Page 32 of Take Me
“Tracey went to the city for me to pick someone up from the airport. She didn’t think you would appreciate her parents coming here. We are a little short-staffed at the moment.”
I scowled at him as I threw up again. This time he detached himself from the wall and knelt by my side. A long second passed before he brushed my hair from my face and pulled it back to keep from falling in the toilet. As he ran his hand down my back in slow circles my wolf seemed to calm. The pops and cracks of my bones weren’t as loud and the nausea was gone.
“What do I do?” I whispered.
His hands wrapped around the tops of my arms while he helped pull me from the bathtub. My legs shook too hard for me to climb out on my own. He helped lift me out without any problems, like I weighed nothing. His eyes were bright yellow when I looked up at them. Something inside of me shrunk away in fear and I knew it was because of what happened at the party when he turned me… and when he had saved me just a week ago.
“You let your wolf control the change. The more anxiety or fear you have, the worst it will be,” he said as I stumbled but instead of hitting the ground, he swooped me up into his arms. My head lolled back as another pop ripped through me. I didn’t even have the strength to look down at myself to see what I was becoming.
“What about my parents?” I growled through gritted teeth.
Rafe shushed me. “Don’t worry about them. I can hear them if they head this way and can be out the window in seconds. I will keep you and them safe through this.”
Pain ripped through me and a howl tore from my lips. Rafe looked nervously at my bedroom door as he laid me on the bed. “I’ll be honest, this is the first time I’ve ever platonically laid a girl down.”
He chuckled and I took a swipe at him. He managed to evade my punch then he settled down in the desk chair beside my open window. I was pretty sure I kept it closed and locked. I didn’t even want to know how he had managed to get around that. Slowly, ever so slowly my body started to break, truly break. A whimper escaped my lips and my back bowed as everything happened all at once. The pain wasn’t as bad as it had been before but it was steadily getting worse. Until the last pop and crack sounded and everything was different.
In one blink everything was black and white. My nose twitched on my much longer snout and something thumped behind me on the bed. I turned my head and there it was… a massive fluffy tail on the bed behind me. I blinked at it all slowly. Everything made sense but didn’t. I could hear my parents talking downstairs but it was like there was a disconnect that my wolf couldn’t put together. She pressed our ears to our head and let out a little whine. Why couldn’t we understand what my parents were saying?
“Being a wolf will take some time to get used to.” Rafe stood up from the chair in the corner and approached us. He held his hands up in surrender but my wolf didn’t seem threatened by him.
My Alpha.She whispered in my mind. It was almost a purr of approval.
I scoffed.Definitely not.
There was a crash downstairs and my wolf jumped from the bed. The scent in the air was wrong. Something was wrong. Rafe held his hands up again and shook his head. “I will go check everything out.”
I shook my massive head. He would get caught. He couldn’t get caught here.
The corners of his lips pulled up into an almost smile. “I will be careful.”
Before I knew what was happening, Rafe was out the window, there was a snarl from somewhere in the house and my parents were shouting. Their voices rose up through the floor in panic. My breathing became rapid as I paced around the room. How would I change back? Could I change back? What if they came up here while I was this massive animal? I got down on all fours and scooted my wolfish form under the bed then turned around to watch the door. My white paws jutted out in front of me and I stared at them in awe. This was a part of me. I could hardly believe it.
Chapter 38
Jade Rivers
The panicked voices rose louder and then there were sirens in the distance. The wrong scent in the air only grew worse. Then Rafe was swinging his body back through my window in a quick arch and was on the floor in front of me.
“Shift,” he commanded. I let out a whine.
I shook my head once.
“I know I am not your Alpha, Jade but you have to shift right now or there are going to be lots of questions about this massive animal that has taken your place.” He stood up, peered over the side of the bed, and then chuckled. “You’re literally tenting the center of your mattress right now. Jade, it will be painful but there was a break-in and your parents need you right now.”
The words he spoke did it for me. I instantly felt my wolf shrink back and even though there was pain, it wasn’t nearly as much as before. A shiver raced down my spine as my limbs became shorter and smaller. The bed above me groaned as my wolfish body disappeared. I laid my head on my arms and took a deep breath. Rafe held out a scrap of silk material and I stared at it in bewilderment before I realized the shower was on. I could barely hear it over the blood roaring in my ears. I took the scrap of fabric, realizing it was my robe and I was lying underneath the bed naked.
I had forgotten that part. My cheeks flamed as he held his hand out to me but kept his eyes diverted. I hesitantly put my hand in his much larger one. In one jerk he yanked me out from under my bed, then shoved me into the bathroom. I leaned my forehead against the door as the sirens got closer to the house. Then his words came back to me and I jerked the door back open.
Rafe had disappeared again and my window was closed. I wrapped the pink robe around myself and rushed out of my bedroom as quickly as I could. I took the stairs two at a time as my heart pounded out of my chest. There was a knock at the door before I could make it to my parents. My mom was holding a bag of frozen vegetables to her face and my father was opening the door. I pulled the robe around myself more securely. My knees buckled with every step. My mom erupted into tears when she saw me. The bag of vegetables dropped from her hands and there was a black bruise forming around her right eye.
I frowned and rushed to her side. My hands hovered right over her face like there was something I could do about it. “What happened? I heard a crash just as I was about to get in the shower.”
She laughed and shrugged her shoulders like she wasn’t fragile. “An accident I think. Someone threw a ball through the kitchen window and it hit me while I was doing the dishes.” The smell of wrongness was still heavy in the air. I inhaled deeply to try to catch the scent again, to try to distinguish what I was smelling. But it was no use.
“Someone came into our yard and threw a baseball through the window?” I blinked slowly as I looked toward dad at the front door. He was leading the policeman through the house and into the kitchen.
“Yes, officer, someone was in the yard when they threw the ball. It wasn’t a fly ball that went over the fence. We don’t have neighbors that even have younger children.” My father’s voice was filled with fury.
