Darkness Bred (4 page)

 
T
his is a strange toy for a man like you,” Elin yelled over the wind tearing past Sean’s Ducati motorcycle. She had not seen it before they left Gabriel’s Place and he had retrieved the bike from an outbuilding. “Sean?” She tightened her grip on him.

Despite the speakers in their helmets, he pretended not to hear her shout to him.

“Why do you want to ride this when we can travel so fast without it?”

The bike covered ground with gathering speed, turning everything they passed into one long blur.

Sean was angry. Elin felt fury coursing through his body and longed to soothe him. But she didn’t know enough about him yet to be certain how to please him, or calm him.

She intended to learn.

The Ducati was black with thin, red stripes. Elin decided they must be all but invisible streaking along the highway in the darkness.

She leaned against Sean’s back and held as much of him as she could. He wore black leather and had made sure she had a coat even though she constantly assured him she didn’t feel the cold.

Abruptly, he clamped an elbow over one of her hands to hold her tightly against him, and covered her other hand with his own. They leaned sharply and shot down the cut between trees at Leigh’s Two Chimneys Cottage.

He stopped a short distance from the cottage, and helped her off the bike. Instantly Elin whipped off the helmet and jacket, reveling in the snap of breeze that lifted her hair and played in the clothes that skimmed her body.

“You hate restraint, don’t you?” Sean said, his own helmet already off and hooked on his handlebars. He ducked his head to look into her face. “I wonder if there are any bonds you wouldn’t fight.”

“None,” she said, laughing and shaking her head.

Sean didn’t laugh. “We all have a few bonds to deal with. Bonds of blood or honor. Bonds we choose.”

First he wheeled the bike into the cover of some dense trees, then he took her by the elbow and led her to the front porch of the cottage. Leigh had given him the key and he let them in.

“You’ll be comfortable and safe here,” he said. “Please wait while I check all the locks and windows, though.”

“You’re so stiff with me.” She watched him shut and lock the door then move on to the windows. He drew the drapes. “Have I done something to hurt you?”

“The sleeping loft is up there.” He nodded to steps leading to an area beneath an apex roof. “Leigh said the bed is made up for you. If you get nervous, I’ll be just outside the front door.”

Of course Elin already knew where the loft and the bed were, having slept there as Skillywidden while Leigh still lived in the cottage.

Without breaking stride, he went from the cozy living room with its two fireplaces, one on either side, to the kitchen. Sounds of windows opening and closing and locks being shot back and forth came again.

Males could be so difficult. They thought they were superior, and if Sean didn’t change his ways—quickly—she would tell him what she thought of this behavior.

He came back to the sitting room. “That’s the bathroom,” he said, pointing at the only other door in the room. “Do not unlock any doors or windows. If you want me, knock the inside of the front door and wait until I come to you.”

“As if locked doors would keep some people out,” she said—she couldn’t help it.

“Apart from your own fae types, I’m not aware of much that doesn’t at least pause outside buildings. Vampires can’t enter unless invited—if that’s what they call it.”

She let his reference to
fae types
pass.

Without so much as a glance in her direction, he lit first one, then the second fire. She would roast but now wasn’t the time to be critical.

“Right.” Sean brushed his hands together. “I won’t shift immediately in case you need anything in here but I’d appreciate having a chance to get a few hours’ sleep.”

In other words, he wanted to leave.

He was so much bigger than she. Elin was accustomed to being aware of his size, but with currents of agitation bouncing from him, he seemed to fill the room.

“You take the bed,” she said softly. “I’ll be comfortable on the couch.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.

“Sean, something happened with Saul, didn’t it? You were already on edge—we both were—but there’s something else.”

He stared at the front door. “Let me deal with what’s on my mind in my own way. It’s for the best. We’ll have breakfast together if you want to.”

“What’s your problem?” Elin said.

He slowly raised his eyebrows. There, she thought, don’t think I can’t be as tough as you?

“Speak to me,” she demanded.

“Okay.” Slowly, he took off his leather jacket. He wore a navy blue sweater and blue jeans—and black boots. “You want to push this, fine. But I don’t like this kind of conversation. In fact, I’m not a man who talks a whole lot at any time.”

“You think I don’t know that?” she said softly. “I am not a woman who can live with unexplained anger—or any anger.”

Too bad he looked so good that all she wanted was to curl up with him in one of the comfortable chairs or couches and sink into the heavy checked tapestry that covered them.

Sally told her never to back away from someone who thought they had the upper hand. Elin walked close to Sean and stared into his clear, gold eyes.

“Do I ever frighten you?” Sean said.

Whatever she had imagined, in even a wild flight of fantasy, that he might say,
that
would not have been it. She couldn’t think of an answer.

“Nothing to say? Perhaps that tells me everything.”

“What do you mean?” Elin made fists at her sides. “Don’t you understand anything?”

He held his tongue but his eyes narrowed.

“Do you think I’m one of those women who get a kick out of being with…with a man who scares her?” She heard her voice get higher and felt furious. Always soft, when she got mad, it sounded as if she was breathless. “Why did you ask me that?”

“Calm down,” he said, trying to move her to a chair. “Please calm down. This isn’t good for you.”

The instant she started to shrug him off, Sean let her go.

“I’m okay.” She wasn’t but she would be. “You could never frighten me.”

His immediate, wide smile made him a different man. “It was something Saul said. I’m not even sure what it was.”

“He probably didn’t mean anything,” Elin said. “He was a bit different tonight. You didn’t tell me why he wanted you outside.”

Sean’s expression closed and he looked away from her again. “I think he was warning me about the danger of a rift within the Team. I’ll talk to Niles and see if he noticed anything different about Saul. But not tonight.”

“Not tonight,” Elin said, momentarily distracted. “I believe they wanted to enjoy their privacy tonight.”

The darkening in Sean’s eyes caused her pleasurable sensitivity all over her body. He was becoming increasin
gl
y anxious for them to have their own private interludes.

“Do you know what Saul might have been suggesting when he talked about not even you knowing everything about yourself?” Sean asked Elin.

She piled her hair on top of her head to cool her neck. “Perhaps he was trying to be mysterious. I know who I am and where I came from.”

Sean scanned her body, then spread his fingers around her waist. “Do you? Do you really? Everything?” He slowly passed his hands up her ribs until he stopped with his thumbs on the sides of her breasts.

She shivered, but with delight, and kept her hands in her hair.

The faintest smile tilted the corners of his mouth. “You are a sensuous creature.”

“Does it matter if I don’t know everything about myself? I was abandoned, and I don’t know who my birth parents were, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t proved my character.”

“No,” he said, using his thumbnails to make small circles on erogenous flesh.

Still Elin stopped herself from touching him, not an easy task for one whose every instinct cried out to show him more ways to please them both.

“You are practiced in seduction,” Sean said. “I’m not sure I understand why.” He kissed the side of her neck, nudged up her chin, and licked his way down and between her breasts. At last the pads of his thumbs settled on her nipples and he rubbed firmly.

She opened her mouth to breathe. They would become a perfect match, a perfect melding of their sexes—that was her eventual job.

“Do you think the clothes I wear are too flamboyant?” she panted. “For a human, that is? You and I intend to become part of this world we’ve chosen. I want to fit in.”

He kissed her lips, tilting his head, nibbling her mouth, and opening it with his own. He passed his tongue along the edges of her teeth, before he licked the smooth, wet skin inside.

For an instant he paused. She had released her hair and held his shoulders. “You are yourself,” he said. “I like what you wear. Your clothes suit you. But you will have to find a way to wear a coat in cold weather or there’s bound to be talk. And when we are bonded, I don’t want the locals suggesting I can’t afford to clothe you.”

She smiled. “I should like to unclothe you, Sean. Now. We could both lie together in the loft bed.”

“You give me too much credit for control, my love. I am only a man, or mostly only a man.”

“I would argue about the
only
part.” Softly at first, and then more insistently, she leaned her body into his. “You are so much more than an ordinary man.” As she could feel very well.

Stepping away from him, she slid her long skirts up, revealing her slender calves, then her smooth thighs.

Mesmerized, Sean stared at her legs. His breathing speeded and he knelt in front of her, kissing her belly through her dress, slipping his hands up the backs of her legs and holding her hard against him.

He nipped her mound through thin silk. “I should definitely leave.”

“What would be wrong with our being together now? We have promised our bond.”

“There is a great deal you don’t understand,” he said through clenched teeth and stood up. “When it’s time, I’ll explain, and I can only hope what I tell you will make us both happy.”

“Sean?” Elin had tried to put her own questions aside. “Saul threatened you, didn’t he?”

He looked away abruptly.

“He asked you to go outside and talk to him. What was all that about how you should remember he’s your friend?”

Elin knew indecision when she saw it. Sean couldn’t decide how to respond. “Do you doubt anything about me?” Sean said, turning back to her. “Anything that matters?”

Perhaps there were secrets between them. “You aren’t ready to trust me with all your secrets,” she said awkwardly. “I’ll try to understand. Pokey’s in my bag. He must have hated riding on the bike. I’d better get him out.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to decide what you think,” Sean said, but he looked disappointed. “I’ll be outside. Lock the door behind me.”

W
ith each shift Sean made, he was less comfortable becoming fully hound. But he couldn’t hang around outside the cottage otherwise. People in the area were familiar with Blue, the huge, blue-black dog they thought of as an overgrown wolfhound. The locals assumed he belonged to Niles, and now Leigh as well, and they wouldn’t think anything of him snoozing on the porch at Two Chimneys. No one was likely to come but he couldn’t risk questions.

It was not that he hated the part of him that was hound, but he resented having to leave the body of the man he had been born to be.

He resented it most of all when the choice was taken from him.

Where he wanted to be was inside the cottage with Elin, who would be turning over what he had said to her.
He
was turning it over. And the actual news Saul had brought.

At the moment, one question mattered more to Sean: Where was Aldo? For Saul to have encountered him, it had to mean the old werehound had been in the area, although he believed the vampire that they hadn’t met on Whidbey.

Sean had felt more or less safe, even if he couldn’t get that night in San Francisco out of his mind. He had made a clean getaway and Aldo didn’t move outside the area he had made his home. Or so the story had gone until now.

 Niles and the rest of his hound brothers knew everything that had happened and would protect Sean to the death from any threat. What kind of threat did Saul present? Would he use what he had found out against Sean?

Sean put his head on his paws and half closed his eyes. How long would it be before he dared to really rest again? Fortunately he needed very little sleep.

Elin was more than sensual, more than practiced in seduction. She had a magical affinity for reaching his male senses. A touch, a look, an angling of her body.

How could that be when everything Sally had told him about her convinced him she was an innocent? Her past experience made no difference to him yet there was this contradiction between her sexuality and everything else about her.

He had encountered Skillywidden when she ran interference for Sean and Leigh. It hadn’t been until after Leigh and Niles were sealed that Sally introduced Sean to Elin, but she was oddly secretive about the girl. If they were to fall in love, they must be compatible in every way, the fae woman had insisted. But she had hinted that if their spirits meshed and they had a child, it should not kill Elin.

Should not
were odds Sean didn’t like.

“Should I be really worried about something?”
Niles’s voice broke into his thoughts. If Sean hadn’t already opened his mind to hearing his alpha, Niles could not have entered.
“Are you outside the cottage?”

“Where else would I be?”

“I won’t state the obvious,”
Niles said and he didn’t sound amused.
“Can you communicate with Elin yet? Other than as—”

“No. But I’m still hoping. I need to work on it.”

“What was going on with Saul? I don’t know what you thought, but he didn’t seem happy to me,”
Niles said.

“He’s not happy and he doesn’t trust me. I think he wants to but—sheesh, it hurts to say this about a vamp—I believe he’s principled. He won’t stand by and watch someone get into trouble if they don’t deserve it.”
Sooner or later he had to break the real truth.
“Saul knows about Aldo.”

That stopped Niles.

“How could he?”
he said finally.
“You said Aldo never—”

“Leaves San Francisco? That’s been the word for years but he must have left recently because Saul said he met him in the area and I don’t think Saul lies unless he needs to.”

“Is he here on Whidbey?”
Niles said.

“Saul said no, but he wouldn’t say exactly where Aldo was when he saw him.”

“There was something about the way he spoke to Elin. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Yes.”
Agreeing made his head pound.
“He was deciding how much of a danger I am to her.”

“Good God.”

“He came right out and asked me. Then he let me know he’ll be watching.”

“Hell.”
Niles’s voice wasn’t serious enough.
“I guess I’m going to need eyes in the back of my head or you and Saul will be scrapping.”

“Scrapping? You can be insulting, Niles. Have I told you that?”

“Not recently. I figured it was about time, though.”

“Are we done?”
Sean asked.

“Not quite. I wanted to wait for you to tell me yourself but I guess I’ve run out of time. Have you told Elin about San Francisco—and the rest?”

If he didn’t think he’d disturb Elin, Sean thought he would howl.
“No. And it would be better if you didn’t ask again.”

“With all that openness, how can love fail?”
Niles chuckled.

“I’m going to kill you,”
Sean told him.
“After I find a stake for that interfering rat, Saul’s heart. That’ll be before I do the other necessities to finish him off.”

Something small gently sliding against him, crawling and leaning on him at the same time, grabbed all of his attention. He held quite still.

“You didn’t just threaten your alpha, did you?”
Niles asked, still chuckling.

Sean ignored him. Elin, or Skillywidden as she was at the moment, had gone against all of his instructions and come creeping, sneaking to the porch to curl up with him.

What had happened to knocking the inside of the front door if she thought she needed him? Did she honestly think he wouldn’t respond with some of that anger she hated?

Damn, he hated it, too.

He kept his eyes closed and didn’t react to the feel of the tiny cat.

“Sean?”

“I’m busy.”
The last thing he wanted was to be a big, lovable dog who cuddled up to an adorable little cat, damn it.

And she had left the cottage by some route other than the front door when he had expressly told her not to do that.

He sighed. Elin might not look it, but she was a strong-minded woman.

She started to purr. Softly, but purr nevertheless. Hearing her explain this should be interesting.

“What’s happening?”
Niles said.

“I need to concentrate here.”
He must consider how best to make Elin understand that his main concern was for her safety.
“Later, Niles.”

With the faintest growl under his breath, Sean stood and shook himself. He lowered his head to stare into those violet eyes, and he made sure Elin—Skillywidden or whoever—didn’t mistake the look for other than a warning.

She drew back, blinking rapidly, whiskers twitching, and Sean gave her a light bat on the rear, pushing her toward the back of the cottage.

The elegant cat made a wide circle around him, looking back, probably hoping for a change of heart. He gave another low growl and made a deliberately poor attempt at chasing her around the building.

A few inches wide crack in the kitchen door had been all she needed to escape, and if she thought he would follow her inside now, she was—unfortunately—mistaken.

The little manipulator had opened that door before she shifted. Did she do anything spontaneously?

He stood outside listening to the cat’s rapid breathing.

The door slammed shut and the lock shot home. She had shifted back but she was letting him know he’d missed his chance to be with her.

Sean stood for a while before loping slowly back to the front of the cottage.

Lying on the chilly porch, he thought about Elin getting back into that bed, mad, and alone. Being strong for both of them shouldn’t feel so lousy.