Page 21

Hellen slowly woke, taking a few deep breaths and tentatively stretching her body this way and that before turning over and opening her eyes.

As her bedroom came into focus the sound of crunching began to grate against her nerves.

Then she realized she heard the sounds of the most irritating reality talk shows possible, accentuated with the sound of a remote control clicking as the channels were flipped.

Sighing exaggeratedly as she realized she had to people before she was even awake good, she half pulled herself up and leaned against the headboard.

“Good morning, sunshine!” Lucien said, as he grinned at her and crunched another Oreo cookie.

Hellen continued rapidly blinking her eyes and scowling as she tried to focus.

“Not a morning person, huh?” he asked.

“Go. Away.”

Lucien chuckled. “Not a chance, cher.”

Groaning out a whine, she started scooting toward the edge of her king size bed to get away from him and the unnecessary noise he obviously brought to the morning.

“Hang on, now. Where you off to?”

“Quiet,” she grumbled.

“Tell you what, I’ll try to be quieter, and I’ll even give you a cookie if you stay.”

“TV,” she whined.

“I’ll turn it down. Needs to be turned down anyway — we got to talk.”

Hellen reached out and snatched the Oreo out of his hand. “My cookies,” she snapped, shoving the whole thing in her mouth and munching away as she turned her back to him, preparing to go back to sleep.

“No, no, no. I need you to wakeup and talk to me.”

“Go away.”

“I’m serious, Hellen. We need to talk.”

With her back to him, her eyes popped open, and she stared straight ahead, realizing he’d used her full name, and all sense of teasing had left his tone of voice.

He was leaving — that’s all there was to it.

He was trying to give her whatever excuse he’d come up with to justify his leaving her.

She just barely shook her head, while at the same time refraining from calling him everything but a child of God for promising her just yesterday that he wasn’t going anywhere.

“You know what, Lucien? It’s fine. Just go. ”

“What’s fine?”

“You’re trying to tell me you’re leaving, and you’re making the effort to justify it.

You don’t need to. I don’t want anybody that doesn't want me at least equally. I don’t need excuses.

Just go.” She heard the sound of a crinkling package as he wrapped up the cookies in their torn cellophane wrapper and set them aside.

“First, don’t go assuming you know what I’m doing or thinking. Second, I made you a promise — have you forgotten that?”

“No, I have not. And it’s the main reason I don’t want to hear any of your bullshit. Just find your way out the same way you arrived.”

“Hellen, I’m not going anywhere. At least not willingly. I’m trying to tell you a few things about me that you really need to know. An excuse for leaving you isn’t one of them.”

Hellen’s brow wrinkled as she processed his words, and she finally turned over and propped herself up against the headboard again as she looked begrudgingly at him.

“Ready to talk now?” he asked, his expression just this side of breaking into a grin.

“If we must. It’s too early, though.”

“It’s seven thirty in the morning!”

“Yeah, it is. Why?”

“Because the sun came up. Because it’s worth getting up in the morning and having a great day after spending the early morning watching the sun come up.”

Hellen growled. She literally growled.

Lucien laughed, that full bodied, rich, sensual laughter that made every female within earshot turn to look at him as their pheromones zeroed in on him.

“I thought I told you not to laugh like that anymore.”

“I’m just laughing, cher. There’s nothing else to it.” He leaned over and pecked a quick kiss to her brow, then laughed even harder when she raised her hand and wiped off his kiss with the back of her wrist.

“What do you want to talk about?” she grumbled.

“I just want you to listen. If you want to talk, too, that’s fine. If not, just listen to me.”

“Fine. Talk.”

“First, I just want to drive home a point I made yesterday. I’m not going anywhere.

I had planned to. I had hoped to. But it’s not working out like I expected.

” He waited until she turned her head just slightly to meet his gaze, and his tone softened.

“I need to be near you. I don’t want to be anywhere you’re not.

I wasn’t just talking for the sake of talking; I’m not leaving you.

I’m not leaving here. It would help my confidence a lot if you’d stop questioning me and believe that. ”

“Don’t think you have any issues with your confidence. You’re quite arrogant, actually.”

Lucien grinned at her. “Want to know why you found me the way you did?”

Hellen pushed herself up a little straighter. “If you’re ready to tell me.”

“I really don’t want to tell you. But your dad already knows, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before everybody else does, too, and I think you should know before they do.”

“How can I know before they do if my dad already knows? If he knows, every damn person in our clan knows.”

“They don’t know you don’t know, though.”

“Oh, my God! Just tell me,” she said, dragging her hands down her face dramatically.

“I used to work for some shady people. Smugglers, if you will.”

“Drugs?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Didn’t really give a damn. I kept watch when they loaded and unloaded, and if they had trouble reaching a certain location, I got it there for them. They paid me very well.”

“And you stole from them.”

“Why does everybody keep saying that? I did not steal from them.”

“Then how did you piss them off so bad? And who’s everybody?”

“Your dad. And because I started killing them, picking them off one by one.”

“Oh. Well, yeah, that’d do it.”

“I figured out their usual shipments had changed. Gotten more frequent, and shipping was much more active than their receipts. Started digging around and figured out they were poaching. Taking advantage of the natural resources around them. I warned them. Told them to stop butchering the animals. Didn’t listen, so I gave them one last chance.

Told them I’d take one of them for every animal they took.

They didn’t like it when I followed up on it. ”

Hellen’s eyes were wide as she simply stared at him.

“Don’t feel bad for them. They deserved it.”

She sat for a few more seconds with the same expression on her face before she launched herself at him, wrapping herself around him as she kissed him for all she was worth, her arms wrapped around his neck so tightly he couldn’t have pried her off if he’d wanted to.

But he most certainly didn’t want to. His arms went around her, holding her to him tightly as his hands smoothed their way up her back as she began to grind her hips into his lap.

She only pulled her mouth away from his long enough to look down at him. “I’m so sorry they hurt you.”

“I’d live it a thousand times if it brought me you,” he whispered.

“You’re really not leaving…”

He shook his head and leaned toward her to capture her lips in another kiss.

Hellen’s lips came down on his, and their kiss melded them together for what seemed like eternity, until a pained rumble bubbled up out of his throat.

Hellen opened her eyes to see what had hurt him only to find herself moving through the air as he tossed her onto her back and came down on top of her.

She caught her breath and looked up into his eye as he hovered over her, his face just inches from hers. “So, we’re doing this.”

“No way around it. Seems like everybody was right.”

“I don’t understand.”

He grinned wickedly. “I belong in Hell.”

She looked at him for just a split second with a bit of puzzlement on her face, before her expression morphed into a snide smirk. “Really?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah,” he confirmed, beginning to slide his hands down her body, and somehow, despite her brain telling her to resist, when his hands completed their slow slide down past her waist, across her hips and down her thighs toward her knees, her panties were balanced on his fingertips, and almost effortlessly slid down the remainder of her legs to be tossed away by his right hand as his left remained resting on her hip.

The sultry grin he wore faded as his gaze met hers and realized that the smoke and mirrors they'd been tossing at each other had just shattered to the ground.

For this one single moment, they were both bare, seeing each other fully for the first time — their souls exposed, poised nervously, hoping for acceptance.

He spoke honestly, the first words that entered his mind. “I trust you, Hellen. I belong to you.”

She quickly blinked away a surprising rush of tears. “I trust you, too, Lucien. I’m yours.”

Lucien leaned his body toward her again, his lips pressing chastely against hers, before he used one knee to separate her legs and nudge his way between them.

His hips lay against hers, his forehead against hers as well, as with his eyes closed, he took a few minutes to savor her scent, to savor the feel of her beneath him, to savor the rightness of this moment in time.

He felt her hands moving over his body and gloried in emotions she stirred in him; then heard the sound of material ripping.

He opened his eyes and looked down to his own waist where he found what remained of his shorts in shreds, her Wolf’s claws having shredded them from his body.

He raised his brows and looked up at her.

“I need,” she said simply.