Page 40 of The Alpha's Arranged Bride

Evil should make a person hideous. It should make them a beast and a monster, but Rome was far too good-looking to be a traditional thing of the dark. He was undoubtedly cruel, but he wanted to do this for his sister. For his family. For the people he loved,even if most times he could only love them from afar. Agnar couldn’t let him do this, but he also realized that he wasn’t going to change Rome’s mind. There was no letting him or not letting him do anything. He was a wolf and what he wanted from life, he would take. He was no warrior, but he was perhaps even more deadly. A shadowy assassin. The face he put on at work or for his daughter wasn’t his true face.

Rome’s hand shot out and wrapped around Agnar’s throat again. He pressed hard, cutting off his oxygen. “Give. Me. Your. Oath.”

Agnar threw him off with a sweep of his hand. Everything in him, all his training and all his rage and all his smashed-up pride, demanded that he do real damage to this fucker who dared to command and touch him. Instead, he shook his head and walked off.

When he woke Prairie Rose, she was in the t-shirt and shorts she’d packed to spend the night. She was flushed and sleepy and she smelled so good that he barely stopped himself from pressing her to the sheets, tearing off her clothes, and devouring her. He was rock fucking hard, and he’d never been aware of another person the way he was aware of her. Of his immediate and uncontrolled desirefor her.

“We’re leaving,” he said shortly, a command, not a question. There was no room for negotiation. He wanted to tell her what her brother planned, but he couldn’t do that. There was no stopping Rome, and Agnar knew that he’d succeed. Maybe he needed to take Alexander’s life to give him his own back, just as much as he was promising that going to Arizona would spare Agnar.

“Why?” Prairie Rose mumbled sleepily, but she came awake at the expression on his face. Her hands shot out and cupped his upper arms, her fingers digging in. “Why, Agnar, what’s happened?”

The words were right there. Words that would stop everything before it happened. Was it his place? Was it his right? Was it even his vengeance any longer? What was happening to him that even if the answer was yes to all of those questions, he kept silent like his thirst for vengeance and blood had been slaked.

“Nothing. I just want to try out the braces. I don’t want to wait. The wolf doesn’t want to wait. Will you come with me? You and the boys? I’d like to take us home.”

Us. As in, all of them. Not just her and the boys, but himself too.

Her smile broke his heart. Shattered it clean, and not just what he thought he had left of it, but what was there, whole and beating furiously. A whole heart. The fucking thing regrew every time it was maimed, butchered, wounded, broken, obliterated.

“Alright. Let’s go home.”

Chapter 17

Agnar

Prairie Rose and the boys napped the whole way back to Nightfall Pack lands. The boys had been yanked from a warm bed barely awake and they were asleep the minute they were tucked into the backseat, using their duffel bags as pillows and his and Prairie Rose’s jackets as blankets. She dozed too, even though she tried to stay awake. She’d burned with the need to ask him what really happened, but after they left Casper behind, she’d closed her eyes, rested her head against the window, and had stayed silent. He thought she was sleeping. Maybe she just chose to give him those few hours of silence because she was always going to be wise and automatically know what he needed.

Like some magic trick, when they pulled past the guards on the road, the boys stirred. “Are we home?” Blake asked, blinking sleepily.

Home. “Yeah.” His voice was thick. He still thought of himself as a stranger in a land that was never meant to be his, but clearly the boys didn’t feel that way. How much longer would it take until he viewed Wyoming the way they did?

It wasn’t so long ago that he’d rolled in here with the survivors of that horrific night and had promised himself that it wasn’t forever, just long enough to regroup and heal enough.

He might not feel at home yet, but he did feel different. He’d never been the kind of man who looked back, but he was learning what nostalgia and everything else was like to experience. Arizona represented oblivion, that sweet relief that he’d been chasing.

Now? Parking the truck in front of the small log cabin on that street where most lights were off because it was five in the morning? Now, when he turned his head and glanced at Prairie Rose with the heavy lids and the full lips quirked in the smallest smile at him, eyes glistening, he felt a shiver work up his back and spread into his shoulders. It morphed into his chest. Rome told him to let Arizona go. He still hadn’t made up his mind if he could do that, even if he didn’t go down and end Alexander.

“Would you like to go to the woods?” Prairie Rose shifted closer to him fractionally, like subconsciously she was trying to shield him from all the pain out there. “To try your new braces?”

That was the reason he’d given her for their quick departure. “I would.” Yes, he would. Yes, the wolf had been leaping inside him, tearing at his insides, begging and snarling and so readyto be let out. He’d missed the wolf as much as the wolf missed being able to run free and be in control. He’d all but given up on that part of himself, and now he’d been given a rare gift.

Just like that second chance Rome was so convinced he needed to embrace. He was alive as a punishment, but he’d come through the worst of it and he was ready to try to raise his head and live again. There was a part of him that couldn’t even imagine leaving Blake and Levi again.

Or Prairie Rose.

He pushed that back down, not ready to admit the possible depth of that connection yet.

“Take the boys, they can help you with the braces if your wolf has any difficulty. Run with them first. I’ll join you shortly.”

The braces weren’t a miracle fix, as yet no one had developed a material that would withstand the shift, so they’d have to be put on afterwards. Tadpole had developed a simple fastening that could be nudged in place by a nose or paw, but he’d yet to try them out. He swallowed hard, the old Agnar would have been angry that his mate could think him weak, but he knew that Prairie Rose was being practical, and she didn’t think him any less of a man. Instead, he said, “You’re welcome to come with us.”

“Here, we start out running in separate spots and end in different places, the men and the women. You might think that’s prudish, but it’s the way it’s always been done. Plus, I’d like you to have this experience with the boys.”

She was right. He needed this. They needed it. Levi and Blake had heard for weeks that he was going to go seek justice and vengeance. They’d prepared themselves to be abandoned. Even if they thought he’d come back, they’d lived with half the father they knew. He was never half the father he should have been to them.

“But we want you to come,” Levi begged, rubbing his eyes.

“You need to listen,” Blake scolded him. “She said she will, Prairie Rose doesn’t lie.”

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