Jace (30 page)

Miri let out the breath she’d been holding. “Good, because it’s going to take a lot of work to get us to where we need to be and it’s going to take everyone’s cooperation to get there.”

“Where is there?”

“I don’t know, as I haven’t been here long enough to know where we need to go, but I do know, from here on out the Tragallion-D’Nallys are focusing on results.”

“What kind of results can we expect, when your mate is a vampire?”

“What
is
your name?” she snapped at the older woman.

“Helen.”

“Well, Helen, if my mate being vampire doesn’t bother the D’Nally, I fail to see why it should concern you.”

“The D’Nally doesn’t have to live with him.”

Miri smiled sweetly at the attractive brunette. “Neither do you. I can have Brac escort you off Tragallion land tomorrow morning.”

A knock at the door punctuated the collective gasp at that announcement. The door opened soundlessly. Jace strode in. The women stared, and not because he was vampire. Jace walked into every room like he owned it, and that confidence and strength, combined with his charisma, would be attractive to any were. Her mate, to put it bluntly, was a very handsome man in face, manner, and presence. He could have his pick of any woman in any room. A spurt of insecurity fluctuated within.

I’ve got the one I want.

She blinked back the sting of tears at the softness of the emotion that flowed from him to her. He was such a strong man. He deserved a strong woman.

Why me?

He reached her side. His hand slid behind her neck. With a brush of his thumb, he tipped her face up. Flames flickered in his eyes. A tiny smile creased the corners of his mouth. His head lowered. She couldn’t look away, just stared, as enraptured as every other woman by the intensity he projected. His breath eased over her lips. She inhaled, bringing the caress inside, holding it close.

Just before his lips touched hers, he whispered mentally,
Because I love you.

She’d expected him to say it with the arrogance of a vampire, could accept the dominance of a were, but he said it the way he said everything—with the unbending certainty of his human heart. And it shattered her. Way down deep where she’d sworn she’d never break again. She just stood there stunned as he claimed her mouth, her soul. He wasn’t with her because of destiny or duty. He loved her. He really did love her. The way she’d always dreamed her true mate would.

The tears she’d been trying to suppress spilled to her cheeks, flavoring the intimacy of the kiss as she brought her hands up to his face and pulled him closer. If she could have, she’d have crawled inside his skin. Awareness dropped away. There was only hunger and need and Jace.

Someone cleared their throat. An audience. The realization made a feeble stab through the haze of passion. They had an audience.

This isn’t the time for this.

I think it’s the perfect time. Kiss me back.

I am.

His hand slid around her back, settling into the hollow of her spine, lifting her up onto her toes, tucking her legs between his, her hips against his.

Harder.

She did, giving him all she had, uncaring that they had witnesses, or maybe giving it to him because there were witnesses. She was wolf. This was her mate. It was as natural as breathing to stake her claim.

She eased her lips from his, reveled in the rasp of beard against the softness of her lips, following his jawline to his ear. Lowering herself to flat-footed, she nipped his lobe, hearing his groan, feeling the stares, her canines itching with the desire to mark him, to irrevocably declare him as hers. She followed the taut cord of his neck downward, scraping the skin with the points of her teeth. Jace’s fingertips dug into her back and neck, holding her to him for a brief second before he wrapped her hair in his fist and pulled her head back.

“No.”

She fought the pressure, his dominance, the pings of protest from her hair spiking her passion even more. “Yes.”

He brushed his lips across her forehead. “I’ve got some pretty specific plans for when you mark me,” he murmured.

So he had known what she was doing. “The mark is my gift.”

“And I can’t wait to receive it, but—”

The creak of a floorboard was faint. One second she was staring into Jace’s beautiful eyes, and the next she was falling backward, the breadth of his shoulders filling her vision as he spun to meet the threat. She stumbled. Someone caught her. She glanced over her shoulder and met Marjorie’s gaze. For once it wasn’t hostile.

“Thank you.”

The woman nodded, her expression strange as she looked at Jace, but when she turned back to Miri, she was dead serious. “If you don’t mark him soon, someone else will. An Alpha like him won’t be neglected here.”

A look around proved the truth of that. Lust and hunger were on many women’s faces. Miri took a step closer to Jace and glared at Helen in particular. Her gaze looked to be the most lustful.

Surprisingly, Helen laughed, launching a string of titters and smiles around the room. Miri noticed, however, that humor didn’t diminish the hunger in the other women. Her lip curled in a warning snarl.

“You’re easily distracted, vampire,” Brac said.

“By my wife, while among friends? Absolutely.” Jace’s weight settled onto the balls of his feet. For all the easiness of his tone, he was ready to fight. “Did you want something?”

“The men are here to distribute the wood among the pack.”

“Good.” He arched that brow in that deliberately goading way. “The wood’s out back.”

“The men want permission to enter the property.”

Jace nodded. “Granted.”

“We’re getting wood?” Brenda Lynn asked with absolutely no regard for the undercurrents flowing through the room or the appropriateness of the question. Jace knelt down in front of her, resting his forearm across his knee. Marjorie immediately came to her daughter’s side, not looking one bit reassured by Jace’s smile.

“All you need.”

The child’s immediate withdrawal was aborted as she looked into Jace’s eyes.

“Enough to warm even my bedroom?”

Miri felt the flick of Jace’s energy that was his anger, but all the child saw was his nod. “Enough to make your house so toasty, you’ll have to bring in sand so Wilhelmina and your friends can have a beach party.”

“A party? I can have a party with other kids and everything?”

His drawl deeper than normal, Jace nodded and told her, “I definitely think you should have a party.”

Marjorie tried to pull Brenda Lynn back. “That’s really not necessary.”

The child tugged her hand free of her mother’s restraint. Her little shoulders squared as she frowned at Jace. “If my friends come out to play, do you promise not to suck their blood and feast on their bones?”

Jace didn’t even blink at the gruesome image. “I promise.”

Marjorie made another grab for Brenda Lynn. She missed. The child opened her mouth. Marjorie’s “Oh, God” was a low moan of resignation.

“Even if my friends are boys?”

There was another stutter in Jace’s energy. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I think that friends are as important as pack and little boys are as special as little girls.”

“Really?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a thousand needles in my eye.”

Brenda Lynn frowned. “You didn’t do it right. It doesn’t count if you don’t do it right.”

“I agree,” Brac interjected with an utter seriousness that was belied by the amusement settling into the creases fanning out from the corners of his eyes. “Promises like that have to be done right.”

Jace cut him a glare. “What’s right?”

“You have to do this.” Brenda Lynn made an energetic crossing motion over her chest and then spit into her palm before making a fist.

Jace arched a brow at her. “Seriously?”

Miri couldn’t blame him for the question. It was a rather gross image to associate with such an angelic-looking child.

She nodded emphatically, pigtails bobbing. “It doesn’t count otherwise.”

“Well, I certainly want it to count.” Jace made the appropriate sign and then spat into his palm. “I promise.”

Brenda Lynn watched as his fingers curled around the last syllable. She reached up and caught her mother’s hand, her eyes round. There was a rapt two-second pause before she looked up at her mom and whispered, “You don’t have to cry anymore, Mommy. He really did send someone for me. Just like you prayed.”

Marjorie half gasped and half sobbed as she grabbed her daughter to her. Brenda Lynn didn’t fight. With a big smile, she turned and wrapped her hands around her mother’s waist. “And I’m going to have a party.”

T
WENTY
minutes later, the women trailed out. Marjorie, Brenda Lynn, and her frog were the first out the door. Helen, the last, and she didn’t leave without casting a lingering look over her shoulder at Jace. Or maybe Brac. They left the mattress and box spring. Miri chose to think of it as a peace offering.

“Looks like a friendly group,” Jace observed in his deep drawl, putting his arm around her shoulder.

She leaned her cheek onto the back of his hand before kissing the base of his thumb. “Don’t get any ideas.”

His hug was quick and hard, as was the kiss he dropped on the top of her head.

“The only woman who gives me ideas is you.”

“I’d better be.”

Brac snorted. “He’s vampire. Don’t hold your breath.”

That level of disrespect could not be tolerated. Her hair whipped across her face. “He’s your Alpha.”

Brac shrugged. “He’s still a vampire.”

“He’s
my
vampire.”

Brac didn’t straighten or otherwise look upset. “Not that anyone could notice.”

They were back to the fact that she hadn’t marked Jace.

“Don’t you have something to do?”

“I’m doing it.”

“Here?”

“Yes. I’m your security.”

“I don’t need security in the middle of my own pack.” Miri turned to Jace. “Do I?”

“Not everyone is welcoming us with open arms.” It was a flat statement of fact, but beneath each syllable lurked emotion she might have missed before. Guilt. His guilt that the pack she got wasn’t the pack she wanted. Guilt that he’d committed them to this. They didn’t need any more misplaced guilt flowing between them in an ever-expanding river. She pushed her hair out of her eyes. In the past, she would have waited for him to build a bridge across the pain. If she waited, he’d no doubt be the one to do so again. She wasn’t waiting. She put her arms around his lean waist and hugged him. “We’ll win them over.”

She felt his start, and then his pleasure. Had she really been that cold to him, that such a small gesture affected him so much?

“Until we do, you’ll need security.”

The slight roughness to his drawl gave her that answer. Yes.

“I don’t want security.”

There was a wild flare in Jace’s energy, a vague impression of their daughter’s face and an agony and fear she never would have sensed if she hadn’t learned to open her mind as his leapt the barriers he’d put in place. “You’ll learn to accept it.”

She nodded against his chest as his pain overwhelmed her. Pain he would rather have died than share. Not because he was proud, but because he thought she couldn’t handle it. Because she’d convinced him she was that fragile. That he had to carry both their burdens. And that he had to do it in silence. She’d never been more ashamed.

“Okay.”

He pulled back. “Just okay? No arguments?”

“Yup. Just okay.” She was the Alpha female, and Jace’s mate. It was about time she started acting like both.

He stared, then blinked, and then pushed her hair off her cheek the way he did when he wanted to know what was going on inside her. She felt the touch of his mind, so much lighter than the brush of his fingers. So much more intimate.

She answered his unspoken question. “I really am fine.”

“Good.”

She pressed her cheek against his chest, looking at Brac as she listened to the steady beat of Jace’s heart. “How did this pack get so out of whack? Why didn’t someone do something?”

“There wasn’t anyone here to do anything. Travis volunteered the warriors to the D’Nally. When we got back, the damage was done.”

“And someone had to undo it,” she finished.

Brac nodded. “Steps were taken immediately to mitigate what had happened while the proper procedures were followed.”

It was as close to an admittance that things had gotten so bad that Brac had been the one to call in the Enforcer.

The were’s golden gaze lingered on the way Jace held her. He pushed away from the table he’d been half sitting on. “And now the process that was begun is in your hands to finish.”

Another undone thread of her life to be rewoven into her future. So many. Jace, her daughter, Penny, the pack. It should be terrifying. “Yes, it is.”

Jace cocked an eyebrow at her. “You don’t sound upset.”

She looked around. Her voice echoed in the nearly empty room. “I’ve got a lot to live for.”

And after the year of hopelessly creating pointless challenges to try to keep herself sane, having so many real ones just waiting to be picked up was exciting.

He crooked his elbow, tipping her head back. “So do I.”

Desire flowed between them in a peaking arc. Every muscle in her body softened with anticipation while the flames in his eyes leapt.

“Shit, an unmated male should not have to endure this,” Brac grumbled, opening the front door. “I’m going to oversee the wood. Try not to get yourself killed by anything in the interim.”

The flames in Jace’s eyes leapt higher as he drew Miri up into the descent of his mouth. His laughter was a sultry burn against her hot cheeks as she perched on tiptoe, straining for the connection he withheld. “I’ll try to find something better to do.”

“Uh-huh.”

The door clicked closed.

Miri didn’t look away, just let her happiness in this moment flow out at him, seeing it catch in the lines that deepened beside his eyes, feeling it reflected back at her tenfold. Feeling how right it was that their energy connected.

He cocked his eyebrow. “They left us the bed.”

She wrapped her fingers in his coat. “So I noticed.”

He leaned in, tipping her off balance. She didn’t even gasp.

His head canted slightly to the side. “Used to be, you’d panic when I did that.”

“Used to be, I thought I’d fall.” She reached up and took his hat off, removing the last shadow from his eyes. She tossed it across the room, where it hit the floor with a soft plop.

His fingers stretched down, pressing into the cheeks of her rear. He shook his head. “You were a very foolish girl to think I’d be responsible for one bruise on this sweet body.”

“Yes, I was.” She ruffled the hair at his nape with her fingers before sliding them into the cool strands, giving him full responsibility for holding her up as, with her other hand, she went to work slipping shirt buttons from their holes. “But I’m a very sensible woman now.”

Arousal spiced the air between them. His energy tugged at hers in little pulses of invitation. A silent
come play with me
she eagerly accepted.

“How sensible?”

The question was gruff. Her response was throaty. “Sensible enough to know we’re not going to make it to the bedroom.”

He laughed and spun them in a slow circle, his lips nibbling at hers as he waltzed her back in gliding steps. “Have I ever mentioned how much I enjoy a sensible woman?”

“No, but feel free to elaborate.” She tugged his shirt free of his pants. His pectoral muscles flexed, and on the next step, thick slabs of resilient power bunched with every move. She pressed her fingernail against one, absorbing the heat from his skin with her touch. Her canines ached as she watched her nail sink the tiniest bit into the hard muscle, marking the tan flesh with a white rim. His whole body jerked.

“Shit.”

She looked up. Jake’s gaze was locked on her mouth with an intensity that sent a shiver down her spine. The skin was tight over his cheekbones and, against her stomach, his cock throbbed with the same rhythm pounding in the hollow of his throat.

She glanced up from beneath her lashes, the filter softening the harshness of his expression. “You want me.”

“’Til the day I die.”

“You’re immortal.”

“Which means good things for you.”

Her heels bumped the mattress. “Oh, yeah? Like what?”

His smile would have done the devil proud, it was so full of hot temptation. She couldn’t look away from the heat in his gaze, the intensity of his emotion. Three tugs on her clothing and cool air hit her abdomen. The razor-sharp edge of the talons that had just done away with the impediment of her shirt skimmed up her belly. With a flick of his finger he sliced through the front of her bra. “Like how much time I’m going to have to learn what pleases this hot little body.”

“Hot?”

The rougher flesh of his palm grazed the underside of her breast.

She didn’t even try to hide the devastating purity of the pleasure that shot through her at the tantalizing touch. She wanted to share everything with him. She needed him to share everything with her.

“Definitely hot.” A knowing edge lifted the right corner of his mouth at her gasp as he rubbed her nipple. “Undo my belt.”

Oh, God! She closed her eyes as a hot rush flowed through her at the order. He did know how to make her feel good. She worked her hand between them, teasing him a bit with the scrape of her nails, his harshly indrawn breath as seductive as his touch. The belt buckle opened, she moved on to his pants. The button gave immediately. The zipper slid slowly, the quiet rasp a staccato beat of anticipation, falling into the rhythm of their heartbeats. When it reached the bottom of its slide Jace stopped breathing altogether, and she took things a step further. Reaching inside, she found his heat and hardness waiting for her. She squeezed. He groaned. His forehead braced against hers as his hips pressed his cock deeper into her grip. “Tease.”

“I learned from the best.”

“So you did.” Satisfaction flared in his gaze. He liked being reminded that she’d given herself to him first.

“No one makes me feel the way you do,” she whispered against the hollow of his throat.

“And how’s that?”

A shift of his weight and they were falling backward. She grabbed for his neck, caught his shoulders instead. They sank slowly to the mattress, rotating as they went, until he was lying flat on his back and she was straddling him.

His grip shifted to her hips. “You were saying?”

“Like the world is made of the hottest fire.” She groaned as his hips pressed up into hers, sending passion soaring through her. “And we’re the center of it.”

In the next second the constriction of her pants was no more. As the thick material slid down her thighs, she licked her lips and mentioned, “I don’t have much of a wardrobe.”

“It’s not a problem.” His hand came behind her neck as he urged her face down. “I like you naked.”

In the middle of a firestorm he created the haven of laughter.

I love you.

The thought stuck in her head, her lips closed helplessly on the silent syllables. Her muscles stiffened with effort to get the words out. His fingers stroked down her nape. “Princess?”

She loved how he said that. Soft, with just the slightest emphasis on the first syllable, as if everything special for him was reflected in the endearment.

She shook her head and levered his cock free. Tears burned her eyes anew as it sprang into her palm, hot and potent. He deserved so much from her. She stroked him softly, trying to tell him through touch what she couldn’t with words.

“Look at me.”

She didn’t have a choice.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“The sight of a man’s appreciation always sets you to crying?”

Appreciation. That was such an old-fashioned way of phrasing it. The smile she forced wobbled at the corners. “No, just yours.”

“Not exactly the reaction a man hopes to inspire.”

“I know.”

She traced the vein on the underside of his shaft with her thumb. He jerked and moaned. If only everything was as easy to control as the passion between them. “I want to explain something to you.”

His gaze dropped to where she was caressing him. “Does it have to be now?”

She could see his point. She couldn’t take her hands from his flesh, nor could she hold the words back, so she shrugged her apology. “Apparently.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw his hands ball into fists.

“Then explain away.”

“While I was with the Sanctuary, I did a lot of things to keep my sanity.” She could tell she had his full attention from the way his mind snapped to a fine focus. “I’d make challenges for myself, impossible goals to keep from screaming in boredom.”

The brush of his fingertips along her nape was more potent than a kiss. Except she wanted a kiss. She bent over, letting her hair fall in a curtain around them, and fit her mouth to his, kissing him with all the tenderness locked up inside. She expected him to take over, to turn it into more. Instead he closed his eyes and held her to him, drinking the moment in, letting her feed her emotions into him the only way she could. When she would have pulled away, he kept her there, murmuring against her lips, “It doesn’t matter, Miri, if you can’t say the words yet. This is enough.”

Yet.
Such a liberating word. Freeing in the expectation that what hindered her was temporary. “Your patience is amazing,” she sighed into his mouth.

His lips twitched against hers in a prelude to a smile. “I keep telling you I’m an amazing man.”

The statement flowed into her, mentally, physically binding them with their shared breath.

“Yes, you are.”

He was amazing in his ability to keep moving forward without faltering, in his ability to hold on to his faith, for her and her daughter. Amazing in his ability to share that faith without making it a burden.

She pulled back. “I just made Faith a promise.”

“What kind of promise?”

The kind she couldn’t break in her heart. The kind that held her together at the memory of the Renegade were putting his big hand over her daughter’s mouth, silencing her cries at being separated from her mother. She relived her daughter’s terror, felt her cries for help, experienced again the devastating guilt at watching little Faith’s cries being smothered and doing nothing to stop it. Because it had been the only way to get her to safety. The only way.

Wrapping her arms around her waist, she squeezed hard, trapping the pain of the memory inside. Oh, God, she needed her daughter in her arms.

Jace caught her face in his hands, tilting it to his. His breath warmed her cheeks. “You’ll get her back, princess. I promise you.”