye, and slipped out of the bubble of light. The night was still dark. It obscured her as she walked toward the lake. It’d been too long since she’d jumped into the fresh water. She was peeling her shirt over her head when her beast growled.

  Her feet stopped. The dragon dug in its heels and refused to take another step toward the water. It lapped against the shore, gentle and unassuming. Charlie didn’t understand her beast’s reluctance. She pushed herself forward once more, but the beast snarled. It turned a glare toward the water.

  The beast didn’t like it. There was something in the lake that set off all of her beast’s survival instincts. Charlie hadn’t gotten this far by ignoring her beast. So, she pulled her shirt back over her head and regarded the water, half expecting a lake monster to rise above the waves.

  The wind whispered in her ears and toyed with the pink streak in her hair. She reached to push her hair back and paused. Her heart stuttered. Was she seeing this right?

  A shape slithered over the water’s surface and then disappeared. A few feet later, she saw it again. Then, as she held her breath, she watched a head break the water. It turned toward her. She swore that the eyes gleamed red in the dark, like a demon that was coming for her.

  Charlie knew what it felt like to be hunted by demons. And this wasn’t it. The creature staring her down was angry. And it was possibly very mean. But it wasn’t the nightmare she’d lived with for the past fifteen years. She wanted to yell at it, ask it to come for her. The beast under her skin was itching to break free.

  But the creature disappeared again. She let loose the breath trapped in her lungs. The urge to fight faded with it. Charlie was nothing but tired. Her body ached and begged for bed. Trudging back to her cabin, she saw that Alec was still working on her car.

  If he didn’t know who she was, then why was he so determined to fix that car? Charlie didn’t understand. The only answer she could summon was that Alec didn’t want her here. Glancing back over her shoulder, she had an idea why.

  She could have told him that she wasn’t scared of the monster in the lake. If anything, she was confused. Their lake didn’t have a monster in it when they were younger. Where had the thing come from? Why was Alec so threatened by it?

  5

  Alec needed her to leave. A feeling crept up his spine like cold fingertips. The air around him chilled and he knew that Zane was watching. How the boy Alec once knew had become the monster they all feared was what Alec couldn’t fathom.

  If he could send Charlie home, then he would be able to sleep easy at night. Knowing that she was two doors down, Alec couldn’t rest. His beast prodded him awake every time he began to drift off. He stayed out with her car all night, not because he was still working on it, but because it gave him a reason to be closer to her.

  He would be able to see anything that stepped near her cabin.

  It also meant that his body gave out and crashed somewhere around four in the morning. He woke with a start, the sky blooming pink over the lake. He leapt to his feet and took in his surroundings. Nothing had changed. Charlie’s cabin was still in one piece. Well, mostly. Zane’s previous assault on it had destroyed the back wall, which Cole and Jude hadn’t bothered to give a permanent fix.

  They were probably afraid Zane would just knock it down again.

  Alec rubbed at the scruff on his chin. It was quickly growing into a beard. He hadn’t found time to shave since he’d come back. It itched a little, but he liked the way Charlie looked at him now, and he didn’t want to change a thing.

  A groan gurgled up his throat. That was a thought he needed to banish. Charlie, his Charlotte, couldn’t stay. This place was filled with Alec’s mistakes, and he was starting to wonder if he could fix them at all. He could never change what he did to Charlie. There was no going back for her.

  She was a dragon. It seemed she’d grown into it, too, because Alec hadn’t seen a hint of her beast since she arrived. That must have meant that she and her beast were on good terms. They didn’t fight for control.

  Knowing that Charlie was managing well eased his worries, but he would never escape the guilt that had taken up home in his heart for the longest time. A new guilt had appeared beside it. Zane trusted his family, and it got him trapped in the lake. Alec wasn’t sure he could fix that mistake, either. He was useless in the face of his screw-ups.

  Alec had to focus on the things he could fix. That meant getting in his truck. He left the cabins before anyone else woke for the day. That way he didn’t have to look any of them in the eye. They wouldn’t see the dark bags weighing down his face.

  In town, he kept his head down. He didn’t disturb the pack of shifters. According to his clanmates, the pack was under new management and doing well. They didn’t bother Alec when he stopped at the home improvement store and bought materials to rebuild a wall. Some of the local shifters were at the diner when he stopped by, but they barely spared him a glance.

  “Blueberry pancakes? Again?” the waitress asked, tilting her head provocatively.

  Alec wished he’d brought Asher. Then the playboy shifter could have dealt with the flirtatious waitress. Alec just nodded. The beast growled at him anytime he thought about saying anything else to the girl.

  Alec knew what that meant, but he ignored it the best he could. The beast settled down after Alec paid and took up a stool.

  “You!” Asher shouted, bounding up the steps of the cabin.

  Charlie leaned back from the oversized man. Asher hadn’t been this big when she left. He’d grown at least a foot and a half. In width. And height, too.

&
nbsp; Asher planted his hands on his hips and bent to look her in the eye. “I remember you. You think you’re being sneaky, but you’re from here.”

  Her heart thumped. She tried to smile and shake her head, like she didn’t know what he was talking about. Alec wasn’t anywhere to be found, and his truck was gone. She’d looked earlier. So, she watched the gravel drive anxiously waiting for him to stumble into this conversation.

  “Charlotte, right? You used to run with Alec and Zane.”

  Charlie swallowed. Her teeth were clenched tight. She would bite Asher’s head off if she needed to, just to keep him quiet. Could she convince him otherwise? She opened her mouth, ready to lie, but the words died on her lips. Her shoulders slumped.

  “Yes,” she hissed. “But don’t tell anyone.”

  “Why the hell not? We could celebrate. It’s practically a reunion up in here.”

  “You can’t!” Panic swelled in her chest, crackling with frantic energy. “No one can know who I am.”

  “Then why did you come back? I don’t get it.”

  Charlie took two steps back and fell into a porch chair. The weight of the world tried to crush her. She could barely look up at Asher.

  “He needs to come to the realization on his own. If he doesn’t…then I don’t know if this is where I’m meant to be.”

  Asher didn’t take a chair. He sat on the porch and crossed his legs so that he looked up at her. The honesty in his eyes was alarming. This was the kind of man who would love to blabber her secret to anyone who would listen. She needed to find a way to make sure Asher stayed quiet.

  She stuck out her hand, pinky extended. Asher gave it a dubious look.

  “Promise me. Promise that you will keep my secret.”

  “Let me get this right. You want me to pinky promise?”

  “Damn straight. Do this for me and I will let you leave my porch unharmed.” Charlie didn’t know if she had what it took to back-up her threat, but Asher just grinned.