Chapter Five
Chloe
I flopped down on my back in the middle of the field, shifting into my human form. My breath was still coming hard from my run, my lungs pumping as I fought to suck in air.
The sun was warm, beating down on my naked flesh. I tilted my head back and drank it in, relishing in the way the gentle heat loosened my muscles. It was early May and the temperatures in Oklahoma were perfect, still cool in the mornings and evenings but warm during midday.
I’d been in Prater a week and was still no closer to finding the answers I was looking for. In fact, I’d barely seen any of the other pack members. As soon as I arrived, Darrell had whisked me out to a rustic little cabin a few miles outside of town. Away from most of the pack.
I wasn’t sure if it was because he wanted to keep me away from everyone or if he thought I needed the privacy. Considering the suspicion I sensed from the few pack members I’d seen, I thought it was the first.
Though I didn’t see many of the wolves in the MacArthur pack, I could still tell that there was something going on. It was obvious in the way the shifters carried themselves. The hushed tones of their voices when they spoke. The way their eyes darted quickly when I caught them watching me in town. The fact that none of them would utter more than two words to me at a time.
Darrell had been conveniently busy over the last few days and every wolf I came across would scurry away as fast as possible when they saw me coming. At this rate I’d never find out what happened to my parents.
I groaned in disgust at my defeatist attitude. I could hear my grandmother’s voice now, telling me that I never would find what I wanted if I didn’t get my head out of my ass and quit focusing on the problems rather than the solutions.
As I lay naked in the grass, staring at the sky, the wind shifted. A scent drifted in the air, one I knew well. At first I thought I was dreaming. It had been three long weeks since I saw Lachlan, but I swore I could smell him at night as I drifted off to sleep.
And I dreamed about him. Lush, sexy dreams where he would touch me in all the ways I needed him to. More than that, he would smile at me. Love me.
The dreams were as heartbreaking as always because I knew it would never happen. He’d lost his mate nearly two years ago. In the haze of his grief, he would never know that he was supposed to be mine.
I hadn’t even realized it until around the time Ricki had gotten pregnant. She and I had been training and it was the first time she managed to knock me on my ass. I’d fallen and cut my arm badly enough that it wasn’t healing right away. Lachlan had insisted on inspecting the wound and cleaning it with his saliva, which was common among shifters. Our saliva held healing properties, similar to a vampire’s though not as strong.
As his tongue swept along my skin, I’d felt the stirring inside me. Not desire. Something deeper. It was as if my soul recognized him and sang.
It was both the most intense and worst moment of my life.
I now understood what shifters meant when they talked about the call their bodies had for their mate. The yearning.
Yet I could do nothing about it.
Lachlan was damaged. Irreparably so. There would be no mating with him, no future. Everything I wanted was dangled in front of me, forever to be tugged just out of reach.
Still, I stayed. I told myself that Calder needed me to help with the pack as they recovered from their battle with the Faction. That he needed me to track down the remaining members and eradicate them.
Finally, I had to admit to myself that I stayed because I wanted to be close to Lachlan and help him heal. Even if I would never have him, I couldn’t live with the idea of his death. I nursed, bullied, pushed, persuaded, and coaxed him into eating, bathing, even sleeping. There were days that I felt like only my will alone kept him breathing. As much as the thought hurt like hell, I would have done everything within my power to bring Belinda back to him just to see his heartbreak eased. He deserved happiness, even if it wasn’t with me.
Once again, the wind shifted, bringing with it the scent of Lachlan and interrupting my thoughts. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. Then I heard the brush of denim on the tall grass and knew I wasn’t alone. Nor was that scent a figment of my imagination.
I rolled to my feet in a flash and gaped as Lachlan walked through the grass toward me. My stomach twisted at the sight of him. In the last three weeks, he had gained weight, his frame no longer frighteningly gaunt. Though he still hadn’t achieved the bulk he’d had when I first met him, he looked healthy and strong.
The biggest surprise was his hair. When I left, it had been long, just brushing the collar of his shirt and falling into his eyes. Now it was shorn close to his scalp, no more than a half inch long. The thick beard that had once adorned his jaw was also gone, his skin shaven smooth.
Without the hair to hide his features, the angles of his face stood out in bold relief. The sharp slant of his jaw and the high formation of his cheekbones and brow ridge were naked. And his eyes. They were so bright and brilliantly blue that it made my chest ache to look into them. He looked dangerous and beautiful, every inch the alpha wolf.
I tamped down hard on my body’s response. I was downwind of him so he wouldn’t be able to smell any changes in me, but I was also naked as a jaybird.
Then it hit me that he shouldn’t even know where I was. I hadn’t told anyone and I’d taken the battery out of my phone and hidden it in the cabin I’d left behind. Any arousal I’d been feeling moments ago was immediately quashed.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him, striding forward.
“Looking for you,” he replied, his eyes locked on my face.
His jaw was hard and his body tight. I understood then that he was angry. No, furious.
“Why?” I questioned, lifting my chin. “I left the MacIntire pack and what I do now isn’t any of your concern.”
He growled low in his throat and reminded me once again of the fact that he was an alpha wolf, not to be challenged.
Unfortunately, he seemed to have forgotten that I had dominant instincts of my own and my hackles rose. I growled back, prowling toward him.
“Don’t threaten me,” I stated. I pitched my voice low and it vibrated with tension. “We aren’t on your turf any longer, Ian.”
He blinked at me in surprise. “What did you just call me?”
“Ian,” I repeated, meeting his eyes levelly.
“How did you…” Confusion momentarily replaced his fury before his eyes flashed once again. If anything, my use of his first name only intensified his anger. “Don’t call me that. No one calls me that but—”
He didn’t finish his sentence. I knew what had been on the tip of his tongue however. No one but his mate would ever have the guts to call him Ian. In fact, I didn’t think I’d ever heard Belinda call him by his given name either.
He hated it and went to great lengths to make that clear. Half the MacIntire pack had probably forgotten that Lachlan wasn’t even his first name because it had been so long since anyone dared use it.
I kept walking, brushing by him on my way back to the cramped hunting cabin that I was staying in. “You need to leave.”
“Not until you tell me what’s going on,” he retorted.
Though he moved silently, I knew he was following me.
“I told Calder. Ask him.”
His hand hooked around my elbow, spinning me toward him. I reacted without thinking, my body moving on autopilot as I twisted his wrist and swept his legs from beneath him. To my shock, he used his downward momentum against me, dragging my body with him as he hit the ground. Then he rolled us so that he was straddling my waist.
Lachlan leaned forward until those burning blue eyes filled my vision. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
I bucked, throwing him off and reversing our positions. This time it was me straddling his hips with my face lowered toward his. “Then I don’t know what you mean,” I snarled. “I’m here to investigate my parents’ death, nothing more.”
“Then why did Brian and Brayden Kirkpatrick seem so interested in your whereabouts when they requested a meet with Calder last week.”
Surprised, I straightened and stared down at him. “What?”
“The Kirkpatricks paid us a visit in Dallas last week and they asked about you. Brayden seemed especially keen.”
A sneer curled my lip as I got to my feet and leaned down to help him up. “I’ll bet.”
Lachlan took my hand but didn’t release it when he rose from the ground. “Is there something between you and Brayden Kirkpatrick?”
I felt my lip curl even further, this time in disgust. “Hell, no. I can’t stand that dick.”
He studied me. “Did he do something to you?”
I pulled my hand from Lachlan’s grasp and gestured for him to follow me to the cabin. “Yeah, he would drive in from Houston and pester the shit out of me the entire time I was in Austin. Kept saying I would make the perfect mate. It was creepy as hell. I was almost relieved when Jacob forbade me from looking into the murder of my parents because it gave me an excuse to get out of there and away from him.”
“Did he—”
“God, no. I mean, Brayden tried to kiss me a few times and got a little pushy when I told him no, but nothing more than that. He was never dangerous, just…annoying.”
I entered the cabin, Lachlan on my heels, and moved straight toward my clothes. Nudity wasn’t usually something that bothered me. As a shifter, I was accustomed to being naked in the presence of others before or after pack runs. However, being around Lachlan made me more aware than ever of my exposed skin and my body’s response to his proximity.
Once I was dressed, I faced him once again. Lachlan was looking around the cabin, his eyebrows lifted.
“This is an interesting place,” he commented.
I laughed. “Yeah, it’s a little on the rustic side.”
The cabin was finished inside, but barely. It was basically one large open room with a huge, overstuffed sofa and twenty year old television in one corner, a small dining table in the other, a tiny kitchen just behind that, and the bed in the final corner. Through a door at the back of the living space, there was a miniscule bathroom. It hadn’t been very clean when Darrell brought me out here, but I took care of that easily enough.
When I looked back at Lachlan, he was grinning at me. My heart turned over at the expression on his face because I hadn’t seen him smile like that in years. Not a genuine, amused smile or a real laugh.
I ignored that smile, and the effect it had on me, and put my hands on my hips. “Now, tell me why you’re really here, Lachlan.”