Chapter 22
SNORING, HOME INVASIONS, AND OTHER CATASTROPHES
LEVI
Parker snored. It wasn’t a great snuffling kind of snore, nor was it like a duck horn, but the soft whistle-like sound was enough to break up the rhythmic hush of his breathing.
He hadn’t slept much the night before, so I suspected that was the reason for his unintentional serenade. Or would he do this every night?
Would it bother me to listen to that every night? Nope. I didn’t think it would. I pulled the covers higher and smiled as I imagined what I might do if we shared a bed. I might wrap my arms around him. Hold him close. Nuzzle his neck. Would he wake long enough to snuggle closer?
What would?—?
My musings cut off abruptly at the sound of the hinges on my front door squealing.
Someone was here.
My first thought was fuck .
My second thought was Parker is in danger.
Son of a fucking fuck.
I threw off my blankets. I wanted to jump out of bed, charge over to Parker, throw him over my shoulder, and haul ass out of here. But that would warn the invaders that I was awake. Fuck only knew what they’d do if they knew that.
Then again, fuck only knew what they’d do if they caught us both sleeping too.
Why didn’t I have cameras installed already? They weren’t going to do much good next week if we were dead by then.
I sucked in a deep breath. Okay. That was just panic talking. At least I hoped that was all it was. My family wasn’t known for being clairvoyant, so I doubted I was having a premonition.
With a shaky hand, I reached for my phone, then I eased my feet over the side of the bed.
As soon as my toes touched the floor, I pushed out of bed.
I slowly moved across the floor, transferring my weight from one foot to the other as smoothly as I could, never letting my heels drop to the floor.
But I wasn’t a small man. The floor creaked under me.
Damn it. I should have fixed that years ago.
Finally, I arrived at Parker’s side.
He looked so damn peaceful. I hated to wake him. But it was better that than…
I swallowed hard. Nope. I couldn’t think about the alternative.
I kneeled beside the couch.
“Parker,” I whispered. “Wake up. ”
“Huh? What?” He flailed. His hand reached out over the edge of the sofa and patted at the air. “Huh? Where’s my?—”
“Shh… Don’t say anything.”
He lifted his head off the pillow and blinked in my direction. His hair was a mess. There were creases in his cheek from the pillow. I desperately wanted to kiss him. But no. We had a problem.
“Levi?”
Of course he had to say something right after I told him not to. “Hush. Don’t speak. Someone is in the house. Downstairs.”
“Oh crap.” Parker’s words were barely audible. He sat up, instantly alert.
“We can either stay up here and try to fight them off if they find the stairs, or we can go out the back way. There’s a risk either way.”
“They could be trying to flush us out.” Parker nodded. “What have you got for weapons? Anything?”
My heart clenched. Why the fuck hadn’t I thought about weapons?
“It’s okay,” Parker said, reaching for his bag. “I’ve got a gun. Why don’t you text Van? Let him know what’s going on.”
Did he just say he had a gun?
I stared as he pulled out a pistol of some kind. Or was it a handgun? A revolver? Were all those things the same thing? I didn’t know.
He angled the muzzle away from us with his trigger finger straight out along the side of the gun. With efficient movements, he clicked something, and a cylinder swung open. He turned it while looking down at it. He obviously knew what he was doing, but I had no idea what that was.
Right.
Staring at him wasn’t helping. He’d given me a task. One that made sense. I needed to get on with it. I opened my phone and saw I had ten unread text messages. I could guess that at least a few of those were going to say they’d lost the hunters again.
Yep.
That did not make me feel better about any of this.
Me: Someone is in my house. Probably your missing hunters.
Isaac: Shit. OMW
Van: Me too
Hayden: I qn p
What the hell was that? Had the hunters captured our alpha? Son of a?—
Three dots appeared. Hayden was typing something more. I held my breath and stared at my phone, desperate for an update from my alpha.
Hayden: Damn it, Ry. I don’t think this ducking speech thing is working.
Ducking texts. Look. Hayden. It’s there.
Shit. It’s typing everything we say. Son of a ditch.
How the duck do we stop it? I should have kept typing.
What happened to ducking phone calls? Duck. Don’t touch anything or it will send.
Hayden: Duck. It sent.
Hayden: It sent something else. For duck’s sake.
Hayden: Ryley. Make it stop. Here. Take it. Tell them I’m on my way.
Hayden: This is Ryley on Hayden’s phone. Hayden is on his way.
Okay. The alpha was fine.
“Backup is on its way,” I told Parker.
He nodded. Whatever he’d been doing with the gun, he was done now. “We need to get into place.”
“Get into…? What’re you talking about?”
“If they breach, we need a defensible position,” he said calmly. “Is there only the one way in?”
I shook my head. My brain was still stumbling over the fact that Parker was using words like breach and defensible.
I waved to the kitchen. “There’s another over there.
The access is in the pantry. The entrance to that one is on the main floor through a hidden panel behind what looks like a large vent cover. ”
Parker scanned the room. “Okay. Let’s move into the kitchen. If they have guns, we’ll hope they have smaller caliber weapons. Those shouldn’t penetrate that marble waterfall on your island. And if they come up through second access, we’ll hear them before they come out of the pantry.”
He walked without making a sound. The boards didn’t even creak under his weight. He held the gun pointed down, but he looked comfortable and calm with it in his hand.
Was he some kind of weekend warrior? No. Surely, I would have known that about him if he was. And he never talked about being in the military. But I doubted most humans acted this way during a home invasion.
Me, though, I was neither comfortable nor calm. I also didn’t have a weapon. So, all I could do was trail after him and hunker down behind the island like he told me to do. I hated feeling so vulnerable and defenseless.
We didn’t speak. My breathing was louder than Parker’s, but I couldn’t figure out how to calm down enough to quiet it. I missed how relaxed I’d been a few minutes earlier when I was listening to Parker snore.
My skin tingled with the need to shift, but I didn’t.
Not yet. I could shift quickly if I had to, but I wouldn’t be able to crouch down like this in my minotaur form.
Were the hunters getting closer? Had they found the passage?
I couldn’t hear them, but my heart was pounding so fast I wasn’t sure that I would.
I blinked to clear the dizziness. It didn’t work.
And damn it. I’d forgotten to buy more antacids today.
“Pucker up, Levi. Just like that. The way you would to kiss me again. Breathe slowly, like before,” Parker whispered against my ear. “Can’t have you passing out on me. ”
He was teasing me? At a time like this? But I did as he suggested anyway.
Slowly the dizziness ebbed away, but that didn’t mean I was okay. Goosebumps covered my arms. My fingertips were ice cold. My ears strained for any little sound from downstairs. I couldn’t hear a blasted thing.
What were they doing?
The hinges on the door squealed again. I held my breath for any indication of what that meant. Had more people come in? Had the hunters left? I didn’t know.
The squeal of tires on asphalt outside my house shattered the quiet. The cavalry had arrived. Thank fuck.
Van’s loud voice boomed through the house. “Police. We’re coming in.”
The hinges squealed again, followed by the thunder of footsteps moving quickly through my maze. How many people were down there? It couldn’t be more than two or three, but it sounded like twenty. My skin itched at the thought of so many people in my space. I clenched my teeth and fisted my hands.
Parker reached over and cupped the side of my face. His other hand still held the gun. He pressed his forehead to mine. “Hey. We’ve got this.”
As much as I still hated having so many people in my space, Parker’s warm touch was surprisingly soothing. And he was so close. Close enough to kiss. Again. His scent teased me, and I breathed in deeply to pull more of it inside me.
“There you go,” Parker said.
At first, I didn’t know what he meant, but then I realized I’d stopped grinding my teeth, and my fists had loosened.
He pulled back a little and peered into my eyes.
His lips twitched in the hint of a smile, drawing my eyes to his mouth.
I wanted to taste him again. I leaned forward, closing the scant distance between us.
My phone rang.
We jolted apart. Parker raised his gun. His gaze darted to the pantry and then to the stairs.
I fumbled to answer the call. “What?”
Parker pushed in close to me again so he could listen to the conversation.
“No one is here,” Van said.
“Are you sure?” I whispered. I wasn’t sure if I was happy they weren’t in my space any longer or disappointed we hadn’t caught them. Maybe a bit of both.
“Any sign of why they were here?” Parker asked as he slipped his hand in mine and squeezed it gently.
“Hayden just got here. Hold on. Give me a minute.”
I should go downstairs and talk to them. But I wasn’t ready to leave the sanctuary of my apartment yet. Through the phone, I could hear the shuffle of footsteps and the murmur of quiet conversations.
“Okay,” Van said, as if to announce his return. “He retraced the path the hunters took through your house. Looks like they retrieved their listening devices.”
“Huh. What does that mean?” I asked, not really expecting an answer.
“I suspect it’s one of two things,” Van said. “It could be they decided they didn’t need to listen anymore. That they got what they needed. Or it might just be that they’re leaving tomorrow and decided to retrieve their equipment before they left. ”
“That was risky,” I muttered.
Van shrugged. “Could mean they trust you and don’t see you as a threat.”
“Yeah. I like that. Let’s hope they decided we aren’t supes and are moving on,” Parker said. His use of the word we stuck out.
“Yeah,” Van agreed. “Okay. We’re going to head out. Looks like the team has picked up the hunters back at the hotel, so hopefully that’s them done for the night.”
I nodded, but of course he couldn’t see me. “Yeah. Thanks, Van.”
“We’ll lock up on our way out.”
He wouldn’t be able to secure the deadbolt, but he could engage the doorknob lock. I didn’t usually bother with it, but it’d work for tonight. It wasn’t like the deadbolt had kept the hunters out anyway.
When the call disconnected, I glanced at Parker. He was doing something with the gun again. When he was finished, he looked at me.
“Do you want to go down and check things out?”
I shook my head.
“Okay. Van will take care of everything, I’m sure. Let’s hit the hay.”
I frowned. “Hit the hay? Why? Because I’m a minotaur?”
Parker grinned. “It’s a saying, but now that you mention it, I’m going to have to search for some more.”
I rolled my eyes and stood up. My knees complained at having been in a crouched position for so long. I groaned.
Before leaving the kitchen, I checked the access panel in the pantry. Nothing had changed. I knew it hadn’t, but I’d needed to check, anyway. I did the same with the main stairs.
Then I was standing in the living room again. Parker was settling into his makeshift bed on my sofa. It felt like a fluke that I’d still been awake earlier. If I’d been sleeping, would I have heard them? What if they returned? If they got up the stairs before I woke, they’d find Parker first.
I couldn’t let that happen.
“Uh… Parker?”
“Yeah? What’s up?”
“I… uh…” My words faltered as his gaze caught on mine. I swallowed. “I’d, uh, like you to sleep in the bed. With me.” Did that sound too forward? “Or I could sleep on the sofa, and you could sleep in the bed.”
His eyebrows rose. “Why?”
“For your protection.”
Parker’s gaze darted to the stairway, and I knew he understood. Sure, he’d been the one with the gun. He was the one who had to talk me down from another panic attack. But… I couldn’t shake the discomfort I felt at having him over there.
“Please.”
He studied me for a minute. “Okay.”
He scooped his gun from the coffee table and sauntered over to the side of the bed I hadn’t slept on earlier. He set his gun on the bedside table. He pulled back the blanket, then paused to look at me. I hadn’t moved.
“You coming? ”
What a word. It conjured all kinds of things, none of which Parker meant in this moment. This was such a spectacularly bad idea, but what other choice was there?
I nodded and returned to where I’d been trying to sleep earlier. Parker smiled at me as he slipped between the sheets beside me. I turned so I faced away from him. Seeing him right there. In my bed. Would have been too much temptation.
“Come here,” he whispered.
He slid across the bed until he was pressed up against me. My heart was thundering again. But this time, it wasn’t from fear. Or at least not the same kind of fear. He wrapped his arms around me and pressed his face against my back.
Parker Girard was spooning me.
It was ridiculous. I was the bigger guy. I should be spooning him. But I couldn’t make myself change position. I liked having his arms wrapped around me.
“Good night, Levi,” he said for the second time that night.
“Yeah, good night,” I croaked out.