Passions Recalled: Forbidden Passions, Book 2 Page 2

  And why on earth was he in Florida? Everything west of the Mississippi belonged to the leopards. East of it was wolf land. Most of the Gulf Coast was dolphin land, however. Jason would have had to get their permission to move into their territory. She was pretty sure his park belonged to the dolphins. Panama City was far from the mighty river’s borderlands, those wild and untamed places most shifters chose not to live in, but where anyone strong enough could.

  Lyra’s pretty face rose in her mind, accompanied with the usual worry. Her cousin had disappeared from her medical clinic in the borderlands a few months ago. Celeste had heard through the family grapevine the cats had had something to do with it, but no one could tell her what exactly and her oldest brother, Bastien, had warned her to stay out of it when she’d mentioned asking Lyra’s parents if they knew anything. Lyra’s father was reported to be in a state beyond rage, so Celeste had taken her brother’s advice without batting an eye. She wasn’t in a hurry to face her uncle’s infamous temper.

  “You have to go to him,” Michael ordered, the bit of pleading in his eyes jerking her out of her thoughts. “Explain our position.”

  She barked out a laugh. She didn’t understand their position; how could she explain it? Fury rose, swelling her chest to what felt like impossible proportions, making her head ache, her fingers itch with the urge to hit something.

  “How would I do that exactly?” she asked sarcastically.

  “We were taking care of you. We were protecting you.”

  A glance around the room told her her brothers clearly hadn’t agreed with this approach, but they’d followed their Alpha. No wolf would have dared to defy him. Even her mother wouldn’t have stood up to Michael, her mate. Celeste’s heart hammered, a whispered voice buried deep in her mind railing against the betrayal. It was a bitter pill to swallow. Her brothers, her mother all had given into Michael’s demands, despite knowing how much it would tear her apart. Ever the loyal family and pack, willing to forgive whatever stupid decisions he might make. Celeste, on the other hand, was not a werewolf or mated to one, and she was not so forgiving.

  Her whole life had changed in that instant, and the person she’d needed there the most wasn’t. Now it was happening again. It was too much to take, too much information at one time. She was angry, shocked and hurt. Confused. She couldn’t stay another minute and quickly walked from the room. Digging her keys out of her pocket she ignored questions about where she was going. At the door, she didn’t even pause, just gulped a deep breath, and sprinted into the rain to her car. She was inside and driving before she could string a coherent thought together.

  What was she going to do? She didn’t believe for one minute Jason didn’t know she was alive. If he’d loaned Michael money, wouldn’t he have checked the family out? The Jason she remembered was fun and light-hearted, but serious minded and thorough. She’d go to Derek. She’d known him for years, but he was much older than her, ran in a totally different crowd when they were young. They hadn’t become friends until she returned from college…and not good friends until the accident. He’d got her through those first awful lonely months when she’d still had to fight her body’s and mind’s cravings for Jason every day.

  She frowned. If Jason didn’t know she was alive, she had to let him know. It wouldn’t be fair not to, and she didn’t think she could resist the urge to find him, to go to him. But how would her relationship with Derek change?

  He’d been her only friend the last year, the only one who had tried to understand how empty she felt. How abandoned. And he wanted a lot more than friendship. She knew that. He’d asked her to marry him so many times she’d lost count, but he’d never pushed her, never made demands. Just smiled and said he could wait. For a man so insistent on marrying her, and a werewolf to boot, he was very physically distant. Not that she was complaining. She wasn’t sure how she felt about sleeping with someone else, even Derek.

  He didn’t live far from her parents, but she was forced to drive slowly in the heavy rain. She tried calling again, but she’d lost her cell signal. Probably the weather, she groused to herself. She turned off into his driveway and eyed the muddy slope. She doubted the car would make it up, and backed into the turnaround that was halfway up to park. She’d have to run for it in the rain and mud, but it couldn’t be helped. Stuffing her keys in her pocket and leaving everything else, she once again stepped out into the weather and sprinted.

  The driveway was slick and slippery, hard to navigate in the dark. The rain picked up as she approached the house and when she reached the yard, she took a minute under the arbor to catch her breath. Unfortunately, she chose that moment to look at Derek’s front picture window.

  Well, no wonder he hasn’t tried to insist on anything with me.

  He stood in the middle of his living room, his pants hanging around his thighs with an enormous erection jutting out. On the floor in front of him was a buxom blonde—Celeste knew, because she was getting a profile view—busily sucking on said erection. Celeste was so surprised she froze in place, thankful they couldn’t see her out in the gloom. When Derek threw back his head and gripped the woman’s face in his palms, she knew he was coming. His face twisted with the orgasm, as if it hurt, and he looked down at blondie with an evil grin. Celeste only had a moment to wonder why she’d thought it was evil before Derek, whose hands had not left blondie’s face, gave a vicious jerk, snapped her neck, and dropped the woman to the ground.

  Celeste jumped back, completely unbelieving of what she’d seen but unable to deny it. She was grateful for the heavy rain and wind—it hid the noise she made as she ran back to her car. With a human she wouldn’t have had to worry. But a werewolf with superior hearing and reflexes? That could have been a major problem. As it was, she made it safely to her car and, with shaking fingers, twisted the key in the ignition. It was at that moment the wind and rain lulled to a low murmur, and she knew Derek must have heard the car from the house. She jerked it out of park and sped into the night. The question was where was she going?

  She got onto the highway and turned south. She didn’t dare go back to her family. Derek was powerful in his own right, and she didn’t want to put them in danger. She needed time to process what she’d heard and seen tonight. But could she trust Jason? Jason who’d abandoned her when her human frailty came to the forefront? Her analytic journalist’s mind said she was nothing more than a chess piece, than a pawn being used between Michael and Jason. Her gut said to go to Jason, that he would keep her safe, but, wow, had it been wrong about Jason before. Did he really believe she was dead? The idea seemed crazy. But what her family had done, what she’d seen at Derek’s was just as crazy.

  She couldn’t see any other choice. So she drove south.

  Through rain and wind that ebbed and flowed, the remnants of Hurricane Helga raging across the state, she drove. By the time she reached Columbus, Georgia the sky cleared, and she fiddled with the radio, searching for news. She knew another hurricane was coming up the Gulf and was relieved to hear it was forecasted to hit far down the coast near Tampa. One model had it veering north into the Panhandle, but the experts were discounting it.

  Iris was a category one storm, so they weren’t even forcing evacuations, just recommending them for lowlying beach areas. She snorted. Wasn’t all of the Tampa Bay area low lying? She hadn’t made it down in a couple of years, but usually she spent time with friends there every summer, even sticking around for a tropical storm one year. She knew her Tampa friends wouldn’t heed those warnings. They’d ridden out many storms over the years, and perhaps their blasé attitude was contagious because eight hours later, she paid her five dollars to enter St. Andrews State Park.

  It was bright and sunny and clear, no sign of the turmoil brewing on the Gulf or the storm that had just blown through. It certainly didn’t mirror the turmoil inside her. Unwilling to confront Jason quite yet, she drove to the public beach, parked and wandered into the gift shop. Her time would probably have been better sp
ent driving into Panama City and finding a hotel room, but she could never resist the Gulf. The rolling emerald water, the pristine white sand. She sighed. This was her idea of heaven.

  She hadn’t brought anything with her, obviously, and on a whim bought a bathing suit, sunscreen and a giant towel. After changing, she dropped her clothes in her car and headed to the sand. She had to think, had to decide what she was going to do about Jason and Derek and her family. If she had any sense she’d walk away from all of them. She was human and couldn’t help but feel both sides were using her. What better place to make a decision than the perfect, pearly beaches of the Gulf of Mexico?

  All right, healthy dose of avoidance and fear there too, Celeste, but way to rationalize.

  She pushed the worry away, spread her towel on the ground and lay down, digging her toes into the warm gritty sand. She’d driven all night. It was still early morning. There were a couple of guys playing volleyball and a few sunbathers, but mostly she had the beach to herself. She wondered whether the hurricane’s predicted landfall site had changed. Was that why the beach was so empty? Even if it had, it was only a category one, and she had plenty of time to drive inland. Safe enough she reasoned. Especially once she found Jason. He might be angry with her, might be indifferent to her, hell he might even hate her, but he’d never let harm come to her. When she’d settled on that conclusion she wasn’t sure—sometime on the long drive down. Exhausted, she sighed as her mind swirled with all of the recent happenings. She drifted to sleep, warmed by the sun and sand, lulled by the pounding surf.

  When she opened her eyes, the sky was dark and ugly, clouds churning as if stirred in a witch’s caldron. The wind whipped her hair, and she felt a moment’s unease. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep or to sleep so long. Standing and dusting the sand off, she looked around. The beach was abandoned. She grabbed the towel and her car keys and sprinted for the parking lot. When she veered around the beach shop, she noticed it was closed up, shutters latched into place. Around the front in the parking lot, a few cars were pulling out onto the road and only two vehicles remained parked and empty. The second one froze her in place a minute. The F150 truck looked exactly like Derek’s.

  Ignoring the fear that bubbled to her throat, she hurried to her car. It was a common truck, and he couldn’t know where she was. Why would she come to Florida in a hurricane after all? It had to be a coincidence.

  She reached her door as thunder boomed over the ocean. The noise startled her so much she dropped the keys. The fine hairs on her arms rose and fear with it, as she bent to retrieve them. Where the hell was Jason when she needed him? She choked back an angry sob. If he hadn’t been around when she needed him before, why did she suddenly expect him now?

  Get a grip, Celeste, and get the hell out of here.

  She’d kicked the keys under the car and had to crouch to her knees to grope the ground under the driver’s side to retrieve them. She almost cheered when her fingers closed over the cold metal. She rocked back on her heels to stand. She never made it to her feet.

  “Bitch. You aren’t going to ruin all my plans.”

  She barely registered the menacing voice as Derek’s before something hard came down on her head, and the world went black.

  Chapter Two

  Anger pulsed through him. This was not the way he wanted things to go down, not part of the plan. Celeste’s death should be just one more thorn to twist in Michael’s side, but it should have been on his terms, not anyone else’s. And not before he’d had the taste of her for which he’d waited so long. Ignoring the tire iron in his hand, Derek stood over her and glared at her prone body, then noticed the steady rise and fall of her chest.

  No fucking way.

  She should be dead, but it had always been as if the woman were protected from the weaknesses of mere mortals, as if she’d been touched by one of the Gods who’d created the world’s shifters. A werewolf—a were of any kind—wouldn’t have walked away from the plane crash last year and yet, she’d lived. And she survived a killing blow now. Pure ass luck or something else? He wasn’t willing to seriously consider the implications.

  Celeste had been the perfect opportunity for him. Abandoned by Jason and smothered by her family, Celeste had been ripe for the picking. He’d earned her trust and wormed his way into the Alpha’s circle. The hardest part had been concealing his true nature. Not from Celeste—she thought he could do no wrong—but from her father. Michael was a suspicious son of a bitch. He’d wondered right from the start why a strong werewolf in his clan was willing to wait so long for his daughter to come around, but as the months stretched on, he relaxed, became complacent. He didn’t consider Derek a threat.

  Resting on the balls of his feet, he hunkered down next to Celeste, brushed a long tendril of blonde hair from her face, and tried to decide how to use these new developments to his advantage. No one knew he was here, and he bet no one knew she was either. He’d been lucky to find her, and it was due more to instinct than knowledge.

  He’d been riding the high from Marie, that special feeling he got every time he brought another slut low. And they had to be sluts. Killing more circumspect women had never been a thrill for him. He’d given it a shot once or twice, but the excitement just couldn’t compare. That’s why Celeste had always been safe. She lived like a nun.

  Lately the women he picked were with purpose, a means to an end as well as the special kick he craved. It was too soon for Marie, too soon after the last one. He’d known that but was so excited about the progression of his plan to bring Michael down, he’d seized the chance to celebrate a little. Who knew Celeste would happen by? It was pure luck the storm had slowed at just the right time for him to hear the distinctive whine as her car’s engine started.

  By the time he’d rushed out she was gone and though he trembled with the need to rush after her, to protect himself, he’d made himself stop and think. First the body had to be dealt with then he’d figure out what to do. He’d known he had to act with haste. If she went to Michael, the Alpha would come after him fast and furious. Walking back into his house, he’d noticed the cell phone on a side table. It had rung a few times while he was playing, but he’d ignored it. He’d picked it up and scrolled through the missed calls—all Celeste—then listened to his voice mail. He’d grinned as he hung up, strolling over to gaze down at the corpse sprawled across his living room floor.

  Michael had called Celeste for a late family meeting, about what she had no idea, but Derek was pretty sure she’d received the shocking news that Jason thought she was dead. Like the good little girl she was, she’d come straight to her good friend. Enraged, he’d broken out in a cold sweat. He’d had to find her before she fucked up everything.

  He’d bet his fortune she wouldn’t go to Michael. She’d already be in shock and the addition of witnessing a murder would have put her on overload. No. She’d go home. Or maybe even to Jason. Derek’s money was on her Atlanta apartment. So he’d disposed of the body—making sure to dump it on Alpha land where it would surely be discovered soon—and driven to Atlanta. He’d been surprised to find she wasn’t there, and he hated surprises.

  He knew she hadn’t gone to Michael’s. His people were watching the Alpha’s house. So, with only one other option, he’d driven south, despite the latest radio weather warnings that had Hurricane Iris turning toward his destination. He went straight to Jason’s park, where he caught a lucky break. He found her car in the beach parking lot and, from a sand dune, he spotted her stretched out on the beach. Although not as crowded as it might’ve normally been, there were too many people around to approach her, so he checked out the park, looking for unused roads and paths, and found a place nearby to hide and observe. He’d narrowly avoided running into Jason who’d driven by in a work vehicle.

  As the morning passed, the weather had grown progressively worse. When she’d finally stirred and hurried to her car, he’d seized his opportunity and made his move.

  Now he had to decide what
to do with her. Finish her off or keep her alive? The better to torment Michael with obviously.

  The roar of an engine stopped him. The sound increased, and he cocked his head to the side. Definitely coming his way. It sounded like the vehicle he’d seen Jason in earlier. He made a split second decision and sprinted for his truck. Jason would probably have to be dealt with later too. The delay infuriated Derek, but he knew he’d need an advantage. The leopard was a fierce fighter, and he wasn’t positive his wolf could take the cat down. Better to fight safe than stupid, a lesson he’d learned the hard way from his father’s murder.

  He made it to the truck and gave Celeste a last fulminating glare. Should have finished her off or taken her with him, but with Jason added to the equation, there were too many variables outside of his control. The other vehicle approached the parking lot, and he knew he was out of time. He started the truck, threw it in gear and peeled out of the parking lot, barely missing sideswiping the oncoming vehicle.

  He’d wait and watch. And strike when they were at their weakest.

  Jason Leonidas steered the park service vehicle into the beach parking lot and growled when an exiting truck almost ran him off the hardtop. The other driver’s tires squealed as he took the turn. “Reckless,” Jason muttered. He would have gone after the idiot and given him a ticket and a lecture, but he saw one car left in the lot. The storm was coming in bigger and faster than the weather center’s models had predicted, and its course had completely changed, leaving Tampa safe but barreling straight for Panama City. His first priority was to make sure the park was empty. Then he’d go hole up somewhere safe.