The Wolf's Mate Book 2: Linus & The Angel (11 page)

“Yeah sweetie?” She walked into the bedroom a
few moments later.

He was going to tell her that she shouldn’t
do his laundry. That he didn’t want her to feel obligated or that
he expected her to act like some 1950s housewife, but the moment he
saw her eyes, he knew it wasn’t about any of that for her. She just
flat-out wanted to take care of him, and for her, that meant this
exact thing. He hung the slacks back up and held his arms out for
her. She crossed the distance quickly and sighed into his chest.
“Thank you, love.”

“What for?”

“For everything that you do for me. You make
me feel very loved. Do I make you feel that way, too?”

Her brown eyes were warm and kind, “Most
definitely.”

There was something that tickled at the back
of his mind while he held her against him and rocked back and forth
quietly. An old saying, maybe that he’d heard as a child. That the
husband was the warrior that protected the home and the wife was
the warrior that protected his heart. But she wasn’t just
protecting his heart; she was the living, breathing epitome of
it.

As he expected, his family loved her. They
peppered her with questions about her family’s pack, her upbringing
as an angel, and her journey to find him. He listened with pride as
she described her search for him, as if he were the most important
man in the universe for her. And he guessed that he was. When they
got ready to leave, his grandmother slipped an envelope into his
jacket pocket and he smiled in thanks to her.

Saturday morning they went back to her
apartment and finished gathering her things. Her clothes were all
at the house and her angel books, but her art supplies and camera
equipment that she lugged from city to city were waiting to find a
place in the house. He couldn’t wait to look through her albums.
She spoke with such an excited gleam in her eyes when she talked
about photography and art. He wanted the walls in the house full of
her pictures.

On the way to her tiny apartment, they
stopped at a dog breeder she had apparently contacted during the
week and she picked out a little female rat terrier puppy. He
managed to find the frozen body of the original dog in the creek at
her request and she’d bundled it carefully in a cardboard box and
they had given the puppy and the dead dog to her neighbor, who was
going to take it to a pet cemetery. He took the opportunity of the
mutual tears of the two women to load up her things, and then he
reminded Karly that they had plans and needed to get going.

She followed him home in her fantastic
Porsche Boxter. She said it was her father’s and he apparently
liked to get a new car every year and donated his old ones to his
children. It fit perfectly in the garage after he moved his
motorcycle to make room for it. He was itching to drive it, too,
and have his arm around her while he did it.

“Now you said we had plans?” She asked,
watching the garage door slide shut.

“Um, naked plans, yep.” He laughed and swung
her up over his shoulder and carried her back to the bedroom like
the caveman he felt like. It was going to be a great weekend.

Chapter 8

He said nice restaurant, and he had grabbed
his only pair of dress slacks and one of his two dress shirts, so
she took the hint and looked through her dressy things and finally
settled on a pretty v-neck sweater dress that she paired with black
stiletto heels.

He was looking out the back door when she
walked out of the bedroom. The black slacks and dark blue dress
shirt looked wonderful, and the tie was black and blue checks. The
shirt offset his eyes and made them look darker than they really
were – blue jean and not baby blue. Gorgeous, nonetheless.

He folded her in his arms, “You are so
beautiful, sweetheart.”

“You are as sweet as you are handsome.”

She could see he was going to do that arguing
thing where he was going to tell her that she was the better part
of the relationship, so she silenced him with a kiss.

He drove to a restaurant about twenty minutes
away. The ride was quiet and he held her hand on his thigh, but he
seemed nervous and tense. When he parked in front of the Italian
restaurant, he got out of his side and came around to hers and
opened the door for her, holding her hand as she hopped down.

They were seated at a small table in the
dimly lit restaurant, punctuated with a roaring fireplace and
candles on the tables. It was definitely romantic. She played
conversation-keeper and asked him about the garage and the bike he
had just finished that afternoon, his friends, and pack news. The
full moon wasn’t for three more weeks.

He told her about his friend Bo who seemed
very unhappy and lonely, and the second in the pack, Michael, who
was the smartass of their group of friends.

Dinner was wonderful. They shared a tiramisu
and talked over coffee, and then he was ready to take them home. He
seemed to get more nervous as the evening drew to a close. He asked
her to give him a minute in the family room alone, so she went into
the bedroom and sat on the bed and waited. He came to get her about
ten minutes later, and held her hand in his and led her back out. A
fire crackled in the fireplace, candles twinkled on every surface,
and a blanket had been spread out and large pillows tossed casually
around the edges. An open bottle of wine and two glasses were on
the end table.

He pulled her to the center of the blanket
and before she could do anything, he dropped down to one knee and
her heart stopped beating.

He pulled a ring from his pocket and looked
up at her. In the firelight and candlelight, she could see clearly
that there was a part of him that worried she would say no. That
she might not really believe they were mates.

“Karly, my sweet angel, I love you. I know
it’s only been a week, but I couldn’t imagine my life without you
in it. And I want to marry you. I want you to have my last name and
make a family with me. I want to spend the rest of my life making
you the happiest woman in the world. Will you marry me?”

Tears slid down her cheeks, “Oh Linus, of
course I’ll marry you.”

He pushed the band onto her finger and stood
up slowly, his face a motley of emotions as he hugged her and
kissed her hungrily.

They made love on the pillows on the floor as
the fire flickered orange and yellow across their bodies and when
he had caught his breath, he said, “Sweetheart, can I mark
you?”

She lifted her head from his chest where she
had been listening to his heart pound, and said, “Of course.”

“Are you sure?”

She tried not to roll her eyes. “I said I
would marry you. Why wouldn’t I also want to wear your marks?”

“I just…wanted to make sure.”

She rolled off him and flipped her hair off
her neck and stretched out on her side. “I’m positive. Mark me,
Linus, make me yours in truth.”

She could smell his body change. He smelled
great all the time, all male and warmth and the cologne he liked,
but as he shifted slightly so his fangs elongated, she caught the
scent of his wolf, like deep earth in the fall. Comforting.

“I love you, Karly. My sweet angel mate.” He
said with a rough voice as his breath skirted over her neck.
Tilting her head to get the angle he wanted, he sank his fangs onto
either side of her spine and her body lit up. It hurt, but not
worse than anything else she’d ever been through, and the emotions
that came with it overpowered the pain as it slid into
pleasure.

She reached for his hand that was resting on
her hip and moved it between her legs and he moaned and it shifted
to a growl that slid down her spine and lodged there. His fangs
receded as his fingers slid into her pussy and he licked the marks
and the blood that seeped from them and drove her to an orgasm.
They made love again, and she rode him this time. Their emotions
tangled together and she could feel his utter awe at the situation
and the love that filled the whole center of his being. As another
orgasm crested through her, she did what she knew he wanted but
would never ask; she jerked him up by his shoulders and sank her
teeth into his neck. He roared as he came, holding her so tight she
could scarcely catch a breath as her teeth cut through his skin and
his blood seeped into her mouth. The very raw power of his blood,
the final part of their bond as mates, coursed through her and she
felt as primal as she ever had. She licked across the marks as she
held him tightly in place with her hands fisted in his hair. Unlike
a human’s marks on a wolf’s flesh, hers would scar just like his
would, but only this time when her blood was in his veins and his
in hers.

She touched the marks with her fingertips,
“These will be here forever, Linus.”

He loosened his grip with a shaky breath and
looked surprised, “Really? I’ll get to keep them?”

She smiled softly and kissed his cheek, “Of
course. I’m a supernatural being. And these were the right
circumstances. You marked me and took my blood into your body, and
with your blood in me, it gave me the ability to make these marks
permanent. I tried to keep them towards the back of your neck. And
they’re not as neat as if I had real fangs.” She paused, “Was that
okay? I should have asked.”

He slid his hands up her sweaty arms and
cupped her face, “Sweetheart, I’m so glad. I wasn’t sure you would
want to mark me every few days for the rest of our lives.” He
smiled genuinely.

He seemed to suddenly remember that he had
wine for them, so they toasted their future together. After they
both went to the bathroom to check out their new marks, they
settled back together in front of the fire and she got a chance to
look at the ring for the first time. It was a simple band of woven
white gold.

He fingered it and said, “I want to get you
one from me, too, sweetheart, but this is my family’s band and I
needed you to have it. You’re the only one I have ever wanted to
give it to. I need you to know that.” He looked at her and a very
sad little boy was peeking through his eyes. She’d caught glimpses
of this part of him. Whether it was the childhood he didn’t want to
talk about or the ex-wife that had caused him so much grief, there
was a part of this man that expected to be hurt. That steeled
himself for it.

“I love it. And I love you, Linus. I truly
do.”

They made love again and although they fell
asleep on the pillows in front of the fireplace, she woke up in his
arms in bed, and couldn’t have been happier.

The following week passed quickly. Her mom
shipped two boxes of her things she’d left at home, mostly her shoe
collection, and she spent her days cooking and cleaning and taking
care of her future husband. It was all very Leave It To Beaver, but
she loved it. It’s what she’d always wanted. She certainly wasn’t
one of those girls who thought that it was an insult to take care
of her man. When he would call at lunchtime to thank her for
whatever she’d put together for him, she could just hear the walls
around his heart cracking; as if every time he called there was a
worry at the back of his mind that she might not be there this time
and he was relieved that she was. And the way he called her name at
night when he got home from work...like she might have changed her
mind and taken off. Time was what would help him to realize she
wasn’t going anywhere, and that she would definitely give him.

He wanted to see her photography albums, so
they spent one evening going through them. She had several
professional cameras and loved to take nature pictures. One
particularly stunning picture of a solid charcoal gray wolf
standing in a snow laden forest stopped him. “This is incredible.”
He said quietly.

“It’s my favorite. That’s my dad.”

“No kidding?”

“My mom wanted a picture of him in his shift
for her birthday. He told me if I could find him, I could take his
picture, and he shifted and took off. I’m a pretty good tracker,
but it took me all day to catch up to him and he wasn’t really
trying that hard not to be found, too. Would you let me take your
picture some day?”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. If I have a picture of you, I could do
an oil painting from it. I think it would be smashing over the
fireplace.”

“I would love it.”

Although he hadn’t seemed to want her to go
out on her own in town, when she insisted that she wanted to go to
the grocery while he was at work, plus to get out of the house a
little, he left her cash on the counter before he left that
morning. She tooled around the small town before she went to the
only grocery. She found the bar called Jake’s that was only open on
Friday and Saturday nights, the bank, the deli, and the grocery,
and then Pete’s Garage, where Linus worked. She was extremely
tempted to drop in under the pretense of getting gas, but she
wasn’t sure he could handle it. They’d just marked each other, and
some wolves got territorial with their mates for the first few
weeks. If her presence caused him to attack his friends, she would
feel terrible.

He suggested they could go to the bar on
Saturday to have a drink and so she could meet his alpha and some
of the pack, but only if she promised to let him be all possessive
and nuts, which she happily agreed to. She was curious about the
pack that he was part of that was so modern that they had abandoned
many of the old ways that she’d grown up with.

“Um, no.” He said Saturday night, leaning
against the doorway of the closet and folding his arms in a final
sort of way.

“No, what?” She looked at him in confusion as
she adjusted her favorite Ed Hardy leather belt on her low rider
leather pants.

“No on the top.”

She looked down at herself. The top was plain
black stretchy material that had one long sleeve and no sleeve on
the other side, and cut across from the one shoulder down under the
arm, leaving the whole other shoulder and arm bare. It was just the
right length to hit above her belly button.