Dreaming of the Wolf (17 page)

But something deeper was bothering him. The need to have a mate. He was seeing Darien and Lelandi together with the babies coming, and now the damnable dreams of Alicia were making him crazy. He had to get away.

“You’ll need more room,” he said, and headed out of the dining room before anyone could say anything further to him.

He knew they’d all be giving each other looks, trying to figure out what was wrong with him, staying silent until he was well beyond earshot, and then discussing his actions in private.

He heard Darien’s phone ring and hoped there wasn’t trouble he had to take care of with the pack or town tonight, considering how much he wanted to sleep—
dream,
rather.

Why was he going to bed this early? Depression, Lelandi might surmise from her psychology classes. Never in a millennium would she or anyone else guess that he couldn’t sleep because of his desire for a woman’s silken touch.

“You need to speak with
Jake
?” Darien said in the dining room to whoever was on the phone, his voice sounding surprised.

Jake paused in the great room before he reached the stairs.

“
Yeah
, he’s
here
. Let me let you talk to him.” Normally Darien would have hollered to him that the call was for him, although why anyone would be calling him on Darien’s line was a mystery. But instead, Darien left the dining room to join Jake in the great room, and
that
didn’t bode well.

Already he was thinking that something bad had happened to Alicia. Although how anyone knew their connection, he couldn’t be sure. Unless she’d been hurt and the gallery staff had made the correlation.

Darien held his hand over the mouthpiece on the phone. “Sheriff got a call from Breckenridge.”

Already apprehensive, Jake could feel his legs turning to rubber, and he was sure his face had drained of all color, as light-headed as he felt. As observant as he always was, Darien noticed and frowned. “Hell, what’s going on?”

“What’s happened?”

Darien raised his brows, then shook his head. “You’ve got some talking to do. An Alicia Greiston passed out in the art gallery’s ladies’ restroom after she bought one of your photographs. Apparently, she’s pregnant. But they said you’d left your number for her to get in touch. Your cell phone must be off so they called our sheriff, trying to locate another number for you, and Peter gave them mine. What’s this all about?”

Pregnant?

Darien didn’t wait for Jake’s answer, but handed him the phone and remained watching him like a wary wolf.

His heart in his throat and worried as hell about Alicia, Jake said, “Hello, this is Jake Silver.”

“I’m Mary Clebourne from the art gallery in Breckenridge. I’m the one who gave you the contract on your work. I just wanted to let you know I gave your girlfriend your phone number like you asked me to, and she said she’d call you. Has she called you? We’ve been worried about her. She passed out in the ladies’ restroom. Said she was pregnant and apologized all over the place. We wanted to follow her home, but she said she’d be all right. Did she call you?” Mary repeated.

Girlfriend?
Pregnant?
“No. She didn’t. When did this happen?”

“Tonight. A couple of hours ago. I wanted to give her time to reach you, but then I worried she might not, so I thought I’d get in touch with you just in case. Then I couldn’t get hold of you and called the sheriff of Silver Town, figuring he’d know your family and someone would pass the word along. But since I couldn’t get hold of you, I assumed she only had the number I couldn’t reach either.”

Hell, the phone was charging in his bedroom. “Did she mention where she was staying? Leave a phone number or anything?”

“No. Nothing. She said that she hadn’t been drinking enough fluids. We gave her a bottle of water, and she seemed better but still awfully pale. Before the episode, she bought your tangerine wood lily photograph.”

Pregnant.
Damn guy probably had left her. Hell, that’s why she had been reluctant to see Jake further. But then why in the Sam Hill was she chasing down bad guys in her condition? She hadn’t been showing when Jake had been with her. Maybe she hadn’t known that she was pregnant right away.

The part about her buying his photograph finally registered. And he was concerned all over again. It was as if she wanted to reach out to him but was afraid to.

“All right. I’ll be there in the morning.” But he’d leave after a few hours sleep, arrive way before dawn, and search for Alicia’s car at hotels all over Breckenridge. Hopefully he’d locate her before she had a chance to vanish again.

“I just thought you should know.”

“Thanks, Mary. I really appreciate this.”

“You ought to marry her, you know. I didn’t see that she had a wedding ring.”

Jake glanced at Darien, knowing that with their enhanced hearing, his brother could hear what was being said through the mouthpiece.

Darien raised his brows again.

How could he tell Mary that, in werewolf fashion, they didn’t marry but mated for a lifetime? And since Alicia was human, that meant turning her. But with her carrying a baby, no way in hell could he or any other wolf risk the consequences. Turning a human was chancy at best and rarely done on purpose.

“Thanks, Mary. I’ll stop by tomorrow.”

They ended the call, and he handed Darien his phone.

“My office,” Darien suggested, although it was more of an order.

Jake knew Darien would tell Lelandi what was going on because she jointly led the pack and she had a need to know. But he didn’t have to like it.

As soon as Jake shut the door to Darien’s office, Darien took a seat in the sitting area instead of behind his desk.

“What’s going on, Jake? She has a gray wolf name.”

“But she’s not one of us. She has a wolf’s name, but you and I both know that the names we’ve chosen are
not
exclusive to our species.”

“All right.” Darien leaned back in his tall leather chair. “So what’s this all about?”

“She’s human and got into trouble at a restaurant where I had eaten breakfast while waiting for the gallery to open. The opening had been delayed. Anyway, she’s a bounty hunter and—”

“
Bounty
hunter
?” Darien looked surprised as hell.

“Yeah, and she’s after a couple of mobster types.”

Darien didn’t say anything for a minute, then shook his head. “She’s
pregnant
? What in the hell is she doing chasing down members of the Mob in her condition?”

He didn’t voice any opinion about why Jake would have been having sex with a human woman who was pregnant. He had to figure that Jake had sense enough to know better.

“She didn’t look pregnant when I saw her. She had a man under surveillance, and he’d sent one of his thugs to remove her from the restaurant where I was having breakfast. So I came to her rescue. We were supposed to have lunch together, but she left before we could do so. That’s why I stayed overnight. I thought either some harm had come to her after all, or she was trying to ditch me.”

“You were at a motel together, though.”

The shower incident came back to Jake in a vivid recollection. He frowned at his brother. Normally, that should have been his own business. He let out his breath in exasperation. “She
didn’t
look pregnant. All right? Give me credit for having better sense than that.”

Darien tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Maybe she broke the engagement because she wasn’t showing and she was too embarrassed to tell you she was having a child out of wedlock. Or maybe she’s still married. Or separated from a husband.”

Jake sighed darkly. “I assume it’s something like that now, yes. But I’m glad she’s not in danger.”

“That doesn’t explain why you’re returning to Breckenridge.”

When Darien’s probing look changed to one of concern, Jake sat taller and ground his teeth. “It’s just something I have to do.”

“Why, Jake? What the hell is going on between the two of you?”

Jake raked his fingers through his hair and stared at the floor before he again held Darien’s gaze. “Tell me about this dream mating that happened between you and Lelandi.”

Darien’s mouth parted. Then he clamped his lips tight and didn’t say anything for a moment. “You’ve never believed in it.”

“Hell, Darien, I dreamed of her last night. And every night for the past seven weeks. Ever since the day she disappeared.”

“The human woman?” Disbelief coated Darien’s words.

“Yeah, damn it. She’s so real, I swear I made love to her last night.
Again
.”

Darien looked at him thoughtfully, then shook his head. “Can’t be happening. Must be just that you’re so fascinated by her, you’re dreaming about her. We can’t dream mate with humans.”

Jake let out his breath in exasperation. “Maybe it’s an anomaly. Maybe it’s just a really rare occurrence. But from what you’ve told me about you and Lelandi, this is the same thing that happened between the two of you.”

“If this woman’s not a wolf, she’s carrying a human child. You
can’t
change a woman and her child. A woman, if the situation is dire enough, but not her unborn child.”

“All right, all right. I hadn’t planned to turn her. I just want to know she’s safe.”

Darien frowned at him. “I’m
serious
about this, Jake.”

“Your
concern
is duly noted. Is that all?”

“Jake…” Darien’s tone was consoling.

Jake didn’t need consolation. He needed to see Alicia again, craved seeing her, and had to find out what had happened to her over the past seven weeks. He had to be sure she was truly safe and well.

Jake nodded. “I know my place, Darien. I know what I can and can’t do. See you in the morning.”

His heart warring with his mind, he left Darien’s office and headed for the stairs. He was past ready to move out.

He hated that a dream could make him crave someone so badly that she’d keep him up half the night. Hated that he couldn’t have her in the flesh the way he wanted.

She was pregnant. He just couldn’t believe it.

In his bedroom, he jerked off his clothes and dropped them on the floor. He glanced at the polished top of his dresser—at the copper hair clip that had bound Alicia’s satiny curls when he had made love to her in the forest in Breckenridge that one day—the only physical evidence he had connecting him to her.

He yanked his bedcovers aside. No matter how much he told himself it was insane, he climbed into bed and waited for her—with wretched eagerness and abject desperation.

***

She had it bad, Alicia thought, as she pulled off her clothes in the scroungy motel room—the only motel she could find in the tiny town of Crestview—and laid her things neatly over a chair. If it hadn’t already been so late and she hadn’t been afraid she wouldn’t find another hotel with a vacancy in another town, she’d have driven on.

Right now, all she wanted was to be with the man of her dreams, but she had a job to do—relocate and start her life over.

She couldn’t risk any of Constantino’s cronies catching up to her if he thought to get revenge for her turning him in. In the future, until she could figure out another way to make a living, she’d go after only bail bond jumpers with non-Italian names, to stay on the safe side. And only work during the day, although she’d shifted some during the day as well, so that wasn’t a guarantee of anything. But she hadn’t realized that the moon was nearly full, and she suspected that’s why she’d felt a sudden need to shift.

Hating that she would be driving right past Silver Town tomorrow and beyond without a word to Jake, she wondered if there was another route she could take.

Jake!
She meant to at least call someone in Silver Town and leave a message that she was alive and well. But when she pulled her cell phone out of her purse, she flipped the phone open and recalled that the battery was dead. She had to charge it. She started the charge and glanced at the room phone. If she couldn’t call him on her phone after taking her shower, and it would have been charging for an hour or so, she’d make a long-distance room call instead.

Then with her lavender shampoo and tangerine body wash in hand, she walked into the grungy bathroom. The grout in the floor was no longer white but a dirty gray, rust stains lined the sink from a perpetually dripping faucet, and the shower curtain was covered with a light sheen of soap scum, but the floor of the porcelain tub seemed clean enough. She turned on the water, waited for it to get hot, then slipped inside to shower.

She soaped up her hair with the shampoo, wanting to wash away the past few weeks’ events, going back to when she’d been doing damn well. Her hands stilled in the suds on top of her head where she’d piled her soapy hair. When the men had come to kill Ferdinand at his townhouse, she’d smelled the cologne of the man who’d entered the bedroom where she’d hidden under the bed. Ferdinand had already bitten her by that time. And her sense of smell had been highly attuned. A wolf’s sense of smell. Would she recognize the man’s odor again?