Tempted (Two Marks 1)

“Keys,” I repeated, tapping my toe on the floor.

“Let her go,” Landry murmured in a defeated tone.

“What?” Wade’s head swung in Landry’s direction incredulously.

“She’s upset and she wants to leave. We can’t stop her.”

“But—”

I took Wade’s distraction as the opportunity to snatch my keys from his fingers. Then I ran.

I ran out of the cabin and straight to my car. Tossed everything in haphazardly, afraid they’d stop me. As I started it up, all the awful images from the last few minutes bombarded my mind in a horrible loop. The bloody wolf—White Paw—dead in the back of Gibson’s truck. The guilt on Wade’s face when he realized he’d been caught. The pain in Landry’s eyes when he’d told Wade to let me go.

I stepped on the gas, as if I could leave it all behind if I just drove fast enough. If I just left West Springs. Of course, I knew it wasn’t true.

The pain in my chest was unbearable. The more distance I put between me and the two males I’d been falling in love with, the worse it got.

WADE

“What have we done?” I tunneled my hands through my hair and turned a slow circle in the cabin. I was lost. Confused. My wolf was snarling and snapping, not understanding what the fuck had just happened.

Landry punched the log wall, smashing his knuckles with the impact and then staring at his hand as if it belonged to someone else.

“This couldn’t be any worse. She thinks we… fuck!” I shouted the last part when I realized that what she thought—that we’d manipulated her to get control of her research—was sort of true. I’d gone to Granger and followed her to the bar to meet her and talk her out of her research. Sure, that had fucking gone sideways. But that had been the original plan. And we hadn’t changed it since.

Landry had taken us on a three-mile hike through the woods just so Caitlyn could think we were helping her look for wolves. We were liars, plain and simple.

“There’s no way she had anything to do with that wolf getting killed,” I said firmly. Maybe I was still shouting, it was hard to be sure with the din in my ears. I was crazed. Wild. “You don’t believe that, do you?”

Landry punched the wall again. The crunch of his bones breaking turned my stomach. They would heal quickly, the pain probably already gone.

“Landry,” I snapped, narrowing my gaze. “You don’t believe it, do you?”

He seemed lost in a stupor, unable to answer.

Our mate was gone. Our marked mate.

She said we were done.

It was all our fault. My fault. I hadn’t been up front about the circumstances of our meeting, and now she believed the whole thing was a manipulation. She questioned whether we were even her true mates! After what we’d done last night, she shouldn’t have had any doubts, but she did.

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

How were we going to fix this? What could we possibly do to sort out the horrific situation? Could our mate be responsible for wolves getting shot? No, I’d just said she hadn’t done it. Yet it had happened.

Obviously she hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger. The latest wolf had been killed while we’d been marking our mate, or while she’d been between us in bed all night.

Still, it didn’t look good. In fact, it looked damn bad. But she wasn’t the only one working on the project. She’d told us herself that little fucker Dr. Andrews was part of it, as well. And he’d been the one hounding her about putting more trackers in the wolves. Even just a little while ago, when we’d overheard her phone call.

Gah, I couldn’t think. My wolf was going nuts over Caitlyn’s departure. I stripped off my clothes.

All I could do right now was shift. Shift, and run.

I’d probably have to run all day and night to burn off this much anguish.

Maybe tomorrow I could figure out how we could get our mate back.

LANDRY

I didn’t know how long I spent staring at Wade’s wall. My knuckles bled and healed, the bones shattered and reformed at least four times as I stood there abusing the great sturdy log that formed the wall of the cabin.

Our mate was gone.

Our sweet, beautiful, caring mate. The one we’d just claimed. Who’d laid her trust at our feet, and we’d… shit all over it.

Damn it all to hell!

How could we have let things get so fucked up? Fate would not have mated us to a wolf-killer. I simply couldn’t believe that. Unless… it was all just biology, and there was no Fate. In which case, it was a pure coincidence that the female our bodies were attracted to was hunting—

No.

Caitlyn Shriver didn’t kill wolves.

Wade was right. She couldn’t have had any part of this. I hadn’t missed those tears shining in her eyes when she saw the dead wolf. What had she called him—White Paw? I couldn’t miss the reverence with which she’d handled the wolves she’d tagged. She wasn’t marking them for death. I knew she wasn’t.