Page 141 of Sapphire Flame
Once past the compound’s team, Kryder’s group lifted into levitation and rose steadily into the air. Almost at the same time, Kryder’s force on the ground began to retreat.
Grant heard his wolves raise a shout of triumph, unaware that the enemy had just kidnapped their alpha.
~ ~ ~
After having settled into the cottage Agnes assigned her, Natalie had gone to the chapel to think things through. She’d spent the past couple of hours, sitting in the front pew, her thoughts turned inward.
Her iridescent wolf lay on the carpet a few feet in front of her, but stretched out on her belly toward her, muzzle on paws. Every once in a while, she’d lift her head as though listening to the sounds outside the building but would soon revert to her head-down position. Her eyes, however, remained fixed on Natalie.
Several times, she had the sense that Grant reached out to her but fell short of telepathy. Of course, she wondered if she was imagining it.
She sighed. Renee had challenged her to examine her fears, so she’d taken the time to do just that. She’d been looking hard at what she feared most.
It didn’t take her long to understand that what she’d really feared was losing Grant. Though, given the way he’d so easily dismissed her, what she feared might have already happened. Worse, she hadn’t put up the smallest fight to hold her ground at the compound.
When had she become the kind of person that didn’t live full-out? When had she started holding back so fiercely, as though her life depended on it?
She almost chuckled at the thought, since quite often her life literally depended on being wary and cautious. Staying at Agnes’s compound instead of returning to her canal home was a perfect example.
Yet somehow, her new, wolfish instincts told her that by not fighting Grant on the issue and insisting on a place at Meldorin, she’d made a serious mistake. Just how serious, she wasn’t sure.
She wasn’t finished, though. She would make an effort to reach out to him, even to challenge him if she had to, in the same way Renee had spoken sternly to her.
As she sat watching the wood sculpture shaped into waves of water, she forced herself to grow very relaxed. There was a truth she needed to face, something she’d been avoiding from the time she’d left the Meldorin Compound.
She pressed a hand to her chest. She realized her heart hurt. No, it ached as though the physical separation from Grant was causing her real pain.
Drawing a deep breath, she let it out slowly. From the beginning, she’d known her relationship with the wolf wouldn’t be simple. But she hadn’t expected this, to feel as though her heart was being torn from her chest just because she wasn’t near him.
A gasp followed.
Oh, no. Was it possible?
There was only one answer. Despite all her best intentions, Natalie could finally admit to herself she’d fallen hard for the wolf, really hard, smack-down-on-cement hard.
For all the angels in heaven, she loved him. Not just wanting to jump his bones, though that was part of it. She loved him with a deep, searing love that spoke to the breadth of her soul and his.
It was love.
Love. And Grant.
She knew something else as well, she was already bound to him. Not in analterwolf sense or because he’d marked her, but as a woman to a man. Her heart was given and had been for some time.
As she looked back, she couldn’t quite pinpoint when it had happened, when perhaps she’d said to herself,Here’s the man for me.Nothing specific came to mind.
Instead, her connection to Grant and her desire for him had come in pieces. It had begun the moment she’d seen Grant in the Graveyard defending a near-dead fae against three powerful wolves. Despite getting shot, his focus had been pure: To get the woman, even though she was fae, to Kiara’s refuge in Revel.
Each subsequent hour with him, in his company as together they worked out the invisibility spell with the wizard, had added more pieces. Later, while rescuing the young wolf, Alanna, at The Sapphire Club, her heart had gone the distance and she hadn’t even known it.
Grant was the man for her and like hell she was going to let him go without a fight.
She stood up before she’d made the conscious decision to move. In kind, her wolf rose to sit on her haunches as though waiting for orders. Natalie glanced at her. “Did you know?”
Her wolf yipped and appeared to smile.
“Well, you’re wiser than I am.” She narrowed her gaze at this external expression of all that she was. “Then why did you approve our leaving the Meldorin Compound?”
But her wolf didn’t respond. She thought she understood. She’d needed to figure this one out herself.
