Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 74292 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 248(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74292 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 248(@300wpm)
Curran came out of the ocean, the hard muscles across his powerful frame slick with water. Oh wow.
My husband started across the sand toward me. At night he swam naked, but since it was morning, he wore blue swimming trunks and somehow that made him even hotter. But it wasn’t his body that pulled me in, although it didn’t hurt.
Looking into Curran’s eyes was like coming face to face with an apex predator. There was steel will there, raw power, and confidence bordering on arrogance to back it up, but most of all there was love when he looked at me. Erra was right. He never stopped being the Beast Lord. He was the man who could dominate thousands of shapeshifters with a single look, and he was also the man who stayed up all night with a child who’d eaten some poisonous herbs in the forest and spent twenty-four hours throwing them up. One couldn’t be separated from another. They were all aspects of Curran, and I loved all of him.
The Curran I knew was done with packs and shapeshifter hierarchy. A few years ago, Mahon came to him with this harebrained proposal of starting another Pack several states over, and Curran had shot him down flat. When Mahon demanded to know who would keep our family safe, Curran did his alpha stare and informed him that he was all the safety we needed. And yet if the Pack came to him now, desperate for his help, I wasn’t sure what he would do.
Try as you might, you cannot change who you are. A son of Jushur, my father’s former spymaster, told me this two months ago when I ran into him at the Farm. I didn’t want to change who Curran was.
I didn’t want to change who I was either. It would take a hell of a lot more than a sob story to force me out of my retirement. I’d earned my peace and quiet, and I would be keeping it.
Curran reached me.
“How was the water?”
“Invigorating. You should go for a swim.”
“No thanks.”
I loved swimming, but I liked my ocean to be right about the temperature of bath water. Our slice of the North Carolina coast was nicely swimmable in September, hovering around the upper seventies, but we’d had three days of storms and the water temperature dropped to the high sixties. I had no desire to get into it.
Curran leaned over and kissed me with cool lips. “What’s the matter?”
Land, connections, money… “My aunt has given me a laundry list of things we don’t have and need to get right away.”
He laughed softly.
Connections would cost us our anonymity, and land would cost us money, which we didn’t have. Curran and I owned a chunk of the Mercenary Guild. It paid quite well, but not well enough to finance us on the kind of scale Erra was envisioning.
“Do you think it was a mistake to move to Wilmington?” I asked.
“I have my smoking-hot wife, my troublemaker son, my fort, my beach... What else can a man want?”
“I’m serious.”
“I can see that.” He scooped me up off my log.
“What are you doing?”
Curran spun around and sprinted to the water with me in his arms. The beach flew by.
“Stop! Curran! Cu—”
He threw me. I hurtled through the air and splashed into the ocean. The water closed over my head.
Aaaa!
I flailed, broke the surface, and gasped. Curran locked me into his arms, his gray eyes laughing.
“You said invigorating, not fucking freezing. Let go of me!”
“Let me warm you up.”
“I’ll warm myself up!”
His smile gained a wicked edge. “Even more interesting.”
I smacked him, kicked him in the chest, and launched into a frenzied freestyle, trying to warm up. I stopped about a minute later. In a calm lake, I would’ve ended up one hundred yards from where I started. In the ocean, against the current, I made it to about fifty.
Curran floated next to me, and he wasn’t even breathing hard. It’s good to be a werelion.
“Hey, baby.”
“You are too much.”
He pulled me closer, and I wrapped myself in his arms. We floated in the water.
“About what you said earlier,” he said, his voice a deep rumble in my ear. “I enjoyed this summer. Conlan loved it.”
They both loved it here in the fort. Erra was right—it really was on the edge of the continent, in a place where the land ended and the ocean began. We could get cornered here, squeezed between an angry sea and an enemy. If we were talking about safety only, I’d felt better when we were in Atlanta, hidden deep inside the subdivision where every neighbor was a friend. But Atlanta wasn’t an option.
“Do you like it here?” Curran asked.
“Yes.”
“Then it works for now. It’s simple, baby. When we stop liking it, we’ll do something else.”