Chapter 6 Dumbstruck
Dumbstruck
Since I didn’t have clothes for him, I handed the man a bathrobe so he could cover his far-too-distracting nakedness and sat him down on the couch while I faced him from the sofa.
“Lucien,” I murmured now, staring at him, tasting his name, mimicking the way he said it, which wasn’t Lu-shen, but rather Lu-see-en. A French name, said in a barely there French accent. “You are a werewolf.”
He leaned back, putting his arm on the armrest and spreading his legs, which gave me a peek at his strong inner thighs, covered by that golden skin. “Yes,” he confirmed, watching me with those brilliant eyes, similar to the wolf’s but far more lethal than the animal ever could be.
“Prove it,” I said now, folding my arms and feeling my cheeks heat up under his piercing scrutiny. “Change shapes in front of me.”
“We call it shifting,” he told me, his lips twitching, “since my kind belongs to the shape-shifter category.”
My eyes widened in wonder. It wasn’t like I didn’t think shape-shifters existed.
There were enough people who seemed to believe so, and while I had yet to find concrete proof—until now—I did believe it was true, though I refused to write about anything I couldn’t confirm.
And I’d already speculated he was a werewolf, so that didn’t surprise me.
I just felt absolutely dumbfounded that I was actually given proof this time.
Heart beating fast, I watched as he silently rose from the couch and took off the bathrobe. My face was immediately on fire, and I looked away. “Why are you stripping?” I asked far too breathlessly for my liking.
“Because I don’t want to tear the robe,” he replied somewhat dryly. “Now, please look, or it would defeat the purpose of shifting.”
Taking a deep breath, I returned my gaze to his breathtaking face, refusing to let my eyes roam down, and watched.
It started with his eyes. One second, they were just human eyes, then the next, they weren’t anymore. They were wrong. The pupils quaked. The irises were too bright. It looked like something ancient and powerful was watching me back from inside his skull.
Then his skin started to move. Not like a twitch or shivering—more like it was peeling.
I heard something pop, then crack, followed by a whole series of sharp, wet crunches that made my stomach clench.
His back bowed, his fingers bent the wrong way, and his legs snapped forward like his bones were being rewritten in real time.
Fur shot out of him in fast bursts, spreading like wildfire over his shoulders, chest, and arms. I couldn’t look away as his face, almost frozen in time, unfolded out of itself, jaw pushing forward, nose elongating, teeth piercing through gum and skin until there was nothing left of him but the beast.
It wasn’t cinematic or elegant. It was downright awful. Beautiful, in a way, but absolutely brutal, like watching a man die and something else crawl out of his remains.
And when it was done, when the last sound died, the wolf that used to be him looked at me.
I didn’t realize I wasn’t breathing, that cold sweat covered my skin, that my whole body was shaking while somehow my spine remained stiff in terror, until the wolf padded toward me, butting his head against my hand, as if nothing had happened.
As if he wasn’t human just a few moments before.
But when I glanced at the discarded robe on the couch, I knew I wasn’t imagining things, and the understanding that what I’d witnessed wasn’t just my theories and daydreams, but real, was so exhilarating, I found it hard to breathe.
After all this time of fighting a losing battle against everyone, after years of writing about supernatural phenomena and insisting I knew the truth, trying to convince not just my few readers but my family, too, that I was in the right .
. . Finally, the universe had sent me a solid acknowledgment that all this wasn’t for naught.
That I hadn’t imagined that monster eight years ago.
That unlike what everyone else thought, I was of sound mind, and I had a werewolf before me to fucking prove it.
“Lucien,” I whispered, cupping the wolf’s head as I stared at him like it was the first time I was seeing him, full of wonder and ecstasy, vindication and conviction. “Oh, Lucien . . . Thank you. Thank you.”
His fur was warm under my hands yet coarse around the ears, softer between them, like thick velvet over muscle. His chest rose and fell in heavy, rhythmic breaths, and his arctic eyes, normally so sharp, were softened with gentleness I’d never seen there before.
I didn’t move, just kept one hand curled around the side of his face, fingers buried in the fur.
My pulse was hammering against my chest. I was far more hyperaware of him than before, when I didn’t know for sure whether he had a human form or not.
Now I knew what he looked like as a human, and while I couldn’t quite take the leap connecting the Adonis with the wolf yet, I could feel the truth humming in my blood, heating me up from deep inside.
Then I felt it.
A tremor under his skin, like something winding up deep inside his chest, vibrated under my touch. The fur twitched beneath my palm before it sank, vanishing into flesh like dust pulled into a vacuum. I flinched but didn’t let go.
His bones started shifting beneath the surface—grinding, stretching, reshaping. His snout began to collapse, lips pulling back as the structure of his face folded in, jaw cracking and shrinking until it wasn’t a muzzle anymore.
Suddenly I was cradling a human’s face. An exquisitely handsome man’s face. And cupping his face like that, his skin instead of fur, felt so overwhelmingly intimate, I jerked back, my hand dropping to my side.
Lucien’s piercing gaze followed my movement before he rose from his hunched pose and turned his back to me.
He reached for the bathrobe on the couch, exposing his broad shoulders, the toned curves of his shoulder blades, and the hardened yet round butt cheeks I could easily imagine my nails digging into . . .
But the wound was there—still raw, still bleeding—and any sort of desire was snuffed out at the sight.
I closed my eyes and turned away, my cheeks burning. I mean, yes, he was scorchingly hot, but come on. I shouldn’t make a spectacle out of myself, especially when he was obviously still injured.
“I’m decent now.” Lucien’s silky voice echoed with blatant amusement in the room, and I peeked at him, seeing that his chiseled, sun-kissed body was wrapped in the white bathrobe.
My mouth dried, but I refused to turn into a bumbling buffoon, so I cleared my throat and headed to the kitchen again, focusing my attention on the spilled shadow mark.
Before I could take another step, though, large, warm hands wrapped around my upper arms and pulled me back—hard. “Don’t get too close.” Lucien’s voice was lower than before, the previous amusement gone, replaced by graveness that made me go still.
His palms were so hot, his touch seared through the sleeves of my shirt.
It made an involuntary shudder run through my spine.
But I refused to fall into that rabbit hole, and so I refocused my gaze on the shadow mark.
“You called it a portal,” I recalled in a clear voice, and tugged at my arms, trying to break free.
But Lucien did not let me go. Instead, he stepped closer until his robe-clad, hard chest aligned against my back. “Let me pick it up,” he said instead of answering my obviously burning question. “Go sit in the living room and wait until I’m done. We need to talk.”
His authoritative tone pissed me off, and I welcomed the anger. It was a far less dangerous emotion than everything else I’d been feeling since Lucien’s human form appeared out of the blue. “Don’t order me around in my own home,” I said, tugging hard against his hold this time.
He froze for a moment before he finally let me go. I whipped around once I was free and planned to glare at him, but when I saw his hypnotizing eyes locked on the shadow mark, I was momentarily distracted, transfixed by the dark look on his beautiful face.
In all fairness, it had been . . . well . . . a very long time since I’d last had sex. This onslaught of gorgeousness without warning, out of nowhere, was far too overwhelming for my very weak, very thirsty heart.
But Adonis or not, Lucien was the key to a number of matters at hand that required my attention.
I had so many questions, so many mysteries that Lucien could solve for me.
It was the first time I’d really met someone from the supernatural community.
This was a moment I’d been waiting for, for years.
So I swallowed my absurd, obviously one-sided attraction and folded my arms over my chest. I was about to speak when Lucien walked toward the shadow mark and paused a few inches away from the murky liquid. “Do you have a scoop?” he asked suddenly.
I did, in fact, have a scoop. I fished it out of the kitchen cabinet and handed it over to him, careful not to get close to the shadow mark. Lucien nodded in thanks, his auburn curls bouncing around his head.
I was mesmerized by the movement of his hair as he crouched down and started scooping the mark back into the bottle. I’d never seen such a deep, rich auburn hair color before. There was even a glint of gold in between strands, which gave his hair the illusion of a faint halo.
In short, his hair was beautiful. Everything about the physique of this man was beautiful. So beautiful I had to actively tear my eyes away, lest I be in danger of drowning in his unfathomable, supernatural gorgeousness.
Lucien was quick, and the shadow mark was fully scooped into the bottle within less than a minute. He stood and turned to me with the bottle in his hands. “I need a lighter,” he informed me, brilliant blue eyes finding mine.
I swallowed hard and forced myself to ignore the heat unfurling in my gut at his intense stare. “Why?” I asked, jutting my chin out in defiance stemming from basic survival needs.
Because despite his beauty, this man was dangerous. He was a werewolf, for God’s sake. He was supernatural, not fully human, if at all. Even though he was still wounded, he was more than capable of tearing my throat out if he so wanted.
Sure, a deep instinct tried to assure me he wouldn’t hurt me. Normally, I counted on my instincts to be correct. But I’d already learned my lesson a long time ago; those instincts were absolutely useless in the face of a hot man.
And this hot man now looked at me, his gaze as searing as his touch had been, or perhaps even more so. “You don’t trust me,” he stated suddenly.
“Of course I don’t,” I replied immediately, because attraction or no, this was the truth. I did not trust this stranger.
He cocked his head, narrowing his eyes. “But you trusted the wolf.”
I opened my mouth, ready to deny that, but paused, because memories of the past few days went through my head one after another.
From the moment I had found him in his wolf form, thinking him to be a dog, bleeding and dying outside the back door of my building, the same instinct that told me Lucien wouldn’t hurt me had guided me then as well. As if my gut knew something I didn’t know about the dog, or rather, werewolf.
It wasn’t just that I trusted the wolf.
“Yes, I did,” I agreed now, my heart pounding faster. “But I knew the wolf. I don’t know you.”
Lucien put the bottle on the counter and stepped toward me, pausing so close I had to tilt my head back to meet his gaze.
He was so much taller than I was, at five-eight, that it now made perfect sense why his wolf form was absurdly large.
“The wolf and I, we are one and the same,” he informed me, eyes searching mine.
“And both parts of me are forever grateful to you for saving me that night.”
My eyes widened.
“With that in mind,” he continued, raising his hand until his fingers reached for a strand of hair that fell over my shoulder, “at least believe me when I say that I owe you my life, and thus will never, ever cause you harm.”
He tucked the hair behind my ear, his knuckles brushing against the lobe, and a shiver that had everything to do with not just his touch, but also his words, coursed its way through my body, leaving a hot, confusing flush in its wake.