Who needed six cars?
The thought stuck in her brain as she cleared her throat and walked up to the front door. She raised her hand to knock. But then she lowered it. Was this really a good idea? No. It wasn’t. She had just turned around to walk away from the house when her phone buzzed. It was a text from Devon.
Kami’s heart leaped with excitement. The she pulled out the phone and blinked at the display. It read simply, sorry about your family you should spend the night in my office.
His office?
Kami turned toward the driveway and the street. She gazed at the enormous houses crouching on either side of the wide lane that seemed to be even more pristine when it was just starting to gather snow. She obviously could not be seen here. That would apparently be bad. But here she was anyway standing in the cold waiting for what? Devon was supposed to be her husband. He was supposed to care about her.
Shivering, Kami felt a pang of loss. It wasn’t fair. How long had it been since she had been welcome to snuggle into Devon’s embrace? How long since she had enjoyed the warmth of his touch or the security of knowing that he loved her enough to go against the wishes of his family just to be with her?
Sometimes Devon complained about the physical distance between them. Kami could not even recall the last time that they had made love. But for her, the real loss lay in the emotional distance and that was something that Devon never seemed to grasp. Kami needed to feel close to him. She needed to feel as though the two of them were a real couple or she could not simply go through the motions of physical intimacy. She just could not bring herself to do it.
Kami pulled out her phone. This was ridiculous. All of it. She typed in a quick text to Devon. She was freezing cold. The snow was actually starting to stick. And there was absolutely no way that she could just prance back down to a bus stop where the bus was likely not to return to this part of the deserted route for hours and hours. Kami was tired. She was emotionally wrung out. The estrangement with her family was already weighing on her. If Devon wanted her to go to his office to spend the night so it wouldn’t upset his precious mother, then he could get his butt out here and drive her there.
It was less than ten minutes before he showed up in the driveway. He didn’t look happy. His handsome face was drawn in lines of irritation. They bracketed his mouth and eyes even as the wet snowflakes settled in his wavy blond hair. So he wasn’t happy? Kami could match that. She was soaking wet and pissed off about that and so much more!
“Kami, you’re being ridiculous.” Devon’s tone was strange. She had never heard him sound quite like that before. “Why are you standing out here?”
“My father and I had a fight. I needed someplace to go. I mistakenly thought that I could count on my husband.” Kami spat the words. Her duffle bag was heavy on her shoulder and she felt as though she were going to buckle beneath the weight. Hitching it up, she crossed her arms and tried to stop shivering. “I don’t want to go wait another hour at the bus stop.”
He shook his head and sent water droplets flying through the cold air. “Don’t you have anywhere else to go?”
“No. I don’t.” She glowered up at him. “Not all of us are rich with credit cards that let us go stay in a hotel.”
Devon held up his hands. “Kami, calm down. I was just wondering if you had friends you could stay with.”
“I was going to see if I could stay in the coffee shop, but it was already locked up for the night. I don’t have the alarm code because Shawn always gets there first.” This irritated her more than she liked to admit. At least she felt welcome in the coffee shop. She could have used her computer and the Wi-Fi to watch videos or something to keep herself occupied for the rest of the night. “So I suppose I could hit a park bench. But this is the first snow in Dallas in years and I’m freezing. I just want to lie down. Can’t I stay in your room? I won’t leave. I’ll just sleep on the floor if you want.”
“My mother is in the house,” Devon murmured. His expression was so flat and yet so sharp that it could have cut glass. “We can’t risk her running into you in here. Not now. It wouldn’t end well.”
“Oh, excuse me.” It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that she’d just let her father force her to marry another man next time to save poor Devon the inconvenience of a wife he obviously didn’t want. But Kami had her pride. She didn’t want to make him feel as though she were manipulating him. That wasn’t what was going on. “So can you give me a ride to your office or what?”
“Yes.” He pulled out a set of keys and pushed a button to start the engine. “Here, let me take the bag.”
She jerked away from him. “I’ve got it. No need to put yourself out.”
“Kami, please don’t be this way.” He exhaled a sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. “It’s just not necessary to act like a drama queen.”
Tears stung Kami’s eyes. She wanted so badly to feel his arms around her. The breadth of his shoulders was familiar and promised warmth and acceptance. Or at least it had. She remembered those days when she would get to work early and he would be there and she would huddle there and let him whisper promises to her. What had happened to those days? What had happened to the promises that he’d made to her back then?
Now it was almost like he belonged out here in the ice and snow. It was inhospitable weather, but it was still warmer than Devon’s attitude. The man was blowing like the arctic. He did not look at her. He didn’t flinch or even seem to notice that she was hurting inside. It was horrible.
Grumbling a bit beneath his breath, Devon moved toward his car. He kept stealing surreptitious glances at the house as though he honestly expected his mother to be peering out the windows. What kind of paranoia was the guy going through? Honestly, they made the most ridiculous pair! Both of them grown up and able to support themselves and yet absolutely obsessed with what their parents thought and how their parents were going to react to their decisions. It was the worst kind of weakness that Kami could think of.
“Here, go ahead and get inside.” Devon opened the passenger door for her. “Can I at least put the bag in the trunk to try and keep some of the snow out of the inside of my car?”
“The snow?” Kami was too dumbfounded to respond as Devon took the bag from her and chucked it into the trunk.
She heard the trunk close and then moments later Devon was in the car. He navigated the driveway. There was only a thin layer of shining white that seemed to glitter and sparkle beneath the elaborate carriage lights mounted on the front of the King house. The tires of Devon’s car slid just a little as they exited the driveway for the street out front. He skillfully maneuvered the wheel and Kami tried her best not to get the interior of his car too dirty or wet because of her clothing.
His comments about the moisture on her bag had served to make her paranoid about the rest of her. What if she ruined his leather seats? She was wet. There was no getting around that. She had been walking out in the storm for nearly an hour between bus stops. She was cold and exhausted. All she really wanted was a warm shower and a bed, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not that it would have happened in her father’s apartment anyway. Nobody in the house was allowed to shower after six o’clock in the evening because her father wanted the hot water for himself and there was a very limited supply available to their apartment.
“Kami, this is a very bad time for me to be trying to introduce you to my family.” These words only came after they had been driving slowly down side streets for nearly ten minutes. The city was deserted. There were plenty of lights on inside of houses, businesses were dark, and nobody was out for fear of the actual snow falling from the sky. “I’m not trying to be rude to you. I’m really not. But things are just—awkward right now.”
Kami thought about the will she had found in the top drawer of Devon’s desk. “Because of your father’s death.”
“Yes.” He pressed his lips into a thin line. “And I don’t appreciate you going t
hrough my desk. If you have questions just ask me, please?”
“Oh really?” She turned and glared at him. “Just ask you? Fine. When are you going to tell your family that we’re married? When are we going to move in together like a real husband and wife? When are you going to stop being ashamed of me?”
“Kami, I’m not ashamed of you. Stop saying that!”
His tone was sharp. It bit into her heart. The man was so good looking that he made her heart hurt. Even in the semi-darkness of the car’s fancy interior the eerie green lights could not hide the fact that Devon King had the sloping jaw and full lips of a very good-looking guy. He looked strong. He had always looked that way. She had only to view the expanse of his chest to remember what he looked like beneath those dress shirts. The guy was built like a statue. All ripple belly muscles, ropy veins, and pectorals that begged a woman to scrape her nails over their firm surface.
But he wasn’t what he seemed. Not really. Kami was starting to feel like Devon King was a paper cut-out. She exhaled a sigh. “I told my father that I had already gotten married.”
“What?” Devon’s word was so loud that it hurt her ears in the close confines of the car. “Why would you do that? You’ve let him back you into a corner.”
“Oh?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Would you rather I have to explain to the priest this Sunday evening why it’s really not a good idea for me to get married?”
“Excuse me?” It was his turn to be upset. “You can’t marry someone else. You’re married to me!”
“Am I?” Kami growled. “I’m starting to wonder.”
It was a rude comment. They’d been married for nearly a year now. It had been a tough year for both of them. The decision was not made lightly and yet Kami now looked back and wondered if it was the best decision she could have made under the circumstances. He had paid for half her schooling. This had allowed her to take double the classes she could have ever hoped to pay for on her own. She’d had help with the taxes and he had covered more than a few medical issues that her parents had been completely unaware of just by putting her on his insurance.
“Kami, don’t.” He looked angry and yet she could tell that for once this anger was not directed at her. “Your father can’t force you to marry anyone. What makes him think that he can?”
“He’s not from here. And don’t give me that crap! Your mother can’t force you to do squat. Not really. But she does all the time. No?” As Kami got more and more upset she could tell that her accent was getting thicker and thicker. English had not been her first language. She had spent nearly two years teaching Devon to speak her family’s dialect of Spanish so that they could speak together, but right now she just wished the last few years hadn’t happened at all. “It’s simple. He wants me to contribute more of my paychecks to the family. He wants the whole thing. He wants me married off so he can still collect all of my earnings. I don’t know what he thinks, but I suspect he wants that loser potential husband to move into our apartment and live with me.”
“In that closet where you sleep?” Devon gaped at her. “You can’t be serious.”
She chuffed out a low sound of irritation and then mimicked her father’s heavily accented voice. “When we lived in Mexico City when I was a boy we had less space than this for twice the number of people! You are all spoiled. All of you. You have television and food to eat and you never appreciate anything I give you!”
“I see.” He shook his head. And then to her surprise, he started laughing. It wasn’t rude though. She had known him long enough to tell the difference. And in a few moments he had dragged in a deep breath of what sounded a lot like desperation. “I’m sorry. I know that our families are so far apart on the socioeconomic scale that it makes anything I say sound snobby as hell. But I think of my mother moaning and groaning about all of the work that she and my father did to earn a living for our family and to give advantages to their children and I just want to scream. Mostly because my mother hasn’t earned a penny in her life. And the rest because my mother is currently living off me and my brothers just as surely as your father is living off of you.”
That was a startling bit of insight and perhaps a bit more than Kami had expected. Although she didn’t know what she expected anymore. Maybe it had all run together and eventually she would figure it out and try to make things better for herself or her family or—yeah, that was all going to have to wait.
She turned her head to look at Devon and that was when she saw the brilliant white headlights careening toward them at top speed. There was no time to do anything but gasp and brace herself as the impact hit hard enough to rattle her teeth.
Chapter Eleven
It was Kami’s expression that alerted him, but by then it was too late to do anything but brace himself for impact. Devon spun the wheel hard to force his own vehicle to turn as the truck hit the rear of his car so hard that it sent them spinning around in so many circles that Devon completely lost track. The impact of metal on metal was terrible to hear. The twisting shriek of vehicles collapsing in on themselves. Airbags exploded on all sides. The subtle puff of gas in Devon’s face was almost as bad as the metal noise. The wheel was wrenched from his hands and when he lost control completely his mind turned to Kami and stuck right there.
Devon swung his head to the right. Kami’s short body was buffeted on all sides by airbags as she twisted in her seat. Time slowed. Devon’s preternatural shifter senses sped up and made everything seem as though it were moving at a snail’s pace. He reached over the center console and grabbed Kami in a bear hug. He pulled her head against his chest and leaned as far over into her seat as he dared. The shifter of his car hit him in the gut. He would bruise, but it would last minutes compared to anything that might happen to Kami.
She grunted as the car continued to spin. And then Devon spotted the light pole and braced himself for impact. In moments the front of his car had been skewered by the pole as though it were made of foam. Their trajectory abruptly stopped as the car wrenched the pole from the ground. The force of these two items pressing on each other brought them both to a complete halt in a rubber burning protest of his tires. Moments later he heard the pole land square on the roof of his car. It dented accordingly, a trough appearing in the ceiling above them both.
It was absolutely surreal. There were no other words. For a moment it was like being out of time. Kami was in his arms. The shifter was pressed against his gut. His brain was moving sluggishly, but with total clarity. He could feel Kami’s breath on his neck. He could feel her trembling with terror in his arms. But she was alive. The copper tint of blood was in the air, but it wasn’t coming from their vehicle. His heightened sense of smell told him that much with certainty.
“Are you all right?” Devon whispered the words to Kami. He touched her face, lightly stroking her full cheeks and seeing the shadow of a bruise already beginning to appear. “Baby, are you okay? Talk to me. Okay? Tell me what you’re feeling.”
“Sick,” she whispered. “Like I’m going to be sick.”
Devon scrambled to get out of his seat. He turned, but his door was absolutely crushed. That didn’t matter. He put his booted feet against the door and pushed with every bit of his strength. The door flew off the ruined hinges and opened with a creak of metallic protest.
Pulling himself out of the vehicle, Devon took in the details quickly as he ran around to Kami’s side of the car. The other vehicle had flipped over. The driver had been ejected from the truck through the windshield and was lying on the icy wet pavement of the street. That was the source of the coppery blood smell. But the other smell that lingered there was death.
People had started to come out of their homes. They were gathering on the street. Someone had called emergency services. That was good. Kami needed to be checked out at the hospital. Now.
Devon ran around the car and pulled on the door. It would not open. Gritting his teeth, Devon applied everything he had to it. The door shrieked as it opened with a twistin
g of metal rubbing against metal. He pushed it aside with his hip and reached into the car for Kami. He helped her out and held her gently in his arms as she retched and lost the meager contents of her stomach onto the frozen street beside his back tire.
Her gasping and sobbing hit him hard. This was his fault. If he had just let her into the house in University Park none of this would have happened. He gathered her close and held her against his body as they waited for the ambulance. He could hear it coming closer and closer.
Devon turned his head toward the other vehicle and saw that some brave pedestrians had gone into the street to check for a pulse on the driver of the second car. At least he seemed to be the only person in the truck. Nobody had said anything about a passenger. That was good.
Police cars, an ambulance, and two fire trucks screamed onto the scene. The pedestrians were waving at the cops and emergency personnel as though they wanted to make sure that they came to the man on the ground first. That was fine with Devon. He was too thankful that he and Kami were both alive and upright to worry overmuch about who got attended to first.
“Sir?” A policeman approached Devon. “Sir, are you all right?”
“Yes,” Devon answered without even thinking about it. “My wife and I are both fine. The truck came out of nowhere. I don’t know what happened. One second we were heading for my office building down the block and the next we were spinning in circles.”
“Yes.” The policeman pursed his lips and looked grim. “It seems he paid for his careless driving. There’s a stop sign. It’s possible with the wet roads he didn’t realize that he couldn’t stop. We’ll take you and your wife to the hospital. The paramedics will be right with you. We can get a formal statement from you there.” Then the cop cocked his head. “I’m sorry. Are you Devon King?”
Billion Dollar Wolves: Boxset Bks 1-5 Page 79
