He was dead serious, but even so, Elizabeth failed to understand how Dante could possibly pose that much of a danger to her or anyone. That being said, however, she surely detested the motel and had been considering sleeping in her Mercedes to avoid it. Perhaps staying with Dean Quinn wouldn’t be such a terrible idea, but she wasn’t about to break her date with Dante.
“I might like to stay at your cabin,” she allowed and caught a bright glimmer of interest flare behind Dean’s dark, inky eyes. “But I’ll expect you to be a gentleman if I do.”
“How was I not a gentleman last night?” he hotly returned. “I played your game.”
She scowled. “It wasn’t a game and I practically had to nag you into being gentlemanly towards me.”
He rolled his eyes, but agreed, “I’ll be a gentleman. Happy?”
She was. Immensely. But she refused to show any indication of that fact.
“You can help me with my bags. All my things are sprawled out in that horrible motel room. I’ll need a hot bath and a nap,” she informed him.
“Let’s do it.”
Chapter Five
DEAN
As soon as Dean offered his cabin to Elizabeth Halsey, he seriously questioned whether or not he’d made a terrible mistake. On the one hand, he definitely did not like how she had been blindly associating with Dante. She was clearly at risk. At any moment the dark lord could turn her werewolf or at the very least, capture and torture her like he had attempted to do with so many others. Dean felt compelled to save Elizabeth, like he felt compelled to protect all of the residents of Devil’s Fist.
But on the other hand, inviting Elizabeth into his cabin meant that he would be spending a lot of time with Elizabeth, which would be good for keeping her safe but perhaps bad for his sanity. This was, after all, Elizabeth Halsey, the same woman who had literally snapped her fingers at him and said things like, chop chop if she didn’t think he was moving fast enough. He obviously didn’t like that side of her personality—quite frankly, it was the one and only side of her that he’d ever seen—and he didn’t much appreciate being treated like a second-class citizen.
Complicating matters was the unavoidable attraction he couldn’t help but feel towards her. Part of that attraction was built on a puzzled foundation of intrigue and horror. She was destined to become his one true mate? It boggled the mind and while Troy hadn’t once been wrong when it came to understanding his foresight visions, it still refused to compute in Dean’s brain. And yet, simply knowing that this was the girl for him caused him to feel an overwhelming sense of affection towards Elizabeth.
All told, it was starting to feel like a war was raging inside of him, his head and his hormones at complete and utter odds.
He held his tongue in her motel room. Elizabeth’s behavior and treatment towards him was exactly as he’d expected. She stood at the side of the stale motel room and pointed to her suitcase, snapped her fingers to indicate the mess of garments she’d left sprawled here and there so that he would follow her orders collecting them. While she didn’t lift a finger when it came to gathering her own belongings, she certainly had a lot to say about the manner in which he consolidated her stuff, especially when they reached the bathroom. Christ, who needed this much makeup?
The one saving grace was that they had driven over in separate vehicles, Elizabeth having turned her nose up at Dean’s pickup truck and scoffed when he mentioned the AC was on the fritz. It meant that no matter how badly Dean might want to strangle her in this motel room, he’d have a solid twenty miles to cool off in the privacy of his own truck before having to deal with her further at his own cabin.
“Did you check under the bed?” she asked as he lifted and lowered her giant suitcase into the trunk of her car.
“Why don’t you check under the bed?” he snapped.
Aghast, she asked him if he was blind then pointed to her bare, delicate knees and said, “Between the two of us, who do you think is better equipped to get down on their hands and knees.”
Dean briefly envisioned himself throttling her but the urge came with a strange swell of arousal. Tempering his rage, he reminded himself that going into her motel room—alone—might be just the respite he needed to keep himself from killing her.
It didn’t bode well that he had such impulses, considering that he main goal was to bodyguard her and keep her safe from harm.
“What could have possibly rolled under the bed?” he complained, but it was a rhetorical question.
He didn’t stick around to watch her carefully sculpted eyebrows shoot up to her bottle-blond hairline. He marched back into her now vacant room, stooped down onto his hands and knees, and checked under the bed where there wasn’t a single thing but lint and dust bunnies.
He felt his mouth tug into a furious grin. Oh, she was good, wasn’t she? Elizabeth hadn’t for one second believed that anything she owned might have migrated under the bed. She was testing him. Enjoying watching Dean jump through whatever hoops she could dream up. He sprang to his feet, realized that his incisors had elongated into fangs that he might like to sink into her throat, and returned to the parking lot, making a concerted effort to reel his teeth back into human shape.
“All good,” he informed her. “You can follow me.”
As he neared his pickup truck, Elizabeth hesitated next to the driver’s side door of her Mercedes and looked lost.
She’s got to be kidding, he thought.
He almost ignored her and proceeded to climb into his own vehicle. Almost.
“This is called a door handle,” he explained, pointing to the handle on her car door and doing his best to treat her like an imbecile. Demonstrating, he popped the door open and added, “This is how you open a car door.”
“Thank you,” she smiled as she slipped inside, demonstrating for him that he’d just accomplished what he should’ve done in the first place without her having prompted him.
When she batted those long, black eyelashes of hers up at him, he fought the urge to roll his eyes and sigh. Instead, he simply shut her car door and started off for his truck.
The drive out west to the Quinn cabins was not long enough.
While he tried to use the time to compose himself and brainstorm strategies he could use to prevent Elizabeth from embedding herself so deeply under his skin that he might hogtie her just to shut her up, all he really thought about was grabbing and kissing her. It made absolutely no sense. How could he possibly feel turned on by someone who was treating him like crap?
But that was just it. Technically, she wasn’t treating him like crap. She was encouraging him to dote on her. Well, that was her surface level behavior. Dean was smart enough to be able to see that what she was really doing to revealing her loneliness and showing him that she needed him. Maybe she was a needy girl. Maybe she didn’t know how to gain mature attention from a man. Maybe she was used to getting what she wanted by acting in a way that made him want to hold her head under water. But at the end of the day, it seemed that Elizabeth Halsey was desperate for his doting attention. She wanted him focused on her and catering to her. Maybe if he saw that possibility through to its farthest conclusion, he would eventually dig deep enough to discover the real Elizabeth Halsey.
It was a thought. Optimistic perhaps. And it wasn’t lost on him that maybe he was kidding himself.
He pulled up to his modest cabin that was tucked in-between Shane and Conor’s, leaving enough room for Elizabeth to pull in next to him, and killed the engine.
He probably shouldn’t have opened her car door after he’d climbed out of his truck, but that’s what he did. But he didn’t give her room to step out of it. Instead, he leaned in and she gasped, assuming that he was going to kiss her or touch her leg. He did neither, as he reached for the trunk release lever that was set into the floor near the car door. As soon as the trunk popped open, he heard her let out a quivering breath of relief. Or was that disappointment?
He didn’t care.
“Thi
s is where you live?” she asked, a bit skeptical for his liking, as he hoisted her tremendous suitcase out of the trunk.
“No, I’m about five miles away. We’ll have to hike through the woods. You’re cool with that, right?”
It took her a moment to realize he was messing with her and she scowled with a dry, little laugh. “Very funny.”
“Just remember what the motel room was like,” he advised as he unlocked the front door of his cabin and carried her suitcase inside. “Keep everything in perspective.”
He crossed straight through into his bedroom and placed her suitcase down at the foot of the bed. Elizabeth hadn’t made it in very far. By the sounds of her clicking high heels, he approximated she was lingering somewhere in the foyer.
Dean had never wished he’d had a guest bedroom in his life. Unlike his brothers’ cabins, most of which were two stories and had multiple bedrooms, his was a ranch-style, one-story home. It didn’t have many rooms because he didn’t need many rooms. He lived a simple life and felt that the only space he really needed was outside anyway, in the wilderness.
He found Elizabeth in the living room. She was standing and looking around. She looked hesitant as if she couldn’t decide whether or not she would contract some kind of disease if she actually sat down or touched anything.
When she offered him a tight smile and said, “Lovely,” he could tell she was being appeasing.
“Thanks,” he told her. “You can have my bedroom. I’ll sleep out here.”
“Did you change the sheets?”
He felt his jaw clench and tried to loosen his large hands. They’d balled into fists.
“You said you wanted to shower,” he mentioned, changing the subject.
She took his comment to mean that he would ready her room while she bathed and said, “Good idea.”
“Bathroom is right there,” he informed her, but she first trailed through the cabin to his bedroom. He heard her groan and asked, “What’s the problem?”
“Would you lift my suitcase onto the bed?” she asked as soon as he came into the room. “You’re so strong.”
A compliment? He was skeptical, but when he neared her suitcase to oblige her, she didn’t readily step aside. It was as though she wanted him to invade her personal space and when he did, she took hold of his sculpted arm and felt his bicep muscle.
“I bet lifting heavy things is no problem for you,” she said.
She had been consistently antagonistic towards him as far as he was concerned, but the trouble was that now that she’d offered the most barebones compliment, it made his chest swell and the rest of him stiffen beneath his jeans. Man, she must have this down to a science, he thought.
He fought the urge to throw her onto the bed, hike her skirt up, and show her exactly how strong he was.
“A little room?”
She took her sweet time releasing him and as soon as she did, he lifted her suitcase onto the bed and popped it open for her.
Was she staring at him? And smiling?
He couldn’t figure out what game she was playing and meeting her gaze didn’t help.
“I’ll get the water going,” he offered in his most unimpressed tone. “It takes a while to get hot.”
He turned for the door and she mentioned, “I’ll need a towel.”
“Obviously,” he grumbled.
“Bring it here?”
He did a soldierly job of not groaning as he left for the bathroom. After turning the shower on and adjusting the temperature to what better be her liking, he grabbed a clean towel from the rack—Christ, they were all clean, he wasn’t an animal—and started back for the bedroom to give it to her.
To his immense surprise, when he returned, he caught Elizabeth in a state of undress. She squealed and clutched her blouse to her crotch to cover herself up and tried to shield her chest even though she was wearing a bra.
“You asked for a towel!” he barked.
“I didn’t think you’d be back so quickly!” she exclaimed.
He chucked the towel at her then left, closing the bedroom door behind himself and wondering why she insisted on being so damn impossible to please.
***
Just as Elizabeth Halsey was stepping into a hot shower, Dean having tucked himself in the kitchen to make a fresh pot of coffee not that doing so would expel the woman out of his brain, through the forest some seven miles west Sheriff Rick Abernathy angled his police issued SUV into the parking lot near the corral stables at Yellowstone National Park.
He was hesitant to kill the engine and pull the key from the ignition. He was even more hesitant to climb out into the cool, dusky night. And the last thing he wanted to do was start off for the private meeting that he had unfortunately no way of getting out of.
From his SUV, he eyed the stables and the grassy field beside it, looking out for his daughter, Whitney. She had been working as a corral at Yellowstone, tending to the many horses there and leading horseback riding tours, ever since graduating college a number of years back. Whitney went above and beyond when it came to her responsibilities at Yellowstone, and Rick happened to know that afterhours she often took her favorite stallion, Buttons, out on the trails for fun. He would like to think that his daughter had immediately rushed off to meet Shane at his cabin after work. They had countless arrangements to make for their upcoming wedding, and Rick would like to trust that his daughter wouldn’t catch him at the National Park.
The thought of Whitney seeing him with Dante Alighieri turned his blood to ice in his veins.
He scanned the parking area, looking out for her car, but his vantage point wasn’t great.
He decided that should Whitney catch sight of him with the dark lord who had been terrorizing the Fist for months, he would offhandedly mention that he was still actively investigating the man, even though it was no secret around these parts that all cases against Alighieri had been dropped.
After sending up a little prayer to the Lord that his Whitney was safe with Shane at home, he climbed out of his SUV, straightened out his taupe-colored sheriff’s uniform and snugged his large sheriff’s hat on his head, and started towards the grassy area where Dante had instructed him, through Eddie Friendly, to meet him.
Honest to God, if Professor Gaylord Geer III wasn’t otherwise lost in a lover’s fog with Sasha Quinn, he would’ve ordered the elderly man to come with him. Rick knew how to subdue Dante. The rules of captive engagement. It only required piercing the dark lord’s soulless heart and uttering commands and chants. That’s what he would’ve liked the professor for. Those chants. He’d heard them once or twice, but not a word of it had stuck since they were in Latin.
Maybe that was for the best. Going against Troy Quinn wouldn’t be the smartest thing to do either, but it was killing him—with every passing second—that Dante was able to roam free and do as he pleased.
Rick felt his heart leap up his throat as he came into view of the stables, but as he slid his eyes in the direction of the corrals, he didn’t see his precious Whitney. He let out a rocky breath and scanned the tourists and hikers who were emerging from the various trails who were losing the light and heading towards their parked vehicles because of it.
Detective Eddie Friendly was sucking on a cigarette in the shade of a nearby evergreen. The audacity! It was one thing to smoke outside of the stationhouse on Main Street and pollute the air as children walked by with their parents. But to light up at the National Park when it was both disgusting and illegal really rubbed Rick the wrong way.
“Put that out,” he barked as he neared the detective. “Don’t you know it’s against the law to smoke in the park?”
“Don’t you know,” he countered with a sneering smirk, “that so long as I have my badge clipped to my belt, I can do whatever the hell I want?”
Rick frowned at him and had half a mind to slap the cigarette right out of him grinning mouth, but he didn’t want to make the situation worse for himself.
“Where’s Alighier
i?” he asked impatiently.
“Let’s walk.”
Ordinarily, he would assert himself and demand answers, but a walk wouldn’t be such a bad idea. With the dusky light, he hadn’t been able to see into the stables and therefore couldn’t tell one way or the other if Whitney was still here.
As Eddie turned towards the trail for Eagle’s Pass, Rick followed after him and it wasn’t until they’d disappeared into the shady woods that he told him, “I stripped Dante out of the police database, like he asked. What’s this meeting all about?”
“You’ll see,” said the detective as he flicked his cigarette butt into the woods.
Son of a bitch!
They walked in silence for a bit, Rick fuming under the surface of his tempered façade and Eddie conducting himself with an air of importance he didn’t deserve.
After they rounded a tight bend, they came upon Dante, who was focused on his cell phone.
Christ, he looked like a damn fool dressed in a tailored suit and patent leather loafers in the middle of Yellowstone.
“You signed off on my permit, I trust?” Dante asked him as soon as they reached his dark corner of the trail.
“I did,” Rick confirmed.
“Good,” was all he said, his dark eyes still locked on his cell phone as he composed some kind of message. Once he sent it off, he slipped his cell phone into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and said, “I bought the old Halsey land. I’ll be applying for more construction permits. You’ll expedite them immediately.”
“You bought the old Halsey land?” he questioned.
“Does that surprise you?”
“Why?”
“I plan to turn Devil’s Fist into the kind of town I can actually stand living in,” Dante explained as though it was the most logical argument in the world.
What it really meant was that whatever Dante had been up to out on that land, would be even harder to discover than it had been. Yes, the land had always been private technically, but since Halsey hadn’t set foot in the Fist, the police had been able to hunt through it whenever it was suspected that Dante had been using it for nefarious means. If Dante owned it himself, then there would be absolutely no telling what was happening out there on the acreage.
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