that?”
Cam growled—actually growled—and took a step closer, almost defiantly. “We’ll explain everything back at the house. We shouldn’t be out here like this.”
The entourage. “They’re all shifters, aren’t they? Bunny and the others? I should have known. You’re like the Twilight family, all gorgeous and tall and irritatingly perfect. The ones that act like their life sucks because they glitter like diamonds. Your life doesn’t suck.”
“Our life is great. But we don’t glitter, and only Deter liked that movie.” Davide was trying to joke, but she could see the sheen of nerves and need that covered him. Feel his hunger and his worry. For her? She wanted reassure him. Go to him.
Want you. Love you. Mine.
She made herself back away. “I have to get to the inn. They need me. I really can’t deal with this right now.”
Cam slammed his hands on the hood of her truck, his arms bulging. “Running away won’t help you. It’s the mate link. It’s affecting all of us.”
The mate link? “No. This happened because I listened, the way he told me to, and now I can’t shut it off. I know things I shouldn’t know now, Cam. Too many things. I know how you two met. That Davide stayed up all night with Aaron when he’d been beaten so badly you weren’t sure he’d survive. I know about Switzerland. Colorado. I know they said…they said…”
Mate. She was their mate, which was not as romantic as it sounded because it wasn’t their choice. In fact, it might actually be impossible. A mistake, according to the Colorado elders. Two shifters with the same mate was an anomaly that was dangerous for everyone involved. She had to release them or they might go feral and try to kill each other.
There was a link. The cord Kaya had seen. Was that the reason she wanted them so badly? Would it disappear once she let them go? The possibility made her want to cry again. Or maybe that was her brain melting from all the new information.
“Bailey, please.”
“I have to rescue my guests from the attic now.”
“What the hell are they doing in the attic?” Cam demanded, sounding so much like a normal, irritating boss who wasn’t naked in the middle of the road that it ticked her off.
She whirled on her heel and he was so close she smacked him in the chest with her hand. “Blame Davide,” she said, breathless from the heat of him burning through her dress. Through her palm. She wanted to touch more of him. Wanted the dress gone so she could finally feel his skin pressed against hers. “He’s the one that got Mr. Olyphant interested in a ghost hunt.”
Wolf. Wolf. He is a wolf.
“Bailey, listen to me,” he murmured, careful not to reach for her, though she knew how badly he wanted to. “I know this is confusing, and we’ll explain it all, but you have to know we’d never hurt you. Tell me you at least know that?”
“She’s part of us. She knows.” Davide was closer now, his eyes golden instead of brown and so beloved. So familiar. She’d die for him. No…Cam would die for him.
I can’t lose him.
They weren’t human. They were more. And they’d both experienced more than she’d ever imagined, been to places she’d never heard of.
The life they’d lived? The way they loved? She had no frame of reference for that. She’d thought of Cam as alien before because of his money, but he was more alien than she’d realized, and not only because he could change into a wolf at will.
She could never be on equal footing with them. And they would never love her the way they loved each other. It was almost laughable, that these two long-lived beings in the epic romance of the goddamn ages would see her as anything but an interesting diversion. A curiosity who happened to live a few steps away from the real reason they’d come.
“Cam, I don’t like where her mind is going,” Davide said warily.
“Neither do I.”
She took a jerky step back, out of their reach. “If you don’t like it, you can both stay out of it. I mean it. I can’t think around you and I need to think. I need space.”
She backed up another step and felt for the door of her truck. “Now I’m going to go do my job, and you two are going to go right home and put on some damn clothes.”
She couldn’t believe she was saying that.