Rivals (Shifter Island #2) Read online

  Aaron drifted a hand over the scarred tabletop, a surface that had seen claws come out many a time, and had had innumerable objects slammed down on it. “I wouldn’t have brought her here if I thought she was a threat to the pack. We both feel the pull of the bond, Alpha. She would do nothing to hurt me. My mate would do nothing to hurt me.”

  He stressed the word mate, thinking it might have an effect—and it did.

  Caleb’s own mate had died years ago, in his arms. It was a subject that still tugged at the alpha’s heart; everyone in the pack was aware of that. They broached the subject of Lisabeth only in the gentlest of ways, unless they wanted Caleb’s fangs to make an appearance.

  Lisabeth would have thrown herself into the sea rather than hurt Caleb. She’d been the tenderest of mates, the most devoted. Abby, he was sure, would be the same—given the chance.

  Certainly Caleb had seen that in her, had picked that up in her scent.

  Caleb stared at the closed front door for a while, fingernails lightly scratching across the tabletop. “I can’t help but think it’s not a coincidence, Aaron,” he said distractedly. “For this human to come here, and your brother being attacked at virtually the same time. That doesn’t seem coincidental to me.”

  “Humans have come here before,” Aaron said.

  “But not–”

  “That would make sense only if someone had come after her, someone who thought she was in danger. That Luca was a threat to her. How would they think that? He was only with her for a few minutes, and I was there the entire time. It would make more sense for someone like that to come after me.”

  Mason interrupted crossly, “Humans make irrational judgments.”

  “And we don’t?”

  Both elders bristled at that, but Aaron didn’t let it cow him. He shook his head firmly.

  “We’ll talk to her,” Caleb said.

  “With me,” Aaron replied. “If you speak to her, I need to be there. She’s not on trial.”

  Mason reminded him, “She’ll need to come before us anyway. You both will. We will need to make a determination, young wolf. There’ll be no joining of the two of you unless we approve. After your brother’s attacker has been found and dealt with, you’ll come before us for examination, and we’ll decide whether this human can remain among us.”

  Aaron took a slow, deep breath. “Yes. I’m aware.”

  “There is procedure for a reason, Aaron.”

  “I’m aware of that too.”

  Slowly, he got up from the table, giving the two elders a chance to object. To his great relief, neither of them did, so he took a couple of steps toward the door.

  “Both of us will cooperate,” he said. “I know you have only the best interests of the pack at heart.”

  He spent the next couple of hours searching the woods himself, occasionally crossing paths with other members of the pack—some of them in human form, and some of them shifted into their wolves. None of them had found anything helpful, a situation that had made some of them angry enough to squabble among themselves.

  He earned a growl or two as he moved through the trees, then climbed the hill overlooking the settlement to the place where he and Abby had stopped to look down. Their footprints were still there in the soft soil, as well as a couple of scuff marks left by Abby’s big bag.

  If they’d turned around and gone back to the cabin, he wondered, would Luca still have been hurt?

  Did this have anything at all to do with Abby?

  He turned and looked down at the settlement, at his parents’ house, then at the corner of Granny Sara’s roof that was visible from the hilltop. He wanted very much to run back down there, scoop Abby into his arms, and bring her back to the cabin, where everything had been so calm, and yet so charged with the attraction between them. Every cell of his body seemed to remember the feel of her, how she’d rubbed and stroked and licked him, how she’d clenched around his cock as his vital seed spilled inside her.

  He’d heard others say that the one drawback of the bond was that it was so painful to be separated, sometimes to the point that the pain crowded out rational thought and made the bondmates foolish and stupid. But Aaron could think of worse things than being foolish and stupid.

  Feeling desperately alone, for instance.

  Now… now, Abby was down there, not very far away, being cared for by one of the people Aaron trusted the most, one he knew would protect her, comfort her if she became worried or scared, and educate her in the ways of the pack from the point of view of another human. Abby was in the best possible hands, other than Aaron’s own. Maybe better than Aaron’s own.

  She’d become precious to him so quickly, something he’d never thought could happen to him.

  But his brother was precious to him too.

  He felt the wolf surge up inside of him, and this time he gave in to its demand to come out. With the warm, salty summer breeze swirling around him, he stripped out of his clothes, crouched down low to the ground, and let the beast have its way.

  Six

  For the rest of the day, people came and went. Came and went. They brought things to Granny Sara: clothes that needed to be mended, bowls of food, questions that needed to be answered. Some of them seemed to have no clear purpose for coming to Sara’s house at all.

  Men, women, children—they all came. They were clearly scared, angry, nervous, worried—but they came anyway. No one seemed to be at ease.

  Sara accepted their gifts, answered their questions, set aside the things that needed to be mended.

  None of them said anything to Abby, but it became plain to her that she was the real reason they had come. A couple of the children went as far as trying to sniff her, but they were quickly hustled out of her reach. That, Abby found more annoying than anything else. If these people thought she was dangerous, why would they bring their children to see her?

  “Am I the bogeyman?” she asked crossly during a moment when she and Sara were alone.

  “A curiosity, at least,” Sara said.

  “But they’re scared of me.”

  Sara shook her head. “They’re more scared of what you represent. They can be very superstitious sometimes. You arrived, and Luca was attacked.”

  This day had started to feel about ten times longer than normal, longer than any other day Abby had ever lived through, and it was wearing her right down to her last nerve. To make things worse, she hadn’t seen Aaron for hours, and had no idea whether he was safe—whether Daniel had managed to lock him up somewhere after all, and what might happen to him if Daniel had his way.

  “I arrived four days ago,” she said. “It’s not like something happened immediately. And instead of pestering us, shouldn’t they be trying to figure out who attacked Luca?”

  “They are trying.”

  Something in Sara’s expression told Abby that the investigation was nothing like what would happen on the mainland, that no one was collecting fingerprints or DNA. There certainly was no security camera footage to be examined. Maybe, Abby thought, they were all just going around sniffing each other.

  She wanted badly to get some rest, but there was just the one bed available. Beyond that, Micah was still here. He’d come and gone several times, for what seemed like no particular reason. Like the others, he was ill at ease—and he’d eaten what seemed to Abby like an enormous amount of food. When he wasn’t eating, he was pacing the confines of his grandmother’s little house, head down, both his hands balled into fists. At times, he seemed to Abby to be as upset as Aaron had been, desperate to find out who had attacked Luca so that he could extract some vengeance of his own. Then, minutes later, he would seem lost and confused.

  They were good friends, Abby decided—Luca and Micah. And Micah felt as trapped and helpless as Aaron did, unable to help his friend recover, and unable to find the guilty party.

  His unease was contagious. The trouble was, Micah could leave the house whenever the urge struck him.

  Abby was stuck here.

>   She would have much preferred being at Aaron’s parents’ house, even if it meant watching Rachel cry and being close to Luca as he lay there trying to recover from his terrible wounds. More than once, she thought about slipping away and returning to the cabin. If Aaron would only come with her…

  A little after sundown, Sara gave her some soup and bread. “Why don’t you sit outside for a while?” the older woman suggested. “I’m sure you could do with some fresh air.”

  Abby accepted the offer eagerly, and Sara led her out the back door into a beautiful garden area tucked behind her house. It seemed protected from the entire world, though the presence of several well-worn chairs suggested that Sara did more than a little entertaining out there.

  Smiling distantly, Sara pulled the door shut to provide the two of them with some privacy. “I’m sorry for all of this,” she said. “I know none of what’s happened is your doing.”

  “Do you? No one else seems to.”

  “You’re a… convenient one to blame.”

  “I’d like not to be.” Abby let that lie for a moment, then shook her head. “I feel like anything could happen, at any moment. I have no idea what’s happening out there.” Because her hands were full of the food Sara had given her, she gestured with her head. “I feel completely out of control.”

  “Sit and eat. It’ll help.”

  Abby sank into a chair and ate a little of the soup, then set the bowl aside. “I’m sorry,” she told Sara. “I’m just not very hungry. I feel like I’m under a magnifying glass. And… and…”

  “Micah?”

  “He keeps staring at me. They all do.”

  “I can’t say that will change,” Sara said with a small sigh. “You’ll always be a curiosity to them.”

  “I just want not to be a dead curiosity.”

  There, Abby thought. It was said. Out on the table. All day long, she’d been scrutinized and investigated by a group of people who thought she might be guilty of stabbing somebody.

  People who could turn into wolves.

  “Is he a friend of Luca’s?” she blurted, so she could stop thinking about fangs—people with huge, glistening, dripping fangs. Like Daniel, for instance. “Micah. Are he and Luca good friends?”

  Sara glanced at the door. “Not really. He’s… You’ve heard the phrase ‘lone wolf’?”

  Abby nodded.

  “Micah is one of those. He prefers to keep to himself most of the time. He trusts me, and a couple of others. Most of the pack… Let’s say they don’t get along very well.”

  “What about his parents? Does he get along with them?”

  “They were killed some years ago. Swept away in a storm.”

  It struck Abby how fragile life must be out here, on what was basically a big rock sitting in a much bigger ocean. But then, life was fragile everywhere. She’d had no idea that her mother was going to die until it happened, and the news was always full of stories of people who’d been struck down in what seemed to be very arbitrary ways.

  Sara was lucky to have lived so long, in a place with no real doctors, no hospitals. Abby came close to telling her so, then decided to hold her silence and eat her dinner instead.

  “I’m sorry,” was all she offered.

  Sara nodded in acknowledgment, regret clear in her eyes even in the dim evening light. Of course she was sad about what had happened; one of Micah’s parents had been her son or daughter. She seemed to have run out of things to say, too, and simply stood near the door for a couple of minutes, gazing off into the woods.

  “You’ll be all right out here,” she said finally, then went back into the house.

  And it was true: Abby felt much better, much more at ease out here than she had inside after Micah had arrived. She could faintly hear voices off in the distance, but somehow, now, they seemed no more threatening than the sound of her neighbors’ TV back home. She took some deep breaths, one after the other, to help herself relax, then settled into enjoying her dinner.

  The thick fragrance of flowers around her made her think of the pool. The air was sweet up there too.

  Warm sunlight, the silky touch of the water against her skin…

  And Aaron.

  Where was he now?

  She tried to remember the feel of him as she set aside her empty bowl. How his strong arms had supported her, how his kiss had made her entire body tingle with need. Part of it was simple lust, she supposed, but she’d never felt like that before—like the universe had put them together, and it had made exactly the right decision.

  With Aaron, she felt whole. Complete.

  And loved. Dearly, fully loved.

  Without him, she felt abandoned and skittish. But she had to let him do what needed to be done. When that was finished, he’d come back. They’d face the elders, and then they’d begin their life together.

  She was thinking only of him as she drifted off to sleep in Granny Sara’s hand-hewn chair.

  She found herself standing in a field of tiny white flowers that seemed to go on forever. In the distance, they looked like a cloud. Everything else was hazy enough that she knew this couldn’t be real. Then again, almost nothing of what she’d experienced in the last few days had felt like it was real.

  “Abby.”

  Aaron.

  He wasn’t anywhere in front of her, so she turned slowly. In every direction the ground was covered with those tiny flowers. Finally, she spotted him—maybe a hundred feet away, walking toward her.

  When he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in close, every inch of her skin began to tingle. It felt as though every cell in her body needed him, demanded his touch. She supposed that had to do with the bond, too, this overwhelming need to be joined with him, but that wasn’t worth thinking about. The only important thing was that she did need him, had needed him desperately for hours, and he was finally here.

  “I’ve missed you,” he whispered into her hair.

  She held on to him as if they were in danger of being swept away from each other, fingers digging into his firm flesh, gripping him like a lifeline. She thought she might be hurting him, but he didn’t flinch, didn’t try to back away. He was holding her firmly but tenderly, almost cradling her.

  “Is this… Where are we?” she asked, tipping back her head to look up into his eyes.

  “In the world of dreams.”

  Dreams. Yes, she could remember sinking deeper into Granny Sara’s chair and beginning to drift off to sleep. But…

  “Dreams? But it… it seems so real. Is it part of the bond?”

  Aaron nodded. “An important part.”

  “So we can be together even if we’re apart.”

  “Exactly.”

  She intended to say more, but he pressed a finger to her lips to silence her, then leaned down for a kiss. It was gentle and sweet at first, then more fervent, his tongue sliding past her lips to explore the warmth of her mouth. She could feel his cock stiffening between them, pressing against her belly, and when she shimmied against it, Aaron made a low groan deep in his throat.

  They were both naked, she realized. She hadn’t noticed that until now.

  This is a dream…?

  His hands traveled up and down her back, caressing her skin, exploring the curve of her buttocks and the angles of her shoulder blades. He tickled her a little, very lightly, smiling when she squirmed. The whole time, he went on kissing her, moving from her mouth to her throat and back again.

  On impulse, she sank down to her knees and wrapped a hand around his cock. When she looked up to see how he felt about that, she discovered that his eyes were closed, that he’d tipped his head back and clenched his hands.

  A rumble grew in his chest as she ran her tongue up and down his length, then slipped him into her mouth. He was too big for her to take very much of him, but she’d had enough experience to know that she could still please him. The rumble turned to a deep hum as she licked and sucked, then wrapped her hand around his sac and squeezed him gently.


  She planned to bring him all the way to the edge, even though her body was crying out for his touch. She tried to ignore her own need, but it began to make her arms and legs tremble.

  “Down,” Aaron whispered.

  She thought he meant for her to lie down, but before she could do that, he had stretched out on the flower-covered ground and was pulling her toward him, to straddle him and take him up inside her. When she did, he let out a long sigh of pleasure. Then he took her breasts in his hands and began to knead them, nipples pinched between his fingers.

  Full of his heat, she began to slide up and down, clenching him, matching his groans and sighs with her own. As she did, he ran his hands up and down her thighs, then cupped her backside before returning his attention to her breasts.

  As had happened almost every time before, they reached the edge together and went tumbling off, panting and gasping, grasping each other desperately, unable to let go.

  The flowers were amazingly soft to lie on, she discovered when she stretched out alongside Aaron, pressed side to side with him, their fingers knotted together. There was no sky overhead to look at, just an odd, pale haze, so she turned onto her side to look at him instead and found him smiling again.

  “My beauty,” he murmured, stroking her cheek with his free hand.

  That took her breath away. No one had ever called her beautiful in that kind of way, as if the idea of it was too much to grasp, as if he found her presence completely overwhelming. For a moment she was tempted to argue the point, to tell him that she was an everyday sort of pretty and nothing more, but there was such adoration in his eyes that she couldn’t bring herself to say anything.

  They lay there for what seemed like a long time, still and silent. In a way, it felt like sleeping.

  Then Aaron moved into a crouch and lined himself up along the length of her body, hovering over her, braced on his hands and knees. He teased her with kisses that started at her forehead and moved slowly but steadily down her face, her neck, over her breasts and belly to her sex. There, he tickled her lightly with the tip of his tongue before he began to lick with longer strokes. When she quivered, he lifted his head just long enough to observe, “You do like that.”