You Will Be Mine (New Horizon Book 3)

Chapter 28: Jeannie

Though I ultimately decided that Garrett had enough of his own stuff to deal with and opted not to tell him anything about what happened with Gabe, I kind of still wish that I had. After he calmed down about Leslie, he seemed to want to talk, and it almost seemed to hurt him that I brushed him off. And I still have all those questions floating around in my head, with no one to share them with.

After I got back to the Bentleys’ apartment, I couldn’t bring myself to share with Stella either. I mean, I told her that Gabe finally spilled the beans, which she already kind of assumed because Gabby was talking about it all through breakfast and I didn’t seem surprised by it, but I haven’t told her anything otherwise. I’m not sure if I can trust her to keep secrets.

The first thing she did after I told her I was a mage was blab it to her parents, which ended up being okay, but she should have asked first. And I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way Gabby could have learned about my connection to Gabe is from Stella, who probably told Gracie. I don’t want all my Gabe business blabbed all over the packhouse, so I feel like I really can’t confide in her.

Garrett was my first instinct, and even though he is close with Gabe, I feel like I got a sense from him that if I talked to him about all this, it would stay between us. That’s what I need. I need someone to talk to mostly because I can’t even tell if I’m being unreasonable, and I’m starting to feel so guilty about it all that I’m tempted to talk to Gabe or maybe even Simon about it.

I couldn’t stick around and keep talking to him last night because I was feeling far too emotional and confused, but maybe I could keep it together now. Maybe the person to work it out with is the person who caused it. I just don’t know if I’m ready for another scene like before, and I don’t know if I can trust him. It feels like he plays defense instead of being straight with me.

All that is still running through my mind as I get ready for bed, and when I come out of my bathroom, I discover that the bedding has already been turned down, and Simon is waiting for me. He perks up and starts wagging his tail uncertainly as he watches me make my way over to him, and I’m feeling just as uncertain about him. I still haven’t decided whether it’s such a good idea to let my mate share a bed with me, whether wolf or man.

But the feel of his warm, furry body beside me is becoming so familiar and comforting that I’m almost powerless to resist it. It’s too bad that his human is such a jerk because I discovered earlier with his brother that the feel of a warm, strong man to hold me is almost just as nice.

In the morning, I wake to the feel of him shifting again, and it’s Simon’s eyes that remain in Gabe’s body just like the morning before.

“Morning, mate,” he greets me with a smile.

“Morning, Simon,” I return his greeting, though I’m still grappling with whether to allow this.

“I was hoping we could talk some more,” he goes on, his confidence from a moment ago evaporating as he senses my uncertainty.

“I can’t, Simon. Not with you, not while I still don’t know how I feel about Gabe.”

“He won’t intrude,” Simon attempts to promise me.

The problem is that after I’ve thought about it some more, I’ve realized that’s an impossible thing for him to promise.

“But he’s in there, and he can hear everything we say,” I remind him. “He might even influence what you say for all I know. I just know I’m not comfortable with it, not until I’m ready to talk to him. And I will talk to him eventually, I just need more time to think first.”

“Okay.”

I can tell he’s disappointed about that, but I can’t help the fact that he’s linked to Gabe. I let him cuddle with me all night. That has to be enough for now.

He rolls toward me to kiss my forehead, which I do allow, and then I roll away from him so I can get up and head to the bathroom. He’s gone by the time I get back out, though I discover that he hasn’t gone far. Mr. Bentley stopped him in the living room.

“I just think it’s worth missing training for is all,” Mr. Bentley says to Gabe. “I can talk to Jeannie alone if you’d really prefer, but I was hoping you could join us because I haven’t had a chance to speak with Clarice, but you did.”

“I get that, but this is just poor timing for it is all,” Gabe argues. “I have training, and Jeannie needs to go tend to her chickens.”

“And I’m saying you can skip, and we can send someone else to tend to the chickens.”

This sounds important, and it’s obviously about me. Since he mentioned the Clarice woman, it must be about me being a mage, so despite my conflicted feelings about Gabe, I decide to jump in on this.

“Okay,” I agree, coming around to join Mr. Bentley on the couch.

Gabe gives me a surprised look but sits himself down in a nearby chair.

“Even me?” he asks, and I nod.

This is different than the conversation I know Simon wanted to have a little bit ago. And Mr. Bentley’s right that Gabe might know some stuff that I don’t. He’s told me a lot of what Clarice said, but I wasn’t there.

“Alright then,” Mr. Bentley adds, obviously pleased that we both agreed, though he does look back and forth between me and Gabe a couple times trying to figure out what sort of strangeness just passed between us that suddenly changed Gabe’s mind.

“Did you inform the Alpha that you were stealing me?” Gabe wonders.

“Yes,” Mr. Bentley chuckles. “I informed her of my plan last night. And Jeannie, Aaron and Gideon were going to tend to the chickens before school, so that’s all taken care of.”

“Okay,” I tell him.

But if that’s the case, then it will probably be later than I usually go down there, so I take a moment to tune into my connection to them, focusing mostly on Itsya because she keeps the others in line.

They don’t even need as much attention as I give them, so they’ll be perfectly fine waiting. Chickens are actually pretty low maintenance, but it’s just that they’ve become used to seeing me at least twice a day, and they do like to stick to our routine.

“I’m sure you’ve both figured out what this is about, Stella’s little announcement the other night,” Mr. Bentley begins. “And just to be clear, Jeannie, we’re fine with having a mage in the family. Our only concern is that so much about you is unknown. I talked to your grandpa a bit shortly before he passed, and though he did tell me some about you and your mother, I’m left wondering one thing in particular.”

He shifts himself slightly so that he can look directly at me, and I see a little hint of his wolf flashing just beyond the surface of his eyes. That’s the first that I’ve seen of him.

“Did your grandpa know that you were a mage?” Mr. Bentley asks me directly.

“I don’t know. Maybe,” I can’t help sighing, but my conversation with Stella the other day comes to mind, as well as a lot of the things I’ve talked about with Gabe and Garrett. “They never told me about it, but now that I know and look back on a lot of things, I think he did know. I think they both did, and they were trying to hide it for some reason.”

Stella is making her way downstairs as I’m explaining that, still wiping the sleep from her eyes. She’s in the pajamas she slept in and obviously on the way to the kitchen, but she stops in her tracks when she sees us all gathered in the living room.

“What’s going on? It looks serious,” she comments, changing course and coming over to sit next to me instead.

“I was just having a chat with Jeannie and Gabe,” Mr. Bentley explains, patiently rather than with the irritation I’m sure almost anyone else would have shown her interruption.

“About mate stuff or about mage stuff?” she wonders next.

“About mind your business stuff,” Gabe tells her with all the irritation his father lacks.

“Geesh,” she complains, getting up and smacking him on the arm on her way to the kitchen.

Mr. Bentley has a look about him as he watches his grown children bickering, and I think he’s about to speak up and intervene, but Stella leaving seems to resolve the problem before he needs to. He shakes his head slightly, fixing his gaze back on me.

“Anyway, when I was discussing bringing you here with your grandpa, he told me that he was ‘counting on my kind’ to keep the mages away from you,” he explains. “He seemed absolutely terrified of the idea of a mage coming for you, and I assumed that it was because he’d seen it happen before, with your mom. He didn’t specifically say that, but it was the impression I got.”

He turns and looks at the coffee table as he seems to think more about it, and I just wait, sensing that he has more to say.

“I thought he meant that the mages hurt her, and that’s why he was scared,” he goes on. “What I didn’t consider was the possibility that you were one, which means your mom probably was as well. He did say that they ‘found’ her, and she was adopted, so I suppose it makes sense that two humans could have unknowingly raised a mage. But now I’m wondering if mages really did hurt her, or if she just left to join her kind.”

“That’s what I was saying,” Stella suddenly exclaims, appearing again from the kitchen where she’s obviously been listening. “When Jeannie said her mom just up and left when she turned sixteen. She had to have gotten her power, right? And went to live with other mages?”

But I ignore her, stuck on the other part of what he said.

“She was adopted? He told you that?” I question him.

My grandparents never said anything about that, and I never even suspected. They have pictures of her going back to when she was a tiny little baby.

“He did. I take it you didn’t know?” Mr. Bentley answers me, reaching out to put a comforting hand on my forearm.

I hear Gabe growl at that, the same way he did that day that he saw me touch Garrett, but I shoot him an irritated look that seems to silence him. This isn’t about him.

“No, they never told me that either,” I tell Mr. Bentley. It shouldn’t even surprise me considering how much my grandparents always kept to themselves, but it does.

“Seems like they kept a lot of things from you, but I can only assume it was because they were trying to protect you,” Gabe chimes in, much more gently than I would have expected from someone who was just growling at me a second ago.

I look up at him, meeting his eyes for the first time since Saturday night, and I wish I hadn’t. I don’t like what I see there – pain, concern, various other tender emotions that almost make me want to forgive him and reconcile on the spot. It’s like his eyes are reaching out for me, and just that one look takes my breath away.

But instead, I glance away, crossing my arms across my chest as if to create a physical barrier to keep him away.

“Yeah, protect me from the truth so I wouldn’t run away as soon as I found out they were liars, just like my mom must have,” I grumble in response, finding myself feeling bitter toward my grandparents for the first time in my life.

But at this point, I’m so tired of secrets and being the last person to learn important things about myself, and I hate that I know so little about my own mother. Everything I do know seems like it could just as easily be a lie as the truth, and it’s hard to say why she actually left. I’m sure they were more involved than they claimed though.

“But like you said before, your mom brought you to them,” Stella points out. “Whatever was going on, she must not have been too upset about it because she thought that her childhood home was the best place for you.”

“Is that true? She left and came back to bring you to them?” Mr. Bentley asks me, seeming strangely excited about it.

“Yeah. The story I’ve been told is that when she was sixteen, a man just suddenly pulled up in the driveway and started talking to her, and then she went in the house, packed her things, and left. He was a stranger, but somehow convinced her to go with him. And then about a year later, she came back with a newborn and told my grandparents that her husband, that same man, didn’t want kids and told her to get rid of me. So, she left me with them, disappearing again at some point that night. We never saw her again. I don’t even remember her.”

“I bet you do though,” Mr. Bentley says, just as excited as before. “Not consciously, but I bet I can get to that memory. If you were even in the room when your mother was talking to your grandparents, I can probably find out what really happened.”

That doesn’t even make sense. Maybe he’s already forgotten the part where I said I was just a newborn baby, so whatever memory technique he’s proposing isn’t going to work. There’s no way I can remember what happened when I was a tiny baby.

“Matt’s a unique kind of werewolf,” Gabe explains softly. “He has a special ability that allows him to look into someone’s eyes and discover their history. If you were in the room with your mom and grandparents, he could observe that conversation and even go in and dig out their thoughts and feelings from that time.”

“Well, sort of,” Mr. Bentley corrects him. “I can do that with anyone who still lives, so I wouldn’t be able to read her grandparents. But if her mother is alive, then yes, I can do that. At the very least, I’ll be able to see the scene that happened the day your mother left you with your grandparents exactly how it happened, even if none of them are still around.”

Mr. Bentley’s wolf is peeking out at me again, I can feel it. Especially since he keeps touching my arm and creating a connection for me to tap into. It feels like his wolf is tapping right back.

Eli. That’s the wolf I can sense in there. It’s actually kind of exciting to be connecting with him finally because he’s the first werewolf I met. I sensed him from the start, but I couldn’t access him then. And now, he’s curious, more curious than any of the other wolves. He senses my magic.

“So, I just let Eli look in my eyes for a few minutes? And it doesn’t even hurt or anything?” I ask Mr. Bentley, which seems to startle him, probably because I named his wolf without him telling me.

“She can sense all our wolves,” Gabe explains to him. “And connect to pretty much every living thing in the area, not to mention control them. And you know how Simon keeps coming here? It’s because he can sense her back, and she gets lonely at night. He can’t stand it.”

“That explains a lot,” Mr. Bentley says thoughtfully, seeming to study me for a moment. “Are you doing something to Eli right now? Because he’s more active and alert than usual.”

“No, he’s just responding to my magic,” I tell him apologetically. “Because you’re touching me, I think, and because he’s curious.”

He pulls his hand away from me, and I try not to take it personally how he does it as if I’m burning him.

“I didn’t even realize I was doing that,” he explains, which admittedly, does make me feel better. “But Eli says you’re right. He was just curious. You’ve never been this close before, and he could sense the energy radiating from you and wondered what would happen if I touched you.”

“What did happen?” Gabe wonders. “I mean, I know what happens when I touch her, but I’m curious what it’s like for you. Someone not her mate.”

“It actually reminded me a lot of the roots I use to manage my pain, and I was so glad to suddenly be able to focus so much better that I didn’t even question where it came from. But I’m sorry, to both of you. I didn’t mean to do it.”

“Quite honestly, I didn’t even mind. I’ve gotten used to all the affectionate werewolves around here,” I tell him reassuringly.

“Who?” Gabe growls again, and I sigh.

On second thought, maybe I liked it better when he was pretending not to be my mate.

“We can do this today, if you’d like,” Mr. Bentley continues with our previous discussion, ignoring Gabe the same as me. “As you said, it only takes minutes, and it’s not painful or draining for you. You can sit right there, just like that. It’s me who will have to sort it all out, and you can just go about your day as normal.”

“Say yes,” Stella chimes in, obviously still hovering and eavesdropping just out of sight. “You know you want to.”

“I do,” I admit, though a little uncertainly as I glance around at Gabe sitting right over there and Stella hanging out in the kitchen doorway. “Although, I’d rather we do it privately. It’s my history, and I want to decide what to do about it.”

“I’m coming,” Gabe insists stubbornly.

“No, you’re not,” Mr. Bentley argues. “If she wants privacy, she gets privacy. You can head home and get showered and ready for work. And you,” he looks over at Stella in the doorway. “You can take yourself upstairs and get ready to help Henny in the kitchen today.”

“Aww, come on,” she groans.

“I’ll meet you in your room in about ten minutes,” Mr. Bentley turns and tells me. “I have to run up and make sure the youngest two are up and getting ready for school first.”

“Not on the bed,” Gabe insists, that deeper tone from Simon mixed in there. “Sit in the chairs.”

“Of course,” Mr. Bentley agrees. “Settle down, Simon. I am happily mated and married, and only want to help your mate figure out where she comes from.”

Even as I’m doing it, I don’t know if it’s the right thing to be doing, but I get up and make my way over to Gabe, reaching a hand up to pull his face down to my level so I can put our foreheads together. I don’t think he intended it when he did it, but ever since the first time he did that when we were talking about mages in his office, it’s been my go-to when I want to connect directly to a wolf. He accidentally showed me that the connection is strongest at the forehead, probably because in human form, the wolves are mostly in the men’s minds.

I take a moment to soothe Simon, assuring him that even though I’m at odds with Gabe right now, he can trust me not to go off and do anything crazy with other men, least of all his father. I pull away when I feel Gabe’s arms starting to envelop me, noticing the look of hurt on his face as I back away from him.

“We’ll talk soon,” I remind him of what I told him earlier. “Not yet, but soon.”

I give him a gentle pat on his arm before stepping around him and making my way back down the hall to my room to wait for Mr. Bentley.