Belong To The Night. Cynthia Eden

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СКАЧАТЬ Buck was forced out…again. Only this time he took my momma with him because she was well pregnant with me. By the time she was about to pop, they’d made it to Smithville. I was born here about a week after they arrived. Then it started again. My father crossing his uncle and cousins, trying to take control of the Pack and, eventually, the town. They ran him off again but this time Momma didn’t go with him.”

      “Why?”

      “There were lots of reasons she’ll give you. She had me. She wanted to give me something stable. She was tired of traveling all over the place. And there were lots of reasons everyone else in town had: That Buck fucked anything that moved even while she was pregnant with me; that after nearly two years of being together he had yet to mark her as his own; that he was cold to her, rude. And I’m sure all of that was true. Actually, I know it was. But what I figured out, what I know is the reason my momma stayed is that she never thought he’d leave. Not without us. She thought he loved her enough to simmer down and wait until he was really ready to take over. At the time, I don’t think it ever crossed her mind that he would leave her. And then I don’t think it crossed her mind that he wouldn’t come back.”

      “I don’t know which is worse,” Jamie mused softly. “Being so confident in the power of love that you’re willing to risk your heart, or knowing that love is just a cruel joke from the gods and never risking anything.”

      “I’d have to say that last one.”

      “Even after what your mom went through?”

      “Yeah. I won’t say it was easy on her. It wasn’t. For six long years she waited for him. Waited while I grew into the most terrifying devil child this side of the Mason-Dixon.”

      Jamie laughed. “That bad, huh?”

      “Yeah. That bad. So bad Miss Addie and her coven politely suggested that Buck was using astral projection to visit me at night in an attempt to turn me.”

      “It must have gotten better.”

      “I wouldn’t say it got better but nothing lasts forever. And it was a cold, dark day when my momma had to come down to the school to meet with my second grade teacher because there was the suggestion I tried to drown another student in the boys’ bathroom.”

      “A suggestion?”

      “I didn’t see any hard proof other than the little bastard’s word and the fact that he was drenched from his head to his shoulders.”

      Jamie laughed, and Tully laughed with her. A shocking feeling since any mention of his father usually sent him into one of his rare funks for days at a time. But she was calming him down, easing him just by being herself, by being his friend. “I still say they misread the situation,” he went on. “Anyway, my momma was called and she had to leave her job to come down to the school. And while she was waiting, she met Daddy.”

      “Love at first sight?”

      “So they say. I still say the old bastard took advantage of her pure innocence.”

      Jamie snorted but she choked on it when Tully teasingly glared at her.

      “Anyway,” he went on, “Momma and Daddy met and, ignoring the grave indignities they were causing both me and Kyle, decided to get married. They didn’t have to, this is a town of shifters, after all, and if there is one thing very few of us care about one way or the other is marriage. But I kind of understand why they did it, being different species and all. They wanted to show everybody how serious they were about each other, plus they wanted to make sure their children grew up feeling like they were family.

      “But it got back to Buck what was going on and if there’s one thing that man hates it’s felines. So ignoring the fact he hadn’t been back in more than six years, he sneaked into town with a Pack he’d created of forced-out Smiths and stray wolves he’d found along the way. The plan was simple: grab me, grab my momma. It might have worked, too, but Buck must have forgotten how loyal the Smiths are to their pups and the females who breed them. Although none of them were crazy about the idea of any wolf mating with, much less marrying, a cat, they still knew how much Momma loved Daddy and, more importantly, how badly Buck had treated her. They also knew what a bastard he was. Most of the Smiths were already here for the wedding when my father came into the territory. He found me first. Told me I was his son and that he’d come to take me home with him.” They stopped by a large boulder and Jamie leaned back against it, watching him closely.

      “You know,” Tully relaxed back against an oak tree, his arms crossed over his chest, “it’s one of those things every eight-year-old kid is waiting for when he’s grown up without a father. For his daddy to come back for him. You daydream about it, wish on it, pray for it. And here it was, standing right in front of me. I knew he wasn’t lying, I knew he was my father.”

      “What did you do?”

      He shrugged, not sure even today he understood what he’d done that day. “I screamed for Jack. I screamed for my daddy and he came runnin’. Not seven years later, but right then. The Smith Pack with him. I’d never seen so much blood as I saw that day. Momma got hurt, too, fightin’ by Daddy’s side. When it was all over no one was dead but Buck’s Pack had taken the worst of it, limpin’ off back where they came from. But I knew that day, when Jack had carried me back into town and I saw ol’ Buck watching us from the trees before he headed off for good that I was his enemy now. That I’d crossed a line with him that he would never forgive me for.”

      It sounded like some old tale her great-grandfather—whom the entire family referred to as “Big Daddy” although the man was no more than five-two—would have told her during one of the family reunions when her mother and aunt would drive for two days from Long Island to Alabama with two arguing brats in the backseat. The only difference was that the people in Big Daddy’s stories were always full-human and Tully never ended every few sentences with, “’Cause you know how those rednecks are.”

      It fascinated her even while her mind worked away at the problem.

      “You think he’s back here for revenge?” she asked but Tully only shook his head.

      “Buck Smith is never that simple.”

      “He wants something.”

      “He wants this.” He glanced around at the trees and up at the beautiful blue sky. “He wants this territory. Smithville is prime territory to our kind and the wolf who ran it before me was my Uncle Tyrus Ray.” Tyrus? “Six-foot-seven and three-hundred-and eighty-five pounds of dangerously unstable wolf, but he could be a big ol’ teddy bear when the mood struck him. He died sudden about five years back and one of his sons, Johnny Ray, took over, but that didn’t go well. He was pushy and testy and one day he just got on my nerves and I…”

      “Beat the hell out of him?” she slipped in when he seemed to be searching for the right phrase.

      “I prefer ‘slapped some sense into him.’ But whatever. Bottom line was when I woke up the next day I was Alpha Male and mayor.”

      “That’s how you became mayor?”

      “No. I was voted in as mayor of Smithville but Johnny Ray got on my nerves at my inauguration party.”

      Fair enough.

      Gazing off, Tully murmured, “I gotta tell Daddy that Buck’s back.”

      “Then СКАЧАТЬ