TALIS
I’m happily floating on my back in the lake when Dayne tugs at my hair.
“Come on, time to get out now,” he says.
I open my eyes and glare at him. “The pack run isn’t for hours yet. You said it was tonight, and it’s still daylight,” I tell him, in case he’s somehow missed the bright blue sky overhead.
“Yes,” he says, “I know, but I need you to get out now.”
The contentment that’s been in his eyes since we got back to Hardin a week ago is notably absent, and it has me swimming closer.
“What is it?” I wrap my arms and legs around him. “Is something wrong?”
Instead of answering, Dayne tangles his hand in my hair and brings my face down for a kiss.
But before I can sink into it or it turns into something more, he breaks the kiss with a reluctant sigh.
I immediately start worrying since he rarely ever breaks our kiss that soon, or with a sigh like that. “Dayne?”
He flashes me a quick grin. “It’s not as bad as you’re thinking. I just have to tell you a few things before those pregnancy hormones kick in and you become impossible to be around later.”
“Hey!” I yell, pulling away from him. “Totally uncalled for.”
By the time I’ve swum to the edge of the lake, Dayne is getting out a little behind me, and I peek down at my still flat belly.
Or maybe it isn’t so flat anymore. Maybe there’s a hint of a-
“No pooch yet,” Dayne says, slinging his arm around my shoulders and leading me over to the tree where we left our clothes.
“Don’t call it that, you make it sound like I’m a kangaroo or something.” I try to shrug his arm off my shoulders, but he’s impossible to move. “You’re like a limpet, you know that, right? And I don’t mean it in a good way.”
To my utter frustration, he steals a kiss before I shove him away.
I drop to the ground and I’m reaching for my shirt when black material hits me in the face, blinding me.
“Dayne! Oh my God, you’re driving me crazy. Quit throwing things in my face. Next time I’m going to kill you. I’ll drown you in the lake and no one will find your body. I swear it,” I snarl, once I’ve peeled his shirt off my face.
“I’m sorry,” he says, slipping his jeans back. “Come lie here.”
When he leans his back against the tree and holds his arm out to me, I don’t move.
“Talis. Come here,” he growls.
“No.”
His muscles tense, which warns me he’s getting ready to drag me into his lap.
“I thought we had to do something,” I say, slipping on his t-shirt, but not moving any closer.
“And we’re doing it. So come here.”
“You do know you’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar, right?”
Dayne’s eyes go wolf and he growls.
“Okay, fine. But only because you hurt me last time you tackled me to the ground,” I mutter, taking his hand and letting him pull me into his lap.
When I’m seated with his arm around me, he presses a hard kiss against my forehead. “I didn’t hurt you. If anyone should be crying foul, it should be me since you kicked me in a place you really shouldn’t.”
I know it’s not funny, but I smile at the memory, and before long my body is shaking from the force of my silent laughter.
“It wasn’t funny.” Dayne sounds like he’s glaring, but I don’t lift my face from his neck to look up to confirm if I’m right.
“Oh, come on. You didn’t see the look on your face. And it wasn’t like you didn’t deserve it. I’m pregnant. You don’t go around tackling pregnant women to the ground like that. We should be treated with tender loving care and adoration.”
It’s a battle to hold my laughter in, and by the end of my little speech, my voice cracks from the strain.
“Wow, you really are something.” Dayne’s tone tells me the something he’s thinking isn’t a good thing.
I take a second to get my laughter under control before lifting my head. “I think you’re being a touch dramatic about it all,” I tell him and press a kiss against his jaw. “Didn’t I kiss it better?”
His eyes go half-lidded at the memory of my kissing him better. I did a lot more than kissing, but I guess that’s semantics.
“Talis,” Dayne growls.
I kiss my way along his jaw and head for the spot I bit him.
While my mate bite is permanently visible, when I bit him, my bite healed pretty much straight away.
After what happened the last time I bit him not more than a few feet from where we’re sitting, I wouldn’t mind it happening again.
With a low groan, Dayne grips my arms and hauls me away. And despite his firmness in stopping me, when I see the heat in his eyes, I know he wants a repeat of it as much as I do.
“No biting.”
I smile. “What about licking? Or maybe I could-”
“None of that,” he interrupts. Then he crushes me against his chest for a long moment and releases a heavy sigh. “God, I deserve a fucking medal for this level of self-restraint.”
“I don’t think God answers those sorts of prayers,” I offer helpfully.
One low growl later, and he sighs again.
“Dayne?” I raise my hand to his jaw. “What is it? If it’s something bad, can we have sex first to improve our mood?”
I can tell he’s smiling when he speaks, “I know what you’re doing, you know?”
“I’m sorry. But something made you sad. I couldn’t help but feel it.”
“Memories.” He tugs me close, and I rest my head against his neck as we gaze out across the lake to take in the lush forest. Home. This is my happy place.
Our happy place, I correct myself, wrapping my arm around Dayne and letting out a sigh of contentment when he rests his chin on my head.
“About Dawley?” I ask since I can’t imagine dealing with Glynn, an out-of-control alpha didn’t trigger at least some memories of his own.
“About my family.”
I still, since this is not what I was expecting.
Dayne has never talked about his family to me, except for what little he said when he told me his old alpha killed his family, not him.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” I whisper. “I can feel how much it hurts you.”
“It’s not only pain,” he says, just as softly. “There’s good mixed in with it. But I think I let the bad, the pain, overtake the good memories.”
“Is that what the tattoos are for? To remind you of the good?”
Although I can’t see the tattoo on his arm of a wolf pack playing from my position, I could draw it from memory. That’s how often I’ve stared at it.
It seems like so long ago when I sat in his truck unable to take my eyes off it when he booked us a hotel room, and when he stole my towel and started his campaign to drive me crazy.
“Draw your wolf out,” he corrects me. “Not drive you crazy.”
“If you knew what I was thinking back then, you wouldn’t be so quick to correct me.”
His body shakes with laughter, but all too soon it fades away. “I had two sisters. Bridget. She was five years older. She was fierce. Had a little boy-my nephew-Peter. But we called him Pinky because when he was a baby, he looked like he was plotting something sneaky. Did you ever watch Pinky and the Brain? It was about mice plotting to conquer the world?”
I shake my head since I’ve got something in my throat.
“Well, we should watch it one day. It was fucking hilarious. My parents introduced us to it, and I made Savannah watch it until she begged me to leave her alone. I think there are some old VHS tapes lying around somewhere.”
He’s silent for a moment.
“Bridget mated with a shifter who was nothing but trouble, so she told him to fuck off and came back home. He made the mistake of following her. She told him if he ever came back, there wouldn’t be enough of him left to bury. He believed her. She was… she was the type you believed would do it.”
I remember the look on his face when he threatened to toss my wolf in the lake and I smile, though tears fill my eyes. “I think I know what that looks like.”
There’s another long pause.
“Angela was the baby of the family. We all called her Angel. She was the one who would get away with anything. No one knew where her red hair came from since we’re all-we were all blond or had light brown hair. Everyone who met her fell in love with her.” Dayne’s voice lowers to a whisper, and I feel my heart breaking alongside his.
I’m desperate to tell him to stop. That he doesn’t have to do this. He doesn’t have to tell me if he doesn’t want to, but then he presses his lips against my hair.
“It’s not just for you, baby, I think I need to do it for me as well. And Squirt too. He should know about his family.”
I smile at his calling our baby Squirt. “She,” I correct him with a smile.
“Owen was the alpha. He’d always loved Angel,” Dayne says. “I don’t think she loved him as much as he did her, but that was Angel. She was like a butterfly, impossible to pin down when she didn’t want to, sometimes. I’m surprised she agreed to mate with him at all. They’d been together for several months before we realized things were going wrong between them. My parents tried to talk to her. Savannah was closest to Angel but even she couldn’t get her talking.”
I get the sense I know where this is going, but I don’t interrupt Dayne.
“You’ve got good instincts, Talis. Better than I did.”
“Your instincts are fine. I have a feeling you just didn’t want to be right about what you suspected.”
He sighs, and it ruffles my hair. “Maybe you’re right. Anyway, despite all their problems, it wasn’t long before Angel was pregnant with twins. And for a while, everyone was happy, at least on the surface. Then whatever had been happening started up again after she’d given birth. The thing was, he was very controlling. Not just beating her, though that was a part of it too. He was charming, and he was a good alpha. At least, at first. And I was busy hunting down a girl I saw crying one night.”
Dayne stops and sighs again. “So many excuses for things we should have seen-that I should have seen-and stopped before it got to the place it did.”
“Dayne, none of it was your fault.”
“I know that now, Talis.”
The fact he didn’t before makes my heart hurt, and I hold him closer. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault either.”
“But you were looking for me instead of-”
“Baby. Please. Don’t.”
“Okay.”
When he barks out a laugh, I’m confused for a second. “What’s so funny?”
“You.”
“Uh… should I be offended?”
“I never know when you’re going to argue about something, or when you’ll let it go. I had a long list of responses lined up to argue my point and I didn’t get to use even one. Other times I have nothing, and that’s when you refuse to drop it.”
I sigh happily. “It’s like I know. Great, isn’t it?”
He mutters something under his breath that I choose to let go.
“I was away. I had a lead on you. The first best lead I’d had in a while.”
I go still because I know what’s coming. I can hear it in his voice, and before he’s even started, my eyes are filling with tears.
“The twins-Violet and Ben-were older, and Angel realized they were getting old enough to understand what was happening in their house. A house the rest of the pack were spending less and less time in. So, most of us lived in town then. She’d told him she was leaving, and she was taking the twins. My parents were there to get her, Savannah too, and Bridget with Pinky-Peter-since she hadn’t been able to get anyone to watch him because Angel had called at the last minute. Angel thought Owen wouldn’t handle it well, so she figured having all the family there would stop any trouble.”
I feel something drop into my hair.
“Savannah said he lost it, utterly and completely. None of them was expecting it, and they all died. My parents, Bridget, Angel, Pinky, and the twins. Everyone except Savannah. Savannah… there’s still a lot I’m sure she’s blocked out, but she was a mess when Luka found her and called to tell me to come home. That’s when she moved to the cabin. She didn’t come to the house for a long time after that. Years. Then when she did, it was only for meals, and she never went upstairs, not until the thing with Abel. I don’t know how that’s going to affect her, but I’m sure it will.”
I feel him sigh.
“Anyway. I got home that same day after telling Luka to make sure the pack stayed away. That I’d deal with it. So, I went into the forest, and I found him. And I did what I should have done years before. And then I became the alpha.”
For several minutes, Dayne and I sit in silence, staring out across the lake as tears slide down my cheeks. I feel something else land on the top of my hair, and I clutch at Dayne tighter.
“I blamed her for a while. Angel. I blamed her for not telling us about Owen. I blamed her for waiting until I was away from the pack. It took a long time before I stopped.”
“Why didn’t she?” I whisper.
He shrugs. “I think she was afraid of the confrontation between me and Owen. She knew what I would do, and she knew what Owen would do. If he didn’t kill me, and I didn’t kill him, he’d have forced me out of the pack. Anything else is guesswork, but I think what it comes down to is Angel trying to protect me. I know she wanted me to keep looking for you. I guess she thought I would stop to deal with everything going wrong in Hardin.”
I force myself to ask the question I don’t want to know the answer to. “And would you have? Stopped looking for me?”
His bark of laughter surprises me, and it makes me lift my head. “What?”
“You think any force in this world would ever make me give you up Talis Blackshaw? I knew from the moment I saw you that you were mine. I would never have let you go. I love you more than life itself.”
I stare into Dayne’s eyes, red-rimmed from his sorrow. “I think I fell in love with you when you took me to see the mountains,” I tell him, my voice coming out husky.
“I know.” He presses a firm kiss on my forehead.
I huff out a breath, even as I wriggle until he releases me. “You don’t have to sound so confident.”
But as I’m about to move, a thought occurs to me. “How did you know I wanted to see them? And how did you know about my birthday?”
Dayne snorts. “As if I could have missed seeing you press your face against the truck window when I drove you past them. And your birthday was easy. I told you I’d been looking for you. Once I figured out who you were, it was easy enough to learn about your parents. Dean did the rest.”
“Are you telling me that Dean hacked my personal information from the government?” I ask, stunned.
“Of course not,” he says, with such an innocent expression on his face, I don’t believe him for a second. Then I sigh and throw one leg over his, so I’m straddling him.
A smile touches his lips as his hands settle on my hips. “And what, Talis Blackshaw, do you think you’re doing?”
I grab the hem of my shirt and tug it over my head, leaving me naked. “What does it look like?”
For the longest moment, Dayne does nothing but gaze into my face. Then he slips one hand around my nape. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
I go still at his words. “You’re only saying that because you want something.”
His amusement slips away, and he shifts us to the ground with him lying over me with his weight braced on his hands on either side of my head. “I don’t think I’ll ever stop wanting to look at you, or touch you, or want to be inside you.”
I raise a hand to brush my fingers against his beard.
He closes his eyes with a sigh.
“Dayne?”
“Hmm?”
“I never thought I’d ever be this happy,” I admit quietly, just for him.
His eyes open, and they’re filled with so much love, tears fill my eyes at seeing it. “Neither did I, baby.”
And then he lowers his head and kisses me under the tree beside the lake. In the place I’m almost positive is where we created the life growing inside me.