COWBOY ROMANCE: Justin (Western Contemporary Alpha Male Bride Romance) (The Steele Brothers Book 1) (104 page)

Chapter Four

“Evelyn?”

Paran’s voice cut like a knife.

She was almost afraid to look at him. “You have to understand.” But she was ashamed of herself.

He stepped in front of her and toward his son. He knelt down in front of him, his knees pressing int0 the dew-covered grass. The boy looked into his eyes with that same expression of bewilderment. This was the moment Evelyn had dreaded her entire life.

Pelyn pressed his hand to Paran’s face. His mouth twisted into a frown.

“I have a son?”

“Pelyn, go back inside.” Evelyn couldn’t stop herself from trying to undo all of this, but her evasion of his question was enough.

The boy didn’t move.

“You kept my son from me?” Paran stood, his body tense and trembling.

“I didn’t have a choice.” Evelyn fought a lost cause.

“Why?” His bark hung in the air, demanding an answer.

“I didn’t want him to know you.”

“That was not a choice for you to make.”

Evelyn prided herself on her precise control of everything and everyone around her. It was her coping mechanism, a delicate balance that kept her afloat. Now that very thing slipped from her fingertips. “Yes, it was!” She stood her ground, determined to lie to herself for just a little bit longer. “He was inside me! We had one night, and suddenly you think you own me? He’s made of my tissue, my blood, me. He’s mine to protect.” Her face flushed red.

“How could you do this?” His voice rose three octaves, his arms jutting out to either side of him.

Evelyn could see Pelyn moving out of the corner of her eye. Her arm flung out toward him, but he swerved from her grip.

“I never wanted him to know you.”

Pelyn stared  at him as if to ask if he were his father, that mystery character, the ghost he chased.

“Step away from him!” Evelyn yelled, but the words went right over his head. He wasn’t listening to her. Neither of them were.

Paran took the boy’s head in both of his hands, an expression of wonder in his watery eyes. “How could you keep this from me?”

“He’s human, Paran. You have no place in his life.” Evelyn yanked Pelyn out of his grip.

Pelyn let out a yelp of surprise and tugged against her, attempting to pry her grip off him, finger by finger.

“You stole him from me!” Paran roared.

“Pelyn, we have to go back inside.” Evelyn gasped through her tears. But even then, she was pulling a boulder up her mountain.

“No!” He slammed at her arms with his fists.

“Evelyn, stop it!” Paran grabbed her elbow.

She let Pelyn go just long enough to land a punch to Paran’s jaw. She sucked in a heavy breath, staggering backward as a sharp pain shot up her fist. “Shit!” she hissed. Her wet sobs hung in the air. She could hardly see what was right in front of her.

The terrain was blurry. The sun rose crimson out of her right eye, turning the sky blood red. A bird rushed across the horizon, its cry cutting the heavy air.

A bout of exhaustion overcame her, ten years of denying herself catching up with her. Son had met father, boy had met destiny, and there was nothing she could do about it. And yet she would not stop fighting, for it was her essential nature. “Get out! Get out!”

Paran swiped the blood away and grabbed Evelyn in the same movement. “Evelyn, calm yourself.”

“No!” She hardly realized that she was yanking Pelyn back and forth. He cried out to her, out to the both of them.

“Mom, let me go!”

“He’s my son! Human!
My son
!”

“You can’t keep him from himself!” Paran’s voice had a sickened husk about it.

“Stop it! Mom, you’re hurting me!” Pelyn’s screech tugged at her nerves.

Paran went for both of them, but he only had two hands and not nearly enough force.

She didn’t know how to stop, how to undo what she had already done.

“Mom!” Pelyn’s voice gained a strange base.

She felt something seize her mind from the inside out, reach inside her and touch her. She froze, as time seemed to have stopped, and with it, the world around her. She caught Paran’s eyes first, but they reflected exactly what she felt.

This wasn’t his doing.

He stepped away from her with the kind of slow movement that suggested he was wading through water. She followed his gaze to Pelyn, who had stepped several paces back. He stood with his hands outstretched in front of him, his fingers webbed out as far as they would go, his eyes bloodshot, a thin stream of blood seeping from his nose.

Pelyn, stop it. It was a weak thought at first, but then it grew until she was zipping across the lawn toward him. “Pelyn!” The scream ripped her throat apart. “You’re hurting yourself! You have to stop!”

Paran followed her. “Son.” He knelt down across from him.

But Pelyn’s irises were no longer visible. His tense body melted before their eyes.

He collapsed onto the wet ground, he sweat-covered body convulsing.

Chapter Five

Evelyn resurfaced with a deep breath, as if she had been held under water for far too long. “This is my fault,” she whispered. “He wanted me to stop. He just wanted to talk to you.”

Pelyn had unwillingly released the both of them from his hold. Awe and wonder seized her mind at the fact that her son had just displayed the most power she had ever seen in another young being, but she had to ignore that. The sight of her little baby shaking uncontrollably, foaming at the mouth, made her stomach lurch, made bile collect in the back of her throat. “Pelyn!” She knelt next to him, part of her wanting to embrace him, part of her afraid to touch him.

“We have to rush him to the colony.”

“What colony?” She slipped her cell phone out of the pocket of her robe, those three numbers already dialed.

The look on his face was enough to draw a resounding “hell no!” from the pit of her stomach.

Pelyn had gone silent and still in front of the two of them. “I’m taking him to a hospital.”

“No. They won’t know what to do with him.”

Evelyn ducked her head, narrowing her eyes at him. “He had seizure.”

“It’s not that simple. If you take him to a doctor, they might make him worse.”

Evelyn gazed down at her lifeless son. She had already made enough mistakes and was not interested in making yet another one simply because of her pride. She had isolated him from his kind for his entire life, and now she could no longer deny that they were his best chance at survival.

Paran hoisted Pelyn up into his arms and followed her back into the house. Evelyn took time only to slip a pair of jeans on and grab her purse before she climbed into the backseat of Paran’s truck with Pelyn in her arms. She stared at her son while Paran rushed them through the streets that formed the outskirts of Boston, weaving in and out of other cars, people who looked suspended in time.

Soon enough, they reached a field off road. In the center sat what looked like a heavily streamlined, tiny, private jet. “What—”

But Paran had already rounded the front of the truck and was lifting Pelyn out of her arms. They loaded into the aircraft and buckled in. Evelyn stared nervously at Pelyn before gazing at Paran. She watched with curious eyes as he started the aircraft up, the roar of the engine filling the entire cabin.

His eyes flitted across the control panel, his fingers flipping this switch this way and pressing that button down. Soon enough, they were racing across the field, leaving deep tracks in the mud. Evelyn held herself as he grabbed the joystick. His jaw clenched with the strain as he lifted the aircraft off the ground.

The events of that morning ran through her head over and over and over again as she tried to pinpoint where exactly she had gone wrong. As she searched for the moment that, if she had a time machine, she would go back to and undo, she pressed her right temple into the seat strap, filing her nails down lower and lower.

It was as she hung in this limbo that she felt something snatch her hand. She turned to find Paran holding her, his eyes as deeply worried as hers, the same expression of horror on his face.

She realized just then that he was the only person on the planet that could understand what she was feeling, the only being with a pulse that she could share her mind with. As she held his hand and raced on the road to saving her son, she felt a part of something for the first time. Suddenly, she didn’t want Pelyn all to herself anymore.

Thirty minutes later, Paran dropped out of the cloud bank to reveal a terrain covered in snow and cut with stony mountaintops. “Where the hell are we?” she whispered.

“I think it’s what you call Ellesmere?”

Evelyn furrowed her brow, trying to remember where she had heard that name before… “Canada? How did we get to Canada in less than an hour on a jet?”

He grunted, preparing the craft for landing.

Evelyn watched as what looked like a tightly paved runway quickly approached.

“This isn’t a jet.”

Evelyn grabbed both sides of her seat as he landed the craft, the wheels popping out just in time to stop the vehicle from scraping the ground. Her entire body shot forward as they raced across the runway, Paran’s brow furrowed and his jaw set as he labored to land the craft correctly.

Evelyn gazed out of her window at the settlement around them. The buildings looked familiar and yet different, as if they had their own flare to them, something alien, something advanced. As Paran slowed the craft to a stop, a team of men, tall and muscular, ran toward them from out of what looked like a massive garage.

Paran didn’t waste a second. He climbed out of his seat and went for Pelyn, picking him up and slamming his fist against a button. As he did this, an automatic door opened, letting cold air rush in.

By the time Evelyn could follow him, he had stepped down onto the runway. Paran spoke quickly to the men that met him. One of them nodded and ran back toward the building while the other turned his attention to Pelyn, examining him with a furrowed brow. More men exited through the hanger and came running toward them. Among them was a tall Kaharan with dark hair and black eyes. He yelled orders at all the others and went straight for the boy, picking him up and running back through the garage.

Evelyn instinctively followed. “Where are they taking him?”

But Paran grabbed her by the arm, stopping her in her tracks. “That was Kal, one of the best Kaharan doctors that ever lived. Your son is in good hands now.”

Chapter six

Evelyn paced back and forth in the short hallway that separated her son’s hospital bed from the rest of the hospital. They had rushed him in right after Kal had introduced himself before hastily explaining away Pelyn’s condition. He said something about how her son had exhausted himself by expelling all of his energy by using his powers. Evelyn took that to mean that it had been her fault. If she hadn’t had been so adamant about pushing Paran away…

Now Pelyn was lying there on what could very well be his deathbed. All they could do was wait.

“Evelyn?”

She raised her head just in time to watch Paran approach her from the main hallway, a look of soft determination in his eyes.

Just seeing him made her want to break down. He was the bucket for her tears. “I haven’t heard anything. I don’t know what to do.” Before she knew it, she was falling into his embrace.

He encased her in his strong arms, resting his chin on her forehead. “There’s nothing you can do.”

She had cheated herself out of moments like this, when the only person fighting for her was herself. All of that time, she could have been bending into him, trusting him. “I—” If she hadn’t been so broken, so worried, so ashamed of herself, she never would have admitted it. But now, with her staring right into the face of the truth, and her son nearly dying because of her, she saw no reason to deny it any further. “I made the wrong decision. I failed him as a mother.”

Paran took her face in both of his hands, forcing her to face him. “You failed yourself.”

Evelyn scoffed. “Why? Because you’re such a catch?”

He took her hand, lifting it to his lips and planting a kiss on it.

Evelyn felt her body respond in that familiar way, her heart pounding against her chest and in her ears, her hot, thin blood zipping through her veins, the chill running up her spine. It was like that first sip of coffee in the morning, that first gulp of strong vodka, that first hit of marijuana. It was essential and yet luxurious. It was a wonder she had let herself go without it for so long.

“Because no one should have to tear themselves away from their true mate and raise his child, a creature stronger than she could have ever imagined, all on her own.”

Their lips were dangling toward each other, hardly separated at all, one’s hot breath coating the other’s face. “You’re the only one who could have changed my mind, the only one who could have saved the both of us from myself.”

“And yet you made yourself unavailable to me.” His jaw trembled as he grabbed her cheek. “You kept my boy from me? Ten years I lost. Why would you do that?”

“I couldn’t let you teach me dependence and then leave me all by myself.”

“I wouldn’t have. I’m certain that in ten years of living with you, of existing with you, I could not have found one reason to desert you.”

Evelyn had to talk around the lump in her throat, the declaration of love she was certain she could never deserve. “Ten years is a long time.”

Paran pulled just far enough back to get a good look at her eyes. “And yet, when I look at you, I still see the woman in the bar with the bourbon and the smirk.”

Evelyn shook her head, smiling in spite of herself. “I actually couldn’t stand that drink.”

Paran chuckled. “You can’t be serious.”

“I just thought it would ward off the opposite sex.”

“So what were you doing there?”

Evelyn raised an eyebrow. “A girl can’t just hang in a bar?’

Paran let out a quiet laugh.

Evelyn wondered what it would be like to hear that laugh over the morning headlines at breakfast, or while sharing a TV show with him on a Monday night. “No. I was working on a project for my philosophy class. Had to survey the crowd, so to speak.”

He nodded, a pensive look in his eye.

“And what were you doing?” Evelyn nudged him.

He wrapped his arms around her again, speaking with his nose in her hair. “I work as a cultural scientist here. My job is to relay human customs to the Kaharans so that we’ve got a better chance of fitting in.”

Evelyn planted a kiss on his neck, the act surprising even herself. “I can’t believe two beings with the same gift in the same place one night doing the same thing happened to meet and make a child.”

He lifted her chin, unleashing the full force of his eyes.

For the first time since they had landed at the Kaharan settlement, Evelyn felt calm. By letting go of her puppet strings, she felt more naturally in control than she ever had.

“Have you ever heard of anything more beautiful in your life?” Paran asked, lowering himself toward her.

“More beautiful than us?”

He answered her question with a kiss. Their lips assumed a familiar dance, his mouth consuming hers, hers embracing his. His tongue jutted into her mouth, the thick muscle commanding the entire environment, daring her to challenge him. She wouldn’t dare.

They stood like this for longer than time itself, until they were interrupted by the sound of a door being opened.

“Paran?” An exhausted Kal poked his head out of the doorway. “Evelyn?”

Evelyn stepped away from Paran, her eyes wide with anticipation. “Yes?”

“Pelyn just woke up. I think he’s going to be okay.”

Evelyn’s knees went weak.

But before she could collapse…

Paran caught her.

THE END