With Everything I Am (The Three #2)(20)

“What?” she breathed in spite of herself, not understanding even half of what he said and not knowing which part of “what” she was asking because there was so damned much!

“What?” he repeated.

Her mind focused on one point in many. “What will go much better?”

He brought her face closer. “At the end of this week, baby doll, we’re flying to Scotland. We’re having the mating ceremony and, from that point on, you’re bound to me in the eyes of my people’s laws as well as yours until you die.”

She’d obviously asked the wrong question.

“You’re… what?” she shrieked. Yes, right in his face.

“I’m binding you to me.”

“You’re… binding… me… to… you,” she repeated, enunciating each word with clear, open, horror.

He ignored her horror.

“Until you die.”

She tried to rear back.

His hand in her hair, his arm around her body and his strength that would make Hercules jealous made this effort moot.

So instead she whispered, “Oh my God.”

He ignored that too and stated, “You may have noticed you have no shoes.”

Sonia blinked yet again.

Then she nodded.

Callum continued immediately but on a different subject, “I’m going to finish outside, the storm is already here. They’re forecasting snow, maybe several feet. The electricity can go out here easily and the insulation isn’t the best. We need the fires. We could be snowed in by nightfall. I need to get us sorted.”

With that announcement, he stood, picking her up with him. Somewhere in her fogged, distracted, ravaged, oh-my-god-what’s-happening-to-me mind, she noted that no man had ever picked her up easily like that (or, at all) and held her to his chest like she weighed no more than a sack of feathers.

He turned and tucked her sideways back in the chair, her knees to her chest, the soles of her feet in the seat.

He leaned in and put a hand on either arm of the chair.

“You take some time, come to terms with what I’ve just said. If you have questions, we’ll talk more after lunch.”

She stared at his back as he walked through the cabin and out the backdoor.

Then she twisted her head to look out the front windows and saw that snow had started to fall.

Heavily.

Then she realized she’d not make it very far in a snowstorm without shoes even if she managed to escape.

And she had to escape.

Because she was stuck in a cabin with a murdering madman who thought she was his queen and intended to bind her to him until she died.

Then, to her shame, Sonia felt a single tear drop from her eye and trail down her cheek as her extreme fear overcame any courage she might have been able to muster.

That tear was joined by another.

Then another.

And then more.

Chapter Five

Mismatch

Callum finished splitting the logs and stacking them on the back porch in which he’d fitted the storm windows that morning while Sonia slept.

He was concerned about the storm. The snowfall was forecast as heavy and this could knock out the broadband and interfere with his cellular reception. Further, if anything should happen and he was needed, he didn’t want to be snowed into the cabin. He could transform and get out but Sonia couldn’t.

At any other time, he’d be thrilled to be snowed in at their cabin. Since buying it decades ago, he’d spent a goodly amount of time there. Regardless of the fact that his title came with castles in Scotland, England and France, a mansion on the East Coast of the US and his entitlement to take over any Territorial Mansion while traveling, he’d toyed with the idea of talking Sonia into settling in their cabin for a long spell after he’d won the war. At least until they started having pups. It reminded him of the years he spent in the Canadian Rockies and he liked its intimacy, the dense forest that surrounded it, sensing and smelling the plethora of wildlife all around.

She’d once told him she loved it there which was one of the reasons why he bought it. The other being that he loved it there and it was the only place that was theirs not to mention she thought she was in a dream when she was back.

He figured she wouldn’t be hard to sway to his way of thinking.

This was the only thing that brightened Callum’s morning.

On that thought, he walked into the house, removing his gloves and tossing them on the counter in the kitchen.

However, upon entry, his eyes went directly to Sonia.

She didn’t look to him. In fact, she didn’t move.

She was seated where he left her, curled up, her neck twisted to look over the back of the chair and out the window at the falling snow.

He had, for one shining moment that morning, thought she’d also felt their connection, just as all wolves do instantly, and he could gratefully dispense of this charade of courtship, claim her, mate with her and install her at his side.

He also had, for one shining moment that morning, gloried in the fact that she was not what he’d feared when he’d read the varied reports that had been unlocked to him after his father’s death or when he’d watched her walk home last night. It was the first time he’d laid eyes on her in person since he met her that Christmas Eve years ago.

For one shining moment that morning, he’d gloried that she was instead like a wolf, lusty for life and all that it offered.