Protector

Chapter 11-2

At least he’d convinced her to stay. That was something, although he could tell from the skittish, worried look in her eyes that it might not take too much more to scare her into running off to Jerome, even though she wouldn’t be able to help her friends from there.

And he couldn’t even blame her for returning to the guest room. He wanted her…his body was telling him exactly how much he wanted her…but he was willing to be patient. The way she’d felt in his arms, the way she’d tasted, the way the shape of her lips seemed to match his exactly…all those things told him she was the woman he’d been waiting for his entire life. But because he’d been waiting this long, he was fine with giving her some space, some room to think things over. Besides, she was right — their main goal right now should be finding Roslyn and Danica. He knew his feelings for Caitlin wouldn’t change merely by putting off any further progression in their relationship for a few days. Or weeks, although he hoped for the missing girls’ sakes it wouldn’t take anywhere close to that long.

The king bed had always felt big to him, but tonight it felt even bigger, the expanse to his left where Caitlin had been lying the night before now empty, cold. He certainly didn’t want her to suffer another horrifying vision, although some part of him thought that if she did, it might bring her back to him.

He began to stiffen at the thought, and he pushed away the vision of Caitlin lying next to him, her bright hair spread on the pillow, the curve of her breasts half-revealed by the covers. Of course, that thought only made his own situation that much worse, and he rolled over on his side, cursing his body. How long had it been, anyway? He and Lana had broken up what, almost ten months ago? Right after Diego’s wedding.

And that had been the reason, because Lana had been his date at the wedding, and afterward she started pushing Alex to take the next step, to start planning for a real future together. She was a civilian, though, and hadn’t known the truth about him. For some reason, he’d never found the courage to go into all of that with Lana…or maybe it wasn’t that he’d lacked courage at all, but that he knew she wasn’t the one, and so wouldn’t risk revealing any of his clan’s secrets to her.

Anyway, that was neither here nor there. It was just that, any way you cut it, it had been a really long time since he’d last been laid.

The house was quiet around him. No air-raid-siren screams from Caitlin, although she’d only gone to bed a half hour earlier. Plenty of time for the next vision of Matías’ iniquities to invade her sleeping mind.

That thought made Alex think of what she actually had seen, of Danica apparently being coerced into having s*x with Matías. No, that wasn’t really correct, because she wasn’t struggling, appeared to be a willing participant.

Only because of the way Matías is able to mind-f**k her, Alex thought, and he frowned, turning over onto his back, since trying to fall asleep on his side clearly wasn’t going to work. And what was Matías’ deal with that, anyway, except getting his rocks off in addition to however he was using Danica to fuel his dark magic?

But Caitlin had said she hadn’t seen any cuts on the Wilcox witch’s arms….

Alex wasn’t sure what to make of that. Were they draining Roslyn first, and, once she was of no further use to them, would they move on to Danica? Possibly. He didn’t have a clue how that kind of magic worked, not when you got down to the real nuts and bolts of it, and he didn’t want to know. Any power that could be gained by participating in dark magic seemed to be canceled out by the damage it did to the magic-worker’s soul. It just wasn’t worth it.

Except…Matías apparently thought it was.

So what was his endgame? Surely he must know that provoking the de la Paz clan on its own territory — and involving the Wilcoxes and the McAllisters, too — wasn’t going to end well. The problem was, too many pieces of the puzzle were still missing. Alex knew that he and Caitlin would never be able to figure it out if they didn’t dig up some more of those pieces.

Exactly how, he didn’t have a clue.