Wolf Bride (21 page)

My heart gave a nervous flutter. “What were you hunting?”

“Evelynn French.”

“And?”

“She’ll never hurt you again. You’re safe.”

Denial was the easiest thing in the world. For too long I’d looked over my shoulder. It couldn’t happen like this. Not so easily. “But what about those men tonight? She didn’t send them?”

“It was the last thing she did before I found her. She told me about the Hell Hunters she’d hired to kill you and Jeremiah and I rode for days until I got here.” His whisper was anguished as it dropped to a ragged breath. “I thought I’d be too late.”

That explained why he looked so tired. “Have you eaten anything? Or changed?”

His eyes widened. “We don’t have to talk about that stuff.”

“We do so. Are you hurting?”

“I’m all right. Let’s just worry about you.”

“Luke,” I scolded. “You’ve been riding for days with little food, little sleep, in one form for way too long, and you’re injured. Go take care of yourself, man.”

His mouth hung slightly open as if he didn’t know what to say. “What, now?”

“Do you really want to wait until tonight or even days from now with that aching in your bones?”

The corner of his mouth turned up in a wicked grin. He stood and headed for the door but stopped. My blistered skin burned from the absence of his shielding hand but I tried as best I could to hide the regret of his going. He had another part of himself to take care of too. I couldn’t stand the thought of him in pain just to stay beside me.

“I’ll come back,” he said.

“Promise you’ll
always
come back to me.”

His eyes held the saddest look. “I promise.” And then he was gone.

My man went away to turn into a wolf, and I was left with a disconcerting emptiness that was slowly filling with something I couldn’t quite understand. I listened until his boot prints faded into the early morning, and then I cried tears of pain, of sadness, of longing, but most of all, of joy.

My wolf would return to me.

Kristina

Alone with my thoughts and the pain—that relentless, all-consuming pain—the silence turned out to be a good thing. I didn’t have to pretend I wasn’t hurting and I finally had a moment to process what happened last night.

Luke was in the woods somewhere, Elias and Trudy were working, and I had no guess where Jeremiah was.

I went through last night over and over, owning the fear I’d had when I’d been chased down by that Hell Hunter, when Luke had the noose around his neck, when the horse had loosed him to hang, and the moment I’d been convinced I’d be burned alive.

I groaned as I tried to find a more comfortable position. I wasn’t dead yet, but I’d definitely burned.

Evelynn French was finally out of my life for good. I inhaled deeply. I’d often imagined what freedom would feel like. Maybe it would be better when my skin healed and I didn’t want to scream.

More important than any of it was the fact that Luke was home. At long last, he was back where he belonged. His admission this morning that he’d been hunting the woman who’d ruined my life meant more than he’d ever know. It was the most romantic thing any man had ever done for me.

A soft knock wrapped on the door and Jeremiah poked his head around it. “Can I come in?”

“Pull up a chair,” I said, trying my best to smile. How could the pain actually be getting worse?

An old rocker clunked down closer to me. “You were wrong,” he said as he sank into it.

“About what?”

“You said your little pea shooter was going to save my life someday, but it didn’t. It saved my brother’s.”

“You aren’t dead yet. There’s still time to save you with it.”

“Do you know how difficult it is to shoot a swinging rope? Nearly impossible. Why didn’t you tell anybody how handy you were with that little puff pistol?”

“A lady has to keep some of her secrets.”

“Mmmm,” he said noncommittally. “I think you’ll do just fine out here, Kristina. You made it through a Colorado winter and you saved a couple of werewolves from the likes of Hell Hunters. Not an easy feat, that one.”

I snorted. “All I did was shoot a rope.”

“That’s not all you done and you know it. If you hadn’t come back, we’d be cold and swinging from that tree right now. Sheriff Hawkins and Elias helped, no doubt about that, but you led the attack and you showed no fear in doing it. My brother lives because of you. So, I guess what I’m getting at is thank you.”

If I could bottle up the emotional balm his gratefulness brought and rub it on my burns, I’d be healed instantly. “You’re welcome.”

He cocked his head to the side in a very animal-like gesture and stared up at the window. “Your man is here.”

A drunken warmth washed over me and despite my burning body, I laughed an excited sound. Luke took off his hat as he ducked under the doorway. He’d washed up and looked happy and fed. His eyes were brighter, and though the rope burn on his neck was still angry and raw, it already looked better than it did this morning. He sat on the squeaking bed beside me while Jeremiah rocked absently in the chair.

“Better?” I asked.

Luke ran his hands through his long, dark hair and nodded slightly. “You?”

“I feel like someone dipped half of me in boiling tar. Did you go by the cabin?”

“I did but there’s nothing to salvage.”

My eyes drifted slowly to Jeremiah. I’d lost my precious dresses but he’d lost so much more. Anna’s picture burned in that inferno and if I had to guess, I’d say it was his last physical connection to her. His lowered eyelids covered the loss that would be swimming there.

“I’m grateful to Trudy and Elias for putting us up,” I said quietly. “But I want to go home.”

Luke took my hand and ran lazy circles over the top of it with the pad of his thumb. “You’re healing, Kristina, and we have nowhere clean or warm for you to sleep out there.”

“Where will you sleep?”

“In the barn. It’ll have to do until we can get a new cabin up.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Jeremiah said. “With you two getting married, I think it would be best if we built two separate smaller cabins. Gable will make his way home sooner or later and I aim to find a wife. That old house wasn’t meant to hold three grown men and their families.”

I bit my lip against the pain of sitting up. Luke pulled the pillow up behind me and held the side of my gown as if it were instinct to protect me from that small pain.

“We haven’t talked about whether we’re still getting married,” I said.

“You wantin’ to look for someone new?” Luke asked. “I’d understand if you did.”

I shook my head slowly, knowing his next words could hurt me more than any burn.

“If you’ll have me, I’m yours,” he said softly. “All of me.” His eyes lightened from their brilliant moss green to the color of the pale and shining moon.

“You’re already my mate, Luke. Just need the circuit preacher to tell me you’re my husband.”

He kissed the palm of my hand and turned to Jeremiah. “What’re we going to do about a place for her to live? My wolf won’t stand for her staying in town where I can’t easily get to her.”

“I can’t stomach it either. It’d be a mite lonely up there without her poppin’ off at everyone. The problem is, when I change, we don’t have anywhere safe to keep her.”

The expression on Luke’s face looked downright dangerous. “You need to learn to control that part of you better, Jeremiah. Going after a woman? It ain’t right.”

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I hate myself for goin’ after Kristina and not being strong enough to stop it? I don’t know how to fix it besides putting some silver shot in my mouth and pullin’ the trigger. All I can do is make sure she’s safe before I change.”

Luke rubbed his face violently and cursed. “There’s no help for it, darlin’. We’ve got to make a safe place for you before you come home.”

“What about the barn?” I asked, desperation tingeing my voice.

“It ain’t gonna keep him out if he has a mind to get to you. Not as it stands now and we don’t need your scent drawing him inside with the horses and milk cows. We’ll have to reinforce the walls before you can stay nights out there.”

The prospect of taking up space in Trudy and Elias’s bedroom was daunting. “How long will it take?”

Jeremiah shrugged. “If we pick up supplies and get out there now, we can have it done in six days if the weather holds. Maybe five. It means you won’t be seeing Luke until then though. We’ll need to be working from sun up to sun down.”

The mention of Luke’s absence sent uncomfortable shivers to my stomach. I hadn’t planned on being split from him ever again now that I had him back, and to do it so soon? It was a hard bite to swallow. However, if I wanted to get home, he needed space to prepare one for me.

I swallowed hard. “Okay. Five days.”

“I don’t want to leave you. Not like this.”

I put on my bravest face. “Trudy will have me better in no time. Make a place for us and then come fetch me.”

The ghost of the smile he gave me was as sad as I felt. He kissed my forehead before he left, and the sound of those Dawson boy’s boot prints against the front porch was the loneliest sound in the world.

****

Luke

Nothin’ in me wanted to leave Kristina there in Trudy’s cabin. I could almost smell her sadness and every animal instinct in my body screamed to stay with her. To protect her, reassure her…claim her.

She’d called me her mate, and until those words left her lips, I hadn’t accepted it. Not completely. She was my mate and I was leaving her injured and in pain. The space that widened in between us became a canyon.

“You know you can’t see her anymore, right?” my brother asked with a knowing grin.

I turned back around and sat straighter in the saddle. Town had disappeared a mile back and I hadn’t even noticed I was still looking for her.

“I missed that woman. It don’t feel right leaving her when everything in me is screaming to stay close enough to touch her.”

“Yep,” he said, the saddle creaking under his shifting weight. “Sounds like you got it bad. Maybe you’ll think twice before leaving again. Listen, I have to tell you somethin’.” He cleared his throat and looked me dead in the eye. “About a month or so back, I asked Kristina to marry me.”

My gut wrenched. “You did what?” I snarled.

Jeremiah held his hand up like he was calming a spooked pony, but it only made me want to cut his fingers off with the buck knife secured at my waist.

“Now listen before you fly off the handle,” he barked. “You put us in a bad situation when you left. You put a lady living with an unhitched man all alone in the wilderness and people in town was startin’ to talk. I didn’t want her like you do, but we got on well enough, and we worked all right at keeping the ranch going together.” In a softer tone, he said, “She’s a good woman and I didn’t know if you were ever coming back or if you were just done, like Gable. She wasn’t ever going to stop waiting for you, Luke. She would have stayed on for years and I wanted to give her the option of moving on.”

The leather of the reins gave a helpless squeak in my clenched hand. “With you. You gave her the option of moving on with the brother of the man she was engaged to. So you didn’t want to kiss her, you didn’t want to bed her, but you wanted to marry her?”

“Dammit Luke,” he said. “It wasn’t like that. There wasn’t a physical connection between us. There never has been. I asked her to think about it, and within a few hours she’d turned me down flat. She said she was yours. I just wanted you to hear it from me and early on before it got blown out of proportion.”

My rage was infinite. Flashes of imagined trysts between Jeremiah and the woman I loved whirled through my mind. They would’ve bonded over time and he would’ve given her all the little baby wolves she asked for. He’d always wanted them. What if he was the better man? What if he was the better option for her? He’d stuck around after I’d run out on her. He’d protected her from the winter and from the darkness within his own self for all those months. He’d fed her and kept her warm and she wasn’t even his woman to keep. Jeremiah was two ticks shy of a damned saint and he’d dangled a pretty future right in front of her face.

Everything I saw was red. Red trees and brush, road and horses. Jeremiah was bathed in crimson. My horse started when I jumped from the saddle and tackled my brother from his.

“Do you know what it would’ve done to me?” I yelled as I pummeled him. “Coming back here and seeing you two all shacked up. It would’ve cut me in half, Jer!”

“Stop it!” he yelled, flinging me on my back and hitting me hard across the jaw. “She wouldn’t be out here if it weren’t for my advertisement. She answered it thinking she was marrying me. I saw her first.” He gripped my shirt with clenched hands. “I had every right to propose to her!”

I bucked him off and put the back of my hand to my split lip. “Do you love her?”

“Yeah,” he said breathlessly. “Like the little sister I never had. I cared about her enough to want to give her a proper name after you ran. It had been months, Luke. You weren’t coming back for her and she was already part of our family. If you weren’t man enough to take her, I was more than happy to do it.” The slice across his cheek was bleeding freely and when he spat, it was red.

“Do you know what I felt last night when that traitor wolf dragged you out of the bushes?” he asked. “Horror, yeah, but underneath it all I was relieved. You’d come back for her and she’d see you that last moment before she left the earth. She deserved for you to be there. You should’ve been the one teaching her to survive, not me. I was a poor substitute for you, brother. I was relieved because I wouldn’t die alone. And I know how selfish that is, but it was going to happen and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. If we were dying, I wanted my family together.”

I dropped my head in my hands as I was bombarded by the fear I’d felt when I saw the noose around my brother’s neck, when I saw Kristina’s blood against the white coat of that Hell Hunter’s horse, and her beating on the window of the burning house. Her screams of panic and pain would haunt me all my days. I’d spend the rest of my time on this earth making it up to them.

Jeremiah squeezed my shoulder and shook it slowly. “You came back for her. For us. I was relieved that you’d come back.”

“You swear she said no to your proposal?”

“I swear on my life. She told me she’d make me a pot roast instead.”

I stifled a smile but it was useless. Jeremiah huffed a chuckle, then burst out laughing as he lay back on the side of the road. Blood coated his front teeth and a slow chuckle came to me too.

I didn’t like that he’d proposed to Kristina, not one bit, but I understood it. He was a good man and a good husband. I’d seen the way he treated Anna. No one was ever more devoted. But the difference was that he didn’t love Kristina. He wasn’t the type of man to get over her previous occupation. The number of men she’d been with would sit in his mind, growing year by year like some poisonous weed. He liked quiet, proper women. Always had. They’d bonded over the winter months, but it wasn’t love. Jeremiah’s wolf wouldn’t be trying so hard to kill her if it was. He would’ve provided her with a safe place to live and babies if she wanted them, but if she’d said yes, she’d never know how it was to be completely loved. She’d likely had some instinct for that when she’d given her answer.