Darien knew that no matter what had happened between Elizabeth and Tom, this was not a good way to say—or not say—good-bye. Darien, for one, didn’t want the job of having to deal with the mood he knew Tom would be in when he woke.
***
That morning, Tom felt something wasn’t right as soon as he got up. The sun was too high in the sky. He never slept this late, and he wondered why no one had bothered to wake him. He hurried to dress, then headed for Elizabeth’s room. Her door was shut. He knocked. No answer. He opened the door a crack.
She was gone. The bed stripped. Her suitcases nowhere in sight.
With a sickening knot in his stomach, he ran down the stairs, expecting to see her eating breakfast with Darien.
The toddlers played in the den, squealing in delight, then arguing—the way he and his brothers had done when they were that age—while a couple of wolf nannies watched over them. He thought Lelandi would be plying her psychology on a human client in the office they had built next to the house. The home was off in the woods, but this was the only way she wanted to work when the babies were still little. Bonding and pack dynamics were all too important, from the youngest lupus garou to the oldest.
To his surprise, Lelandi was sipping coffee with Darien. Jake and his mate were there, too, which was odder still. They normally ate breakfast at their own home.
Elizabeth wasn’t there. Everyone looked at him as though they didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know how to act.
“Where is she?” he asked, sounding much more growly than he intended.
“Peter took her to the airport,” Darien said.
Tom turned and began to stalk out of the dining room.
“Tom!” Darien called out. “She’s gone. She left two hours ago.”
Tom scowled at Darien. “Why didn’t anyone wake me? Tell me she was leaving?”
Why didn’t she tell him herself?
“She didn’t want it that way,” Darien said.
Tom was the most even-tempered of his brothers, but right now he was so angry that he could have put his fist through the wall.
“What happened between the two of you?” Darien asked in a voice that was meant to calm him, but Tom didn’t want his brothers’ or their mates’ sympathy or interference.
“Nothing,” Tom said.
“Was she scared of the men? Afraid to stay?”
“Hell, no. She would have gone into the hotel after them if I hadn’t stopped her.”
Darien took Lelandi’s hand in his. “Anything else that you can think of that happened, Tom? She asked if someone could take her to the airport, then had a glass of orange juice but no real breakfast. She was in a rush to leave. She barely said a word or two to us in response to anything I asked.”
“She was supposed to be here three more days.”
“You said yourself she had a job to do,” Darien reminded him.
Lelandi said, “She was running away from something. She might not be afraid of the men, but maybe something else is going on that we don’t know about.”
Tom ran his hands through his hair. “I don’t know about that, but… I asked her to join our pack. She didn’t act interested in the idea.”
Everyone stared at him as if he’d suddenly grown vampire fangs.
He folded his arms across his chest. “She’s a damn good tracker. We could use someone with her expertise in the pack. And we don’t have a newspaper. Maybe she could have started one.”
“Is that what you told her?” Lelandi asked, her voice a little edgy.
“Not about the paper.” Then Tom frowned at Lelandi. “Are you implying that if I had told her I wanted her to stay, she would have done so?” Lelandi’s raised eyebrows indicated she thought just that. Before she could respond, Tom shook his head. “She was completely against the idea. She’s not a loner, but she’s afraid of belonging to a pack for some reason.”
“Or making a commitment to a wolf possibly,” Lelandi said.
Tom didn’t want to mention he’d gotten a little frisky with her last night, and that that had brought tears to her eyes. “Was she okay this morning? Hurting still?”
“She was fine,” Darien said. “She moved fast and started hauling her bags out of here when she saw Peter arrive, so she couldn’t have been feeling any pain.”
Not physically. Then it dawned on Tom. She’d been emotionally upset—hurting. Shit.
Irritated with himself, Tom said to Darien, “Unless you have something else for me to do, I’m tracking those rogue wolves today.”
No one said a word. Tom stalked out of the dining room, grabbed his parka and other cold-weather gear from the coat closet, then left the house.
Before he reached the garage, Jake joined him outside. “She left you something. She’d taken a picture of you helping an injured little girl on the slope, and she used it as your desktop picture. She also left you a note.”
“Why the hell didn’t Darien say so?” Tom strode back to the house. “Did you read what she said?”
“No. Not that I didn’t want to, mind you, and it killed me not to. If it helps tell us why she rushed out of here, we’d all like to know,” Jake said. “Lelandi said that the picture she left on your desktop has significance. Of all the photos she took, and she took lots, she put up that particular one. Lelandi believes your helping the little girl really touched Elizabeth. If you want to see more of her, you might have to take the initiative to make it happen.”
“I already plan to,” Tom said. He was so irritated at his brother for thinking he needed to suggest such a thing that he couldn’t help snapping at Jake.
Jake smiled. “That’s what we all wanted to hear. Darien got all her information—her cell number and home address—before he turned over her bags. Look, Darien and I have both been in the same position as you. We’re with you all the way, however you want to deal with this. I’ll see you later.”
The little red wolf-coyote thought nobody cared anything about her when a whole gray wolf pack was ready to take her in.
Jake didn’t join Tom in the den, giving him some privacy, for which he was grateful. Tom opened his laptop and turned it on. The monitor showed the picture of him crouching before the crying girl who had wrenched her knee on the slopes.
Looking at it now, it made him sick to think Elizabeth had taken a Norman Rockwell-type picture of him and the little girl, and then some bastard had shoved Elizabeth down the slope right afterward.