Chapter 3 #3
Suddenly, her forehead wrinkled, and she grimaced as though she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
Then she was moving toward him, on a mission, closing the distance between them.
Her eyes were trained on his shoulder, and he stopped breathing as she raised two fingers and pressed them against the pink, jagged scar tissue of his recent gunshot wound.
Her eyes flicked to his, then back to the scar, which she lightly caressed with her cool fingers.
Jack felt his body responding to her touch, the first she’d voluntarily offered him since they said goodbye in his car last Sunday.
He clenched his jaw together. Control. Control. Control.
“Oh, Jack,” she whispered, staring at the angry, twisted skin, her fingers resting like a cool brand against his skin. “What happened?”
He stared at her bowed head, trying to think of words. Any words other than: A member from another pack took a shot at me while my mentor and I carried my doped-up father into the woods before shifting to take him home to die.
With all the strength in his body, he stepped back from her, leaving her fingers dangling in midair as he fixed a neutral expression on his face, glancing nonchalantly at his shoulder.
“It’s nothing.” Then he shrugged, turning to head down the stairs.
“You were hurt,” she murmured. “You were hurt on Friday night. I…I felt it.”
More than you can possibly know, he thought to himself, still looking away from her, remembering the feeling of his body losing the battle against the icy cold water.
He stood immobile on the stairs for a moment, fighting the instinct to say these words aloud and tell her how deeply she had hurt him.
He clenched his jaw, holding his tongue, and realized she wasn’t referring to the first time he pulled her inside, but the second, as he fell asleep, after his father died.
She must have felt his pain and sorrow when he’d pulled her inside, when he’d fallen asleep at her feet.
He looked down quickly, the moment almost unbearably charged with unsaid things.
Get away from her. Now.
He wanted to grab her around the waist and pull her up against his body, plunge his tongue into her mouth until she moaned his name and wove her hands through his hair.
Until she told him she loved him and would never hurt him again as terribly as she had last night.
His fingers trembled, and he felt his hips shift to turn around and face her.
No! Go now, Jack. Now!
He made his feet move down the stairs without turning back to look at her, tossing, “I’ll find you that charger,” over his shoulder as he left her.
Darcy watched him go, dazed and confused, her fingers still warm from where they had briefly rested on his skin. She backed up to her room, then turned, shutting the door behind her.
He had backed away from her touch, ended their conversation as quickly as he could, and left, barely looking at her. He was so cool, so politely impersonal.
He wouldn’t meet her eyes, not that she’d been able to hear inside his head since they’d returned to the lodge.
It felt like he was pushing her away.
Looking at herself in the mirror, she saw the confusion on her drawn face. Making a choice to push Jack away was one thing. Having him do the same to her was quite another, and she had to consider how she felt about getting exactly what she asked for.
“What do you want?” she demanded from her reflection in a hiss. “What the hell do you want from him? If you don’t want him, you’re getting exactly what you want. Be happy.”
But she wasn’t. At all.
In fact, she would go so far as to say that if it continued, this disinterested politeness, this protection based on duty instead of love, it would be unbearable for her.
She flinched at the thought of losing his teasing smile, his burning eyes, the touch of his hands on her body, his lips moving hungrily over hers. You belong to me, and I belong to you…
She wanted to weep with confusion and frustration.
Of course she wanted him.
Of course she loved him.
She just wished he were a human being. Just a regular human being.
No, a voice inside her heart whispered. No, you don’t, Darcy.
You’re drawn to him, to all of him, and that includes his darkness.
You wanted it from the beginning. From the very beginning.
Make no mistake, part of what you love most about Jack Beauloup is acknowledging his darkness but believing that you can brighten it. Sun to his moon. Day to his night.
When she’d seen him that very first time in the library, she’d been blinded initially by the sun in her eyes.
Then, as the clouds had shifted to dull the light, the first thing she’d been able to focus on was the inky blackness of the stranger’s hair at the far table.
And when their eyes met, her heart had leaped in her chest in recognition, in sympathy, almost in reunion, two halves of a whole finding one another after a long, lonely exile apart.
She’d watched his cold, brooding eyes warm just for a second as they held hers, and she’d felt the truth deep inside where her mind and heart and body formed a perfect trinity of understanding. I could be the light in your darkness.
She took a shaky breath and sighed at her face in the mirror, still moved by the fierce connection she’d felt to him so long ago.
She looked away from her face and grimaced as another reality surfaced.
She didn’t like the packaging. She wasn’t frightened of Jack personally.
She knew that he wouldn’t hurt her, felt strongly in every fiber of her body that he would expend his own life protecting hers, if necessary.
But she didn’t know how a shape-shifting Roux-ga-roux could fit into her life, and vice versa.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want him physically.
She did. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him.
She did. The problem was that she simply didn’t see a way to be together.
Big tears welled in her eyes, and a lump rose in her throat until it hurt to swallow. Her fingers dug into the soft wood of the antique dresser until her fingers ached, and she left a neat set of eight small indentations.
She turned and sat gingerly on the bed, picking up her cell phone charger and carefully coiling it before hiding it in the zipper pocket of her duffel bag.
Then she lay back on the bed, her head swimming with confusion and despair, and allowed the quiet tears to run free from the saturated wells of her eyes.
Jack strode into the night’s cool air, fighting the urge to shift and run off all of his frustration and want.
It would feel so good to run, to feel the branches swipe at his protected body, his feet thumping on the floor of the woods.
If he were quiet enough, he might be able to stalk and kill a deer.
Blech. He didn’t love the taste of raw deer—it was bitter and tough compared to human meat—but the mere act of the kill would quench some of the fire in his chest and, tasty or not, the blood would quench a bit of the fire in his belly.
Oh, yes. That’d be perfect, Jack. You’d come back with blood all over your body, your hair and beard wild, covered in leaves and dirt. The way your luck’s been lately, Darcy’d be standing at the top of the stairs waiting to see it.
No. No hunting. No shifting. Save it for Lela.
Lela.
Jack crossed the front courtyard, briefly admiring the almost-perfect half-moon, oddly called the Three-Quarter. The math came easily. Twenty-three days until full.
Entering the garage, he climbed the stairs to the writing studio where Julien would be staying and found his brother sitting at the desk, typing on his laptop.
“Looking for fresh kills?”
Julien nodded, scanning the police notices for Quebec City. “Not finding any, though. None reported, anyway. I don’t think she’s traveling shifted, Jacques. Which is good. It’ll take her longer to get here if she doesn’t run.”
Jack plopped down on the loveseat that he’d had upholstered for Darcy in soothing moss green tones. “You want to stay in the house?”
“Nah. Best your, um…mate doesn’t see me coming and going too much. Didn’t get a very friendly feeling from her. She can pretend she’s just there with you.”
Jack scoffed. “She’d rather be anywhere than with me.”
“Yeah.” Julien swiveled in the chair, facing Jack. “Sort of picked up on a little tension.”
“Tension? She’s pushing me away with both hands.”
“Sorry, brother. That’s gotta hurt.”
“Doesn’t feel great.” Jack sighed. “Nothing I can do about it, though. I’m giving her space.”
“Women hate space. They think they want space, but they hate it, and they make you pay for it later.”
Jack rolled his eyes, changing the subject. “What’d you talk to Willow about?”
Julien scratched his thick beard. “She had a lot of questions. How does it feel when we shift. She made me detail what happens. She asked about hunting and killing. I left out some details of that. I told her about the bindings. She asked if I felt yours was legit. I said it was, but that I’d never seen anything like it.
I mentioned the re-bindi—Uh, um…I mean, we talked a little bit about Natalia.
She asked about the stuff Nat had been hooked on.
Seemed real interested in that. She’s a smart little Enchanteresse. ”
Jack leaned forward. He hadn’t been listening carefully, distracted with thoughts of Darcy’s fingers on his shoulder, but perked up at the word Enchanteresse. “Do you think she knows?”
“What she is?” Julien shook his head. “Nah. She wouldn’t have been nervous of us at all. In fact, when I realized what she was, I got tense for a minute, but I’m positive she didn’t know. I mentioned the word, and she didn’t flinch.”
“She’s also a doctor. A Western doctor.”
“Some combination,” murmured Julien respectfully.