Chapter 5
ARCHER
Isla hadn’t been kidding when she’d said she was an expert runner. She’d had her and the kid packed up before lunch, the house basically back to a clean slate. From the outside, it didn’t look like it had ever been inhabited, and there was no trace of the woman or her child who used to live there.
I looked in the rearview mirror at her, the secret crush of my teenage years.
God, I’d loved her. She’d been a perfect blend of innocence and mischief, and as soon as she’d stepped into our lives, she’d completed us.
All of us. Even Axel had had a massive hard-on for Isla, though he refused to admit it at the time.
But you only had to see him in the aftermath of her disappearance to know it was more than a casual friendship.
She was his mate—of that, I was certain.
The kid, Bohdie, slept in his booster seat, his head tipped forward in what had to be an uncomfortable angle.
Isla sat next to him, holding his hand as he slept.
I looked over at Axel and busted him casting a glance at Isla too.
I couldn’t blame him; she looked like an angel with her head resting against the window, the sun picking up the new golden threads in her hair.
My eyes shot back to the kid. Sleeping, he looked so much like Kara. I’d loved Kara too, and had been devastated by her death, but not in the same way as I’d been completely wrecked by Isla vanishing.
Bohdie was a problem—an adorable, slightly feisty problem.
But he was our problem now, and I would fight tooth and nail to keep them both.
Cubs had never been in my future, by choice.
You had to be part of a Pride to breed, and I had no urge to participate in the psychotic version of the Hunger Games necessary to get standing in a Pride, just to get laid and have some cubs.
I was happy with humans and bachelorhood.
Except with Isla. With Isla, I’d always yearned for more. What kind of grown-ass man uses the word yearn?
And here it all was, dropped in my lap. If you ignored that infanticide and the crazed Regent, it was almost like a feelgood movie.
I chuckled at my own dark thoughts as we crossed another state line.
It was an eighteen-hour drive from Mississippi to our place in Nebraska, and we didn’t intend on stopping until we got there.
We knew every inch of those woods and every creature in there, from Thumper to Bambi. We could protect them there.
“Isla is right. Bob has to go.” I broke the silence in the car, and everyone’s eyes shot to me.
“That’s easier said than done,” Axel grunted, his gaze sliding back to the road. “Even if we just walked up and challenged him, it would create a struggle for power. Someone would need to replace him, and it sure as shit isn’t going to be me.”
I turned my head so Axel couldn’t see me rolling my eyes. Yeah, right. He was the only one dominant enough to take down Bob and step up as Regent. I knew that if it came down to it, he’d do it for Isla. But I let him have his way for now.
“What happens to the Pride afterwards is the least of our worries,” Wyatt, the little ray of sunshine, interrupted.
“You guys are acting like we can just walk up to Bob and ask him to stand still so we can take his head. He’s strong.
He knocked out Kara’s parents and all their supporters in one night with only the two lions in his Coalition. ”
“Coalition?” Isla asked. Nothing slipped by my girl. Shit, I had to stop thinking of her as mine. She barely even knew us now. But I was going to change that.
Wyatt beat me to answering. “It’s the power structure of males in the Pride. Usually, there’ll be only three or four males in the entire group.”
“And how many females?”
Wyatt shrugged. “Anywhere between ten and thirty. There was a Pride out in Nevada that had sixty females to a Coalition of five.”
Isla grimaced, making her nose scrunch up adorably. “That sounds awfully hillbilly of them.”
I boomed out a laugh. “You’re not wrong. The Nevada Pride were only one generation away from being born with extra limbs before they were broken up.”
We drove in silence a little longer while everyone digested the conversation.
We needed to make Bob’s death as quick and unexpected as possible, but that would need some seriously careful planning.
The Chatsville Pride only had nine lionesses and a handful of cubs these days, and Bob had killed off Cedric, one side of his Coalition, soon after he’d secured power. Bob didn’t share well.
But that still left Angus, Bob’s right hand, and Bob himself. They were both strong, experienced fighters. One-on-one, we were screwed.
The silence dragged on, until it was time to stop to gas the car and stretch. A two-hundred-pound lion shifter didn’t do well cramped in a car for too long.
Bohdie was still sleeping, so we left him in the back seat.
Axel pumped the gas, while Wyatt went into the store to try and discover if there was anything more substantial than donuts and Cheetos to feed the cub when he woke up.
Isla walked around the rear of the SUV, shaking out her legs.
As she lifted her arms above her head in a stretch, my eyes locked on the tiny strip of flesh exposed below her tank.
I sucked in a breath, willing myself to stop staring.
What was wrong with me? I’d seen plenty of naked flesh in my time. After Isla disappeared, Axel had become a monk, and Wyatt a scholar, but I’d become a manwhore. I’d found solace in the flesh of meaningless humans.
I tore my gaze away. She deserved better. She deserved Axel.
I could feel her eyes on me. I looked up, giving her my trademark grin, the one that dropped panties and got women into bathroom stalls in crowded nightclubs. It did its job, a flush rising in Isla’s cheeks.
“I’ve missed you, Archie,” she whispered, and the words were like a sucker punch. “Come here. I need a hug.”
I was too weak to resist. Despite my previous thoughts—or maybe because of them—she pulled at me like a magnet until I had her in my arms.
“What have you been doing all these years, Archie? Breaking hearts?” she murmured against my chest with a laugh.
“Only on days that end in the letter Y, Isla baby. You know me, there’s a line right around the block for a night out with Archer Barden.”
I could feel her laughter vibrating beneath my hands. “You are so full of shit. You always have been. So much bravado, such a soft heart. I know your secrets,” she said as she looked up, catching my eye and holding me captive.
I couldn’t help myself. I was so fucking selfish. I leaned forward and kissed her on those perfectly soft lips, catching the little squeak of shock with my mouth and sucking her bottom lip between mine.
She softened against me, and I wanted to deepen the kiss.
I wanted to spin her and press against the back of the car, and plunge my tongue into her mouth and my cock into her body.
I wanted to hear her moan and see if the face she made when I pleasured her was the same one I’d always imagined in my dreams.
But a throat cleared beside us. Axel was there, an eyebrow raised.
Isla flushed bright red, jumping away as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “I, uh, should use the bathroom.” She skittered away from me, like a gazelle from the hungry lion.
I dragged a hand down my face, then turned to look at Axel, preparing to get my ass handed to me. He was just staring at me, his head slightly tilted.
“You love her.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.” There was no lying to Axel. I wouldn’t lie about this anyway. The lie would be like poison on my tongue.
He just nodded, turning back to the car. “Your turn to drive,” he said, throwing the keys over to me. That was it. Axel was a man of few words. Always had been. He was inscrutable, but normally, he had a healthy dose of asshole thrown in.
“Shouldn’t you be warning me off, or staking a claim or something? You are Alpha,” I pressed, because apparently, I had a death wish.
Axel shook his head. “No. The choice is hers. It’s always been hers.
She can have whatever she wants, and if it’s within my power to give it to her, that’s what I’ll do.
” He turned, putting one of his huge hands on my shoulder with a heavy thump.
“If that happiness is you, then I’ll be glad to have her in my life and within my Pride.
” He grinned at me, but it was all teeth. “But I fucking hope she chooses me.”
I laughed at the absurdity of our lives in that moment. It was perilous, and we were considering regicide, but buzzing from that kiss, I was the happiest I’d been in five years.