Chapter 25
I patched the call through to the latest disgruntled homebuyer, and looked up when I heard someone enter through the front glass doors of the office.
A very handsome guy about my age, with dark hair in a messy but stylish cut approached me. His clothes were neat and his eyes were friendly. He smiled.
I smiled back. “Hi, may I help you?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “Are you Ayla St. John?”
Confused, but holding my smile, I said, “The one and only.”
“Do you have a minute to chat?” he asked, and I detected a slight Southern drawl in his voice.
The phone beeped and I held up a finger, pressing the receive button. “Carter Homes, how may I direct your call?”
“To Jim Allen, and don’t put me through to his voicemail,” an angry voice said on the other line.
“Please hold.” I dialed Jim’s extension and patched it through, not waiting to see if Jim was in the office.
I looked up to the cute stranger and said, “As you can see, I don’t have a minute to chat. Who are you and what is this about?”
“My name is Evan Grant. I’m part of a clan here in Northern Colorado. I’d like to speak to you, if you have the time.” For a brief second, his blue eyes turned yellow, and then back to blue, a mischief behind his gaze as they did so.
My eyes grew wide and I looked around the small reception office, even though I already knew that I was alone. I glanced at my computer’s clock. It was a little past one p.m. and I’d already had lunch, but I was dying to hear what this guy—this wolf—had to say.
“Okay. Give me a couple of minutes. Meet me at The Pour House down the street. It’s that way, about two blocks.” I pointed to the left.
He nodded. “I know the place.”
I watched him leave, and the switchboard rang again. I patched the person through, and then dialed Nan.
“This is Nan,” she answered.
I groaned. “Nan, it’s Ayla. I think I have food poisoning. I need to go home.” I faked a gag noise. “I’ve almost thrown up twice and I feel feverish. Can you relieve me?”
“Oh, my God! Of course, I’ll be right up.”
I squirted some water from my water bottle and splashed my face and neck with it. When I heard her heels clacking on the marble floor from behind my desk, I slumped in my chair, and laid my head on the desk.
“Oh, honey. You gonna be all right?”
I lifted sad, dramatic eyes to her and wiped my lip. “Yeah. I just need my bed.”
“Shoo, go home,” she said as I stood and grabbed my small purse from the bottom drawer.
“Thanks,” I muttered as I slunk out of the office.
As soon as I rounded the building to where nobody could see me through the glass walls, I walked briskly to the coffee shop.
Upon entering, I saw Evan sitting alone at a corner table, and I quickly took the seat opposite of him. The strong smell of coffee hit my nose, and the murmured chattering of people hit my ears.
“Hi,” I said.
“Why are you wet?” he asked, pointing to my face.
“Oh, oops,” I said, chagrinned. I used a couple napkins from a dispenser on the table to wipe off my face and neck. “I had to fake sick to get out of work.”
With an amused grin, he said, “How very Ferris Bueller of you.”
“Who?” I asked, confused.
He waved a hand. “Never mind. Anyway, thanks for joining me. Would you like a coffee?” He pointed at his own.
I shook my head. “No, but thanks.”
“I’m gonna cut right to the chase,” he said, a stoic and mature look on his young face.
“Thank fuck,” I muttered under my breath.
He chuckled. “I know all about you, Ayla.” Evan lowered his voice and cut his eyes across the coffee shop, and then back to mine. “From your adoption by the witches, to your wolf boyfriend Ryder, to your brother’s murder. It turns out that you and I are looking for the same man. Linden.”
I shook my head. “Wait, okay… back up. How do you know all of this?”
“To make a very long story short, I belong to your biological family’s clan. My small family and I moved up here from Texas about two years ago. I joined their clan.”
“There’s that word again, clan. Am I supposed to be in one or something, just because I’m a wolf? I mean, Aden told me his… our… uncle had tried to get him to join one. I thought the idea was stupid at the time. Is it a requirement?”
He shook his head. “It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s recommended. Also, I understand you are already in one, with your brother Aden as Alpha.”
I chewed my lip. “I guess so. I just never thought of us as a clan, per se.”
“Y’all shift together during every full moon, and are a close-knit group, right?”
I thought back to my last hideous shift-gone-wild, and said, “Yeah, I guess.”
“Ayla, you and I have something very important in common.”
Intrigued, I said, “What’s that?”
“We’re both hybrids.” He took in my surprised face, and added, “I know about your attack. The only slight difference is that I was born human, bitten by a wolf when I was twenty. Then, as I lay dying, a vampire took me in, and then bit me and fed me her venom-laced blood to try to heal me, but it turned me into a vampire. So I am both. Thankfully, I do not have a sun allergy like my family does. They are the ones who sent me to find you.”
“Sun allergy… wolves don’t have them. You said you and your ‘family’ moved up here and joined my bio family’s clan. Color me confused.”
He grinned. “I said I joined the wolf clan. My family are vampires. They saved my life, but being that I was a wolf first, once I moved to this area, I had to, sort of, check in with the wolves, if that makes sense.”
“I guess it does.”
“My parents are also wolves down in Texas, and they belong to a clan down there. I’m not an active member of the clan here, however. I’m like a card-carrying member, but I don’t hang out with them or anything.”
“So how do you know how much about me then?”
A grin lifted his lips. “My family… they have money… enough to pay for information.”
My head was starting to spin. “Okay, let’s just cut to the chase. What. Do. You. Want?”
“I think you’re powerful, Ayla. I want to help you find Linden and destroy him.”
“You’re going to help me kill another vampire,” I deadpanned.
He nodded. “Yes. He murdered my brother’s maker. Only his name was Malcom Rich back then. Regardless, he wants a little revenge.”
I shook my head as if to clear it and then smiled darkly at him. “Revenge, I can get onboard with. So we’re going to team up, or what? You know where this asshole is hiding out?”
“I do,” he replied. “In a mountainous, magical city here in Colorado, and I’m going to get us in there.”
His words shocked me. “You are, are you? And how are you going to do that?”
Evan sipped his coffee, and then set it down, piercing me with a knowing look. “I have a witch on my payroll.”
A grin lifted my lips. “Witches come in handy.”
“You would know,” he replied cheekily.
* * *
A knock on the door bolted me out of my Internet searching. Sitting on my bed with the laptop on my legs, I hadn’t been expecting company. I set the machine aside and made my way to the door. A look through the door’s peephole showed me it was Ryder.
As I opened the door, I said, “I wasn’t expecting you!”
He immediately wrapped his arms around me. “I was missing you something fierce tonight.”
I smiled. “I was missing you, too.”
He leaned down to kiss me, and I kissed him back. I pushed him out of the doorway and slammed the door shut with my foot before I let him lead me into my bedroom, where we devoured each other in the best way possible. His mouth captured mine and our tongues intermingled in a lusty and familiar way. He ripped his shirt off over his head, as I shoved my shorts down, stepping out of them as they pooled at my feet. I then broke the kiss to tear my tank off over my head. We resumed our frantic kisses until he pushed me onto bed. I smiled into his mouth as his body covered mine. It was warm and familiar, and when he pushed his shorts down and threw them onto the floor, I opened up for him, wanting to feel his passionate comfort. I didn’t have to wait long, as he pushed himself inside my willing body and I threw my head back, basking in his rhythmic pushes, as my hips met his, thrust for thrust. As he chased his release, I chased mine too, clawing the taut flesh and muscles of his back until I could hold back no more. I released my bottom lip from my teeth and groaned out as pleasure rocked my body and made every one of my nerve endings tingle. As I was riding my own climax, I felt Ryder grip me tighter and grunt, stilling his body on top of mine, then finally releasing all his energy onto me.
With a final kiss, he rolled off of me, and we both lay there panting.
“That was amazing,” Ryder said, his arms behind his head.
I lay there, tracing a finger along his chest between his pec muscles. “Mm-hm.”
His finger rubbed circles on my shoulder as his arm rested under my upper back. “I missed making love to you during our shift this past time,” he murmured.
“You remembered doing that?” I asked.
I felt his body shake as he chuckled. “Yes, I always remember. Sex as the wolf is different than sex as a human.”
Having no argument for that, I simply nodded.
A long, comfortable silence stretched out between us, then I finally said, “I got a visit from a stranger today.”
I immediately felt his body stiffen. “Yeah?”
Continuing to trace my finger along his chest, I said, “Yeah.” I then launched into a long, rambling tirade about how Evan Grant had come into my place of employment today, and our plans to find Linden an end him.
Ryder once again stiffened, and then he removed his arm from under me, sitting up on one elbow and peering down at me. “You’re just fucking with me, right? You’re not actually going to go after this guy.”
I sighed, also propping myself up on my elbow, taking the sheet with me to cover my chest. “Yes, I actually am. What’s the problem?”
Ryder raked a hand through his hair. “What’s the problem? Fucking seriously, Ayla? Do you know how dangerous this is? This Linden guy—he’s a goddamn maniac, from what I’ve heard. I am not gonna let you do this!”
I huffed, now getting out of bed and taking the bedsheets with me. “Screw you, Ryder! You don’t get to tell me what I can and cannot do. I have an agenda, and nobody is gonna stop me from fulfilling it.” I stood with my arms crossed over my chest in a defiant posture.
He got out of bed and pulled on his shirt and shorts. Storming out of the room, I followed him into the living room, where he snatched his keys, wallet, and phone from the dining room table and made his way to the door. As his hand was on the knob, he paused before leaving and said, “It’s not an ‘agenda’, Ayla, it’s a vendetta—a stupid act of misguided revenge. I’m not gonna sit here and watch as you kill yourself. Grieve Austyn and move on with your life. Don’t put yourself on a suicide mission just to try to prove to the world that you’re a badass. Because you’re not.”
With that, he slammed the door behind him, and I stood there, wrapped in a bedsheet and dumbfounded by his coldness. I felt hot tears begin to sting my eyes and cursed myself for it.
Who the flying fuck was he to say that I wasn’t a badass? I was a badass. I would show everyone, including Ryder, that I could do what I put my mind to, because vengeance was a strong word… but it was also a strong verb. This vengeance wasn’t just for Austyn, it was for me, too. That vampire who bit me had changed me inside and out, and there was no way he was going to get away with it. I would show the world that nobody got away with biting or assaulting a St. John. The punishment would be swift and it would be sweet.