Mate Claimed by Jennifer Ashley

Author:Jennifer Ashley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

As they passed one of the six-paneled doors, it opened, and Jace filled the doorway, half-asleep and alarmed at the same time.

With his hair tousled, his green eyes, and his hastily pulled-on clothes, Iona marveled at how much he looked like Eric. At the same time he looked different from him; the shape of his face and set of his body had come from his mother’s Shifter family.

She wondered how he’d gotten down here—Jace had been in the living room when she and Eric had exited the bathroom and gone to bed last night. She would have woken if he’d come through Eric’s room.

“Dad?” Jace asked. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Showing Iona the vault,” Eric said calmly.

Jace rubbed sleep from his eyes and bolted in front of him. “Are you crazy?”

“She needs to see it.”

“Yeah, but, you haven’t been thinking too straight lately. Cass know about this?”

“She will.”

Jace stepped in front of them again, putting his back to the steel door. “Only mates of the pride, Dad. Only mates. Or did you have a full sun ceremony without telling me?”

“Jace.”

Eric’s voice took on a note of patience, a patience so old that Iona for the first time was struck with how long Eric already had lived. He’d lost his parents and his mate, had raised his sister and then his son on his own, had fought covertly in a war to help humans escape atrocities, had made the decision to move his family here and let humans put Collars on them, had prevented humans from torturing his son by taking on that torture himself.

The laid-back Eric, who lounged barefoot in his house or kissed Iona so sensually in the dark while he fed her chocolates, was a man of complexities and hurt so deep, she’d never understand it.

“We need her to see this, Jace,” Eric said. “She needs to understand how to help us.”

“Cass should be here, then.”

“Cass needs to rest for her cub. Leave her be.”

Father and son faced each other. Jace had the impatience of youth, Eric the calm of experience, but Iona sensed that otherwise, they were evenly matched. She wondered if Jace would ever decide it was time to take over from his father, and what he’d do then.

She saw, in Eric’s eyes, that he knew that time would come. But not today.

“Open it up for me, Son.”

Jace sighed, took a small, round disk from his pocket, and touched it to a blank space in the door. The disk, Iona saw, had a Celtic knot design on it, but she couldn’t discern any place on the door the disk fit. To her, the door looked like an unbroken surface.

A ponderous sound like gears grinding filled the little hall, and the door slowly slid back into the wall. Beyond it was, indeed, a vault.

Eric led the way inside, flicking on lights as he went. The vault was long and narrow, taking up the rest of the space under the house and heading toward Nell’s side yard.

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