Quest (Shifter Island Book 4) (6 page)

“Keep my… what did you say?”

“He’s a wild animal. I told you: sex on two legs. I won’t do anything, but that’s not saying someone else won’t.” Julie took a deep breath and steadied herself. “Okay. I’m going back out there and making sure they haven’t torn each other to pieces. I need to keep everybody in one piece for three more days.”

And she was gone. The rest room door squeaked a little as it swung closed behind her.

At first, Allison intended to follow her—but something held her back. It made her take a long look at herself in the mirror. She knew she hadn’t done anything to mar her own makeup, but she felt odd.

Embarrassed? No, that wasn’t it.

Keep my…

For a moment, everything was all right.

Then the world started to swirl around her, and her mind filled with pictures. Sounds. Bits of conversations she’d had back home with her neighbors, Helene and Russell. Conversations she’d never even once connected with Luca—but she couldn’t help connecting all of it with him now, because of the way she felt about him. The way they’d found each other after all this time.

The way she couldn’t bear to be separated from him.

There’s a bond between us, you see. Something that ties us together. Very powerful. Hard to describe.

Even when we’re apart, we know what’s happening to the other one.

She’d met Helene and Russell a little more than a year ago, after she’d moved out to her little house in the mountains. Then, on a brightly moonlit night a couple of months later, she’d happened to look out the window… and the next day, Helene had confessed to her.

Helene and Russell were shifters. Wolves.

She realized now… so was Luca.

This, too, Luca remembered from four years ago: how sometimes human males would confront him when he had done nothing to provoke it. Nothing deliberate, at least. It was uncomfortable to deal with now, so soon after Micah—in a fit of jealous rage—had attacked him in the woods and left him for dead. He doubted that a human man would be able to best him the way Micah had, but that didn’t make sitting alone in the corner with Matt any easier to endure.

Matt was tearing apart one of the dinner rolls, turning it into scraps on the tablecloth.

The wolf didn’t care much for that.

Calm down
, Luca told the animal.
He has no interest in our mate. He’s just trying to defend his own mate.

And there was no need for that. He had no interest in Julie, nor did the wolf. Julie was simply reacting to what was in the air. If Matt had understood that, he would have known that the best response would be to take his mate somewhere private, where they could couple.

Instead, Matt was attacking a helpless piece of bread.

“I have no objection to Allison accompanying your cousin to your sealing ceremony,” Luca said.

That was only partly true. He did object to some degree, because it meant several hours of being separated from Allison, a very long stretch of time as far as the wolf was concerned. Now that they had found each other again, and had spent so much time mating, stretching the bond between them might actually be painful. He would have to find a way to soothe the wolf so that it wouldn’t try to break free.

Matt didn’t seem to have heard him. He kept looking toward the entrance to the dining room.

“My… what?” Matt said abruptly.

Luca blinked. “Your wedding.”

“You didn’t say that. You said ‘sealing ceremony’. What is that?”

“A wedding.”

“We have a head count,” Matt announced stubbornly. “We gave the final head count to the venue two weeks ago. We can’t just open the doors to everybody who decides they want to come.”

“I do not want to come,” Luca said.

He was mildly curious, because he had never attended a human wedding, although he’d seen them on television and in the movies. But it seemed like a very bad idea: being confined to a room with dozens, maybe hundreds, of unfamiliar humans. They would be drinking alcohol, he assumed, which would make them react badly to the presence of the wolf.

They would react the same way Matt was reacting. The same way Julie had reacted.

It was the wedding that had brought Allison back to this place, he reminded himself. She lived somewhere else now, some distance from here, and if not for the wedding, she would not be here at all. She had promised to attend the celebration, had made a commitment to her friend, and he could not ask her to break it.

But more than anything, he wanted to plead with her to come with him. If not to the island, then somewhere where they could be alone and could surrender to the pull of the bond. Not that awful, cold hotel room, with its collection of bad, medicinal smells. Somewhere beautiful and peaceful.

One of the servers walked by, bearing an enormous tray of food. The wonderful smells caught Luca’s attention, and he turned to sniff the air.

Four years ago, he had decided that one of the very few good things about spending time with humans was being able to eat their food. Much of it was too salty, or too dry, or both, but if it had been carefully and lovingly prepared—as the food at Maggie Mae’s always was—it filled his belly in a wonderful way. After a good meal here, the wolf was always placid and content, willing to lie back and rest.

Maybe it would feel that way after dinner tonight. He could only hope that was true.

“She’s all about the job, you know,” Matt said. When Luca looked at him, he went on, “Allison. Every time Julie talks to her, it’s all about the job. It’s all she thinks about. She works eighteen, twenty hours a day.”

Luca could think of nothing to say.

“There’s not much time for anybody in her life,” Matt went on. “A woman like that—she’ll cut the balls right off you.”

That seemed unlikely. During the last two days, all Allison had seemed interested in doing to that part of his anatomy involved stroking, licking, and sucking. Both he and the wolf had been very pleased.

“You need somebody who’s gonna put you first,” Matt said. “You know what I mean?”

Luca asked, “Does Julie not put you first?”

“I—what? No. I mean… yes.”

“Then why are you concerned?”

“I’m just telling you, pal.”

Matt was a smaller man than Luca: several inches shorter, perhaps twenty pounds lighter. Luca understood that dynamic, that the smaller male would need to pretend he was larger and more capable than he actually was. He would need to make more noise. But doing it at a time like this seemed foolish. Yes, Julie was attracted by the presence of the wolf, but Luca had no interest in her, despite what this smaller man thought.

Nodding, Luca leaned forward a little. “I wish you much joy with your… with your new wife,” he told Matt. “I am not your competition.”

Something flared in Matt’s eyes.

“Allison and I will leave, if that would relieve your anxiety,” Luca told him. “We’ve been apart for a very long time, and I’d prefer to spend this evening with her. I agreed to come here only because she asked. She’s very fond of Julie, and I believe she thinks the two of you are a good match. She wanted to share this meal with you, but if you would prefer it, we will leave.”

Matt didn’t say anything. He was frowning deeply.

“As I recall from years ago,” Luca said, “you are not… an asshole. I am not your competition.”

Even over the noise of the restaurant—dishes and cutlery clanking, people talking, the door to the kitchen creaking as the servers went in and out—Luca could hear Matt breathing. He was struggling with himself, and that made Luca think of the human man who had come out to the island intending to seize his brother Aaron’s mate and drag her back to the mainland with him. The wolves had chased him back and forth across the island for hours, until the last of his strength was gone.

He had no desire to chase Matt anywhere. He simply wanted to eat.

“They’ll be back soon,” Luca said, hoping he was right. The two women had already been gone what seemed like an unreasonably long time. “I would enjoy having a good dinner. Can we do that?”

“You can come,” Matt muttered.

Luca tipped his head a little. “I did not hear what you said.”

Matt lifted his head and stared Luca in the eye. “I said, come. To the wedding. They always figure on a stray or two. And I think we might have had a cancellation. I don’t know for sure. Julie’s mother has the list.”

How that sudden shift in the tide had come about, Luca wasn’t sure. He’d said nothing, done nothing to prompt it.

These humans were very complicated, he thought with an inward sigh.

“That would not be a good idea,” he said quietly.

Matt nodded in the direction of the rest rooms. “Five bucks says the girls won’t agree with you.”

“It still would not be a good idea,” Luca said. “Beyond that—I don’t have the appropriate clothing.”

“The—what, you don’t have a suit?”

“I do not.”

“Just do shirt and tie, then. It’s not formal.”

“I do not have a tie.”

Now Matt’s change of heart began to make sense. Sometimes, Luca observed, humans and wolves were not so very different after all. He had seen more than one wolf back down from a confrontation in just this way. Not surrendering, exactly. Matt was giving ground for the moment—step by step, setting aside their conflict for another time, acknowledging Luca’s position as the stronger of the two, the more dominant male.

Then Matt offered another gift of conciliation. “You can borrow one of mine. I have a million of them.”

“A necktie,” Luca said bemusedly.

“Come over to the house tomorrow, and you can pick one. And you can…” Matt sighed deeply. “My bachelor party. It’s tomorrow night. It’s just me and a bunch of guys, at this place out by the highway. Come, if you like.”

The man was all but groveling. He’d pushed things a bit too far for Luca’s taste, and Luca began to hope that he didn’t intend to throw himself down on the carpet so he could lick Luca’s shoes.

But he didn’t have a chance to respond. Julie sat down beside Matt and smiled in a way that looked like an apology. Matt frowned for a moment, then, in a sudden show of his virility, he pulled her in to him and kissed her passionately.

Someone at a nearby table whistled.

Luca picked up the scent of his mate returning, and then Allison was tugging at his arm, saying quietly, “Can I talk to you for a minute? I-I really need to talk to you.”

Clearly, something had happened in the toilet room, but Luca couldn’t begin to guess what it was.

“Now,” Allison said. “Please? I need to talk to you right now.”

She had no real idea what to say to him once they were outside the restaurant. The whole idea struck her as ridiculous, as something so completely off the wall that it couldn’t possibly be real.

But the moment that word had come out of Julie’s mouth, all she had been able to think was,
Why didn’t I realize that a long time ago? Why did it never occur to me?

After more than a year of living next door to Russell and Helene, becoming more and more familiar with them, learning how they acted, how they thought—how could she not have known about Luca, particularly after this last couple of days? How could she not have even begun to suspect?

He’s a werewolf.

A shapeshifter. A perfectly natural—though not well-known—part of the world. She’d heard about them since she was a kid, back when she and her siblings and their friends had been fascinated with ghosts and dinosaurs and bug-eyed space aliens and things that hid in the closet and under the bed and up in the attic.

The stories said there were creatures out there that no one could quite track down: animals that were there in plain sight one moment and gone the next, as if they’d vanished into thin air.

Bears. Big cats of every possible variety.

And wolves.

She’d moved into her little cottage twenty minutes outside of Denver thinking that her neighbors were an ordinary retired couple: gray-haired, but still fit and very active. Fond of gardening, hiking, and observing the stars with what looked like a very expensive telescope.

Although they’d greeted her warmly at first, for several weeks they’d seemed standoffish. Allison had found no fault with that; they were part of her grandparents’ generation, and she couldn’t expect them to embrace her as a close friend.

Then, one night when she was fighting a bout of insomnia, she’d seen something she couldn’t explain.

A glimpse of a swiftly moving gray shape.

One that had transformed into a woman. Into her neighbor, Helene.

“Do you want to leave?” Luca asked her now.

He looked as if
he
very much wanted to leave, as if this dinner had turned into a nonstop collection of small tortures. He’d never really been much for hanging out with groups of people—although he’d done it, if she asked—and even though Julie and Matt didn’t qualify as a group, they were surrounded by strangers inside the restaurant.

Beyond that, she wanted badly to haul him back to bed, and suspected he felt the same way.

They were standing alongside the building, in a part of the parking lot that was turned a deep gold by the last of the late-afternoon sunlight. Luca’s well-tanned skin looked like burnished gold. And his eyes…

How did I not see this?

She’d seen his eyes turn golden a thousand times when they were together, and it had happened several more times during the last couple of days. But they were normally brown, shot through with lighter streaks. Brown often turned golden in the afternoon light. In lots of different kinds of light.

You didn’t want it to be true. So you didn’t even consider it.

It came back to her now: his talking again and again about a connection between them. A bond, the same word Helene and Russell used to describe their relationship. He’d said they were meant to be together.

He lived on an island, for heaven’s sake. Away from people.

Away from
human
people.

“Do you not feel well?” he asked quietly, wrapping his fingers lightly around her elbow. “We can leave. We should leave. And… we should find a place to sleep that smells better than the hotel you chose. You shouldn’t be breathing those chemicals while you sleep.”

“Luca?”

You didn’t want it to be true.

But here he was.

She felt cold all of a sudden, even though the afternoon was mild and they were standing in a pool of warm sunlight—so cold that she began to shiver, and had to wrap her arms around herself. The idea of going back inside, where the air conditioning was running, seemed intolerable. All she could think of was a need to be back home in her quiet little house, where she could curl up wrapped in the quilt Helene and Russell had given her for Christmas…

Luca pulled her in close and held her tight to his chest. “You’re safe,” he told her. “I won’t let anything harm you.”

“I know that,” she whispered.

“Did someone threaten you in there? In the toilet room?”

She thought about Russell, strong and athletic in spite of his age. She’d seen him lift and carry things she would have thought were far too heavy for one man to move, and climb over things with an agility like a wild animal’s. Helene, too, was stronger than a 70-year-old woman had any right to be.

“There’s a place not far from here,” she said against Luca’s chest. “It’s very secluded. Do you know where I mean? Up the county road, past the fairgrounds. It’s like half an hour away. There’s an old barn with some woods behind it. Nobody’s lived there for decades.”

“I think I know it,” he said hesitantly.

Slowly, she tipped her head back and looked up into those golden eyes. “Will you go there with me?”

“Of course. If you like.”

“Now?”

“What about dinner?”

“I’ll tell Julie I’ll see her tomorrow.”

He tangled his fingers deep into her hair, then bent over to bury his nose in there too. The warmth of his breath tickled her scalp, making her smile involuntarily. He was inhaling her scent, she understood. The wolf was inhaling her scent, reassuring itself that she was still there. That she still
wanted
to be there.

“Luca?”

“Mm,” he murmured.

“Will you shift for me? Will you… will you show me the wolf?”

All at once, he stood very still. He stopped breathing, too; she couldn’t feel his chest move, couldn’t feel his breath in her hair. Then he took a step back and looked deep into her eyes. She was afraid he might be angry, taken by surprise like this, but he didn’t seem to be. If anything, he looked relieved. Astonished, but relieved.

“You… know, then,” he murmured.

So, she was right. It was true. This man she’d found standing at the counter in a sandwich shop on a sunny afternoon four years ago… was a wolf.

Her
wolf.

“Will you?” she asked.

It took him a long while to answer.

Then, finally, he murmured, “Yes.”