Katey blinked and gave him a quizzical look as if she didn’t understand the point of the kiss, if he were only trying to continue the conversation. Logan glanced back to the flirtatious woman and saw she had turned away, just as he intended.
It didn’t happen often, but Logan detested the way some women tried to make a pass at him and found the whole incident an impropriety. If the woman were worth it, they would win men’s hearts with their personalities and not their unwarranted offers of shallow pleasure that wouldn’t extend beyond one evening.
“Why would Forrest leave without her?” Katey asked.
Logan shrugged. “I don’t know. I tried to contact him once, but his phone was disconnected.”
“I was really hoping to see Lily at least. Do you think she left with him?”
“I’m sure they’re both safe and well.”
It wasn’t a lie, but Logan believed it to be an uncertainty. Jacob said nothing about Forrest during their evacuations, and without being able to get a hold of the man himself, Logan had no idea if Lily even knew about the hunters. If she had known - or if Forrest planned to leave before they became involved in the evacuations - then it would have made little sense for him to leave behind his fiancé. Forrest knew as well as any of them how dangerous hunters could be. He would not have left his future mate behind to suffer.
He did know for a fact that Forrest was not one of the loups-garous that chose to stay behind and there was hope in that.
Katey pulled away and looked across the dance floor. There was a spark of recognition in her eyes and Logan followed her gaze to whom he presumed were the owners of the studio. They waved, and Katey returned the greeting.
“I’ll let you socialize,” he stated as he let his hand slip from her grasp.
A tiny whimper made its way from Katey’s throat, but after a quick peck on the cheek, he strode away to join Michael and Dustin at the table. His heart was heavy to leave her, but mingling was never one of his strong suits, and he would only get in the way while she tried to have fun.
“You own a villa in Florence?” Dustin asked Michael just as Logan was taking a seat across from them.
“I do,” Michael replied as he leaned back and made a steeple of his fingers. “The vineyards surrounding it yield some of the best wine you will ever taste.”
“And, judging by your last name, you’re Italian?” Dustin asked, mouth wide in a grin.
“I am. I was born in Florence, in fact. As far back as we can tell, the Gennari were some of the first inhabitants of Italia, even before the Romans.”
“Fascinating. I spent some time in Florence. It’s a gorgeous city.”
Michael smiled. “It’s a gorgeous country, Dustin. Rich with culture and history. It will be a sad day when Italia ceases to be the wonderful place that it is. After the council meeting, I plan to return to my home for a short while before coming back to the states.”
“I imagine having to keep up with a house like that can be pretty tough.”
Michael gave a dismissive wave. “With the proper passion and knowledge of old architecture, a seven hundred-year-old home is nothing to take care of.”
Dustin smiled and propped his chin in his hand as he leaned on the table, thoroughly enthused. “Seven hundred years old.”
“Of course. I had it commissioned as a wedding present for my bride. We were married for three hundred years.” A whimsical look dawned in Michael’s eyes and over the booming salsa music, Logan could hear the old man sigh. “She was a beautiful woman.”
“Of your kind, I assume?” Logan asked, folding his arms over his chest.
“Yes, she was. Our families were close, and she and I grew up together.”
Dustin lifted a finger to interject. “I was wondering how Katey’s parents met. I never knew Adam personally, but would they not have crossed paths so easily?”
A nostalgic cloud hung over Michael as he spoke. “My daughter and I were not like others of our kind. We kept the company of werewolves, such as yourselves, quite often. I met Katey’s grandfather under…” Michael made a face, “not so pleasant circumstances, but we found common ground in our love for the past and hunger for an understanding of the origins of our kind. He also knew of the prophecy and met with the spirit of Tanatia first-hand. I sometimes wonder if his belief in the spirits didn’t come from that same experience.
“Anyway, a short time after the Great War began, we all met again – I, Jane, Geoffrey, and Adam.” Michael smiled. “And the rest is – as you say – history.”
Logan leaned over the table, the votive candle casting a dancing glow on his face. “So, you both knew about the prophecy, and you purposefully came together with your single children so they could meet?”
Michael chuckled. “I know what you’re thinking, young man. No, this was not an arranged marriage. We met quite by accident while visiting a mutual friend. Adam and Jane were wary of each other at first, but later my daughter told me that she loved him from the moment she met him. There was no need to coax them.”
Logan glanced over his shoulder and saw Katey laughing in a group while the owner told some anecdote about a dance competition a few years ago. So even from the beginning, fate had a hand to play in how Katey came to be with them. Logan did believe in making his own way in life some of the time, but he couldn’t deny the obvious forces that were bringing together the masterpiece where Katey starred as the heroine, and he merely a pawn. He played his part in changing her, but what else was there left for him? What role did he play in the grand scheme of things?
“Now, they were not able to marry for quite a while later, of course. They had to be discrete. I arranged for their secret meetings, but we were not sly enough for the coven Jane had joined at the time.”
“They betrayed her,” Dustin stated.
Michael nodded. “They did. As I said before, many of our kind believed their relationship to be an abomination. It was unnatural for her to love a wolf, but she did, and he loved her.”
Logan let out a long breath and turned back to the others.
“Something bothering you, Logan?” Dustin asked.
With a cautionary glance to Michael, he replied, “I’m fine.”
“Will you not dance with Katey?” the old vampire asked, his tone insisting.
Logan rolled his shoulders until he felt the joint pop. “I don’t intend to.”
He hadn’t intended to dance with her the last time they were in the studio, but he did anyway, and both frightening and magical things happened that night between them.
Michael braced his hand against the table and rose just as a waltz melody began to drift from the speakers. “Well, if you won’t, then I will.”
Dustin let out a laugh as the aristocrat strode across the floor toward the group Katey was involved in. Logan grew hot with embarrassment as the old vamp upstaged him.
When Michael approached, all eyes turned to him in fascination. He offered out his hand to Katey, his body bent forward in a regal and gentleman-like fashion. She smiled and placed her hand in his before they walked onto the dance floor.
With perfect poise, they stepped to the soft ballad as elegantly as any professional dancing couple. Perhaps it was from her vampire genes that Katey inherited her natural grace.
“Why don’t you want to dance? I thought you liked dancing with Katey?” Dustin leaned forward as if that would screen off their conversation from the rest of the studio.
Dustin had always been the one for Logan to confide in when he had no one else to turn to. How could he possibly understand Logan’s dilemma with Katey? He never had to court or marry a woman so far above his class that it was almost blasphemous.
Logan shrugged. “You know I’ve never been one for dancing.”
“Then why did I waste my time in teaching you if you were never going to?”
Logan looked away, watching Katey and Michael glide across the floor. Their lips were moving, but he could only hear unintelligible whispers. They had their own conversation
, but whatever they were saying was intended to be private. His eyes narrowed into slits.
“Well,” Dustin continued, “if they start playing ‘Rocky Road to Dublin,' I’m tempted to get up and dance a reel myself.”
Logan cracked a smile, despite himself and slid an unsavory look to Dustin. “If you get up and start tapping your heels together like some leprechaun, I’ll deny any association with you.”
“How are you, my dear?” Michael whispered almost too softly for Katey to hear over the music and voices that surrounded them.
They continued to step in perfect time with the symphony and Michael impressed her with his superior talent. It was the first time Katey had danced since that night at the castle when she waltzed with Martel and howled in front of the assembly of vampires. This time, the joy was there, but she knew how to temper herself and her wolf.
Katey made a face. “You don’t have to ask that. You know how I’m doing.”
Michael’s eyes sparkled with amusement. “Katey, I may have a sense of how you are feeling, but only you can explain why.”
The entire day had been one strange occurrence after another. First, she made her alpha go ballistic, then she finds out that her entire pack knew who her parents were, and now she felt the burden of the entire world on her shoulders. Unlike Atlas, she couldn’t shrug it off or pass it to another unwilling victim of fate.
She understood all too well how important, how vital, she was. There was no forgetting what Michael had told her in the vehicle about the War Beast and the legend of Tanatia. The huge shoes she would have to fill made her feel like a child again and not the young woman she had believed herself to be. It was as if she were a little girl trying to slip into her mother’s high heels and stumbling around the bedroom, and there was no shortage on the stumbling.
Already in her disobedience to Darren and her rebellious attitude, she was going against the tide of destiny. If only her wolf had told her sooner that such behavior was not fitting for the hostess of Tanatia, there might have been less strife within her pack.
“I’m feeling a little lost,” she replied, making sure that their conversation was confidential, even to Logan and Dustin who sat on the other side of the room. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“For the moment, you’re dancing with me.”
Katey snorted. “I know that. I mean, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do when it comes time for the council. How will I make them listen? I’m not a public speaker at all. I still get nervous thinking about having to stand in front of a classroom to give a presentation.”
Michael nodded and guided her into a slow walk-about turn that showcased her beauty and grace to those watching. When they came back together, he said, “You don’t have to have every detail figured out. There are still a few months before the council will take place.”
“But what if I’m not ready by then?”
He gave her a knowing smile and nodded. “You will be. I have every confidence in you.”
“Forgive me for bringing this up, but we barely know each other. How can you have faith in me if you barely know my responsibility track record?”
“Because I knew your mother and father.”
Katey glanced away and then met his eyes again. “That doesn’t exactly help. I didn’t realize they were such big players in their own races. I don’t know how to live up to being a daughter of Adam Swenson or daughter of Jane Gennari.”
Michael grinned. “My dear, you already have. You may not realize it, but when you saved the life of your lover, Logan, you fulfilled every hope your parents would have had for you. You sacrificed yourself for someone you love.”
Katey remembered what her mother had said in her afterlife experience. “Love is what binds us together for eternity.” At the time, Katey thought her mother was talking about the love they shared as parent and child, but perhaps it was more than that.
Love – or at least its sister forms of peace and tolerance – would bring the world back into harmony. All her parents wanted was for her to be an example, to be like Tanatia.
Still, Katey couldn’t help but be a little overawed. How was she supposed to incarnate this princess from millennia ago? It couldn’t be as simple as saving the one she loved. If that were true, then she had completed her mission, and there was nothing left to do, yet there was an innate feeling of void and confusion in this matter of her mission.
“Is there like some list of rules? Some guidelines? Was there something in the artifacts you found from the civilization that could give me some clues?”
Michael sighed as the song slowed to the end. “Unfortunately, there is not. If there was, I would certainly tell you.”
He spun her one last time, her skirt billowing out from her legs as she twirled. When Katey came to face her grandfather, he advised, “All I can say is for you to look inside yourself. Tanatia is there. You just have to listen.”
Katey opened her mouth to contest that all she felt was her wolf, but they were suddenly not alone.
A young man, a few years older than Katey, stepped up to them. She looked him over from his shiny leather shoes to his navy blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt and curly dark blonde hair. His brown eyes smiled when their gazes met.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but I was wondering if I could have the next dance?”
Katey stared, her mind trying to understand why he had no scent whatsoever. Everyone had a scent, even a faint one. This man was perfectly blank.
Chapter Twelve
Katey glanced to Michael, and his shoulders squared as if he were ready to give the man a lecture on etiquette, but instead stared at him with as much coldness as a floating glacier in the arctic. Perhaps Michael also picked up on the fact that the man had no scent.
A mellow Latin tune blended into the fading waltz, and though Katey knew a dance for the tempo, she had no desire to accept the stranger’s invitation. Yet if she didn’t, Michael was liable to tell him off in true noble style, and Katey couldn’t bear the thought of a confrontation in the middle of the dancefloor like that.
Without much thought, since her mind was scrambled by the sudden shift in focus, she stepped away from Michael and regarded the man. “Can you keep up?” she asked, issuing it as more of a challenge than a stab at flirting.
The man grinned and took her hand from Michael’s. For a second, Katey looked to Logan and saw the look of crossness written on his face. If only they could reach through their bond and somehow telepathically communicate that this meant nothing to her.
More than anything, Katey was curious why this man had no scent. Not since she had become a loup-garou, had she ever experienced an utter lack of sensation as she did with him. At first, she wondered if his scent was just lost in the crowd, but as he drew closer, Katey confirmed her suspicion that he truly had no signature to his presence.
Michael moved away and joined the others at the table without ceremony. Hushed words were traded, and Logan’s guttural growl of disapproval rang in her ears just as loudly as the music.
In the flurry of divided attention between her thoughts and what was going on at the table, Katey almost missed her cue to start dancing.
The man stepped forward too soon, and his knee bumped into hers.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, quickly withdrawing his leg. It was then she realized there was a vivid drawl in his voice that brought up images of bayous and crawfish.
Katey hardly noticed the pain in her leg from his misstep. “It’s fine. I’m just a little distracted.”
“If you don’t want to dance – “
“No, no,” she said quickly, her hand gripping his to keep him there. “I want to. I just wasn’t ready.”
Katey watched his inscrutable expression while she counted the beats, her chin bobbing with the rhythm as if she were an instructor working with a student again. Her partner was not unattractive, but he couldn’t compare to Logan, that was certain. Her fiancé had nothing to fear, but the room slowly filled with d
read like a heavy, suffocating gas and she knew exactly where it was coming from.
“What’s your name?” the man asked as they steadily paced their steps with the tango pattern.
After a quick debate with herself, Katey replied, “Katey. And yours?”
“Drake. It’s nice to meet you, Katey.”
He was too polite, too tame. Something in the back of Katey’s mind screamed that this was not natural. Logan was polite, but only because he was over a hundred years old. Drake, who had no scent and therefore could not be identified as anything other than human, appeared to be of college graduate age. Katey thought it rare to find gentility among her generation.
“I’ll admit that I’ve had my eye on you since you walked in,” Drake said.
Katey’s eyes darted away, a flush of embarrassment flooding her cheeks, but she refused to smile. “Is that so?”
“Yep. I saw that little kiss your man gave you, but I wonder why he isn’t dancing with you.”
“Logan doesn’t like to dance as much as I do.”
Katey wanted to kick herself for giving so much information to a stranger. She bit her lips together.
“That’s a shame. You’re a wonderful dancer.”
“Thank you,” she replied, allowing herself one nicety.
“Who are the others with you?”
Her wolf snapped and growled, filling her chest with an ember of defiance. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
Katey glimpsed toward the table. Logan was halfway out of his chair, and the only thing to hold him back was Dustin’s tight grip on his arm. Michael watched with keen suspicion but made no moves to intervene.
“I’m sorry. That was nosy of me.”
She squinted at him. Something wasn’t right, and perhaps it was her distrust of any man who showed interest in her, but there was a prickly knot in the pit of her stomach. Nothing about this seemed right, and she couldn’t put her finger on just what it was. Her wolf would not let her ignore that fact, either. The wolf raged inside of her but had no logical answer for its behavior.
Beast Within (Loup-Garou Series Book 3) Page 18
