Read The Alpha's Desire 5 for Free Online Page B

them.”
     
    Talk continued this way a while longer. I managed to chew and swallow half of my fish sandwich along with a few bites of fruit salad as I listened, eating for the cause, hoping to keep it down at the same time. Lex kept giving me encouraging looks the whole time, though I could tell each bite was work for him as well.
     

Chapter Four
     
    I fought back my yawns as we boarded the plane in the morning.  There had been a delay in the flight, some mechanical issue on the jet. I’d had a fitful rest even in Lex’s arms. Last night, our ability to feel each other’s emotions created rounds of feeding off each other’s stress with poor Lex taking claim to the burden of trying hard to calm us both.  Every time I had managed to fall asleep, dreams of that warehouse, seeing Lex tortured, seeing werewolves and vampires die, had come flooding back to me, waking me up drenched in sweat.
     
    Even after more than seven months, the images of those few days, the worst of my life outside of losing my parents young, had haunted my. My wolf protector in my bed now, as my husband and lover, should have helped as it had when I’d been younger, and he just a figment of my dreams, or so I’d thought. Yet, given it was him I’d feared losing during those horrid days, even having him there, loving him so much I felt my heart would burst, didn’t help. It only made me more anxious, having him, and thinking of what it would mean to lose him.
     
    I wouldn’t survive that. I knew that for a fact. When I’d lost my mother so young, I’d been just that – young. With my innocence, I had found some solace in the stories of adults about Heaven, my mother an angel. When I’d missed her, I’d imagined her singing, happy, watching me. When that failed to work, Lex, as a wolf, had come in my dreams, calmed me with our connection as protector. When my father had died, I’d been older. By that time my wolf protector only showed up out of the corner of my eye, and I’d thought him a hallucination. Still, even though I had mourned my father, in a way, I’d been old enough to also find peace in the fact he no longer suffered, no longer had to drink away his pain of losing my mother and being forced to go on raising a daughter.
     
    With Lex, it would be different. My heart beat along with his. We had a connection no one could describe, even the Royals who understood it. There were not words for it. He gave me strength where I lacked it. He made me brave. It was like I breathed only because he did. We were definitely one unit though we walked as two. An orphan now, I understood even more what my father had gone through losing my mom, and why he’d drank so much just to get through each day. Why I hadn’t been enough.
     
    I shook off my melancholy thoughts, ones that came so easily when exhausted and stressed, when it came my turn to climb the metal stairs up to the belly of the jet. As the ten of us boarded, found places to sit in the large great room inside, I grew thankful that the crowded situation had me pressed against Lex. We’d just come from having said our good-byes, gotten our last pep talks from Edward and Catherine. Going off to battle, good-byes could feel all too real. I knew that each one of us as we’d gotten hugs, kisses, personalized words of wisdom, had thought the same. What if this was the last time we saw each other alive?  
     
    The deaths of Vivian and Riker, and the other wolves we’d lost last time hung over the group of us like a dark cloud. Edward and Catherine had told us to use that grief and turn it into action in the names of those lost to Daniel before. Lex held me tightly to his body, the strain on my sore and stress-weary muscles welcome, keeping me alert, making me feel loved and alive rather than an inmate on death row.
     
    “Don’t forget how well trained you are this time going into battle. You did fine last time, and you hadn’t a day of training. Also, you are a werewolf now, so