by Lexi Blake
“Thank god. I don’t know what’s wrong with your boyfriend.” Trent shook his head as he started walking toward me. “I can’t get him to speak English.”
“Then let me make it plain to you, Mr. Wilcox.” Marcus’s hand was suddenly around the big wolf’s throat. He managed to dangle Trent a couple of inches off the ground, which was a feat because Trent was several inches taller than Marcus. “Take your eyes off my mistress. Now.”
“Damn it, Marcus,” Trent gasped. His eyes widened and his feet kicked, trying to reach the floor. I was surprised to say the least. Marcus was typically a very nonviolent-type vampire. He tended to leave that sort of thing to me. “I’m sorry. What am I supposed to do? She’s…”
“Half naked.” Marcus growled as he turned his unnaturally dark eyes to me. I have rarely seen that pure vampire part of Marcus. Sometimes it came out when we made love, but he was always in control. Tonight seemed different. Tonight those pitch-black eyes bore into me and his will rolled across my skin. Persuasion pushed at me. That was all vampire, with none of my indulgent trainer. “I told you to get dressed.”
I knew he was right. I should go and do as he asked, as he’d asked me to in the first place. Still, I stood there. It’s a perversity of my nature that I have a strong aversion to any sort of authority. He was pushing persuasion my way. Oh, he wasn’t attacking me with it, but the threat was there. My wolf didn’t like that much. “Since when do I follow your orders, Marcus?”
“Since you decided to become my mistress, Kelsey. You agreed to belong to me. I do not allow my mistress to expose herself to other men. Your body belongs to me. It is not for his eyes.” He kept Trent dangling.
I wondered if the wolf would start turning blue soon. His neck was muscular and thick. It didn’t look like Marcus could get his whole hand around it so I thought he was pretty safe. Marcus might be pissed at the king, but I couldn’t let him kill the queen’s guard.
His anger fed my own. I shoved back at his will. Despite the sex, my she-wolf was prowling in my gut again. “You possessive freak, I am not going to meekly obey you.”
I’m pretty sure my she-wolf is also an alpha bitch.
“I wish you would, Kelsey.” Trent’s muscles strained. “This really fucking hurts.”
Marcus ignored his prisoner. His arm showed no signs that he couldn’t hold him there all night long. His fangs were out, and he enunciated clearly around them. Nothing in his face told me he wasn’t completely serious about what he said next. “You will obey me in this or we will be done, my mistress.”
I took a tight rein on my anger, but couldn’t help flipping him the bird as I turned away. He wanted to play that way? Oh, I would show him. I could walk out on anyone. I could burn my own fucking house down without a thought. I was not the girl who took ultimatums well. I would get dressed and walk right away from him.
I stalked into the bedroom and was assaulted by lilies. I stopped, staring at this room we were supposed to share. Marcus had filled it with gorgeous flowers. My favorite flowers.
They were tasteful, as was everything Marcus did. There were Asian lilies on the dresser and on the small table beside the bookshelf where he’d stocked my favorite books. Sitting in the middle of the bed was a wrapped bouquet of gorgeous orange and black lilies. They were the kind my mother used to grow in the tiny bed in front of our crappy duplex. Sometimes those lilies were the only beautiful things in my life. I’d told Marcus about them one night while we lay together in front of the fire.
I touched the lilies and felt all of my anger flee. Even the she-wolf kind of yawned and gave up. How could I stay mad at a man who remembered almost everything I ever told him? I was used to walking away the minute something went wrong, but my life had changed three months before. I couldn’t walk out. I needed Marcus more than I needed my pride.
I walked to the closet and liked the fact that my clothes were on the right side of the huge walk-in while his suits and sweaters hung neatly on the left side. I selected a pair of well-made black slacks and a ruby red sweater.
Marcus was a man of his time. Trying to treat him like the dudes I dated in college wasn’t fair to him. He made no secret of it. He enjoyed the modern world and gave me an enormous amount of latitude. He never minded when I took the lead or cussed or got into a fight. He merely asked that I be faithful to him, and part of that for Marcus was a certain amount of modesty. If I’d thought about it for two seconds, I would have seen it from his point of view. I was half naked in front of another man. It was bound to bother Marcus. I was going to have to apologize.
I don’t like to apologize.
I slipped on black boots with a small heel and went to brush out my hair. Marcus had slowly gotten rid of every ponytail holder I owned, so I was forced to leave it long. I selected one item of jewelry. It was the only piece I possessed. It was a small red and gold heart made from Venetian glass. I fell in love with it while at a jeweler’s in Venice. Marcus bought it for me. Normally I didn’t wear jewelry of any kind, but I was conceding this argument, and he liked to see me wear it.
When I was certain I looked every inch the lady, I walked back out.
Marcus had let Trent down and was pacing the floor. Trent was sitting on the couch massaging his neck.
“Better?” I asked Marcus in an even tone that let him know I wasn’t willing to fight anymore. We’d only had a few fights. They tended to end with Marcus and I throwing down with some raucous sex. We didn’t have time for that tonight, so I didn’t want to fight.
Marcus didn’t look even slightly guilty as he studied me from well-groomed head to properly accessorized toe. In his mind, he’d been completely in the right. “You look lovely.” He approached me and gently touched the heart I was wearing. “But then, you always do.” He kissed me. I got the feeling it made our wolf guest uncomfortable. “Thank you, cara mia. I’ll leave you alone to work now. I must go and have a discussion with our king. Mr. Wilcox says he has come on some business. You will be fine without me, no?”
I wrapped my arms around his lean waist and went on tiptoes to kiss him again. I sighed as he deepened the kiss and wound his hands in my hair. It wasn’t something he would normally do. He wasn’t a big fan of the PDA. In public he would hold my hand and he would give me a light kiss. Tonight, he seemed to have something to prove.
When he let me up, I answered him. “I’ll be fine. I’ll be late, though. I have some stuff to do on a case.”
“See me before you leave, Kelsey,” Marcus said, walking to the door. “I would not have you go out without making sure you are protected.”
I nodded, trying hard not to get too excited by what that meant. He would share his blood with me. It would blow my mind. I wasn’t a companion. I wasn’t his wife. By all vampire traditions, he shouldn’t share his blood with me unless he needed to save my life. He couldn’t seem to help himself though. He came up with some flimsy excuses, and I always took them. The truth was, I wanted that blood. No drug ever made me feel the way Marcus’s blood did.
The door closed behind him. I was left alone with Trent Wilcox, asshole werewolf and the king’s official lackey. He also had shoulders about a mile wide. Not that I noticed or anything.
“Sorry,” I said, not sounding sorry at all. “He can be a little possessive at times.”
“He’s fucking insane is what he is, Kelsey.” Trent growled, the sound way more animal than man. It was odd but I found that growl slightly comforting. “Do you have any idea the things he threatened to do to me if I so much as look at you the wrong way again?”
“I can only imagine.” It was nice to see Trent on the ropes for once. “You’ll have to forgive him. He cares for me. He doesn’t understand that other men don’t have any interest in me at all.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Trent muttered. His eyes softened marginally. “Are you okay? You know, after what happened today?”
“You mean after you and the big boss threatened to lock me up again? Somehow I’ll survive. I
don’t think it’s the last time you’ll try to kick me in the gnads.”
The big guy managed to look offended. “We didn’t do that. It was only a test. You know how dangerous you are.”
“Terrifically dangerous to a vampire king.” Donovan was kind of the most powerful supernatural creature on the planet. I was supposed to believe he was afraid of little old me?
He stared at me for a moment. “Marcus hasn’t told you, has he? You haven’t read the histories.”
Yeah, when I read it’s usually a nice juicy thriller or a romance. “Nope. Not my style.”
“I’m talking about the histories written by academics concerning Hunters. Your boyfriend wrote several of them. It seems academics like to keep records, and god knows the Council does. Donovan found them when he had the libraries moved from Paris to here.”
“Records about other Hunters?” I was interested in that. As far as I knew I was the only Hunter in the world.
“Yeah, I can get them for you. Maybe then you’ll understand why Donovan’s been so hard on you and why he’s going to let up from now on. You did great today. He was impressed.”
“Donovan is hard on me because he’s an asshole.”
Trent shook his head. “He’s hard on you because the last Hunter who was found and trained past the age of twenty killed over three hundred people before they were able to put her down. She killed her entire family and moved on to slaughtering whole villages in South America.”
“What are you talking about?” Marcus hadn’t said a thing to me about that. Actually, now that I thought about it, he hadn’t talked much about other Hunters. I knew he’d trained a couple, but he never talked about them. I thought maybe it was a little like ex-girlfriends. It’s not in trainer etiquette to talk about your ex-Hunters or something.
What if he had different reasons? Even earlier today, Hugo had mentioned something about a girl he’d tried to train being too old when they’d reached her. He’d said it was heartbreaking.
Had that woman been the one who tore apart villages?
Trent leaned against the wall, sighing. “I was worried you didn’t know. You seem so level-headed that when you pulled all that guilt trip shit, I was worried. The king’s a good guy. Now that he knows the training will take, he’ll back off.”
“So I was too old.” There was still so much I didn’t know. If there was one good thing about being forced to live in the Council headquarters, it was the fact that I might have a chance to learn more about myself, about this thing I was becoming.
Trent stood back and shrugged. “There’s a reason the Council tried to find them young. I think having a family helped you. I think who your dad was made a difference, too. Your real dad, that is.”
“I didn’t know him.” Lee Owens. I thought about him a lot. I think I dream about him.
“He’s a legend in my community. I’ve only met two loners, and Owens was so different from the other one. Lone wolves, well, they have that name for a reason. They drift and keep drifting. Your dad stayed. Your dad was different, and I think that’s why you’re different. He had a strong heart. You do, too.”
Thinking about my real dad made me emotional. I’d grown up with a complete asshole for a father figure, but maybe my real dad had left me something important. Maybe he’d managed to leave me a piece of his soul. If I didn’t watch it, Trent was going to see me cry like a baby.
“I want to read those histories.” There was a whole book out there describing other women like me? Yeah, I wanted to read it.
Trent nodded. “I’ll get them to you. Maybe then you can find it in your vengeful she-wolf heart to think about not hating the king. He was only trying to protect the world. He reads a lot of comic books so he thinks he can do that.”
“I’m not vengeful. Well, maybe a little.” Something about the way Trent called me a she-wolf made me want to smile. But I was still pissed at him so I didn’t. “So everyone knows about the whole elderly Hunter goes cray cray and kills everyone thing?”
“Not everyone. Donovan studied it carefully after he found out about you. You were supposed to be brought in a decade ago.”
I’d been told this part of my history back when I first met the king and his Council. The king’s coup a decade before had saved me from being kidnapped and brought to the old Council for training. I often wondered about what would have happened if I’d been brought to Paris. I wonder what my life would have been like had I met Marcus at the age of sixteen. “Did the queen know? Why would she encourage her son to talk to me if she thought I might go bat shit?”
Trent’s lips curled up in a smile. “Yeah, she knew all about it. I think the king gave her a hearty lecture on the subject, but Zoey Donovan-Quinn doesn’t play by anyone’s book but her own. She’s an ‘innocent until proven to be a stone-cold killer’ kind of girl.”
“You like her.” Somehow it made me feel better that one person hadn’t thought me capable of destroying whole towns.
“She’s incredibly likable, but don’t tell her I said that. I have to admit, I kind of like a hard-headed woman.” He seemed to remember he had something to do here. “Now, let’s talk about your job. I hear you’ve already started meeting with clients. I’m supposed to help you.”
“Great.” I knew exactly what strings Trent’s “help” would come with. “I get a bodyguard. Well, I get a jailer. How long is Donovan going to keep you on top of me?”
“It’s not like that,” Trent tried to explain. I didn’t care to listen. I was already walking out the door. He hurried behind me as I made my way to the elevator that would take me down to Ether. “Come on, Kelsey. Please give me a chance. This doesn’t have to be hard.”
“How about I make it easy by staying home like a good girl and not getting into any trouble.”
He smiled at the thought. “You couldn’t stay out of trouble if you tried. The boss wants you to have backup. That’s all. Now calm down. We’ll go downstairs, and I’ll buy you a burger. I saw the menu the vampire planned for you. It’s very…nutritionally balanced.”
I frowned at the thought. Sometimes Marcus got weird ideas about eating vegetables and shit. I could really use a burger.
“So I told them to chuck the kale salad and ordered us bacon cheeseburgers, fries, and some beer.” Trent dangled the proposition tantalizingly in front of me.
My stomach responded in the affirmative. I gave in. I needed that burger. I didn’t even know what kale was. “Fine. But this doesn’t make us friends.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Trent promised.
Chapter Five
I might not have liked Trent at that point, but I did like being around a wolf. I feel comfortable around werewolves. They’re kind of like my people even when they’re assholes. So I tipped back my beer and settled in beside him as we watched the show currently playing in Ether.
“Donovan’s saying something about how much he respects Marcus and how happy he is to have him back.” Trent gestured to the two men pretty much everyone in the club was watching.
Marcus had apparently tracked the king down to the club level of Ether. Donovan had been talking to a couple of shifters when Marcus had approached him. It had quickly dissolved into some seriously angry dinner theater.
“Yeah, well, Marcus isn’t having it,” I pointed out as Marcus began speaking rapidly. His hand jabbed at the air. He had the general look of a man who wasn’t going to take it anymore.
For the most part, Marcus is a private man. It was only after I became his lover that he allowed me to see the range of his emotions. He tended to play things close to the vest. Every once in a while, though, his Italian temper flared, and the man could rage. At those times he didn’t care that he had an audience. This particular audience was out of luck since the entire argument was being conducted in rapid-fire Italian. Turns out the king has an ear for languages. So Trent and I were making a game out of figuring out what the men were saying.
“Obviously.” Trent laughed as the kin
g put his hands up in submission. “That would be his ‘Sorry, I fucked up’ face. I think he conceded that Marcus can stay your trainer.”
“Like he has a real choice in the matter.” I snorted. We’d already bonded. It wouldn’t work so well with anyone else.
“Well, Donovan might have conceded, but it doesn’t look like your guy is done. That dude is pissed.” Marcus leaned over the table that separated him and the king, his eyes narrowed. Trent took a long swig from his third beer. It was kind of nice to eat with someone who could keep up with me. It made me feel less like a freak. “I’m surprised His Highness is putting up with this. Anyone else and his ass would be on the ground unconscious.”
“Not just anyone else,” an amused voice said from behind us.
I turned and saw Dev Quinn watching the byplay between his partner and Marcus. He held three bottles of beer in his hands. He passed them out, keeping the last one for himself.
The fertility god hopped onto the barstool beside me like he owned the place, which he did. “I think you’ll find there are four people in the world who can get away with embarrassing the hell out of Dan. Zoey does it on a regular basis. I save it up for those times he’s truly pissed me off. Then there’s Marcus. Dan loves Marcus. Marcus saved him after his turn. He can get away with almost anything.”
“Who’s the fourth?” Trent asked curiously.
“Our father-in-law.” Quinn had a rueful smile on his face. “Of course, Harry would never yell at Daniel. Daniel is perfect.”
“I bet he yells at you.” From what I understood, the queen’s father was human. I wondered how he took his baby girl being claimed by a fertility god.
“Less and less as the years go by, but in the beginning, I was his whipping boy,” Quinn explained. He winced as he watched his partner. “Shit, what did Marcus say?”
