Hell Hound's Redemption (Fae 0f The North Shore Book 2)
Page 18
He crouched, flexing his thick thighs, and used a yardstick to make sure the logs he’d placed were lined up perfectly. Order kept his mind clear. Planning kept his path clear. His brothers might joke about it, call him Mr. Clean, but at least his coping mechanisms had kept him upright all these years. The same couldn’t always be said for his older brothers.
After the Black Castle Brethren murdered their parents and youngest brother more than fifty years earlier, Cormac cracked. He took off, hell bent on revenge—a life for a life—and didn’t come home for half a century. Declan had turned into an addict—though he’d recently got clean with the help of Nurse Rowan McNeely, a daoine sídhe and Declan’s anamchara.
But Aiden…he’d held his shit tight. It wasn’t like he was going to change his stripes now, though sometimes he wished he could.
He stroked his hand through his thick dark beard, assessing, then he adjusted one of the logs that was protruding a quarter inch beyond the others. Once he was satisfied, he went inside to work on the next project for the day.
He set his yardstick on the kitchen table just as Declan’s voice came from the bedroom directly above where Aiden stood. “Hey! Who’s got guard duty tonight?”
Though the cú sídhe—or hell hounds, if one preferred—had long since been liberated and were no longer obligated to protect the sídhe from the Black Castle threat, natural instincts were hard to ignore.
Aiden tipped his head back and yelled at the ceiling. “I printed out our schedules for a reason, Declan!”
Rowan’s softer voice trickled down through the vents—It’s all right, love. There’s plenty of time—and Aiden imagined her hand resting gently on his brother’s shoulder.
“Does anyone know where my phone is?” Cormac yelled from the top of the stairs.
Aiden shook his head with exasperation, then he turned his head toward the front of the house and the stairwell. “In the sitting room! Charging!”
“I looked there!”
Aiden sighed. “Look again!” Sometimes he wondered if he was the only thing keeping the MacConall ship afloat. In fact, that thought was so frequent, it barely even registered anymore.
He refocused on his project. Two days ago he’d painted a four-by-five foot section of the kitchen wall in blackboard paint. Now he was using chalk and his yardstick to mark off columns and rows. Once he was done, he’d create a menu plan for the week.
Things were different now that it wasn’t just Declan and him whipping up instant ramen and the occasional frozen fish stick. Rowan insisted that Declan eat healthy, and Meghan—Cormac’s anamchara and now wife, a leannán halfling—was an excellent cook.
Well…she was getting better, at least. It was Meghan who’d seen this blackboard-menu idea online and mentioned she liked it.
Painting the wall (in other words, changing the house) had been a risk. Aiden and his brothers kept their parents’ memories alive by keeping the house nearly the same as it had been when they died. They’d replaced the blood-stained kitchen floor, but otherwise the kitchen, their parents’ bedroom, even their mother's music room remained untouched. Sometimes Aiden swore he could still hear her playing the piano: Gershwin, Joplin, Bernstein…
She gave him lessons for a while when he was a pup, but he was never very good at it. Instead, he enjoyed sitting under the piano and pressing the shiny yellow pedals with his hands while she played above him, the sound enveloping him…
He cleared his throat to escape the darkness of his memories, then he tipped his head to the side and narrowed his eyes. Did one of those rows look crooked? He rubbed it out with a wet paper towel and waited for the board to dry before trying again.
He’d just got the chalk realigned along the yardstick when there was a loud thump from above his head in Declan’s room. Aiden’s hand jerked and the chalk line slanted up. Fuck!
Two more dull thumps followed, setting up a rhythm. He glanced at the ceiling with annoyance.
The other big change in the house lately…? His brothers were gettin’ it on the regular, which—time for some brutal honesty—was the real impetus behind all his household projects. Not only did they play to Aiden’s need for good solid planning, they also gave him a necessary distraction from all of the pheromones in the house.
The thumping intensified over his head, then picked up from the front of the house too. Sweet Danu, his brothers were going at it in stereo.
In the past, Aiden had rarely left the house or the woods behind it. That had changed in the last eight months with the arrival of Meghan and the Black Castle Brethren’s attempt to kill her at Kawishiwi Falls—an attempt that had been led by her own aunt and uncle.
There’d been no new threats from the Black Castle since Rowan’s family had been targeted six months ago, so this seemed like a safe enough time for Aiden to make a solo foray into the world.
There was another thump above his head. Right. Time to get out of Dodge.
As a cú sídhe, Aiden could travel to places he’d been before by “tilting,” willing his body to enter a fourth dimension and travel through space. It required focus, though sometimes a rush of adrenaline would do the trick.
Right now it was sexual frustration that forced his memory bank to search for a good place to escape. His thoughts landed on a dark, pádraig-packed bar in Grand Marais on the north shore of Lake Superior. He’d gone there only once, years ago with his father, Conan MacConall, who’d been bouncing between card games.
Aiden loved to watch because his father always did well. The senior MacConall had a charming personality, a genius IQ, and luck in spades. And hearts, diamonds, and clubs. He’d brought his young family from Ireland to North America, then proceeded to play every casino and smoky back room poker table from Bean Town to Lake Superior.
It wasn’t long before he’d won enough to pay cash for an abandoned lumber baron’s hidden retreat home, a grand Victorian house deep in the woods near Martin’s Landing. It had been a welcome and peaceful escape from the Black Castle’s sadistic grasp—which, at the time, had been limited to Ireland.
Aiden swallowed hard and refocused his thoughts on that small, dark bar. With his eyes closed, he could practically see its 1960s-styled neon signs (new when he first saw them), and the straight-backed wooden booths that lined the walls. He could hear the shuffle of cards, the laughter of grown-up women; he could see the bartender’s bushy eyebrows…
Of all the places he could go, he didn’t know why this place came to mind; he hadn’t thought of it in years. But it was perfect for what he needed now: some small dark place where he could get away from his brothers and their anamcharas, clear his head, and forget about the one small dark-haired female he wanted but could never have.
The unavoidable truth of the matter was, it didn’t matter that Aiden was built like a mountain—massively strong and, once shifted into his hound, able to tear a man limb from limb. Muscle couldn’t overcome the wall another man had built between Aiden and Aiden’s own anamchara. No amount of planning could ever make her a part of his life the way she was meant to be.
But a change of scenery would at least be a nice reprieve from that miserable thought.
Before he could fully form his memory of the bartender’s eyebrows, Aiden felt his body lurch as the tilt began. It twisted his limbs and popped his joints. It distorted his vision and squeezed his chest, until all his breath escaped him. There was a sucking sensation, then a pop as he was pushed through the fourth dimension, coming out on the other side of his envisioned target.
Only when he felt something solid under his feet did he open his eyes. He was standing in a dark corner of the bar. In his sight line was the same bartender he’d remembered, though, after so many years, the man’s bushy brows had gone white.
A waitress, arguably older than the bartender himself, was taking glasses out of the dishwasher and lining them up on a rubber drying mat.
“Welcome,” she said when Aiden approached.
He looked over his shoulder
at the loud room. It was crowded with patrons who weren’t merely buzzed but had long since progressed into shit-faced.
“Visiting?” the old woman asked, raising her voice over the din. “I don’t recognize you from town.”
“Aye. Visiting. Could I get a whiskey, please?”
The corners of her eyes crinkled and she filled a glass with an extremely generous pour. “Man after my own heart.”
“Better make it the whole bottle,” Aiden added.
Then he slid his ass onto the stool to his left and settled in, ignoring the look that passed between the waitress and bartender. Slowly, he lost himself in the raucous voices and clink of bottles. His nose twitched at the smell of spilled beer on old wood floors, the occasional waft of tobacco from someone’s clothe… Then another scent filtered through his olfactory system—a scent so painfully familiar it made Aiden’s balls ache and his cock swell in his pants.
Her.
He swiveled on his stool and looked around.
He could have sworn… But she wasn’t there. He spun back around, simultaneously relieved and disappointed.
Fuck, he muttered into his glass. Would there never be any escape? Now even his imagination was getting the better of him. Fighting back a growl, he took down half his whiskey in one swallow and winced against the sting.
* * *
Look for Hell Hound’s Curse coming March 2019!
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Want to read an EXCLUSIVE, FREE novella, Making Waves?
There’s trouble at sea when he denies his love.
Declan Howard has been at sea for three years—a crew member aboard the Catriona, a luxury superyacht off the coast of California. Anything shiny and new gets his attention—hell, it gets the attention of everyone on board—but Sarah Carter is more than just shiny. She’s the new hostess who captures his heart the moment she knocks on his cabin door.
Also by A. S. Green
ROMANTIC BEACH READS
Summer Girl
Wild Child
Lucky Stars (coming 2019)
FAE HELL HOUNDS OF THE NORTH SHORE
Hell Hound’s Revenge
Hell Hound’s Redemption
Hell Hound’s Curse (coming March 2019)
QUICK & DIRTY READS
Real Man
Rough Ride
COLLABORATIONS
Their Bride (with Stasia Black)
About the Author
A.S. GREEN is the author of erotic novellas (Real Man, Rough Ride) and new-adult novellas and full-length romances (Making Waves, Summer Girl, Wild Child). She lives in the cold, upper-Midwest with her husband and three mostly grown children, usually hunkered down with a good book. You can find her on the interwebs at asgreenbooks.com and @asgreenbooks. Say hello and follow on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Book Bub, Goodreads, etc.