Tristan threw me a side-eye that said there was no way in hell I was getting behind the wheel of his all-but-priceless baby.
“Oh, come on,” I said in an exaggerated whine. “I’m an awesome driver. I promise I won’t wrap it around a tree. Probably.”
“I know you won’t,” he laughed. “But I brought you here to show you the south. That’s a lot harder to do when you’re driving.”
“Don’t you want to look around too?” I asked. But no. Of course he didn’t want to. It sounded like Tristan had spent a good deal of his life in this area of the world. “Then again, I suppose you don’t need to.”
He nodded as we climbed into the car. “I know this area very well. I could draw a map of Credence Parish where I grew up with my eyes closed. Every tree, every stream, every house. At least, I could draw them the way they were two hundred or so years ago.”
“So you’re really telling me,” I said, slipping into the passenger’s seat, “that this is where you were raised?”
“I am telling you exactly that,” he replied, pulling the car away and heading for the nearest road. “You wanted to know about me. So I’m going to show you where I was raised. I should warn you, it’s not all warm memories and happy times. Our family life wasn’t exactly easy.”
“I never pictured you as a southerner, Tristan Wolfe,” I said. “I know you’ve hinted at it, but I always thought…”
“You figured I grew up in Long Island in the late eighteenth century, huh?” he chuckled.
“Well, it’s not inconceivable,” I said, but the truth was that some part of me had always known he wasn’t from New York. Sometimes I wasn’t sure he’d even been born in the same world that I inhabited. I remembered looking him up online shortly after we’d first met, only to realize that his history was sketchy, even on the internet. He was a mystery to everyone, not just to me.
“So, where exactly are we headed?” I asked, trying to relax in my seat as I straightened the knee-length hem of my yellow dress. Tension riddled me. Whatever we were about to see—wherever we were going today—I reminded myself that as excited as I might be, there was a good chance that I wouldn’t like what he was about to show me.
I reminded myself that I was the one who’d wanted in on his secrets. I was the fool who’d literally asked for this. So it was time to open the curtains and look behind them, regardless of how frightening it was to do so.
I needed to be brave.
“Don’t worry,” he said, slipping a hand onto my thigh and squeezing gently. As always, he could sense my trepidation. “Today, I’m going to show you nothing but the good, relatively boring stuff. We can save the rest for another time.”
“I’d feel better if I knew what that meant,” I said, my voice tight. “I can’t help wondering what the rest means.”
Tristan held up his right hand, palm up. I took it and squeezed, grateful for the reassurance. “The rest is what you see of me now. The scarred man who has a wolf inside him. But there was a time before, remember,” he said. “A time when I wasn’t like I am now.”
A small dose of pain settled into my chest. I set his hand down on my thigh again and turned his way. “I kind of like who you are now, you know,” I said quietly. The Tristan of the present was strong and powerful. He was sexier than any living creature, not to mention that he was the man I’d grown to love. I didn’t even want to imagine him any other way than how he was now.
“I know,” he replied, his tone going deep as his hand slipped farther up, dipping under my skirt to land on my skin. I could sense that he wanted to feel closer to me, to remind me of the intimacy that we shared. He was trying to find a way to pull us closer together. “I know. But if you like who I am now—if you want me—you should know where I came from. It’s important.”
After we’d driven for half an hour or so we turned down a narrow dirt road. Giant, ancient trees flanked the lane on either side, moss hanging like desiccated strands of pale linen from their limbs. There was a beauty to this place that made me feel as though I’d stepped out of the present into some enigmatic part of history that was about to unfold in front of my eyes.
“I will say I’m intrigued,” I said. “This place is so…I don’t know, eerily lovely. But I’ve got to admit that I’m also slightly terrified.”
“No need for terror,” Tristan said, taking my hand in his. “Not while you’re with me. At least, not yet.”
“Not yet? That is…not reassuring at all.”
He let out a low laugh. “We’re almost there,” he added. “Like I told you, this is the good part.”
Chapter 18
A minute later he was pulling into the rough dirt driveway of a small, derelict wooden house that looked as though it had sat abandoned for twenty years or more. Its white paint had mostly peeled off, revealing decaying wood underneath. It was more shack than house, really.
The entire structure looked like it was one story, and couldn’t have contained more than one, or maybe two, small bedrooms.
“What is this place?” I asked as the car pulled to a stop.
“This, believe it or not, is my childhood home,” he said. “Mine and Krane’s. We were raised on this property.”
“Holy. Shit.” Without waiting, I climbed out and stepped towards the house, trying to get my head around the image of Tristan as a small child, running around this isolated property in the middle of nowhere with the brother who’d long since become a terrifying, womanizing monster. “It’s…”
“I think the word you’re looking for is atrocious,” he said, slipping up next to me to complete my thought. “Tiny. Pathetic. Awful. It looks like it belongs in a museum of rotting abodes once inhabited by impoverished bayou-dwellers.”
“I wasn’t quite going to say that. I mean, it has its charms,” I laughed, turning Tristan’s way, only to see that his eyes were locked on the funny little house, a look of strange affection set somewhere deep inside.
“It does, I suppose.” His voice had gone distant now, almost melancholy.
I pressed up against him, trying to offer him the same physical reassurance he’d given me earlier. “What are you thinking right now?” I asked.
“I haven’t been here in so many years. It’s a weird feeling. Mixed emotions.”
“Me too. It’s a little hard to imagine the owner of Wolfe Tower ever living out here.”
“Believe it or not, living out here was part of what drove me towards success,” he told me, his eyes finding my own. His expression had changed to one of stark determination. “We were very, very poor. Like, hunting squirrels for dinner poor. You’d be amazed at what being destitute can do to motivate a person.”
“Something tells me that it wasn’t just poverty that drove you,” I said, turning to look back towards the house. “I may not know everything about you, but I know you don’t care much about money. You’ve always seemed to me more about power.”
“I suppose that’s true,” he said. “Though any power I have—any money I have—are insignificant in the grand scheme of things. All I care about is carving out a life that I can somehow share with you.”
When I heard those words I wrapped my arms around his waist and buried my face in his chest for a moment.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I murmured against his pectoral muscle. “Let’s just say I like it when you talk about sharing our lives. A day ago I thought we were over.”
“We’ll never be over,” he replied softly. “Never. Not as long as there’s breath in me. Do you hear me?”
I pulled away, worried that tears would come if I held onto him too long.
Even if I’d completely forgiven him by now, I was just a bit too stubborn to let him see me cry with happiness just yet. I still had a lot of questions for my man of mystery.
He shifted his gaze towards the house. “Krane and I shared a room,” he said. “On the left side. It was tiny.”
A hard, chilling shudder overtook
me, despite the oppressive heat of the humid atmosphere around us. The only thing that was harder than picturing Tristan as an innocent young child was envisioning his beastly brother as a little boy.
“You all right?” Tristan asked. No doubt he’d grown all too familiar with the scent of fear that I emitted whenever I thought of his sibling.
“Fine,” I said. “Just…from what you’ve told me, you and your brother aren’t exactly friends anymore. I can’t help but wonder what happened when you were young to bring you to this point.”
“A lot.” Tristan tensed for a second before I felt him relax. “Listen, let’s not go inside. I told you I was going to show you the good stuff today,” he said, “so no talking about my problems with Krane, not just now. Let’s just say that when he and I were kids, we got along just fine. I’d rather focus on the good old days.”
He took me by the hand and guided me around the house to the back, where a hill sloped down towards a grove of massive, ancient trees. We walked in silence for a little as I took in the lush green landscape around us, which was more paradise than destitution.
In spite of the sad, run-down nature of the house, the grounds in this strange, hidden corner of the world were beyond amazing. They were overgrown in a way that made me feel like we’d just wandered into the wildest part of the Garden of Eden.
“All this belonged to your family?” I asked.
“Yes. At least we used to pretend it did. Officially, it belonged to the Parish. But I liked to announce to anyone who would listen that I was the king of this entire domain. Krane disputed my claim to the throne, naturally.”
“I can see why.”
“Our time here was happy,” Tristan added, “at least until my mother fell ill.”
“When was that?”
I was about eighteen,” he said. “My father had already passed away, so Krane and I took on the work of looking after our mother until she died years later. We ran the place. Fixed it up, worked odd jobs here and there.” He shot me a sideways glance. “When I look back on it now, I have to say that even though things were hard, they were still pretty good.”
He led me through the woods until we came to a small, natural pool of glistening water, complete with a waterfall. The sunlight created a perfect arching rainbow in its mist, the water sparkling like diamonds under the day’s brightness.
“Oh, wow,” I gasped. It was like a vision of Heaven. Perfect, utopian, private.
“It’s pretty good, isn’t it? We called this place the Magic Lake. Krane named it that after an incident that involved what he called a miracle.”
“Miracle?” I asked, an amused smile on my lips. “Tell me more.” I was actually beginning to enjoy hearing about the child version of Krane. It seemed it was only the adult who frightened me.
“We were swimming down here once, just him and me,” Tristan said. “I was twelve, he was ten. Something happened—I guess he swallowed some water, or something—and I swam out and grabbed him. I pulled him to shore. He wasn’t breathing, at least he didn’t seem to be.”
“Oh, God.”
Tristan nodded. “As you can probably imagine, modern CPR wasn’t exactly a known skill back in the late eighteenth century. I was angry with him. Screaming at him not to leave me.” He paused for a moment, his gaze moving into some point in the distance, like he didn’t want to make eye contact just then. “I hit him. Slapped his face, then punched his chest. Hard.”
“You revived him?” I asked.
“I did. I had no idea how, of course. He sputtered and coughed, and suddenly he was okay. He told me he’d seen a bright light. An angel, he said, with wings, surrounded by bright flame. He said the angel was a miracle, but my bringing him back was an even bigger one.” Tristan laughed quietly. “To a child, everything is amazing, everything has potential to be incredible. So I believed him. I thought I really had done something superhuman.”
“It is pretty amazing that you brought him back,” I said.
A chuckle rose up in Tristan’s chest. “Ironically, it was my rage that brought him back. I was so fucking mad at him for even thinking about deserting me that I wasn’t going to let him go without a hell of a fight.”
“You must have really loved him.” My heart both wanted to swell with affection and ache with sadness.
A silent nod. “I did,” he said. “Come on, let’s go for a swim.”
He raced down to the shore of the small pond, and within seconds he was naked, his scarred torso bronze under the hard light of the sun, bright eyes all but glowing when he looked back and dared me to follow suit. He leapt into the water, leaving me behind.
“Well?” he asked when he’d come up for air. “What are you waiting for?”
I laughed, yanked my dress over my head, pulled off my panties and bra, and jumped in after him.
The water was remarkably cool, given that the air temperature had to be at least 95 degrees.
“This is amazing!” I yelled as I treaded water in the middle of the pool.
Tristan smiled. “It is. Oh, hey—just make sure you watch out for gators.” With that he dove deep, leaving me gasping as I treaded water at the surface.
“What’s that now?” I asked, thrashing my arms and legs around in an attempt to ward off any creature who might think it was a good idea to swim my way.
I spun around, waving my arms to control my trajectory, my eyes searching the water for anything living.
After a second I felt something slip along my leg, and I let out a shriek, flailing as I tried to swim away from my underwater assailant. Then a hand was on me, and another, pulling my legs around his face, his tongue lapping at me under the water.
I grabbed him by the arms and yanked him upwards.
“You scared the living hell out of me!” I shouted.
Tristan popped out of the water, slicked his hair back and laughed. “That was fun,” he chortled.
“You can’t say the word gator then disappear like that,” I reprimanded. “I thought I was going to lose a foot.”
“Oh, I guess I forgot to tell you the only gators around here are the ones who enjoy cunnilingus,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Smart creatures. And rare.”
I reached for him, wrapping my hands around his neck as I saddled him with the responsibility of keeping us afloat. His erection, which seemed to be on the hunt for my body, pressed into my belly, reminding me how much I missed having him inside me. “You’re a brat,” I said, my voice tensing from the pleasure of his touch.
He threw me a crooked, accusing smile. “You love it and you know it.”
“I do love…” I stopped myself. “It. I love it.”
The truth was that I wanted to say I love you, and I am perfectly, resplendently, stupidly happy right now. Let’s never leave this idyllic place. But for some reason, I didn’t. I couldn’t say the words.
I swam away from him, tears in my eyes as I struggled with the conflict that wouldn’t let up inside me.
The truth was that sometimes, loving him scared me more than any gator ever could.
Chapter 19
When we’d finished our swim and thrown our now-damp clothes back on, Tristan drove us along a series of winding roads that skirted the bayou. Giant, untamed trees with lush green foliage surrounded us, guardians scrutinizing anyone who dared slip into the wilds of Louisiana.
“What’s our next destination?” I asked.
Before Tristan could answer, a series of small buildings appeared along the road in the distance. A crumbling house here, an old building that looked like it might once have been a church there.
The place was a ghost town.
“This is where we went to school, believe it or not,” he said, pointing to a set of stone ruins. “When we actually made it to class, anyhow. Over there’s where the general store used to be. We bought our supplies there—anything that our family couldn’t grow or hunt.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What exactly did you hunt?”
“W
e hunted anything that moved,” he nodded. “Squirrels, like I said. Muskrats, gators. We fished too, of course.”
“Wow, and I thought you were kidding earlier. So, you were basically some kind of wild mountain man.”
“More like mountain boy,” he replied. “Minus the mountains.”
“That’s too weird,” I laughed. “I can’t get my head around that image at all. You’re so…I don’t know, well-groomed.”
“When you have no money, you do what you need to survive,” Tristan replied in a matter-of-fact tone. “When I got away from this place and started working—I mean really working—it changed my life.”
“So you left home?”
“I did. It took a while. Krane and I were expected to help out around our home—my father had died of typhoid, and of course my mother wasn’t well. I did odd jobs for people at first—mostly construction—just to help put food on the table. Eventually, when she died and left us the property, I looked for more ambitious contracts in locations that were farther away. I wasn’t tethered to our land anymore.”
“The house—is it still yours?”
Tristan nodded. “It is, believe it or not,” he said. “Ironically enough, it’s mine and Krane’s. It’s one thing we never fought over, probably because neither of us particularly wanted it. Still, for some reason, we’ve never been able to let it go.” He pushed out a heavy sigh, like he’d been holding it in for ages. “Anyhow, I finally landed a job with a wealthy land owner. I thought for a time that I had it made.”
“Where did you work?”
“I’ll show you, if you like. It’s not all that far from here, at least not by car.”
He drove for a time, slowing down once to point out an ancient oak tree in the middle of a pretty field to our left. “That, by the way, is where I had my first kiss,” he said, mischief playing across his features. It was sort of sweet to see him recall the days of his youth, though I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to hear about kissing other women.
Alpha’s Hunger Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 28
