Page 9 of The Wolf and his Witch

“Je ne suis pas en mesure de répondre a votre appel pour le moment. Veuillez laisser un message et je vous repondrai des que possible.”

“Putain.” His voicemail.

He selected another number and tried again. Same answer. This time from Louis.

Gabriel hit end and checked his watch—five p.m. That made it…one a.m. in France. Pierre and Louis were either sleeping or partying. Or, knowing his younger brothers, they had a party for three going on. He snorted. What was it with the twins in their family? Like his tenth-century ancestors, Edmond and Aubert, his brothers preferred to share. He shoved his phone back into his pocket. He’d get nothing from them for a few hours.

Gabriel retraced his steps back to the High Priestess’ office. Stef was right. If Annabelle was the Bella Rodriguez the journal talked about, he’d have to let her go. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t exist. His whole life, everything, gone in the blink of an eye as if he had never been born at all. But letting her go… He’d walked away from her once, in Paris, and it was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life. To let her go again might very well destroy him.

Chapter Five

Annabelle dropped her bag to the floor, slammed her apartment door behind her, and leaned up against it. What the hell had she done? Resisting Gabriel was going to be so much harder now she’d had a reminder of how explosive it was between the two of them. In the intervening years since Paris, she’d single-mindedly worked on erasing the feel of his hands on her body, his kisses, his musky scent and the way she came undone in his arms. She’d thought she’d succeeded, but one look at him in the High Priestess’ office, one swipe of his tongue against hers and one grind of his hips pressing his thick length against her core, and she was back in Paris where they’d spent more time having sex than eating. And they’d spent a lot of time eating.

She let her head thump back against the door.Damn my stupid body. And damn him.Why, of all the Langeais shifters, did it have to be him they’d sent?

Isobella, her flatmate and stepsister, poked her head into the hall. “Are you okay?”

Annabelle groaned.Am I okay? She was going to have to be.

“What did the High Priestess want?” Isobella folded her arms across her chest, a defensive measure Annabelle recognized.

Though Isobella showed remarkable promise with her magic, her family had not been prominent in their coven. Not until Isobella’s father had married Annabelle’s mother a few years ago. Being married into the Jackson family had elevated their status right to the top. But years of conditioning was hard toundo, and the whispers through the coven were hard to ignore. So it was always High Priestess, and never Aunt Marjory, with Isobella.

To be fair, it wasn’t all in Isobella’s head. Coven politics could be brutal. Some families were always vying for control, like the Kings and their cronies, and they’d seen the marriage as a grab for power by the Rodriguez family. Not even Annabelle and her mother taking on the Rodriguez name had managed to quash that. Annabelle couldn’t care less what the Kings thought. But Isobella did. Annabelle had changed her name for her.

Annabelle pushed herself off the door. “I have a new task.”

“To do with all that research you’ve been doing?”

Annabelle nodded. “Yeah.”

Wariness descended over Isobella’s features. “She wants you to be the one to go back in time, doesn’t she?”

Annabelle picked up her bag. “Would you rather it be Dutton? Because he wanted it to be him.”

Isobella screwed up her nose.

“My thoughts exactly. Don’t worry, Isobella,” she said, patting her sister on the shoulder. “I’ll be fine. We’ve got two wolf shifters from France who”—she hooked two fingers in the air like imaginary quotation marks—“apparently have knowledge of the time I’m to go back to. I wanted to be the one to take on this task. I just didn’t expect I’d be going as far back as the tenth century.”

“Thetenthcentury?”

Isobella’s unease matched her own. The mission was always going to be dangerous. Being a witch in medieval Europe wasn’t an enviable position. Being a twenty-first century witch in medieval Europe meant there were so many more ways she could make a mistake and become one of the accused, one of thousands of women who’d died. But the tenth century was an unknown quantity. No witch trials. That was a bonus. But whatwouldshe be facing? A plague? Wars? She hadn’t done anyresearch that far back, and didn’t have a clue what to expect? Could she trust Gabriel to prepare her for it? And why were he and Stefanie really here? Sure, their pack had a connection to this bishop—and not in a good way—but was there more to it than that? What was it they weren’t telling them?

Maybe someone else should go, someone with no history with the enigmatic shifter, but they weren’t flush with choices. Dutton was the obvious one, but there was no way her aunt would give Dutton an opportunity like this. Not if she didn’t want to give his family any more influence within the coven than they already had. There was Douglas, but recent events would sway the decision against him. That Isobella now lived with Annabelle, that Douglas had dumped her in favor of his bit on the side—a witch from the King family—said everything. Her aunt would always back her family, including those added to it through marriage. And there was not a chance in hell they’d trust anyone with a connection to the King family, no matter how fleeting it might be.

Dutton and Douglas. Two dickheads with a capital D.

There were a few other witches, one or two warlocks, but their loyalties were untested. No. She was the best person to go.

Annabelle followed Isobella into the living area, the scent of pine and fresh earth hitting her. She froze in the doorway. “What’s all this?”

She knew what it was. She just couldn’t believe it was in her apartment. In the corner, by the window, sat a Christmas tree in a pot, a length of red tinsel winding around it and clinging to its needles. Boxes of unopened ornaments in bright colors littered the floor.

Isobella shrugged. “I know. It’s weird for witches to celebrate Christmas, but it was something my mother always did. She liked the decorations, the spirit of family get-togethers.” Isobella held up a shoebox with the word Paris scrawled across it in blackmarker. “And I found these behind some towels in the linen closet.” “I figured your family was the same, too. I mean, the High Priestess has a tree in her office…”

Her voice trailed off as Annabelle stared transfixed at the box in Isobella’s hands. Too beautiful to throw out, and yet too painful to look at, she’d packed the delicate, hand-carved Christmas ornaments she’d bought with Gabriel in an old shoe box and shoved them to the back of the linen closet. There they’d sat for three years, undisturbed, but never forgotten. She’d never had a Christmas tree in her entire life. Not until Christmas in Paris. Not until Gabriel. She’d gotten caught up in the festivity of it all. The snow, the lights and trawling the Christmas markets with Gabriel by her side. Then he’d left her, and she’d never had one since.

“Annabelle? I just thought… Douglas always humored me and got me a Christmas tree, and when I found these ornaments, I guess I thought…”

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