by J. D. Light
His looks made him intimidating as hell, but I'd always thought his heart seemed far too innocent for this world, even though he had killed more than once in the line of duty, and he was deadly accurate with a gun.
"Well," Gabriel said, putting the phone back on the nightstand and climbing back into bed with me, I guess it depends on why he was planning to do it in the first place."
"I don't think he was doing it for sex," I said, curling my lip. "But it sure seems like he was trying to get rid of us for a while so he could get something else done. We should probably let Dylan know before he drinks the coffee, so he can know how to act after."
***
Breakfast was awkward with things getting even more confusing when Lane spent the whole morning joking and laughing with us and looking away any time any of us would take a drink of coffee.
When I first started complaining of being woozy, right after Gabriel excused himself to go back to work, Lane had been quick to make sure he was at my side, guiding Dylan's head to the table when he slumped forward against the countertop, and then walked me to my room, even looking genuinely sad when he pushed my hair back from my face, whispering, "I'm sorry, West. If you ever talk to me again after this, I swear I'll explain everything." And even taking my shoes off and covering me up in bed.
He stopped for a moment, reaching out and pulling the collar of my shirt aside to look at the mark Gabriel had left there in the middle of the night, and he chuckled softly, letting the fabric fall back into place.
"Congratulations, West. If we have to live in this cruel world with all its cruel people, we should at least get to experience true love, right?"
I was glad he turned away then and walked away, because I had to swallow the lump in my throat. or risk sobbing right then and there. He sounded so fucking sad, and yet genuinely happy for me at the same time. How could a man so pure want to hurt me?
In the near silence of the upstairs, I could definitely hear when he entered Dylan's room, and I nearly chuckled at the grunting, having no doubt that Dylan had made him carry his long ass the entire way as absolute dead weight.
Lane, just like Dylan and I, was very well-trained, and it was almost impossible to make out the sound of his footfalls after he left Dylan's room, but the sound of the basement door opening and the buzz that filled the hallway from the dangerous ass breaker box was hard to miss, and I eased out of bed.
I'd just twisted the handle on the door, thankful I'd thought to grease the hinges of mine and Dylan's doors before Lane had been up and around, when I heard Gabriel's voice, followed by the slamming of a door and the cutting off of the humming noise.
"What are you doing, Lane?" My mate asked.
I jerked the door open, and Dylan and I ran into the hallway at the same time, guns drawn. There was a slight scuffle as Lane jumped at Gabriel, and my heart sank when I saw him spin expertly and easily slide his gun from the holster beneath his jacket, ducking under Gabriel's powerful arms and coming up with the barrel pointed directly at the temple of my mate's head.
Everything froze as I realized, though my mate didn't have the same training we had, he was still a nearly three-hundred year old shifter, and as the whole scene in front of me registered, I could see the blood slowly sliding down Lane's neck where my mate's claws were poised against the soft skin there, ready to sink in and rip the man's throat out.
Lane glanced up at us, his eyes going wide for the smallest moment, before closing completely. He relaxed, letting the hand with the gun fall to his side.
"Fuck," he said in defeat. "You can't interfere in this, okay? You all have to leave."
Gabriel followed Lane's lead, dropping his hands to his sides and stepping back, but I could see the tension in his spine and knew he was poised to attack at any second. "Explain to me what you're doing and why you drugged your friends."
Lane took a deep breath, holstering his gun and leaning back against the wall, letting his head fall to the ugly paneling. "I'm sorry. I can barely keep track of all the lies anymore, and it's fucking exhausting. I'm working undercover, pretending to work for Darian who knows I actually work for the FBI. I've been working for him for about eight months. I'm basically supposed to be watching his back with the law, which has worked out great until West took it upon himself to kidnap these two, then my job got more complicated. Now, I have to get him out of this mess, so I can get back to my real job, which is being in the middle of the auctions so that I can give the information about each chosen sold, and to whom they are sold, so that they can send someone in to get them out and take the buyer off to shifter prison without anyone involved in the actual sells finding out."
"That doesn't sound complicated at all," I said sarcastically. "Can you say it again?"
Lane chuckled softly, rolling his head along the wall to give me a sad smile.
"Why don't they just arrest the ones involved in selling?" Gabriel asked, but I already knew the answer to that. Nothing was ever that simple with it came to cases like this. Especially involving human trafficking.
"They will once we have all the information. Unfortunately, this is by no means the only group doing things this way, and we need to save as many chosen as we possibly can while still digging for information on just how many we are dealing with. The one they busted last year where they found Pierce and Harper was only one of many, and when it backfired and we ended up losing the shifter division, we had to come up with a new way to handle things."
"So, you drugged us to get us out of the way?" I asked, with zero malice in my voice. I fully understood the reasoning behind it… mostly.
"I was supposed to kill you and make it look like you guys were just horrible criminals that he managed to get away from," Lane said, hooking a thumb in the direction of the basement door, indicating Darian. "It was going to make him look like a hero on the news, but obviously I couldn't do that. My boss said I needed to get you guys out of the way without telling you what was going on, and that he would talk to your boss and put up the bogus news story that you two were killed, so he'd actually believe I did it, so I decided I'd do it this way and hide you in your rooms. I wondered if Gabriel would be able to smell the drugs, but he didn't mention anything, so I figured I was in the clear."
"Why didn't you just tell us all this stuff?" Dylan asked, sounding a little hurt. "We would have worked with you. We all know how this goes."
"Then you know I couldn't tell you. I was under orders not to. My boss is… kinda a paranoid prick. He doesn't know who to trust, so he doesn't trust anyone. He happens to be a little higher up than Granger, so he was just going to tell him to make you guys let it go."
"That wouldn't have worked," I said, smirking. "Unlike you, I don't always listen to orders."
"I figured," Lane said, rolling his eyes, but he was smiling slightly. "But I was only able to worry about one problem at a time. This job is already so fucking complicated I can't think straight."
"Well, you're pretending to double-cross the FBI, while you're really double-crossing the cum-crusted dickhead downstairs. I can see how you wouldn't know your ass from a hole in the ground."
"My what from what?" Lane asked, a confused smile making him seem far less grim.
"It's just something my grandmother used to say."
"Okay, so we'll back off, and you'll pretend you killed us." Dylan still sounded a little down, but that was just the fucked-up situation we'd found ourselves in. "That sounds fun."
"I sighed, pursing my lips and looking around. "I guess I'm going to have to fix their financial records." I glanced toward the kitchen where the shock collars were still hanging out it the drawer. "And I'm going to have to find something else to do with my collars or this house anymore. I might talk to Flynn about buying it. I'll burn that fucking couch right in the middle of the living room."
Gabriel raised an eyebrow at me, his face looking far less convinced of this particular part of the plan as he scowled at me. "I have a house."
I tilted my head to the side, gi
ving him my driest look "Is it the place you claimed me?"
"So," he growled, still glowering. "This is going to be our vacation home?"
***
I cried out, gripping the headboard hard and shooting my load down his throat where he lay below me, shuddering as he groaned around my dick, making my orgasm extend out while his body locked up.
He gurgled around my cock happily, and I whimpered, pulling out of his mouth and flopping backwards on top of him, curling my lip when I slipped right off due to the jizz I'd landed in on his chest.
Fuck! It had been two days of near constant fucking and talking and I was pretty sure I could still get it up for another round if he so much as looked at me with heat in his eyes.
"You never answered me," he growled, sitting up and easily maneuvering my floppy body into a proper position in his arms.
"Bout what?" I asked lazily, thoroughly enjoying my afterglow.
"Where do you live usually? When you're not in Purdy, living out of a shack with disease-ridden furniture."
We were at his house now, and I had to say I really liked the cute little cottage-style house on the edge of town.
"That's because I don't live anywhere really. I have a house in Florida, but I'm hardly ever home. I only have it because I inherited it from my aunt."
"Oh," he said, looking genuinely interested as he leaned up over me. And sexy. He looked sexy as fuck and my dick actually plumped up, making me groan. "She didn't have any children, I guess."
I chuckled, thinking back to my crazy Aunt Marie who'd always made life so fucking interesting. Maybe that's where I get it.
"No, she did. She left it to me to piss them off. She said they were a bunch of greedy assholes, and she wasn't leaving them a fucking thing. She even had that drafted into her will."
He smirked, and I couldn't help it, I reached up and touched it with the tips of my fingers, loving all these new expressions that only I got to see.
"Why'd she choose you?"
"Because my cousin Deb, her oldest, used to leave me out of the Thanksgiving invites because I was gay. So, Aunt Marie started having Thanksgiving over at her house and told my cousin if she couldn't be around gay people, then she should probably sit Thanksgiving out, and Deb and the other two older children stopped coming to Thanksgiving."
"Were all of her kids assholes?"
"All but one. The three, from when her first husband was still alive, and he was a judgmental dickface. I'm honestly not completely sure she didn't have the man offed. He just kinda disappeared one day, and they were never able to find what happened to him. After he 'died', she was left with the three mostly grown kids that acted just like him. She thought she couldn't have anymore kids, but when she met her second husband Lewis, she ended up getting pregnant with Wade." I smiled. "He's great. She left everything but the house in Florida to him. You should have seen the look on the other three's faces when her lawyer read that off."
I started laughing, remembering how the usually prim and proper Deb, who was known around town for her poise and grace, had thrown the biggest fit I thought I'd ever seen to date, even going as far as throwing a chair through the window. And she didn't throw that thing once. She threw it three times before it finally penetrated the pane of glass. She'd been so determined.
"You laugh so much," he whispered, bending down to press a peck to my lips. "I hope I don't suck the happiness out of your life."
My chest ached for him and I reached up, grabbing his face and forcing him to look me directly in the eye. "There is absolutely no way. I might be the type of person who laughs and jokes all the time, but that doesn't mean I've always been truly happy. I was mostly just surface happy, not depressed, but also not feeling that bone-deep happiness that makes you feel truly blessed. But now, with you. I'm truly, actually, completely happy. Fuck, I feel it in my soul."
He looked at me in awe, and I was in awe of his awe. I could feel it. Just like my happiness, I could feel how he felt about me from the look in his eyes, and it was the same way I felt about him.
"I think I'm falling in love with you," he whispered.
That. That's what I feel.
"Wow," I said, smiling brightly, while trying to blink away the prick of tears in my eyes and look at him at the same time. "When you said you were going to try to show me how you felt even though you aren't good at emotions, I really didn't expect you to jump in all willy-nilly like that."
Willy-nilly? He mouthed, before shaking his head. "I have to start right. I don't want to half-ass this. I need to express myself more often so I'm confident in all of it. I really don't want to screw this up, West."
I believed him completely. I could see the desperation in his eyes to make things work.
"Sh," I said, pulling his head to mine for a brief, sweet kiss before whispering against his lips. "You won't. We just both have to be vigilant. We are perfect for each other, but that doesn't mean there won't be days when we fight. There absolutely will be, but I know that I will never do anything on purpose to hurt you, and I know you won't either. We just have to make sure we talk to each other when we're feeling like something isn't right and try to fix it as soon as we can. At least, that is what all the relationship books say."
He pulled back, a gorgeous chuckle rumbling against my side through his chest. "You've been reading relationship books?"
"I don't know any more about being in a relationship than you do," I reasoned.
"Will you promise to tell me if my personality starts to feel like it's smothering you?"
I absolutely hated that he felt that way. I didn't want him to doubt himself and his ability to make me happy. I was just going to have to show him every single day how happy I was to just have him in my life.
"Again, that's never going to happen. When you love someone, you don't love them because they would be perfect if only they would change this or that. You love them in spite of their flaws, and in some cases, you love them even more because of them."
"Love?" he asked on a breathy whisper. "Do you love me, West?"
How long was it going to take for me to stop being shocked when he expressed himself? We'd gone out in public a few times since the start of Sex Fest Twenty Nineteen, and he'd been cold and stand-offish, sometimes even intimidating to everyone except me in those few hours of time, even going as far as to chuckle when at Bunny’s Diner, I patted Dylan on the back, nonchalantly pinning a note there that said Horsey rides! Five dollars and I'll show you my reverse cowgirl.
He'd actually had to hide his face in my neck, when some seventy-year-old woman handed Dylan a twenty and told him she wanted four before grabbing him by the belt loop and dragging him toward the exit.
I didn't know what would have happened if the woman's daughter hadn’t intervened.
"I do love you, Gabby..." I told him, reaching up to trace his brow bone with my index finger. "...so damn much."
My chest tightened with absolute joy when a giant smile pulled at the little-used muscles on his face, and he closed his eyes, looking almost like he was throwing a prayer up toward the heavens. "I love you too, West. I'm so fucking glad you kidnapped Darian and Brinkley. I don't know if I ever would have pulled my head out of my ass if you hadn't."
"I'd have found a way to wear you down eventually." And I absolutely would have.
***
I was still in the blissful haze of afterglow and once again plastered to my mate's side when my phone started ringing. I fumbled the thing off the nightstand without actually committing to rolling over and looking for it, and then dropped it on my face once I finally had it in front of me. My mate groaned, flopping back to the bed like he just couldn't with me.
I smiled when I saw Lane's name on the screen. He'd been checking in off and on, letting us know everything that was going on, even though his boss was still being a hard-headed paranoid dickhead.
The plan had gone pretty well. The claw marks on Lane's throat, along with the sound of three gunshots that I had no doub
t could be heard even through the noise-dampening, fuck-awful humming coming from the danger zone in my new home, had been all Darian and Brinkley had needed to believe that he'd shot us all. There had almost been a small snafu when the freakshow had actually wanted to see our bodies. Thankfully, the hissy fit Brinkley threw had been enough to persuade the man to leave, and now Lane was back to dealing with the sickening reality of chosen auctions on the regular again, and sounding more and more depressed every time I talked to him on the phone.
"Hey, Lane, what are you doing?"
"I'm about five seconds from strangling this thick-necked motherfucker who won't stop following me around like he's my fucking babysitter," he growled, making me laugh in surprise.
I'd honestly never heard Lane say things like that in all the time I'd known him. They sounded mean and harsh, but there was definitely heat in his voice, and it was so good to hear in comparison to the sad monotone I'd been hearing lately from him.
"Say that again," I said after putting the phone on speaker and dropping it to my chest, amusement in my voice.
"I know you just put me on speaker phone so you could share my misery with your mate," Lane grumbled, and even my non-shifter ears could make out the sound of a piece of furniture groaning as he plopped himself into it.
"He might have some advice," I reasoned perkily. "You never know."
He sighed, his breath making that weird static sound through the receiver. "He's driving me crazy."
"Who is?"
"Jax. The guy they sent in as my backup," he groaned. "He's basically here playing the role of another of Darian's bodyguards, but he's supposed to make sure I get out if things go bad."
I smirked, glancing over at Gabriel. He sounded so irritated, and even that emotion was better than the depressed resignation he'd been putting out lately. "Why is he driving you crazy?"
"I don't know, you'd have to ask him what his motives are." His tone was petulant, and it made Gabriel and I both chuckle.
"What's he doing that is driving you crazy?"
"He won't let me do anything alone. It's like he honestly thinks I'm going to screw something up or something. It wasn't even my fault the last one happened. You're sneaky, and kidnapping people is supposed to be a bad thing. FBI agents aren't supposed to kidnap people"
