Tied With a Bow

by Lora Leigh

  “Because of the fear. Because man doesn’t want to accept what’s different from him. Even when he believes he created it.” She looked down at her fingers again, only to find his covering them as she did so.

  “Isabelle, this battle is one you’re only just coming into. Don’t begin looking for trouble this quickly, love, because I promise you, it will show up soon enough on its own.” He drew her to him, dragging her over his chest, though she did very little to resist him.

  She should resist him. She’d just experienced something that should have been quite traumatic. After all, by time he had finished releasing his pleasure inside her, he’d bitten her, knotted her, snarled, growled and declared “mine,” as though saying it made it so.

  The problem was that when he’d declared “mine,” she had felt an answering demand inside her own heart.

  “What are you doing to me, Malachi?” she whispered as he turned, sprawling her beneath him as he came over her in a surge of strength and latent power.

  “I’ve been crazy since meeting you,” he rasped as he pulled the sheet away from her naked body. “Completely insane, Isabelle.”

  A graceful brow arched as her eyes suddenly lit with an inner amusement. “I would guess you were already crazy, Malachi, because I haven’t seen a whole lot to suggest otherwise.”

  Malachi lifted his brow. “Baby, you haven’t had time to draw that opinion. Once you get to know me, you’ll realize I’m actually hardcore certifiable. It’s a Breed thing.”

  “Being certifiable?” she questioned. “After meeting Ashley, I’m beginning to think that rather than a Breed thing, it’s more a Coyote thing. I just hope it’s not too contagious.”

  She was teasing him. Had anyone bothered to tease him before, she wondered as he stared back at her with that reserved, cool expression.

  She wouldn’t let it bother her, she promised herself. If he intended to stick around, then he may as well learn. She, Chelsea and Liza were always joking with one another, sometimes playing pranks and always having fun. She wasn’t about to give it up.

  “You make me want to laugh,” he groaned suddenly. “And if I drop my guard enough for that, what will I do if you decide to try to fight the mating?”

  “So it can be reversed?” Already she was craving his kiss with a strength that had her mouth watering and her body tingling. Like someone needing their next drug fix, she needed his kiss.

  She needed him.

  “There’s no reversal.” Cupping the back of her head, he pulled her down for his kiss, needing it, needing her.

  His tongue wasn’t swollen, the mating taste was only barely present to his senses, but still, the need to kiss her, to bind her now with pleasure, was an overriding impulse.

  Catching her lips with his, he rubbed against the soft, pouty curves and tasted the warmth of them. It was a kiss of natural heat, the same passion and hunger that had flared between them when their eyes connected in the bar.

  His tongue slipped past her lips, mated with hers, rubbed at it, felt the silken softness and the measure of the woman as she accepted him with soft innocence.

  It wasn’t mating heat. It was just a man and a woman, that was all. Surrounded by warmth, by the attraction and the flaring emotion that happened only once in a lifetime. When one man and one woman fated to be together, came together.

  That moment had happened in the bar when their eyes met. When their lives had merged and destiny had given them that one and only chance.

  One chance. One moment out of time and Malachi refused to lose it.

  She was his mate.

  Letting her go wasn’t an option.

  Holding her, ensuring her safety, her protection and, God, loving her. Those were his only options.

  Easing back, he stared into the soft depths of her cobalt eyes and whispered, “For the first time in such a long, lonely life, I touched love.” Trailing his hand from the back of her head where he’d held her to him, he let his palm cup the fragile line of her jaw as his thumb brushed over her kiss-swollen lips. “You’re my mate, Isabelle. Frightening you is the last thing I want to do, but Breeds, like the animals we’re created from, heed our instincts, unlike man. Every instinct that makes up the creature I am knows what you are to me. Courting you isn’t an option. Wooing you isn’t in the equation because nature won’t allow the humanity inside us to chance losing that one moment, that single chance we have to claim what is ours. Or to allow our mates the opportunity to fear or to doubt and to turn away. That’s all mating heat is, baby. That’s all nature meant for it to be. Everything else is optional, but staying together, learning our way and learning what true love, what soul mates, were meant to be isn’t a choice any longer. It’s now a part of everything we are. It’s like death and taxes. Inescapable.”

  She swallowed tightly. “Breeds don’t pay taxes.”

  Trust her to have to point out the one flaw in the ages-old saying.

  His lips quirked in amusement. Nature was indeed the perfect matchmaker, because this woman would be more than a challenge. She would keep him on his toes. There wouldn’t be a chance to be the lazy, shiftless Coyote that all of his Breed pretended to be.

  “Breeds don’t pay taxes,” he agreed. “We have mates to keep us in line instead.”

  Her head settled on his chest, her cheek against his heart as Malachi let his hand smooth from her shoulder to the middle of her back.

  “It’s not going to be that easy, Malachi,” she whispered. “You know it’s not.”

  He knew it wouldn’t be. “What is the old saying?” he asked softly. “Nothing worth having is easy? If it were easy, baby, would it be as important?”

  He found a curl of hair that trailed over her shoulder and caught it between his thumb and finger. Rubbing it, experiencing the softness of it, he stared up at the ceiling as he inhaled slowly.

  “No, it won’t be easy.” The scent he caught assured him of that. There was very little time left. “We need to get dressed, baby.”

  She levered up and stared down at him. He could smell the trepidation, the edge of nervousness rising inside her. “Why?”

  “We’re about to have company.” Moving from the bed, Malachi gathered her clothing, handed it to her then collected his own.

  Rule was leading the pack, so to speak. He could smell his commander’s anger, just as he could smell the anger of the men with him.

  “What’s going on, Malachi?” Nervousness was edging into fear as she pulled her dress over her head and allowed the silken length to fall to her feet.

  Hell, they hadn’t had enough time, not enough to combat what he sensed was coming, he feared.

  “Commander Breaker, your father, uncle and grandfather are coming up the hall,” he told her. “The commander is trying to delay them. Breaker never moves that slow, which means they’re not heading to a meeting. They’re coming here.”

  He glanced at the bed, and on the sheets he saw the proof of the innocence he had taken not long before.

  “Great,” Isabelle muttered. “Just what I need. How did any of them even know where I was?”

  Exactly. Neither Breaker nor Stygian would have informed the three men of Isabelle’s whereabouts, and her sister and friend wouldn’t have known. At least not for certain.

  A hard knock at the door signaled the arrival of the group.

  “How did you know they were coming?” she hissed as a startled flinch had her jerking toward the door.

  “I could smell them,” he sighed. “The commander is pissed and your family more so.”

  Striding to the door, he gripped the knob and opened it slowly, placing himself in the small opening he made.

  “Can I help you, Commander?” he asked Rule, though his gaze met that of her father, Terran Martinez.

  “The Martinez family is here to collect the girl,” Rule stated coldly. “Produce her, Malachi.”

  The order grated on the independence and pride that Malachi knew he had a surfeit of. He pulled his gaze slowl
y from the father and met his commander’s. “They can see her, but no one is collecting her.”

  “The hell we’re not.” Terran Martinez was clearly furious. “I’ll be taking my daughter home, Coyote, whether you like it or not.”

  Hell, this wasn’t the footing he’d wanted to begin his life with Isabelle on.

  He could feel her moving toward him.

  “I feel I should inform you, Commander Breaker, Isabelle Martinez will not be leaving this room. To allow anyone to force her to leave will be breaking Breed law.”

  He had no idea how much these men may or may not know about mating heat. There were times the people of the Nation knew more than anyone wanted them to know. He was informing his commander subtly that Isabelle was now his mate, and therefore under every Breed’s protection. Including Rule’s.

  “Mr. Martinez,” Rule said softly. “As I told you, this meeting will be held with civility, and the only way Ms. Martinez will go anywhere is if it’s her wish.”

  Isabelle stepped to her mate’s side. “Dad?” Confusion and hurt laced her voice as Malachi allowed her only a sliver of room to face the men confronting him from the hall. “What’s going on?”

  “Get out here, Isabelle.” Stone-faced and furious, Terran Martinez spoke in a tone that had Malachi’s hackles immediately rising and a growl rumbling in his throat.

  Isabelle laid her hand on his arm, a move that was immediately noticed by all five men as they stood in the hall.

  “Perhaps it would be best if we discussed this in the room,” Rule suggested calmly, if mockingly. “You never know when or where a damned journalist is hiding.”

  And he was right, Malachi knew he was right, but he was loath to have the fury of the Martinez family invading the scent of his mate’s pleasure that filled the room.

  “Malachi,” Commander Breaker growled in a reminder that the walls didn’t just have ears, but could have eyes as well.

  Turning his head slowly, he looked at Isabelle. He could smell her confusion, her fear and her hurt. The three scents were an affront to the protective instincts that raged inside him for her.

  “Malachi, it’s my family,” she said softly. “I won’t turn them away.”

  She didn’t say she couldn’t turn them away, she said she wouldn’t. Restraining a sigh, he stepped back and steeled himself. Because he had a very bad feeling that this first test of the world against the union he had dreamed of could very well steal the dream from his desperate, greedy grasp.

  Chapter Seven

  Then your smile lit my world.

  Isabelle couldn’t understand why her family was standing in the middle of Malachi’s room, their too perceptive gazes raking over the barely made bed she and Malachi had just left.

  “Dad?” She stared back at her father in confusion. “What’s going on here?”

  Terran Martinez was younger than his brother, Ray, the chief of the Navajo Nation. Both men strongly resembled Orin Martinez, though, their father and medicine man of the Nation.

  Her father crossed his arms over his broad chest, the dark denim shirt he wore straining over his biceps. “What are you doing here?” he asked, his tone dark with the anger she could read in his eyes.

  “Terran, I warn you.” Her grandfather spoke up. “Don’t allow your anger to cloud your judgment. You can see before you the truth of this situation. Don’t shame her when no shame is needed.”

  “No one will be shaming her,” Malachi informed them all, while Isabelle felt like just stalking out and leaving all of them to fight among themselves. All but Malachi. She would have to take him with her, of course.

  “Do you know the man you’re consorting with?” Terran snapped at her then, shocking her with the lash of anger in his voice. “Did you even take a moment to pull up what little research exists on him?”

  “Why would I?” Cocking her hip and propping her hands on each side, she confronted her father now. “Nothing else we read about the Breeds on the Internet has been the truth. Why would I believe whatever I read on one individual?”

  And it was the truth. The propaganda that had been placed on the Internet had been proven false over and over again.

  Her father’s lips flattened in disapproval, as if he was disappointed that she hadn’t done it anyway.

  “He murdered his own,” Terran snapped furiously. “Ask him which lab he was created in, daughter. Ask him if he wasn’t there when your Aunt Morningstar was murdered.”

  Isabelle swung around to Malachi. But it wasn’t he who responded.

  “Malachi wasn’t in those labs.” It was Commander Breaker who spoke instead, his tone heavy, almost too soft to make out.

  Her father had obviously heard him, though. “And how can you be so certain?” he demanded, disbelief clear in his expression. “You of all people should know how easily those records could be manipulated.”

  Rule’s expression only darkened. “I know he wasn’t there, Terran. Malachi was created in Russia, far away from the labs your sister was in.”

  The tension that began filling the room was strangling. Isabelle could feel Malachi all but holding his breath, holding in whatever he knew, or whatever he would say.

  “And how the hell do you think you can be so sure of that?” Terran sneered. “And why would I believe you over someone I’ve known for most of his life?”

  Who?

  Isabelle stared at her father in surprise. Who could have told him anything and known what they were talking about?

  “I was reported to have been created in that base because there was no one left alive but Breeds to deny it,” Malachi stated softly. “But I wasn’t there. And even if I had been, nothing could have changed the outcome of her fate, Mr. Martinez. Nothing could and no one could have saved her that night.”

  The disappearance and death of his sister had haunted her father, she knew. So much so that he made certain he knew where his daughters were, at least their general vicinity, every second of the day.

  “Even the dirty Coyote that reported the escape attempt another Breed was initiating to get her out of there?” Terran snapped back at him. “That Breed was you, Malachi Morgan. You were there, and you reported the attempt.”

  “And I told you he wasn’t there,” Rule injected again.

  “And you’re lying for him.”

  Isabelle was shocked to hear her father raise his voice, to lose the calm that was always such a constant and steady part of him.

  “Dad, please, don’t do this.” Isabelle stepped forward, shock and pain filling her at the fury in her father’s face. “I don’t know what Malachi did in those labs, but whatever he did, it was to survive. And I don’t believe he would have ever deliberately brought danger to an innocent.”

  It didn’t matter that his gaze had swung to her, narrow-eyed and strong, as he stepped to her. She may not know the particulars of the circumstances or the story behind his escape or anyone else’s. What she did know was the man who held her in his arms and the fact that he couldn’t have, wouldn’t have, participated in her aunt’s death. Not in any way.

  “Isabelle, if you’ve ever trusted me, come with me now.” Her father turned to her, the eyes she had grown up staring into whenever she’d needed answers, whenever she was frightened or confused, and that gaze was demanding she obey him. That she follow him. That she turn her back on the man she had already begun accepting into her heart.

  “I trust you with my life, Dad,” she whispered painfully. “But I need you to trust me. Trust me to know the man I’ve fallen in love with.”

  That was all she asked of him. Just for now, for this moment, trust her and allow her to make her own decisions. She couldn’t bear being controlled, being forced, without a choice. Neither Malachi nor Commander Breaker was doing that.

  Malachi stood close behind her, not touching her, trying not to influence her. The commander had his back to her, but her father was glaring at her.

  “Terran, watch what you say,” her uncle Ray advised him as i
t became obvious that her father’s anger was only growing.

  She stared from her uncle to her grandfather then back to her father. They were obviously there only to ensure her father didn’t make a mistake he couldn’t take back.

  “What does he intend to say, Uncle Ray?” she asked softly as she felt her throat tighten with tears. “What do you intend to do, Dad, when I tell you that I won’t walk away from Malachi without proof that he’s done something vile? A mistake I can forgive. Anything he was forced to do in those labs I would have to forgive. It would break my heart that he were forced to be something he wasn’t. That he carried the nightmares of it. But I wouldn’t turn my back on him.”

  “Even if he killed your aunt?” her father yelled back at her, causing her to flinch. “You would forgive him for it?”

  She was going to cry. Isabelle could feel the tears coming. She could feel her chest tightening, her lips trembling with the need to spill her tears, her pain.

  “Even if he were forced to do that,” she whispered. “I’ve never lied to you, Dad. I won’t start now. I’m not saying it wouldn’t break me in half. That I wouldn’t live every day of my life knowing the unbearable weight of it, but what happened in those labs I won’t hold against him.”

  “Then I dis—”

  “No!” her grandfather yelled behind him as another voice broke over him.

  Her father had been only a single word from disowning her.

  “I was in that lab.” Commander Breaker stepped forward and spoke as Isabelle’s eyes began to widen in horror of what her father was about to say.

  Her father swung around to the Breed. “What did you say?”

  “I was there,” Breaker growled. “I was created there. I was trained there. And I knew your sister. I swear to you, Mr. Martinez, on the soul I hold as my dearest possession. I swear to you, Malachi wasn’t there. And I know he wasn’t there, because I was.”