Claimed by the Mate, Volume 1 (39 page)

Minutes later, Kira was in the library.

“Whose idea was it to make this a library?” she asked him.

Yesterday she'd wondered this same thing as she'd walked into this space with its darker, heavier-looking wood shelves. Today she stood in the center of the room, the plush Oriental rug cushioning her feet; the two love seats positioned in the middle of the floor directly across from each other were dark brown leather. There was a large round coffee table between the love seats and on the opposite sides two sets of the same high-backed leather chairs that matched the one she'd sat in yesterday.

“Did you hire a decorator?” was her next question, and she turned around to see where Blaez was and why he hadn't answered the first one.

When he turned to face her he was already holding a book, the one on the Trekas family she'd been reading yesterday.“Channing's mother is into designing. His father's a contractor, so they helped with the remodel. Each of us agreed on the library.”

“What do you all do for a living?” she asked, since he'd opened the door with mention of Channing's parents. “Are you all sickeningly wealthy?”

“Not all of us,” was Blaez's calm response. He sat on the couch, opening the book, and began flipping slowly through its pages. “You said you read this book last night,” he said without looking up at her. “I know that parts of it are written in Greek. My family loved the language and made sure that each of us knew how to read and speak it. So I'll have to teach you the Greek alphabet before you can read. For now, I want to tell you the story of how the lycans came to be in existence.”

Kira sat beside him, moving closer to look down at the page. “We all know the story, Blaez,” she started to say even though she distinctly remembered reading things she hadn't known before in that book last night.

He nodded then, sitting back on the couch. “Tell me what the Hunters taught you to believe.”

The Hunters—her parents and their pack had been Hunters. She had been a Hunter. Ignoring that fact, she began,

“Lykaon pissed Zeus off. Zeus sought revenge in his usual brute way by killing all of Lykaon's sons but one, and turning Lykaon into a wolf. Nyktimos was Lykaon's youngest son and had been saved from Zeus's wrath by Gaia, who hid him in the river. She should have been smart enough to hide him from Lykaon, who was now bitter and still irritated at having lost his reign as king of Arcadia and was now relegated to walking around on all fours howling at the moon.” Kira paused when she noticed how intently he was staring at her and noticed the quick warmth spreading throughout her body as a result.

Clearing her throat, she continued, “Lykaon eventually found Nyktimos and out of anger and jealousy bit his only living son, thus changing him into a werewolf. Nyktimos, now angry at his father in turn for the fact that now on the night of the full moon he would shift into a hideous beast, left Arcadia and Olympus and all its battling gods and demigods and helpless mortals. He ended up in Washington State, where he met and fell in love with the human Aleya, whom he eventually bit. Thus began our hybrid breed of part wolf, part man, otherwise known as the lycan.”

She left out the part where Nyktimos had felt an instant connection to Aleya and only bit her because his love had grown so quickly and so deeply for her that he never wanted to lose her. When Kira looked at Blaez this time there was a brief change. His eyes were blue again, his face contorted until he looked more like a wolf than a lycan, and he lay on the ground, not moving, dead. A quick and potent wave of grief washed over her and she bit down on her lip to keep from gasping.

“The lycan breed then began to grow throughout the world, continuing the ridiculous feud between Zeus and Lykaon in their own self-destructive way,” he said, slamming the book closed on his lap and not noticing the few strange moments she'd just experienced.

Kira chanced another look at him, just to make sure what she'd seen wasn't true. Blaez wasn't dead. He couldn't be, because he was sitting here talking to her. His shirt today was light gray, a color that made his dark eyes brighten only slightly, even though his brow was still furrowed, his jaw stoically drawn.

Maybe she was hallucinating since they'd skipped breakfast. Yes, that was it. Her blood sugar was low and so now she was seeing things.

With a shake of her head Kira replied, “Mortals that were forced into being animals coming to an even bigger population of mortals, thus cursing some of them to the same dastardly fate, were supposed to do what else exactly?” She asked because she hated this story.

“Your pack, the Hunter packs, are attempting to kill off the Devoted lycans. Are you trying to say that's because they have nothing better to do and that we should all simply blame Zeus and let the killing ensue?”

“No.” Kira shook her head, turning in the seat so she could face him. “That's not what I'm saying.”

“Then tell me, Kira. What are your thoughts on the Hunters and the Devoteds? Where exactly do you stand in this little war?

He was speaking as if he already knew the answer, watching her closely like he had a plan for the moment she responded. It was like he had this all sorted out in his mind and was just waiting for her to walk to his beat. Just like Penn had.

“I don't give a damn which one of you kills who,” she shot back quickly, loving the slight widening of Blaez's eyes, which said she'd managed to shock him. “It's not my fight, hence the reason I could so easily walk away.”

“Was it easy?” he asked, tilting his head slightly as he continued to stare at her. “Walking away from your pack?”

Talk about being caught off guard. His voice had changed with the blink of his eyes, from the cool, aloof interrogation to what she thought might be genuine concern. Kira fidgeted. Well, she clasped her fingers, then unclasped them. And when she caught herself doing that she pulled her hands apart, tucking each one beneath her thigh as she looked back at him.

“Nothing in this life is easy, Blaez. I'm sure you know that considering you're a leader of your own pack. You know better than I how all the decisions rest on your shoulders, how you are responsible for the lives of those who follow you.”

“Why would you feel responsible for your father or his pack? After what they did to you.”

She was already shaking her head, regretting the moment he'd come to her last night in the midst of her nightmare. She'd said things to him then that she shouldn't have. Blaez was not her friend. Sure, she'd had sex with him, so maybe that kind of made him her lover, at least temporarily. But a friend was different. It was intimate and personal and there was nothing like that between them. Was there?

“Look, my situation is different from yours and probably from anyone else's. I wasn't what my father wanted or needed in his pack, I guess. And the others, well, they were down for making the best of the situation.”

“But you're not a situation,” he said vehemently. “You were their alpha female. They should have cherished and protected you.”

His words, because they were so true and so exactly like the way her mother had been treated, hurt as if he were cutting directly into Kira's chest with a heated blade.

“Yeah, I know,” she said with a wavering smile and a chuckle that didn't spark any humor inside. “They shouldn't have felt like it was a chore to decide which one of them would claim the big girl. Alpha female or not, a man knows what he likes.”

“And an idiot will soon see what he lost,” came Blaez's automatic reply.

Kira grew quiet, looking down at her thick thighs and shaking her head. She'd never been thin and hadn't convinced herself that she was beautiful. Cute, yes, especially in the right outfit; pinks and vibrant blues were really her colors. So she didn't have self-esteem or body image issues, but that didn't mean she was stupid to the way of the world or the way most men thought when they looked at her. Hell, her father had even suggested diets and gyms to her on more than one occasion. Kira had declined both. She ran on a daily basis, sometimes in the forest—where her mother had been killed—and Kira loved to cook, which gave her ample excuse for also loving to eat. She was healthy according to her latest physical with the human doctor, a healthy size 16, with a mind much sharper than all the lycans in her father's pack and a sweet spot for love songs.

“They were all idiots,” she replied finally. “Even my father. And so I left. Case closed.” She shrugged when Blaez didn't immediately say anything and looked across the room.

“They'll come for you,” he said.

She nodded. “I know. That's why you should let me go. I can move surprisingly fast, thanks to my daily runs in the forest, which I'm missing out on being stuck in this lovely but locked-tight log fortress of yours. If I leave now I'll be gone before the full moon.”

“Because there's no way they'll come before then,” he said.

Coming from anyone else, it would have been a question, but since Blaez seemed to know everything about everything, it was a statement.

“They're not as strong as you and your pack,” she told him.

“How do you know how strong we are?”

She did chuckle then, honestly. “I can see, Blaez. Each of you is built like you stepped right off the pages of a workout magazine. And you carried me at least two miles back from the woods to this place and then again up the stairs, where you so eloquently showed me my sleeping quarters. Believe me when I say you're much stronger than any of my father's pack.”

“You're not proud of your father at all. You speak almost as if you have no feelings for him. Why is that?” Blaez asked her.

“Because I don't,” Kira immediately replied. “I loved my mother and she was killed. I believe my father knows what really happened, but he refuses to tell me. For that, and for—” Kira stopped. She took a deep breath and continued, “I'll never forgive him for that.”

She was looking across the room again, trying to tell herself that this feeling like Blaez might actually be a nice guy, a guy she could on some level really like, was most likely way off base, when he surprised her yet again. His fingers slipped along her shoulder, moving until he was rubbing the nape of her neck. As she'd pulled her hair high into a ponytail today, each brush of his skin against hers sent a shiver of excitement straight down her spine.

“Sometimes people do what they think is best to protect others,” he told her.

When she looked to him again she was shocked to see that he'd moved even closer, without making a sound. His face was only inches from hers and she blinked away her astonishment.

“I don't need protection,” she told him adamantly. “I needed the truth.”

Blaez stood then and said, “The truth is overrated and is rarely what one expects.” He walked away at that point, going to put the book back on its shelf, she presumed.

Kira also figured that Blaez thought this conversation was over. He probably assumed she would leave since he'd walked away from her yet again. But no, that was not happening, not today. And especially not after she'd just about emptied her soul to him about what had gone on in her life. No, she was going to get answers from Blaez Trekas right here and right now, if it was the last thing she did.

Chapter 9

“Tell me why you're doing this,” Kira said coming up behind Blaez, cornering him at the far end of the library.

He'd been thinking about her as he'd slipped the book into the empty space on the shelf where it had been. He'd known she'd read it even before she told him because Channing had come to Blaez's room, tossing it onto his desk before saying, “You should tell her why you're being such a dick. She's a lot stronger than you think and she deserves better from you.”

Blaez had looked at the man he'd known for years, the lycan who had been raised by humans and had no clue of what he was until his fifteenth birthday, when his first shift had almost inadvertently exposed their breed to the human world. Blaez had found him when he'd shown up at Channing's high school recruiting for the Marines. From that moment on they'd been together, like brothers, which was why Blaez hadn't broken Channing's nose for speaking to him that way.

“It's none of her business,” he'd told Channing. “It's none of anyone's business.”

Channing was already at the door when he turned back to Blaez. “So you've always said. But she's different, Blaez. All of us sensed that the moment you brought her in here. And it seems to me that whichever greater entity selected to send the two of you into the woods at the same time may have done so for a good reason.”

Blaez had frowned at the door long after Channing had closed it, rubbing his hands over the book and contemplating the beta's words. Kira was different, but in ways that nobody besides him really knew. He'd already been pissed off about seeing that mark on her, about wondering each day if she had been Selected for him or someone else. Because Blaez had wanted her. He'd wanted more than just touching and tasting her, oh, so much more. But if that mark meant what he knew it did, she wasn't his for the taking.

He'd returned the book to the library, dropping it onto the table instead of returning it to the shelf because he'd wanted to return to his room, to stay locked behind that door in the hopes of keeping his hands and mind off her again. But then she'd screamed and he'd gone to her and he'd stayed. He'd held her, watched her sleep, felt everything from the curve of her chin to the bright pink polished toenails creep inside of him, winding herself so securely around his heart he'd thought he would never take another breath again. But he did breathe; he'd watched her enter that shower, seen her in all her naked glory, touched her, felt her touching him, until none of that was enough any longer.

“I'm not leaving just because you're choosing to be quiet. I'm going to stand right here until you tell me the real reason why you're keeping me here. Why you want me desperately one moment and then do everything in your power to pull away from me in the next. Dammit, Blaez, I want to know why when I should be breaking these windows in an attempt to get the hell out of here, I'm not, because the thought of walking away from you, what I see when I think—” She sighed, but she didn't back down.