Holy crap.
I was officially a woman.
“How do you feel?” he asked, tucking me against his bare chest and running his fingers through my hair.
I tried to assess all the emotions pinging inside me. Physically I felt the same, maybe a little sore. It was the emotional connection between us that felt different. If Chase and Angel felt half of how I did now, I could say for the first time that I understood the intensity of their relationship. “Like I’ve died and gone to heaven.”
“Me too,” he murmured against my hair and pressed a tender kiss on my head.
With languid limbs I fell asleep plastered to Travis and with a smile on my lips. It was blissful, especially because there were no nightmares.
Chapter 15
This plan was really, truly, 100 percent, certifiably crazy.
These half-breeds were totally out of their frickin’ mind.
And I was totally onboard with crazy.
We all knew that the facility had to be stopped, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of organization you could take down all at once. And more importantly, my dad was going to be sending a team to track down both Angel and me. They weren’t about to let go of such precious cargo. They were going to be coming in hot and heavy, and we needed to be one step ahead of them, if we had any chance of surviving.
Travis and I both knew that Chase was going to go absolutely hit the fan when we suggested Angel be the one to deal with my dad. She was the only one who could, with her freaky acquired abilities from the badass himself.
There was already tension thick enough to visibly see in the room. It made me itchy. A room full of half-demons and the freak-of-the-week hybrid. Not exactly a friendly bunch and I didn’t have a stellar reputation.
Sierra spent most of the time giving Angel the stink eye, and I twirled one of my knives between my fingers, just in case one of them got any funny ideas. I felt naked without a weapon.
Just as expected, Chase took our idea and squashed it immediately. No contemplating. No discussing. No reasoning. Just a flat-out no.
Oh for shit’s sake.
To top it off, he decided to take out his aggression on my car. I stood on the porch with Travis looming over me and watched Chase slam his fist on the hood of my already beaten-up car. “God damn it, Chase,” I snapped. “Can’t you use something else as a punching bag? Not my car?”
He spun his neon yellow eyes at me and snarled. Crap. I took a step back, bumping into Travis’s chest. His hand curled around my waist, dissipating a good dose of annoyance I had been working up for Chase. “Jeesh. Fine,” I said and let Travis pull me back inside, leaving the squawking lovebirds alone.
Travis kept his hand at my hip as he ushered me into the kitchen, slightly away from everyone else. “You really shouldn’t egg him on,” he said.
Maybe I needed to clean my ears because there was no way in h-e-double-hockey-sticks that I heard him right. “What?” My voice rose a few octaves. “He was the one who decided to go all Rambo on my car.”
Travis didn’t seem to understand my outrage as he swept my hair off my neck and pressed his lips between my shoulder blades. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of the damages,” he murmured against my skin. He played dirty.
I spun around, my eyes blazing. “That is not the point. And I don’t need your money,” I said, shoving a finger into his chest. “The point is…your cousin needs some serious anger management.”
He flashed me his dimples. “Don’t we all?”
I rolled my eyes. “Speak for yourself.”
“I’d rather not talk at all.”
The corners of my mouth curled. “That is the first good idea you’ve had all day.” I promptly wound my hands around his neck and pressed my body to his.
I loved the way his aqua eyes sparked gold. His lips were feather soft as they swept over mine. I was still basking in the afterglow of last night, and even the Grinch Chase couldn’t dilute that feeling.
We were interrupted before things could get steamy and out of hand, but Travis kept his hand glued to mine. I liked the way our fingers interlocked and the feeling of having someone stand by my side. It helped that he had abnormal abilities that made him dangerous—sexy.
Angel must have used her womanly wiles because when she and Chase came back inside, he had gone from “douche of the century” to almost compliant. On the bright side, Angel had gotten him to agree to let her try to hone her compulsion skills. Maybe she’d bribed him with sex. Who knew? However, I wasn’t overly thrilled at being her guinea pig, but hey, we all had to play our parts.
***
There was a sense of excitement humming in my blood, and I wasn’t the only one who felt the exhilaration. All of my comrades had the same bubble of anticipation, except one.
Poor Angel.