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41
I was almost to Duluth when I got the text message from Brian’s phone. I pulled over to look at it. “Come pick him up, 1887 Pioneer Road, Grand Marais. I’m sorry, he was a fighter to the end.” The photo showed a cooler, covered with branches, off the side of a road. My stomach lurched, and I barely got the door open and stepped outside before I was throwing up on the asphalt.NôvelDrama.Org owns all content.
I put the address in my phone, setting it as my destination. I got there well after sundown in the shortening fall days and dragged the cooler back up to my car with some difficulty. I opened the lid, looking in with a flashlight, and closed it again.
Brian was gone. The water in the cooler was tinted red with his blood, the ice had cooled his body and prevented decay. I could smell both Jessie and John’s scents on the cooler. I started driving south for the second time that day, my heart heavy as I approached my Pack.
We had talked about this before I left. If anything happened, if she wasn’t safe, Brian was supposed to take Jessie and John far away, not waiting for me. They wouldn’t tell me where they were, and I wouldn’t ask. I was out of the protection detail now, John would have to protect his mate alone.
I drove straight into the Pack compound, stopping in front of the house where Brian and his parents lived. They came out, shocked to see me, and when they saw my face they both knew. His father held his mother tightly as she collapsed in sobs, and a howl went up to the moon, a howl of loss from a broken heart. “Brian was killed today defending Jessie. She and John have fled.”
The rest of the Pack picked up the howl, the sound echoing through the woods.
Jessie’s POV
He kept holding my hand as we closed the back of the SUV, then he pulled me into his arms and hugged me. I relaxed into his broad chest, tears on my face as I remembered the man who I had met when he helped me move, and who was a close friend after my time on the run. “His parents will take care of him?”
“Yes, they will.”
“It’s all my fault…”
He let go of my waist and brought his hands to my face, lifting it up so I was looking in his deep blue eyes. “Nothing that has happened has been your fault, Jessie. Yuri is the one who has tried to kill you now three times just because of who you are. You are a small boat being tossed about in the great ocean right now. We just have to survive the storm… together.” The way he said the last word put a shiver in my spine, then his lips came down on mine and we kissed. I was shocked, but my body was all for it; I responded before I could think about it, opening my lips as his tongue twirled with mine. When he finally pulled back, I felt weak in the knees, and his eyes were dark with lust. “We have to get going, my love. You drive.”
He handed me the key. “Why me?”
He just laughed. “I got put in jail and kicked out of the country, remember? I came here as Cuddles, I have no identification, no driver’s license, and if they run my fingerprints I’ll be back in jail for the rest of my sentence plus immigration violations. So yeah, you can drive and if we get pulled over, I’ll be Cuddles again.”
I pulled his collar out of my pocket and gave it to him, then I walked to the driver’s side. I turned us around and went back to the main highway. “Where to?”
John had pulled a map out of the glove compartment, something I didn’t think they made anymore because of cellphones and GPS. “Canada is to the north, we can’t go through there as we don’t want your name showing up on immigration records. East is the lake, it’s too late in the season for a ferry. There is wilderness to the west, good for short term but we aren’t geared to stay there for a month. We need to head south to Silver Bay, then we head west instead of going to Duluth. I think if we go through there or closer to the Twin Cities we’ll be too easy to pick up.”
“So we head west?”
“Yes. Northern Minnesota is full of cabins, resorts and hotels. We get away from Grand Marais and find an isolated place to hide out.” It sounded good, and I joined the traffic heading south on the road along the North Shore. John didn’t say much, he was busy looking through the SUV for things we could use, and I was busy thinking too. What was I doing with John? Why did that kiss feel so good, so right? Why did that voice, that sexy Scottish accent, vibrate my chest and all the way down to my lady parts? Why wasn’t I afraid of the man who pulled my arm out of my socket and landed me in the hospital? It made no sense.
All of the sudden, a memory came to me and I saw red. He didn’t know the can of whoop-ass I was about to open as I pulled onto a cross-road and parked at the side. I turned to him, furious. “YOU PERVERT! YOU SAW ME NAKED!” I slapped him across the cheeks, and his arm came up and held my hand. I went to slap him with my left hand but he grabbed that too. “I can’t believe I got naked in front of a DOG and it wasn’t a DOG at all!”
He started laughing, and that just pissed me off more. “It’s NOT FUNNY! No man has seen me naked, and no one except my HUSBAND was ever going to!”
He brought my hands down to my lap, and looked straight into my eyes. “And no man EXCEPT your husband will have seen you naked, my love.” I froze, trying to figure out what exactly he was saying here. “I wasn’t spying on you, I was protecting the love of my life while she was in danger. You have nothing to be embarrassed about. Your body is spectacular, by the way. I want to write poetry about it, I want to carve it into marble like the masterpiece it is.”
“You… UH!! Men!”
“You’ve seen me naked, too.”
“That doesn’t count, you’re a freakin’ WEREWOLF and you didn’t ask me before you got all naked on me!” He started laughing again, and I pulled my hands free and wrapped them around my body. “WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING?”
“Sit back and think about this for a minute. Less than an hour ago, you survived the THIRD attempt on your life. Your two friends were killed, you cremated five people with your magic, you were betrayed for a ten-million-dollar bounty, you’re on the run with a man who turns out to be a werewolf, he tells you he loves you and wants to be your husband, and out of all THAT… You get pissed because he was in the room as a dog while you got dressed.”
I huffed, turning back to face forward in the seat. As I thought about it, he was right. I’d watched people have their heads blown off in front of me and I kept going, but I stopped everything at the thought of him seeing me nude. Maybe it was because somewhere deep down, I liked the idea. He was a chiseled specimen of a male, and the thought of him ripping my clothes off…
“Please don’t think of that right now, Jessie.”
“What?”
“The smell of your arousal is strong. I’m holding my wolf back, all he wants to do is take you and make you his. You deserve more than the back of an SUV for our first time making love.”
I blushed hard, putting the vehicle back in gear and swinging around. He opened the window and breathed through his mouth until it was aired out again and we were on our way. “You could smell that?”
“Yes. Werewolves have greatly enhanced senses over humans. Better vision, especially at night, although our color vision isn’t as good. Our hearing is that of a wolf, our smell as well. It doesn’t go away when we are in our human form, either, though we can turn it down if you will if things get to be too much.”
“Like in a city?”
“Exactly. Most of us live farther out for that reason, but there are city werewolves too.”
I was in a line of cars, we had a long drive. “Why do you think you love me? You barely know me, I know very little about you.”
He just smiled and took my hand. “I loved you the moment I first smelled you back at Hooter’s, when I came in the door I knew my mate was there. All I had to do was find you, and I was shocked to find you were human.”
“Wait, mate. What do you mean by mate?”
“Werewolves aren’t like humans when it comes to love. Our Goddess creates our souls in pairs, and that person created to complete us is our mate. When we are old enough, our wolf is able to sense their presence. There is an unfinished bond between the two that has been there from the beginning. Finding and claiming your mate makes your soul complete, and normally a wolf claims and mates her immediately.”
“What is claiming and mating?”
“Claiming is the act of biting the neck of your mate, leaving behind a scar that shows other shifters you are mated. It also forms a link between the two werewolves, so his scent is in her, and the other way around. It’s like a wedding ring, but you can’t take it off.”
“And the mating?”
“Sex. You bite each other as you reach orgasm, and this is the final tie between your souls. If both are of age, the claiming and mating is usually at the same time; if not, like when Patrick found his mate in Russia, the claim is the engagement ring, the mating is the marriage.” My eyes widened, Patrick was a wolf too… and while I was recovering, he was off at his engagement party. “At that point, you can talk, send emotions, even feel through the link you have with the other. Werewolves mating bonds last until death. Partners who lose their mates don’t get another, they are alone until they die. The loneliness kills many of them. You have no concept of how loved a mate is, how treasured a mate is to a werewolf.”