ROMANCE: Mason (Bad Boy Alpha Male Stepbrother Romance Boxset) (New Adult Contemporary Stepbrother Romance Collection) (233 page)

Jenna thought of the moon and turned her head to Bruce.

“Does the moon get to you?” she asked.

Bruce shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“I’ve heard stories. Does it affect you when it’s fuller.”

He nodded. He didn’t want to talk about it, so she stopped asking. He wasn’t going to give her more than one word answers. She sighed and let go of Bruce’s hand. He glanced at her when she did, but they kept walking and he didn’t say anything. She’d half-hoped he would. She wanted a reaction from him, anything other than this locked down version he was giving her.

When they got to the house he unlocked the door.

“I’m going to head out,” he said in a distant voice. When Jenna turned he was already looking into the trees and he had longing on his face.

“You’re not going to spend time with me?” she asked. He looked at her but his eyes were glassy.

“I have to go,” he said.

Jenna nodded and the moment her head moved he headed off into the trees. He didn’t even say goodbye. It was as if something was pulling at him, drawing him away from her.

And she was curious.

She only took a moment to argue with herself about it before she swapped her jacket for a thicker coat. She glanced around the edge of the house and into the trees. She could see Bruce walked away, weaving through the trunks. She stepped pulled the door closed and waited just a moment before she, too, stepped into the trees.

She followed him, staying far enough behind that he wouldn’t see her. There were times where she thought she’d lost him, but then she saw him again and kept going. She hoped he wouldn’t hear her, or smell her. It made sense that his senses would be sharper, although she wasn’t sure.

After what felt like half an hour of walking he came a pile of boulders that were enormous. She’d never been this far past the village. Bruce climbed up easily and disappeared over the top.

Jenna walked up to the rocks and ran her hands over it. The rocks were smooth and high – much higher than she’d thought. How had Bruce done it?

She tried, but slipped and nearly fell. Two more times and she realized there was no way she was going to get up there with just normal human strength. She stepped back and she was just about to give up, when a crack between to boulders caught her attention.

It was very thin and narrow, and dirt was wedged in there. She tested it with her foot, and it was almost too narrow for her toes, but she managed to get a hold.

A small rock jutted out, just low enough to grab on, and she hoisted herself up. It took her a while, but finally she managed to drag herself onto the top of the rock.

She’d lost a lot of time and there was no way she was going to catch up to Bruce now. She might as well have turned around. But when she looked out over the other side of the boulders, something in the air tugged at her. It was a cross between the feeling she’d had when she’d found Bruce first, and something else that she couldn’t place. Something different – she wanted to say magical.

She slid down to the ground on the other side, which was quite a bit higher than where she’d started. There was only one path that lead through the boulders and rocks, strewn like someone had dropped them. She followed it up the side of the mountain.

As she climbed higher and higher, the atmosphere kept changing. She felt like she wasn’t just leaving the valley and Williamsburg behind, but also reality. The air had a tingle to it, and she got goosebumps. It felt like feathers running over her skin and when she breathed it was so thick, like she was underwater.

She climbed higher and higher, the trees changing, smooth trunks becoming tangled and knotted, like they were wrestling with something. There were no night sounds – no sounds of birds or mountain animals. It was eerily quiet and Jenna could hear her own heart hammering in her chest.

She followed the pull as far as she went, and at some point she stopped climbing up. Instead she changed course and started moving horizontally across the mountain. She crossed a thin stream with water that felt like ice when she stopped to take a drink. Her legs screamed at her, the muscles aching from the awkward angle she’d been climbing for so long. Her chest cramped from the air she was breathing like it was something her body wanted to reject, and a voice at the back of her head told her to turn around and go home.

But the tug was stronger, it pulled her forward. It felt like she was attached to something with a chord that wound into her belly, just beneath her ribs, and she followed it like she was a puppet on a string.

The mountainside suddenly flattened out. The trees got denser again, and there were times where she had to squeeze between trunks so close together she was scared she was going to get stuck.

But she made it through every time.

She started hearing things. She turned her head, sure it was the wind, but a moment later she heard it again. A soft murmur, like a voice. No, not just one. There were more. She turned her head, and when the wind died down she heard it better. Men and women talking, the sounds floated to her but she couldn’t make out what they were saying.

She couldn’t see them, either, but the sounds came from ahead. It was the same direction the pull came from, and she followed the voices. She had to squeeze through more trees, but then the trees suddenly thinned out, and she found herself on the edge of a plateau that stretched ahead, bare and empty with no trees, and the disappeared into nothing.

It must have been a cliff on the other side. She would be able to see for miles if she stood at the edge, she thought.

She heard the voices again, and held her breath. People appeared to her side. A big man with dark hair and blue eyes that almost glowed. A small, light-haired woman with dark eyes walked next to him. They were absolute opposites, but somehow they looked the same. They moved with the same fluid grace, and even though they weren’t touching each other, Jenna got the idea that they were a couple.

Another woman stepped into the clearing, a woman that didn’t look much like a woman at all, although Jenna knew she wasn’t a man. She carried herself like one though, and she was muscular with sharp, hard angles that weren’t feminine at all.

The most ordinary man followed with a dark ponytail, and then a light, small little guy with pale hair and eyes. He looked the size of a child, although there was something about the way he walked that suggested he was old. Very, very old.

And then it was Bruce.

Jenna recognized him by the lurch in her stomach before he turned and she recognized his face. He was bigger than all of them, except that woman, and he moved like he had authority over him. Something made her think he was stronger.

Maybe it was the way they were toward him, too. They were submissive, like they’d accepted he was the boss.

Why Bruce didn’t want to introduce Jenna to these people were beyond her, especially if he was the boss. But he hadn’t wanted them to know about her, so she stayed put.

They gathered in a circle toward the edge of the plateau, and it looked like some sort of meeting was about to begin, but nothing happened.

They were still waiting for someone, Jenna realized.

A moment later a woman with long black hair and a rolling, lethal gate appeared from the trees almost right next to Jenna. The woman was tall and thin and the way she carried herself let Jenna think that she knew she was beautiful, even from behind. The whole group stiffened when she came closer, and it was clear that she was in control, not Bruce.

Even he turned his eyes down and hunched his shoulders when she came closer.

There was familiar about this woman, but Jenna didn’t know what. Until she turned around.

Tara’s green eyes glowed in the dark, and when she flashed a menacing smile Jenna’s blood ran cold. Tara had sharp, pointed teeth in her mouth. She looked more like an animal than anything Jenna had ever seen, and she was almost sure it wasn’t Tara after all.

But then the woman spoke, and it was impossible to mistake her. It was definitely Tara.

So that was why Bruce hadn’t wanted to introduce Jenna. Because Tara was there. She was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of jealousy. Bruce was asking her to stay home while he went up the mountain and spent the night with her?

Jenna huffed. She hadn’t decided what to do yet, when Tara’s voice cut off in the middle of her sentence. She started looking around, her eyes searching the trees. The atmosphere around Jenna changed, the air was suddenly so cold she started to shiver. An icy wind blew from where they group was standing, and Jenna wrapped her arms around herself, trying to keep the cold out.

She didn’t dare move now, with Tara scanning the trees, but a moment later Tara’s eyes snapped back to where Jenna was, and locked onto her, even though Jenna had been sure she was completely hidden.

Tara’s eyes changed from a green glow to a white glare that almost blinded her, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe.

Chapter 5

The night prickled along Bruce’s skin and something felt wrong. Everything felt like it was just slightly off-kilter, like something was about to happen and he didn’t know what it was.

All the way up the mountain he’d had the urge to look over his shoulder, but every time he did there was nothing. As if anyone could follow him up there… the only creatures able to go up that side of the mountain were other shapeshifters. Humans couldn’t scale those slippery rocks.

And still he’d felt like he was being followed. Not stalked, like it was an animal, just followed. And still, even though he hadn’t felt like it had been dangerous, he had felt danger curling up his spine and unfurling in the base of his skull.

He just couldn’t place it.

The group of shapeshifters came together on the plateau as always. He was one of the first to arrive but he hung back in the trees. He wanted to see if something was waiting for them. He had a thought that it might be the Assassins, but the feeling didn’t fit. He’d felt the dread that came with Assassins, smelled the stench of death that followed them. What he felt wasn’t that.

It was a relief, but it still left him in the dark.

Stephen and Rosa were the first to step out onto the plateau. They didn’t show anything, but Bruce could tell Stephen felt it too. He was twitchy and his eyes shifted all over, looking out for something.

Lori was next and she stomped onto the plateau looking like she didn’t feel a thing. Bruce didn’t doubt that. She was big enough and strong enough not to fear too many things. Anything other than the Assassins was an afterthought to her, either because she was too close to her animal to care, or because she was too tied up in the preternatural world to have to really fend for herself.

Bruce wondered for a second what it would be like to be like her – to have absolutely no attachments. The only people Lori really were bound to were the members of the pack, and even then it had nothing to do with affection. It was purely because that was how it worked. He doubted she’d ever really invested herself, and if she had it was so long ago she couldn’t remember what it was really like.

He couldn’t imagine a life like that. Everywhere he’d been, even before he’d come to Williamsburg, he’d known people and loved them on some level.

Williamsburg was the one place that felt the most like home, but still. He couldn’t imagine a life without people, ties, connections, bonds. He couldn’t imagine a life without Jenna.

The conversation earlier had bothered him. She was so open-minded about it. She could have run for the hills and decided never to see him again after she found out what he was. Instead she wanted to know more about his life, wanted to make peace with it.

That was all good and well if it wasn’t so dangerous for her to be a part of his word. Just
knowing
about his world was bad enough already. He was edgy about it, nervous to leave her down there alone when all of the pack hadn’t arrived yet. There had been too many times already where one of them had been down there trying to kill her while he thought they were up in the mountains for a meeting.

Dwayne and Cleveland appeared at the same time as if his strength of will that they be present had summoned them. Dwayne glanced at Bruce with a strange expression, his eyes telling Bruce that he knew things that the others didn’t. Maybe he felt it too. Maybe he knew what it was. After the meeting he would have a chat with the guy, see if he could find out what was going on.

The feeling was starting to give him the scratch and he couldn’t shake it no matter what he did.

He held his breath as they all marched to the circle and stood facing each other. They didn’t say anything and the shift in power was clear, the hierarchy settling so that he was at the top of the pyramid. The others felt it too, their auras submissive toward him. The power always rearranged itself that way, but it felt different than usual. It was more distinct, like it was important. More than before.

When Tara finally stepped out of the trees Bruce let out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding. He’d been anxious about her turning up. He hadn’t forgotten that she was the last one of the pack members that had tried to kill Jenna. And he was the one that had shot her in the shoulder.

It didn’t look like it now, with how she moved, but she’d struggled to recover, fought a battle to pull through at all. It was her power that had saved her.