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She collapsed onto the bed, deeply satiated and content beyond words. He rode down with her, staying connected to lay on top of her. It was a wolf thing that he didn’t slip out of her.
Her cat meowed, and Lauren shifted to glance at the open door where Janey meowed her warning. “It’s dawn, Cole. Can you make it home in this light?”
As she spoke the words, the protective steel shutters began to descend as they did every night in almost every above-ground dwelling throughout Five Bridges.
“I should go,” he said. “I can tolerate this level of light and a bit more.”
He drew out of her at the same time. He gathered some tissues and tucked them between her legs, then headed to the bathroom.
Lauren turned on her side facing toward the shutters. It seemed somehow appropriate that the beautiful view of her garden was gone now that Cole was leaving.
Tears slid suddenly from her eyes and her heart began to ache more painfully than ever before.
Chapter Six
Cole stood in the bathroom uncertain what he should do.
He could leave and fly home anytime within the next forty minutes or so. He was lucky in the sense he could tolerate so much light when most other alters couldn’t. As a witch, even Lauren couldn’t manage what he could.
The trouble was, he didn’t want to leave, but he knew he couldn’t stay. Lauren was a witch, a resident of Elegance, a spellcaster.
He ran the shower because he needed time to think. He hopped in and let the warm water ease some of the tension from his body.
When he’d arrived at her home, he’d been so certain it would be a simple thing to make love to her one last time, then head out. She knew the score, so he was certain she wouldn’t put up a fight. It wasn’t her way.
He once more reviewed his objections to being with a witch. He only had to conjure a host of times he’d seen the torture a dark witch had inflicted on his fellow wolves, and a shudder went through him. His hatred of her kind ran deep.
Yet, she wasn’t that kind of witch or that kind of woman. She wouldn’t hurt anyone, which was one reason it had stunned him when she’d taken out his knee. Of course, she’d insisted she’d done it to save his life, but he’d refused to believe her.
And he’d been stubborn in holding to his disbelief despite knowing her character as he did.
When he dipped his head beneath the warm spray, he finally admitted to himself that he’d used the injury as an excuse to break with her. Earlier that same night, he’d found one of his pack-mates poisoned by a dark witch. The paste had eaten through to his bones and invaded his blood. Given the number of wounds all of over his body that had sunk to different depths, the torture had gone on for hours.
The images of his suffering still tormented Cole.
When Lauren had used her power to hurt him, he knew he couldn’t stay with her. He didn’t want anything to do with her kind. So, he’d built a wall and blamed it on the injury to his knee.
Maybe at the time, he’d believed what he’d told himself, but he didn’t now. This time with her tonight, while they’d worked together to find Vickie, he’d experienced several warlock moments like being able to see the violet waves connected to her invisibility shield.
His warlock instincts had deepened. He could no longer hide behind his insistence she’d lied to him. He now understood in the depths of his marrow that she had protected him that night. A dark witch had been present and if he’d shown himself, he would have been killed just as Lauren had said.
He used her bar soap to scrub himself all over once again. Yet, all he was doing was buying himself some time to think. A momentous understanding came to him, something he hadn’t expected: He’d fallen in love with a witch, deeply and truly.
He saw it now, all of it. He’d loved her almost from the first night they’d been together. He’d thought it was just a forbidden kind of lust because he was a wolf and she, a witch.
But how quickly he’d grown comfortable with her, to desire more than anything to be with her, to savor all the ways they made love together.
He knew now that he couldn’t go back to his solitary life lived out in a burrow in the earth. He had to be with Lauren. She was his woman and he would make her his mate. His pack probably wouldn’t approve because she wasn’t a wolf. But then even Alpha Fergus had mated with a fae woman and his pack loved her. So, it wasn’t unheard of to take a mate from a different species.
As he finished rinsing off the
soap then shut off the water, he left the shower with a profound sense of how much, in a few short hours, his life had changed.
That’s when he heard a terrible gurgling-gasping sound coming from the other room. Lauren was in danger.
His first instinct was to go wolf and race back into the bedroom. But he now recognized that he had emerging warlock abilities because of his connection to her. Whatever was happening, he couldn’t manage the situation as a wolf. He had to respond more like a warlock. He had to stop, to think.
Before he made a move, he contacted Lauren. What’s happening?
