A Warm Heart in Winter(75)

The smell of dark spices thickened the air, and sweat slicked his body, and the bed was banging, and—

Oops, bedside lamp was on the floor. Fortunately, there wasn’t a crash as it landed on the pillows he’d evicted. It also wasn’t the one Blay had turned on.

Qhuinn started to growl, and the smacking sounds behind Blay’s body got louder, everything going next level. And then his mate started to come, Qhuinn’s hips locking in, his cock kicking deep, everything slipping into perfect, blissful alignment.

As Blay closed his eyes and felt his mate’s fangs sink into his shoulder . . . he prayed that this lasted. All of it.

Forever.

And yet even as he reveled in the releases, he still feared the future.





Find a way to cope.

As Qhuinn stepped out of the Brotherhood’s mansion the following evening, that was his mantra. He’d been saying the words over and over again to himself, ever since he’d woken up, naked and sated, in his mate’s arms. By mutual agreement, Blay had stayed on rotation, and after they’d eaten First Meal in their room, Blay had left along with the other brothers to go out into the field.

Qhuinn had chilled on his lonesome for a while, just sitting on the bed and holding his brother’s letter. Gathering his courage.

And now he was here, standing on the front steps of the big house, the cold air in his nose and his lungs, his body braced even though there was barely a breeze and no challenge to his balance. He wasn’t sure he liked where his head was at, his thoughts all disjointed and wired, but he had a feeling that if he waited until he felt more stable about everything . . . ?

It was going to be fucking spring before he made this trip.

Closing his eyes, he thought maybe he wasn’t going to be able to dematerialize. Maybe he was going to have to drive—

His corporeal form scattered into its component molecules, and he willed himself to travel off the mountain, over the farmland, past the suburbs . . . to the wealthy part of Caldwell. As he moved through the night air, he wouldn’t have been surprised if he spaced where his old house had been. But like that was possible? Just because you wanted to forget something didn’t mean you could. In fact, usually the converse was true. The more you needed to bury a memory, a place, a person, the more the shit stuck with you.

His destination reached, he re-formed behind the groundskeeping shed—

“Fuck!”

Qhuinn jumped back at the same time he threw his hands out in front of his chest. The building he’d very nearly killed himself on was single-storied and super-shingled—and most certainly had never been on the property when he’d lived on it.

“Jesus,” he muttered as he looked around.

Had he gotten the wrong address? Nah, that wasn’t possible.

Wondering what the hell was wrong with him, he walked to the corner of whatever outbuilding he’d nearly embedded himself in—

Motion-activated lights flared, and he hissed at them as he willed them off with such force that the one that had pegged him right in the eyes exploded up at the roof, smoke rising, glass shattering.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck . . .” He stopped the cursing as he blinked the retina-shock away—and got a look at the back of his family’s old house and yard. “What . . . the fuck?”

The last time he had been here, there had been formal gardens and a perfectly maintained lawn, along with a back terrace with old school black wrought iron furniture. Now? Everything but the terrace was gone. In its place? A swimming pool you could stage Olympic trials in, a pool house that could shelter a family of six, and half a dozen modern sculptures the size of SUVs.

All of which were the colors of Lassiter’s collection of zebra tights: Neon pink, acid yellow, kryptonite green.

Rubbing his eyes, he was sure his parents were rolling in their graves—and heard his mother’s voice, dripping with censure: All that money in the wrong hands.

Frankly, he was surprised that the mansion remained intact—

For one piercing moment, he saw it all as it once had been, his mahmen walking among the flowers, pointing out the varieties of white blooms to his sister, forcing Solange to memorize the proper Latin names. Behind them, Luchas and their sire would likewise be strolling at a leisurely pace, their hands clasped behind the small of their backs. They were discussing finance. They’d always discussed finance.

In the warmer months, the four of them had walked together after every First Meal, the females in front, males in back, and never the twain shall mix: Solange was never going to learn about money—it was far too above her. And Luchas would never learn about horticulture—it was far too beneath him.

Qhuinn had always watched them promenade in the moonlight from the window in his bedroom.

And yearned to be asked to join, even just once.

Before he got all maudlin, he stopped the memories—and decided it was a relief that everything on the estate was so different. It made things less complicated.

Setting himself into motion, he stalked across the lawn, his footsteps marring the pristine snow cover—and when he went by one of the sculptures, he knocked his knuckles on the pink surface. The hollow ring suggested it was metal, and he imagined some interior decorator exclaiming the virtues of its random contours and hard corners. Fuck all knew what the design was supposed to represent. Or maybe that was the point.

Closing in on the back of the mansion, he found that he’d been wrong. There had been renovations to the house, too, and they were . . . pretty extensive. Was that a new room out the back? And the terrace—he’d been wrong about it, as well. The old flagstone was all gone, replaced by some kind of sandstone? He couldn’t really tell because of the snow cover, but it was clear from what had melted close to the first floor’s edge that the tile was totally different.