Pain shot through me, sharp and sweet. I broke the kiss and struggled to breathe through the need clawing at me. “Tangi, wait. We can’t do this.”
“I need you to bind me to you.”
Oh, fuck. I had no idea how to do that with a werewolf. The rapidly dwindling part of my brain still possessing a modicum of intelligence screamed bad idea, bad idea in a continuous, piercing litany, warring with a more primitive devil who cackled greedily and encouraged me to do it, do it.
He scraped his teeth down the column of my throat. “Instinct says…I need you.”
“Binding isn’t the answer.”
“Yes.”
The word came out in a rough growl, hoarse and not quite human, and panic spiked through me. “Are you changing?”
“Soon,” he panted. “Sex.”
“Oh, hell, no. C’mon, Tangi. Pull yourself together.”
“Need…” He shuddered and rasped his tongue over my collarbone. “Safe. Always.”
I wrapped one hand around his braid and yanked his head back. His eyes had morphed into an icy green, cold and wild in the room’s dim lighting, and tears shimmered there. My heart cracked, breaking my resistance. Fen had done this, Fen and that harpy bitch Oriana. Nobody could fix the damage they’d inflicted on Tangi, but maybe I could help him find himself again.
I was positive Eric wouldn’t mind. Nearly one hundred percent.
Ok, maybe ninety percent, but the other ten percent I could deal with. He was all the time lecturing me about making allies, wasn’t he? And what better ally could we have than a young werewolf tied to the strongest vampire in North Dakota and the main werewolf pack in Minnesota?
“Ok,” I whispered. “Ok, but no full-on sex. I need to be in you a little bit, though, and we need to exchange blood.”
He nodded and his eyes lost some of their iciness. “There’s an oath.”
“I can do that, as long as it doesn’t break my ties with Eric or Gianna or Elizabet.”
“It won’t.”
“Ok, here.”
We rearranged each other, according to the needs of our different rituals. I stayed on my back, he straddled my hips. I guided him onto my erection. “Just a little bit, ok?”
“Mmm.” He arched his hips back and eased his way down, and he didn’t stop with just a little bit.
I gripped his hips and tried to halt the delicious slide of his ass engulfing my dick. “What are you doing?”
“Fucking you.”
“That’s…” He took all of me, every inch, and tightened his ass muscles around me, and I gasped as pleasure strobed outward from my groin. “Not necessary.”
“I want to.” He tilted his chin to the side, exposing his throat. “Take from me.”
I squeezed my eyelids shut, blocking out the sight of all that golden skin, waiting for me to sink my fangs into it. “Your thumb.”
He pressed the tip of his thumb against my lips. I wrapped a hand around his wrist, holding him there, jabbed my own thumb into a fang, and offered it to him. “At the same time, ok?”
He sucked my thumb into his mouth. I did the same for his and groped along the passing blood streams for a way to connect us together. Almost immediately, I was surrounded by his scent, freshly fallen rain, evergreen pines, rich earth, and something tugged at me, drawing me toward him. His hips moved, easing me into and out of his body, and his mind brushed mine, and an image flashed, an ebony-haired wolf with icy green eyes, its spirit strong and unbowed. It leapt forward and tumbled into a part of me I hadn’t even been aware of, and I welcomed it gladly. Mine and Tangi’s beasts twined together, mingling into an inseparable form, and the sensation of joining with him swirled me into an unending eddy of rightness.
I slowly drifted toward awareness. Bright light stabbed into me through closed eyelids and I flinched away from it. What the hell? I hadn’t slept in a room with uncurtained windows in months now. Who in God’s name had let the sunlight in?
The world rocked under me, and my eyes popped open. I blinked against the viciously harsh light. A dim figure was sitting next to me, head bowed. Memory stirred and sharpened, and I sat bolt upright. “Tangi!”
The figure’s head turned toward me and became Eric. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”
“Where is he?” Where was I? I glanced around and finally recognized mine and Eric’s bedroom at my parents’ house. The windows were all covered, exactly like they were supposed to be, which didn’t in any way explain why the dim light hurt my eyes so much. I flopped back on the bed and scrubbed shaky hands over my face. “Is he ok?”
“He’s fine. Better now that he has a new pack.”
“What? When did that happen?”
“When you bound him to you last night.”
“I bound him to me, yeah, and I didn’t think you’d mind. Christ, Eric. Isn’t that why we went to Remy’s last night?”
“I didn’t mean for you to start a hybrid vampire-werewolf pack.”
The amused note in his voice wasn’t completely lost on me, in spite of my utter confusion. “A, I didn’t start a pack. I just bound him to me. And b, what’s so funny?”
“Well, your parents are sitting in the kitchen watching your new pet, and I mean that literally, by the way.”
I rolled my eyes. New pet, werewolf. Funny, har. “What’s so amazing about Tangi sitting in the kitchen?”
“He’s cozied up to Charity—”
I bolted out of the bed and groped for clothes. “Oh, fuck, no. That wasn’t part of the deal.”
Eric laughed. “Relax, Jase. They’re just talking.”
That brought me up short. “Tangi’s talking? Like, voluntarily?”
“With words and everything.”
Boy, was Eric on a roll. “Hand me my shorts.”
He pulled them out from under his ass and held them out to me. “Strange how you came by those shorts.”
I stuffed my legs into them, one and a time, and hiked them up around my waist. They covered the important parts, and that was good enough to call it dressed. “Tangi let me borrow them last night, said they were his uncle’s.”
“Uh-huh. And how many werewolves do you know in this area that are your size?”
Only one came to mind, and I’d met him once for about five minutes. I stared at Eric as horrified realization washed over me. “No.”
“Oh, yes. He’s sitting in the kitchen, waiting for you to wake up. He’s also very curious to know what you thought gave you the right to bind his nephew to you and break Tangi’s bond with his home pack.”
“I can explain.” I shoved a hand through the short strands of my hair, ruffling them. Fuck, no, I couldn’t explain. “Tangi can explain.”
“He’s tried, believe me.” Eric slipped off the bed and held a hand out to me. “Come on, my budding alpha. Time to face the music.”
“Kill me now,” I murmured. At least if Eric did the deed, it would be quick and relatively painless. Having an alpha do the job? Not quick, not painless, and not easy to clean up. My stomach roiled and flipped, and bile shot up my esophagus, stinging the back of my throat. “I love you. Just, you know. Tell my family I love them.”
“Tell them yourself.”
He tugged my hand, and I stumbled forward to face Tangi’s uncle, the alpha of Minnesota’s most powerful werewolf pack.
Eric half led, half pulled me through the house into the kitchen. We walked into an absurdly normal scene. Pop sat at the head of the table, coffee cup in hand. Ma was at the stove frying bacon, about three rashers of it, looked like. Charity and Anna Grace sat on their side of the table, bracketing Tangi, who had his arm around Anna Grace’s shoulders and his head bent toward Charity.
It was the man sitting across from them that worried me. Alden Kreger was a big man, maybe two inches shorter than me, but way more muscled. His hair was pale blond and trimmed in a working man’s cut, and his icy green eyes were neutral in the harsh angles of his face, if not friendly.
No wonder
I hadn’t put him and Tangi together. They didn’t look a thing alike, except for the eyes. Those, I recognized from Tangi’s brief brush with his wolf last night, but everything else? Not even close. Alden was Scandinavian, no doubt about it. Except for his stature, Tangi appeared to have a good dose of Samoan or Maori in him.
Maybe he was adopted.
Those alpha eyes snapped around and fixed on me with the intensity of spotlights. My first instinct was to bow my head and expose my throat, exactly what Tangi had done to me last night. No. Fucking. Way. I wasn’t submitting to a man who wasn’t my master.
On the other hand, I’d been around Darien enough to understand that meeting an angry alpha’s gaze head on was pure suicide. I shifted my eyes to Alden’s chest where I could monitor his aggression without impinging on his primacy. Eric’s hand squeezed mine and nobody jumped across the table and killed me, so I figured I’d made the right choice.
Anna Grace scrambled out of her seat and raced toward Eric. He scooped her up and sat down with her at the foot of the table. I took her vacated chair and scooted it close to Tangi, giving him the option of contact if he needed it.
Alden grunted and set his coffee mug on the table. “Jason. Nice shorts.”
I nodded, aiming for respectful, and ignored the dig. “Alden. How was your trip?”
“Hurried.”
Pop leaned back in his chair, his stare not nearly as fierce as Alden’s. “Woke up this morning to a new guest. I’m hoping I can get some manual labor out of this one, unless he’s allergic to the sun, too.”
Tangi ducked his head, hiding a quick grin. “No, sir. I’m willing to work, if I can stay on.”
“He’s staying,” I said bluntly. “I’ll chip in extra for the food he eats.”
“He can earn his keep, same as the rest of you,” Pop retorted. “The way I hear it, he’s here to help you get back in shape.”
I slid a curious glance at Eric. So that was the story, huh.
“And since he knows one end of a tractor from the other,” Pop continued, “he can help me out in the fields in his spare time.”
Alden inclined his head once. “I need him three nights each month.”
I only needed one guess on which three nights those were. “We’ll get him there.”
Tangi turned slightly toward me and whispered, “You have to run with me.”
“I can do that,” I whispered back. To his uncle, the fucking alpha I hadn’t known Tangi was related to, I said, “Respectfully, sir, we’ll take good care of him.”
Alden’s icy eyes narrowed on me. “You will.”
A chill shivered down my spine and I had the uncharacteristic urge to hunch into myself, diminishing the target my big self was.
And I’d thought Eric’s unspoken or elses were scary. Apparently, his still needed a little work.
“He’s on loan to you, nothing more,” Alden continued. “When he’s ready, he comes back to us and resumes his rightful place.”
I glanced at Tangi. “Er, your rightful place?”
“His heir,” Tangi said in a quiet voice.
“As in the next you know what?”
He nodded, and my shriveled insides shrank to nothing. “That was need to know information, Tangi.”
He didn’t cringe, but it was a close thing. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” Eric said. “Mr. Bellmont really needs the help, and so does Jason. God knows I can’t keep up with him.”
I shot a sour look at him. He was really having way too much fun at my expense this morning.
Ma bustled over and patted Alden’s shoulders, like she’d known him for years and trusted him implicitly. “You’re staying for breakfast, aren’t you?”
Alden twisted around and smiled at her, and it was, surprise, surprise, genuinely friendly. “Thank you, Kathy. I’d love to.”
“Well, it’s a long way across the state. You could’ve called, you know. Oh, that reminds me. I need to give you our numbers…”
Ma rattled on about all the things she and Alden needed to work out, and it dawned on me that she was happy to have Tangi around. Another son. The thought floated to me from her, startling me. I’d never caught any of her thoughts before, but there it was, as plain as day. Three sons, three daughters, a perfect familial symmetry.
Pop sipped his coffee, drawing my gaze to him, and the small smile on his rugged face matched Ma’s mood. I relaxed in my chair and cupped my hand over Tangi’s, encouraging him to lean into me. Yeah, a perfect symmetry, that’s what we were now. It wasn’t a bad combination of human, vampire, and werewolf at all.
Eric’s toe nudged my shin under the table and he grinned at me. We’re doing good here, yeah?
Yeah, we are.
I settled in for a rousing conversation about crop futures with my newly expanded family, and kept an eagle eye on Tangi’s hand creeping ever closer to Charity’s.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Di skipped downstairs not long after we started eating, wearing khakis and a polo shirt embroidered with the logo of a local grocery store. Tangi whipped around and stared at her, and his sub-vocal growl reverberated through my skull. She stopped in the doorway and returned the stare, not at all intimidated by the strangers sitting at our kitchen table.
“Di, this is Tangi and his uncle Alden,” I said. “Guys, this is my oldest sister, Diana.”
Her nod of greeting was almost polite. Alden murmured a rough hello. Tangi didn’t bother. He kept one hand on Charity and both eyes on Di, and his upper lip curled into a silent snarl.
Pop jerked a thumb at the food piled high on the island. “Eat before you go.”
“I’ll eat in town.” She crossed the room and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks for letting me borrow the truck.”
Ma bustled away from the table. “Let me jot down a note so we can have the mechanic look at your car this week. With everything else that’s going on, I almost forgot.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“The clutch is on its last legs.” Di squeezed Pop’s shoulder. “Don’t forget I start a new job at the farm supply tomorrow morning.”
Ma clucked her tongue. “Oh, I wish you wouldn’t take on more work. Two jobs plus your chores around here? That seems like too much.”
“It’ll be fine, Ma. Besides, the more I work now, the less I’ll have to do when school rolls back around.” Di waved and flashed a wavering smile. “Nice to meet you guys.”
Alden’s grunt could’ve translated into anything from nice to meet you, too to fuck off.
“I’ll hold supper for you,” Ma said.
Di nodded and left, and the screen door slammed shut behind her.
I leaned toward Tangi. “She’s a pain in the ass, but she’s not worth a snarl.”
“She smells wrong.”
Charity popped her head around him and grimaced. “It’s called perfume.”
“No, under that.” He chuffed a breath out through his nose. “Wrong.”
I didn’t prod him for a more detailed explanation. Werewolves had an incredible sense of smell, far keener than even a vampire’s ability to sort through scents. It was one of the few things I knew with any certainty about the species. Maybe Tangi just wasn’t used to being around snotty teenaged girls or maybe Di just rubbed him the wrong way. She’d been doing that a lot lately, sometimes deliberately.
I shrugged Tangi’s assessment off and focused on my breakfast and the banter being passed around the table. After, Alden summoned me, Eric, and Tangi outside and reiterated the rules. At Alden’s house by sunset on the night before the full moon, no unplanned trips into town, regular meetings with Paolo, Tangi’s counselor.
Which was news to me. I’d thought Tangi was on loan to Remy as a blood slave or for diplomatic purposes, aside from his need to be as far away from the Twin Cities as possible, but no. Paolo was a fully certified psychologist, helping Tangi work through his Fen issues. I never would’ve guessed if somebody hadn’t told me.
Alden cupped Tangi’s face between massive palms. “Any more nightmares?”
“Some,” Tangi said.
“Don’t sleep alone.”
“I won’t.”
“Watch the girl.”
“Which one?” I asked.
Alden’s icy eyes slid toward me and his smile held more wolf than humor. “All of them.”
I bristled. “If my family is that big of a threat—”
“They’re not.” Alden kissed Tangi’s forehead and pulled him into a bear hug. “Come home soon. We miss you.”
“I miss home.” He burrowed his face into his uncle’s chest and shuddered out a sigh. “I miss everything.”
My heart twisted into longing. Yeah, I knew what that felt like. We’d been away from Gigi for better than a month, and I missed her, missed talking to her and holding her hand, even though she was out of it and completely unaware of her surroundings and the people who loved her.
Alden murmured reassurances to Tangi, then said goodbye to my parents and left. Tangi stood on the porch watching him drive away, his arms wrapped so firmly around his torso, his knuckles were white.
I pulled his back against my chest and surrounded him with the physical contact he seemed so desperately to need. “It’s gonna be ok.”
“I know,” he whispered. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For taking me in. You didn’t have to.”
Yes, I did. After watching the horror Fen had dragged Eric through, how could I turn my back on another one of his victims? “Let’s go inside. Charity wants to play cards or something.”
“I like her.”
I tightened my arms around him in a playful warning. “You better keep your hands to yourself.”
Tangi’s head dipped. “Can’t promise that.”
“She’s fifteen.”
“No, I meant…” He turned around in my arms, facing me, and fixed his eyes on my shoulder. “I can’t lie. If I promised never to touch her and she asked me to later, I wouldn’t be able to. She’s…”
“What?”
“Important.”
“Is this the instinct thing again?”
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