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Natalie didn’t know how to end the conversation. Was it really only a half-hour ago that they were wrapped up in each other’s arms and flying through the stars?
Finally, she said, Call me when things settle down.
I will.
Oh, God. She felt certain he never would. She hadn’t dated in so long, she’d forgotten that men could switch gears this fast.
Her heart began to ache as she walked slowly across the living room.
She waited for the team to arrive and only opened the door after they had knocked and identified themselves to her. She recognized two of them from the sandpit squad.
What surprised her was that Ryan was with them. “May I speak with you for a moment, before you leave?”
“Of course.” She gestured for him to come in.
Ryan told the men to wait outside, saying that he’d only be a few minutes.
When the door was shut, he moved several feet into the room and spoke quietly. “I know the communication between you and Grant went on for a bit and I don’t profess to know what you said to each other. But for what it’s worth, afterward Grant stood for a moment with his back to me and I knew he was struggling.
“You have to know you’ve been the best thing to happen to that man since Renee died and if I can help it, I’ll try to encourage him to make an effort. It won’t be easy for him and not just because of Kryder. I’ve never seen a man so destroyed by his wife’s death as Grant was. I don’t think even he knows what he was like afterward.
“It took him weeks to do more than head out to serve his Border Patrol shift. When he returned, he spent hours going over every aspect of the compound. As for women, just a long series of one-night-stands and it wasn’t pretty.
“You’re the first real thing to come into his life, that wasn’t about pack business, in all these years. I don’t want him to go backward.”
Natalie felt overwhelmed by what Ryan had just said. “Thank you for that. I’ve heard you and I will keep what you’ve said in mind. But right now, I belong in Revel. I’m fae, despite my odd, iridescent wolf. I had a life before Grant and I need to get back to it, back to the clients I have scheduled for the next two months.”
He shook his head. “Is that really what you want?”
“Maybe I would feel differently if Grant had asked me to join him a little, in, say, a meeting or two. But I wasn’t even an afterthought. I also know how important the Meldorin Pack is to him and that more than anything he wants to create a secure environment for his people. If he had to worry about me as well, he’d only start resenting me.”
Ryan nodded, his brow pinched. He kept on nodding as well, his gaze falling to the floor. She could tell he was trying hard to think of something else to say.
Finally, he lifted his gaze to meet hers and said, “Let’s get you home. But please don’t forget Grant or me or the rest of us. If you’d let yourself, I think you’d find a home here you could love. Just sayin’.” He then smiled, if sadly, turned and gestured toward the door.
A few minutes later, as Natalie rose into the air, she forced herself not to look back, not to think about Grant and what she was leaving behind.
Even so, her eyes grew blurred with tears. She was grateful for the vanguard in front of her, so she wouldn’t have to worry that she couldn’t see her path home.
Chapter Thirteen
For the next few hours, Grant kept his head down, mind focused. Because he’d been planning for years, he’d always known the day would come when he took over the pack. It was time to put everything in motion.
His core team, which included Ryan and those wolves that had helped secure Kryder with the net, had a dozen strategies in place as well as hidden stores of food and weapons.
Besides the usual stockpile of pistols, assault rifles, and a mountain of ammunition, he also had a rocket launcher in case Kryder produced an armored vehicle. The crew in charge of this piece of weaponry had watched a dozen training videos and practiced non-firing runs at least a hundred times.
Hopefully, they wouldn’t have to use the rocket launcher. At this point, however, he wouldn’t put anything past Kryder and had structured his training with the man’s psychopathic character in mind.
Several pack females, not involved in the military end of things, kept stopping by the conference room. They brought buckets of coffee, kept the team members well-fed and offered a dozen ‘thank you’s’ for taking Kryder down and for having prepared the pack for this day.
Grant expressed his apprec
iation for their efforts as well. But he had no illusions about the difficulties in front of him. Kryder had always nurtured a network of spies within the pack whose efforts had frequently ended in the torture and death of a wolf who had been caught in any kind of opposition to Kryder.
Over the years, Grant and had learned how to keep his mouth shut no matter what happened, to train his wolves to a form of intense discretion, and to take his beatings any time it could divert Kryder’s cruel nature away from the pack members and onto himself.
The latter had earned him a level of devotion and loyalty that had kept his wolves out of trouble. In recent years, Kryder’s killing rate had gone down significantly.
