Wild and Free (The Three #3)(114)

“Where?” she asked.

“When you forced me out of your dream.”

Her mouth dropped open.

“Don’t know for certain,” he kept going. “But I figure that pain in my head was you locating me. What I do know for certain, that light was you. You got an ability, Lilah. A f*ckin’ powerful one. Spans miles as long as it’s connected to me.”

“Holy shitoly,” she breathed, and he allowed himself to smile.

“Could do without feeling my head was gonna explode, but yeah, that shit rocked.”

“So, what you’re saying is, I’m not clingy. I’m so hyper-attuned to you, I can locate you in my subconscious from miles away, unknowingly sense you’re in danger, and actually do something about it?” she asked.

“That’s my take,” he answered.

Slowly, she grinned and whispered, “Right on.”

Abel relaxed.

Then he asked, “You gonna let me put my arms around you and show you how sorry I am that I pulled an * stunt, or you wanna throw more shit at me?”

“Don’t piss me off, Abel, or I’ll blast you with my blue light,” she shot back, and it wasn’t entirely a joke.

He smiled at her and said quietly, “Baby, wanna hold you.”

“Then do it,” she returned.

He moved instantly and took her in his arms.

She didn’t wrap hers around him. She lifted her hands and laid them on his chest. He sensed it was to keep distance but, being Delilah, doing it still gave him what he needed.

“Still pissed at you,” she told his throat.

“I’d still be pissed at me too,” he told the hair on the top of her head.

She took in a breath that was rough, exposing she was still feeling emotion and doing it deep.

“Hate a lot of what went down this morning. Figure Lucien and Callum are right now dealing with shit of their own making too,” he said, still speaking to her hair because she wasn’t giving him her face and he wasn’t going to force her to. “But we got shit happening within these walls so there’s shit to be done.”

“Right,” she mumbled. “Go.”

“Before I go, don’t need you to assure me we’re good,” he told her. “Just need you to tell me we’re inching that way.”

At that, she tipped her head back and caught his eyes.

“Abel.” She slid a hand up to curl it around the side of his neck. “You did something you had to do. You f*cked up doing it. You apologized. A lot has gone down, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t still getting to know one another. Not to mention all this supernatural shit we don’t have a lock on. I know you didn’t have any clue your f*ck-up would be that huge. It was. It’s over. You promised it won’t happen again.” She took in breath and finished, “What I’m saying is, let it go. I am. Which means we’re not inching toward good. We’re there.”

Simple as that. She blasts it out, says it like it is, he takes his licks, then she’s done. Over it. Moving on.

Jesus, he loved her.

She wasn’t a dream come true.

She was a f*cking fantasy come to life.

“Abel?” she called, and when she did, he realized he’d been staring at her for longer than he thought.

“Can’t say how much it means to me, you bein’ this cool,” he told her quietly, and she grinned a feisty grin.

“You don’t have to. I know I’m totally awesome.”

She was.

His Delilah.

Totally awesome.

He grinned back.

Then he dipped his head and kissed his mate. He did it hard and as thorough as he could when shit needed to get done.

And when he was finished, he didn’t leave the room alone to get shit done.

He took her hand and pulled her with him so they both could see to it.

Together.

*

Yuri

“Told you,” Aurora stated after lifting her eyes to him. “Cuckoo.”

Yuri stood back from the women, arms crossed on his chest.

He did this because he was allowing Aurora to work. He also did this because it meant her mother, with the shockingly unworthy witch name of Barb, was at his front.

Not at his back.

To say his meeting with Aurora’s mother was thorny was a vast understatement.

Luckily, she was well aware of The Prophesies and trusted her daughter wasn’t an idiot.

She would know. She’d raised her.

And after spending the last several days with the both of them, Yuri now knew that neither of them were.

Barb Lenox was sharp, no-nonsense, blunt-speaking, affectionate with her daughter through actions, not words, and she utterly detested vampires.

Aurora Lenox was intelligent, humorous, talented, energetic, openhearted, quick to smile, and unconsciously appealing, which made her infuriatingly alluring. Thus, with all this being her, along with her body and beauty, she was damnably f*ckable.

In other words, the last four days had been torture, and not simply because Barb eyed him like he was manure on her shoe at the same time she did things, like sharpen a wooden stake, something she knew didn’t work on him, but that was not her point, even if she was making one.

And also not simply because he was forced to procure bagged blood, which was hideous, but he couldn’t feed nor take the time to find a Feast where there were hundreds of mortals with The Dominion’s stamp of approval he could partake from.