Stalking the Pharmacist (15 page)

Ash swallowed the lump that rose. Why had
she been so afraid of these men? They were obviously kind and loving; she’d
seen it at their wedding.

“Thanks, Tyler.”

She took the bottle of apple juice with two
hands, opened it, and poured some into a glass without spilling any. Which was
impressive, considering the amount of shaking her hands were doing.

Laura placed a bowl of hot food in front of
her and she picked up the fork and ate automatically. The chicken had a
beautiful honey soy marinade on it, and Ash ate most of it without lifting her
head. Once her tummy was happy, she looked up to see her cousin staring at her
with those assessing green eyes of hers.

“What?”

Laura burst out laughing,
then
slapped her hand on the table.

“What? What do you mean
‘
what
’
! What the
fuck happened?”

Ash couldn’t help it. She burst out
laughing. “Did you just…” She put a hand over her mouth and another over her
stomach as she let the happy ripples fill her body.

Had her very proper cousin, the talented
Dr.
Laura, just said “fuck”?

Laura grinned at her, her understanding
obvious.

“Yeah well, some situations call for it.”

Ashleigh giggled for a while longer, but
finally the hysteria dissipated and she wiped away the tears that had gathered.

“That was just too funny.”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t change the topic. What
happened since our wedding? The last thing I knew, Jack and Scott were sniffing
around you, looking very much like another perfect pair that had found their
mate, and now you’re here in tears. I’m guessing that would be
’
coz you saw them in lion form, yeah?”

Laura’s summation was like a bucket of cold
water, sobering her instantly.

“How did you… Yeah, that’s about right.”

The men moved, slowly, as though she’d bolt
like a frightened animal, and pulled up stools next to Laura at the kitchen
bench.

Brandon spoke
first,
his muscles a little too like Jack’s for Ash’s mental health. God, she missed
him already. “They obviously screwed it up. Even Laura didn’t bolt the first
time she saw us.”

Ash huffed out a little laugh. “Yeah, well,
I’m sure she had some warning! I knew something unusual had to be up with the
whole perfect pair thing, but animals!
For goodness
’
sake!”

Tyler poured more juice into her empty
glass and smiled kindly.

“What happened, exactly? Can you start from
after the wedding?”

Ash sighed and let her shoulders sag. She
didn’t really want to regale them with the whole scenario, but she had come
here for help.

“Well, Jack took me home after the wedding
and pretty much told me I’m their chosen mate and—oh shit! Now that makes
sense, I never got the whole
mate
thing, weird word to use…anyway. We spent some time together and despite all my
hang-ups about men, Jack somehow managed to convince me pretty much
straightaway that we were perfect together.”

It all seemed so stupid now.

Laura smiled at her and glanced at both her
men. “Of course he did, because you are, honey. Did you get the electrical zap
thing when you touched them?”

“How did you…?” Ash glanced between the
trio
and shrugged.
“Of course.
It’s
one of the signs, isn’t it?”

Laura nodded with a big smile on her pretty
face. “Yes, as well as feeling completely safe and happy while you’re with
them. Their personalities match every list you ever made about your perfect
man, don’t they?”

Ash smiled a little, stinging hot tears
gathering in her eyes. “Yeah, they do. I always knew you couldn’t get a guy
that was relaxed, yet serious, smart and crass, super funny and super
intelligent.”

The men around Laura laughed and high-fived
behind their wife’s back. Brandon puffed up his chest as he spoke. “Did she
just describe us as her perfect man?”

Ash shook her head at Laura’s pair while
her cousin got covered in kisses.

“Stop, both of you. We need to fix this.”

Laura fixed her with a stare. “What’s the
actual problem? I know it’s freaky, but it’s just a genetic thing, like having
blue eyes. They have full control over everything and they’d never hurt you.”

Ash wasn’t so sure about that teenage daughter
of Scott’s, but really, she was the least of her worries. Ash looked away and
down, picking at her nails and trying hard to focus on something that she
actually understood.

“Ashleigh!”

“What?” She looked up to see that her
cousin was now glaring at her. “I don’t know, Laura, I don’t. Number one, it
isn’t just freaky. It’s bloody, amazingly, out of this world. I’m still trying
to wrap my head around it.”

Tyler sat forward a bit. “What did Jack and
Scott say?”

Ash shrugged. “I haven’t spoken to them. Scott
and his daughter ran into the kitchen and started fighting,
then
all three of them transformed into snarling cats and ran out of the house. I
haven’t spoken to them about it.”

“So you haven’t even talked to them about
all this. Shit, no wonder you ran.”

Brandon
tsked
loudly. “Well, Laura pretty much summed it up. We’re born with the ability to
shift at any time, and it kicks in around puberty. Our whole family does it.
You can’t catch it. We have full control in our animal form and would
definitely not harm anyone, especially not our mate.”

Ash’s head had begun to ache again and her
brain was definitely overloaded. “I think I might go lie down again.”

She slid off the seat, a weird sort of
numbness slipping over her. “Is that okay?”

Laura jumped off her chair and walked back
around the bench, taking Ash’s hand in her own.

“Of course it is. Let’s go.”

They walked along the long hallway once
more and Ash made her way to the bed, climbing onto the comfortable mattress
and pulling up the blankets. Her eyes were heavy and everything was too hard at
the moment. She needed sleep. Everything would make more sense in the morning.
She hoped.

“You know they love you already, Ash. No
matter what else is going through your head, you need to know that those men
would have fallen in love with you from the moment you touched. Nothing will
keep them from working everything out with you.”

Ash forced her lids open for a moment,
feeling the hot tears gather at the back of her eyes.

“I’m not sure I want to work things out, Laura.
The shifting thing is scary, but you can obviously overcome it. There’s more to
it than that.” She took a steadying breath and spoke the words she’d been
terrified to even think about. “Scott’s so broken, and his daughter was just
horrible. I don’t know if I can join a family with so much pain already in it.”

Her voice caught on the words as she voiced
one of her biggest fears. Taking on a man who already had children had always
been something Ash swore she’d never do. Let alone two men, both with children
to other women. She’d already escaped a bad marriage and poisonous environment;
she didn’t want to join another one.

“I’m sure there’s a way for you all to work
things out, Ash. Please don’t give up on them. These men are
a
dream come
true. You have no idea.”

Ash let her eyes drop down, shutting out
the light and her optimistic cousin.

“Night, Laura.”

Chapter Eleven

Jack banged on the glass door to Scott’s
laboratory, again. He wasn’t going away until his brother let him in. They
needed to sort out this bloody mess as soon as possible.

Scott’s annoyed face finally surfaced
behind the glass, and the door swung open.

“What are you doing here?”

Jack glared at his twin. “We need to talk.”

Scott groaned and turned away, marching
back across the sterile environment of stainless steel, white floors, and
microscopes.

Jack let the door close and walked behind
Scott, who quickly sat back at his work station and ignored him.

“Guess who I ran into today?” Jack asked
his twin, leaning back against the stainless steel bench.

“Who?”
Scott asked, not even bothering to look up
from his microscope.

“Kane and Reid.
They’re on some sort of extended holiday.
Catching up with the family or something.”

Scott went unnaturally still, his hand that
had been rotating the knobs on the lens now completely frozen.

Jack continued, his heart still aching
strangely from the conversation he’d had with the perfect pair from his
father’s side. “Did you know Kellie died last year?”

He hadn’t known. Kane and Reid were second
or third cousins, and rarely talked about. Not that Jack would have listened
anyway. He’d always been insanely jealous of any perfect pair that had managed
to find their mate.

Scott sighed and straightened up,
swiveling
on his stool and facing Jack.

“Yeah, I did. I can’t believe they’re back
in town, though. I thought…”

Scott looked away, his face pale in the
stark light.

“You thought what?” Jack asked, crossing
his arms over his chest. His brother was acting even weirder than usual.

Scott coughed and cleared his throat,
finally looking back at Jack with a pained expression.

“Didn’t you ever listen when we were
younger? This is one of the main reasons I never wanted to find our mate.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Perfect pairs who are mated are linked.”

“Yeah…and?”

Jack tapped his foot against the linoleum
floor and bit his tongue against the need to scream. Getting words out of his
twin was literally like pulling teeth sometimes.

“When one of them dies, especially the
woman…the perfect pair
die
too.”

“What! How did I not know about that?”

Scott shrugged. “It’s not really talked
about because most families die late in life and are happy to perish together
anyway.”

Jack swallowed, the life they’d led without
their mate suddenly seeming like an all right alternative now.

He shook his head. Nope, he’d give anything
to feel that connection just once.

“Okay, so what’s your point? And don’t give
me any shit about not wanting to love Ash because of this. You’ve been living
like a fucking corpse for twenty years now.”

Scott swallowed hard, his
adam’s
apple bobbing up and down.

“I know. Trust me, I know.”

“Good.” Jack grunted and nodded.

“My point is
,
it’s
been over a year for Kane and Reid. The longest any perfect pair has lasted was
twelve months, absolute maximum.”

Jack shrugged, still not understanding the
point of this conversation.

“Ah well, they’re only,
what…thirty-something?”

Scott’s eyes flickered a little. “Yeah,
thirty-eight I think.”

Jack let his arms drop and he stood up
straighter. “Well maybe they made a mistake or something. I don’t know. Anyway,
they’re down and they want to catch up, but we have bigger things to deal with
at the moment. How are we going to get Ash back?”

Scott growled at him, the sound strangled
and borderline menacing. Jack rumbled back, his lion baring its teeth within
him.

“Just go away, Jack. The romance is over.”

Not
by a long shot.

“No fucking way is it over, you bloody
fool! Get up off your ass and come with me to Brandon and Tyler’s place.”

After their fruitless night before, he’d
taken the day off, unlike his brother, and made some phone calls. He knew where
she was, but they needed a plan of attack to get her back.

Scott stood up with
stealthlike
slowness, and Jack took a step back and pivoted on his toes as though readying
himself for a fight. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t sure what his
brother was going to do.

“We had our night with her, and it’s done,
Jack. Why can’t you just let it be?”

Jack relaxed his posture and let his mouth
drop open in shock. Then the anger set in.

“Let it be?
Let it be
!” Jack slammed his clenched fist on the metal table and
jerked when he heard glass shatter nearby. He didn’t give a shit whatever it
was that he’d just broken.

“We have been missing a piece of us for
forty fucking years. We finally found her, and you want to just let her go?
Didn’t you feel anything Saturday night?”

Scott blinked a few times,
then
looked away, his voice cracking when he spoke.