Yep. Dumb kids. That made a hell of a lot more sense. Paige had a feeling that if she just kept repeating the theory over and over in her mind, eventually she’d believe it.
The upside was that it was easier to deal with the fear when her hands were busy, so she’d spent the weeks settling into her new role. She’d learned how to fire up and cook on his wood-burning stove. She’d plucked weeds out of the garden, and mastered the art of washing laundry by hand.
Of course, it wasn’t all sweat and hard labor. There were a lot of upsides to her new living situation. Most of them involved watching Kian as he went about his daily routine, chopping wood, dressing game, hauling heavy things around, all without his shirt.
Most days, she found it only took about thirty seconds or so of watching his muscles flex and strain for the slick to start flowing down her legs…and then it was all over.
He’d drop whatever he was doing and come for her the second he caught scent of her desire in the wind. Of course, the sight of him rushing toward her would only excite her more.
Then he’d grab her up and take her hard. Sometimes on the patio or kitchen counter. Sometimes right there on the forest floor. It didn’t seem to matter.
Paige didn’t care. As long she felt the thick shaft of his cock sliding inside her, his knot surging until she thought she might burst, she had all she wanted.
Needless to say, sometimes it took all day for them to get even their basic chores done.
At least Gail didn’t mind when she’d shown up looking disheveled. Paige figured if anyone understood, it was her. Who else could possibly appreciate that irresistible pull toward an alpha, the absolute need to have him and have him now?
And Gail made it sound like that feeling wasn’t going anywhere. She and Randall were the same way even after twenty-three years. The bond that existed between an alpha and his omega was not a fire that ever went out.
Speaking of which…
Paige looked up from the board where she was chopping carrots and onions as the front door creaked open. A familiar rush of heat entered her cheeks as Kian walked in.
Shirtless—of course—and covered in a fine sheen of sweat, he set down his load of firewood by the hearth. The scent of pine and fresh earth filled her senses as he walked behind her. A new burst of desire shot through her veins as his huge hands wrapped over the swell of her hips.
“It’s a little early to start dinner, isn’t it, my love?”
My love.
Goosebumps sprung up along her arms at the tender name. He’d started saying it a few days ago, and Paige loved it. The sound of it, growled against her ear, so deep and rumbly, made her push back her hips and press her ass against his thighs.
“What I’m cooking needs to simmer for a long time.”
“Is that right?” Slowly, he slid his hands down, over her lower belly to the top of her legs. Spreading his palms out flat, he pressed her back farther, so she could feel the outline of his massive erection surging against her back. “How long?”
“Hours,” she said, her voice already husky with lust.
He nudged her head to the side with this cheek, exposing the long column of her neck. His lips closed around her sensitive flesh. Once. Twice. The tip of his tongue flicking against her with every kiss. “I know how to pass the time.”
So did she.
Paige twirled around in his arms. Snaking her fingers through his hair, she pulled his mouth to hers, tasting the salty sweat that covered his lips.
Kian cupped his hands around the swell of her ass and lifted her up onto the counter. Throwing open her knees, he pressed in close.
Paige felt a warm pool of slick already forming on the counter beneath her.
Yes, this is what she wanted. This was what she waited all day for. This is what she craved for the rest of her life.
Suddenly, Kian broke the kiss. Paige let out a small cry of frustration as he stood up straight. The muscles along his arms and neck pulled as tight as the string of a crossbow.
“Kian.” She tried to pull him back toward her, but it was impossible. He was far too strong for her to move.
He put his hand up between them, stilling her. He lifted his chin slightly.
“Someone’s here,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.
The fire in Paige’s blood was instantly doused.
Craig.
No, it couldn’t be. She didn’t want to believe it.
Kian must have sensed her fear. He wrapped his fingers around her shoulders. “You don’t have to worry. No one is going to touch you. I’ll kill them before they have the chance.”
The frost in his eyes told her he wasn’t exaggerating.
She was safe, she told herself. Kian was an alpha. No matter how many betas Craig sent after her, it would never be enough. He’d rip through all of them.
“They’re still far away,” Kian said, taking a step back and lifting his nose. “Close to the Road.”
“How many?”
“Four.”
The same as before.
All her doubt disappeared in a flash. Deep down, she knew it was Craig. Four men each time. She wasn’t sure if they were reconnaissance or a hunting party. All she knew was that they weren’t college kids out testing their courage.
“Stay here,” he told her before heading for the door. “I won’t be long.”
“Kian, wait.” Paige jumped down from the counter and ran toward him. “You can’t go out there unarmed. If those are Craig’s men, they’ll be loaded down with guns.”
She trembled at the thought of anything happening to him.
“Then they won’t be able to move as fast.” Kian leaned in and pressed a kiss to her forehead. Pulling back, he looked her straight in the eye. “Don’t leave the house for any reason. I’ll be back soon.”
Paige ran her hands over her suddenly chilled arms as the door slammed closed behind him.
Kian’s feet flew over the forest floor as he followed the scent of the betas in the air. The wind whipped in from the west, tinged with the salt of the sea, but he could easily make out each one of the four men.
And their fear.
They knew exactly what the crime they were committing stepping foot on his land. They knew the consequences. Yet they were doing it anyway.
No doubt because someone had paid them.
And there was no question who.
That son of a bitch who had dared to touch Paige before she was his. So, the bastard hadn’t learned his lesson after all. He still wanted to hurt Paige. Still thought he could control her.
The beta was about to learn a hard and painful lesson.
Raising his face to the wind, Kian drew in a deep breath. Too bad Craig wasn’t one of the four men that were currently making their way toward him. Kian remembered his oily scent well from their run-in at Evander’s Bar. He would have been able to pick it out in an instant, but it wasn’t there.
So, the coward had sent hired men to do his dirty work for him. Kian wasn’t surprised. He’d known betas who had died from a single punch from an alpha. Those who survived weren’t usually in a rush to relive the experience.
Well then, Kian thought to himself as he quickly covered the ground between him and the outsiders, he’d just have to make sure that Paige’s old fiancé got the message this time. Four heads in a bag ought to do the trick.
“Something’s coming.”
The whispered voice came from a cluster of trees at the base of the hill. Even though he was still a ways away, Kian heard it loud and clear as a rooster call in the morning.
“Are you sure?” another voice said. “I don’t see anything.”
“I’ve got it on the thermal camera, about a quarter mile away, big and coming in fast.”
“Shit. Let’s get out. Now.”
The sound of their panicked rustling gave their exact position away. Now Kian didn’t just have their scents to follow. There was also the clumsy pounding of their feet against the earth like a drum.
Instead of scattering, the idiots kept in a relatively straight line that headed back toward the road. They were fast…for betas, but they couldn’t come close to Kian’s pace. He closed the distance between them in less than a minute.
Rounding an embankment, he spotted the slowest of the hired guns. Kian didn’t slow down as he overtook him. He simply threw out his arm, and the beta went sailing, across the faint footpath and making hard into a tree. His body plummeted into the long fronds of ferns at the base.
Kian did the same to the second and the third man, taking them out with a swipe and leaving them broken in his wake. He wasn’t interested in foot soldiers. He wanted the leader.
Kian caught up to him mere feet from the Road. Diving, Kian took him out at the knees. Rocks and twigs gouged into his skin as they rolled across the ground, only stopping when they smacked into a granite boulder, but Kian barely noticed the pain. He had what he wanted.
He looked down at the bruised and bloodied face of the beta and snarled. “You should have never come here.”
The beta stared up at him, his puffy eyes swimming in fear. “I had to,” he said, his voice shaking. “Mr. Mathieson would have killed me.”
Kian’s lips twisted up in victory. “He probably still will when I send you back to him with three dead men and a message that no matter how many more he sends, they’ll never be successful. Paige is mine, and no one will ever touch her.”
The beta blinked. His mouth opened. For a moment Kian thought he was imagining the horrors that awaited him at home, but an icy tingle crept up his spine as he realized that the beta’s expression meant something else entirely.
Pride.
“But we weren’t given orders to capture Paige,” the man said. “That’s the other team’s job. We were sent to lure you away.”
Pure, hot rage surged through Kian’s blood. He swung back and brought his fist down hard. Bone and tendon split as he drove his fist clean through the beta’s skull.
Paige.
He jumped to his feet and took off toward the house. The house he’d told her to stay in no matter what. The house where Craig and his men knew that she’d be alone.
Chapter Thirteen
Paige couldn’t stop pacing.
From the front window, to the kitchen, to the bedroom, and back again. She’d started walking the circuit the second Kian had left the cabin, and now, at least twenty minutes later, she was still going strong.
She couldn’t help it. She had to keep moving. If not, she feared that all the anxiety and fear inside her would swallow her whole.
Besides, what else was she going to do?
She understood why Kian had ordered her to stay inside the house. She was safer here than lost out in the woods, and it wasn’t like she could help him fight off Craig’s men. Without a gun or weapon, she was more of a liability than an asset.
Kian, on the other hand, was an alpha. He wasn’t just bigger and stronger than anyone Craig could send; he knew how to fight. It was second nature to him. Instinctual.
Especially when it came to protecting her, his omega.
Paige believed that down to the deepest depths of her soul. Kian would die before he let anyone touch her.
She only prayed that it didn’t come to that.
And what would she do if it did? How would she go on without him?
She couldn’t. The realization came in a flash.
It wasn’t a matter of not wanting to go on. There was no doubt in her mind that she’d wither. She’d fade away. Somehow, she just knew that they were bound together so tight that her heart would rather give up than go on beating without him.
She paced back to the window and pulled back the curtain for what must have been the hundredth time.
Still no sign of him.
Or was there?
She narrowed her eyes, and focused in on the edge of the tree line just on the side of the truck. For a second, nothing happened. Everything seemed normal. But just as she was about to step away and start the loop again, she saw it—the shadow that had caught her eye before.
Someone out there, moving in the trees. Too big to be a deer, and far too slim to be a bear, it had to be a person.
Kian?
Another shadow shifted a few feet away from the first.
Then another.
And another.
Oh, shit.
Paige’s hand flew to her mouth. She didn’t dare scream. Hell, she was almost afraid to breathe.
There were four men across from the cabin. Four of Craig’s men.
Did that mean that they’d overpowered Kian? Had they shot him? Killed him and left his carcass in the dirt?
No.
The answer rang out clear in her heart. She would know. There was no way that tie between them could be severed without her feeling it.
Kian was still out there and alive…and coming to save her.
All she had to do was hold out long enough for him to get here.
Spinning around, she ran for the kitchen to find a weapon. She made it to the counter just as the front door flew open. Paige wrapped her fingers around the long knife she’d been chopping vegetables with less than half an hour before and spun around.
“Don’t come any closer,” she shouted, her arm surprisingly steady as she held the blade out in front of her.
Four men clad in black hoods paused just long enough to assess the threat she presented.
One chef knife versus all their guns—it wasn’t exactly an even match.
The man in the center raised a metallic gray pistol. Paige’s heart hammered.
“Put down the knife,” he ordered. His tone was militaristic and unusually calm.
He’d done this before, Paige realized. Stalked people. Held them at gunpoint. Murdered them.
She was pretty damn sure that last one was what was going to happen next. Strangely, the realization didn’t push her over the edge. She didn’t start shaking in dread, or sputtering pleas for her life.
If anything she was angry. Just really pissed that these assholes thought they could break into her home and threaten her. Maybe it was her newfound nature, but she didn’t feel like rolling over and dying. Especially not now, when she’d finally found some peace and contentment in her life.
In that moment, Paige decided that if she was going to die anyway, she might as well go out fighting.
Adrenaline pumped into her blood, her fingers curled even tighter around the handle of the knife, and she lunged forward.
The blade swept down in arc across the gunman’s cheek. He reeled back in shock as blood sprayed from the wound. His finger twitched against the trigger, but now his aim was nowhere near Paige, and the bullet buried itself into the wood of the wall to her left.
“You bitch,” the gunman spat at her. “You’ll pay for that.”
Paige brought the knife back down in front of her just in time for the other three men to swarm her at all at once. She tried like hell to fight them off, slashing wildly, but it was no use. There were too many of them. It took them only a few seconds to overpower her and twist the knife from her hand.
The man with the slashed face waited until both her arms were safely pinned behind her back before he came close.
“You’re lucky I was told to bring you to Mr. Mathieson alive,” he snarled. A second later a menacing smile twisted his lips. “Of course, he didn’t say anything about unhurt.”
Paige stared defiantly into the thug’s eyes as he curled his hand into a fist, cocked it back behind his shoulder, and brought it down hard against her cheek.
White-hot pain burst through Paige’s face. The sharp taste of copper filled her mouth. She tried to spit it out, but it only pooled up again a second later. Her head felt heavy and rolled forward. Her chin pressed against her collarbone.
A black fog pushed in, closing in a ring around her vision. She tried to blink it away, but it was no use. She was fading fast.
The last sight she saw before the lights wen
t out completely was the slow river of thick crimson flowing down to the floor.
Kian had never run so hard in his life. His lungs ached with the force of his breath. His muscles burned with exhaustion. But he kept going.
He had to get home.
He had to get to Paige.
Kian covered the three miles in less than fifteen minutes, but the moment he saw the front door hanging open, he knew he was too late. Still, he rushed inside, desperate to see if Paige was there.
She wasn’t. The only traces he could find of what had happened were a kitchen knife tossed in a corner and two small pools of blood about two feet apart.
He knew in an instant one of them was Paige’s.
Molten anger flowed like lava inside him. Betas had been in his house. They’d touched his omega. They’d made her bleed.
And for that they would pay. Dearly. With unimaginable pain.
The last rational part of Kian’s brain pushed its way to the front. The bastards had hurt her, but they hadn’t killed her. If she were dead, they would have left her body here. Dragging a dead woman through the woods would only slow them down. And these men had to know he would be after them.
Kian burst out the door and raised his head, desperate to catch Paige’s scent. Concentrating hard, he finally found it, weak and already far away. A slight mechanical rumble echoing through the trees told him they’d gone from moving on foot to a vehicle of some kind—ATVs probably. They must have stashed them at least a mile deep into the woods to avoid detection.
Kian flew down the steps and sped into the woods.
With every stride, Paige’s scent grew stronger. His rage increased as the sharp smell of her blood entered his nose. She was still bleeding.
But she wasn’t the only one. One of the men was as well.
A sense of pride swelled inside him at the realization that Paige must have fought back against her attackers, and fought back hard. Four against one, and she’d still managed to do some damage. She wasn’t easy prey, his omega.
His legs pumped as he flew past trees and bushes, rocks and ferns. With every step he pushed himself a little harder. He needed to get to her. It was the only thought in his mind.
Kian: The Boundarylands Omegaverse: M/F Alpha Omega Romance Page 11
