Now you know I’m crying hysterically and begging for help, miraculously not hitting any trees, when suddenly I hit a brick wall with muscular arms and tree trunks for legs.
“Nooo!”
Thrashing and kicking out at the monster rampaging through my head, I struggle to get away in the hopes of dashing for safety. The arms tighten instead and I act on instinct, sinking my teeth into what feels like a pectoral muscle and bite down as viciously as possible.
“Jesus, love, leave off, would you!”
What I feel in that moment is crushing relief and an aching recognition that steals every rational thought but the most basic of all. My man has come for me; he’s saving me from the monsters in the dark and the villains in my head.
He’s come for me, and I no longer have to keep myself together because his strong arms are here to hold me up and chase the demons away.
“Lucian?”
“It’s okay love. Shh, don’t cry, my darling, I have you,” he whispers, crushing me closer and stroking my hair as I fall apart and attempt to crawl right into his skin. “I have you, baby. Shh, don’t cry.”
Can you blame me for pushing closer and ceding the battle? Is it pathetically stupid to fall into his heat and give up the last vulnerable piece of the heart now pounding in my chest?
Maybe, but right at this moment I don’t give a damn. I’m safe and protected, and for the sake of not feeling so alone, I’m willing to give him everything I have just to see where it will take me.
Chapter Seventeen
Luc
I’ve never felt this happy and furious at the same time. The emotions are stronger than any I’ve ever experienced, and not because I’ve not felt these things before but because the intensity is far beyond anything I’ve known.
After seeing the empty, rotten bowels of that cabin I’d been ready to lose all sense of sanity. I’d looked into the darkness of the woods and felt my head spin with the desperation of a drowning man, when the shrill scream of my girl had lit the air, making the hair at my nape stand straight on end.
We’d all run toward that sound, ready to defend against any attack. Honestly, I’d been ready to rip her father apart with my bare hands before assessing the damage to her and getting her to the nearest hospital.
Thankfully what I’d stumbled upon was nothing worse than my frightened baby, running pell-mell in the inky darkness because some unseen animal had crawled over her skin.
I’d caught her up, speechless with relief and so thankful to have her slight weight against me again that my knees had weakened. My mistake, I think ruefully, rubbing at my chest where her little teeth had bitten.
The damn female had bitten me!
And damn me if I wasn’t proud of her for fighting like a feral animal.
“Her wrists and hands need some attention. Don’t think the gash on her eye needs stitches, but she’s gonna be sore when she wakes up for sure.”
I nod to Frank and pull her closer, inhaling the scent of her twig and leaf matted hair. We’d had to sedate her when we’d reached the car as fatigue and shock finally set in, so she now rests comfortably on my chest, her even exhalations and snores making my heart settle for the first time since I walked into the kitchen and seen the carnage.
“I’ve called the doctor. He should be waiting for us at home.”
I keep my tone and volume even, not wanting to disturb her rest any more than I have to. Rage and the need for violence still seethe beneath the surface of my skin, but there will be adequate time to seek an outlet for them after I tend to the needs of my woman.
“About that other matter.”
“No, we’ll discuss it when I’ve had her seen to and resting comfortably.”
Frank nods and stays silent for the rest of the journey, his unsettling eyes never straying from my light burden and the paleness of her skin. As I relax back and shift her closer to the crook of my neck, I close my eyes and plot my next course, laying it all out as methodically as my vengeance-filled mind will allow.
I have no use for those who oppose me, never have, so for Wesley Munro…well, let’s just say that as far as I’m concerned it’s become a personal affront to me that the man breathes the same air as my little family.
For daring to take what is mine I’d already decided to make him suffer. For hurting her, though, I have an altogether different set of standards. For this he will not only suffer but beg for mercy.
I will make him cry for every tiny scratch he put on her delicate skin, will make him scream for every shiver that wracked her body as I pulled her close and willed my heat into her frozen limbs.
Every mark and bruise that he has given her will be visited upon him two fold. By my own hand, and then… I may not kill him like I wish to, I’m no murderer, but I will ensure that he lives the rest of his miserable days regretting that he dared to hurt my Ashley.
My thoughts are brutal and hard and so far from the civilized man I show to the world, but as I pull her closer and stare out of the window I can’t find the will to give a damn.
Wesley Munro will hurt for hurting my family.
***
Ash
“Lucian, seriously, I’m totally fine. See? I can get out of bed without my limbs falling off. For God’s sake! Put me down, you ninny!”
I’m yelling, something that makes me feel shitty due to the fact that he’d saved me, but I can’t help it. It’s been three days since I’d woken in our bed, and the man has yet to let me so much as lift a fork to feed myself.
I love that he’s been so attentive and caring, and yeah, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to hamming it up a little just to have him fawning all over me a bit longer.
But even I can’t stay in bed this long and I freaking well say so, have said so continuously since yesterday, when the doctor came by to give me the all clear.
“You’ve been through an ordeal. You need your rest,” he snarls, sweeping me up only to lay me gently back on the bed I’ve come to hate.
“But Lucian—”
“No! You damn near had hypothermia, and you’ve had a massive shock. You need to give yourself time to heal,” he grinds out, pinning me to the bed with a hand over my heaving chest. “Really, love, I can’t tell you how awful you looked—”
“Gee, thanks. If you’re looking to get laid anytime soon, you should keep going. The flattery is almost killing me.”
His mouth kicks up in the first grin I’ve seen since waking, and I do what any hot-blooded female in my position would do when pinned beneath a man this dominantly sexy.
I stare open-mouthed and drink it all in with a long line of drool streaming down my chin.
“You’re twisting my words. Deliberately,” he chides, leaning down to plant a gentle kiss on the skin between my eyebrows. “You know I didn’t mean you looked ugly. You looked half insane with fright and cold.”
I snort and look away as a blush heats my cheeks.
“Don’t remind me of my overactive imagination.”
I’d confessed to running from not only an animal but a fictional ghost, needing to explain my little biting attack after seeing the bloody evidence of my teeth marring his sculpted chest.
Instead of being annoyed—or amused—by my ludicrous imaginings and the resultant hysterical attack on his person, he’d gone all stony silence before yelling at me that it wasn’t amusing.
Seems my man doesn’t like the thought of me running scared and almost braining myself on a tree, even if I’d done it to escape a movie villain.
Nope, it only seemed to piss him off more that I’d been so afraid my mind had gone berserk and almost gotten me hurt more than I already was.
The thought of what I must have looked like makes me laugh despite the embarrassment, and I giggle once more, trying to picture my face and the speed wobble I’d been performing to escape the dastardly ghouls behind me.
“Stop laughing. It isn’t bloody funny!”
“But it is,” I wheeze, burying my face into h
is neck as tears leak out of my eyes. “I must have looked like—”
“You looked half dead with bloody fear!”
I sober at the heat in his tone and peek up at him, biting my lips to quell the smile blooming there. He must really like me, at least a little, if he can’t laugh with me at my silly antics.
The idea sends tingles of joy to my already melting heart, and I sigh, giving him a quick peck on the lips before pushing him away to sit up against the headboard.
“Okay, all right, I won’t laugh about it anymore, grandpa,” I gripe. “If you won’t let me out of bed, and plan on staying cooped up with me all day again, I think it’s time to talk about it.”
His face shutters, letting me know he’s been waiting for the inevitable questions and doesn’t want to answer.
I’m more stubborn, though, and smarter just for having boobs and a vagina, so I square my shoulders and school my features into a glare I learned from the master himself.
“Tell me what happened with Wesley. I want to know.”
“Ash—”
“Nu-uh, mister, I was kidnapped and robbed.”
God, who steals a woman’s engagement ring, anyway! It’s like kicking a freaking puppy, it’s so wrong, and just…just mean!
“You tell me what the heck happened, or I’ll call Frank and get it from him,” I warn, keeping my face stoic.
Lucian scowls darkly at the mention of the other man’s name, and I fight a giggle at the look of jealous irritation it invokes. I’ve now officially met my personal bodyguard and have him so wrapped around my finger he’d willingly jump through flaming hoops for me.
I kinda like knowing that I have someone at my back; it makes me feel safer, as well as the added benefit of using the big burly ex-soldier to threaten my stubborn husband.
“Dammit! Fine,” he mutters, raking at his hair in frustration. “I had your father—”
“Wesley. That man is not my dad,” I mutter, feeling a fresh rush of tears at the mention of the man who’d ripped my ring away and left me for dead.
“Wesley,” Lucian concedes, taking another, deeper breath. “I had him investigated, and…Ash, can’t we just—”
“No! I want to know,” I insist, locking gazes with his stubborn frown.
“He stole the inheritance your mother left for you and Ben,” he finally grits out after a few long minutes of staring each other down.
The news shocks me a little, because honestly, I didn’t even know Mom had any money besides the meager savings we’d used for her funeral.
“She left us money?”
That rat fink bastard! Not only has he taken my ring, a symbol of the commitment…ownership, I amend, of the man before me, but he’d taken money I could have used to keep Ben and myself housed and fed.
I could have used the safety net while getting my life back in order, as well as not having had to work so much Ben had felt neglected.
Just another tic against him in the ‘crummy dad’ department, Ash. Shake it off and move on.
“Yes. Not a lot, but enough to see you through the first year at least. He stole it and ran, and then…”
I see from his hesitation that he’s afraid to tell me the rest, not wanting to add to the hurt and disillusionment I already feel. Sweet brute.
“I already know he has another family,” I whisper, pushing the hurt away with a forceful shove.
I can mull that over later when I don’t feel so raw. Definitely when he’s out of the room. For some reason he goes ballistic when I cry or get sad. I like it, but not right now when I need to calm him as much as he needs to tend to me.
“Christ. I—I’m so sorry, love. I know how much that must hurt you.”
“Not even going there. Not yet,” I mutter, shaking my head to stop whatever he’s about to say. “He said you told his…wife, and that she left him and took his son.”
It’s hard to say, harder still to say when my sweet boy is just down the hall, oblivious to the cruelty of a man who should have loved him.
Lucian nods and grinds his jaw, making it tic slightly.
“I made sure they were set up, and then…I took his money and his business. I felt it only fair to leave him as helpless and alone as he left you and Benjamin.”
I feel whole when he says it, because no matter how much I want to tell myself that I had everything under control, I know I’d just been fooling myself as the house of cards toppled down around me.
It’s bitter and unforgiving, but the thought of Wesley suffering what we had makes me feel good and avenged.
“I—I should have realized he’d lose it and go after you and Benjamin. I wasn’t thinking clearly, and I—”
“Don’t. Don’t blame yourself for something he did. He chose to abandon us and steal our inheritance. He chose to use me to hurt you. He did this, Luc, not you,” I whisper, leaning in to kiss him softly. “You saved me. From him. From losing Ben. From myself. You’re my hero right now, so please, don’t ruin that for me,” I beg.
It takes a while, full minutes of my unwavering stare, before he releases a shuddering breath and nods, accepting the truth of my words.
“How did you find me?”
I can tell he wasn’t expecting such a quick change in topic and that the question makes him uncomfortable, but I don’t care. If I’m gonna give him every part of me I want honesty and trust.
It’s all he’ll give me, after all. There’s no love for me; I’ve seen it clearly enough in his shuttered gaze, but if I can have liking and respect as well as honesty I think I can do this without freaking out every other minute.
“I had a tracking chip in your ring.”
“Say what?”
His head dips and then lifts again, bringing his burning eyes back to mine. The look in them is stubborn and unapologetic, the first real glimpse I’ve seen of my dominant man since being taken.
I’ve missed it, a lot, over the last three days and through the incessant nagging and coddling he’s forced on me. The look is welcome, though no less infuriating as it would have been just days ago.
I love him, really I do, but he’s got some serious issues about keeping me under his thumb, and if I let on how creepily romantic I find this I know I’ll never hear the end of it.
Controlling bastard.
“I had a tracker on you the whole time, and bloody thank God I did or I suspect we wouldn’t have found you so soon,” he mutters. “As it is, it was just dumb luck that made Harry stop at that dirt road. We almost drove right by. Don’t even get me started on the fact that I was about to leave those woods when I couldn’t find you. The next chip is going in your luscious arse.”
“Uh, no. That’s not happening.”
And don’t even get me started on how hot I find it that the guy is this crazy about stuff. Sure, I should be pissed that he tagged me like a freaking cow, but instead I’m just relieved that his obsessive behavior let them find me sooner.
“Love?”
He’s looking and sounding uncertain now, not enough to make him seem weak, mind you, just enough that I can see he’s not quite sure how to handle me now that I know it all.
“Yeah?”
“Are you okay about all this? About your—about Wesley and…”
“No. The man is deranged enough to have kidnapped me and expects me to put in a good word so you can get off his ass. I am so not okay with that. It’s also really chapping my ass that he’s gone nuts because his wife took his son. What about Ben, huh? Why didn’t he go nuts that way about Ben? Why was it so easy for him to leave him?”
Lucian’s shoulders tense and shrug, reminding me that he’s still more than a little cheesed about this whole mess, anyway. I mean, he’s been upset about it since the beginning. He’d gone after Wesley almost from the start.
No, it’s not his fault that I got hurt. I have to admit a lot of my injuries were somewhat self-inflicted, thanks to my fight response in stressful situations, but he has a lot to explain still before I’ll feel s
ecure enough to let him handle it.
“Why didn’t you tell me about him and the money? You knew this for weeks and said nothing.”
He shrugs again and stands to prowl the room, his body yelling out his frustration.
“At first I couldn’t believe he’d do something that awful to his own… And then I got angry, really pissed if you want the truth, when I saw the kind of father he is to his other son. I admit I went a bit nuts. That’s why his wife left him; I went to see her and told her everything.”
God, that poor woman.
“And ruined him?”
It scares me a little to think of that ruthless side. I mean, I’ve always known it’s there; I’ve just never seen it so close and personal, as intense as I do now.
Wesley had been broken, devastated by what Lucian had done to him. I think I should feel pity or something for the sadness I’d witnessed. Instead I feel nothing, not one single thing at the prospect of my man going to the mattresses for us.
“I took no more or less from him than what he took from you,” he says so deeply I flinch.
The words make that silly, sappy side of me come to roaring life, and I look at him, smiling gently at his annoyance. Something in my eyes, on my face, makes him pause, and I see him tense again.
“Lucian, I—”
That’s all I get out before he’s at the door and bolting, leaving my words of love whispering on my lips.
Chapter Eighteen
“Stop moping around and come have a drink with me. He’ll be back tomorrow.”
“I’m not moping.”
“Oh puleeeaz, you are so moping. I recognize that look. Seen it in my own mirror a time or twenty, thanks to Brody’s commitment issues.”
I laugh at the face Cammy pulls and flop down on the patio sofa, watching the wind kick up an eddy of leaves. Lucian has been gone for two days, doing God alone knows what, and I’m really mad that he left me so soon after everything went down.
JACE (Lane Brothers Book 3) Page 59
