“What a fucking eyesore,” she muttered to herself.
Then she rolled her eyes—
—and swung her gun around. Pointing the muzzle into a stand of pines, she said, “I don’t know what you’re doing back there, but after the last twelve hours, I’ve got an itchy trigger finger and this gun is ready to go to work.”
There was a pause, and then she saw the glowing hazel eyes. A moment later, a gray wolf padded out into the clearing.
Except it wasn’t a wolf in the conventional sense, was it.
Drawing in some air through her nose, Xhex frowned and slowly lowered her weapon. “So you’re the wolven V was talking about when he saw my future.”
EIGHTEEN
AS FATE WOULD have it.
What a saying, right? Blade thought as he stayed behind an outcropping of boulders and watched the two females on the summit: On the right, a four-footed wolf who was not a wolf in the conventional sense of the word. On the left, a biped who looked human enough, but had the blood of two different paranormal species running through her veins.
When he had come here to find the entrance to that final lab, the last person he had expected to see anywhere on the mountain was the very one his King had ordered him to stay away from. And then his sister had pointed her gun into the trees and addressed a presence she had clearly sensed—and he had obviously missed.
He’d been so shocked, both at the wolven’s appearance and his own lapse of survival, that he had been rendered momentarily dumbfounded.
He remained as such.
Although that wasn’t just because of the shifter.
Now he knew why Rehv was worried about Xhex. Her grid was collapsing, that which should have been three-dimensional now only two-. And he also knew why the superstructure of her emotions was folding in on itself.
With her, there was one and only one why—
No, that wasn’t right. Something equally bad had happened to her after she’d gotten out of that lab. Another trauma… he could see the echo of it on her grid. But at least there were other, happier events that had affected her soul, as well. Profoundly good things. Her mate, the Black Dagger Brother John Matthew, for example.
Out at the clearing, Xhex lowered her gun and said something to the wolven that he wasn’t able to track.
There was a pause—and then he saw for the first time a kind of magic that took his breath away.
The wolf transformed herself, her entire body reconstituting, limbs that were lupine shifting into human-like arms, human-like legs, the muzzle retracting, the jaw reworking, a face emerging as the fur pelt, which was luxurious and gray and white and brown, retracted into the skin.
When the change was complete, what stood in front of his sister… was naked in the night, with blond-streaked long hair and eyes that were unapologetic and unashamed by her nudity. As any animal would be.
His eyes locked on her high, proud breasts and traveled down her stomach to the cleft between her thighs.
The stirring deep within his gut was such a surprise, he looked at the front of his hips and frowned. Then he put a hand upon his own crotch.
He couldn’t possibly be getting erect.
No offense to the female sex, but entities of the so-called “fairer” side of things generally did not interest him.
Blade refocused on the resplendent form before him-and what was going on between his thighs thickened even more.
Letting his head fall back, he stared at the overcast night sky. No stars to see, and he could have used the perspective of all those galaxies, all that space, all that epic scale.
Clearly, this was a confusion of some sort, he thought to himself. What sex he’d engaged in had always been with males; he liked submissives with big cocks. Therefore, there had to be another explanation for the fact that he was suddenly partially erect.
Maybe it had been the King’s grip on his throat.
That had to be it. He’d come here directly after being vampire-handled. This arousal was obviously a delayed reaction to a male who had arresting amethyst eyes, and a mohawk that begged to be stroked, and a hand strong enough to powder a concrete block in its grip.
Following this very rational pep talk, Blade righted his head and refocused on the female—
Blink. Those beautiful bare breasts. Blink. Those tight, little hungry nipples. Blink. That bare cleft that was just begging for him to…
“Fuck,” he growled into the darkness.
NINETEEN
ABOUT FIVE HUNDRED yards back from the summit, Daniel waited in the passenger seat of one of C.P. Phalen’s SUVs—while the woman he loved went off into the darkness to meet a stranger. Under any other set of circumstances, he wouldn’t have allowed it. He’d have gone first, all tip-of-the-spear macho.
And as recently as this morning, he would have been furious at being left behind like a child, all locked-in-safe against the big, bad wilderness.
Except here was the thing.
True, he was never going to be comfortable with Lydia going off into the dark, even with her other side being so incredibly powerful. But outside of that, even as his catalogue of you-can’ts glared at him, he remembered the way she had looked all undone and coming in their bed, her head back, her breasts tight and straining for his mouth, her core hot and wet for him—for him.
She had cried out his name.
Three times. Because he had kept going after her first orgasm.
And when she had taken a shower, he had watched her, propped up against the headboard. Through the glass door, she had put a show on for him, soaping her body, leaning back against the marble wall, putting one hand between her legs and the other in her mouth as the water had gleamed over the contours of her curves.
So he wasn’t bitter about not being able to walk all the way to the clearing. And he didn’t care she’d locked him in for safety. And this female they were meeting? Maybe she helped them, maybe she didn’t…
But he had been a man with his fucking wife—
Daniel frowned. “Oh, shit.”
They weren’t married.
As the thought occurred to him, he wondered how he’d missed that little detail somehow. Then again, he’d been pretty busy puking his guts out, having the cold sweats, and wondering whether, at any moment, the cocktail of poisons that were trying to cure him were going to overdo it and knock him off.
Well. Didn’t he have something at the top of his list of things to do.
The smile that hit his face was nothing that he bothered to hide, and not just because there was no one around—and as his cheeks burned, he decided healing came in many different forms, didn’t it: His medical landscape hadn’t changed, but his mindset was improving big-time.
“No more cigarettes,” he murmured as he ran his hand up and down the padded top of the center console.
No more Jack, either. It turned out what he needed to feel like himself was to make his woman feel like herself—and the rest fell into place.
As if the universe wanted to emphasize his new direction, Lydia walked out of the trees and into the trailhead’s open area. She was gloriously naked and utterly unselfconscious about it, as if, to her, nudity on the mountain was second nature.
“My wolf,” he purred.
But then the other woman came out, and not only was she clothed… she was fucking armed. Before he could think about it, he unlocked and opened his door and slid out with his own gun, his numb feet catching his weight.