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“If you’ll all excuse me, I think I’d best catch up with my mate.”
As he headed out of the dining room, Hamish stopped him. “She’s headed out the back, and she looked to be in a full-on radge.”
Most of Hamish’s Scottish expressions were fairly easy to translate. Colby arched his eyebrow. “Radge?”
“Pissed. Your fated mate is as pissed as I’ve ever seen the lass.”
Colby chuckled. “My guess is not nearly as pissed than if you called her ‘lass’ again.”
Hamish rubbed his jaw. “Aye. She did seem a wee bit put off by that.”
“Just a wee bit,” said Colby mocking his brogue. “Hold down the fort. It may take me a while to cool Brie off. I’m afraid Adriana was feeding a jealousy I didn’t know Brie had.”
“Well, her being jealous isn’t the worst thing…”
“Let’s hope not.”
Colby sprinted down to his office and opened the French doors out to the private patio and the massive estate beyond. He stripped out of his clothes and called forth his lynx, who had been restlessly pacing back and forth in the corners of his mind. As the shifting mist began to swirl all around him, the lightning crashed, and the thunder rolled. His lynx sprang forward, and out of the mist it emitted a long, wailing call—the mating call of the lynx.
CHAPTER 9
BRIE
That simpering idiot! She wasn’t sure if she meant Colby or Adriana. Had the witch cast a spell on him? Wasn’t Adriana descended from the banshees—the harbingers of death? What did that mean? Could she be some kind of plant from Strode? After all, they only had her word for it that Strode had arranged for her to be taken to him. For that matter, they only had her word she’d been turned against her will.
Brie moved to the back of the house into the changing room set up for the women. Looking around, she could tell Colby had taken a lot of care in refurbishing the manor house. Most estates had a room with hooks, maybe a communal shower. Most were divided by sex, but not all. This place looked like an exclusive spa—private lockers and showers, a makeup and hair station and overall, a level of luxury and caring she rarely saw.
Finding an empty locker, she removed her clothes and called her lynx forward. The swirling mist enveloped her, and she fed her anger and jealousy into it, tinting the shards of light in angry colors of reds, golds, and oranges. She snarled her defiance as her lynx came forward and she bounded out the door, which she was sure was modeled after a dog door. She had to admit it worked well.
She hit the patio made of antique cobblestones at speed and was away from the house in the blink of an eye. She didn’t want to be found. She wanted to run. Some days she just wanted to run, retreat to her home in the Olympics, and never come back. She snorted at her own sense of hypocrisy—she espoused being free and having no mate to answer to, but if that were true, why did she long to curl up next to Colby and let the rest of the world go to hell?
How could Colby not see through Adriana? Had she really needed the help of the Shadow Sisters? Yes, but that didn’t mean Brie meant for her to move into Windsong and more importantly into Colby’s bed. The grass beneath her feet was lush and soft. Colby must spend a fortune to make the cold, Alaskan soil produce such a rich, thriving lawn. While lynxes spent more time on the ground than in the trees, in their more primitive state they liked boreal forests with dense undergrowth and tall grasses.
Halfway to the trees, she heard a long, low wail. It hit her like a burst of wind from behind, toppling her head over heels. She scrambled back to her feet, and using the power of her haunches, she charged toward the trees. If Colby wanted to play, he could do so with his newest acquisition. And since when did Colby decide what happened to those the Shadow Sisters helped? Wasn’t that part of her job description as leader?
The little voice inside her—that of the green-eyed monster—laughed. She liked the idea of sending the witch to some remote place. Had they known she was a witch, would they have helped her? Shifters were not normally chummy with other paranormal creatures like vampires and witches. Witches tended to be arrogant and looked down on shifters. Brie was Colby’s acknowledged mate, even if Brie refused to accept it.
Lost in her own musings, Brie did not hear Colby’s approach. She would later tell herself it was because he moved with such stealth. In truth, she wasn’t sure she would have heard the approach of a freight train. Certainly, he tackled her with all the subtlety and power of one. Brie twisted beneath him and brought her claws and teeth up to fight him, but instead of finding a larger version of her primal self, she was confronted by an angry and very human Colby.
“Shift,” he commanded.
Brie snarled and showed her teeth. Colby pinned her on her back.
“I told you to shift,” he growled.
In her lynx form, she could tear him apart with her teeth and claws, but she would never hurt him—not like that; not physically. She felt her lynx retreat in response to an order from her fated mate. She was naked, which didn’t bother her all that much even in the cold of Alaska. She should be cold, but she wasn’t. The heat rolling off Colby could heat all of Windsong. He, too, was naked, a fact made all too apparent by his rampant cock.
“You are impossible and absolutely gorgeous,” he said before covering her body with his and lowering his mouth to hers, pressing his mouth to hers as he traced the seam of her lips, coaxing her to open for him. “You have nothing to be jealous of.”
“I’m not jealous,” she said, knowing neither of them believed that. “Adriana was being a distraction. She was so busy flirting with you she wasn’t offering anything useful.”
He chuckled as he nuzzled her. “I ought to be furious that you would even dare to think I might be interested in anyone other than you, and yet you’re downright adorable when you think someone might be moving in on your territory.”
“I am not adorable.”
“You are so adorable when you doubt your adorability,” he purred.
“Adorability is not a word.”
