The Strip (33 page)

Charlie wondered what it was.

“Here, luv.” Cole pulled her attention back to him and she looked up to see that he was gesturing toward a break in the copse of bushes to their left. No one else seemed to notice it and she speculated as to where it led. “After you,” he said, softly.

She searched his face for some hint of the secret he was keeping from her, but his expression gave nothing away. He simply smiled an easy, sexy smile and waited for her to duck into the small pathway.

Charlie sighed and stepped through. On the other side was a ledge and a drop of about six feet. Lucas Caige and a few other members of Cole’s pack were waiting for her down below.

Caige turned as she came through the bushes and he raised his arms. “Come here, Charlie. I’ll help you down.”

Charlie blinked at him and then turned back toward Cole. He was right behind her. He nodded, urging her forward. Then he turned to Caige. “Make it quick, Caige. They’re due to start any minute.”

Now Charlie was as confused as ever, but she decided to resign herself to it and allowed Caige to lift her off of the wall and help her down. It wasn’t necessary. In her training over the past several years, Charlie had learned how to jump distances that were much further down and quite a bit more painful than this one would have been. But she knew that Cole’s pack wouldn’t know that. And they were trying to be nice.

“To the boat, Charlie,” Caige instructed, nodding toward a small row boat that had been pulled up at the edge of the lake. She walked toward it as two other werewolves held it still.

“Get in, luv,” Cole instructed, a gentle hand at her back, urging her forward. She carefully stepped into the boat, admiring its polished wooden edges and carved designs as she took a seat and waited.

Cole stepped in after her and then sat down. He nodded toward Caige, who gave the boat a gentle shove with his motorcycle boot. The boat drifted from the white ledge of the hidden walkway and Charlie watched as the shadows of the looming hotel above her receded and the boat coasted out into open water.

All around her, revelers gazed in their direction, but none of them pointed. Their behavior didn’t change. They continued to talk and drink and glance at the lake expectantly. It was as if the boat was not even there.

“Can they see us?” Charlie asked.

“Yes and no,” Malcolm replied. He pulled two oars from the bottom of the boat, shoved them through the loops at the sides of the craft, and began to row them further out into the lake.

“What do you mean?”

“They possess the capability of noticing us,” Cole clarified, his smile broadening mischievously. “However, I’m not allowing them to.”

Charlie blinked. “You’re – you’re what?”

“Charlie, many werewolves are born with gifts that set them apart from others of our kind – ”

“Oh,
crap
, don’t tell me you can read my mind!” Charlie immediately exclaimed, thinking, instantly, of her grandfather and those exact same words that he had uttered.

Now it was Malcolm’s turn to blink. “What? No! No, I can’t read your mind. Why on earth would you ask such a thing?” And then comprehension dawned on his handsome features and he nodded. “Ah. The Overseer.” He nodded again and rowed them a little further in. “No, as far as I’m aware, Kavanagh is the only one who possesses that particular ability. Along with several other very useful talents,” he added, softly.

Charlie had no response for that, so she focused on the lake and their boat. “The lake is very pretty, and the night is gorgeous,” she admitted softly. “But is this what you brought me out to show me?” She recalled his words to Lucas Caige. Something about being late. “What were you talking about when you told Caige that… they’re due to start any minute?”

Cole didn’t have a chance to answer her because, at that moment, the speakers embedded in the walls around the lake began to vibrate with music. Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” rode across the water’s smooth, reflective plane and the lake’s surface started to bubble. Charlie looked around the boat, her eyes wide, and realized that the bubbling was surrounding them on all sides. The small vessel was right smack in the middle of some kind of churning water work.

The music grew louder and Dion’s voice caressed the audience. Water began to break the surface of the lake, spraying in what seemed like a hundred fine streams of fountained beauty. The lines of water swayed back and forth in time with the music.

Charlie’s breath caught in her throat and her face broke into a smile that she simply could not suppress as the song crescendoed and canons of water shot straight into the sky, drum beats of majestic, liquid beauty that pierced the darkness hundreds of feet in the air.

All around them, the crowd gasped in wonder and Charlie found herself laughing, unable to hide her joy. Werewolf or not, she couldn’t hear the sound of her own exclamations over the roar of the music and the crowd and the sonic boom of the Bellagio’s fountains.

The water began to fall back down to Earth and Malcolm produced an umbrella, seemingly out of nowhere, opening it with perfectly timed precision in order to place it over them both as the fountain’s droplets slammed into the lake.

Charlie smiled broadly at her mate, too amazed to say anything. But she didn’t need to. As the song continued and the fountains erupted around them, her glittering eyes told him everything he needed to know. And his smile was a reflection of her own.

There was nothing else in that moment. There was nothing but the music and a kind of magic that seemed to swell within and around them. Charlie would never forget this moment. This precious space in time seemed to freeze, like the water suspended in space above them, drifting on sound waves of bliss and hovering, poised before the love-struck gazes of a thousand gasping children.
Children
, because they laughed and cried and abandoned themselves to the beauty that was before them.

For the space of a song, they were no longer forty or fifty or twenty-one. They were four and a half and in lust with life.

A single tear escaped the corner of Charlie’s once-more glowing eyes and, as she smiled at the beautiful man across from her, it trickled down her cheek, the only drop of water that managed to fall into the boat that night.

In that moment, Malcolm gazed at her with a kind of expression that he’d never shown her before. It was a breed of wonder, a kind of gentleness and of astonishment. Beneath the ballistic sound of rockets at the climax of the display around them, Malcolm took the umbrella in one hand and cupped her face with the other.

She closed her eyes as he leaned in and, when his lips softly brushed hers in the first, tender moments of a kiss, she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back. It was a kiss that reflected the happiness he’d awakened within her, in the middle of this tiny lake, beneath a rain storm of man-made magic.

He groaned against her lips and took possession of her mouth, his hand sliding to her nape to hold her in place. She melted beneath his touch and let him take control. He was better at it.

But then he was breaking the kiss, drawing back just enough to gaze down into her eyes and whisper across her lips. “You’ll make me lose control of them, Charlie,” he told her, his grip tightening in her hair. She realized he was talking about the humans; the humans whose minds he was willing not to see them. His once-green eyes had again gone completely black with hunger. “Not here,” he told her. A single shake of his head.

She shuddered as he released her and set down the umbrella. The fountains had died down to a low, soft sway. Cole picked up the oars and began to row them back to the private walk where his men waited for them.

Charlie tried to calm the erratic beating of her heart. Moisture had gathered between her legs and, because she wasn’t wearing underwear, she was more sensitive to the sensation. Distractedly, she rubbed at the inside of her right wrist. She lifted her legs and hugged them to her chest as she gazed across at Cole and watched the taut muscles of his broad chest flex and relax beneath the tight material of his t-shirt. She thought of how those muscles would hold her down; how warm his body would be against hers. She rubbed distractedly at her other wrist, this time, harder.

She hissed in pain, but barely realized what it was that was hurting. She was too wrapped up in everything that was Malcolm Cole. She wanted him to say something, anything, just so that she could hear his amazing voice and that sexy accent of his.

She wondered if she were falling in love with him….

Again, she drew in a sharp breath, and Cole’s gaze narrowed. He followed her movements as she wrapped one hand around her other wrist and squeezed.

“Ow…” she hissed, now fully aware of the dawning pain. “It hurts,” she whispered. She’d said the words before she could stop herself, and he heard them loud and clear.

They bumped against the walk and Cole was immediately up and stepping out of the boat. Just as quickly, he was reaching in, lifting her into his arms, and hauling her out as well. He set her down in front of him and gave her no time to steady herself before he was grasping her right arm in his left hand and shoving the sleeve of her sweater up with the other.

He froze. Charlie could hear his heart skip. And then it slammed against the inside of his chest with a fierce thud. “
No
.” His eyes were wide in his handsome face, and they were no longer black. They were a vivid, emerald green that glowed eerily in the darkness.

Roughly, Cole took hold of her other arm and shoved its sleeve up as well, exposing the matching red mark on her left wrist.

“
God
, no,” he choked, “No, no, no….” He released her and then, in what seemed like one clean, swift movement, he ripped the leather bands off of his own arms and gazed down at the insides of his wrists.

His marks were gone.

Chapter Seventeen,
The Showdown

“Take him,” Lily turned to her husband and waited as the tall, black-haired, blue-eyed man gently took the infant boy out of her arms. “My phone is vibrating.”

“I know. I can hear it,” Daniel said.

“Of course you can, Superman.” Lily strode to the purse that was sitting on a divan across the room and unzipped it. She pulled out the phone, glanced at the number on the screen, and frowned.

She hated it when it said “private.” Unfortunately, she knew a good number of people who might have numbers that were “private,” so she couldn’t afford to let it go. She sighed and popped it open. “This is Lily.”

“God
damn
it, Kane, why didn’t you tell me?”

Lily blinked and went stone cold. It was Cole’s voice on the other end of the line and she had never heard him so livid before.

“You knew! You
knew
and you didn’t tell me!
Why
?”

A flash of a vision and suddenly Lily was remembering.
Shit,
she thought
.
“Calm down and tell me what’s going on, Cole.”

“What the fuck do you think is going on, Kane? The marks transferred to my mate. That’s what is going on. And now they’re heating up and
hurting
her.” There was a brief shuffling pause and Lily imagined that Cole had removed the phone from his mouth and was squeezing it in his hand, trying with all of his might
not
to break the instrument in his rage.

She waited for him to put it to his ear again, and as she waited, she glanced at her husband. Daniel’s blue eyes were glowing. He could hear Cole loud and clear and the man’s anger was forcing Daniel into fight mode.

She tried to give him a look of reassurance. His own expression didn’t change. He held their son in one arm, gently moving him back and forth, but his handsome features were hard and unforgiving and his gaze was locked on hers.

Eventually, she heard Cole’s breathing once more. She interrupted him before he could speak. “Cole! Listen to me carefully. There isn’t much time, okay?”

Silence. Rage and Wrath and Redness. But silence.

“You didn’t transfer the curse to her, Cole. Not exactly. It lifted from you, yes. And she has a bit of it now, yes. But it’s different – ”

“I swear to God, Kane, if you don’t tell me how to fix this right now, I’ll-”

Lily gasped as the phone was suddenly torn from her hand and Daniel placed it to his own ear. “Speak like that to my mate again, Cole, and I don’t care how fucking powerful you are, I will die trying to kill you.”

“She has Cole – more power to her – and the only people who need you are standing in front of you, Lily.” He pinned her with a stark sapphire gaze. The baby in the crook of his arm made a low mewling sound.

Lily glanced down at him. “Give him to me,” she said softly. Daniel handed her their child and the infant immediately wrapped his fingers in Lily’s long golden hair, pulling gently.

“This is too important for you to go all machismo on me, Daniel.” She turned toward the hall that led to the nursery. “I’m going to call him back, unless you call him back yourself.” It wasn’t so much a threat as a promise. At least she was giving him a choice.

She put her son in his crib, swaddled him, and then returned to the living room. Daniel was strapping on his shoulder holster. She watched her husband as his ample muscles stretched and flexed, taut beneath the black t-shirt he wore.

“Daniel, did you hear me?” she asked as she looked around for her phone. “What’s happening is very serious.”