“It brought it all back.” Ari’s eyes shined with unshed tears. “What are you going to do? If the cougars see you up there, they’ll finish what they started.”
“I’m getting Leo the hell out of there.” I was getting madder by the second. “He’s not staying there. Who cares about the rest of the season? It’s not like the world is going to stop if someone has to wait until fall to learn how to ski. The cougars think they can intimidate me? Fine. But they’re not going to even think they can have my mate.”
Ari took a deep breath. “Dylan’s going to have to bring you. I can’t go back there.”
“I understand.” I felt so bad for her. I didn’t know what she’d been like before the challenge, but we’d been together every day since, and even I could tell there was something missing. I’d asked too much. And it added fuel to my fire.
She shook her head as she turned the key in the ignition. “And it’s probably better if Dylan takes you, in case anything...happens.”
My blood ran cold at her suggestion. But as long as Leo was on that mountain, this fight was never going to end.
“THAT DIDN’T LAST LONG.” Dylan chucked as the two of us climbed into his truck. Ari watched us leave the parking lot of the gym that he worked at. Dylan hadn’t bothered changing out of his shorts and sweaty T-shirt.
“Nope. It didn’t.” I rolled my eyes and he laughed even harder. “Would you leave Ari up there?”
“Not a chance in hell,” he growled. “I’m coming up to the cabin with you.”
My eyes widened. I would’ve never asked him to come because I assumed he’d laugh at me. “Thank you.”
“I have a stake in this too, Daphne.” Dylan tapped on the steering wheel to the beat of the music. It was angry heavy metal, completely appropriate for the situation. “You’re not the only one who needs Leo.”
I wished I could growl. “You don’t think he’d come with me?” Linnea’s words swirled fresh in my mind.
He shook his head and bit his lip to hold in more laughter. “I have no doubt that he’s your mate. But you’re both useless to me if you get shredded.”
I folded my arms and looked out the window. We were getting close to the mountain, and the anxiety made me nauseous. “Glad I have a use for you.”
“You know what I mean.” Dylan turned down the music. “I did everything to talk him out of going back to the mountain the other night. He should have gone back to you, but he insisted on going back to the mountain. I don’t know if he was pissed at me, or being stubborn. But it doesn’t look good when he comes back without any of us. We need to operate like a team now.”
What I said to Ari. Interesting. “Sounds like you expect a fight.”
“I do. We don’t know what we’re going to find on Deception. But if it isn’t friendly, we’re going to be much stronger as a unit than four separate animals.” He raised an eyebrow at me as he pulled into the parking lot. “Even you.”
I climbed out of the car without answering him. We weren’t the same, we never were going to be, and it was time to move past that.
Dylan stretched and put his hands on his hips, looking up the mountain. “If we don’t shift, it’s going to take us forever to get up the mountain.”
My mouth fell open. I hadn’t even thought about that. The idea of shifting with Dylan terrified me. “Okay.”
“No one is going to bother you,” he growled, and my doe started to rise inside me. “If you don’t want to shift, you can ride on my back.”
That didn’t sound safe, either. “I’ll shift.” I unzipped my sweatshirt, completely self-conscious about doing this with anyone but Leo. Especially Dylan, since he was only tolerating me to get to his brother. He’d already yanked his shirt over his head and thrown it back in the car.
“I’ll go first, if that makes it easier for you.” Dylan leaned over to take off his shorts, and I turned away. His roar ripped through my body, and I knew he was fully lion.
That was all I need to kick my shift into high gear. I stripped out of my clothes as quickly as possible, but I didn’t get everything into the car before I turned doe. Dylan trotted around the truck, picking up my discarded clothes with his teeth, and tossing them inside before pushing the door closed with his massive paw.
He was huge in lion form. Even bigger than Leo. I jumped back. We hadn’t discussed how we were going to communicate, and now we had to trust each other and rely on our instincts to get to the cabin safely.
Dylan’s breath was noisy, more like a growl than a purr, and it was clear he did not want to be messed with. We were lucky this time, every other lion and cougar on the mountain was busy with something else, and we made it to the cabin without seeing any of them.
I didn’t have a key. I nudged the door with my nose and then looked back to Dylan. He smashed his paw through the window, then sprang from his back feet through the cracked glass. Leo was going to be pissed when he saw this, so it was a good thing he wasn’t going to be living here anymore.
I jumped easily through the hole Dylan left, my hooves sliding across the floor. I crashed into the couch. Dylan shook in the middle of the living room, and his hands had already broken through his fur. Soon he was going to be standing on two legs, naked and human.
Awkward.
When I turned around, he was gone. I still had to shift back, and for that, I needed to calm the heck down. My heart had been pounding double time since I walked into Linnea in the coffee shop. I thought about Leo with his arms around me, his curls tickling my cheek in our new home, wherever that was going to be. Gods, I missed him so much. He’d be here anytime now, and I couldn’t wait to see him.
My shift was gentle, and in human form I hugged myself on the living room floor, still thinking about holding Leo. I pulled the blanket off the back of the couch and wrapped it around me before I went to find Dylan.
He’d put on some of Leo’s clothes which didn’t really fit him. I went straight to work, yanking Leo’s bag out of the closet and shoving as much as his stuff into it as I possibly could.
“Hello?” Leo’s voice echoed through the cabin. Before we could get out there, Leo followed up his original greeting with a roar. Of course he’d shifted. A broken window wasn’t a sign of anything good.
“Hey,” Dylan called out to him. “It’s me and Daphne. We didn’t have any other way to get in.”
Leo growled. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but Dylan could.
“She’s packing your shit to get you the hell out of here,” Dylan responded, and Leo made a noise that sounded like a half howl, half meow. “Screw this place. You’re done here, Leo.”
Leo hissed at Dylan before he began shifting back, and I didn’t bother hiding my laugh. As soon as he was human, Leo came over to me, his body covering mine. He hooked a finger in the blanket. “What’s this?”
I automatically I went up on my tiptoes to kiss him. Leo didn’t commit to the kiss as much as I wanted him to, and it took everything I had not to break into a thousand pieces. “It’s a blanket.”
His eyes were the darkest I’d ever seen, almost brown. “Do you have any idea what I’m thinking right now?”
Dylan for once seemed small in the background, and I realized how bad this looked. “We had to shift to get up the mountain. And I didn’t have a chance to get dressed once we got back here,” I said, my heart pounding.
“I’m trying to trust you, Dylan.” Leo didn’t turn away from me. “But you’re not making it easy.”
“Nothing happened,” Dylan said. He raised his hands and backed out of the room. “I’ll wait for you guys out there.”
The door closed behind Dylan and Leo pulled the blanket away from my body, but he didn’t touch me. “Leo, you know what happens when we shift. Dylan came in here to get dressed and I shifted in the living room. I wrapped the blanket around me and got to work.”
“Doing what?” He picked up the bag and I covered myself again. “I come home and you’re naked with my twin brother, casing the joint.
Have you lost your mind?”
“No. But I almost got in a brawl with Linnea at the coffee shop today after she told me how much fun everyone was having on the mountain with you. I’m tired of this, Leo. You’re my mate and I’m sick of everyone thinking they can make us doubt each other. Or worse.”
Leo sat on the bed and I joined him. He was so pissed I was worried he wouldn’t respond when I wrapped my arms around him. With a faint purr, he pulled me in closer. “What are we doing, Daphne?”
My breath caught in my throat. “Do you mean where we are going, or what are we doing, like, together?”
“I would follow you to the end of the earth to keep you safe.” Leo’s lips skimmed mine. His hot breath melted the tension that had been building between us. Reaching around to my back, he ran his fingers over the three raised lines on my back that showed the world I belonged to him. “Never question my loyalty to you.”
I melted against Leo. I hated that I’d had any reason to doubt him. At first his kiss was soft, but as it intensified, I knew that he felt the exact same way I did.
“Get dressed,” he said, resting his forehead against mine. “Let’s get out of here.”
Chapter Eight
“YOU’D THINK THEY’D let us have the bed.” Leo shifted his weight on Ari’s couch, trying to get comfortable. It was snug for me, I liked to sleep on my stomach with my arms curved around my head. Or with my head on Leo’s chest. I sat on the arm of the couch while I watched him squirm and wondered how I was ever going to fit. “We let them have ours. We’re guests.”
“Ari’s still healing.” I carefully crawled onto the cushions, careful not to mangle Leo’s legs with my knees. I awkwardly landed on his chest and he pulled the blanket over me. He might not have been comfortable, but it didn’t stop him from purring. Gods, I’d missed him. “Seeing Linnea today didn’t help.” Ari’s face had been gray ever since we ran into her.
“How’s she doing?” Leo asked.
“Little by little she’s getting better. But every day I hear her crying in the bathroom or her bedroom.” I sighed, I would never not feel responsible for Ari’s pain. “It’s going to take her a while.”
“Stop blaming yourself.” Leo ran his hand through my hair, and my eyes fluttered trying to stay awake. I was exhausted after today’s drama and the shift. A very different kind of cry spilled out from behind Ari’s bedroom door. I looked up at Leo, and both of us tried not to laugh. “She helped you because she wanted to. And she’s got a good support system. We’re all going to make each other stronger.”
“Do you trust Dylan?” I asked. I went so back and forth about him. As soon as I was certain he felt one way about me, he’d say or do something that would prove me wrong. Like he said, I was fun to play with.
“I’ll be honest with you. When I walked into that bedroom and saw you in there in nothing but a blanket with him, it took everything I had not to rip that beard off of his face.” Leo’s jaw tensed.
“I’d never—"
“I know,” Leo rumbled. “It’s not you I don’t trust. I knew what you were doing. He’s such a wildcard.”
“I trust you, too,” I said softly. “Linnea pissed me off when she said that, but I knew you wouldn’t touch any of them. I don’t want the cougars to have any reason to even think otherwise.”
Leo nodded. “Dylan warned me not to go back. He was right. It was my way of trying to keep things normal when nothing was ever going to be the same again.”
We spoke in hushed tones, even though it was obvious from the sounds coming from beyond the door that no one was eavesdropping. “His plan is risky. Did he tell you about it?”
“Yeah. There’s bound to be a pride there.” Leo’s breathing was getting slower and deeper, and both of us were starting to fade.
“Do you want to go with him?”
He didn’t answer me right away. “Things are far from perfect with Dylan, but I realized I missed having him around. Maybe he’s right. It’s time to have something of our own.”
WE FINALLY SETTLED into a good sleep side by side, my back pressed against Leo’s stomach. His strong hold on my waist was the only thing that kept me from tumbling off of the narrow couch, and his leg was wedged in between mine. Now that we were together again, I slept soundly for the first time since leaving Soldier Mountain.
My eyes fluttered open when Leo’s lips began to caress my neck. The motion was slow and sleepy, and the rhythm made me want to fade back to oblivion. He gripped my waist, and I brought my hand up into his hair. I moaned, my eyes still closed, as he pushed himself in between my legs. His fingers dropped to my sex, and he purred faintly.
“I missed you so much,” Leo mumbled against my neck. My eyes flew open as he entered me, now I knew it wasn’t a dream. Or maybe it was. His movements were much like the kisses still on my neck, deliberate and soothing. Our bodies moved together like they were meant to be one. I needed as much of him as I could possibly get right now. I’d missed him the last few days, but I didn’t realize that something inside me with withering without him.
Being limited in what we could do, we had to get creative. I pushed myself up on one leg so I could ride Leo without falling off the couch. Now that we were both awake, his thrusting became more intense and I cried out, shattering the silence.
“Oh, crap,” I whispered with a giggle, like the damage could be undone.
“They weren’t worried about us earlier.” Leo’s words were strained. Both of us were panting, sweat beading on my back where Leo’s body moved against mine. I clenched around his shaft, and he let out a groan equally as loud. I giggled again.
Leo slid of out me and I saw stars. The waves had been building inside me, and he loved to stop when he knew I was close. I loved it as much as I hated it. He picked me up like the rag doll I was, draping me over the arm of the couch. I looked back over my shoulder, not sure why he’d moved me as he ran his cock along my soaking wet sex before rocking back into my body. I leaned forward, but he pulled me upright by my hair, his body against my back so he could kiss me, dropping his hands over my breasts as he continued to thrust. He expanded inside me, and pulled out quickly. I fell against the arm of the couch as his hot release slid down my back.
“Stay there,” Leo instructed before jumping off of the couch. He came back with a damp cloth, wiping between my legs and my back. “I realized I was going to mess up Ari’s pretty couch.”
Now clean, I wrapped myself back in the blanket and couldn’t stop laughing. The couch was velvety and bright yellow, and yeah, it would’ve left a stain. Ari would’ve been pissed and I couldn’t believe Leo actually thought of that, then. “We need our own place. Like yesterday.”
Even though so much of what had happened on Soldier Mountain had been awful, I was going to miss the cabin. We’d shared so many firsts there.
“We’ll have it soon enough.” He dragged me back down on his body, “Then you can yell and scream all you want.”
I turned to face him, my head on his chest. His heart was still pounding. “You promise?”
Leo picked his head up, and if I wasn’t so exhausted, that wicked smile would have sent me right back over the edge. He pulled me up so my face hovered over his, and bit my earlobe. I stifled a squeal. “You have no idea.”
Chapter Nine
“I’M USELESS IN THE kitchen,” Ari explained when, much to my surprise, it was Dylan who helped me make breakfast. I chose granola with strawberries in coconut milk, and he chopped veggies and meat for omelets. “He won’t let me have pop tarts anymore.” She winked as Dylan shook his head, suppressing a smile.
“Hey, you can have them,” he teased. “Then I’m eating your omelet.”
“Hands off, mister. I was only eating that stuff because I hate cooking.” She slapped his ass as she finished making her coffee. “And I thought sexy chefs only existed on TV.”
“How are we going to do this?” Leo asked Dylan once we sat down to eat. He was totally deferring to Dylan with h
is Mount Deception plan, and I wonder how long that would last. Leo liked to be in control. This was going to be interesting.
“I say we take a look around. If there’s the bones of a ski area, there should be some cabins.” Dylan wiped his mouth after he spoke.
“Are you going to live there year ‘round?” I asked. Leo only lived on Soldier Mountain during ski season. He had a cabin in the forest outside of Woodland Park for the rest of the year. I hated that place. Rustic was an understatement.
“I’ll be up there a lot, getting things started, but no. I have a job in town.”
“Yeah, how are you going to do both?” Ari asked. “You’re starting to pick up some clients.”
“I’d like to get the ski area so it was self-sufficient, but for now, it’s going to be a lot of work.” Dylan looked worried about his plan. His eyes kept darting back and forth between me and Leo, searching for some sort of reaction.
Leo had been awfully quiet during this whole conversation. I put my hand over his. “What do you think, babe?” I asked.
He ran his hand over his face. “We need a place live. We can go back to the cabin in the forest—“
“No.”
Ari laughed. “Tell us how you really feel about that, Daphne.”
“It’s so boring!” I stabbed at my granola. “The only thing to do there...is Leo.”
Everyone burst out laughing. “Sounds kind of nice, actually,” Ari said.
Obviously I hadn’t made myself clear. “There’s no electricity! No water. No nothing.”
“Oh. Forget it.” Ari wrinkled her nose.
“Your girl called you boring.” Dylan’s eye’s glimmered as he chuckled.
Leo tensed under my hand. “I did not!” I protested. “Leo’s never boring.” I leaned over and kissed his cheek.
“There isn’t going to be any electricity on Deception, either. Unless there’s a well-established hierarchy up there. So we’ll need a place to stay, too.”
Destined to the Pride Page 4
