Love Bites (Bitten Book 4) (8 page)

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Calder

I watched Ricki
stomp up the stairs of my farmhouse, her tight ass swaying with each step. For the first time in my life, I appreciated the sight because it meant the woman was walking away from me.

While Ricki hadn’t tried to fight me physically, she had a mouth that could tear strips off of the toughest hide. The trip from her apartment complex to the pack compound felt three times as long as usual. For the first five minutes, she sat in the passenger seat, fuming silently. I wondered if she intended to give me the silent treatment. Her cat growled and complained intermittently from the carrier in the backseat, but I assumed she would quiet down after a while.

I was wrong on both counts. After five minutes, Ricki proceeded to tear me to pieces verbally. At first I tried to defend myself, but it rapidly became clear that she didn’t give a shit what I had to say. That was when the demon cat in the backseat began to screech as though in agreement.

So I tuned them out.

When we arrived at my farmhouse, Ricki followed me inside and as soon as the door to the carrier opened, her cat shot out and disappeared in the downstairs hallway.

“Where’s my room?” Ricki asked impatiently. Before I could answer, she continued. “And where’s Shannon?”

I hesitated. As angry as she had been over something as small as riding here with me, when she found out that she and Shannon were in separate safe houses, I was worried that the explosion would be of a nuclear nature.

Ricki immediately picked up on my reluctance and accurately assessed what it meant. “She’s not here, is she?”

I shook my head.

Crossing her arms over her chest, she cocked a hip. “Will she be here anytime soon?”

“No.”

“I see.” Ricki paused. “Okay, so where is my room?”

I gave her directions and watched in relief as she went up the stairs without further comment. I knew better than to believe this was over, but I was glad I didn’t have to listen to her yell at me any longer.

My head ached, an extremely rare occurrence for werewolves. We were never sick and didn’t typically suffer the same sort of nagging ailments humans faced, like headaches or colds.

I unloaded the car and noticed that there was no litter box among the cat paraphernalia, so I called one of the pack members that lived closer to the city and asked them to pick one up and bring it to my house. I knew I would be catching all kinds of hell from the other males over letting my mate bring her cat to my home, but I didn’t care.

I would face her ire a thousand times over if it meant that she would be safe.

Calder

A
few hours
later, I was downstairs making dinner when my cell phone rang.

I yanked it out of my back pocket. “Hello?”

“You wanna tell me why your mate is calling my woman and asking if I can come get her?”

I froze at the words Alexander Dimitriades drawled in my ear. “What?”

He sounded both amused and angry when he answered. “Somehow, you neglected to take your mate’s cell phone. She’s been calling her friends and asking for a rescue.”

How had she gotten it after I’d taken it away? Then I remembered how close she’d been to me when we were getting her things out of the truck. I’d been distracted by the high-pitched screeches of her cat and likely hadn’t noticed her sneaking it out of my back pocket.

“Shit, she must have grabbed it when we got here. Thanks for the warning, Lex.”

“No problem. Now, go take her phone away. It’s too dangerous for her to be using it right now. There’s no way of knowing how The Faction is keeping tabs on us.”

I wanted to retort that he and Conner didn’t seem concerned since they were staying in their homes, but I knew that their protection was cutting edge and practically insurmountable. Short of a mortar attack, The Faction wouldn’t be getting through their security. After the breach at Lex’s home a few months ago, all the members of the vampire council reinforced their residences and hired additional guards.

Wolves weren’t like vampires. If we went to war, there were no guns or knives. We fought with bare claws and teeth, in both human and wolf form. Other than a patrol that roamed the compound, our security was minimal. Since we were now involved in this fight, maybe it was time to change that. I made a mental note to talk to Lach about adding additional protection because several of the pack members had mates and pups here.

Before I spoke with Lach, it seemed I had a wayward mate to deal with. Cursing under my breath I turned off the stove and ran upstairs. How had she been able to get the phone out of my pocket without my noticing? Then again, with the headache I’d had, I wasn’t exactly at the top of my game.

As I walked down the hall, I could vaguely hear Ricki’s voice as she spoke to someone. Her cat sat in front of her bedroom door, bright green eyes unblinking as its black tail swished along the floor.

It hissed at me when I stopped in front of the door. I knocked and Ricki went quiet. I hadn’t caught much of the conversation, but heard enough to know that she was talking to Shannon.

I waited, but the door remained firmly shut, so I knocked again. When she still didn’t respond, I pitched my voice low and calm. “Ricki, please open the door.”

Silence.

I was beginning to get annoyed. Sighing heavily, I tried to turn the knob. It was locked, which only served to piss me off further.

Using the side of my fist, I beat on the door hard enough to make it shudder in the frame. “Ricki, open the fucking door. Now.”

“Go. Away.”

I decided that I was done fucking around. “Have it your way,” I muttered. Then I stepped back and planted my boot against the door next to the knob.

Everything in the house was reinforced so it took another kick before the door flew open and bounced off the wall, leaving a dent in the sheetrock.

Ricki stood in the center of the room, phone clutched to her chest, and her mouth hanging open. “Y-y-you can’t just…”

I reached out and took the phone from her loose grasp.

“Hey! You can’t just take my phone!”

I dropped it to the floor and stomped it to bits.

“HEY!” she yelled, darting forward to shove me. “You asshole! You can’t take me prisoner and destroy my phone!”

I grabbed her wrists as she tried to shove me again, holding tight when she tried to jerk away. “I’ll replace it later. You can be tracked through the phone’s GPS so it’s not safe for you to have it.” I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed when she grabbed the damn phone.

“I know that,” she spat at me.

Confused, I stared down at her. “Then why in the fuck were you talking on it? Don’t you realize what you could have done?”

She tried to yank her arms out of my grip again. “As soon as I got someone to pick me up, I was going to ditch the phone.”

My rage exploded. “There are females and pups in this compound, dammit! You put them in danger.” Disgusted with my lack of control, I released her.

Ricki stared up at me, her brown eyes dark and huge on her pale face as she massaged her wrists.

Feeling like a huge asshole, I rubbed the back of my neck, the headache from earlier now raging behind my eyes. “Look, I know you’re pissed off at me for bringing you here, but I did it to keep you safe. Conner and Lex agreed that it would be a good idea if we kept the five of you separated to make it more difficult for The Faction to locate you.”

Like a wisp of black smoke, her cat wandered into the room and leapt up onto the bed. Ricki reached down and lifted the animal to her chest, stroking her back as she stared moodily out the window across the room.

I sighed. “I’m making dinner. If you’re hungry, it’ll be ready in twenty minutes.” I turned to leave, but stopped by the door. “I’m sorry I lost my temper. I’m not great at the whole…talking stuff. I shouldn’t have—” I took a deep breath. “Anyway, I’m sorry.”

Without looking back, I left the room, went back downstairs, and turned the burner on. While the pan heated back up, I finished slicing vegetables then stirred the chicken in the pan as it started to sizzle. A sharp spike of pain pierced my left eye, so I rummaged around in the cabinets until I found a bottle of ibuprofen with two pills rattling around in the bottom. Tossing them into my mouth, I grabbed the beer I opened earlier and washed the capsules down.

The cat wandered into the kitchen and drank daintily from her water bowl. She disappeared into the laundry room, hopefully to use the litter box I’d stuck in there a couple of hours ago.

I heard Ricki walking down the stairs a few seconds before her scent drifted into the kitchen. When she hesitated in the doorway, I kept my back to her and stirred the sliced vegetables in with the chicken. After I stirred the rice, I turned to face Ricki.

She stood in the doorway, her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes rimmed in pink. The tip of her nose was red, as though she’d been crying. Seeing the signs of her distress, I felt like a huge dickhead. So she made a mistake. I’d made too many in the last couple of weeks myself.

“I’m really sorry, Calder,” she apologized. “I didn’t realize that there would be children here or that I would be putting anyone else in danger.”

“I know. I shouldn’t have exploded like that.”

I watched in horror as her eyes welled with more tears, which she roughly wiped away with her fingertips.

“Please don’t cry,” I begged.

“I can’t—” Her voice broke and she cleared her throat before she continued. “I can’t stand the thought of someone else getting hurt because of me.”

She looked so small and fragile, standing in the doorway alone. I couldn’t keep my distance any longer. I crossed the kitchen and wrapped my arms around her, tucking her head against my shoulder.

“No one will get hurt. I promise.”

Ricki sniffled. “You can’t promise that,” she retorted weakly.

I sighed because she was right. “Okay, I seriously doubt that anyone will get hurt because you made a couple of phone calls from my house. The phone is destroyed now and can no longer be traced.”

“I think we should wrap the broken bits in foil and bury it,” she muttered. “Just to be on the safe side.”

I had to smile. It seemed that not all of her spunk had deserted her. “If you insist.”

I tried not to tense as her arms lifted slowly to wrap around my waist and she gave me more of her weight as she inched closer. I didn’t want to scare her away now that it seemed we had reached a tentative sort of truce.

Ricki lifted her face from my shoulder. “I think we need to talk.” Her eyes drifted over my shoulder. “But first you should probably stop dinner from burning.”

“Shit.”

After seeing her tears, it was nice to hear her laugh, even if she was laughing at me.

I rescued dinner and we ate at the kitchen table. While she wasn’t the talkative woman I remembered from the first night we met, Ricki was noticeably warmer toward me. I insisted on washing the dishes alone and she carried her beer into the living room.

When I finished cleaning up and went into the living room, I found Ricki curled up on my couch, her little black cat cradled in her arms as she stared out the front windows. She hadn’t bothered to turn on the lamps. The night was cloudless and the moon bright, casting the entire compound and surrounding woods in milky white light.

She looked up suddenly. “Damn, you scared me. You seriously need to consider a bell or something before I drop dead from a heart attack.”

The cat yowled at me, her ears laid back.

I held up my hands. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you sound really apologetic.”

Moving to the coffee table, I tentatively sat on the edge, my knees on each side of hers. The cat growled at me before jumping off the couch and stalking away. I would have to figure out a way to get the little furball to like me. “I think it’s time we talked.

Ricki crossed her arms over her chest. “Okay.”

Obviously, I was supposed to go first. I rolled the beer bottle between my hands, choosing my words carefully. I decided to start from the beginning. Or at least our beginning.

“The first time I caught your scent, I knew you were mine.”

Ricki eyed me warily but didn’t speak.

“Then I saw you at Donna and Conner’s house and I couldn’t wait any longer. I needed to be with you. I didn’t plan to mark you that night, but I’m glad it happened.” I took a sip of my beer because my mouth felt as though it were full of dust.

“You never told me what that mark really means to you. Just that it meant we’re supposed to be like husband and wife.” She looked tense as she spoke, as though she didn’t truly want to know what it meant.

Last week she didn’t seem to know much about werewolves, except what little Donna had told her. Since Donna was new to the supe community, I imagined that she didn’t exactly have a clear picture. I decided to be completely transparent. No white lies or exaggerations, just the truth. It would be the only way to get this beautiful, skittish woman to even begin to trust me.

“When shifters find their mates, they recognize them by scent first. There’s something about the body chemistry that draws mates together. Then, comes the instinct to mark. It’s usually strongest during sex, but the possessiveness that accompanies it grows even before mates bite each other. The urge to be close to each other becomes stronger after the marking, to the point that mates often can’t be separated from one another for more than a day or they begin to pine.”