Chapter 24
Chapter
Twenty-Four
CALEB
The next few weeks fell into a pattern.
Jesse made breakfast around ten, which I was pretty sure he hated, being a six-AM-eggs-and-black-coffee kind of guy.
But he never mentioned it, just appeared in the kitchen every morning looking annoyingly put-together while I shuffled in still half-asleep and mainlined whatever he set in front of me.
After that, we went to the “coach house.” Constructed of the same weathered stone as the manor, it sat on the other side of the courtyard. One half was a gym with mats, weights, and an actual rock climbing wall. The other half held two cars and a sleek motorcycle.
But we never used the vehicles. Jesse was all business about me shifting, and he slid the big doors shut and ordered me to get to work.
He shifted effortlessly, transitioning between forms like someone changing their clothes.
For me, it was like getting stuck inside a sweatshirt I’d outgrown in eighth grade. By the third shift, sweat soaked my hair and my bones felt like they’d been put through a car crusher.
Jesse always seemed to know the exact moment I hit my limit. He’d tilt his head, study me for a second, and then say something like, “Inside. You need lunch.”
I didn’t argue. Partly because he was always right, but mostly because only an idiot would turn down food prepared by Jesse van der Meer.
Lunch was always something fresh and filling.
Dinner was even better. Somehow, he always knew what I wanted.
Homemade pizza we folded in half and ate with sauce dripping onto the plates.
Roasted chicken with crispy skin and potatoes loaded with cream and butter.
Pasta so good I ate it standing over the stove until he banished me to the table.
One night, he fed me piles of tacos with tortillas he made in a press.
“Fuck,” I muttered, licking salsa off my fingers. “These are going to get me pregnant.”
Jesse coughed mid-bite, his eyes streaming as he reached for his water.
“You okay?” I asked, lowering my taco.
“Yes,” he said after he’d taken a drink. “Should I assume you’re going to want seconds?”
I winked at him and took another bite. “The child support is going to be astronomical,” I said around a mouthful of cheese and ground beef.
Smiling, he shook his head and turned back to his plate.
The afternoons belonged to the salon, where we played video games or watched movies.
Jesse studied the screen with the dedication of a film student: brow furrowed, gaze attentive, every emotion displayed on his face.
I watched him watch the TV, a big bowl of popcorn in my lap and butter coating my fingers. He caught me looking more than once.
“What?” he asked, curiosity and a hint of self-consciousness in his dark eyes.
I tossed a piece of popcorn into the air and caught it with my mouth. “Nothing.”
He stared for another moment, then turned back to the TV. When I set the bowl between us, I saw him smile out of the corner of my eye.
On other afternoons we played cards. Jesse was hard to read—until I noticed his breathing sped up slightly when he was bluffing, at which point I cleaned him out twice in a row.
“Impossible,” he said, staring at my cards fanned on the table. He looked at me. “You cheated.”
I leaned back in my chair. “I’m a football player. We study tells for a living.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What’s my tell?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” I grabbed my half-empty beer bottle and drained it. “But you won’t. Sorry.”
He muttered under his breath as he collected the cards. “Fine. Best out of five.”
The day after we talked about Philippe, he handed me the laptop across the kitchen counter. “I enabled the Wi-Fi,” he said. “The password is apple.”
He turned back to the stove before I could say anything.
I stood there holding the laptop, my heart doing something embarrassing in my chest.
When the sun went down, we shifted and ran on four feet, racing each other across the French countryside until our sides heaved and our tongues lolled out of our mouths.
According to Jesse, we didn’t have to worry about humans. The castle I’d spotted from my window was a ruin, and the nearest neighbor was twenty miles away.
“This area has poor drainage,” he’d explained after we’d shifted back and stood nude on the crest of a hill with the Big Dipper splashed across an inky sky.
“It’s bad for growing grapes, which is the main industry in this region.
No one else wanted the property, but it was perfect for me.
I loved the house. The lack of people sealed the deal. ”
I stared at the horizon, where the castle turret was a dark smudge against the night sky. “I guess I ruined that.”
He looked at me until I turned to him. “You’re the exception,” he said, dark eyes steady.
Our evening runs were the best part of every day. Sprinting at his side made the painful shifts worth it, which was information I kept strictly between me and the French countryside.
One week turned into two, then three. The ice around my ribs thawed in increments, every moment with Jesse pushing me toward something I didn’t want to acknowledge but couldn’t run from anymore.
I loved him. Maybe I could live without him, but I didn’t want to.
One night, I found him in the kitchen after our run, chopping vegetables while something simmered on the stove.
“That smells amazing,” I said, drifting toward the island that triggered all sorts of muscle memory in my dick.
He glanced up, pausing his knife mid-chop. “Hachee,” he said.
“Bless you,” I replied.
He laughed softly, then pointed his knife at the pot. “Hachee is a traditional Dutch stew. It’s my mother’s recipe.”
I slid onto a stool at the counter, watching his hands as he continued slicing onions. “What were your parents like?”
“About as traditional as this stew.” He picked up the cutting board and slid onions into the pot. “They wanted me to be a doctor, but I didn’t like the thought of blood.” He flashed a rueful smile. “Then I grew up and became a werewolf.”
My heart did a little flip. “Did you see them again after you turned?”
“Once,” he said, “after the war. They wanted to see me settled with a wife and children.” He picked up a wooden spoon and dipped it into the pot, stirring slowly. “I let them think they were getting something close to that. It wasn’t the truth, but it made them happy.”
I thought about that later, lying in bed. The way he’d said it—not sad, just matter-of-fact, like he’d long since made his peace with the things he’d had to let go. With people who were never going to understand him. For a lot of reasons.
He’d always put others first. His parents. Philippe.
And he was still doing it. He fed me. Trained me. Kept me supplied with clean towels and fresh bedsheets. He never made me feel like a burden. I kept waiting for a magical gift to appear—for power to rush into my fingertips so we could both stop worrying about the Council of Elders executing me.
But nothing came.
I made a list of questions on the laptop, adding new items every night before bed. Then I lay there staring at the ceiling while the moonlight moved across the floor.
One question was a constant presence in my head. I never wrote it down.
Why hasn’t Jesse tried to touch me?
He’d said he wouldn’t unless I wanted it. And he’d stuck to that. He looked plenty, which kept my ego sufficiently stroked. But he never made a move.
The start of our fourth week in France, the full moon was so bright it was like a helicopter searchlight shining into my bedroom. After half an hour of tossing and turning, I pulled on a T-shirt and went down the hall.
A strip of soft yellow light shone from under Jesse’s door. I knocked once, my heart rate picking up.
“Come in,” Jesse called. But, of course, he’d heard me. I’d listened to both sides of his conversation with Sterling Moray. Jesse had probably known the second I stepped into the hall.
He sat propped against the pillows with a book in his lap. No Syracuse T-shirt this time, just his bare chest with its dark hair that held my attention like a fire alarm. The blanket lay across his thighs, exposing a pair of navy blue gym shorts.
The bedside lamp cast a soft glow, and moonlight spilled through the big windows on either side of his bed.
“Is everything okay?” he asked, big and solid against the white sheets.
“I had a question.” I leaned against the doorframe. “About the moon,” I added, gesturing to the window as if the moon was a novel concept.
Fuck, I was so lame.
He closed the book and set it on the nightstand. “You want to know whether it affects us.”
Embarrassment washed over me. I rubbed the back of my head. “I guess I’d probably know by now, right?”
His eyes softened. “I should have told you everything from the start.”
“Well.” I lowered my hand. “We were kind of busy.”
The air shifted, a charge filling the bedroom. We were both still and moving toward something at the same time. And I fucking wanted it. Wanted him.
“What else do you want to know?” he asked. “Ask me anything.”
I thought about my list. “How did we get into France without going through customs?”
“When you have enough money, you can bypass certain rules.”
I huffed. “I feel like you need a lot of money to bypass those rules.”
“I like nice things,” he said. “But I like the security money brings even more. I have false papers for both of us. New identities, new passports. We don’t have to worry about running afoul of the human authorities.”
I had to look at the window for a second because he was so fucking cute, sitting there saying “run afoul” like that was something people said outside a British period drama.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, drawing my eyes back to him.
“That you’re really hot.” I pushed off the door frame. “Also, you said you’d teach me to set wards. But I’m a rogue. So I can’t, right?”