ROMANCE: Mason (Bad Boy Alpha Male Stepbrother Romance Boxset) (New Adult Contemporary Stepbrother Romance Collection) (212 page)

“I know it’s hard for you here,” Warren said like he’d read my mind. “Things are completely different than in the city. But we’re all so happy to have you. Mom loves you, and when we have the family gathering on Sunday you’ll meet my brothers and my sister, and you’ll realize how much you can really fit in.”

“You’re having a family thing?” I asked. This was news to me.

“We are. There will only be a handful of guests this time, so the family is coming through.”

Great. More cowboys. Just what I needed.

“How does it work with the rest of your family?” I asked to try distract myself from the bitterness that sat like a bad aftertaste in my mouth.

The breeze picked up and rustled through the grass. On it, it carried the scent of the ranch, of grass and trees and animals and wilderness. A soft bleating bled through the sounds of nature. I guessed the sheep were nearby.

When I looked at Warren his head was cocked to the side and he was listening. I’d forgotten his hearing was so much better than mine. Sometimes it was difficult to remember he was a werewolf, because I only ever saw the human side of him.

“Something’s wrong,” he said, and then he started to pack up the food. I stuffed the half-eaten veggie roll in my mouth. I guessed the picnic was over. I shook out the blanket and folded it up. Warren was already on his horse, and with a lot of difficulty I managed to pull myself up onto mine. Warren clicked his tongue and Blaze moved forward at a slow trot. Honeycomb followed suit and it felt like all my organs were being shaken loose.

“Not so fast,” I called to Warren, but he ignored me. The wind shifted, and suddenly it was much louder, the bleating a sound of distress. Warren had heard it before I had, and kicked his heels into the sides of his horse. Blaze leapt forward in a flat gallop, and of course mine followed too. I dropped the reigns and grabbed onto the horn in front me. I heard the snap as the reigns broke under the horses hooves, but I was just trying to save myself now. The harder I gripped around the horse with my legs, the more it felt like I was going to slip off.

“Warren, stop!” I called out, but he kept racing.

We reached the sheep’s pasture. The animals milled about, eyeballs rolling in their sockets, blathering for help. Warren wasted no time. He was off his horse in a second, running toward the flock. Blaze spun in a circle but stayed put. Honeycomb skidded to halt next to him, and held her head up high, looking toward the sheep.

I saw what Warren had seen long before me. There were three animals between the sheep. They were smaller than wolves, and duller. I guessed these were coyotes, even though I’d never seen then before. They attacked a sheep together, and the poor thing had no chance. It went down wailing. Warren was headed right for them. He didn’t have any sort of weapon on him, but he looked determined. I held my breath. If these animals turned on him…

But as I watched, he started changing. Dark fur crept over his skin, covering every inch of him, and his face elongated until it was a muzzle. The change was so bizarre I blinked hard to make sure what I was seeing was real. Somewhere  he bent forward and hit the ground with his arms, but they were legs now, too, ending in big paws.

Warren had just changed into a werewolf. He was bigger than most wolves, even a city girl like me could see that, and he was thickset and muscular the way a wolf never was. When he thundered down on the sheep, two of the coyotes cut their losses and ran, but one turned around and faced Warren, lips drawn back and teeth bared in a wicked snarl. It had blood around its muzzle, nose red and paws stained.

Warren growled and attacked without a moment’s hesitation, and they fight looked like an unbalanced dog fight for a moment, with the small coyote throwing itself at Warren’s front legs, and Warren launching for its throat. A moment later it was all over. The coyote lay lifeless on the ground, and Warren was heaving and trembling. Blood was around his own muzzle now, and he shook himself like a dog. His clothes lay in torn bits scattered along the path he’d run to the sheep.

He looked at me, and his eyes were voids of pure black. My blood curdled in my veins and terror wrapped around my throat with long icy fingers. The sheep felt the same, they huddled at the far end of the field, pushing up against the fence, getting as far away from Warren as they could. I would take the coyote of that thing any day, too.

The big black wolf that was Warren started toward me, but I shook my head, sliding off my horse and backing up. Warren stopped and dropped his head low, and then the shift started again. When he was a man again, he was naked. The clothes he’d worn were only shreds now, but he found something he could wrap around his body.

“Edit,” he called out, moving slowly towards me, his free hand outstretched.

“Get away from me!” I shouted. This was not what I had signed up for. The ranch was bad enough. Margot was nosy and annoying and the dirt and mess everywhere was horrible. But that… that thing he’d just become… I couldn’t do it.

“Baby, please don’t—“ he started but I cut him off.

“Don’t come any closer. Just stay away from me!” My voice had started trembling and my eyes kept flicking back to the dead coyote and all the blood, even when I didn’t want to look. Warren had done that. He’d killed without even thinking twice.

“Sweetheart…” he said but he knew it wasn’t going to go anywhere. I turned and ran. He could probably catch up with me, either as a wolf – I shuddered – or on his horse. But I didn’t care. My legs were doing their own thing, my heart thundering against my ribs. My throat was raw with every intake of breath, like I’d been screaming for a long time, and my chest burned.

I couldn’t do this anymore. I had to get out of here.

Chapter 4

“Darling, what’s wrong?” asked me when I tore into the house like the devil was on my heels. For all intents and purposes he was.

“I can’t stay here a minute longer,” I said, running down the passage. In the bedroom I yanked my suitcase from underneath the bed where Warren had stashed it after I’d unpacked, and I started ripping my clothes out of the closet in armfuls, folding to hell. I shoved my clothes into the bag until it was a big messy ball of creases. It looked how I felt.

“Didn’t you know?” Margot asked behind me, staying in the door for a change. I wondered vaguely why she was respecting my privacy now when she couldn’t have been bothered since I’d arrived. “He said he told you.”

“He didn’t tell me that he was a cold-blooded killer. He didn’t tell me that he left me once a month, not so that he could hide his hideous face from me, but so that I wouldn’t see his true colors.”

My hands were shaking so bad I couldn’t grab hold of the zipper properly. Margot suddenly appeared next to me and I spun round, backing up instinctively, but she just helped me zip up my bag. It took a bit of elbowing to get the tangle of clothes compacted enough to close the top, but Margot had ranch-arms. She wrestled with my clothes while I wrestled with my emotions.

“Don’t you want to tell me what happened?” Margot said in a gentle voice. I shook my head.

“I don’t want anything to do with it. I can’t…” my voice caught in my throat and a sob shook my body. I realized my cheeks were already wet, and I squeezed my eyes shut. I couldn’t run away from this world right away, but I could shut it out.

“It’s alright,” Margot said.

“Edith?” Warren’s voice sliced through the room like a knife, and I froze. When I opened my eyes Warren stood in the door. He wore a woman’s coat I guessed he’d grabbed from the hooks by the door, and wrapped it around his body like a robe. His muscular legs stuck out from underneath it like power pistons, much too manly for the fur-lined fuchsia. His feet looked like normal human feet. I’d half-expected him to look different.

But now, the only animalistic thing about him was his crazed eyes.

“You’re leaving,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He’d taken one look at the suitcase on the bed, and put two and two together. Clever man.

“I’ll leave you two alone to talk,” Margot said. I started protesting but she was out of the room before I could ask her to stay.

“I didn’t hide anything from you,” Warren said. “You knew exactly what this was all about.”

“I didn’t sign up for this.” I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t. His eyes were so dark, and when he sat down on the bed I was scared I would want to wrap my arms around him. I couldn’t do that. Not with what he was.

“Sign up for what? A lifetime of love? Because that’s all I’ve given you. I told you what I was, you knew. Why did you think I kept disappearing? Other men have affairs, dammit, and I go to save you. And you want to tell me that you can’t do this anymore? What do you—“

“I didn’t sign up for life with a killer,” I said. My voice was cold, emotionless.

“A killer? Baby it’s an animal. Those coyotes kill off our sheep. Two years ago we nearly went bankrupt because of the amount of sheep we lost. In human form I would have taken out a gun and shot them.”

“Then why didn’t you?” I challenged.

“Because I didn’t have a gun on me. And someone had to do something. It was…”

“Say it, Warren. Because it was easier. It’s not about the fact that the coyote died. It’s about the fact that you could do something like that with your bare hands. Or paws. Whatever.” I took a deep breath and held it for three counts. Maybe if I filled myself with air I could pretend that my whole body didn’t feel like it was made of lead.

“Okay, so I did something out of habit. Okay so I don’t like carrying a gun. I’m not a bad guy for saving my flock, Edith. This is our livelihood. This is the only way we make a living.”

“What will you do if one of your guests do something you don’t like? Rip their throat out?”

Warren’s expression turned to stone and I knew I’d pushed it too far. I was being unreasonable and I knew it. But I couldn’t stop myself before the words fell out. Because the truth was he’d scared me half to death. Because it had all seemed so primal. Because after everything, I’d thought I’d known him, and I’d seen a side of him that I didn’t understand.

But most of all – the part that I would never dare verbalize – was that it had all seemed so normal. The horses hadn’t been scared. Margot thought it was normal. Warren couldn’t understand why I was so upset.

I couldn’t understand how my life had crossed the border between my biggest problem being the price increase and Bloomingdale to my husband turning into a monster to save the ranch.

“You know,” I whispered, not looking at him. “You were my hero. You’d come to my stagnant life and saved me. You were my knight in shining armor when I was a damsel in distress. I didn’t meet a hero to end up married to a villain.”

I took my bag and dragged it off the bed. It jerked my body down before I managed to take it’s full weight, and I lugged it down the passage, leaving my husband behind in his ladies coat, rolling my words over and trying them on for size.

Margot was at the front door when I got there.

“You can’t stop me from leaving,” I said, ready for another fight. I wasn’t about to let anyone tell me what I had to do. But she held up car keys and jingled them. Her face was serious.

“Let me drive you, dearie. The trip to the airport can get so painfully long when you get on the bus.”

I opened my mouth and mouth inaudible words before I closed it again. Margot took my bag from me and hauled it into the trunk.

“Won’t Warren be angry?” I asked.

“My days as a mother are over, dear,” she said. “I don’t tell the kids what to do, and they don’t tell me either. I’m just here as a friend now, and I get to choose what I think is right. Besides, you need a ride don’t you?”

She got into the driver’s seat. I pushed down the lump that had risen in my throat when she’d said it, and walked around to the passenger side. When I slid in and slammed the door Margot pulled out. I turned and looked through the back window watching Warren shrink on the porch in the cloud of dust the car left behind.

We drove to the airport in silence. Margot switched on the radio and settled on a country station where every song sounded just like the one before it, and all of them were about the woman leaving the man, not the other way around.

What if I wasn’t the one that was leaving him? What if I was the one that was left behind in a world where I just couldn’t keep up?

“My phone rang. Warren’s photo flashed up on the caller ID, the smile that I’d fallen for, the messy hair that always looked right, even when he just woke up. I silenced it and turned it over so I wouldn’t have to look at his face.

The engagement ring he’d given me had been a ring that was incomplete. The band didn’t go all the way around my finger. Instead there was a gap in the white gold on the one side of the princess cut diamond.

The wedding band had completed it. The wedding band filled the gap, and circled the diamond so the ring was a fusion of white and yellow gold. Warren designed it himself. It was supposed to represent me and him. Our unity. And our worlds that were intertwined now. One.

I slid off the ring and put it in my jacket pocket, zipping it shut. My finger felt naked without it, and a thin white line was the only evidence that there had ever been anything on that finger. Was it really that easy? Was that all a marriage left behind? A tiny line that showed an irregularity, and that would fade in time?