The Protector (Lone Wolf, Book 1) (19 page)

I paused for a long moment,
searching her face.
 
“Werewolves,” I
finally murmured, one brow up as I glanced sidelong at her.
 

Layne nodded almost imperceptibly,
her wild eyes flashing.

All around us, the wind had grown
into a monster, rushing through the trees, and making them creak and grown
dangerously.
 
Branches thrashed
overhead, and leaves, twigs and other flotsam were beginning to rise all around
us, hurled about by the might forces of the gale.
 
But it was as if Layne didn’t even notice.
 
She leaned against me, over me, and with her
strong, feverish body shielding me from the beginning of the storm, I was
perfectly safe.

Just like she’d promised I would
be.

She was hot against me, physically
hot to the touch, and I found that, in that moment, I was moving on
instinct.
 
Maybe it had been her story,
about women who were wild enough to become wolves if left to their own
devices.
 
Maybe it was her
nearness.
 
But either way, I found then
that my hand was rising and that I was powerless to stop it.
 
My fingers curled tightly to her belt, then,
my fingertips drifting under the edge of her shirt.

They met with the heat of her skin,
the softness of it, with the ripple of muscles on her belly that seemed to
shiver against my touch.

I shuddered against her, staring up
into her eyes as my lips parted, as a rush of air escaped me.
 
She was staring down at me with wide, dark
eyes that were full of such uncontained want that my body responded
likewise.
 

I arched back my head, stood up as
tall as I could on my good leg, and I brought my mouth to hers.

Her lips were feverish, her mouth
so warm against mine that it contrasted brightly with the cold wind—unusual for
a June morning—that roared around us.
 
And for a single, perfect moment, her mouth met mine every bit as
intensely as I kissed her, opening and drinking me in like she’d wished for
this moment as much as I had.
 
For that
single, perfect moment, her hand against my waist held me tighter, pressing
down with ferocity, and then she was pressing me fully against the tree, the bark
biting into my back, but I hardly even noticed that, because her hips were hard
against mine, she was standing between my legs, and I hooked my fingers into
her belt loops and pulled her to me, holding back a moan as her hand pushed up
under the edge of my shirt at my back, her hot fingers raking over my skin, the
world spinning and utterly…

Layne stopped.
 
Her mouth went hard against mine, and she
took a single step backwards, licking her lips, her hand stilled against my
back, her gaze planted somewhere above my right shoulder.
 
She took another step back completely.
 
She was no longer touching me.

I was left to hold myself up
against the tree, my legs still apart from where she’d stood between them,
feeling disheveled and more upset than I wanted to be.

“What is it?” I asked, tugging at
the hem of my shirt and pushing my braid back over my shoulder with a
frustrated shove.

She shook her head, raking her long
fingers through her carefully teased hair so that it stood up in all directions
again.
 
She pushed her hands deeply into
her jeans pockets, shrugging her shoulders forward, her gaze still distant and
not looking at me.
 

“I can’t,” was all she said, as
simply as if it were written in stone.

I felt my face redden more than I
thought was possible, flushing feverishly.
 
I tried to stand tall on my own two feet, but since I couldn’t put any
weight on one of them, it wasn’t nearly as cool and detached as I’d been going
for.
 
I leaned against the tree heavily,
feeling its coarse bark beneath my back.
 

My heart hurt like it’d been
crushed beneath her boot.
 
I hated
that.
 

“Why?” I asked, trying to make my
voice even.
 
But it cracked at the end
of the word as I leaned back against the tree, pressing my full weight against
its solid bulk as I tried to take a deep breath.

She shook her head, her eyes steely
as she leaned back on the heels of her hiking boots.
 
“I just…I just can’t.
 
I’m
sorry, Elizabeth.”

The words were so cold, and they
made me
so angry
.
 
No
explanation.
 
I wasn’t even worth an
explanation.

My mind spun through everything I
knew or thought I knew.
 
Maybe she was
already with someone—though I would have assumed I’d have heard of her.
 
Maybe she wasn’t attracted to me in the
slightest.
 
Maybe she didn’t want to
date the daughter of the guy she was working for, the woman she was trying to
keep safe.
 
Maybe she didn’t want to get
involved with someone who people were trying to kill.
 
Maybe a million things, but without any sort of explanation, I
couldn’t know.

I felt desperately embarrassed,
made worse by the fact that desire was ripping through my belly, a red haze of
lust and longing making it difficult to see.

Or maybe it was the unshed tears at
her cold refusal.
 

I blinked, rubbing the back of my
hand angrily across my eyes.
 
“Sorry,” I
bit off curtly.

She looked surprised at that, and
she actually shifted her gaze back to me, back from the cool, detached spot
she’d been staring at, over my shoulder, back to my eyes.
 
For a moment, something flickered in her own
eyes, which were now a deep, dark brown that seemed to have an odd sort of depth
to them.
 
She swallowed audibly, shook
her head again and leaned back on the balls of her feet, bowing away from me.

“Elizabeth, I…”
 
She worked her jaw, glancing upward, as if
the words she was searching for were written on the dark, brooding storm clouds
overhead.
 
When her gaze came back down
to earth, her eyes had taken on a hard glint as she looked at me.
 
“There are things you don’t understand,” she
said softly, working her jaw.
 
She fell
silent and watched me.

“Things I don’t understand,” I repeated,
the words brittle.
 
“Really?
 
Like what, Layne?” I asked, the words coming
out knife-sharp.
 
“What could I
possibly
not understand?
 
What is
obviously
too far beyond me for me to comprehend?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Layne
snapped, and then she pursed her lips together, her eyes flashing
dangerously.
 
“It’s going to start
storming soon,” she said, raising her voice as a particularly epic burst of
lightning touched down some ways away from us, crackling probably a mile or two
out to sea—but still, the shadow of the lightning bolt was still brightly lit
behind my eyelids when I blinked, and I considered that the storm was probably
going to hit shore much sooner than I thought it was.

But I wasn’t done with this.
 
Not yet.
 
It was too important.

“No,” I said impetuously then,
drawing myself up to my full height and shaking my head.
 
Frustration coursed through me hotly.
 
“What could I not understand?”

For a long moment, I wondered if
she’d actually tell me.
 
Her gaze
softened almost imperceptibly, and the same look came over her face as before,
her brows furrowing, her eyes becoming gentle and concerned.
 
I remembered that expression.
 
She’d been about to tell me this important
thing a few times in the past few days, something
so
important,
something so absolutely and completely essential…

But just as quickly as her gaze
softened, it hardened again, her lips curling down into a deep frown, and she
shook her head.
 
“I’m sorry, Elizabeth,”
she said, almost formally, with a curt bow to her head.
 
“But I’m not under liberty to discuss this.”

She sounded like she was addressing
a jury or a board meeting, not speaking with a woman she’d just kissed
passionately, pressing between her legs and pushing her against a tree.

Wow.
 
I wasn’t even worth an explanation.
 
I’d never felt so embarrassed, humiliated or more stupid in my
entire life.
 
There was no way that I
could extricate myself from this situation with even a scrap of my dignity left
intact.

Dignity and humiliation aside,
however, I was simply and plainly hurt.
 
She’d wanted to kiss me, she’d kissed me with so much fervor, it had
melted every bone in my body.
 
That kiss
had been everything I could have dreamed of from a kiss with Layne
O’Connell.
 
But in my dreams and
fantasies, the kiss hadn’t ended like this.
 

I’d wanted this kiss for so long,
and so deeply, I hadn’t even understood my want or need.
 
I’d felt a complete attraction to Layne from
the very first moment I’d met her, like we were two opposite magnets, pulled together
by forces we couldn’t understand or control.
 
And then, when she’d kissed me, for a single, pure moment, I’d known
that all of those things I’d felt?
 
She’d felt them, too, and she answered them with the same want that I
possessed.
 

But for some reason, some
inexplicable reason, none of this seemed to matter, because there was something
Layne wouldn’t tell me:
 
something that
was keeping us apart.

“Please take me home,” I managed to
say, my voice cracking.
 
But the
lightning and subsequent rumble of thunder overhead hid the break in my voice.

“Of course,” said Layne, not
meeting my eyes, a steely cast to her own, and her jaw set stubbornly as she
turned.

Overhead, the heavens opened as she
lifted me in her arms as if I was weightless.

The rain was cold and relentless
and hard as it beat against us, as she effortlessly carried me back to the car,
not gazing down at me once.

The torrential downpour matched my
mood perfectly.
 

Chapter 10:
 
Third Time’s the Charm

We drove home in complete and
excruciatingly painful silence, the windshield wipers dashing back and forth at
full speed, trying to make the view out the windshield even partially
visible.
 
But the wipers could do little
against the onslaught of the gale-force rain, driving into the front of the car
like it was hell bent on pushing us off the road.
 
I didn’t know how Layne was seeing out that window, but at that
point, I was too numb to care, looping over the kiss and her subsequent—and
unexplained—refusal until I was too upset to consider anything else.
 
And anyway, the pouring of the rain and the
explosive thunder rumbling around us would have made it impossible to talk,
even if we’d wanted to.

When we got back to my apartment
building, Layne parked the car on the street and helped me hobble to my
building, then to the elevator, down the hall and through the apartment
door.
 
We were both completely drenched,
actually leaving a wet trail behind us, but still, even exhausted and with the
both of us resembling drowned rats, I rounded on her with as much strength as I
could muster.

“I think it would be best,” I said
coolly, as I’d practiced it in my head about a thousand times on the last leg
of the drive, “if you took the afternoon off.”

Her eyebrows rose at that.
 
I think whatever she’d been expecting from
me, it wasn’t this.
 
She shifted her
weight, narrowed her eyes.
 
“I’m your
bodyguard,” she growled, as if I wasn’t already painfully aware of that
fact.
 
“I don’t get ‘the afternoon off’
unless your father permits it.
 
Which, I
hate to point out, he hasn’t.”

Perhaps she didn’t mean for the
antagonistic edge to be in her tone, but it was there all the same.

“Well, I’m your client, aren’t I?”
I hissed between clenched teeth, my hands balled into fists at my sides to keep
them from shaking with emotion.
 
“Which
means that if I tell you your afternoon is off, it’s off.”
 
I opened the door and pointed to her
bedroom.
 
“So come in, get a change of
clothes and go enjoy yourself.”
 
Since
she obviously didn’t enjoy her time with me.

Her face had taken on a stony
expression, and she hadn’t budged a muscle.

“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,
Ms. Grayson,” she said, every inch the professional, her tone practically
oozing
professionalism.
 
“But I was hired by
your father to keep you safe, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

“It’s not exactly raining poison or
armed men,” I said, my tenuous grasp on civility snapping.
 
“I don’t want to see you right now,
Layne.
 
Take the fucking afternoon off.”

She winced at that, visibly winced,
but I held my ground, my heart twisting in me.