The Protector (Lone Wolf, Book 1) (21 page)

Her hand snaked out and grabbed my
wrist.
 
It was as if she hadn’t even
moved
,
it was so quick, but where she’d just been kneeling there before, now she was
kneeling there and holding tightly to my left wrist, her fingers encircling it
like steel bands, still staring up at me with a wide, bright smile that now
made her eyes look a little cold…

It was strange.
 
Her teeth hadn’t seemed quite so pointed
before.
 
I stared down at them, feeling
my heart begun to thunder in me.
 
Something
was wrong.

“You are Ms. Elizabeth Grayson,
yes?” asked Sheila, the words coming out soft and clipped as her unblinking
eyes pinned me to the spot.

“Yes?” I muttered, trying to tug my
arm out of her grasp.

It was as if her hand was made of
solid steel.
 
It was completely
immovable.
 
I glanced down at her hand,
clasped tightly around my wrist, then back up at her face.

“Good,” whispered Sheila, her smile
widening, a feat I happened imagined could be possible.
 
“It’s nice to know I have the right person.”

She drew me closer to her, a little
bit like a fisherman, reeling in a catch.
 
I’m not a weakling, but I couldn’t move her fingers an inch, couldn’t
twist out of her grasp, and she was squeezing her fingers tightly around my
wrist now, squeezing so tightly that it was beginning to hurt.
 
White hot pain sprouted from my wrist as she
twisted my arm then, a cruel expression beginning to overtake the smile.
 

“I think you should leave.”

The words were a dark, rumbling
growl, and I knew that voice.
 
There, in
the entrance to the kitchen, stood Layne.
 
She was still just as wet and disheveled as I was, but there was
something about how she stood there, her body angled toward us and a sneer of
anger on her face, making her lips go up over her teeth.
 

Her shoulders curled forward, but
not in dejection anymore.
 
They curled
like she was carrying a huge weight on her back, and she was about to throw it
off, perhaps violently.
 
Her leather
jacket seemed to be too small for her muscles, for a long moment, and there
seemed to be a pulse of heat and power coming from her form that radiated
across the short distance of my kitchen to roll over both me and Sheila in one
dizzying wave of aggression.
 

The repairwoman let go of my hand,
standing in one quick, jerky motion, like she’d just been bitten.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly, wide
eyes glued to Layne, hands spread in front of her, and her palms up to Layne in
the universal gesture of please-calm-down.
 
“I think I have the wrong apartment.”

Layne took one step forward, Sheila
took one step backward, and then Layne, who’d had her head bent, lifted her
chin, raising her gaze and staring at Sheila.

From somewhere far away, I heard a
gasp.
 
I’d made that sound, I realized
in a detached sort of way, like it was someone else making it, not me.
 
Because this moment?
 
It felt like a dream.
 
It didn’t feel real in the slightest.

Because Layne’s eyes were no longer
perhaps brown of perhaps green or perhaps blue.
 

They were as red as blood.

“Get,” she whispered, the air
shimmering in the air among the three of us like it was carved of solid ice,
“out.”

Sheila stayed frozen for a long
moment, her entire body quaking, and then she bolted faster than I thought any
human being could move, past Layne and out of the kitchen and through the
living room, and the door slammed shut behind her, making the walls of the
apartment shake like an earthquake was beginning.

Layne stared at me, her nostrils
flaring, her eyes narrowed, and her hands clenched into such tight fists at her
side that it looked like she was braced and holding back a falling wall.
 
But she was just standing there in the
middle of the entrance to my kitchen, still as drenched as she’d been when
she’d left, just moments before.

But now, the air seemed to shimmer
around her like waves of heat were radiating off of her body into the colder
air.

“Did she hurt you?” said Layne,
getting each word out with some difficulty.
 
I stared at her, knowing that my heart was beating too fast, but this
time, it wasn’t from attraction.

It was from fear.

There was something wrong with
Layne, the Layne who was standing in my kitchen right now, the Layne who was
completely different from the Layne who’d walked down the corridor just a
handful of moments before.

This Layne was dangerous, I knew.

“What’s wrong?” I managed, the
words small and hardly audible.
 
I
stared at her tense form, her tense form that shook for some reason, shook like
she was holding back an avalanche, a mountain, a moon, with only herself
between the object and something she was trying to protect.
 
I cleared my throat, tried to make my voice
stronger.
 
“What happened to you?” I
asked.

She shook her head, growled a
little under her breath, swallowed.
 
She
took a very long breath and visibly straightened, raising her head again,
relaxing her shoulders to curve downward instead of hulking forward.
 
Her hands went flat against her thighs, and
then she assumed a more relaxed position, sliding her hands slowly and
carefully into her leather jacket’s pockets.

When she raised her gaze to me
again, her eyes were their normal, captivating hazel.
 

Had I imagined the red?
 
But no, I’d
seen
it.
 
I’d
seen
her eyes, and they were
red
like
blood
and any other cliché comparison you can think of.
 
But they weren’t red anymore, looked like
they’d never been red.
 
I had to have
imagined it.
 
Right?

I leaned against the sink, suddenly
drained of the energy to even hold myself upright.
 
The adrenaline that had been pouring through me left as quickly
as it’d come, and now the distance to the couch, someplace that would hold me
while I slumped down onto it and curled myself into a ball, seemed practically
overwhelming.

I tried again:
 
“What
happened
to you?” I asked, my
words soft and small in the space between us, but there all the same.
 

I really needed some answers.

But it didn’t seem like I’d be
getting any anytime soon.
 
Layne simply
shook her head at me, stepped forward smoothly.
 
As if she knew how suddenly exhausted I was, she scooped me up
and carried me, just like she had on our hike earlier today, back to the
couch.
 
I didn’t protest.
 
With her overly warm body tight against
mine, I carefully did not think about what had happened earlier, in Dogtown,
about the kiss she’d stopped.
 

I thought, instead, about the Layne
who had stood in the entrance to my kitchen just moments ago, the Layne with
her lips up over her teeth, the red eyes that had seemed impossible.
 
But I’d
seen
them.

“I forgot my car keys,” said Layne
simply, as if that was any sort of rational explanation for why she’d come back
to the apartment apparently just in the nick of time to stop…what?
 
What had that fake repairwoman been about to
do?

Really, what had just
happened?
 
My logical mind told me that
a woman had just been in my apartment intent on harming me, and Layne had
arrived just in time to stop it.
 

But my instincts were telling me
that there was a lot more going on under the surface of things than what I was
seeing.

Layne crossed to the little table
by the door and scooped her key chain up from the bowl there.
 
She turned to look back at me over her
shoulder.

“Keep the door locked.
 
Don’t let anyone else in,” she said, one
brow up and a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth.
 
“Though I don’t think anyone will be back.”

She looked practically smug.

“What the hell?” is what I managed
to say, then.
 
It seemed to encompass everything
I was feeling quite nicely.

Layne grinned at that, actually
grinned, shrugging her shoulders, and with that gesture, shrugging off the last
bits of her tension.
 

“I hope you know that I’m not going
to let this go—not until I get some answers,” I told her as she shut the door
behind her.

“I didn’t think you would,” she
muttered, right before the door clicked shut behind her, leaving me alone in my
apartment, confused, a little afraid, but mostly angry that something
unspeakably strange had happened, and I had no explanation for it at all.

But I would sure as hell get one.

Chapter 11:
 
Instinct

“Who the hell is Layne O’Connell,
Dad?” I asked, trying to keep my tone steady as I held the cell phone tightly
and narrowed my eyes.
 
“I mean,
really
?”

“She’s your bodyguard!” said my
father cheerfully on the other end of the phone.
 
It was early Sunday morning, and every early Sunday morning was
when my father went into the office, made a very good, strong cup of coffee,
and created a game plan for what he would tackle in the coming week in the
company.
 
I knew I was interrupting some
of his prime working time, but—to be frank—I didn’t give a damn today.
 
For some reason, I felt that my father and
Layne were pulling the wool over my eyes, and I was sick of it.

There was something going on, and I
needed answers.
 
Now.

“So I think some strange
repairwoman came into my apartment last night and had some sort of nefarious
plan,” I said, waving my arm about as my tenuous grasp on politeness
snapped.
 
“Seriously.
 
A
repairwoman
.
 
But, somehow and magically, Layne knew that
there might be trouble and sort of just
appeared
out of nowhere to save
the day, but not as the Layne we know!
 
Nope!”
 
I was practically
shouting now.
 
“She had
red eyes
,
Dad.”

“Kids these days and their colored
contacts,” said my father indulgently, smoothly steamrolling right over what
I’d been about to say next.
 
“Elizabeth,
shouldn’t you be getting ready for your concert?”

“I
am
ready for my concert,”
I replied hotly.
 
“And
you
are
evading my
questions.
”

“Elizabeth, sweetheart,” said my
father then with a sigh, “I want you to go to your concert and have a really
wonderful time.
 
I want you to forget
about all of the fishing moguls that are currently making your life—and, I’d
like to point out,
my
life—a veritable living hell.
 
Go play your music, sweetheart.
 
Do what you were born to do.”

If he was gearing up for one of his
inspirational speeches that he gives his plant workers, he had to know I was in
no mood to have it work on me.
 
I sighed
for a long moment, pressing a fingertip to my forehead to stave off the
headache that was beginning to pound in my skull.
 
My father was beginning to throw the words “fishing moguls” at me
anytime anything was—and you’ll have to forgive my pun here—fishy.
 
And I was starting to not buy it any longer.

“Dad,” I said then, my voice
small.
 
I went for broke: “I just want
some answers.
 
People are trying to kill
me, and I don’t know why.”

His voice swelled with
emotion.
 
“Honey, I’m doing everything I
can to make certain that stops, okay?
 
Please believe me, sweetheart, I’m doing everything in my power that I
can.
 
There’s nothing in the world that
I want more than to keep you safe.
 
They’re after
you
because of
me
.
 
And that’s unforgivable.
 
I’m going to make it right.”

There was so much raw emotion in
his words.
 
I knew them to be true.
 
My father loved me with all of his heart,
and he
did
want to keep me safe.

But I also knew my
dad
through and through.

And there was something he was keeping from me.
 
Had, perhaps, been keeping from me for a
good, long time.
 
His answers were too
evasive, his voice taking on that certain distant quality that he used when he
told me what he’d always called a “white lie” to keep me in the dark from
something that might hurt me.

I turned my mother’s ring over and
over on my finger absent-mindedly, staring down at the garnet glinting in the
morning sunshine that streamed through my kitchen window.
 
I would never forget that he’d taken on that
distant tone the morning of my mother’s funeral.
 
His eyes couldn’t meet mine that entire day, always looking over
my shoulder as if he was waiting for my mother to stride into the house behind
me, waiting for her to come back from the grave, like she’d never really gone.