“I thought so.”
They sat there. In the Jeep. Their gazes holding.
Then she shook herself and said, “I love you, too. Did I say that before?”
“No. First time.” And it made his heart pound, and his mouth go dry, and he’d never have expected it so soon after what had happened in the den.
“Oh. Because I do.” She swallowed.
He sighed. “I thought you were going to leave me.”
“What would you do if I did? If I left you?” Her defiant look said this was some sort of test. She’d left people before, and they hadn’t bothered to come after her.
“I’d come after you. I wouldn’t sleep until I found you and convinced you to give us a chance.”
She looked surprised.
He leaned over and framed her face with his hands. “I love you, LeAnn. You belong with me and I belong to you. Do you understand?”
“I think so.”
“Because I’m keeping you. We’ll figure all this out together. I promise you I’ve got your back.”
“Even if I go all…rabid and attack Alanna?”
“Yes.” He grabbed her hands, bringing one up to his lips to kiss. He was keeping her forever. Jordan had been too late to help with the rescue, but maybe he could talk to him about marrying them. Soon. He wanted her as his…in every way. A marriage might help her see that she hadn’t lost the only ties she had to here—and to see that the pack could be her family—and they could start their own family. He was definitely keeping her.
“Are you still doing the handcuffed thing?”
“Yes, and taking lots of showers.”
She glanced down at their clothes and said, “It might take a couple to start off.”
He grinned. She wasn’t going to run. He wanted to shout and hug her, but he probably shouldn’t make a big deal of it.
She cleared her throat. “You really won’t be disappointed if I go all Exorcist on Alanna a few minutes from now?”
“Honey, I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”
Smiling, she took her foot off the brake, and they jolted forward. And he held on tight. Because it’d be a shame to die in a Jeep after all they’d survived.
…
She’d tried to plan what she was going to say, but it all flew out the window when she arrived to find a lot of the pack gathered and Alanna, leaning against the wall, looking bored, rather than like a prisoner being held there. Oh, it was on!
“You!” she shouted, pointing, and the Lycans between them melted out of the way.
Alanna raised her eyebrows as LeAnn stalked toward her.
Stopping ten feet from her, she yelled, “You freaking whore! You filled my brother’s brain with lies about how the pack should have protected that woman he liked…” She snapped her fingers.
“Sammy?” Travis supplied.
“Thank you,” she threw over her shoulder. She took a second look when she saw Jordan standing beside Travis, but she shook it off. “You convinced Ross that the Glacier pack had failed Sammy, and you twisted it and twisted it until he started the damn war you wanted.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you’re a sick nutjob who gets off on death, and because you like to manipulate people into doing whatever you want. And because you were here at Rainier, all alone, for all that time and this was your land, and Glacier Peak never invited you to their party or to join their club. Instead, suddenly they start a pack here and take over this place.”
“I joined this pack!” she shouted, pointing at herself and standing up.
“Did you? Regardless, it was all fine and good because everyone thought of you as Alpha, and you were still pulling the strings and making puppets like my brother dance, and it was fun. Then I came here, and it wasn’t funny anymore, and Ross lived through what happened at Glacier Peak, and he could tell everyone all about how you’d encouraged him to call in the poachers.”
“I never did that! If he told you I did that, he’s a damn liar!”
“My brother is dead! Because of you! Because not only did you do that, but you’ve been feeding him lies this whole time, and he believed you because he saw you as Alpha still. Of course he did. I was his little sister, and I didn’t know anything about being in a pack. You told him that Travis had scent-matched to me in order to get him to kill Travis because suddenly you weren’t Travis’s first choice for Alpha.” Right. We’ll talk about that later. She threw a glance over her shoulder at Travis.
Travis moved in back of her and said, “Keep going. You’re right so far. You’d gotten to where I’d chosen you as Alpha and told everyone to back the hell away from my mate.”
LeAnn nodded as she felt him rub a hand down her back. “So you went to Troy and screwed with his mind and convinced him to challenge Travis.”
It was a shot in the dark, but it made sense, and Alanna’s widened eyes said she was right. “That’s a lie!”
“Yeah, whatever. But that didn’t work either. So then you killed Merilee and tried to pin it on me, which is interesting because Travis told me if you really were pack, you shouldn’t have been able to kill her. Maybe there’s an escape clause for psychopaths though. Nevertheless, that failed because everyone in the pack agreed with my opinion of you and refused to kill me when it was obvious the only one I planned on killing was you.
“And when all that failed, you went back to your pal Troy and told him that Merilee would still be alive if not for Travis and me. And, okay, that worked, but we wouldn’t die because”—she gestured between her and the man at her side—“we’re better than you.”
Alanna narrowed her eyes.
“And this morning, when the sun rose, and I was still around, you were all ‘oh hell no’ so you went back to my brother and told him that he needed to get me out of town because Travis was filling my head full of lies about how I needed to wipe out the entire female population of the pack. So you had my brother make that call to Travis from Troy’s phone so that Travis would go all Alpha and leave me behind because…”
“I was a damn idiot,” Travis supplied.
She shrugged. No disputing that. “Then you came here and chased me out of the lodge—which I feel stupid about and wish I hadn’t brought up. My brother found me at Travis’s place, drugged me, and carried me off to some old cabin of yours in the middle of the woods until he could get us out of here. And then I shot my own brother because he tried to kill Travis to get me out of the scent-match.” Eventually, she’d have to deal with that emotionally, but for now, it was going in that box of things she repressed. “All of this because of you.”
“None of it is true. You’re a filthy, lying…”
“But here’s where I run into a problem!” she said, speaking above Alanna. “Because once upon a time, you told me that Travis would never suspect you of killing Colby because he’d know that if you ever killed someone they’d never find the body.”
“Oh,” Travis and Jordan said together.
“I wondered at the context of that,” Travis whispered to Jordan where he was standing behind them.
“It makes so much more sense now,” Jordan whispered back.
“And it seems we have no body,” LeAnn said. “So it’s my word against yours that you killed her, using an injection which is, interestingly enough, the same way Colby was killed, and the way I was knocked out, despite my brother not really keeping a whole lot of syringes and drugs around, and then you also dug out her tracking tag—which I had no idea you guys even had in you.” She stopped and turned to stare at Travis. “By the way, that’s weird.”
He raised his eyebrows and gestured at Alanna. Yeah, he had that thing where he always wanted to stay on one topic of conversation until they were done with it.
“Oh, right, so, I don’t have Merilee’s body…so that’s a problem. It wouldn’t be as much of a problem if I had my brother still alive to rant to everyone about how much you talked to him about being pack, and how you guys were such special
friends that he’d swiped your lab coat to lay a false trail for that thing with Colby along with a bunch of other raunchy-smelling clothing he collected after an orgy.”
“So it sounds like you have nothing,” Alanna said.
“No, you’re right. You’ve won. I can’t have Travis cuff you and haul you off like I’m dying to. You’ll never be charged with Merilee’s murder or held accountable for poisoning my brother’s mind, so you can sit there with that smirk I’d like to slap off your face—that smirk I would have slapped off last time if Travis hadn’t stopped me. You can do all that because you’ve won.”
And she waited a beat.
And Alanna continued smirking in that irritating way.
And Jordan said, “Hm,” behind her.
“But, oh wait,” LeAnn said. “You have one big problem. You’re part of Rainier pack. My pack. And even if I wasn’t Alpha, I could still point out pack law which says that if the majority of the pack feels like you’re a threat—you know, by killing people and manipulating the criminally insane—your life is forfeit, and you’ll be ripped to shreds, which I will spit on, mostly because I hate your guts.”
Alanna paled.
Jordan laughed softly.
“I love this woman,” Travis murmured, shaking his head. “That’s damn brilliant.”
“But I didn’t kill Merilee, Ross did.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Travis said. “There were drag marks outside Merilee’s place. You were too weak to pick up Merilee’s body, so you had to drag her, unlike Ross, who had no trouble at all carrying LeAnn off after he knocked her out.”
The hag scowled at Travis. Okay, so she loved him a little more now that he was throwing stuff in Alanna’s face. It was strange having a cop on her side—especially a smart and sexy cop.
“So which do you want, Alanna?” Leann said. “Are you going to produce Merilee’s body and evidence that’ll get you safely locked away in prison, or are you going to take a chance and go to a vote? Because as Troy would tell you, if he were still in one piece, the pack protects its own.”
Clenching her teeth, Alanna looked over at Travis and said, “I think I’d like a lawyer before I turn over anything.”
LeAnn strode forward, hauled back, and punched her right in the face.
Alanna fell back against the wall, clutching her nose.
Shaking out her fist, LeAnn said, “Damn, that felt good.”
She turned, expecting to see shock on the face of the pack. Instead, she noticed first that Travis had blocked Jordan from stopping her with an arm. Though from the way Jordan was grinning, he wouldn’t have stopped her. The rest of them were facing her, but they’d dropped their chins and were looking down. Even Liam—though he was smiling as wide as Jordan while doing so. She swallowed. They were doing that thing…showing that they respected her. She was pack. She was Alpha.
“I’m accepting the scent-match,” she announced. Though they’d probably guessed that.
Travis walked to her side—there was a bit of a swagger in his stride. “Liam, grab my handcuffs from my room.”
“Really? In front of our pack, Travis? Kinky.”
Several pack members snickered but didn’t look up.
He grabbed her, pressing a quick kiss on her lips. “I’m arresting Alanna, smart-ass.” Then he winked. “But I’ll get them back in time for later.”
“You better…because I say so, and I’m Alpha.” She grinned. It sounded fantastic to say that. “And I’m getting a tattoo, but a tracker…” She wrinkled up her nose.
“That reminds me,” Travis said. He yanked up Alanna’s sleeve.
A thin pink line crossed her upper arm where the tracker had once been.
“A little after-hours surgery, Doctor?”
Rolling her eyes, Alanna reached into her shirt and drew the tracking tag from her bra. “A girl likes her privacy.”
LeAnn snorted. “You ought to have loads of fun in prison, princess.”
“How’d you know?” Jordan asked Travis.
Her mate grimaced. “Merilee’s tracker never disappeared despite her killer being in the vicinity and removing it. Whoever killed her wasn’t using a jammer. That left two options: it was either someone who’d never had a tracker—which I never believed”—he sent LeAnn a significant look—“or someone who’d removed it. I’d been laboring under the misconception that it was Ross, not a new…variable.”
Was it wrong that she liked him calling Alanna a variable?
“A psycho variable,” she added. LeAnn threw Travis a look. “Definitely not getting a tracker. No way in hell. I think it was an insane idea from the beginning.”
She felt the weight as every eye in the pack swung to her. Uh-oh. She turned to meet Travis’s gaze and swallowed. They were equals. Hopefully, she could disagree with him in front of the pack without them resorting to a battle to the death.
A smile tipped up one corner of his lips. “You don’t happen to have a knife on you, do you?”
LeAnn exhaled in a huff. “No, I decided to go for the gun instead today. I feel sorta naked without something.” Though her last experience with a gun might make her switch back to knives for a while.
There was a flare of heat in his eyes at the word “naked” that made her heart speed up.
“Why?” It didn’t help her pulse that he brought up a knife right after she’d challenged him in front of everyone. That couldn’t be good.
Travis shrugged. “I was going to have you dig out my tracker.”
Her mouth dropped open in a soft gasp. Wow. He trusted her to do that? She probably would’ve hurled, but it was…nice that he’d thought of it. They didn’t even make Hallmark cards with that sort of touching sentiment. She cleared her throat. “Oh, I think Alanna can do that before she goes off to spend time peeing in front of large women named Bertha. I can stand beside her with a knife to make sure she does a good job.” She raised her eyebrows. “You’re sure?”
He nodded. “And that goes for everyone. We can all get them removed.” He glanced around, but the pack had returned to bowing their heads respectfully. “I’m starting to suspect that the illusion of being in control is more dangerous than being out of control.”
She tilted her head. “Have you felt a little out of control lately, Sheriff?”
He snorted and shook his head. “Pretty much since you arrived in town.”
“And you don’t like that?”
A wide grin stretched his lips. “On the contrary, LeAnn, I’m finding some things are worth turning your world upside down for.”
“Is that so?”
“Yup.”
Epilogue
“Jordan said maybe I could go on patrols for our pack. He said it was possible,” LeAnn said with her arms folded.
Smiling, Travis wrapped his arms around his mate, drawing her in for a kiss…while he pulled the gun from her back waistband. He had to disarm her about three times a day. She probably still had a knife on her somewhere. He’d get that away from her tonight when he dragged her to bed.
“You want to go on patrols, Mrs. Flynn?” he asked, pulling back. He loved calling her that.
“Well, Sheriff Flynn, everything is supposed to be back to normal now, and the rest of the pack is doing their usual routes.” She slid her hands into his back pockets and rubbed her body against his. Usually, that would get her anything she wanted…well, it still might.
“If you shift, I’ll take you on patrols.” Her nightmares were getting further and further apart, and she hadn’t spaced out on him for weeks. She could take on her genetic heritage with his support. She’d love running wild and free, if she could stop repressing it. He’d seen the wolf in her eyes too many times for her not to be a full-blooded Lycan.
“Jordan said that you take non-Lycans on patrol.”
“Who died and made Jordan Alpha of my pack?” It was a legitimate question. He heard “Jordan said” far too often for his liking.
She grinned. “He called me earlier.
”
What? He narrowed his eyes as he stared down at his mate…his wife. “He called you? Not me? You?”
“He told me that he’s talked to you as much as he wanted to for the rest of this year. Besides, you’re actually doing your sheriff thing again, and this wasn’t about something you’d know.”
Not about something I’d know? What? He might have to call Jordan and tell him to worry about his own damn pack, and stop trying to horn in on his…which would sound really ridiculous this soon after their crisis, but this was his wife, and she should only be worried about what “Travis said.”
At least things had calmed down within his pack enough that he could do his “sheriff thing” again. Jordan had been right about an alpha female being exactly what his pack needed. And after she’d decked Alanna, no one doubted LeAnn was Alpha. Even Liam was showing her deference, and she had him running pack errands with no complaints. So Jordan had been right. Travis wasn’t about to start saying “Jordan said” all the time, though, even if he had been right on this one thing.
“What was it about?” he asked finally. He should have known she wouldn’t volunteer the information.
“A gift for Christa.”
“Oh.” That was okay. That made sense. He wouldn’t even know the first thing about a gift for a woman. In fact, now he was tempted to call Jordan and ask what LeAnn had recommended.
Being mated was making him insane. He made so much less sense than he had a month ago. Every impulse seemed to contradict a previous one. And half his brain seemed to be entirely LeAnn-centric. Luckily, it seemed to have the same effect on Jordan and Dane, so it wasn’t just a personality flaw of his. Plus, there were perks. A lot of perks…and he had one of them in his arms—all warm and soft and smelling of honey.
She’d totally rewritten his life plan. Now it was more of a life outline—a rough outline, with room for adaptation. He’d never be as carefree as his brother Josh, but finding something worth dying for made living for the same reason as close to heaven as a man could get.
“Also, one of his clients wants a nice safe, and he wanted to run a few brands by me to see if I could break into them.”
Crazy Over You Page 25
