Therewasa place he could take her.
It was secure, remote, and built to house an orcish family. There was a nest, empty and waiting, and it was a place he’d gone out of his way to make sure the Solbournes would never touch.
My mother’s homestead.
ChapterTwenty-Nine
Kaz didn’t wakeher up before he got them back on the road. Instead, he bundled her in the blanket, made sure she was at least semi-secure in the back, and then — after a quick use of the rest stop facilities — hopped behind the wheel and turned them north.
Atria woke up a few hours later. He heard the shifting of fabric and glanced in the rearview mirror to find a drowsy-eyed witch peering back at him.
He felt the unfamiliar urge to smile when he noticed her tangled hair and the deep crease on her left cheek. Kaz thought it might annoy him that she was such a deep sleeper, but all he felt was affection and amusement as she half-crawled out of the makeshift nest, long bronze legs flashing under his borrowed hoodie and blanket, to blink owlishly out at the road.
Her hair brushed his shoulder when she leaned over the center console. “Where’re we going?”
Kaz reached over to run his thumb over the crease in her cheek. “Somewhere safe.”
“Do I get to know where that is?”
“No.”
“Why?” She was still too groggy to be annoyed with him, so instead she sounded adorably baffled.
“Because,” he answered, smile widening, “I’m kidnapping you.”
Atria grunted. Dragging the blanket over the top of her head like a cloak, she groused, “You’re very funny.”
He shifted a little in his seat, allowing her some room as she gracelessly clambered over the center console to plop in the passenger’s seat. “And you’re not a morning person.”
Kaz watched her out of the corner of his eye, strangely riveted by the sight of her curling up in the seat. Making noises of deep discontent, she scrunched up the blanket and wedged it between her shoulder and the window, making a lumpy headrest. “I’m used to late nights in the lab. And coffee.”
Once she was settled, he automatically extended his arm to lay his hand over her bent knee. It was as natural as breathing, and when they touched, something tense in his chest eased again. “I need coffee, too. We’ll get some with our breakfast at the next stop.”
Atria squinted at him from over a fold of the blanket. She looked less like a princess this morning and much more like a disgruntled forest witch from a fairy tale. Kaz found he liked both sides of his mate equally.
“And this stop is on our way to…”
“Somewhere safe,” he insisted, squeezing her knee. He flicked his gaze her way. “Do you trust me, princess?”
Atria paused just long enough to make him frown before she answered, “After coffee.”
Her soft little fingers slipped out from under the blanket to curl over his, clinging tightly, and his frown melted away. A purr built in the back of his throat.
The deep rumbling filled the cab as they sped down the country road, and just like that, his little mate was once more asleep, her hand still clutching his.
* * *
They made slow but steady progress.
They could have gone much faster, but Kaz felt a crawling unease as the hours passed, prompting him to take a route full of back roads, detours, and switchbacks to lose the tail he wasn’t even certain they had. That feeling of paranoia also forced him to switch cars once more, but he was careful to get another that his mate could comfortably sleep in.
He’d run over one of the two men sent to Norman’s lab and he was almost one hundred percent certain they’d escaped Denver without a tail. So why was his intuition screaming at him that there wassomeonebehind them, just out of sight, waiting for the right moment to snatch his mate from his claws?
He’d done everything he was trained to do, and even had Atria stretch her senses to see if she could feel anyone tailing them on a desolate stretch of road, but there was nothing. No one.
It didn’t just make him paranoid. It made himdetermined.
He wasn’t exaggerating when he told Atria he wouldn’t tolerate another scratch. No one was touching his mate again.No one.
