Burn Bright (Alpha & Omega #5)(46)

She put her head back down on his sweaty and smoky skin, breathed him in contentedly, and said, “Okay. I can go with that.”

? ? ?

ASIL DROVE AS if he were a human, with human reflexes. It was nice, Anna decided, to not have to choose between driving herself or living with Charles’s sometimes-sudden decisions to drive as though a wreck could not possibly injure anyone in the car. Anna could relax while Asil navigated the almost roads they traveled.

Since they’d taken Asil’s new Mercedes SUV instead of Charles’s truck, she could also not wince when the scrape of tree branches or rocks against the sides and underside of his pristine vehicle made Asil growl. The growl was just noise, without any passion behind it. Unlike her husband, Asil didn’t love his cars. He appreciated them and took meticulous care of them, but they were just vehicles to get him from one place to the next. He enjoyed them more if they did it with style and power, but they weren’t anything he was attached to.

Not that she wouldn’t rather be driving in Hell itself if she could do it with Charles, but she’d take the good where she found it.

They were going to see Wellesley first, and Anna couldn’t help a frisson of fan-girl excitement. Wellesley was an artist, their artist.

His oil paintings held places of honor in the homes of the pack—and she’d seem them cherished by other packs when she and Charles traveled. There were two in her living room that should have been hanging in the National Gallery of Art in Washington or maybe the Metropolitan, certainly not on the walls of a modest home in the wilds of Montana.

He was an artist who should have been world famous instead of werewolf famous. She considered that a moment. Maybe he was famous, but if so, it was under a different name—because she’d looked before, to see if she could find his work in the real world.

“What’s he like?” she asked Asil because she knew that Bran used Asil to deal with Wellesley most of the time. They got on together, and she gathered that Wellesley could be difficult.

He glanced at her as if he couldn’t fathom who she was talking about.

“Wellesley,” she said impatiently.

His eyebrows shot up. “He’s one of Bran’s wildlings. That means he’s broken.”

She growled at him, and he grinned—and the expression made his normally austere face look friendly and approachable. “I am sorry, querida, but I don’t know how to answer that. He is troubled in a way that is very like schizophrenia but is more likely a damaged interaction with his wolf. He is very shy, but I think that is a product of his condition rather than a natural tendency.” He paused. “I can tell you that you aren’t his only fan. People keep trying to get me to ask him about commissioning a piece.” He laughed. “Just this morning, Sage petitioned Leah to switch with me so she could come and meet him.”

When she’d first come to the pack, she’d thought that Sage and Leah didn’t like each other. But she’d grown to understand that they were possibly as close to friends as two very dominant women (werewolves or not) could be. Leah actively liked Sage and usually behaved herself in front of her. Sage snipped and snarked at her and about her but ultimately had Leah’s back.

“So why are you and I together instead of Sage and I?” Anna asked.

“Because there is the distinct possibility that putting Charles and me in the same car together might make the universe implode,” said Asil. “I might have said that to Leah when she looked like she might make the switch.” He paused, and said slyly, “I waited until Charles could hear me, then I told her that I’d been looking forward to a whole day traveling with you.”

Anna’s first thought was surprise that Charles hadn’t put his foot down and paired Sage and Asil together instead. Her second thought was that Asil had made that suggestive comment in front of Sage, too.

“Aren’t you and Sage dating?” she asked.

“Sometimes,” Asil said. “Currently, she is playing hard to get.”

Anna took a good look at his face to see if it was okay if she asked for more details.

“She believes I am arrogant and treat her as though she cannot take care of herself,” he clarified.

“She’s right,” Anna said.

“Yes.” He gave her a graceful bow of his head. “She is.” He took a deep breath and gave Anna a humorless smile that told her he was more upset about it than he let on. “I am too old to change who I am—a man a hair less arrogant would be lost to the beast that lives inside me. You cannot look at a person, and say, ‘If I could change this or that, if I could pick what I want and discard other things, I could love this one.’ Such a love is pale and weak—and doomed to failure.”

She thought about that. “I tried to change Charles,” she said in a small voice. “I told Bran to quit sending him out on killing missions.”

Asil sighed. “You are so sensible most of the time, I forget how young you are. That was not changing Charles, that was trying to change the world so Charles could survive. That is protecting your mate from the things he cannot protect himself from.”

“Maybe Sage is trying to save you, too,” Anna said thoughtfully. “Saving you from death, really. If you keep trying to protect her when she doesn’t need it, she might have to shoot you.” Sage was a pretty good shot.