by Emma Roman
I was on a blind date, too, she wanted to say. But somehow, telling Paul she was dating other men still felt like a betrayal. When she knew in her heart that he should be the man across the table from her.
But she’d made a promise.
“Will you at least tell me how you’ve been?” he asked, a tired plea in his voice.
She opened her mouth to answer, but the words caught in her throat. All it would take was one open door, and he would be back in her life in a heartbeat. She’d seen Fated mates enough times to know how thoroughly magick worked. Paul was as miserable as she was.
It was better for them to stay apart.
But Uncle Caleb practically made her swear a blood oath to stay away from Paul. He had used his alpha magick to impress upon her just how important his warning was. She didn’t understand it, but she had to be obedient to her alpha.
This isn’t ‘staying away’ from Paul.
Sylvie closed her mouth and edged farther in to the open door. She should get in her car and drive away. But even being in Paul’s presence for a few minutes was like oxygen, and she was so starved for it, she wanted to take in big lungfuls to last her…
Forever.
“Syl, why won’t you even talk to me?” he asked, an edge of anger in his tone.
“I have been fine, Paul.”
“There.” His smile was sudden. Easy. Like he’d won something. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
She found herself returning the smile, against her better judgment. A little smile couldn’t hurt. After all, she should be polite.
“And how have you been?” she ventured.
“Well, my date is going crappy. To say the least.” A tiny shiver moved through his body and he glanced at her bare shoulders. “Aren’t you freezing?”
Sylvie wrapped her arms around her body. Her wolf kept her warmer than a human would have been, although she was cold. But she wouldn’t shiver when Paul’s body would. He was human.
“I’ve had some alcohol,” she said, smacking her hands on her arms. “It helps to dull the senses.”
A dark shadow moved across his brow. “Then you shouldn’t be driving home. Here.” He reached his hand toward her. “Give me your keys.”
She turned her body away, shielding the keyfob from his grasp. “No. I’m fine.”
“Sylvie.” There was a warning in his tone that warmed her more than her wolf did. He was concerned for her.
This was exactly what she’d want him to do. Care for her. Watch out for her. Protect her.
A little crack inside brought tears sniffing up the back of her nose, burning a well-worn trail. She missed him so much, and her heart knew it.
“Sylvie?” A male voice called out across the parking lot.
Oh shit.
Caleb’s tall frame was unmistakable. Even in the semi-dark, she recognized his swagger. Her uncle carried himself like an alpha, even dressed in the white kitchen apron. He was on the war path.
“Is he bothering you?” Caleb said, coming up behind Paul.
“No.” She grabbed the top of the car door to steady herself. “I was just leaving.”
“She’s had too much alcohol,” Paul said, flexing his broad shoulders. “I can’t let her drive home.”
“It’s none of your concern, son.” Caleb’s words to Paul were kind, but Sylvie heard the beginnings of frustration there. “I’ll have one of my boys drive her home.”
“It’s okay. I can do it.” Paul stepped between Caleb and the car, almost like he was shielding Sylvie. “It will only take me ten minutes.”
“You have a date inside.” Caleb crossed his arms. “I’ve got Kier, Sean, and Luther here. One of them can take her home.”
Paul’s body tensed, like he wanted to keep arguing, but Sylvie put a hand on his back. The touch sent electricity singing through her, and she felt Paul shudder under her touch. He felt it, too.
They hadn’t touched in two years until tonight, and for good reason. The magick spoke so clearly, whenever they were in proximity. Like it was saying, Mine. She let the warmth of that thought seep through her for a few seconds, and then pulled her hand off his body, by the sheer force of will.
She didn’t want to stop touching him.
“Go ahead,” she whispered, her body on the edge of breaking down at the loss of contact. “They can drive me.”
“No. Syl. I can do it. I have to make sure you’re all right.” Paul’s voice was gravel, and it made her knees shake. She had to grip the door to keep herself upright.
“Paul,” Caleb said, a wave of magick coming off him that the human wouldn’t understand. “Go back inside to your date.”
Her ex shook his head, like he was fighting it off, even though, unlike the wolves, he wouldn’t know what he was fighting. He staggered to one side and turned back to look at Sylvie.
She gave him a tiny smile and nodded. “Goodbye, Paul.”
Her chest constricted as she watched him walk away, continuing to try and shake off whatever he thought was happening to him. As a rule, using magick on humans was forbidden, but it was the alpha’s purview to break the rules. She certainly wasn’t going to scold her uncle for his misuse of magick.
Caleb glared down at her, and she braced herself for more energy, but it didn’t come. He glanced back at Paul’s retreating form. “You promised me, Sylvie Ann.”
“I know.” She moved her gaze to the footprinted snow in front of her. “He followed me.”
“Still.” Caleb shifted, uneasy. “You shouldn’t even have spoken to him.”
“He doesn’t…” She swallowed, trying to keep her urge to cry from surfacing. “He doesn’t understand why we broke up. So every time he sees me, he—”
“Then maybe it’s time for you to leave Springfield.” Caleb’s gaze was hard and dark.
No! Sylvie choked on the cold air. She couldn’t talk back to her alpha.
“Wh—why? Just because of Paul?”
“This isn’t something to play around with, Sylvie. I gave you an alpha order, and I expect you to obey it. If you can’t obey it, then I want you to leave.”
She flapped her jaw, still unable to make words. Every molecule of her body wanted to run after Paul, to throw her arms around him, to take him back to bed.
To run away with him.
But if she wanted to remain part of the Gallagher family, she had to stay away from him. Caleb had made that clear two years ago.
“I mean it, Sylvie. Can you stay away from him?” Caleb asked, hands on his hips.
“We have…” She stopped short of saying we have a Fated bond. It was the one thing she’d never told her uncle. It wouldn’t have made a difference. He’d ordered her and he expected the order to be followed. “We have a lot of history.”
“You are shaking. Let me go get Luther. He’ll drive you home.”
“He doesn’t have to.” Sylvie leaned into the door. “I’m not drunk.”
“But Paul said—”
“He asked me why I wasn’t cold.” She indicated her bare shoulders. “I couldn’t tell him about being a wolf, obviously. So I said I’d had too much alcohol.”
Caleb’s brows drew together and he stared straight into her eyes, like he was trying to force an admission out of her. But there was nothing else to admit. She’d told him, two years ago, that she was in love with Paul. There was nothing else to tell.
He relaxed and sighed. “Sylvie, I know what it’s like to love someone you can’t have. But I made a promise to Paul’s mother that we would never involve him in the magick world. You have to stay away from him.”
Her shoulders rose involuntarily at the discomfort she felt. Her uncle never shared personal information of any kind with her. She didn’t like knowing that he’d loved someone besides her mother’s sister, besides Aunt Gretchen. Even if it made his command easier to bear, because he knew how hard it was.
No doubt, he wanted to impress on her the severity of adhering to his request. But all it did was make her th
ink of Paul. How much she wanted him. How he was sitting in that café right now with another woman. How empty her bed was without him in it.
She slid into her car and grabbed the door to pull it closed, but her uncle’s hand was there before she could. He leaned down and the proximity made her shoulders raise again.
“Can you stay away from him?”
“I have tried.” She tried to pull the door again, but it wouldn’t budge. “I can’t control what he does.”
“You’re right. You can’t.” He nodded his head and backed away. “You go home. I’ll send Luther over tonight to check on you.”
She slammed the door and the tears began to come again in earnest. Sylvie pulled out onto the dark road and let herself cry. If Caleb made good on his promise to send her away, she’d never see Paul again.
It was already torture to be in the same town and try to avoid him, but if she moved, it would be like saying goodbye forever. It would kill her last shred of hope that someday Caleb would change his mind.
3
Paul threw his keys on the counter and gripped the wood hard, rocking back and forth. It was almost ten o’clock, and he’d left Roxy at the restaurant at her own request. She’d been flirting pretty hard-core with that waiter and Paul had no doubt she would be going home with him when his shift was over.
That was just fine. Roxy had been a set-up. An attempt, by his family, to fix what they thought ailed him. But they were clueless, as usual.
“You’re home early,” his brother said from the kitchen door. “Where’s what’s-her-name?”
“She went home with the waiter.” Paul went to the fridge and pulled out a Heineken. “So whoever had that in the pool will win the big kitty.”
Brady snorted. “There was no pool.”
“Right.”
An uneasy silence grew between them. Ever since they’d fired his last attempt at cold comfort, months ago, and had the official intervention in his love life, his family had been trying to get him together with some respectable girl or another. It had pissed Brady off enough that he’d almost gotten rid of their sister’s boyfriend just because he worked there, too.
That had been the last straw for him—when it started affecting his family. Paul had to back off. His family felt like they were helping, setting him up on dates, but it just made things awkward around the ranch.
“Pass me one of those,” Brady finally said, taking a step into the big kitchen.
Paul grabbed a green bottle and threw it over the counter. Brady caught it and laughed. It had been an old ritual of theirs, after a long day on the trails, throwing Heinies around and opening bottles on their boots.
They weren’t that close anymore. Brady didn’t even know Sylvie had existed. Let alone that she was the love of Paul’s life.
Love of my life. He took a long swig of his beer and rested against the refrigerator. He could have sworn that he saw desire in her eyes after she’d touched him. Just the pressure of her hand on his back had made the blood start to swell in his groin. It had only been the presence of Caleb that had kept him from sweeping her up in his arms and making love to her against the side of the freezing cold car.
Being with Sylvie would have been warmth enough.
“So, how was the date?” Brady asked, sliding into a seat at the counter. The kitchen was open and spacious, and there was seating in three different places—at the counter, along the wall leading out to the mud room, and at the four-person table in front of the door that led out to the second-story deck. But somehow, his brother had chosen the chair closest to Paul.
Like they were still buddies.
Paul shrugged his shoulders and took another pull on his beer. He wasn’t sure how to answer the question. Roxy had been beautiful. At first, she had even been nice to him. But Paul hadn’t been interested.
He was always hungry for… for something. But Roxy hadn’t been able to whet his appetite. She hadn’t even looked like an interesting snack. No one did, anymore.
“The steak was good,” Paul said, finally.
“Where did you go?”
“She wanted to try out the Blue Moon.” Paul swallowed almost half the beer. He’d known, when Roxy suggested the Gallagher place, that it was a bad idea. He and Sylvie had practically divided up the town when they broke up. All the places Sylvie frequented went on a list of places he shouldn’t go.
She’d said, I need to never speak to you again, and he’d listened. He’d stayed away. Until Roxy suggested the Blue Moon.
And he’d seen for himself that Sylvie wasn’t over him, either.
It had been two years. If she didn’t feel anything for him, then she should have moved on by now. Hell, he’d tried to. It hadn’t worked, but he’d tried. And if Sylvie didn’t care about him, then she shouldn’t have been crying. Or aroused.
“Earth to Paul,” Brady said, waving the green bottle in the air. “I said, I thought you didn’t like the Blue Moon.”
“I never said that.”
“You won’t go with us when we take the tourists there.” His brother set the beer on the counter. “Why would you go with what’s-her-name?”
“Roxy,” Paul said, focusing his attention on the uneven wood grain. “Lady’s choice, I guess.”
Brady gave him a serious glare, like he knew something was up, but before his brother could keep probing, Paul gestured to the door that led back into the rest of the house.
“Where’s Jamie?”
“Out to dinner somewhere.” Brady picked up the bottle and stared at the label. “It sounded like Kyle was planning to propose.”
Paul grunted. “Yeah. We all saw that coming a mile off. The only reason he waited was because Hugh took Christmas.”
The uncomfortable silence stretched out again, like an animal making itself at home on a hearth. Brady hadn’t talked about his own lack of a love life in years, and Paul didn’t want to touch the topic of their mother’s romance, or their sister’s.
Stupid fucking Valentine’s Day.
“Here’s to Jamie and Kyle,” Paul said, raising his beer. “May they have very quiet sex in the bunkhouse, where we don’t have to hear them.”
Brady’s chuckle brought a smile to Paul’s face. It was kinda like old times. His brother raised his own beer and nodded. “To Kyle and Jamie.”
“Are you going to ask her to move out?”
“When they get married, they’ll want to, don’t you think?”
Paul shrugged. He’d been living with his brother and sister and his mother his whole life. The house was so big, it didn’t feel like sharing space, and at different times in his adult life, he’d had his sister’s boyfriend-now-fiancé, his mother’s fiancé, and his brother’s late fiancée sharing his bathroom.
It didn’t bother him.
But if he and Sylvie had lasted…
He found himself nodding. “Yeah, I think they’ll want to get their own place.” Paul finished off his beer and laughed. “Not that I won’t miss having Kyle around. That dude can cook a steak like nobody’s business.”
“Well, you’ll have to go back to the Blue Moon, then.” Brady downed the last of his Heineken and smacked his lips. “If the steaks are that good.”
An uneasy pressure built in Paul’s stomach. After his confrontation with Caleb Gallagher, he didn’t dare go back to that place again. Apparently, Sylvie had told her whole family about their relationship and breakup, because the Gallagher boys all huddled around the bar together and stared at him the whole time he was with Roxy. And when he left, he could have sworn he saw them inch toward the door like they planned to fight him.
All he’d done was go after the woman he loved. Can’t fault a guy for that.
“What’s wrong?” Brady asked, rounding a brow.
Paul shrugged. “Nothing. I just didn’t expect the night to…”
The end of the sentence didn’t materialize and he wasn’t even sure what he wanted to say. There was a time when he and Brady shared everything. Like
brothers should. But Brady’s own loss had been too raw, and he had shut down long before Paul did. Trying to pick up where they left off, too many years previous, was like speaking a new language.
“Something’s off,” Brady said. “It was the setup, wasn’t it?”
“Nah.” Paul picked at the Heineken label.
“I can tell Mom to back off.”
“It wasn’t the setup. She was fine.”
“Then what was it?”
Paul blew out a long breath. Jamie was always telling him not to hold stuff in. Well, here it comes.
“I ran into Sylvie Proulx.”
Brady’s forehead wrinkled and he stared at the ceiling. “Sylvie Proulx?”
Of course. They didn’t even know. Paul peeled the rest of the label off the bottle in one long strip. “Sean’s cousin. We had a… Well, I don’t know what it was, but it was intense as shit. A couple of years ago. When we broke up, she told me not to come around anymore, so I left her alone.” He crumpled the label, still avoiding Brady’s eyes. “This was the first time I’ve seen her since we broke up.”
“Wait. Sean Gallagher?” His brother’s voice went dark and hard.
“Yeah. She was a bit of a buckle bunny, back in the day, but—”
Brady snapped his fingers and pointed a very steady finger in his direction. “Look at me. You stay away from the Gallagher girls.”
Paul’s back straightened and a defensive streak shot through him. “What the hell, man? You ask me what’s wrong and then you pull some dad bullshit on me?”
“I’m just saying, you need to stay away from the Gallaghers.”
“Well, apparently, that’s a common sentiment around here, because Caleb fuckin’ followed me out to the parking lot and I thought his kids were going to jump me after Roxy and I finished our date.”
Brady spread his hands on the counter, shaking his head. “You’ve really got to stay away from the Gallaghers.”
“Stop saying that.” Paul pushed off the counter and grabbed his empty. He set the green bottle on the recycling pile in the corner of the kitchen. His muscles itched to do something active. He never should have said anything to Brady.
