“How the hell do I know?”
Chapter 5
ANGEL tried to stifle her yawn. Clearly, Parker was nervous about the idea that he could kill her and she wasn’t particularly thrilled with the fact that he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t try. But, she carried around part of his soul inside of her now and one of the biggest parts of Parker to come over to her in the freaky mating thing that had happened between them was his sense of right and wrong.
Parker was pretty darn serious and unless something weird happened in the next few minutes to completely alter his ability to be a moral compass, Angel didn’t feel like she was in any immediate danger. Still, when the sun came up tomorrow she was going to start to work on a way to get her soul back and remove his. She wasn’t going to be permanently bound to anyone—not even someone as utterly fantastic as Parker Liberty.
For tonight, as long as they were stuck this way she might as well take advantage of some the perks, so to speak. She patted the bed next to her. “Come here.”
He shook his head. “Not a chance.”
“I’m not going to let you kill me.”
“My mother thought she could stop my father. Apparently, she was wrong. I’m twice your size. I’m not going to take a risk with you.”
Angel looked at her wolf who had sat up at the mention of Parker’s mother. “Any suggestions?”
Her wolf nodded. “Ask him more about the mother.”
“Did you say your mother thought she could stop your father?”
He nodded and sat down at the end of the bed. Placing his head in his hands, Angel couldn’t get over how tired he suddenly seemed. His eyes were red and worn, the hard lines defining his face more evident than they had been earlier. He took life very seriously. She knew this because she could feel those parts of his soul now tucked safely inside of her stirring to life.
“I witnessed my father kill my mother.”
“That’s terrible.” A sudden thought dawned on her and she scooted over to where he sat, holding the blanket over her nude form. She wasn’t shy, not really, but this didn’t really feel like a ‘naked’ conversation. “Let me ask you something, where were you living at the time?”
“On an island about six hours north of here.”
She nodded. That had been the answer she’d been expecting. “Westervelt.”
His head shot up. “That’s right. How did you know?”
Leaning against his shoulder so she could get a good dose of his scent infused back into her bloodstream, she smiled. “That’s where I’m from originally, too. How many wolf packs do you think there are running around North America?”
He put his head on top of hers. It was an awkward position but she didn’t mind. She knew she’d have to give this up but for now she was content to enjoy it.
“Don’t be a smartass.”
“I can’t help it, it’s my nature.”
“No,” he kissed her hair, “it’s not.”
“Just because you are currently in possession of parts of my soul doesn’t mean you know me. If I say I’m a smartass, I’m a smartass.”
He nodded but she couldn’t get over the impression that he humored her. She wasn’t sure exactly what made her think that way, maybe it was the gleam in his eyes. She’d be leaving soon so maybe she shouldn’t bother trying to figure him out. Still, it irked her to think he was laughing at her on the inside.
“Back to the important stuff here, I was born on that island—Westervelt—but my mother got me away before my father and the other crazies could hurt me.”
She could feel his sigh travel through her body. She shuddered. This mating stuff was freaky even if she kind of liked it.
“That’s good. I’m glad they got you away but since you understand what happened that day, can’t you understand why I am so dangerous to you?”
She shrugged. “Yes and no. I’m really, really good at magic. I think I would be able to feel it if you had bad energy flowing through you making you want to kill me.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Like you knew the two idiots were going to come into your room and whack you over the head?”
Now that wasn’t fair. She stood up, putting her hands on her hips not caring one bit if she was as nude as the day she was born. “I didn’t know they were coming because they weren’t bathed in dark magic. They’re just idiots who wanted to have sex with me. It’s different and I’m pretty darn sure that since you just got to have sex with me you aren’t going to conk me over the head to get more of it.”
“All right, I apologize. That wasn’t exactly fair.”
That was it? He apologized? But she was rip-roaring ready for a fight. She sighed and sat down. “Look, I’m exhausted. We’ve already done what we were trying to avoid. We might as well share the bed. I think we’ll both sleep better.”
“But…”
She held up her hand. “If you try to kill me in my sleep, I’ll kill you, okay? And if there is any way to get us out of this mess called mating, I’ll find a way to do that too. Okay?”
Moving toward the headboard, she wriggled under the covers. When she was finished adjusting herself, she looked up at Parker.
“Seriously? Did you suddenly become a statue or are you going to join me?”
As she waited for him to respond, she felt an array of emotions inside of her. Even though it might be stupid, she knew she was going to be hurt if he didn’t spend the night with her. She’d just given her virginity to him. Was he going to treat her like he didn’t care? She bit down on her lip. Did the fact that he had some of her soul inside of him not do anything to him?
Without a word, he climbed into the bed next to her. Laying down beside her, he pulled her into his arms until they spooned each other. She could feel his warm breath on the back of her neck and it sent shivers down her spine.
“I want you to know that I will end my own life before I would take yours.”
She smiled in the darkness. “Determination was one of your first traits to come over. We won’t let it come to that.”
“Do you think the fact that we have each other’s souls would matter if something happened to the other one? Like if I was to die, would your soul return to you?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know the particulars of this any more than you do. Besides, I think we’ve talked enough about death tonight. It’s too gloomy. I don’t want to think about it right before I go to sleep. I need to be rested so I can get to work on returning your voice to you in the morning.”
“How exactly are you going to do that?”
“I have a book back in my hotel room. It’s the one thing I have from my mother. It’s a collection of family magic. I’m hoping it will teach me to draft a spell to help you.”
“I would be immensely grateful. I feel kind of…foolish that all of this time I assumed I could speak and I couldn’t.”
“Don’t.” She rolled over until her face touched his chest. “That’s the thing about spells. You don’t know you’re under them until you’re either released from it or someone tells you that you are.”
She closed her eyes, loving the way he smelled and the way his scent seemed to enter her bloodstream and not leave. She could swim in his scent, she could live in it…She knew she was falling asleep about a second before she did.
* * * *
Angel wasn’t sure where she was. She supposed she could be dreaming. She’d dream walked before. It was part of her magic. Usually, they were simple dreams full of images she couldn’t really identify. This time she had a clear feeling of where she was…sort of.
She stood in some kind of conference room. Not that she’d ever been in this room before, she hadn’t, but it was obviously used for meetings. A wooden oval table filled up most of the space with chairs on all sides of it. There were no windows anywhere she could see. A group of people walked into the room.
Her immediate impression of them was that they’d been through some kind of fight
. A lot of them had bruises on their faces or their clothes torn. She did a quick head count. Eight men and eight women.
One of them moved away from the others. He sat at the end of the table in one of the swivel chairs. Angel shuddered as she regarded him. He had wolf eyes. There wasn’t even a trace of human in them. They made her want to take a step back or look down. Everything about him made her wolf nervous. Clearly, he was dominant.
Angel had never been particularly comfortable around wolves that were more dominant than she was. Not that there were too many wolves who fit that bill. She was an Alpha wolf, which meant that this man, whoever he was, he was someone’s supreme Alpha. He was in charge of his pack and she wouldn’t be surprised if all of these people around him were his pack members. She sniffed the air and wasn’t surprised that since this was a dream she had no use of her wolf senses. She couldn’t scent a thing. She took a few steps around the room watching the people who surrounded the table. No one had spoken yet.
One of the women ran a hand through her hair and sighed. Angel turned around to look at who it was and almost fell backwards. Scarlett Knoll. She knew her. She was one of the nice women pack members from New Orleans. Not an Alpha wolf, she was frequently picked on. Angel had done what she could to help her.
What was Scarlett doing in this room? As far as Angel knew, this conference area had not existed in any of the pack houses in New Orleans. This was somewhere new. Had Scarlett been kidnapped? Taken from New Orleans? Angel’s heart pounded hard. If Scarlett was in trouble, being trapped with these men, Angel would do what she could to help her. Maybe that’s why she was having this dream. Maybe that was her destiny: to save Scarlett from these wolves…
The man at the end of the table pounded his hand down and everyone jumped. “I refuse to lose any more pack members. Consider it a law I’m enacting. No one else dies.”
“Darling,” a redheaded woman approached him, sitting down on the arm of his chair. “It’s not like you did this on purpose. None of us saw the attack coming. It was a terrible tragedy. I don’t think, however, that you can outlaw death.”
“Why not?” The man stood up. “I’m Alpha here. They take an oath to obey me, to listen to me, why can’t I tell them they’re not allowed to die saving my life?”
Angel was impressed with whoever this man was. Most Alphas she knew were happy to let others lay down their lives for them. In fact, she’d never met one who put others welfare ahead of their own.
“Tristan,” a male voice from across the room spoke. “My mate would like to speak.”
The man—Tristan—sank back down into his char. “By all means, Scarlett, speak. You have my permission to speak at will.”
Mate? Scarlett was mated to the tall, dark haired man who had spoken for her? Wow, how much had happened in the weeks she’d been gone?
“I think you’re underestimating, sir, how much it meant to those men to be allowed to give their lives for you.”
“How much it meant to them? To die? I don’t think it was something they particularly enjoyed. I can feel their pain, remember?”
“No,” she shook her head. “Not that they enjoyed it but that they were allowed to be part of a functioning pack with a strong, good Alpha. It was their right, their privilege to help uphold the Westervelt pack.”
Angel took a step backwards and tripped over the chair behind her. Westervelt? She wanted to run. She’d dream walked to Westervelt? What a nightmare.
The room went silent. Tristan stood up. All eyes seemed to be focused on the chair that had flown across the room.
Tristan pointed at the chair. “What made that happen?” He whirled around. “Tell me one of those invisible wolves isn’t in this room with us!”
Angel wasn’t sure how that had happened. In her dream walk, they shouldn’t have been aware of her and she certainly shouldn’t have knocked over that chair.
She needed to get out of there right that very second. She looked around. She could maybe get to the door. Then where would she go? A tall, broad shouldered man who stood next to a small blonde woman walked forward.
“I don’t know if it’s one of the invisible wolves, my Alpha, but I would say that we are clearly not alone.”
* * * *
Angel jolted back into awareness in Parker’s room sitting up straight in the bed. Usually she came to awareness slowly but that experience—whatever it was—made her awaken fully conscious.
She felt Parker’s hand on her back before she heard his voice in her head. “What’s the matter?”
“I dream walked—meaning I traveled in my sleep—to Westervelt. Gods, it was so scary. I don’t know how they knew I was there except they did.”
She needed to steady her breathing and get control of herself. It did no good to be scared. If someone wanted to hurt her, they would only get more enjoyment out of her fear. She’d learned that lesson over and over again growing up with the pack in New Orleans. Still, traveling without a choice to Westervelt had thrown her.
Parker’s strong arms came around her pulling her up against his chest. She could hear his heartbeat. His scent enveloped her. He felt steady, strong, and larger than life. He felt real. She was here, not in Westervelt. Even if her consciousness had been there—and somehow moved a chair—her body had been here with Parker, safe in his bed.
That knowledge helped more than anything else could have.
“You were only asleep about ten minutes.”
She sat up to look at him. “Really? Were you awake the whole time?”
“I had started to doze off.”
Nodding, she let him lay her back down on the bed tucked into his arms. He stroked her hair as they both lay silent under the covers. There was so much she needed to consider about what she had just seen.
The Westervelt pack was alive and well—with women, including Scarlett, whom Angel had known her whole life. They had an Alpha who wanted to outlaw anyone dying for him. No one in the whole room—even scared Scarlett—seemed at all worked up or afraid of him.
She groaned at the implications. Could she have been so wrong in her assumptions of Westervelt? Were things so much better there? They had all looked beat up, like they had been through some kind of ordeal. Clearly, some kind of violence had gone on. That didn’t speak well to their current state of existence.
Was the whole thing an elaborate trick to try to get her to come back so they could do to her whatever nefarious plan they’d had for her since her birth?
There were too many questions and no one to give her any answers. Parker’s breathing had evened out. She suspected he was asleep but when she looked up at him his eyes were open. He was awake, unless he was one of those freaky-deaky people who slept with their eyes open.
“I was just thinking that we need to find a way for you to control your magic when you’re asleep.”
She nodded, not surprised he knew she’d been wanting to speak to him. He was super quiet, hardly ever moved when he didn’t have to, and he never missed anything that was going on.
“Maybe there’s something in my mom’s book.”
He sniffed her hair, which made her smile. “You haven’t read it cover to cover?”
“I have, except every time I do something new pops up. That’s the thing about a magic book.”
“Do you always find what you need?”
She shook her head. “I wish, but no. I think my Mom tried to anticipate things I might need but how could she know everything I would face?”
“Or perhaps there isn’t a spell for everything. Or maybe your wolf needs to teach it to you herself.”
He made some really good points. “True.”
“Go back to sleep. I won’t let you travel.”
“You can’t stop it.”
“I can. When I need to be, I am a force to be reckoned with. For as long as we are together, I will protect you. Tonight you will be safe, even from your own abilities.”
It was a stu
pid statement filled with sentiment and not fact. He couldn’t possibly do what he said he was going to do. Yet, she believed him with all of her soul.
Somehow Parker might actually be able to keep her from traveling in her sleep to places she didn’t want to go.
“Do you snore?”
He shook his head. “Don’t you think you should have asked me that before you insisted I get in the bed with you?”
She laughed, loving this easy way between them. Her wolf liked it too. She yawned contently and Angel suspected she’d soon force Angel to go to sleep whether she wanted to or not.
“I just want to know how hard I’m going to have to elbow you in the ribs.”
“I don’t think I snore, but feel free to kick me if so. I’d prefer that to a good elbow jab.” He paused. “Do you snore?”
“Going to throw me out if I do?”
“No. But I might go and sleep on the couch.”
“You’re such a gentlemen. I’m talking about beating you up and you’re saying you’ll sleep elsewhere.”
“What can I say? I’m clearly a better person than you are.”
This time she cracked up. Long, hard chuckles. She couldn’t remember the last time she had laughed so hard. Or, to be honest, had really laughed at all. Wow, it felt good, which was why it shocked her to her core when she started to cry.
Not even dainty tears, no, hard thick wetness fell from her eyes.
“Oh my gods, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Parker didn’t say a word as he pulled her even closer into his side. “I’ve got you, Angel. You’re safe with me.”
Once again, she believed him.
Chapter 6
PARKER set down the dish he washed and inhaled deeply. He knew the moment Angel set foot in the restaurant. He hadn’t wanted to wake her so he’d snuck out while she was still lost in dreamland. He’d hated doing that. When he’d woken up and regarded at her, she had appeared so incredibly soft and delicate. He’d wanted to pull her into his arms and never, ever let go.
He shook his head. This had to stop. If there was one thing they’d both agreed about, it was the need to end their so-called mating before it got out of hand. Day dreaming about her was a bad sign. It meant he was getting comfortable with her soul being inside of his.