12. Logan
CHAPTER TWELVE
logan
Six-Mile Manor
Aweek.
I’d built a lot of things in a week. A wrought-iron gate.
Two more rows of tiny houses. Guard towers at all four corners, framed and roofed.
I’d mediated a jurisdictional war between ravens and raccoons over a bathtub and bunk assignments, signed off on a mess hall tournament bracket my beta swore was for morale and not gambling, and personally carried enough lumber that my shoulders ached.
A shifter could get a lot done in a week if he refused to sleep, and I had refused to sleep. Every night the bond had gone dark, it was easier to swing a hammer than to lie in a bed while missing my other half.
A week was also enough time to go mad.
That was the part nobody had warned me about, being fated.
Before Emma, my bed had just been my bed.
Now it was a place with a shape cut out of it, and the shape had rainbow hair, a smart mouth, and the scent of blueberries and sage.
Her curves were miles south in a cypress hollow letting a blind cat and a mouthy squirrel guard her instead of me.
Dragging her into my arms, gripping her waist, plunging into her… And I wouldn’t hesitate if I had to choose between the rest of the world and her.
I could feel her out there. That was both a mercy and a curse.
All week, the link had run like a river over the next rise.
There, moving, and alive, but muffled, sealed under the distance and the bear-warded trees.
I missed her… craved the shit out of her…
hated that other alphas kept her safe. She wasn’t even in my vicinity, and she kept me awake until exhaustion took over.
Each night around four in the morning, the link would ripple and go tight as Acheron found his way into her dreams again wearing that poor girl’s face, or mine, and there wasn’t a single damn thing I could do to protect her.
Each night, I would stand at the window with my hands flat on the sill and fantasize about tearing Acheron apart limb from limb.
My wolf hated the situation even more than I did. He’d paced a groove in the floor of my skull. Go get her. Go get our mate. Bring her home where I can put my body between her and everything else. It’s what I’m for.
He wasn’t wrong. He usually wasn’t about the important things.
But I was the alpha of Six-Mile. I was responsible for holding a fragile miracle together, and I couldn’t abandon it to go fetch the woman who’d created it, even if she was the one thing in the world that made the holding worth a damn.
So I built the fence, assembled the gate, and sent Phil south with her bags and a message.
If I’d sent the rawest one, I’d have followed it up the trail myself.
I’d also folded a scrap of paper with two words on it, pressed hard enough to leave a scar in the page.
Race ya.
Small reminder. Dumb, maybe. Sentimental as fuck.
A bet from the last time we were in Vixen’s, a lifetime ago.
Emma had always been the prettiest woman in Willow Creek, and I was an idiot for convincing myself I didn’t have time for a relationship with her the second I laid eyes on her.
Now, across the miles I couldn’t cross, the message had been the only way to hint at what I couldn’t shove through the bond without triggering an avalanche.
Come home to me, Emma. Come home so I can stop pretending the window is interesting. Come home so my wolf will lie down. Come home so I can breathe.
Phil radioed in from the border an hour before dusk. “She’s coming, Alpha. Fast. You’re gonna want to be standing somewhere she can see you.”
“Ten-four,” I radioed back. My stomach clenched.
I didn’t bolt to the porch. After taking a deep breath, I strolled at a perfectly dignified alpha’s pace.
Then I took a position against the wall with my arms crossed like a man who had absolutely not been counting the minutes, and I aimed my being toward her and waited.
Fucking glad I was as naked as a damned shifter ought to be.
Then the bond came into sharp focus as she got closer, suddenly roaring free and blazing hot. The last of the daylight caught a streak of cheetah gold coming up the drive at a dead sprint, and my muscles tightened, and I clenched my teeth.
My mouth watered. For her. My wolf howled, trying to fight his way out, and I nearly shifted on the spot. Mine. Home. Finally. I kept my hands as fists and down at my sides.
She dropped the cheetah shape at the bottom of the front porch stairs and landed on the boards as her human self.
Naked, breathless, her hair a glorious rainbow disaster, grinning up at me like she’d been the one counting minutes too.
Her voluminous breasts bounced as she danced on her toes, and desire punched me in the heart.
She thought she’d won.
I let her believe it. Then I dragged her inside.