The Alpha's Desire 2 (13 page)

Chapter Twelve

The scent of greasy cheese and spicy tomato sauce roused me first. Vivian dropped three large boxes on the coffee table, having to push aside paper plates and coffee shop cups to do so. The two guys, having ended their conversations minutes before, though I hadn’t opened back up my eyes, dug into the boxes.

“We’ll eat and then relieve Sam and Dirk from the door so they can eat,” one of them said to Vivian.

She only nodded before turning to me. “You want some?”

I shook my head, “Not yet. I need to see him first, to see him healed, to settle my stomach.”

“Well then, ask and you shall receive, my love,” Lex said, his voice full as I turned to see him walk in the door.

“Lex,” I got out as my shaking legs flew to him.

He wrapped me in a huge hug, regardless of anyone else in the room, and I let him, sinking into his arms, letting my head fall to his chest. I inhaled his spicy scent that mingled with my vanilla soap. My fingers gripped his shirt as they pressed into the muscles of his chest. Hearing his voice, touching his body, taking in his scent, and seeing him healed... all I needed was to taste him to be whole in this moment.

As if he’d read my mind, he tilted up my chin and placed a light, but full, kiss on my lips. When he pulled away, in response to my wide eyes, he stated, matter-of-factly, “They already know about us, remember?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t mean it’s okay to flaunt it,” I teased, my face burning red, feeling all eyes on me.

“Ah, pizza,” Lex exclaimed, as he moved us to the boxes. He pulled out a piece, cheese hanging in strings, and lifted it to my lips for the first bite.

I took a nibble, but then chewed slowly, willing myself to swallow and keep the tiny morsel down afterward, shaking my head against another immediate bite. Aware they all watched me, still, I kept my eyes on Lex. I needed to prove to my addled brain that he lived and breathed here beside me.

After taking a huge bite of the slice himself and winking at me, he asked in a low voice of the others, “So where are things at? And, I can’t thank you enough for saving my hide, and coming to Christina’s rescue, although unlike me, she seemed to be doing fine on her own.”

Words erupted simultaneously, those like him reprimanding him that it takes a pack sometimes, correcting him that he’d fought with all he had, exclaiming they wanted to hear about my powers, and so on.

Lex only shook his head, a slow smile building on his face. “I couldn’t do this life without you.”

“Nor we without you,” Riker shot back, punching Lex in the arm.

“Nice,” Lex laughed now. “Come on, what is going on?”

“You tell us first,” a voice said from the hallway.

The two men on guard filled the door. Vivian moved to give them each a piece of pizza.

“Okay. Well, this guy in a black suit showed up flanked by several wolves. Six. He took some time talking shit to Christina before he let his wolves attack me. Though, they didn’t want me dead. They toyed with me until I was too weak to fight for her. He spoke of revenge, of making me watch him take her.” He stopped as a low growl filled his chest.

Shaking it off, he continued. “Looks like the plan was to take us both. He said they have a sorcerer that will make Christina their savior, and they only intended to take me for revenge. He tried to attack Christina, but she literally blasted him with a blinding flash of light that set him flying from her, a good few feet. That about covers it.”

“It sounds a common story, well, at least on their part. However, no other charge used magic against them. In almost all cases, the charge was protected once back-up arrived. Sadly, not all back-up arrived in time,” one of the guys in the room who had been on the phone when I arrived filled us all in. “We lost a few today to their pack, an unprecedented event. We took out a hell of a lot more, but who knows what their plans are, attacks on top of attacks. And, the guy in the suit you spoke of here, he got away. We tracked him as far as we could, but eventually lost the scent, as if it disappeared by some sort of magic.”

“Shit,” Lex grumbled. “Guess we need to count our lucky stars, Christina.”

I nodded, still processing all that had been said.

“So, where does that leave us now?” Lex asked, his voice tight, his apprehension tightening my own.

For a minute, I didn’t think the pizza would stay down, especially when Lex pushed his half-eaten piece at me again.

“Well, with the other pack, we’re still clueless as to what is next and when this will all end. They have to be off licking their wounds after all their losses today. But, with talk of a sorcerer, who knows for how long? As far as you two,” the man said, and grinned, “well, the Royals want to meet her, and they still don’t even know that she used magic to protect herself today. Just the fact that the two of you being together as you have been has produced some kind of resurgence of the magic that should have remained weak and dormant within her...it has made them want to evaluate and try to train her.”

“Really?” I squeaked. The idea of meeting these Royals, family, got to me as much as being trained to use magic, something I wouldn’t have dreamed actually existed outside of books just a few days ago. Of course, I hadn’t believed a love like I now felt for Lex existed either, at least not for me.

“Really,” he continued. “And, as news in your favor, they want Lex at your side, as they believe that your connection, your feelings for each other, have to have something to do with all of it.”

I turned to smile at him. All of the residual fall-out from the bad crap that had happened to us in the past hours drained from me as my smile grew to the point of making my cheeks ache.

“They aren’t going to separate us,” I said, tears welling up in my eyes, in a way that I welcomed this time.

As I hugged Lex, I saw Vivian smiling at me. My heart leapt with knowing that a family member, no matter how distant, even if one of the created, was happy for me.

“You said you are family?” I asked her over Lex’s shoulder.

As he pulled back to look at Vivian, too, she answered. “Yes, I am. I am actually one of the Royals, one of your distant relatives with magic, who was granted my ability to turn into a werewolf a few hundred years back. I’m one of the few of them that like to still get my hands dirty, but this time, I just couldn’t wait to meet you.”

She reached out her hand to grab and squeeze mine. A plethora of sparks flew from us as she grasped my hand tight, and wouldn’t let me pull away.

“What the…” Riker and Lex bellowed in unison.

As I watched the sparks die down to a swirl of power, the light that emanated from our point of connection started to swirl around our bodies. The light created wind that lifted my hair. A sound like thunder cracked in the room, and I ducked, then smiled, realizing that she’d done that.

“Duck, everyone,” she giggled, and then to me said, “just let it go. Help me push it away from us.”

I did as she asked, though I wasn’t one hundred percent sure how. I pushed like I had when suit guy had threatened me. With another claps of thunder, the noise rolled, even as the light moved from us, formed a literal tornado in the room. Everyone held steady as it moved from us, gathering up all the crap in the room with it as it went, before breaking through the sliding glass door, shattering the glass into tiny shards that finally fell like rain to the balcony once the tornado moved on.

“Place needed cleaned up anyway,” Vivian joked. “Just wanted to test you out for myself.”

“How come that didn’t happen before when you touched me?”

“It wasn’t the right time to do that to you, to let my magic move with yours. I seriously felt it, though. I couldn’t wait to give something like that a try.” She paused, looking around her at the mix of frowning and astonished faces. “What? Cleaners are coming anyway.”

After a shaking of heads, someone griped about the loss of the pizza and walked out claiming they’d get more. As the guy left, one from the hallway added for him to grab some ice cream from the little store down the street, as well. A growl and a grunt later, the guy was gone.

The next hour passed in friendly chatting and gorging on more food. I took the handful of bites I could manage. Mostly, I indulged in those around me, some blood, some magically created, but all family. I hadn’t had such a thing in over a decade myself. We’d lost touch with extended family in the years after my mother died, when they’d one by one given up on my father, and thus the hard-headed girl I’d grown to be.

“You better eat up,” Vivian stated to me. “You will need your strength tomorrow.”

“For what?” I asked.

“To meet the Royals. They don’t wait. We’ll all crash in various apartments here tonight. No one is getting a call to come back until the cleaners are done. So, you two can catch some sleep, but then we leave early in the morning. You should be excited instead of fearful, Christina. What we did together tonight is nothing like what you will be able to achieve under their direction.”

After twenty minutes of working out the logistics of the night, followed by goodbyes, Lex took me to our assigned apartment for the night. A giant sleeping bag had been handed to us as we left. These people thought of everything, though I was sure this wasn’t their first time having to sleep wherever their duties had taken them.

I’d gotten a glimpse of the cleaners moving in and out of my apartment as Lex drug me to another. After he placed the bag over the bed there, he pulled me under the thick cover of it, to him.

“How can I possibly be expected to sleep?” I hissed through a giggle as he snuggled my body into his. “After all that has happened? Knowing what will happen, or more, knowing the gist of it but having no real idea how it will go? Really, I’m supposed to sleep? Sounds like I’m going on the trip of a lifetime instead of into work tomorrow. Work! I’m going to lose my job!”

“Seriously, you are worried about that job that you hate?” he teased, his hands moving over my body as his chest rumbled his appreciation, his approval, as well as his need.

“Well, I need to make a living, don’t I?”

“Christina,” he said, sitting up until his face towered over mine. “You are Royal. You are going to go live with the Royals to be trained. You will never need a job again. They live in a mansion, a practical castle, on an island all its own. You will want for nothing, and get more than you can possibly imagine. And, that is just stuff, not to mention the training and how you will learn about the bloodline you come from.”

“Family. I can’t get over it. I went from an orphan, a loner with one good friend, to having a man I love more than I can say and a family bigger than I know.”

“I know. I’m so happy for you. And, I love feeling yours.”

“Crap, what about Chloe? I’m surprised she hasn’t called or shown up here.”

“Oh, right. Actually, Riker said she did when we chatted in the bathroom. He didn’t know who she was, but he asked to see if she was a problem. He said that, with your phone destroyed in the first attack, they’d checked into your calls at the time. A general precaution in learning about you. When Chloe had not gotten an answer, she did try to show up here. But, the other pack had men stationed outside to inform any visitors of the gas leak, I think it was, or whatever lie they’d concocted. She was told you had been relocated, and to go home.”

“Wow, she has to be so pissed at me. But, even when I can call her, what am I going to say?”

“You are going to tell her a version of the truth, that I swept you away to an exotic land. Tell her that you will see her soon.”

“Will I see her soon?”

“Well, maybe not soon, but yes, if you want to come back to visit her, at some point I’m sure that will be possible. Eventually, you will have to tell her that you are moving away.”

“I’m moving away? Permanently?” The whirl of my thoughts greyed my vison. I swayed even with my head resting on a pillow.