by Nalini Singh
“I know—and I wouldn’t have her any other way.” Arm still slung around her shoulder, Tai nuzzled a kiss into her hair. “So, can I stop hiding from you now?”
Laughing, she cupped his face and kissed him on the mouth with the easy affection of a packmate who’d played with him when he was a babe and bound up his injuries during his terrible teens. “Smart aleck. You can walk me back to—” Breaking off, she smiled at the man who’d appeared out of the trees. “On second thought, shoo.”
“I feel so unwanted.” Waving a quick hello at Walker with that laughing statement, he rose and jogged off toward the den.
“This is a nice surprise,” Lara said as her mate took Tai’s place beside her, his denim-covered thigh pressing against her own.
Quivering with happiness, her wolf tried to nuzzle at Walker, its fur rubbing against the inside of her skin.
“I only have five minutes.” Closing his hand over hers, he brought her knuckles up to his mouth, the unexpected caress making her breath catch. “I saw you kiss Tai.”
She angled her head at the edgy comment. “You’ve been in the pack for years. You know how affectionate we are.”
“You didn’t belong to me before.”
Lara’s first instinct was to laugh, tease him about his unwarranted jealousy, but something in his expression made her pause, think. Touch was a precious thing to Walker, not something he shared lightly. And a kiss on the mouth…it was an act he only ever did with her. “I didn’t know it would hurt you,” she said, kissing his knuckles in turn, “and I’m so sorry it did.”
He curved his hand around her thigh when she released it, squeezed. “I’m reacting badly,” he admitted. “You’re the healer, and the pack has certain rights to you.”
Wrapping her arm around his, she leaned into his body. “I could never withhold my affection,” she said, hoping he would understand. “It would go against my every instinct to do so.”
“I wouldn’t ever ask that of you.” It was a quiet promise, his hair lifting in the breeze as he looked down at her with those eyes the stunning shade of new leaves under sunlight. “I know who you are, Lara. It makes me proud to be your mate.”
Tears threatened. “Ditto,” she said a little shakily.
Reaching out with his free hand, he brushed his thumb over her cheek. “But…not on the mouth, if it’s an adult male. I can’t deal with that.”
The naked honesty of his request hit her right in the heart. “Only you,” she promised, and it was no sacrifice. Affection was affection. She’d find some other way to show it to adult males if needed. “Only ever you.”
Cupping her cheek, he bent his head until their foreheads touched. “I’m sorry—I know I’m being difficult,” he said, and it was a comment heavy with things unspoken.
She rubbed her nose playfully against his, refusing to allow the past to suck him under. “More than one changeling male has been known to go all growly over his mate touching another man—you’re pretty reasonable in contrast.”
A single raised eyebrow that told her he didn’t particularly like that description. Proven a second later by the kiss he laid on her. “I plan to be very ‘reasonable’ tonight,” he threatened when he broke the kiss so she could gasp in a breath.
The smoldering tone made every cell in her body sit up in attention. And as he took her mouth again, she realized her complex, fascinating, addicting mate had taken down another shield, opened another door…invited her deeper into him.
Chapter 4
FOUR DAYS LATER, Walker put down his end of the sofa in the family’s new quarters and nodded at Judd to do the same. In spite of his brother’s telekinetic power, he and the others helping with the move had done the heavy lifting manually so as to conserve Judd’s psychic strength in case of an emergency.
Standing up to his full height, his brother looked around the room. “Nice. Roomier than your old quarters.”
It was, to a significant extent. Had Lara been any other woman in the pack, they could’ve remained in the family quarters he’d previously shared with the children, but she needed to be close to the infirmary. It was as a result of that necessity that their new quarters had been organized with such speed—a construction team had torn down the walls between Lara’s original spacious apartment and two other units, converting it into a place suitable for a family. A big one.
Lara had told him the entire section had been designed to be transformed in that way when the time came. “Healers always have children around them,” she’d said when he commented on the increase in square footage. “Our own, adopted, packmates…it’s a good thing you’re used to that already.” She gave him a smile that came from the heart of her. “We’ll probably also have the odd packmate sleeping over. You won’t mind, will you?”
“No.” He knew she healed as much with her gentleness and affection as she did her abilities. It would be no hardship to have his home be a place where the pack felt welcome and loved. “Family is important to me, too.” And pack was family.
Right now, the youngest member of their immediate family was happily setting up her dollhouse in her room, while Toby was hanging some posters in his, both children being “supervised” by their new great-grandparents. Lara’s mother, Aisha, had also been popping in and out as her duties permitted, always with a snack for them in hand.
Walker had never truly had a maternal figure in his life, had been the patriarch of his family since he was a young man; so at times, he found himself startled by the way Aisha related to him, treating him as he imagined she might a son. It was a strange sensation but not unwelcome, especially since Aisha never forgot he was an adult male.
Funnily enough, it was his assassin of a brother whom she treated as much younger.
“You’ll make us fat,” Judd commented when she appeared at the door, even as he took two peanut butter cookies from the plate she held.
Snorting, Aisha pinched at the hard muscle of Judd’s biceps. “Then I’ll put you on a diet. For now…” She gave him two more cookies before handing a couple to Walker and heading off toward the kitchen section of the open-plan living/dining area. “Toby! Marlee! Cookies on the counter.”
Judd grinned as the kids called out their delighted thanks. “Can I adopt you as my grandmother, too?”
That got him a slap on the back of the head as Aisha walked out of the apartment. “Call me old and live to regret it, boyo.”
Laughing, his brother rubbed at his head. Walker felt his cheeks crease.
Lara and Brenna entered the apartment seconds after Aisha’s departure, both carrying boxes filled with the last of the clothing from the old apartment. Walker’s heart ached at the sight of Lara’s smile, her curls—tied with a fine silk scarf in emerald green—shining under the simulated sunlight of the den. His mate. Who seemed not to care that he wasn’t like the changeling males she’d grown up with, would never be like them, no matter how long he lived out of the PsyNet.
Yet…part of him remained wary, watchful for any sign that she was unhappy in this relationship. He knew that part had been born in the decades in which joy had been a mirage, survival his only focus, but he couldn’t erase it, couldn’t reform himself into some other, better man.
Lara’s eyes met his at that instant, a frown between her brows. Crossing the room, she rose up on tiptoe to brush her lips against his, saying, “I adore who you are, Walker Lauren,” as if she’d heard his thoughts.
Cupping the side of her neck, he slanted his lips over her own, drenched himself in the taste of her, this woman who saw pieces of him he’d long forgotten existed.
“Hold that thought.” A husky command from his mate before she disappeared into the master bedroom with Brenna.
Turning, Walker found himself being watched by eyes of gold-flecked brown. “Mating’s good for you,” Judd said, his expression shifting to betray a deep vein of emotion. I’m alive to love Brenna because of you. And it always seemed grossly unfair that you didn’t have the same kind of love
in your life.
Walker had never known his brother felt that way. Until Lara, I didn’t comprehend the lack. The safety of his family had been his sole concern.
Judd’s clear telepathic voice appeared once again in his mind. Aden says knowing we made it, have lives, gives him hope, though he doesn’t use that word. I don’t know if he even understands it. Judd went silent until they’d finished repositioning the dining table. It may sound cruel, but I’m glad he doesn’t understand what it’s like to have what I have with Brenna, you with Lara.
Walker thought of the life Aden lived, a life that had once been Judd’s. You think the knowledge would drive him mad?
Wouldn’t it have done that to us? To know exactly how much we could never touch?
Walker shook his head. The point is moot. To experience it is the only way to know. The glory, the raw punch of emotion, no words could ever do it justice.
“Put it down on the left,” he said aloud, seeing Drew and Hawke arrive with the second sofa, followed by Indigo—six cushions in her arms, her head peeking around the side.
The lieutenant’s dramatic eyes, the reason for her name, locked with his. “Gotta say, Walker,” she drawled with a grin, “I never took you for a throw-pillow kind of a guy.”
“I bought them,” Sienna said from behind Indigo, a duffel bag in hand. “Marlee and I chose the design.” Her gaze shifted to Walker, and in her eyes was the memory of the piercing happiness she’d felt at being in charge of her own environment for the first time in her life. He recalled how she and Marlee had pored over the catalogue, how excited they’d been to get the cushions, put them in place precisely how they wanted.
A tiny thing, but it had mattered.
“All done?” he asked, running his hand over the distinctive dark ruby of her hair when she came to stand beside him. Kristine’s hair.
She leaned into his body, cardinal eyes brilliant with stars as she spoke. “I gave the place a final sweep, picked up any odds and ends. It’s clean, but Evie, the kids, and I will give it another polish tomorrow to make certain it’s ready for the next occupants.”
“Thanks, sweetheart,” Lara said, coming out of the bedroom sans box. “But for now…” Walking to the cooler, she pulled out a bottle of champagne and one of sparkling grape juice. “A thank you from us.”
That simple drink turned into an impromptu dinner, complete with takeout brought up by Riley and Mercy when they finished a security run in San Francisco, and special desserts prepared by Lara’s mom. Having returned from the tutorial he’d been running for his junior engineers up at the hydro station, Lara’s father, Mack, was also able to join them.
As Walker sat and listened to the ebb and flow of the voices—the laughter—around the table, an unexpected vocal music, he realized his family had grown by a factor of multiples in a few short years. Each Lauren mate had brought a cascade of family and friends into the mix, adding to the bonds he, Judd, Sienna, and the children had formed, and those connections would only continue to grow, lives entangling and intertwining.
It was an extraordinary network, beautiful and steel strong. Never again would any member of his family have to fight alone, hurt alone.
His eyes lingered on the wild curls of the woman who had banished the agonizing, endless loneliness that had lived in him for so long, he’d believed it part of his psyche. Even now, though she was laughing at something Indigo had said, her hand was a gentle heat on his thigh, the intimacy already familiar. He’d placed his own arm along the back of her chair, his fingers brushing her hair.
Regardless of what the future held, one thing he knew: He could never go back to the way he’d been, his body nothing but a tool he maintained because it was useful. It had become so much more, a source of pleasure for him and for his mate.
Fox-brown eyes meeting his own. “Happy?”
He twined a curl around his finger, his answer instinctive. “Yes.”
Lara’s smile was slow, deep, for him…as it was that night when she pressed him to his back and tasted him with unhidden passion and a sweet feminine possessiveness, until his nerves overloaded with sensation, his spine locking in a pleasure so intense, it was thunder through his blood.
• • •
A couple of nights after the move, Lara growled as she tore the shirt she was taking off, her claws having escaped to prick the fine cotton.
Walker dropped his hands from the buttons of his own shirt, looking at her in that way he had of doing—as if he could see through her very skin. “Do you need to hunt?”
“Healers have trouble hunting,” she muttered, suddenly angry at him for seeing her so clearly when so much of him remained a mystery to her. “It goes against our instinct to heal. But”—she took a deep breath in an effort to clear the fog in her head—“I could do with a long run.”
Her wolf clawed at the insides of her skin, ready to race through the forest, the wind in its fur, the scents of the night sharp and bright in its nose. She could almost taste the cold slice of the air cutting through her nostrils, almost feel the crackle of leaves beneath the pads of her paws, her skin shimmering with the need to shift.
Walker redid the buttons he’d opened, eliminating a view she’d been enjoying in spite of her temper. “I’ll ask Judd to keep an eye on the kids.”
“No, you stay here,” she said, kicking off her shoes and wiggling out of her skirt. “I’ll be back in an hour.” After she’d run off the frustration that gnawed at her, vicious and relentless.
A dangerous pause, before her mate spoke again, his voice flat, calm…lethal. “You really think I’m going to let you out alone at night when the enemy was on the pack’s doorstep less than two weeks ago?”
Lara wasn’t about to be intimidated. “And you think I’ll let you insult my intelligence?” It came out a snarl, her body and mind both ready for a fight. “I’m not a child. I know enough to stay in the safe zones.”
Walker didn’t yell, didn’t get angry, which only increased her aggravation. Instead, he crossed over and tugged her stiff body into his arms, her near-naked skin flush against his fully clothed body. The rasp of the fabric was too much for her oversensitized flesh, and she pushed at him. “I can’t handle that right now.”
He released her, but the set of his jaw made it crystal clear she would not be going out on her own. Fine, she thought, and not bothering to remove her underwear, shifted, her body turning into a million particles of light before coalescing into the wolf who was her other half.
Hackles raised, she padded out of the apartment and the den. Then she ran, daring her mate to keep up with her. He wasn’t as fast as she was, but he was clever. He kept tracking her down, even when she raced away. The wolf liked his cleverness, liked his determination even more. It stopped trying to evade this strong, dangerous male who was its own, and they ran side by side under the diamond-studded Sierra sky, the night alive with the rustling of nocturnal creatures that froze when the wolf and her mate passed by, before going about their business again.
• • •
EVERY hair on Walker’s body stood up at the haunting sound of the howl that rose on the night currents as he and Lara halted at the top of a hill, hearts thudding from the run, a silvery vista of towering pines and waving grasses in front of them.
Lara, her wolf stunning in silhouette against a heavy moon, went motionless for an instant before throwing back her head and joining in. The wild music was the most beautiful harmony he’d ever heard, so alive it made him want to add his own voice, so untamed it stripped away the civilized veneer to leave only the primal heart behind.
Only when the song had ended, the night quiet but with a complex depth to it that told him he didn’t hear everything she did, did he run his hand down the proud line of her back, her fur thick and soft under his palm beneath the protective guard hairs. “Something is wrong, and you need to tell me.”
A cock of her head that he didn’t need to be a wolf to read.
“Yes, it’s an order.�
� He hated seeing her unhappy. “You asked me not to close up on you. Don’t do it to me.” She could hurt him in ways no one else could on this earth, savage him from the inside out, but the one thing that would hurt worse than any other was being shut out from the loving warmth that had become integral to his existence.
The wolf looked away…and suddenly, the air fractured under his palm, her body dissolving into a million particles of light. He froze, his heart a drum. Her trust in him cut him off at the knees, told him all over again what he was to her. I will never, ever let you down. It was a renewal of the vow he’d made the instant he claimed her.
A heartbeat…an eon later, he was touching night-cooled skin, a woman with eyes of fox brown kneeling in front of him, her hands cupping his face. “It’s not you, not us. You’re my everything.”
He felt something in him break at the fierce honesty of her, didn’t quite understand what it was, his emotions stuck in his throat. “Come here,” he said, his voice a rasp.
Once she was in his lap, he petted her without further demands until she curled into him, her hand on his heart. He knew she had a high tolerance for cold, but he took off the shirt he wore and made her shrug into it.
She did so without argument, then put her head back against his shoulder, her legs silky under his touch. “No one”—a long, appreciative sigh—“will ever convince me that there is a more beautiful place on this earth.”
Walker couldn’t deny her words, the Sierra night a thing of near-painful beauty, but his attention was on his mate, on what might have caused her to snap at him in such an uncharacteristic way. There was only one possible answer.
Chapter 5
“ALICE?” THE HUMAN scientist had been put into cryonic suspension by unnamed parties over a hundred years ago, and now lay in a coma in SnowDancer’s infirmary. Inside her mind were secrets that might further help Sienna understand her abilities, but whether that mind would ever wake, ever function as it should, was an unanswered question.
