Beneath a Blood Moon (50 page)

Wendy choked, and after her second snort, she dissolved into a fit of helpless laughter. “What are you doing, Richard?”

“Your daughter looked like she was having so much fun I had to join her.”

“You’re hopeless, Richard,” Desmond grumbled. “I love you both, but get off. I am not a bed for you to romp on.”

“That’s disgusting, Father.” Worming her way out from beneath her mate, Nicolina scrambled up the staircase. She halted partway up as though she wanted to say something, shuddered, and fled.

Snickering, Richard sat up, leaning against my mate’s side. “Sure you don’t want help with him?”

“Go bake my daughter cookies so she doesn’t kill us all. I’d like to avoid leaving any bullet holes in Sanders’s lodge because we annoyed her too much.”

“If you’re sure,” he said, rising to follow his mate up the stairs. “Howl if you need me.”

“Will you need me?” The other woman asked, and I realized she was likely Amber, Nicolina’s witch.

“We should be fine. Go pretend you’re helping them in the kitchen if you want. Steal a cookie for me so I get at least one.”

After Amber squeezed her way by my mate instead of crawling over him, Desmond sighed. “Okay, Sara. This is probably going to be a really unpleasant change for him. You panicking while he’s fighting his way through it would not be good. He’ll be fine, but it’s going to hurt like hell, he’ll probably bleed all over the place, and when he’s done, don’t be alarmed if he passes out. All I need you to do is keep still. He’ll probably fixate on you through the whole thing.”

“Okay.”

“Ready?”

I wasn’t, but I nodded anyway.

It took my mate far too long to transition from wolf to man, and as Desmond had warned, the process involved a lot of blood, most of which ended up on me. When it was over, Sanders slumped on top of me, his breathing ragged and uneven.

“Two hours and twenty minutes,” Wendy reported. “You’re almost as bad as Richard, Sanders.”

“Ouch,” my mate groaned.

“Immediate use of English. I’m impressed,” Desmond said, shifting his weight beneath me, and with a grunt, he pushed me upright. I scrambled to secure a hold on Sanders, holding him close to me. “I’ll have Richard bring clothes for you. I have no idea what you’re going to wear, Sara.”

“Upstairs,” Sanders croaked. “Spares.”

“I’ll go look,” Desmond said, extricating himself from beneath me, easing me against the wall. H headed up the stairs and paused at the top. “Will you be okay with them, Wendy?”

“You ask me
after
you leave? Yes, I’ll be fine with the puppies.”

I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall, relieved when my mate shifted his weight off me, sitting beside me instead of on me. “Hi.”

“Hello, yourself,” Sanders replied, his breath leaving him in a heavy sigh. He rested his head on my shoulder. “Ouch.”

“You’ll live,” Wendy said, sitting at our feet. “How much do you remember, Sanders?”

“Bits and pieces. More bits than pieces,” he admitted in a grumble.

“You, Sara?”

“I remember.” I paused, wondering how much to tell Wendy, decided it didn’t matter either way, and started from the beginning. “Sanders and I were talking in the limousine. There was a bang, loud enough I couldn’t hear anything for a while. The driver turned around and shot him with a dart. It pissed me off, so I choked him. When I tried to get out of the limo, someone was waiting for us. I shot him with the driver’s dart gun,” I reported, flexing my hand as the memories roused my anger. “There was another car, but I dragged Sanders into the water and left.”

“That explains why your phone died, Sanders. It wasn’t meant to go swimming. We found yours with the limousine, Sara,” Wendy said. “What happened next?”

“I changed into my wolf to keep him warm because he wasn’t waking up. I dozed off, and when I woke up, Sanders was a wolf. He wanted to go west, so we went west.”

“We managed to catch your trail near the Mississippi, and we would have had you both if that idiot witch hadn’t put you on a leash like he did, Sara. Why did you run?”

“Stranger danger,” I muttered, remembering my mate’s flight or fight response. “Sorry.”

“I can’t say I blame you. Sanders, you managed to break several of Charles’s ribs when you crashed over him. You hit him at full throttle. He was furious for days over losing your trail, too.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault, especially considering you were drugged when you went wild. I’m just glad you’re both safe.”

“Where are we, anyway?” Sanders mumbled. It was then I realized my mate’s eyes were unfocused and glazed.

“Your lodge in Snoqualmie. You were headed in this direction when Richard and Nicolina took you down. You broke my daughter’s wrist, so you better apologize to her
after
you’ve been fed.” Wendy smiled, which softened her rebuke.

“I don’t remember any of that,” he confessed. “How the hell did we get here?”

“You walked, Sanders. It’s been a full month since you left New York.”

“A month,” my mate echoed.

“You made damned good time, too. I still don’t have any idea how Richard and Nicolina found you.”

“Dumb luck,” Richard said, coming down the stairs with a bag in one hand and a pile of folded clothes in the other. “By the way, you have a wolf-shaped dent in the front of your SUV. I clipped him when he ran out in front of me. That’s actually how Nicolina broke her wrist. It was during the accident, not the actual scuffle.”

“You hit Sanders with my Mercedes?” Wendy growled.

“It’s
not
my fault. He jumped out in front of me, and I had nowhere to swerve. Be glad I only clipped him. Hitting him head-on would be like hitting a moose. Anyway, I managed to change while he was stunned from the impact. While he was tussling with me, Nicolina gave us both a jolt. She claims hitting me was an accident. By the time I came to, she had wrestled both of us into the SUV and had Sanders wrapped up like a Christmas turkey. At least I got to ride in the front seat without her tying me up.” Setting the bag and pile of clothes down, he crouched beside me. “Better, Sanders?”

“You hit me with Desmond’s SUV? Do you have a death wish?” my mate demanded, reaching for the bag. “Clothes?”

“Shower first,” Richard replied. “Since my cookie-making duties are over, I’m the poor bastard who gets to make sure you don’t drown. Wendy, Desmond asked me to beg you to take care of Sara. Once you’re both cleaned up and dressed, Nicolina should have dinner ready. I think she’s cooking everything you have in the freezer and pantry, Sanders.”

“Full bath is upstairs, Wendy,” my mate said. “There’s a shower down here I’ll use.”

“Come on, Sara.” Taking hold of my arm, Wendy hauled me to my feet, secured the blanket around me, grabbed the pile of folded clothes, and herded me up the stairs.

While I had no memory of eating dinner or going to bed, when I woke up, light streamed in through the window, and my mate was sprawled beside me, his nose pressed to the side of my neck. His slow, steady breaths tickled. The low murmur of conversation kept me from drifting back to sleep. Grumbling, I rolled to get up. Sanders hooked his arm around me and pulled me to him.

“Go back to sleep,” he murmured.

“We should get up.” My stomach agreed, growling its complaints at being empty. “Breakfast.”

“Lunch,” Desmond called from somewhere nearby.

“Stalker,” my mate grumbled.

“Think he’d taste good if we grilled him?” I pondered out loud, prying my way out of Sanders’s embrace.

“It’s winter. We don’t grill in winter. Grilling in winter is cold work.”

An oversized t-shirt and a pair of boxers served as pajamas, and after a moment of consideration, I decided I was going to have to make drastic changes to my sleepwear. While I ached, stretching worked out most of the kinks. Sanders sighed. The bright amber of his eyes reassured me, and smiling at him, I leaned over the bed to kiss him. “So we can’t grill him?”

“You may not,” Desmond answered.

Sanders rolled out of bed, and not caring he was only wearing a pair of boxers, he wandered into the other room, pausing in the doorway to say, “Too much work. He’d put up a fight. I bet he’s stringy, too.”

“Good afternoon, Sanders. How are you feeling?”

“You keep interrupting these nice dreams where I’m cuddling with my mate and I don’t have to get out of bed. Stop it.”

“They’re not dreams if you’re awake when they happen,” Desmond replied. “Be serious. How are you feeling?”

“I’m not twitching anymore. I think your daughter hates me.”

“I do not. Maybe if you weren’t so stubborn, I wouldn’t have had to shock you,” Nicolina replied. “There are leftovers in the fridge if you’re hungry.”

I followed after my mate to find Desmond, Wendy, Richard, and Nicolina sitting on the stairs to the ground floor. Yawning, I leaned against Sanders’s back. My mate chuckled, reached behind him to take my hands, and wrapped my arms his waist.

“It’s nice to see you, Nicolina. It’s been a while.”

Desmond’s daughter flashed my mate a bright smile, and she bounced to her feet, standing on her toes and hopping to kiss him on the cheek. “We were worried. Thanks for coming home.”

“See, Charles, she’s a perfectly affectionate girl when she wants to be. Maybe if you’d stop taunting her and her mate, she wouldn’t try to shoot you every visit,” Wendy said.

I recognized an old argument when I saw it and watched with interest. Nicolina scowled in her mother’s direction.

With his scent sweetening from his pleasure and amusement, my mate propped his elbow on the top of Nicolina’s head. “You’re still perfect armrest height, girl. Haven’t figured out a way to add inches yet?”

She stomped her foot, ducking out from beneath his arm. “Jerk.”

“You make it so easy,” he replied. “Sorry for dragging you all the way down from Yellowknife. Where you two are, surely Alex is not far behind?”

Richard chuckled. “Alex is holding down the fort. Frank, however, is flopped on the couch downstairs. He’s not talking to me because I hit you with Desmond’s SUV.”

“I’m not talking to you because you hit him with my SUV,” Desmond growled. “You busted out a headlight and crunched my radiator. Can’t you limit your destruction of vehicles to your own? I’m still amazed you managed to get it back to the lodge before it went into its final death throes. I
like
that SUV.”

“I was not driving,” Nicolina stated, sniffling.

Confused, I tugged on my mate. “What are they talking about?”

Laughing, my mate turned in my arms, tilted my chin up, and kissed me. “Nicolina crashes things. So far, she’s totalled three Porsches, several snowmobiles, a plane—”

“The plane was
not
my fault!”

“—two bicycles, a truck, a motorcycle, a helicopter, and don’t ask me how she did it, but she wrecked a boat on dry land. I’m amazed you let her drive anything at all, Richard.”

“She just needs to be near the vehicle. I’m still working out a way to stop her from going anywhere near moving objects. It’s a challenge.”

“Don’t give her new Porsches to crash,” Desmond suggested.

“She’d just buy her own. Perhaps I enjoy how pretty she is when I give her the keys to her very own death trap.” Smiling at his mate, Richard got to his feet. “I like her just as she is. I’m not giving her back, sorry.”

“Mutt.” While Desmond’s tone was gruff, amusement laced his scent. “You still crashed
my
SUV with
my
daughter in it. Prepare yourself, Puppy.”

“No beating my mate, Father,” Nicolina grumbled. “Leave him alone. I don’t want to have to patch Sanders’s walls because you need put in your place again.”

“Please limit the gunfire to your own homes. Is there a reason you all are camped out on the stairs?” Sanders asked, freeing himself from my hold to head downstairs. “There’s an entire sitting room downstairs. And don’t feed me any crap about Frank being asleep on the couch. He’s probably on the couch to avoid your bickering. Frank!”

“Hey, Sanders,” a man called out from somewhere downstairs. “They haven’t killed you yet?”

“I’m sure it’s an oversight, Frank,” my mate quipped, disappearing from sight.

I leaned over the banister in my effort to figure out where Sanders had gone. “Who’s Frank?”