“You feel better though, don’t you?”
“I s’pose...” She thought she did, things were slightly clearer in her mind. She flicked her eyes up to meet Cole’s. “I still want to know who my warriors are though.”
“It’s really not that interesting.” Cole picked up a handful of sand and watched it fall through the gaps in his fingers. “My life only truly began when I met Zane. I had your regular, happy, uneventful shifter childhood before that. I’m an only child, born to doctors in Italy. Despite being content, I never truly felt as though I belonged there and was always restless. As soon as I was old enough, I left home to travel.”
“Lucky, until the other night I’d never left Ireland,” Aurora said, wistfully.
“We’ll change that.” Cole nudged her shoulder with his own and they shared a companionable smile. “I saw many countries and experienced many ways of life in the few years I spent travelling, but I still felt something was missing. Then one day, I happened to come across a bar in the back of beyond. I stopped in for a beer, hoping I could find somewhere to stay for the night. Unbeknown to me at the time, it was used by the members of Laignach Faelad. Zane zeroed in on me right away. He has a knack for that, spotting the ones who were meant to be warriors. He and I got talking and I signed up to train and become part of the organisation immediately.”
“It wasn’t long before Jax and Marco turned up in the bar, in much the same way I had, only they knew about Laignach Faelad and were deliberately looking for it. Again, Zane made a beeline for them. Actually, I think it was more that Jax and Zane were drawn to each other. As soon as Jax told us about you and the prophecies, I knew this was what had been missing from my life. You were what I’d been waiting for. Anyway, Zane put together our own team right away and we began working as a unit. Hunter was already in the organisation, with another team, until he sought Jax out one day, having heard he was looking for people for a special mission. And there you have me, in a nutshell.”
“Do you really believe all this prophecy stuff?”
“You don’t?”
“I didn’t. Maybe I didn’t want to, I don’t know. It just sounded so ridiculous, like something you read in a book. The whole idea of a prophecy seemed a bit far-fetched.” She worked through her thoughts, toeing off her boots and burying her feet in the cool sand. “Now, I’m not sure I could deny it if I tried. Something is happening, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah, something is definitely happening,” Cole agreed.
“You know, you’re going to have to pay for making me do the girl talk.” She gave him a sideways glance.
“What’s your favourite food?” Cole asked, uncapping his bottle, and draining the water in one go.
“Crisps,” she answered
“Crisps?” He screwed the cap back on the empty bottle and returned it to the backpack.
“Yep. Crisps. Crisp butties are the food of the Gods.”
“Crisp butties?”
“Yep. Crisps, in a sandwich.”
“Well, since it’s long past dinner time and we haven’t eaten yet. I was going to offer to cook your favourite meal, but I suppose I can do crisp sandwiches.” He snorted a laugh.
“Do you cook real Italian food?” She was suddenly curious.
“I might.”
“Risotto?”
“Perhaps.” He waggled his eyebrows.
“You have a deal.” She stuck out her hand and he shook it.
“Done. Risotto it is. With crisp sandwiches to start.”
“What?”
“I’ve never had a crisp sandwich, I’m curious.”
“Oh, well then we need to educate you. First of all, it’s a butty, sandwich is far too posh a word for crisps.” She stood up and held her hands out to drag him to his feet. “Let’s go for a ride, Beauty.”
“At your service, my queen.” Cole accepted her hands and once standing, bowed theatrically, before pulling off his shirt and getting ready to shift.
“I’m not sure how I feel about that title.”
“I think it suits you. You’re definitely not the bratty princess we all expected.” He winked and began to remove the rest of his clothes, handing them to her, to put in the backpack.
“Off with their heads,” she shouted, putting her boots back on as Cole shifted.
“The trick is to use salt and vinegar crisps and pack as many onto the bread as you can. Really layer them up. When you put the top slice of bread on, smash it down hard, crush all those crisps. Then check for gaps,” Aurora explained, as Jax watched her and Cole, seemingly un-noticed, from the door.
“Gaps?” Cole asked, clearly bemused by the science behind the perfect crisp butty.
“Yeah, find the gaps and fill them,” she said, as though it should be obvious. She turned her plate, inspecting the edges of her sandwich and squeezing crisps into any space that she considered to be a gap.
“Fill them with what?” Cole frowned.
“More crisps, of course, Beauty. You can never have too many crisps in a crisp butty. You want them crumbling and falling out all over your shirt when you take a bite. That’s why you assume the stance.” She smiled, of course she knew Jax was there, but she wasn’t looking his way.
“The stance?” Cole looked at her, wide eyed.
“Yep, like this...” Aurora stood, legs hip width apart and leaned over the counter. She mimicked holding her crisp butty in both hands in front of her mouth and opened her mouth wide, as if to take a bite. Jax stifled a groan.
-Get your mind out of the gutter, O’Conner!
-I can’t help it, that mouth of yours is just so damn tempting.
“Okay, I think I’m ready.” Cole turned his plate in the same way Aurora had and inspected his sandwich from all angles.
“Stop!” Jax yelled, as Cole went to pick up the bread. Jax walked over to the fridge, opened it, and grabbed a bottle before taking the stool next to Aurora. “You forgot the salad cream.”
“No, Jax! You fucking freak! I can’t believe you still do that!” She was visibly horrified.
“Believe me, buddy, you want the salad cream.” Jax pushed the bottle towards Cole, then grabbed two slices of bread and began making his own sandwich.
“No. He doesn’t. You don’t mess with perfection, Jax!” Aurora watched him spread salad cream onto his bread with a look of repulsion on her face. It was a debate they had carried on since childhood.
“The salad cream holds it all together. Nothing falls out when you eat it if you add salad cream. Rory is a purist, the Amedee Ozenfant of the crisp butty world. I’m more open minded, like Salvador Dali,” Jax explained to Cole, loading his bread with crisps while he spoke.
“The salad cream de-crisps the crisps. Soggy crisps equal no crunch. A crisp without a crunch is a very sad crisp, O’Conner,” she countered. His face broke out in a grin, he loved it when she called him by his last name.
Cole was looking back and forth between them when Marco burst into laughter, he and Melaina having followed Jax into the kitchen. “I can’t believe you two are still having this argument.”
“You told me you didn’t argue.” Cole looked to Aurora. Jax briefly wondered what they had been talking about before he got there.
“We didn’t, except about crisp butties.” She shrugged her shoulders, not looking up from her plate.
“A crisp butty is a work of art. You do not want to get it wrong,” Jax added, concentrating carefully on assembling his masterpiece.
“And yet you do exactly that every time you make one,” Aurora accused.
“I’ll cut it in half and eat one half without salad cream and one half with salad cream.” Cole tried to compromise.
“No!” Aurora and Jax both shouted.
“You don’t cut a crisp butty in half, Cole!” Jax gave him a disappointed shake of his head.
“No, you pick that whole beast up in both hands and you get your mouth around all that carby goodness.” Aurora picked up her sandwich and demonstrated
.
Assuming the stance, she opened her mouth wide. Jax had trouble keeping his mind from wandering, what else could she do with that mouth? Cole, Melaina and Marco laughed when she bit into the bread and despite the stance, crisps crumbled and fell all over her chest. Jax’s mind wandered again.
-I can hear you, Jax!
He couldn’t help but grin at her while she crunched her mouthful, he was sure she was deliberately crunching louder to get her point across.
“Go on then.” She gestured to Cole’s plate when she had finally finished chewing. Cole picked up the sandwich and did as he was told. Opening his mouth wide, he bit into it, the crisps fell out and he struggled to keep a straight face.
“Well?” Aurora demanded when he had finished.
“Best food ever?” Jax asked.
“You two,” Cole shook his head, dropped the sandwich back onto the plate in front of him and pointed at them both in turn. “We don’t need to worry about anyone trying to kill either of you. You’re both going to die of malnutrition!”
“Yeah, yeah, but do you love it, Beauty?” Aurora asked.
“Yeah, it’s good.” Cole picked up his sandwich and took another bite.
“Wait until you try it with the salad cream,” Jax said and Aurora punched his shoulder. The blow startled him. She’d hit him before, both in training and while playing around, but this time it hurt. He rubbed his shoulder. “Shit, wild thing, you got strong!”
“Yeah, I did. You better watch yourself because I can take you now,” she threatened.
“Oh, yeah?” Jax raised an eyebrow, a whole other form of taking was on his mind. He lifted his work of art to his mouth and took a bite.
“Mmmhmm…” she mumbled through a mouthful of crisps and bread.
“All right.” Jax swallowed his mouthful, threw the sandwich onto the plate, and stood. Challenge accepted, but not in the way she thought.
“You wanna do this now, Jax?” She wiped her hands down her black, ripped jeans.
“I don’t know if you’re ready for me yet, baby.” His voice became low and husky as he moved around the stool towards her.
Unfazed, Aurora stayed put and watched him suspiciously from the corner of her eye. When he reached her, he spun her stool to face him and did something that had never failed to make her laugh in the past.
“Oh, Jesus! What the hell is he doing?” Melaina screeched, her hands flying to her face.
“He’s trying to make her laugh,” Marco informed her. Ignoring them completely, he made his own version of a crisp butty, which included slices of cheese.
“By humping her leg?” Cole asked, watching Aurora doing her best to ignore the 6’5” wall of muscle, bumping his groin against her thigh.
“One minute he’s name dropping artists as though he has a brain and the next…” Melaina squinted through the gaps in her fingers.
“Always worked before.” Marco shrugged without looking up and right on cue, Aurora burst into a loud fit of cackles.
Jax threw his head back and howled loudly, then humped her leg again, while she cried tears of laughter. After a few seconds, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders, stepped into the gap between her legs and crowded her space, so nobody but he could see her face.
“You still angry with me, wild thing?”
“Twinkle Twinkle little star...” she began, looking up at him, a playful glint in her eye.
“How I wonder what you are?” he asked, knowing it wouldn’t be the right answer. He’d made her laugh, a step in the right direction but he still had work to do.
“I wish I could hit you with my car,” she smirked, pushing her hands lightly against his chest.
“I don’t believe you,” he whispered.
He pressed a kiss her forehead, then plucked the tiny clip from her fringe, letting her hair fall onto her face. Stepping away from her with a satisfied grin, he signalled Marco and Cole to follow him outside. Zane had asked him to round them up earlier for a night training session, before his mate distracted him in the kitchen.
“Shit! I wanna do things nuns wouldn’t approve of to that man!” Aurora confessed, when the men left her and Melaina alone in the kitchen.
“I knew it!” Melaina laughed.
“You did not hear that!” Aurora warned her, blowing her fringe out of her eyes.
Jax had heard it though.
Jax handed Aurora the torn page of the Morrigan prophecy. He’d taken it from the book to prevent anyone else from discovering information about him, in order to protect himself and Aurora. Her face crumpled into a frown as she read and understood the words in front of her. The emotions coming through their bond told of her heartbreak for him and her need to reach out and comfort him over the secrets the prophecy revealed.
“Shit!” she whispered, wide, sympathetic eyes meeting his.
“You see why I had to take it?”
“You couldn’t let this become public. Your parents would be in danger. Fuck, Jax. There’s so much more to this than any of us even began to think. Are you all right?” She patted the bed next to her, wanting him close. He went without hesitation, sharing that same desire.
“Am I all right with the fact that my father is a stranger I’ll never know?” He slumped on the bed next to her and she shuffled closer to him. “When I read it, it didn’t occur to me to question it. I think I always knew in some way that I wasn’t Sean’s. I mean, Mum is a beta, but he’s just a regular pack wolf, no rank. For them to produce Caspian makes sense, not an alpha though. Then there’s the fact that my wolf is black and they’re all silver.”
“Still,” she reached out to him and he leaned into her touch, her fingers dancing along the back of his neck and into the hair at his nape. “It’s not easy finding out your parents have lied to you all your life.”
“I suppose you’d know,” he smiled, sorrowfully.
“Have you spoken to your mum about it?”
“I can’t see any point. Aside from the fact that going back there now puts all of us in danger, the prophecy tells me everything I need to know. My father died before I was born, killed by the vampire king because he was a witch, predicted to conceive the raven queen’s mate with a shifter. Fortunately for me, he never considered that my mother was already pregnant when he killed my father. The man who brought me up, my father’s best friend, took her as his mate and passed me off as his own to protect us both. There it is, what more is there to tell?”
“You have witch blood,” Aurora paused, rubbing a hand absently between Jax’s shoulder blades while she looked at the paper.
“You think that’s significant?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Aurora thought back to Lykos’s story, his Grandmother in particular and the potion she made to suppress the alpha gene.
“I guess we’ll find out the deeper into all this we get,” he answered, picking up on her thoughts but not reacting. He’d done enough arguing over the other wolf with her recently. She was finally beginning to thaw towards him and he wanted to keep it that way.
“You talk about it as though it’s so straight forward. Doesn’t it bother you that our lives were mapped out for us before we were even born?”
“It doesn’t matter what any prophecy tells me, Rory. I know in my heart that I would always be with you. The rest is just shit we have to overcome so we can get our happy ever after.”
“When did you get so romantic?”
“I was always the romantic one in this relationship, I just never got chance to show you before. You better brace yourself, because I plan on blowing you away with romance now that I’ve got you back.” He twisted his body to face her and lowered his head to steal a kiss. She smiled against his lips, accepting the kiss without pulling away for the first time in days and his racing heart relaxed slightly. She pulled him towards her and lowered herself to her back, taking him with her.
“Aurora,” Zane yelled through the closed door.
“For fuck sake!” Jax mumbled against her mou
th.
“Shh!” Aurora smiled up at him. “They’ll never know we’re in here if we’re quiet.”
“I can hear you whispering,” Zane announced through the door. “There’s a phone call for you.”
“Take a message, I’m busy!” Aurora called and Jax’s heart warmed that she wanted Zane to go away and leave them alone together. She was no longer eager to end their moments of affection when they happened.
“No can do.” Zane opened the door and held up his mobile phone, waving it in her direction.
“What the fuck, Zane?” Jax pushed himself up off the bed and rose to his feet. Unhappy that Zane had marched in without permission, he was ready to stand off with the other man over it.
“It’s Lykos, about the dagger.” Zane raised his other hand and spread his fingers in surrender, deliberately avoiding Aurora and looking Jax directly in the eye.
Aurora sighed, kicked her feet over the side of the bed and stood. Reaching out to touch Jax’s hip as she passed him, she approached Zane and took the phone.
“Hey, old man,” Aurora lifted the phone to her ear, not bothering with the speaker since she knew the others could hear both sides of the conversation anyway.
“Aurora…” the lack of smarminess in his voice and use of her real name was an immediate cause for concern.
“What’s wrong?” She honed-in on his mood, wandering out of the bedroom, through the house and into the warm sunlit courtyard. The rest of the team, as though sensing something important was happening, appeared from various locations around the house and joined her in the courtyard.
Unable to help himself, Jax, who had also followed her, wrapped a possessive arm around Aurora’s waist. His wolf needed to lay claim to his mate, despite knowing that Lykos couldn’t see them. Sensing the change in his mate’s scent, slipping from curiosity to concern, he slipped his hand under the hem of her shirt to trace patterns on her skin with his fingers, calming her. She glanced up at him, but other than that she didn’t react. He had been gradually breaking down her walls in days since the vampire’s visit. Their few minutes in the bedroom just now was proof that he was doing something right. He wasn’t about to allow a phone call from Lykos to undo all his hard work.
The Raven Queen Page 27