by Dean Murray
Chapter 25
I slowly stretched, and then turned over and smiled when I found Alec lying on top of the covers.
"Good morning, beautiful." As always, his voice sent shivers down my spine.
By the time we'd arrived home, it was ridiculously late, and I'd barely managed to stay awake long enough to bolt down a little dinner after Donovan had helped us unload our haul. I'd then done the single most gutsy thing of my entire existence. I'd quietly followed Alec back to his room and then asked if I could sleep there again.
He'd given me another of those long looks that seemed to say he thought it was a bad idea, but that he couldn't bring himself to deny my request. Not with everything else he couldn't do for me.
"Please, I must look horrid. If you'd known I could look this bad, you'd never have bothered saving me from Simon and Nathanial."
Alec cocked his head to the side, as if trying to decide how to respond to my half-serious jest.
"Actually I was completely serious. You are beautiful."
I waited for the inevitable joke, or backhanded compliment to follow, but he seemed happy to just stop there. For once in my life I managed to be smart and do the same.
"So what's the agenda for today?"
Alec stretched and then shrugged. "School, just like every Monday."
My groan brought a smile to his face. "I can ship pesky parents out of the country, but if you start a wholesale program of cutting class your mom will find out when she gets back."
"So I just go about my day like normal, pretending like I don't know Brandon's a psychopath who just happens to be able to change shapes at will and rip big holes in brick walls?"
I finally rolled out of bed, and started picking through the pile of bags from our shopping trip, hoping to find something that wouldn't make it look like I'd just won the lottery or robbed a bank.
"Now you know how Rachel feels. I'm afraid that with only a couple of differences, it'll be business as usual."
I finally settled on a white button-up, and headed to the bathroom so I could change.
"So are you going to tell me what the differences are, or is that part of the stuff I'm not allowed to know?"
Alec's chuckle was muffled by the closed door, but still brought a smile to my face. "The biggest difference will be that we're going to have to shuffle some class schedules to make sure Brandon and his pack don't have access to you or Rachel. Everything else is just kind of a corollary to that. At least one pack member will need to be with you whenever you leave the house."
I spit out the toothpaste currently prohibiting me from being able to respond, and swung the door open. "Alec, it's the middle of the semester. We can't just walk into the office and tell them we want to change our schedules. It doesn't work that way."
