Deadly Mates (Deadly Trilogy) (20 page)

Another couple minutes passed before I heard the crunch of leaves under foot behind me.  I pulled in a few more deep breaths and slowly straightened, turning toward him.

“Hey, little girl,” he said, looking me over with cool eyes as he walked toward me.  I didn’t really know what I had expected when I saw him, but what I saw definitely wasn’t it.  Jared looked … good.  Really good, actually.  He had gotten a haircut, his black hair short, spiked, and gelled.  His face was clean shaven, smooth and fresh looking, and there wasn’t a stitch of darkness under his eyes.  The tension he had carried around with him while he had stayed with me was gone.  I didn’t recognize the leather jacket he was sporting, and underneath he had on a light green tee that I was sure I had never seen him wear before.  He usually kept to blacks.  It hugged his sculpted
chest, outlining his thick pecs.

He stopped a few feet away from me, and his eyes swept over me in a thorough inspection.  His nostrils flared a few times, and then he smirked.  I knew what he was looking for, a change in my scent, and I seriously hated that smug look that was etching itself onto his face.  “Does he know you’re here?” he asked, amusement thick in his voice.

“Does it matter?” I countered, blandly, lifting a brow.  A gnawing sense that I was walking in a gray area surfaced and it scared the crap out of me.  My muscles tensed, my stomach started to twist, and I tried to breathe through it, hoping he wouldn’t notice.

Jared chuckled, a husky sound.  One that usually sent my inner-wolf into a round of manic back flips, but oddly enough
, she was calm and steady.  It was strange and well, amazing.  But then I guessed living with Aidan had calmed her.  But still, I had kind of expected the franticness, the racing heart, but it didn’t come and my coiled muscles began to unwind.

“Nope,” he said.  His smirk widened.  “Just didn’t figure he’d loosen up on that short leash he’s been keeping you on long enough for you to sneak away.”

Ouch.
  Okay, the truth of his statement kind of sucked.  I tried not to frown, but it happened anyway.  Yeah, Aidan had been keeping me close, but frankly, I was just as bad as he had been.  I hated having him out of my sight.

But was I really so transparent that Jared could see that I had snuck out or did he just know me that well?  I could feel the scrunch in my forehead, and a knot deep in my belly twisted and yanked.  The gray area flapped in front of me again. 
I probably should have told Aidan,
I thought.  I should have given him a choice to come with me, too.  But honestly, I hadn’t wanted to get that look again.  The one that told me he didn’t trust me enough to go alone; the same one I would have given him if he had have told me he wanted to see Erika.

“I didn’t sneak away and he doesn’t have me on a leash,” I snapped, except it didn’t sound believable.  I took a step toward him and he backed up a step, putting up a hand as if he were asking me not to come any closer.

My frown deepened, tugging at my lips.  I huffed.  He looked at me as if I were the dangerous one out of the two of us which was pretty much a laughable notion.  I never thought I would see the day that I would make the head of the enforcers nervous.  And, man, had I tried to make him nervous in our training.  But Jared didn’t get nervous, not usually.  He fought.  Sometimes he lost, mostly he won.  His job as an enforcer was black and white for him. 
Fear and nerves are for the weak
, he’d told me. 
Win or lose, don’t show fear.

I plopped down onto the grass, stretching my legs out in front of me, and leaned back, propping myself up on my elbows trying to make myself look unthreatening.  “Where have you been?”

“Around,” he said with a lazy lift of his shoulders.  He scanned the length of my body again, letting his scent thicken in the air.  When I gave him no reaction, he lowered himself to the ground, sprawling out on his back still a few feet away from me.

“Really?” I asked.  “That’s all you’re going to give me?”

Jared sighed long and loud as he stared up at the cloudless sky.  “What did you expect, Jade?” he asked in a hushed tone.  “You made your choice.  I didn’t want to stick around and watch.”

I groaned and cut him an exasperated look.  Too bad he still wasn’t looking at me.  “There was never a choice, Jared.  I never hid that from you.  You knew from the start I was his.  Don’t you dare try to make this about
us
because you know damn well that there never was an
us
.”

He lay on his back as still as rocks except for the steady, even rise of his chest as he breathed.  He was quiet for a crazy long moment before he finally said, “I needed a break.  The team is a nightmare with Aidan’s newbies hanging around.”

I laughed.  “Nightmare?” I said, and laughed again.  “You want to talk about nightmares?  Hell, I’m living in a damn nightmare.”

Jared chuckled.  He shifted onto his side, propping his head up on his hand.  His dark brown eyes searched my face with an intensity that made me shiver, not a pleasurable one.  His eyes were cold and calculating and hard, and they traveled along my skin as if he were watching the shiver spread down my body.  His lips quirked into a cocky, one-sided grin.  “Awe, kitten, is that soon
-to-be mate of yours not treating you as good as you thought he would?”

I bristled like a porcupine and my inner-wolf became seriously agitated within me at his insinuation.  “He treats me just fine,” I said through my teeth.  “It’s keeping him from hunting you down that’s the freakin’ nightmare.  On top of that
, most of the males hate me.  And you hiding away like I’ve ripped out your heart is only fueling their anger.  It makes us look guilty.”

That wiped the smirk off his face.  His brown-black eyes hardened and cooled again.  “Maybe we are guilty.”

I rolled up to my feet and paced the few steps over to him.  “I’m not buying this
poor me
act,” I said, smirking.  “And by the way, you suck at it.”

That earned me a throaty chuckle.  “Come on, I know you felt a little bad.”

“The team needs you, Jared,” I said, ignoring him.  “Aidan needs you.  He might not want to admit it, but he does.”  I extended a hand to him.  For a minute, I didn’t think he was going to take it.  He schooled his expression into a blank mask of indifference and as he did, I whispered, “Please.”

As soon as the whisper left my lips he took my hand and pulled himself up.  He stood in front of me for a moment before he tugged on my hand and wrapped me in a tight hug, resting his chin on the top my head.

I stood stiff in his arms, waiting for my inner-wolf to perk up at his nearness, but she didn’t, not in the way she usually did, so I wrapped my arms around his waist, and squeezed back.

~ AIDAN ~

“
What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked, waving a hand toward the man, tied and bleeding out onto the floor. I felt cold and tired.  I probably should have been mad, but I just couldn’t drudge up the emotion.  Jade was with Jared.  Cold and tired and disappointed was pretty much all I had right then.  Ice slid over my skin.  I wanted to dig out my phone, and call her.  How long had I been gone?  An hour?  She didn’t have a car, but he could have picked her up.  My brain raced and swirled with all the things she could have done with him in the last hour.  My stomach rolled.  I swallowed hard.  “He can barely hold his head up.”

Jeff chuckled, and shook his head.  “He’ll heal,” he said.  “
The count’s eighteen.”  He chuckled again.  “Seventeen now.”  He moved into the house, rounded Richard, and placed a hand on his shoulder, his grip hard. “I was supposed to kill this one, but I figured he could be of use to you.  Like I told you, they were moving locations when I left and he’s been to their new hot spot.”  He dug his fingers into Richard’s shoulder hard enough that the man groaned and winced, and then he let go, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “But if you don’t want him, I can dispose of him.”

I couldn’t focus.  I knew I needed to.  I knew that Jeff was playing me and I needed to pay attention, read between the lines, but all I could think about was Jade.  Was it so wrong that I wanted to keep her close, protect her, hold her, to have her in every possible way?  She seemed to think so. 
“Stop being such an overbearing dog,”
she’d said to me this morning, laughing.  She had kissed me, kissed my cheeks, my lips, my neck, a flutter of delicate presses along my skin. 
“I’m yours, Aidan.  You have nothing to worry about.”

But she wasn’t mine.  Not really.  Not fully.  Most of all I wanted her to want me the way I wanted her.  To be with me.  I thought that was the part that was eating at me the most.  When she was with me, she wasn’t really with me.  Her mind was with him.  I was lost to her.  Completely lost.  At some point those ideas of love had grip
ped me, turning into so much more than just ideas.  And knowing that she was out somewhere with Jared, that she clearly didn’t feel the same as I did, was wrecking me.

I guessed that was probably why Jeff had told me where she had run off to.  I figured he wanted me distracted.  “What’s his death sentence for?” I asked, trying to push her out of my mind, even for a second.

“He fell in love, took off with one of the women just before the accident.”  Jeff’s tone held a note of remorse, remorse that I knew he didn’t feel.  “He was stupid enough to go back, and when he was caught, they called me to get rid of the problem.”

The rage I had been missing surfaced and thrashed against my skull. 
Accident.
  The way he said it was as if it were actually an accident such as a car crash or a house fire.  But it was nothing like that.  His pack had brutally used two women, used them until they died.  It wasn’t an accident.  He didn’t care that they were dead.  I was even willing to bet he had known they would die.

“
I can help you,” Richard rasped.  He struggled to lift his head enough to meet my eyes.  His were a cool blue, hard and full of conviction.  “I want to help you.”

“We’ll take him,” I said, and fished my phone out of my pocket, and thumbed the screen.  9:30.
Jade had been alone, or with
him,
for an hour and a half.  I should have killed him.  I could have, too.  In the eyes of pack law, Jared had done enough to be put down, but Jade … she wouldn’t even let me throw him out of the pack, claiming none of his crimes were his fault.  They were hers.

Another rush of ice pushed through me.  I stared at the clock.  A minute ticked by.  In the back of my mind I knew I needed to call the team.  Get them here.  Deal with the cougar.  If nothing else, I wanted time to question him before he met his death, but I stood there frozen staring at the clock.  Another minute passed and then another.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Jeff said blandly.  I glanced up as he stepped away from Richard. There was a pitiless, callous glint in his eyes as he approached me.  “You’re wondering how long she’s been gone, counting the seconds, minutes, maybe even hours since you left her this morning. She probably told you she was going to take a shower and meet up with the team. She’s been trying so hard to help and you wanted to believe her. You want to trust her, but you can’t, not really. Not when you know he can speak to her inner-wolf and that she cares about him enough that she has to hide it from you.”  He paused, smiled, and chuckled. “I bet you’re trying to figure out how long she’s been with him this morning. Did she actually take that shower? How long could that have taken?”  He stopped in front of me, his smile widening. “You should have taken my advice.  You shouldn’t have waited to claim her as your own. If you had done it, you’d see Richard as something of value to you and not just another problem for you to solve.”

Listening to him speak about his daughter as if she were a piece of meat was like walking through the pits of a garbage dump.  Stomach
-turning and vile.  But even if listening to him made bile rise in my throat, he’d summed up everything that was racing through my head.  I forced out a laugh that I hoped sounded somewhat believable and lied, “Actually, I was thinking you have a lot of cleaning to do before your wife gets home from work.”

He
chuckled and said, “I’m sure that’s exactly what you were thinking.”

For half a second I entertained the idea of shifting and ripping out the man’s throat.  Oddly enough, it was my inner-wolf who pushed the thought away.  I’d promised our mate that I wouldn’t hurt her father, and it seemed as if my inner-wolf was determined to make me keep that promise.  He wasn’t willing to make a move that could jeopardize my chance at claiming her.

I thumbed my phone again, bringing up Beck’s number, and tapped it as I headed down the steps of the porch, putting some distance between myself and the bastard Jade called a father.  It rang twice before he answered.  “How’d the meeting go?” he asked.

“Gather the guys and come to Jeff’
s,” I said, walking down the driveway, away from Jeff.  I let my voice drop low and added, “And send someone to track down Jade.”

“What do you mean ‘track down Jade?’” he asked, hi
s voice taking on a hard edge.

“She’s with Jared,” I said, and swallowed the rotten taste that had filled my mouth that was full of my useless anger.