CHAPTER FOUR
Sebastian watched Liv fall asleep, her eyelashes fluttering as she settled back into slumber, nightshirt still bunched up over her breasts.
He shouldn’t have come here.
Shouldn’t have made love to her.
She didn’t think he was real.
She was living with his brother.
And now he had the taste and touch and smell of her all over his skin, on his tongue, embedded in his brain, his heart, his soul. The memory of Liv had helped him stay alive, the reality seemed like it might kill him.
He couldn’t have her. She was no longer his. And she had betrayed him as surely as his brother had.
Yet he lingered before he pulled the sheet up over her, allowing himself one last touch of his fingers over her full lips. Then he moved off the bed, unable to stay another minute. God, she had felt so good, and he could stay inside her forever.
But she was no longer his, and his brother had seen and touched and tasted the same places on her body that he had and it made him sick, disgust and anguish overwhelming in their intensity.
Sebastian shifted and leapt out of the bedroom window. He padded carefully down the metal stairs, then when he hit the ground, he ran. Away from Liv, away from the past, way from the uncertainty of the future, and the temptation to claim her body with his yet again.
He ran hard, as fast as his four legs would carry him, into the thick lustrous forest behind Scarborough’s house. Once under the cover of the trees, he dodged and weaved, sailing over fallen limbs and hurtling himself through brush. The crisp air felt good on his hot fur and the night around him whistled with an autumn wind and hummed with the presence of insects and nocturnal creatures.
Such as the wolf.
He heard the high keening howl immediately to his right and he drew up short, not wanting an encounter.
But it was too late. He smelled the scent of the other werewolf, and he knew it was doing the same. Before he could make the decision to retreat or confront, there was a werewolf with mottled gray-and-white fur in front of him.
Nick. His cousin, younger than him by two years.
Their eyes locked, and Sebastian bared his teeth, ready to battle.
Yet Nick did the unthinkable and shifted back to man, the expression on his face, as he crouched naked, incredulous. “Sebastian?” he murmured. “You’re alive?”
It was that incredulity and the trust it took for Nick to risk being human with Sebastian still as wolf, that led him to make his own shift.
“Obviously, yes, I’m alive. No thanks to you or any of the James clan.”
While Sebastian was wary, Nick was jubilant. A grin split his face. “Man, I’m so glad to see you!” He clapped Sebastian on the shoulder. “I thought for sure you were a goner, but no worse for the wear, huh?”
Actually, he felt like a pickup truck with three hundred thousand miles on it, but there was no point in going into all of that. “Yeah, I’m alright. So when you run to Scar and tell him I’m back in town, you make sure he understands I know who put the knife in my shoulder.”
Nick’s smile fell off his face. “About that…we didn’t know. The rest of us had no idea that’s what Scar was planning, I swear to you. I never would have agreed to that kind of bullshit.”
Sebastian wanted to believe him. Nick had always been a happy-go-lucky guy and a fairly docile werewolf. He was a follower, not a leader, and had no head for elaborate political scheming. Much like Sebastian had been. “You’re trying to tell me that none of the four of you in the pack knew Scar was going to kill me?”
“Hell, no, we didn’t know that. We’ve always known Scar was ambitious, but in human form. I never thought that he took the clan so serious. I never thought we were anything more than six guys who got extremely hairy and grew an overbite once a month. A family quirk, nothing more.”
Studying Nick, Sebastian turned his words around in his head. Damn, he did want to believe him, but he didn’t know who to trust anymore.
“And by the way, can I just point out that this is more than a little awkward standing here bare-assed in the woods with you? I hope we don’t run into any campers…that’s how rumors get started. And that could seriously affect my ability to pick up women.”
The way Nick was looking around them uneasily made Sebastian laugh, no easy feat these days. “I probably shouldn’t hang around too long anyway.”
“Scar’s out of town.”
“I know.” Sebastian felt his face fix into a hard frown, the way it always did when he thought about his brother now. “Why’d he do it? He could have talked to me about taking over the pack, he didn’t have to kill me.” He had turned that one around and around and while he thought he understood that Scar was motivated by power and control, it still seemed excessive to Sebastian.
But then again, he wasn’t entirely lacking in human emotion.
“Because if you believe the legends, even if you had given the pack leadership over to Scar, you still had Liv.”
“The sole survivor of the French clan of werewolves.” Sebastian ran his hand through his hair.
“Mated to her, it doubles his power.”
Which was why Sebastian had never married Liv. He wanted no part of anything that smacked of ulterior motives when it came to her. He had loved her for her, not for what she could bring him.
“Liv has no idea who and what she is.”
Nick nodded. “Just so you know, she’s started shifting at the full moon. But Scar says she doesn’t have any memory of it.”
Sebastian’s eyebrows shot up. “Liv is shifting? But she never did before.”
“Extreme emotion triggers the first shift, you know that. It started almost immediately after you disappeared.”
Yeah, he did know emotion could initiate the change. At sixteen, Sebastian and Scarborough had both shifted for the first time after their parents died in a car accident. Scar had internalized enough of his anger that he had learned to shift at will almost immediately, a dark talent Sebastian now possessed himself.
Sorrow for the pain Liv had suffered enveloped him. “What does Liv think happened to me?”
Nick cleared his throat like he was uncomfortable, but he didn’t evade the question or Sebastian’s stare. “He told Liv that you disappeared without a trace, no sign of foul play. She thinks you walked out on her and emptied her bank account right before you did.”
“What?” Sebastian felt the anger rising inside of him, from his gut, feathering out to all his limbs in a hot rush. His hands twitched. “You’re telling me she thinks I stole her money and skipped out?”
Nick shot him a look of sympathy. “She had no reason to think otherwise, especially since you would never marry her. I thought about telling her the truth, but why would she believe my crazy-ass story over Scar’s? His was a hell of a lot more believable, and the money being gone just cemented what he told her. And then he would have just killed me too and he’d still be with Liv, so there was no point. But it was rough on her, Sebastian…. I’ve never seen her look like that. For weeks she was just…” He cleared his throat. “Anyway. I’m glad you’re back, man. Your brother is a little out of control.”
Sebastian couldn’t believe it. No wonder Liv was living with Scarborough. The guy had attempted to kill Sebastian in cold blood, then had lied to Liv about it, claiming he had walked out on her without a backward glance, with all her cash. Then clearly Scarborough had been there as a shoulder to cry on.
The fucking bastard. It was so devious and cold and calculating.
It made Sebastian want to throw back his head and howl in disgust and frustration.
It made him want to go back and make love to Liv again, with more tenderness, with the truth between them.
And it made him want to rip his brother apart, piece by miserable piece.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he told Nick. “I have plans for Scarborough.”
The alarm shattered Liv’s sleep and had her reaching over to smack the quiet button on her cell phone to stop the squawking. Peeling her eyes open, she swallowed, her mouth dry, and clutched the sheet a little closer to her. She was freezing. She shouldn’t have left the windows open, it was too late in the year for that. Plus she realized that somehow her nightshirt had worked its way all the up to her neck so the majority of her body was exposed, nothing but the thin sheet covering her.
The dream came back to her then.
The bride, morphing into a wolf, then the bride’s room morphing to her room, then the wolf in her room morphing into Sebastian.
It had been intense and so very real, like all the bride dreams were. Yet in this one, Sebastian had been there and he had touched and licked her, brought her to orgasm, and buried his erection in her.
Her cheeks heated and her inner thighs throbbed at the memory. It had felt so good, so powerful, so satisfying.
Clearly her body was hinting to her that she needed release. She refused to admit that it meant she missed Sebastian. She couldn’t possibly still crave a man who had done what he had to her.
But there was no denying what the Sebastian in her dream had said when he was thrusting in her. He had demanded she tell him that Scarborough couldn’t make her feel that way, and she had admitted it. It didn’t take a psychologist or a professional dream interpreter to figure out what that meant.
She couldn’t bring herself to make love to Scarborough, and that was a serious problem.
It meant she needed to be slapped for still wanting the touch of Sebastian when it was his brother who had treated her with kindness and respect.
Yanking her nightshirt back into place, she tried to ignore the tightening of her nipples and the tingle between her thighs at the lingering memory of the dream.
Maybe she should do dream analysis. The wolves were a curious repetitive theme of the last few months, one she really didn’t understand. And not just wolves—these were werewolves, shape-shifting humans.
Liv forced herself out of bed. She didn’t want to be late for class. She only had half a semester to go until she had her degree, then she could finally have a decent-paying job to both support herself and replace some of the money she had lost. The money Sebastian had stolen.
Maybe she should start taking a sleeping aid. Something to knock her out so that she didn’t dream for a few nights. Because dreams weren’t reality and she needed to put aside the false sense that Sebastian had come back to her, had touched her like he still loved her.
As she padded across the floor to the bathroom, Liv suddenly froze. It wasn’t possible. It was just a dream….
Yet she lifted her nightshirt, and in the early morning light streaming from the open windows, saw the distinct and telltale sign of semen trickling down her inner thigh.