Wicked Werewolf Passion (7 page)

“Carmen wait-”

“Let go!” 

He let her legs slip to the floor and she could feel the damp proof of his release slick between her thighs, a taunt that screamed that they had never been mates, that this was just sex and always had been. Carmen sunk down the wall to the floor, facing the truth of why staying away five years had been so easy for him. He was in front of her in an instant. 

“Listen to me,” he said, pressing his shirt between her legs, and his hand on her face. She was on the floor, naked, his shirt as her towel. How disgraced did she have to get? “Carmen, we’re mates.” 

“I have no mark. We aren’t mates and so now I know why you forgot me so easily.”

“Baby, I have never forgotten you. I have ached for you every second of every day. I don’t want you to have to choose between me and your father.” His lips thinned and he held up his palm and showed her a strange circle design etched. “It’s temporary Benedanti magic meant to stop mating.” 

Her eyes went wide and her chest exploded with pain. “What? What does that even mean?” 

“I wasn’t letting someone else be here, dealing with your father, with you. I had to come and I knew without help I couldn’t help but claim you.”

“You want to avoid our bond so badly that you would use magic to stop it?” Could he hurt her any deeper? “Oh wait. You haven’t even had the Benedanti check me out for magic. You don’t even trust me.”

“I don’t need them to check you out but they already did. The man on the porch when we got here wasn’t a wolf. He uses magic to give off that scent. He’s Benedanti and he cleared you.” 

She sucked in a breath. No wonder he’d made her nervous. “I hate you needed him to check me out more than you can know.”

“Not me. The Guard and the King.”

“The King?” she asked, appalled. “Our King knows about my father?”

He nodded. “He’s Kole’s father-in-law. How could he not?”

“They’ll kill my father for being a traitor. He can’t be a traitor.”

“I know, which is why I need you to understand that I want you, Carmen. It’s against everything male and wolf in me to not claim you. No. It’s more than want. I need you, but we both know it’s me or your father and we both know you can’t live with that. And baby, I love you way too much to hurt you like that.”

Her chest tightened. “You...love me?”

“Yes. I love you. More than you can possibly know.”

Tears, she hated tears, but they spilled from her eyes of their own accord and she knew why. She knew the truth. “I love you, too. I do. I don’t hate you. I can’t hate you. He’s not right, Shi. I know he’s not. I know....and I don’t want to lose him but I don’t want to lose you again, either.”  Emotion overcame her, shaking her body, the tears pouring from deep in a hurtful spot inside her soul. She’d been destined to lose either Shi or her father since the day she’d lost her mother. Shi picked her up and she curled into him, welcoming his strength, his presence in her where he belonged. 

She glanced up at him, swiping at tears. “I need you, Shi. You can’t leave again. You can’t.”

He sat down on a couch and settled her against the arm, her legs across his lap, gently swiping tears from her eyes. “We’ll find an answer.”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I want to hear. Tell me you aren’t leaving again. Tell me we’ll deal with my father together and everything else from this point forward. Tell me you’ll help me try to save him.” She climbed on top of him, straddling him. “Tell me, Shi.”

He wrapped his strong arms around her, laced his fingers at the back of her head, and rested his forehead against hers. “I can’t make a promise I can’t keep. I don’t know if he can be saved.”

She pulled back to look at him. “If it’s magic eating him alive, then surely magic can save him. Surely, Nico has ties high enough in the Benedanti to go to someone ancient and powerful enough to save him. Just tell me we’ll try. It’s all I can ask, but I need you to mean it.”

He slid his hand to her face, brushed his lips over hers. “I’d do anything for you, Carmen, but promise me you won’t get your hopes up.”

“I won’t. I promise.” She pressed her mouth to his. “Thank you, Shi.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Carmen. Just don’t hate me if it doesn’t work out.”

“I love you. I’m not going to stop loving you.” 

“Show me,” he murmured, shifting her so that she could feel his shaft pressing between her thighs. “Show me, Carmen.”

She eased forward and took him inside her, sliding down his length, feeling him fill her, her arms wrapping his neck, their lips a breath apart. “How long does that mark on your hand last?”

“Not long without more magic. A day, maybe two.” He rolled her to her back, settling over her. “Too long.” 

“Too long,” she whispered, before his mouth closed over hers, and the desperateness of two mates afraid they would never be one drove them over the edge. 

 Chapter Seven

“Damn it, Nico, this isn’t the answer,” Shi said, standing in the middle of the ranch’s kitchen that was technically owned by the Royal Guard. Shi was just using the place until Kole replaced the warehouse he and his mate had managed to get blown up. “She’s not going back there. The Rebels came after her.” 

“This is the best plan we have.”

“What plan?” Carmen asked, appearing in the doorway.

Shi’s gut tightened at the sight of her standing there, now dressed in the black jeans and t-shirt Nico’s mate had sent her, her red hair a wild silky mass of just-fucked-many-times glory that he wished wasn’t about to go away. He loved this woman too damn much to watch her tormented. “We don’t have a plan,” he said firmly, his gaze dropping to her hand where she held the folder he’d given her with evidence against her father.  

She held it up. “If it means undoing what my father might have done, Shi, whatever it is, I have to do it.” 

Shi cut Nico a hard look. “We don’t have a plan.”

She stared at him, and then cut her gaze to Nico. “You want me to go back and spy on my father.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Nico agreed. “Otherwise we can’t be sure he’ll tell us what we need to know.”

“You aren’t going back there, Carmen,” Shi said. “Not after the Rebels came after you.”

“Maybe they came after you, Shi,” she suggested. 

“They didn’t.”

“You can’t know that. And...if they did come after me, what does that mean?” Her brows dipped. “If they need me to use against my father, then my father must not be willingly helping them.”

“Or your father somehow figured out I was coming after you and used Rebel allies to try and stop me.”

She cut her gaze to the ceiling and swallowed hard, before looking at him again. “In which case, I’m not in danger from the Rebels. I can go back.”

“You’re not going back.”

“You can’t stop me.”

“You want to bet on that? You’re my mate and I’m done denying that. You aren’t going back there and putting your life in danger.”

“Shi, damn it-”

Nico’s cell phone rang and he grabbed it and punched the button. Shi focused on Carmen.“A mated male does not let his woman put herself in harm’s way.”

“We have an option,” Nico announced, drawing their attention, and the air around him crackled before a rather large and clunky gold chain appeared in his hand, dangling from his fingers. “Ariel pulled in some high up favors and found a spell to slow the spread of the magic’s poison in Alexander’s blood. It won’t cure him but it will buy us time to try to find a way he can be.”

Carmen’s excitement was palpable but Shi wasn’t ready to get on this bandwagon. He’d seen too many things in his years. “What’s the catch?”

“It won’t erase the changes that have already occurred. It won’t keep him out of jail. What it will do is convince the King there is a chance to save him. This necklace is a lifeline.”

Carmen’s eyes met Shi’s. “It’s hope. That’s all I can ask for.”

“We have to get it on him now, is the trick,” Nico said, looking worried, as if that was an issue. “I’ll give it to him as a gift,” Carmen suggested. 

“That won’t work,” Nico said, nixing that idea quickly. “The magic in the necklace will react to the dark magic in his body. It’s going to hurt just being near it, let alone wearing it. We can’t arrest him without risking this becoming public.”

“So we bring him to us,” Shi said softly. 

“How?” Carmen asked. 

Shi’s eyes met Nico’s and the two of them knew what had to be done. Nico grabbed his phone and dialed. “Council Member, Sir,” Nico said into the phone. “I’m afraid I have some bad news. Shi McKnight has kidnapped your daughter but we’re tracking him. Once we have a solid location we’ll contact you back.” Nico snapped the phone shut. “I’m going to check on my mate and round up the troops.” He disappeared from the room, using the newfound magic his witchy mate had gifted him.

“You’re bossy,” Carmen said immediately. 

“I won’t apologize for protecting you. Just for not doing it sooner.”

Suddenly, she darted towards him and wrapped herself around him. “You aren’t leaving this time, are you?”

He tunneled his fingers into her hair and forced her gaze to his. “No. I’m not leaving this time.”

“Promise.”

And this time, he answered her, and meant it. “I promise. Good, bad, or ugly, you’re stuck with me.”

“Not yet,” she whispered. “Not until the damnable magic you have etched in your palm is gone. I hate magic. I hate it so much.”

And so did Shi. More in that moment than he thought possible since that magic kept him from making her truly his. 

***

It was an hour later when Carmen stepped onto the front porch of the ranch house alone, the hot night suffocating her despite the recent sunset. Shi was out back in some sort of building behind the house with Kole, Nico and Jacob, doing some sort of planning for her father’s appearance. She was a wreck, so close to the chance to have both the men she loved in her life, and terrified it would go wrong. 

A sudden chill rushed over her despite the heat, and she instinctively took a step backwards. The blond man, the Benedanti appeared in front of her. A second later, her father stood beside him. Her father, who had simply appeared using magic to transport him, when that should be impossible. 

“Father?” she gasped. 

“Take her back to my quarters,” he ordered the Benedanti. “I’ll deal with Shi once and for all.”

The Benedanti stepped towards her. “Wait!” She yelled. “We’re mated. Shi and I are mated.  We live together and we die together.”

Her father’s eyes turned red. Red like a virus infected wolf which made no more sense than him using magic to travel. She had no idea what he was anymore, or who he was, for that matter. “I’m proof that isn’t true,” he said. “And don’t think I’m not prepared to make sure it’s not true for you either.”

“You want me, here I am,” Shi said from behind her and she jumped when a gun went off. The Benedanti traitor collapsed to the ground, dead far easier than she thought one of their kind could die. Suddenly, she stood between her mate and her father – the one thing that separated the two wolves she loved the most in this world. Her father cried out and dropped to his knees. Carmen whirled around and found Shi holding the necklace. Frantically, she looked between the two men. Her father gasped and held his throat. 

“Carmen...Carmen,” he croaked. 

Shi started towards her father and she launched herself at Shi. “Stop! Stop! You’re killing him!” 

Shi shackled her around the waist and tried to set her aside but it was too late. She felt the air shift and change. She knew her father had just disappeared. “Oh God. What have I done?” She turned in Shi’s arms to confirm her father was gone, and then turned back to Shi. “I panicked. I didn’t want him to die.”

“I know,” Shi said calmly. “It’s okay. We’ll find him.”

The air shifted again and a roar filled the air. Carmen whirled around to find her father shifting to wolf.  Shi shoved her aside and to her horror watched him shift and launch himself at her father and she knew this was a fight to the death. And that was when all hell broke loose. Suddenly, Rebel wolves charged from around the parameters. The ranch was under attack. 

All around Carmen there were wolves fighting, but she stood on that porch, frozen, unable to move, until one of those wolves launched himself her direction. Operating on pure instinct, not even aware she knew it was there, Carmen picked up the gun Shi had dropped when he shifted and landed a bullet in between her attacker’s eyes. It dropped like a rock and she reached down and grabbed the necklace and a second gun, realizing right then what she had to do. She was going to shoot her father and her mate. How else was she going to stop them from killing each other? 

Shi felt the bullet to his shoulder a moment before he heard Alexander’s roar of pain, and Shi rolled and began to shift, knowing he’d heal instantly. Alexander did the same thing. The gun went off again and Shi focused trough the crush of bones and bite of the bullet his body was grinding past skin, to gape in disbelieve. Carmen was not only holding the gun but he was pretty sure she put the bullet in him, but she’d just shot her father with another one. 

Alexander roared again and started to shake, shifting with obvious pain. Carmen dropped to her knees beside him, and fear pushed Shi towards her, crawling in desperateness to get to her before his shift was complete. He didn’t know what Alexander was capable of and he didn’t want to find out at the expense of Carmen. She reached down towards Alexander and he caught the flash of the necklace a second before Alexander sat up grabbed Carmen by the hair. The necklace dropped to the ground. Shi was there in an instant, snatching the chain and maneuvering so that he was slamming it against Alexander’s chest, trying to free Carmen. The wolf roared and let go of Carmen and the necklace burned into his skin, seeming to crawl like a snake through his flesh and wrap his neck on its own.