Hard As Steele (A BBW Paranormal Romance) (Timber Valley Pack) (8 page)

             
She nodded. “I get that. I understand why you’d need to keep your existence hidden, but Steele, if you’d just told me that, I would have never said a word to anybody.” Her face fell, and she looked hurt. “You said that you loved me. If you’d asked me to come here with you…”

             
Anguish clenched at his heart. “I want that more than anything else in the world.  I fell for you the minute I laid eyes on you, and I wasn’t lying about that. I haven’t been with another woman since I left you, not even on a coffee date.”

             
“So why…” her voice trailed off, and she looked woebegone.

             
“Our people have a Covenant. It’s the book of rules that we live by, and to violate those rules is punishable by death.  One of the most important rules of all is that shifters never reveal their existence to humans. Another is that we never mate with humans.”

             
She glanced up at him, biting her lip, and said nothing. 

“The feelings and desire of one shifter are not as important as the safety of our species. We can’t enforce the rules for one person and then not enforce it for everybody.”

              “I see.” The hurt expression still pinched her face. It made him feel physically ill to know that he’d hurt her. “Who was that man who erased my memory?”

             
“He was what we call a shaman. Every pack has at least one.  They’re men who are born with special abilities, and they can make humans forget. We believe it evolved as a defense mechanism that allowed our race to survive, like a chameleon’s ability to change color to blend into their environment.”

             
“What went wrong?” Roxanne asked. “Sometimes I can remember, sometimes I can’t, and I also seem to be remembering things that never happened. Is it possible that my head injury somehow interfered with what he did?”

             
“I aim to find out what went wrong,” Steele said. “Unfortunately, our shaman, Cody, is not in the country right now.  He’s at an annual worldwide meeting of shamans, in Europe.  He’s literally the best that I know of, in the entire country, and there’s no-one else that I know of that I’d trust to take a look at you. I’m going to call him and see how quickly he can get back here.”

             
She looked around the room, her expression bewildered. “Have you ever heard of something like this happening before?”

             
“No, I haven’t.  Let’s go over what happened after you got back home.”

             
“Well, my friend Katherine dragged me to the doctor’s office because she was worried about the fact that I couldn’t remember the entire weekend.  He seemed to think I was fine. I went back to work at the diner, I got a new car because my old one was trashed…” she frowned in concentration. “Then I started having these weird memory flashbacks, remembering being at that cabin with you.  I also started having bouts of amnesia where I’d forget several days at a time. I’d suddenly be standing on a street corner and have no idea how I got there, or I’d be working at the diner and the next thing I knew I’d wake up in my bed and not remember how I got there.”

             
She let out a bitter laugh. A thick lock of hair fell into her face, covering her eye, but she didn’t move, just sat there clenching her fists. “I may forget that you and I had this conversation. I may forget all of this again. That would be the best thing for you, wouldn’t it?”

             
Steele reached out and brushed her hair back out of her face, letting his fingers trail over the silky softness.

             
“There’s no good solution here,” he said. “I don’t want you to forget me. But I swear, Cody can fix whatever’s wrong with you. He’s a miracle worker.”

             
“The car that I drove here…I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know why I didn’t just drive my own car,” she said.

             
“I’ll have my deputy run the plates on it and find out who it belongs to. That may give us some answers.”

             
“How do you run plates through the system if nobody knows that you exist?” she asked.

             
“We can tap into human computer systems undetected. We’re pretty tech savvy when we need to be,” he said.

             
“Did you really pull the door off my car when I got in the car accident?” she asked.

             
“Yes. We’re physically much stronger than humans. That’s one of the many reasons that humans would feel so threatened by us,” Steele said.

             
He leaned forward. “What made you come here today, in particular?  Try to think back.  You drove here, so you would have left yesterday. Do you remember walking to your car?”

             
Her brow furrowed in thought. “I was at my apartment, packing some clothes in a bag. Everything was so dusty…I don’t know why it was so dusty. I kept sneezing. Then…” she looked down at the purse sitting next to her. “That’s not my purse.” She dumped it out and pulled out a wallet.  She opened it. There was a picture of a woman in there; the woman wasn’t her. “I don’t know who this is. It isn’t anyone that I know, and I know everyone in Lonesome Pine. This person has an address in Wyoming.”

             
Steele grabbed the wallet. “I’ll run a check on it and see where you might have gotten this from.”

             
“So, am I free to leave, then?” she asked.

             
He shook his head regretfully. “No.  I need to figure out what’s going on first.”

             
“You’re telling me I’m a prisoner in your house?” Her eyes widened in astonishment.

             
“I’d really prefer that you think of it as being my guest.”

             
She glared at him. “Guests are allowed to leave.”

             
Steele felt anguish tearing through him.  She was looking at him as if he were a monster now. He’d thought that the worst thing in the world was falling in love with her over the course of one beautiful, perfect weekend and then being forced to have her memory erased, but he was wrong. Even worse was having her know what he was, and hating him.

             
“I have no choice.” He recited the words woodenly.  It was the truth, but it didn’t help at all.

             
He held out his hand. “I need your cell phone. I’ll give it back to you when you leave here. I can promise you that nobody will hurt you, Roxanne.”

             
“No, they’ll just mess with my mind and possibly I’ll come out even worse.” She glared at him. “Has it occurred to you that maybe there’s something about me that just won’t let my mind be erased? What then?”

             
“That won’t happen. Cody will fix this.” He prayed that was true. There had never been an instance of a human whose mind was completely resistant to erasing, but if it happened, what then? He had a feeling that he knew what the shifter edict would be. The preservation of the shifter race was the highest priority. They’d want her eliminated.

             
What would he do if it came to that? His only choice would be to go on the run with her to protect her, or let her be killed.

             
That second possibility made his hackles rise, and he had to fight to keep his inner wolf down.  He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t let anyone hurt her.

             
God help him, what a hopeless dilemma.

             
She pulled her cell phone from her purse and rather than hand it to him, slammed it on the oak floor. It shattered into pieces.

             
“Show me to my room, or rather, my cell,” she snapped. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

             
“Roxanne-” he saw the look on her face. It was hopeless. “Fine. Are you hungry?”

             
“No,” she bit out.  He led her down the hallway to his guest bedroom.

             
She walked in and slammed the door shut.  He felt that slam reverberating through his body.  He stood there for a long moment, wanting to call out to her, to say something that would fix all of this, but there was nothing.

             
So he went back to the kitchen, scooped up the pieces of the broken phone, and then made a phone call to the Silver Forest pack in Montana, the ones who had sent the shaman to erase Roxanne’s memory.

             
He was put on hold for a minute, and then they connected him to the Alpha, a man named Cullen.

             
“This is Steele Battle, of Timber Valley,” he said. “When I was in your area a year ago from this past June, I called on your shaman to erase a human’s memory.”

             
“Yes?” the Alpha growled. His tone was defensive and unfriendly, and Steele felt his hackles rising. 

             
“There are problems arising.  What’s the story with this shaman? Is he competent?”

             
“Are you questioning the abilities of my pack shaman?” the Alpha snarled.   The fact that he was already on the defensive set up a million red flags for Steele.

             
He felt fur rippling under his skin, and his fangs briefly descended. He forced them back in; he needed to be able to talk.

             
“God damn straight I am,” he said. “I’ll come out there and say it to your face if you like.”

             
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone. Steele was an Alpha too, and he’d partaken in several Death Challenges. He had the scars to prove it. He had chosen not to have a pack, but like most Alphas, he was a born leader and had become sheriff of Timber Valley because of it.

             
He was a large, imposing man, and his wolf was nothing to be trifled with.

             
The silence on the other end of the line stretched and stretched.

             
“Are you still there, or did you decide to run away?” he snapped.

             
“Those are Death Challenge words.” Cullen’s voice rolled out in a low growl. “I don’t run away from anything.”

             
“Name the time and place. I’ll call the Elders right now and notify them,” Steele said coldly. “Also, you might want to start making final arrangements, and notify your next of kin. I won’t be taking over your pack, but I may send one of my relatives out there to manage it.”

             
The Council of Elders supervised all Death Challenges, with the Wardens standing by to ensure that all rules were observed.

             
More dead silence.

             
Then,  just as Steele was tipping over from pissed off to furious enough to rend flesh, he heard Cullen clear his throat.

             
“I may have spoken a little hastily,” he said.

             
“Do you submit?”

             
Cullen spoke in a low voice. “There are other people in the room.”

             
“Not my problem. I don’t give a damn if you’re not man enough, or wolf enough, to keep the respect of your pack. I suspect that if you’re this weak, you won’t have your position much longer anyway. You’ve got five seconds to say that you submit, or I hang up and call the Elders.  Five, four-”

             
“I submit!” Cullen barked angrily.  “Damn it, you can’t blame me for sticking up for a member of my pack.”

             
Steele felt his temper rising again. “Actually, I can. Here in Timber Valley, we expect our people to perform their duties properly. If they cannot perform adequately, they step down. Now, if I have to ask you again I’m going to make a trip up there to do it personally – what the hell is going on with your shaman?”

             
“We may have been having some issues with his abilities. Our old shaman died before he could fully train the new one, and we’re not near any other packs, so we, ah, just tried to make do.”

             
“And you didn’t think to tell me about this before you let that jackass monkey around with a human being’s mind?  If I’d known, I would have waited until we could get a competent shaman.  He totally screwed it up!” Steele roared with fury. “She’s remembering!”

             
“What?” Now Cullen sounded scared. “Okay, let me see. Bring her back here and we’ll do it again. It should take the second time. I think.”

             
“You’re never getting near her again, and I’m reporting this to the Elders immediately,” Steele gritted out. “Your shaman will step down at once. If I ever hear of him attempting to do a mind-wipe again, I will personally come out there and lay open his aorta, and then I’ll do the same for you.” He hung up without waiting for an answer.