He itched to storm into her house and be done with it. Instead, he forced his feet to remain still, and reminded himself that the Prime was in there with her.
His cock hardened in his jeans. He soothed it, rubbing his palm over the length. Maybe he’d fuck the cunt before he killed her. Better yet, he’d do it in front of the Prime and then kill them both.
No. He liked his plan for their demise. He wouldn’t alter it now.
From his hiding place in the shadows across the street, he centered all his energy into the house and waited for the fun to begin.
* * *
Tieran’s eyes flew open. What had woken her? Again. Her gaze flashed to the open bedroom door. There it was. The tiniest of creaks. Not her front door then, because opening it was paramount to setting off a nuclear explosion. She was still surprised she hadn’t woken Caelan when she’d gone to the store earlier. Or when she’d gotten home.
What then? Had Eli come back? She glanced at the clock, glowing a red one-o-four. Geez, she’d only slept about an hour since getting back in bed. At this rate, she’d be lucky to get a full five hours in tonight.
Another sound. A footstep? Her heart pounded ferociously. Nudging Caelan’s still form, she leaned over and whispered, “Wake up.” He didn’t move. She shook his shoulder. “Psst.” Nothing. Christ, what did she have to do?
There was another creak, louder and closer this time. Someone was definitely in her house. No time for subtlety. She punched him. He never flinched. Jesus, he gave new meaning to the term sleeping like a rock.
Apart from screaming like a banshee, what could she do? The phone, you idiot! Tieran crawled over Caelan’s seemingly lifeless form, wincing when the bed squeaked. She froze, sure that whoever it was outside her bedroom could hear all the racket she was making. She turned to the door, expecting to see someone there.
The floorboards groaned in the hallway. So not in the doorway yet, but getting closer. She scrambled to the nightstand, ignoring the noise. Dialing 911 would at least alert the operator to her location, even if she didn’t get the chance to talk. If nothing else, she knew they would send a policeman to investigate.
Holding it close to her chest to try and hide the glow, she pushed the buttons and set the phone face up beneath the bed. Her dust ruffle would contain the small light.
With both hands, she shoved on Caelan’s back. “Come. On,” she grunted, terrified. The man was immovable. She’d never get him off the bed. Why didn’t he wake up? As a last ditch effort, Tieran yanked the comforter up from where it bunched at his torso until it concealed him from head to toe. She had to do something to try and protect him. If the intruder wasn’t blind, then he’d have to be a moron not to see Caelan’s form under the covers.
She squeezed herself into the crevice between the nightstand and bed and heard the operator droning on through the phone. Scooping it off the floor, she breathed, “He’s here.”
“Ma’am? Ma’am, stay on the line.”
Like she was going to hang up? she thought, hysterically.
Tieran sensed a disturbance in the room. Hugging her knees to her chest, she tucked herself into a ball and held her breath until her lungs burned. With her chin down and her face buried in her knees, she couldn’t see anything. The hair on her nape prickled and she knew he had entered the room.
“Wake up, wake up, Caelan,” she chanted silently. Any second he would, launching himself off the bed and coming to her rescue at the last possible second. After she kissed him senseless, she’d choke him to death.
A warm puff of air ruffled her bangs and she jerked. Oh, God. This was it. A horrible sense of foreboding flooded her body. She was going to die. Her whole body shook in absolute fear.
Tieran raised her gaze a scant inch, sweat beading on her forehead. Its lips were curled back, exposing the razor-sharp teeth that would rip out her throat. She tried swallowing but her mouth was dry as cotton.
Its low snarl reverberated through the otherwise silent room. Ever so slowly, she backed her head away, as if those few more inches gave her any leverage. Its yellowed eyes glowed back at her as he followed the movement. Her breathing became desperate pants.
It barked, lunging at her and snapping its teeth where her nose had been. She screamed and buried her head in her arms, expecting to feel the vicious shredding of her forearms.
Caelan flung himself upright at the ear-splitting scream, his heart pounding as he readied for an attack. Christ. There was nothing. The house was dark, as quiet as when he’d first gone to sleep. No trace of anything wrong. Except the woman next to him. He laid a hand on Tieran’s shoulder. She was scrunched up tight, her arms covering her head in a defensive position, and her breath bellowing out of her lungs. Her pulse raced beneath his fingertips where he placed them on her neck.
A nightmare. It was only a nightmare. Or worse, a vision.
“Tieran, wake up. It’s me, baby.” Jesus, she was nearly catatonic, trapped in some kind of hell. “Shh. Everything’s okay,” he murmured.
He curled up next to her and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her sweat-slickened, naked form to his chest. She reeked of fear-induced adrenaline. Caelan attempted to soothe her with his fingers and his words. Finally he felt her relax a fraction.
His heart soared. Subconsciously, her mind and body trusted him. The rest would come later. He continued rocking her until the last of the shudders subsided and she whimpered.
“Must have been some bad dream,” he muttered into her hair.
“Caelan?” she whispered.
He rose onto his elbow and rolled her to her back, taking sharp notice of the way her pupils were dilated. Even in the dark room, he could see how big they were.
“Yes, baby.” He nuzzled her cheek with his lips and kissed down her jaw. She swallowed and ducked her head, dislodging his roaming mouth.
“It was him. He was here, in the house.”
Caelan inhaled deeply, and pushed her wet bangs off her forehead. “He’s gone now,” he consoled. Had never been here, either. There were no foreign scent markers whatsoever.
“I heard something,” she continued, oblivious to his reassurance, “and I couldn’t wake you up. I had to crawl over you and squish into the space between the table and the bed.” Her gaze searched the room in a wild fashion.
“I called 911.” She jerked up, rapping his chin so hard he bit his tongue and fell back onto the pillow. Then she was laying over him.
He twisted to see what she was looking for. There was nothing out of place that he could see. Even in the dark, his enhanced wolf’s vision picked up the clock, lamp, book, phone and picture of Tieran and someone who could only be her grandmother. They were all there. Everything looked untouched.
He felt her breasts rise and fall with each harsh breath and her skin was clammy against his abdomen.
“It was the one who killed the last woman. I know it,” she insisted. “Same hair, same eyes, same teeth, same sc…” Shuttering, she laid down again, this time pulling his arm over her chest and snuggling into him.
She had to be exhausted.
“It barked at me and I screamed.”
“I know you did, baby,” he said absentmindedly and buried his nose in the crook of her neck. Barked? What the hell? He thought she’d been rattling off the traits of the burglar in her nightmare. Of the human kind. So, did she have another vision, or had the one about Micah led her to have a bad dream?
“Why didn’t you wake up? Why didn’t you protect me?” The censure in her voice broke his heart.
“You were dreaming.” Please God, let this have been a dream. He felt her hot tears on his cheek and laced his fingers with hers. No way would he have slept through a real attack. Hell he would have sensed any intruder long before they got to her. Even in a dead sleep. But he couldn’t fight something that wasn’t real.
“Where’s Eli, Caelan?” she whispered.
How the fuck should he know? He tightened his grip on her body. Why the hell did it matter?
He forced himself to answer her, dreading her response. Eli should be the last person on her mind right now, so why was he the first?
“He had a meeting, remember? He’s probably home by now. Why?” he asked when he really didn’t want to.
“Are you sure?”
Why did he smell a renewed sense of fear? He couldn’t be positive where Eli was, but he assumed Eli would go home after a meeting that late at night. Then again, this was Eli they were talking about. He may have hit a bar somewhere and picked up a woman, or he could be at Derek’s, his best friend’s house. God, please let him have done one of those things. Then Caelan wouldn’t be outright lying about the whereabouts of his twin.
Caelan cleared his throat. “I’m not positive. I’ve been here with you, so I wouldn’t know exactly where he went afterward. I’m not his keeper either. He comes and goes as he pleases, and trust me he pleases all the time.”
“Call him.”
It hit him then. She thought Eli was the wolf that had barked at her. He did some barking of his own then. “No!” He pulled away from her and rose on his elbow. “Damn it, Tieran, I’m not gonna call him. He’ll call me in the morning to tell me how things went tonight. You still think it’s Eli? How can you not trust me?” he demanded, wanting to hear the words straight from her mouth.
“Because you didn’t just see what I did,” she cried, turning over and giving him her back. God, how did he do this to her? Stir her into such a tizzy that she blurted out the first thing in her head. She never should have said anything.
“You have to stop thinking that Eli is responsible for whatever it is you’ve seen.” He laid a hand on her upper arm and rolled her until she faced him once more.
Damn him for making her feel like this.
“Why should I?” she screamed, startling him with her vehemence. “You have to understand where I’m coming from here, Caelan.” She swiped angrily at her wet cheeks. “The only thing I can do is tell you what I see. I can’t help it if you don’t like the answers.”
Caelan wrapped his arms around her shaking body and gathered her close to his chest, holding firmly when she tried to push away. She hated that despite the fact he pissed her off, he still had the ability to make her feel safe.
“Shh, baby.” He stroked his hand over her hair. “You’re doing your best. That’s all I can ask.” With a hand cupped under her chin, he lifted her face and forced her to look at him when she didn’t want to. “But you have to understand where I’m coming from too. Eli is my twin, my other half, and he is not capable of the maliciousness of this killer.”
Tieran sniffed and flicked her gaze away from him, searching the deeply shadowed room. She half-expected the beast to jump out at her again. Another wave of chills wracked her body. Her heart said Caelan was right. Eli was too much like his brother to have killed a woman in cold blood. Her brain said screw your heart, there are too many damn coincidences not to think of him as a suspect.
Tieran shivered and sank into his warm strength. She was too tired to think right now.
“Just hold me. Please.” They could talk in the morning, but no more tonight. She felt his sigh and his fingers dug into her hip. Caelan wasn’t happy with her putting him off again.
“I’ll hold you whenever you need me to, sweetheart.” He snuggled closer than she thought possible. “Please tell me what happened. I promise to listen.”
Tieran sighed. He would, too. He wouldn’t like it, but he’d wait until she was done before listing his reasons why she was wrong.
“Please, my own,” he whispered, nibbling on her earlobe. Warmth pooled in her belly.
She could honestly say with Peter, she’d never once felt inclined to talk to him about her visions. Sometimes they inadvertently came out, much to his chagrin, but she’d learned not to involve him. After the Florida debacle she hadn’t gone to the police again either.
Caelan, on the other hand, somehow made her want to spill her guts. She wondered what kind of hold he had on her that put her in some kind of trance-like state making her talk to him.
“What did you see, Tieran?” His tone was almost hypnotic and she felt herself slipping under his spell again. It was a damn strange weakness she had with him.
“A man in a car. It died and he had to pull it off onto the shoulder,” she heard herself say.
“What did he look like?” His voice was as soothing as the fingers he gently combed through her hair.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It was almost as if I was inside his mind.”
Caelan stiffened around her. “Is that normal?”
“No.” She swallowed. Not at all, and she really didn’t care for the way her gift was starting to evolve. “Before I met you, I was always an observer. When that wolf attacked that lady, I was her. I felt her terror, her pain, her…loss.” Absentmindedly, she smoothed a hand over his bunching biceps. “I can describe the wolf because I saw him from her point of view, but other than the fact I saw her in the paper, I have no clue what she looks like.”
“Okay, let’s try it this way. What did he see?”
Tieran searched her memory for details. As with most of her visions, not all the pieces fell into place. Oftentimes, something would happen much later that triggered tidbits of information to the forefront.
“There were woods,” she remembered. “He wanted to go for a run. And there was a woman. He kept picturing her and leering at her. No, not leering, but…lusting for her.”
Caelan’s fingers tightened in her hair and she winced. She wondered if he was thinking the same thing she was. If this was his killer, he already had another victim in mind.
Gradually his hand loosened its hold. He took a deep breath. “What kind of car was he driving? You said it broke down somewhere? Are there any landmarks, something that might lead us to where he’s parked?”
“No, nothing but woods in both directions. And asking me to tell you what kind of car it was is like asking me to sing the Greek National Anthem. It ain’t gonna happen. The best I can do is something black and sporty. Sorry, I don’t always remember everything I see right away. It will probably float in and out all day.”
“But maybe you could ID it if you saw it again?”
She shrugged. “Possibly.”
Now it was his turn to sigh. “What else?”
“Nothing, Caelan.” Thinking about it too much right now would probably bury her deep in headacheville.
She yawned so big her jaw popped. He held her face in his hands. It was amazing how much she could see despite how dark the room was. She liked to sleep in pitch black and normally she wouldn’t be able to see her hand in front of her face. So why was he so clear in front of her?
“You’ll tell me if anything else comes to mind?”
She nodded. He tucked her head beneath his chin and squeezed her to his chest.
“Fuck. I hate doing this to you. If I didn’t need all the help I can get, I’d help you get through the pain and not make you bring it up again.”
“‘S’okay,” she mumbled. Her eyes welled with tears. Where had he been all her life?
He gently rocked her through her quiet sobs until her eyes grew too heavy to keep open and she let the darkness of sleep consume her.
Chapter Seven
Caelan added a third pancake to the stack and slathered it with butter before covering them in warm syrup. He eyeballed the golden discs for a second then poured another dollop. Perfect. The pancakes were anyway, Tieran’s ass would be his for a spanking whenever she appeared.
He’d gotten up this morning intent on making her something to eat and had been shocked to see the newly stocked refrigerator. Dumbfounded, he’d stood there for several minutes, the cool air washing over him and his heart pounding at the implication of just where the food had come from.
He’d let her continue to sleep out of the sheer goodness of his heart. What he’d wanted to do was storm in there and demand she tell him what the hell she thought she was doing going out in the
middle of the night for groceries. A twinge of pain in his hand made him realize he was gripping the syrup bottle to the point it was about to burst.
“What the hell have you done to my kitchen?” she growled from the doorway, mirroring his grumpy mood.
Tomorrow, he’d remember that she was obviously not a morning person. Caelan smiled despite his anger but kept his back to her so she wouldn’t see.
“It’s called making breakfast, my own.”
“I don’t eat breakfast,” she grumbled.
He heard the scrape of a chair and had to laugh at her “humph” when she plopped onto the seat.
“Have fun on your little late-night expedition, Tieran?” he asked, still not bothering to turn around. If he did, he was liable to snap at her. Literally.
“You’ve got food, don’t you? Be happy.”
He curled the corner of his lip. Damn her smart-ass mouth. “The food could have fucking waited until this morning.” When I could have gone with you to watch out for your stubborn behind, he added silently.
“But then you wouldn’t have had anything here to make whatever it is you’ve made, now would you?”
Caelan finally turned, the pancakes in one hand and a huge pile of sausage and bacon in the other. Tieran’s face faded into a sickly shade of green when her gaze landed on the food he’d made for her. Her lips curled in distaste and she jerked her gaze out the window.
“You need to—”
She threw a hand in the air, palm out to him and her head shook violently in protest. When she faced him again, her eyes were wide, her cheeks puffed out. Her eyelids lowered like a curtain a second before she bolted from the chair and raced out of the kitchen.
Caelan sighed and set the plates on the table. He knew a shifter pregnancy could be hard on a human but he sincerely hoped this didn’t last too long. Her body would need protein to maintain the life growing inside her. How could he get meat in her if she started throwing up every time she looked at it?
The sound of violent retching filtered down the hall. He went after her. It was his fault she was like this anyway.
Seeing Eye Mate Page 11
