Page 435 of Love Bites

“That’s why I’d like to find my father,” I interrupted. “Only he knows where I came from.”

Some of that fire extinguished from Lorenzo’s eyes and they skimmed over me. “You don’t know your real parents?”

I shook my head. Austin inched so close I could feel his body heat.

“How old are you?” Lorenzo asked.

“Twenty-seven.”

Lorenzo reached in his shirt pocket and lifted a box of cigarettes, pulling one out and lighting the end with a red plastic lighter. “That’s interesting.”

Austin picked up on it too. The way Lorenzo said it wasn’t conversational; it was the way you sound when you know something.

“What’s interesting, Church? She’s not yours.”

He chuckled and savored another drag of his smoke. “Perhaps she is, more than you know.”

I yanked my hand free and stepped forward, feeling Austin hook his arm around my waist. “What do you mean by that?”

Lorenzo nodded, staring at the stars with a contemplative look on his face. “My uncle was a Packmaster years ago. There’s a family secret we kept for a long time, but he’s dead now so it doesn’t matter. My aunt had a baby and then a few weeks later, she was murdered and the baby went missing. There were territorial disputes over a large piece of property at the time and two names were on the deed—my uncle’s and an old friend of his. We were told the baby was found dead and my uncle buried her on that property, where our pack belonged.” Lorenzo drew in a deep breath and sighed, tossing the cigarette in the grass. “One night, I overheard my father talking and found out that my aunt had been cheating on her husband—the Packmaster. The baby was not his. To add further insult, the father was a drifter from up north—not one of our people.”

“What does this have to do with anything?” I said, hoping he’d get to the point.

“My father suspected he had hired someone to take out his wife and baby, then pinned it on the neighboring pack. Two problems solved. No more cheating wife and no infant to remind him of the affair, and an end to a dispute which had been going on for decades. My uncle challenged and killed that Packmaster, reclaiming his property. We sniffed around that land over the years. Never picked up the scent of a dead baby.”

His eyes lowered and memorized me on the way back up.

“Uh-uh,” I said, shaking my head. “You think that was me?”

“Little Talulah, all grown up.”

I gasped, and Austin pulled me tight against his chest.

“She’s a grown woman. I don’t need to remind you of that,” Austin warned.

“Alexia is ours.”

“You mean… you’re mycousin?”

The horror. Oh, God. I’d been felt up by my cousin.

Lorenzo laughed. “By family and pack, but not by blood. My father and uncle were blood relations. My aunt—your mother—was married in from another pack. She had a baby by a nobody, which makes us related, but not related.”

My face heated and I looked away. Maybe we weren’t really related by blood, but it still felt wrong in all kinds of daytime-talk-show ways.

“Hang on to her as tight as you want, Cole, but just remember she’s a Shifter of free will until she signs with a pack. If she wants to come to my bed… then I’m not going to stop her. Goodnight, Alexia,” he said with a soft growl.

I turned to Austin. “What’s a Mage?”

---