ROMANCE: Mason (Bad Boy Alpha Male Stepbrother Romance Boxset) (New Adult Contemporary Stepbrother Romance Collection) (12 page)

Sabrina suddenly appeared next to me like she’d materialized out of thin air. I jumped and took a step away from her.

“No no, don’t worry. Just a human tonight,” she said with a low voice that reminded me of the adverts for adult entertainment. “I noticed you standing alone, and I thought now woman should be alone without some kind of company.”

Right, because Sabrina had been so nice to me the last time we spoke? I hadn’t seen her since that night. I had the feeling she’d been sulking.

“So, what are you doing out here? Not with Mac tonight?”

I hesitated before I shook my head.

“Yeah, he can be a bit much sometimes. Trust a woman who knows. You think it’s easy putting up with him now, try long run.”

“I remember you mentioned something about being with him,” I said carefully. She hadn’t said anything, only implied, and the few sentences he’d spoken about her had been very vague as well.

“Dated? We were on our way to being mated, honey. White picket fence, dog, kids, the whole spiel.” She chuckled. “Well maybe not a dog. Our kind don’t really do well with those, you know?”

“Kids?” I asked. It seemed strange to hear someone talk about something like  family with Mac who seemed to untethered and carefree.

“Oh, yeah. That’s why werewolves mate at all. We have to keep our kind going. We don’t just appear out of thin air, you know,”

“Don’t werewolves get turned?” I asked.

“Oh sure, that happens from time to time. But we are a species all our own, really. It’s better to breed, makes for a purer breed. Makes us stronger. If I hadn’t lost my young who knows what kind of power I’d have now.”

It felt like the wind picked up even more, cutting through the thick fabric of my jacket and sending goose bumps across my body.

“You lost young?”

She nodded and shrugged like something like that wasn’t a big deal.

Mac and I were pregnant. Werewolves don’t really reproduce easily, it’s a miracle I was pregnant so young as it was. We stand a chance of losing the baby and we also stand a chance of dying at birth. Trust me, after a pregnancy as long as sixteen months that’s a hell of an anti-climax.”

She chattered on like we were discussing the weather, but one sentence just kept echoing around in my head. She’d been pregnant with  Mac’s child. It hadn’t just been a fling or a childhood romance or something silly. It had been real.

And he hadn’t told me about it.

I felt like somehow she had a claim on him. I felt like somehow I didn’t stand a chance anymore. I felt like he lied to me. I felt a huge amount of emotions dumped on me, and none of them allowed me to keep my composure.

“I have to go,” I said, my voice thick in my throat. Sabrina pretended to be surprised but I knew she wasn’t. The fact was she’d come here to let me know exactly how things stood with her and Mac. And I understood her perfectly.

Chapter 5

Being back in New York after two weeks in the wilderness felt like a time warp. I went back to the office the next day, and sent out an e-mail to let clients know I was up and running again. The quicker I could get back into my normal routine and forget about werewolves and lost loves in Alaska, the better it would be.

It could be like none of it had ever happened.

I hadn’t spoken to Mac again before I’d left. I’d left the day before my flight and stayed over in a hotel in Ketchikan. I didn’t want to run the risk of seeing him again. I wouldn’t have known what to say.

Lidia was at her desk when I walked in through the doors, looking bright eyed and healthy. A break had done her good. I wondered with a  pang of guilt why I hadn’t given her a break like that before.

“Mrs. Spencer wants to set up a meeting, and you have three client requests on your e-mail. I printed them and put them on your desk to review.” She handed me a steaming cup of coffee.

“Thank you, Lidia,” I said and walked past her into my own office, but I paused at the door.

“Have I ever told you that you’re really good at your job?” I asked her. She blinked at me surprised and shook her head slightly.

“Well, you are. And I’m lucky to have you. Thank you.”

She looked like she was going to fall over. Maybe I’d been too focused on myself for too long. Maybe I’d missed all the important things in life along the way to getting myself happy and established.

And at the end of it I’d failed, because I’d never really been happy at all.

I thought of Mac. His muscles body, the stubble on his chin because he only shaved once a week. His black eyes that drew me in.

I squeezed my eyes shut and forced the memories of him out of my mind. Someone else’s beau, I told myself. The father of someone else’s children.

I saw three clients that day, and scheduled them all for the next month. It was a lot of work. I was burying myself and I knew it. But I was doing it on purpose. I wanted to stop myself from thinking. Stop myself from feeling. Stop myself from anything and everything that was remotely human.

The thought of it was ironic. I wanted to stop feeling human because the man I’d fallen had broken my heart because he wasn’t human in the first place. I was an idiot.

The rest of week was dull and colorless. I took care of paper work, a lot of things I needed to catch up. The gray shades of the city and the harsh unnatural colors of the advertisements that surrounded Time Square like a barrier that kept all feeling out.

By Friday night my phone rang. One of my friends that had been too busy to see me for months wanted to go out. I could get dressed up, do my hair and make-up, put on my high heels and paint the town red like nothing was wrong.

But I didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see her. It just felt like everything in my world now seemed fake and unrealistic. And a waste of time and money.

What was I doing all of this for? It wasn’t the first time this week I’d been wondering.

I locked my door and curled up in front of the television. I flipped through a hundred channels before I realized there wasn’t anything on that would hold my attention, and I switched it off again. I stared at the black screen, tracing the outline of myself, wondering how my outside was suddenly unrecognizable just because my insides didn’t feel the same.

A knock sounded on the door. I walked to it and looked through the peephole, but there was no one on the other side.

I unlocked it, expecting a package. The doorman did it sometime when he missed us coming through to pass it on. When I pulled the door Mac stood on the other side, larger than life.

His presence was like a wind that nearly pushed me over.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, forcing myself to be stony and cold. My voice sounded adequately defensive. He looked around  himself like he wasn’t sure he was a the right place, like he felt completely uncomfortable in the narrow passage that ran past all the doors on the floor.

“Mac?” I asked because he didn’t answer me.

“This is quite a bit different than Metlakatla,” he said. Great first opening line.

“It is,” I said. “What do you want?”

He took a deep breath and blew it out in a shudder, the first signs, and the only I’d ever seen, that he wasn’t perfectly composed and confident all the time.

“I want you back,” he said. “I miss you.”

It was quite a speech for a man of his stature. But he looked like he was struggling to keep the pieces together. I felt sorry for him, and stepped away, opening the door wider.

“Come on,” I said. He nodded curtly and stepped into the apartment. He looked around like he was in a museum, and it looked like he was shrinking in on himself, trying to touch as little as possible.

“I spoke to Sabrina before I left,” I said. She’d spoken to me, but that was hardly the point. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it was a mistake. She wasn’t right for me, and I didn’t want to be forced into a marriage with a woman that loved herself more than she could love someone else.”

“But a child? And the amount of time… it sounds really difficult to have children for werewolves.”

“It is difficult. But at the end of the day it was just like any other miscarriage. And I hate myself for it every day, but I was relieved when she lost the baby. Not because I resented the child – I love children and I’d like to have some someday. With the right person – but because it was a narrow escape from a life with a woman that would have locked me up emotionally. She’s a prison Nadine. I didn’t want that.”

“You could have told me,” I countered.

“Do you tell someone your life story two weeks into a relationship?”

“Is that what it was?”

“Isn’t it?”

I took a deep breath. He was confusing me. His presence made me feel unstable. I wanted to wrap my arms around his waist and bury my face in his chest. I wanted to feel his arms around me like a barrier that would ward off all the pain and all the hurt and all the evil. But he hadn’t wanted to commit.

“Are you here to ask me to come to Metlakatla with you?” I asked. Because I would say yes. But I couldn’t let him get off that easily.

He nodded.

“And what if you get tired of me? What if I’m just another kind of prison to you? I can’t just let it go and then run back when it doesn’t feel right anymore.”

He looked like he suddenly gained all the confidence I knew him to have. Like it had been slower than he had and it finally caught up with him. He pulled into me, pressing his lips down on mine and kissing me like he’d never kissed me before.

“This is crazy. I don’t know you,” he said after he pulled away. “I mean, look at this place… it feels like all this suits you so much better than what I can offer. But I want to offer it. I want you to come and try doing things forever with me. I mean, I’m an animal. Literally. And you’ll get mad at me because I’m a pain in the ass. Ask your parents.”

I pulled a face at the mention of my parents.

“Or don’t,” he said quickly. “Please say yes?”

“You’re asking me to give everything up and jump with my eyes closed.”

“I promise I’ll catch you,” he said, and I believed him. I nodded and he kissed me again, this time lingering, like he was thanking me this time, instead of pleading. My business would stay behind. My life here would go.

I knew exactly who I could leave it to. Lidia has been faithful and loyal for four years. She deserved a promotion.

“This place is terrible. It bombards your senses. Well, mine at least. I don’t know how you can live here.” He shivered visibly and looked around the apartment. “It’s really classy, though. It suits you.”

“It suits the person I’ve forced myself to become,” I said. “Deep down inside you know I’m small town. I think I’ve finally figured it out too.”

It was weird how I suddenly felt like I never belonged here in the first place.

“It gets tiring,” I finally admitted. “It’s always a rat race.”

“And you’re not even a rat,” he said and grinned at his stupid joke.

“Right. I’m not a wolf either though. Don’t you think we don’t really fit?”

I took my hand and held it against his chest. I could feel the thump of his heart.

“Do you feel that?” he asked. I nodded.

“Then we fit.”

He wrapped his arms around me, the warmth and security I’d missed so much suddenly flowed over me. I smiled and breathed in the scent of him, rough and manly, like forest and musk.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“I followed my heart.” I linked his fingers into mine. “And I asked your mom for your address.”

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BONUS

TRAPPED

BLOOD

MATES

By Sicily Duval1

To divorce a vampire; the concept, while seemingly utterly outrageous, was one that was becoming more and more appealing. Vampire, it was a term used loosely in the modern age and one that if I had been given the choice, would not have chosen for myself. Vampire, I let the word roll silently off my tongue, it was a silky smooth word that was most unfitting with what we truly were. But what truly were we? As the world populated, visually an impressive feat with numbers that boggled the mind, our kind was slowly creeping into the shadows, becoming a dying breed.

I looked to my vampire now, my, it was a word I would not be able to use much longer. My vampire, the thought still caused a small smile to crease my lips, my vampire. He was the same as he had always been; his shaggy brown hair seemed unruly but only I knew that it had been that way for hundreds of years. It held a multitude of colours if only you looked closely enough. I hadn’t done it in a while, looked at the subtle browns, the sparking gold and the darkening black streaks that made up the mane that framed his strong jaw. I had always liked his hair I mused.

Letting my eyes wander further my lips twisted as I took in his solid jaw line and remembered the distinctive taste of his startlingly pale yet soft and unblemished skin. His lips, the willing reciprocate of so many stolen kisses were pursed as he stared intently forward. He didn’t divert his eyes; the concentration of a vampire was of course renowned for its diligence. His eyes, while a sparkling emerald green to most were filled with darkness to me. Anybody could see it if only they wanted to; see the thin mask of black that coated the shocking green if only they would look at who he really was beneath the mask.

“Stop staring at me, Flo” Charlie snapped as his bow crinkled and he refused to turn and look at me. I bit back the harsh remark that bubbled so readily on my lips, it was odd how quickly an angry retort came to me these days. He knew I hated it when he called me ‘Flo’, but that’s who we were now ‘Flo and Charlie’, gone were the days when we were ‘Florence and Charles’.

My fixation with his frozen features was gone now as anger thundered through my body, how was it that he could make me so angry with just a few words? Instead I noticed his tight black jeans, the denim now rough with the days travel. His shirt was crinkled slightly; it was a modern shirt, smooth to the touch and unbefitting of Charlie’s ancient mind. My own clothes, a deep red summer dress, hugged my curves tightly; it was one of my favourites yet sadly not reminiscent of better times.

On the outside we were the prefect image of a young married couple, barely breaking our early twenties in appearance. My hair, full of luscious brown curls that never faltered, even in the wildest of winds, fell gently over my slender shoulders and my complexion, while strangely pale was that of youth. To those that turned to use on the street we looked sweet, madly in love and relishing the years of youth, only to us was it clear that our undeniable lust was not for each other anymore but instead a heated and ancient need for the blood that passed through their veins. While some lust seemed destined to fade, that one natural urge, the urge for blood, was ever present.