Sassy Ever After: Bonnie Sass (Kindle Worlds Novella) (6 page)

C
alum’s
and Ewan’s wolves threw themselves at the locked door. Angie’s scent—and that of the vampires, more than one of them—led straight to the room. Larger than natural wolves and more powerful, and with a half dozen more pack brothers at their backs, they burst through the door….

To find Angie alone, startled, looking around as though the vampires had been there a moment before.

They probably had, Calum thought as he stalked quickly toward Angie. Nothing could possibly have kept him from her now. His human form returned as he moved. The woman was trembling and seemed disoriented—in shock perhaps—when he swept her up into his arms to carry her. God, the relief, having his sister safe and his mate back in his arms. Even dazed, Angharod held tight to this neck. The alpha and his wolf didn’t care that he was naked from his shift or streaked with blood from his own wounds—but more from the wounds his wolf had inflicted. Feeling Angie breathing warm against him was the only thing that mattered.

Calum squeezed his mate just as tight, keeping her bound to his chest like he’d never give her up. The only thing he said to her as he carried her down the stairs and through the main room of the loft was, “Don’t look.” At the blood, at the bodies, both wolf and human.

Back at the suite, the alpha ordered pack guards posted outside in the foyer. In privacy, he dragged the unusually quiet Angie with him to the bathroom. Wide-eyed, pensive, she didn’t resist as he peeled her clothes off of her beautifully curved body and left them in a heap on the bathroom floor.

The hot water in the huge marble shower was almost heaven against Calum’s sore muscles and wounds as he stood with the jets pummeling the contours of his back. It was feeling Angie’s wet naked body pressed to his chest, his tensed abs, and his growing cock that was the true definition of paradise, though. He ran his hands over every luscious inch of her as he washed her clean of the fear the vampires had inflicted upon her and the streaks of blood she taken from his body as he had carried her.

Taking her face in his hands, brushing his mouth and his words against those rose petal lips of hers as he spoke, Calum said, “Worry for you will be the death of me, woman.”

When he kissed Angie, he wanted her to feel the urgency not just of his desire but of a need for her that went far deeper. One by one, the kisses grew harder and deeper and more urgent until Angie started to return to him. Little by little, she became present in the moment with him.

“You don’t have to handle everything yourself, lass, you know?”

The statement drew resistance from Angie, and when she couldn’t avoid Calum’s kiss, she nipped him. He gasped lightly, and she just stiffened her jaw with determination, with defiance.

“Are you ever going to let me help you the way a wolf should for his mate?” Calum asked with exasperation, tightening his hold on the woman’s broad, beautiful face. “Is it really so impossible, the thought you might let me protect you?”

“I don’t need—,” she started to breathe out in a hiss.

“You do, Angharod, you do need someone to protect you. And not just tonight. Not just physical danger but from everything hard in life that we should be facing together as mates.”

“We aren’t,” Angie started to say, and Calum knew that she meant to deny their bond as she so often had before. But this time she stopped herself. She amended the complaints to, “We can’t. It just doesn’t work.” Then, finally, she floored him with the confession, “I’m just not strong enough to be your mate and not be a liability. Maybe because I’m human. Maybe just because I’m me.”

“Good God, lass, you are ridiculous when you say things like that. Not strong enough? I know no stronger woman, human or shifter.”

Angie responded by tightening her hold on Calum’s biceps and sinking her fingernails into his skin. “And you aren’t ridiculous yourself?” she countered. “When you don’t let me know anything you’re facing? Not even something as big as the death of your father? You wouldn’t let me in for that, even
that
. You fucked me, but you hardly let me in your life at all.”

Calum blinked, stunned, frustrated with this woman beyond words. “You are me, Angharod. Not just in my life. You are in me. In my wolf. To the core. There are times I don’t know how to be an alpha, and I’m sure as hell not the lord and leader my father was. So, no, I don’t always want you to see me flailing along trying to be part beast and part statesman. Your opinion of me matters too much.”

The woman lifted her wet face, lifted her chin in challenge. “Aye,” she said mimicking his brogue, “that fragile male ego.”

“Fragile? I’ll show you fragile.”

And Calum pushed his mate back against the cool marble of the shower wall with his hot, hard body.

C
ouldn’t
Calum Ferguson tell that Angie was all bluster by now? She bickered with him over the issue of her independence and her refusal to accept the vulnerability of her feelings for him. When he kissed her with that hot, silky mouth, she resisted and tussled with him and kissed him back with a hard nip time and again. Couldn’t he tell that the lady fought too hard? Protested too much? Couldn’t he tell that she wanted him to break down her defenses and make her love him? That she wanted him to want her to love him that badly?

Yes, she wriggled and squirmed and resisted, but she never said no. She never said leave. And when he roughly her pinned her against the shower walls and thrust inside her now, she spread her legs wider and cursed with pleasure and the beautiful ache of stretching for him.

“You still take me, Angharod,” Calum groaned against her temple as he began to pump inside her. “I still fit inside you like you are made for me. Aye, you feel it too, lass. You squeeze me as tight with your pussy as you do with your hands.”

Instead of sassing the alpha, Angie wrapped her arms around his sturdy shoulders and her legs around his solid hips. Staring boldly into those beautiful blue eyes of his, Angie thrust her own hips to meet Calum’s. She was riding him as much as he was riding her, and she wanted him to know that.

The challenge seemed to inflame the man, the wolf, the alpha in both. Calum began pumping into Angie in a circular motion, stretching her wider and hitting all the special spots inside her that made her want to squeal. She wouldn’t let herself, wouldn’t give him the satisfaction despite the obvious satisfaction he was trying to give her. When she bit her lip to keep from crying out with pleasure, Calum gave her that infuriating smile that only crooked one corner of his mouth. Smug bastard, but damn he could fuck.

Damn but he could pound up into her until his thick cock made her whole groin seem to vibrate and tingle maddeningly with a bristling, almost electrically charged pleasure. Damn but his teeth felt so right scraping and nipping the lobe of her ear, the column of her neck, her bare shoulder. Damn but his tongue on her throbbing nipples as he flicked and teased before he nipped. Damn but the things he whispered, the filthy things that came out of his mouth about how it felt to be in her pussy when she came and tightened down on him.

Like she did now. Like she did with the thick shaft of his manhood buried to the balls in her sex. With her whole body contracting and straining under the onslaught of so much sensation dancing along so many nerves.

After years of fighting this attraction, after days of sexual frustration never getting enough of this man, and after the last harrowing hours, when Calum laid Angie in his sprawling bed, she slept like a woman utterly spent.

It was still dark when Angie woke up alone in Calum’s bed, alone in Calum’s suite was only the guards out in the foyer, as she saw when she peeped through the door. She rinsed in the shower again and brushed out her hair and tried not to look at the blood-smeared pile of her clothing crumpled on the floor.

Not until Angie checked the messages on her cell did she realize that she wasn’t waking up later that night. It was already tomorrow. It was the next day. She’d slept something like twenty or twenty-two hours.

Fuck, the penguin is going to have my ass for this
.

Maybe, just maybe, if she got herself cleaned up and made some kind of appearance in the lobby looking busy, her boss would think she’d spent all day running errands for Calum Ferguson instead of just sleeping in his bed.

Angie put on a fluffy white guest robe and was shaking out her crumpled clothing to inspect the damage as she walked back into the bedroom. Thomas Davenport was standing quietly, hands clasped before him, in front of the gaping door to the bedroom balcony.

Freezing in her tracks just from the memory of how the magnetism he’d wielded over her had fogged her thoughts, Angie hugged her clothing protectively to her chest. Like that with any protection from a vampire’s speed and power. Or from those looks.

Even in what appeared to be just a plain but expensive black cashmere shirt and slacks, Davenport was devastatingly attractive. Angie couldn’t help by stare at the way the fine material hung elegantly along his body, suggesting taut, sleek musculature with the just the right breadth at his shoulders and biceps. Screw the teen movie anemic vampires boys; this vampire was built like a true predator, like a panther or a cheetah.

Glaring at the vampire and keeping her distance, Angie said, “The guards are right outside.”

Thomas Davenport did not advance on Angie as she feared he would. But she’d also seen how quickly he could move, so that was little comfort.

“Yes, they are,” he agreed. “Right outside the suite.” Not right outside the door.

Damn, one bluff called, she thought. How many more could she think up? How many would she need in order to delay whatever this vampire’s purpose was long enough for Calum or one of his pack to find her?

Be brave, Angie
, she told herself. Davenport had seemed to admire her for the way she’d faced her fear of the wolves back at the loft, for how calm and cool and strong she had seemed to remain faced with such danger. She couldn’t let him see weakness now if her strength was the reason he hadn’t done away with her already.

“Neither Calum nor Kenzie are here,” Angie said, “and I’m just a human who offers you no leverage. So what are you doing here?”

Thomas smiled, still handsome, lips still sinfully sexy. “Just a human,” he repeated. “If you keep insisting that you’re not Calum Ferguson’s mate, I’m going to take your word for it and make you mine.”

“Make me what?!” Angie drew back with shock, wondering if it would do her any good at all to lock herself in the bathroom. She knew it wouldn’t. The woman had to come up with a better plan than that.

Standing firm when she felt like running, Angie said, “Whether I’m Calum’s mate or not, I’m under his protection in his suite. How cooperative do you think he and the Highlands pack are going to be if you….”

If he what? Fucked her? Fed on her? Did vampires have anything like mating? Or did they simply seduce their food before they killed it?

“How cooperative will they be if I decide to indulge this compelling hunger for you that I can’t seem get out of my mind? Hunger like I haven’t felt in a century? You should consider that you might be worth the sacrifice, Angharod.”

Angie nearly choked on her breath. “How did you find out my name?”

Before Thomas Davenport could answer Angie’s question, the henchmen he’d called Simon, the one who had obviously wanted to kill her, stepped through the balcony curtain. “Money, sex, or pain buy any information a man could want in the city,” Simon told her with a sneer.

Davenport’s brow knit at the site of the second vampire, making Angie realize that Simon wasn’t supposed to be there. And this could not possibly be good.

N
ow that he
had Angie and Kenzie safe back at the hotel under guard, Calum had the chance to check with his pack brothers on what they and the scouts had uncovered on the whereabouts of Joel Ballard. Ramos had confirmed that the rogue wolf was not among the dead at the loft.

A call from one of the scouts said they had a solid lead at an off-Strip club called Steamworks, in an old industrial section of Las Vegas. Calum called for Ewan and Hew to meet him, but the alpha arrived first and forged into the thrumming dance music and pulsing lights of the old factory turned nightclub.

Only a small portion of the property had been remodeled. The rest remained a stylishly derelict industrial ruin. Falling down walls clinging to concrete stairways. Moonlight sifting through gaping ceilings. Piles of brickwork, rusty tools, metal scrap. Solvents and industrial chemicals still saturated the fringes of the property, throwing off Calum’s sense of smell. He had to think this was the perfect place for illicit behavior and rogue shifters.

It was in a far corner of the dilapidated brick maze of buildings that Calum found a stranger standing over the body of his scout holding a cell phone that had just been used to call the alpha.

That quickly, Calum shifted to his wolf’s half-form. Muscles swelled and bulged. Bones and ligaments lengthened. Seven feet tall, black in the moonlight, Calum’s beast stalked the stranger around the body of his scout as they circled. Readying to pounce.

The man who fit the description of Joel Ballard—scraggly shoulder-length hair, an unkept goatee, baggy surplus bomber jacket over his wiry frame—shifted just as quickly to his own ruddy brown werewolf form.

“You’re going to be sorry you found me, Ferguson,” the rogue snarled through fangs and snout.

Calum growled back, still stocking the other shifter in circles and weighing the moment to pounce. “So you do know who I am. You targeted my sister to get to me, but then you don’t want me to come looking for you?”

“I never had the slightest interest in your lordly ass,” Ballard said with what passed for laughter in half-form. It was a sharper, chilling sound not at all like a human’s. “Some fancy fucking vampire wanted your sister to get to you. She was just currency to me. Payment for my end of the bargain.”

Snarling with growing rage, Calum lunged forward and snapped at Ballard. The wiry beast was too fast and dodged away into deeper shadow.

“You bargain with vampires? That’s beneath even a rogue.”

Ballard laughed again, unwisely hinting at his location while Calum closed in on him in the darkness. “Your disapproval doesn’t mean jack shit to me, Highlander. The blood of the Vegas pack in my mouth better than a bottle of Jack Black label, worth any bargain. When they’re gone, the rogues will remain, and we’d be like nothing you’ve ever seen. The power of wolves. The immortality of vampires. The packs will cower then.”

The immortality of vampires? With his beast much more in control than the man, Calum struggled to grasp the full implication of what he thought the rogue was suggesting.

“You think that wolves can be made vampires?” Even the words tasted bad him.

“The right line of wolves? Oh, yes. But I don’t need to convince you. So long as I have these vampires willing to indulge my wild ideas, whether they think it will work or not, and all I had to do was bring them your sister.”

Calum’s reaction to the mention of Kenzie and what this bastard had tried to do was to drop down onto all fours into his full wolf form. His dark wolf leapt into the shadows where he thought Ballard was, but it was a trick, a whole, and long fall tumbling down the remains of two flights of crumbling concrete stairs. Even in wolf form, bones broke and skin tore.

Dazed for a moment, the dark wolf shook his head and leapt to his feet.

To find he was surrounded by wolves that were not his.