ROMANCE: Mason (Bad Boy Alpha Male Stepbrother Romance Boxset) (New Adult Contemporary Stepbrother Romance Collection) (11 page)

“Nadine,” a deep voice suddenly said and it danced over my skin like feathers. I opened my eyes and Mac stood in front of me, wearing a black fur coat the same color the wolf had been.

“Mac?” I asked with my voice raw. I looked over his shoulder. Sabrina was sitting on the ground, wrapped in a brown fur coat of her own. She hung her head.

“What are you doing all the way out here? It’s not safe.”

He stepped forward to take my hand, but I jerked it away. Knowing about mythical creatures, knowing someone was a wolf, was one thing. But seeing it?

“As opposed to how safe I am now with wolves surrounding me?”

“Come on, let me take you home.”

“She was going to attack me!” I said, putting the pieces together. When I pointed at her she pulled her lips back and hissed at me. It was strangely animalistic, even in her human form.

“She was out of line, but that won’t happen again,” Mac said.

“I was just going to have some fun with her,” Sabrina said, pouting like a child. Mac ignored her and held out his hand to me. I hesitated, but eventually I took it. Where was I going to go? I would probably get lost if I didn’t let him take me home, and after this I didn’t really want to wander the streets alone again.

Mac’s truck was parked on a dirt road not too far off.

“How did you find me?” I asked after he’d gotten in next to me.

“I followed your scent,” he said, starting the truck. “Sabrina left after you did and she’s a mean one. I thought it would be better if I found you first.”

“Well… thanks,” I said. He had saved me, after all. He nodded without saying anything and drove the short distance to the shop, weaving through streets until we got there. When he switched off the engine it ticked before it came to rest, and the silence between us was thick.

“She’s your mate, isn’t she?” I asked. She was a wolf, he was a wolf, he was dominant. It had to make sense. But he shook his head.

“She wanted that. And there was a time I thought I wanted it too.”

“What happened?”

“People change. She does this for the sport of it. She kills easily, doesn’t think about it, and it’s always a race to her. A challenge. I can’t have a family with a woman that will put herself first no matter what.”

I looked down at my hands. He spoke of family and their history so easily, and still an uncomfortable feeling had bled out between us.

“Well, I’ll stay away,” I said. I didn’t feel like another run in with Sabrina because she felt the need to show dominance. This was a whole different battle ground. In my world, women out-dressed each other, had the ability to look like they insulted instead of being insulted. It was simple.

Here it was animalistic. There was no way I could keep my own.

“I don’t want you to stay away,” Mac said. His hands were on the steering wheel and he stared out through the windscreen.

“Well, I’m not really planning on getting involved with—“

He leaned across the gap between us, moving so fast and so fluidly I didn’t even see him moving, and his lips pressed against mine, cutting off my sentence. His lips were hot, searing my own, and electricity flowed from his body into mine. It was like he was charging me with emotion that he’d been building up.

When he pulled away again, I gasped, looking for words.

“Sorry,” he said, not looking sorry at all.

“What was that for?” I asked like an idiot.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s something about you. Since the moment I saw you… I just wanted to do that.” His black eyes were large and liquid as he stared into mine, and I felt like everything around us fell away until it was just me and him.

“You can do it again,” I whispered before I could stop myself. The corners of his mouth turned up in a smile, and he leaned into me, touching down on my lips gentler this time. I opened my mouth and he slipped his tongue between my lips, finding mine. It was like I’d stuck my finger into a plug, but in a good way. My body hummed to a frequency that matched his. His hands came up to cup my cheeks and his touch took my breath away. I could feel my heart slowing down, beating in a rhythm that I was sure was in time with his.

I’d never met a man that felt like he was the other half. The piece that completed the puzzle. I didn’t do relationships because I always ended up feeling like somewhere down the line I got a pebble in my shoe. But if this was what it felt like, if this was what I meant to be with the right man, I would do it.

I would do it again, and again, and again.

Chapter 4

It was amazing how two weeks could fly. I was wrapped in a cocoon with a looking glass that recolored everything around me. I wasn’t in a measly town on a tiny island in Alaska. I wasn’t in my parents’ shabby house spending my time listening to them make inconsequential small talk. I was in a palace of dreams, with rolling hills of green and moonlight and roses.

Mac was there around every turn. His hands held my dreams in a way I could never really quite paint them myself, and when he smiled at me he saw in me the person I’d never been able to become myself. The small-town girl I hated wasn’t gone, instead she was loved.

He picked me up for a dinner date two nights before I had to leave. I put on jeans, black boots and a black coat. I didn’t straighten my hair, instead my A-symmetric bob was wavy all over, making me look a little windblown but in a nice way. I wore make up but I didn’t hide my freckles. There was something dishonest about hiding parts of myself. I’d learned this from Mac, who was reckless and raw all the time.

When he picked me up he kissed me, pulling my body tightly against his. The warmth that radiated from him enveloped me and his lips on mine were hot and fierce.

“You look great,” he said. In New York I’d always felt like I had to dress to kill, that my image was my ticket to the big show. New York. My stomach felt like lead when I thought about going back there. The time had flown and it was almost time for me to leave. Here everything was about who I was underneath, and somehow I’d learned to like it this way. I had managed to push New York and everything it had made me away. It was amazing how much could change in two weeks.

We drove the short distance to a small restaurant in the heart of Metlakatla. It was dark wood and green and reminded me more of a downscaled hunting lodge than a restaurant, but it was warm and inviting, and we were led to a table in the back by the same woman that did half-day shifts at the convenience store two shops down from my parents’.

“This is nice,” I said, looking into Mac’s eyes. We’d been here before. It was the only real restaurant, although dates didn’t define themselves with fine dining in my mind anymore. Mac had taken me fishing, his big hands covering mine on the pole as he showed me how to cast a line. He’d taken me into the woods and pointed out various plants and roots that could be used for medicinal use. He’d taken me on a boat out into the middle of the ocean where it had felt like we were floating on a sea of glass and the only land we could see laced the horizons.

He’d held me in his arms on the back of a truck, huddled in fur blankets when we were stargazing – the stars were like fire here, not just pinpricks of light fighting through the smog of modernity. His hands had burned my skin when he’d run it over the skin of my back, down my neck, on my cheek.

With his mouth he had told me everything he didn’t do with words, and he couldn’t have said it any better.

“Next week I’ll take you to the reservation. It’s wild country, but I think you’ll manage.” He grinned and leaned back in his chair, interlinking his fingers behind his head.

“I’m leaving soon,” I said, looking down at the fork I was tracing instead of at him. “My two weeks here are up.” Mac didn’t say anything, and when I looked up at him he was looking at me, his eyes closed, his face an expressionless mask.

“We both knew how long I was staying, Mac,” I said, sounding more defensive than I’d meant to. When people kept quiet I tended to fill the spaces with a lot of things I hadn’t intended on saying. “My ticket was return. I have to get on the ferry in two days’ time.”

He still just looked at me.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” I asked, and I wondered how it had happened that he had turned into a stranger sitting opposite me, instead of Mac who had been an open book for two weeks.

“Stay,” he said softly, so softly that it wasn’t really audible, but I heard it all the same. “Stay with me,” he said again, this time a bit louder.

“I can’t just leave my life in New York behind. I have a company to run. I have friends there, responsibilities and duties.”

Mac nodded and looked around the restaurant. He wasn’t looking for anything in specific, he was just looking for reason not to look at me.

“This has been amazing, and you’re…” How could I even put into words how I felt about him? “I just don’t’ know how to do this.”

He looked at me again, his eyes big and black and so intense like they haven’t been before.

“Stay with me, Nadine. I don’t want you to go.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but closed it again. What if I stayed? What if I did leave it all behind and moved out here? What kind of life would I lead?

I knew the answer to that. A simple one. A cold one. A life that was filled with people, not things. A life that was filled with Mac. I took a deep breath and blew it out again. Was it really that simple?

“I don’t know if I’m cut out for this kind of life,” I said honestly. “A two week vacation is great but forever?”

“You don’t think you can do forever with me?” he asked.

“Is that what you’re asking?” I looked up. The atmosphere around us changed. The warm air sucked right out of the room, and it was replaced with an icy chill. “Tell me what you’re asking me, Mac,” I said. I needed to know what his conditions were. Was I going to be here for another month and then suddenly he was going to get tired of me?

“You said forever. Is that what you’re asking? You don’t know me, not the way I fit into a life. You don’t know more about me than an arsenal of two weeks’ memories. What are you asking?”

Mac hesitated. “I just want to wake up one more morning and know that you’re still here. I don’t… I don’t know what’s going to happen in the long run. I know that I want to see you tomorrow. And next week.”

“And next month? And next year? You’re asking me to drop the entire life I’ve built for myself in the city, and you don’t know what you want in the long run. How can that be enough?”

“Enough for you or enough for me?” he asked. He was angry now, and I wasn’t sure why. “You always need more, don’t you? This life isn’t what you wanted, it never was. Hell, your parents told me how you refused to come over and over again. It’s because it reminds you of the person you really are, doesn’t it?”

I was getting angry now, too.

“This has nothing to do with me and my past. All you really know about me is what you’ve heard from my parents because you’ve moved into the spot I vacated.”

“They needed someone who cared.”

“And you think I didn’t? I care about them, I do. Where do you think the money comes from that pays for my dad’s medication? Or the loan that they needed to start up the shop at all? Who do you think paid for the house they’re living in?”

“Is caring about money to you? You sure have a funny way to show love.”

“At least I show it. At least I don’t walk into someone else’s home and take over the role of being the worshipped child.”

“Well, you ran away. What did you expect?” his voice was raising and I pushed mine up to match him.

“I needed to live for myself for once! For years I was everything they needed me to be. I took care of my mom because she’s like a child. I’ve been the adult my whole life, and I’ve raised my parents. You can’t tell me you haven’t noticed how they are. You’re blaming me for leaving that? And now you’re expecting me to come back to it, after you’ve made up your mind that you just don’t like the way I think about things.” I paused to take a breath. An expression flickered across Mac’s face, too fast for me to read, or maybe just too shuttered for me to try and find out.

“You know what, two minutes ago I nearly said yes. Two minutes you made it sound like I could start over here. But I’m not sure I want to spend my time with someone who manages to tell me who I ought to be, when he doesn’t even know who I am in the first place.”

I got up and left Mac behind, gaping. It reminded me of the first night I’d stormed out of that bar. Mac had been the problem there too. I wondered how I’d thought he wasn’t still the same person.

I walked down the road. Most places were locked up for the night, and the street was illuminated in golden light by the setting sun. The streetlights were already coming on, starting with a dim glow that would eventually take over from the sun and cast individual circles of light on the concrete.

I stopped and wrapped my arms around myself. I was freezing. I leaned against the wall of a shop, next to the big shop windows.

The air around me became colder still, and felt like a void, and absence of warmth and human presence, even though I was still here. My chest felt tight and I struggled to breathe.

I recognized this feeling. A little different than before, but there was a very familiar pinch in the air.