14. Hook
Never’s fingers trembled as they hovered over the necklace, not quite touching the pendant. I’d always seen the thing as grotesque, a sick trophy carved out by a mad pixie. Until Never told me it was her way home.
Just knowing that it was something she needed transformed that petrified piece of me into something worthy.
Worthy of a woman who deserved so much more in life. Her apartment was a disgrace. Not for lack of upkeep. It simply wasn’t good enough. Yes, her foul mouth would almost certainly land her in hot water for the rest of her life, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t deserving of the finer things.
If I could convince her to return with me, I would build her a castle on her own private island with my own hands, if that was what she wanted.
But would she live long enough to see it? That was one of the many questions about the woman that plagued me.
I closed the distance between us, grabbing her hand and gently closing her fingers around the pendant. “Nothing about what you hold in your hand has changed, only your understanding of its origin has.”
She shook her head. “I can’t.” Fear and panic darkened her eyes, and her breathing became alarmingly erratic.
She stepped back and yanked, snapping the chain and tossing the necklace at me. Then she kept backing up until she ran herself right into the wall. A wall she looked like she might try to climb with bare hands and fingernails to get away from me.
Instead, she started to fold over on herself, hinging at the waist as she dragged in increasingly shallow and panicked breaths. “Can’t.” She braced her hands on her knees and let her head fall. “Breathe.”
Lily was there by her side before I could wrap my head around what was happening. “What the hell, kid? You haven’t had a panic attack in forever.” She cast an apologetic look my way. “Telling her about the pendant might have been a mistake.” She motioned to the kitchen table. “Grab me a chair?”
I felt numb as I moved across the room and fetched a beaten-up chair. Lily eased her down onto it, and for a second all I could do was watch as Never fought for every breath she tried to take in. Even Leo was doing more than I was, filling a glass with water and setting it on the floor beside her.
A thread of something niggled inside me, growing stronger the longer I stood there. I’d done this to her. If I had just kept the truth about the pendant to myself rather than letting a meddling shifter lead me astray, we’d already be working on getting her brother back.
That sliver of awareness became a tingle, and what started deep in my chest was spreading slowly through my upper body, rolling through my shoulders. The moment I recognized the sensation, I understood what it was telling me to do.
I knelt in front of Never, dismissing Leo’s mumbled objection. She was still bent over, still sucking air. Her eyes met mine for the briefest of moments before I reached for her. There was no mistaking the misery in that look. It had me hesitating with my hands inches from hers until she pulled in another ragged breath.
I didn’t say anything when I took her hands and let that thread of my power bleed from me to her. What was there to say? I’d given her a piece of myself, but now that she understood what it truly was, she was rejecting it.
Worse, the knowledge had given this impossibly resilient woman a panic attack.
She jerked back when she felt my magic spike. What had been a deliberately soft and steady flow pulsed when I thought of her reaction to the pendant, but I refused to let go of her hands.
“I’m sorry, lo—Never. Just bear with me another moment,” I whispered, trying to calm and soothe without frightening her more.
Don’t focus on her rejection. Think about something, anything else.
Naturally, a vision of Never from the night before filled my mind. Her want. Her need. The look in her eyes when she realized I was the one with her on the dance floor. She’d wanted everything I’d had to give then, and I would kill to make her feel that way again.
A whimper pulled me from my heated, spiraling thoughts, but it wasn’t until I withdrew my hands, worried I was doing more damage, that I realized her whimper had nothing to do with pain.
Never looked at me, desire burning clear in her eyes. “Dirty trick, pirate,” she whispered.
“What?” I asked, feeling a tad bit drunk.
Ah, yes. It was all coming back. Never Darling had a powerful effect on me. As much as I had dreamed of her during her absence, as much as I’d obsessed over her, I had forgotten how her presence had a way of knocking me off balance.
Rather than answering my question, she reached out and wrapped her fingers around my wrist. “What are the odds it works both ways?”
In the next instant, I was hit with a desire so strong it made my breath catch in my chest. And it wasn’t mine. That deep need was coming directly from her.
“Whoa there, Captain,” Lily said, sounding more alarmed than my swimming brain thought was strictly necessary.
“It’s fine, Lil. He does this around me.” Never leaned in and lowered her voice. “Careful, pirate. I’m pretty sure your godliness is showing.”
In her gaze, I could see my own reflected, glowing a brilliant orange. I closed my eyes and pulled in a deep breath, holding it as I focused on what I was sensing beneath the lust coursing from her.
The vixen was fortunate for every single shred of decency I still possessed with the emotions she was throwing at me. If I were even a fraction less of a man, a hair’s breadth, I would have hauled her up out of that chair, carried her back to her bedroom, and said to hell with the rest of the world until I’d had my fill of her.
The only thing that was stopping me, besides a pair of shifters who apparently had no intention of leaving the two of us alone again anytime soon, was the emotions riding beneath the lust. She wanted me. Powerfully. With an intensity that rivaled my own.
But something was holding her back.
I opened my eyes to find her watching me. Her tongue darted out before she rolled her bottom lip between her teeth. Oh yes, her desire was in no way false, but there was definitely something else at play.
Laying my hand over hers, I gently peeled her fingers away from my wrist. “Just focus on breathing for now,” I whispered. Not because those words needed to be private, but because in the wake of her scorching desire, I didn’t trust my voice.
She rolled her eyes, a tired move with a sliver of the sass she normally threw my way. “Bossy doesn’t usually do it for me.”
“Usually?” I asked.
A smirk lifted one side of her mouth. “You heard me.”
In another situation, I would have taken that comment and run with it, but it wasn’t the right time. “Are you feeling better?”
Never straightened in the chair. “I’m sorry for throwing the... pendant at you.”
“And I am inclined to forgive the slight.” I offered her a tentative smile.
“If?” She lifted a brow.
“If you tell me why you felt the need to be rid of it in the first place.”
A silence so thick I could have cut it with my cutlass filled the space around us. For a moment, I wondered if she might not respond at all, until her chest rose and fell in a muted huff.
She stood, offering her hand to help me up. I took it greedily. Any opportunity this woman gave me to touch her, I would take it. Shamelessly. She’d only been back in my life for a matter of hours, and I was already feeling like an addict.
“I need a minute,” she said, directing her attention to Leo and Lily.
Lily offered her a knowing nod, but Leo’s disposition was decidedly darker as she laced her fingers through mine and led me down the hall to her bedroom.
The space was precisely as I expected from what I knew of the woman. She didn’t seem to have an affinity for things—not a lot of baubles or trinkets—but she did have a few items that stood out.
A crossbow hung on the wall like a trophy, its fine wooden shaft dented and worn from battle. Was it hers or something she’d picked up as a display piece? My guess would be the former, possibly passed down through her family.
In the corner sat a full-length mirror, and in the reflection, I got my first real picture of the two of us. I wanted to pull her to a stop and stand her in front of the glass, watching her reactions as I kissed and touched and licked down her delicious body.
Instead, she pulled her hand free and turned, shaking it out at her side as though she was suffering a bout of the tingles.
“What the hell is that all about?” she asked.
Her reaction was a little confusing. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.”
She eased back to her desk, a dull gray metal behemoth, resting her rear end on the edge as she crossed her arms in front of her. “The thing you just did. The same thing I did to you out there?”
She was talking about the touch. How she could feel what she was feeling. “Did you sense something when I was looking at the mirror?”
“That’s one way to put it.”
That settled it. I needed to do a much better job of guarding myself around her. Rather, guarding her from me.
I scanned the room and motioned to the bed. “May I?”
“Sit? Yes. Whatever the hell you were thinking earlier?” She paused. “We’ll see.”
Those two little words sent a thrill through me. I tempered the sensation, moving to sit on the edge of her bed. I didn’t want to be looming over the woman as she confessed why she’d hurled the pendant at me after finding out what it was.
No, that wasn’t entirely true. I did want to loom over her. I wanted her looking up at me so I could read every drop of emotion that didn’t make it into her words.
That, however, was not the way to get Never Darling to talk.
So, I took a seat that left yards of space between us, a chasm that seemed to grow wider with each passing second.
“You first, Hook.”
Honesty was the obvious choice, but giving her the truth of our connection might do even more damage than learning the true origins of the pendant had done. Not that I had any other great options.
I had a feeling she would know if I was lying, just as I would know if she was. I wasn’t certain, not by any stretch. What I knew of these kinds of connections came from stories so old they predated the written word in Never’s realm.
“Or you can just sit there looking contemplative,” she quipped, her tone as dry as my throat.
“I’m considering my words carefully, lo—” I cut myself off before I used the nickname I’d bestowed upon her a million years ago in my world.
It’d just popped out back then, and it had felt as natural as breathing. I wasn’t in the habit of referring to anyone with that kind of affection, but there was something about her.
She narrowed her eyes. I thought for a moment that she might comment until her expression turned guarded and she remained utterly silent.
I didn’t like that one bit. There were times when I wanted her quiet—for her safety, for my own twisted pleasure—but to receive her silence now left a hollow ache in my chest.
It was that ache that pulled the truth from me. “Do you recall your last night in my world?”
“It was all of three weeks ago. Yeah, it’s still pretty fresh in my mind.”
That knocked me back a step. “Three weeks? That’s all?” In my realm, I’d been pining over her, turning over every stone I could find, calling in every favor I’d ever been owed for months. Many, many months.
Her expression softened a little. “Why? How long has it been for you?”
I shook my head. “A good bit longer. Which is neither here nor there.” It did, however, leave me with questions. “The important thing is what happened that night.”
She unfolded her arms and boosted herself up onto her desk, letting her feet dangle. “I remember what happened.”
But did she understand it?
I pulled in a breath and let it slowly as I considered my phrasing. “Do you recall a moment that night, during our time together, when you might have felt something strange?” I couldn’t even think of how to put it properly. “Perhaps like an opening or a welcoming of some kind.”
Never studied me through narrowed lids. “No.” My heart sank a thousand leagues into the depths in the time it took her to continue. “But I felt something...” she pressed her hand to her chest right over her fragile human heart. “Crack.”
Relief flooded me. The connection was real. That was a fact, but had she not recalled the moment, I would have been profoundly disappointed. Because there was a part of me that wanted to explain everything to her, but in a very different setting. Like over a fine meal and with a glass of wine. Not perched on her small bed, in her depressing apartment, while two grown shifters with superhuman hearing were mere paces away and her brother was playing the unwilling host to a demonic shadow.
Alas, beggars could not be choosers.
“That crack was, in a sense, a gift from you to me,” I said quietly.
Her responding expression was understandably skeptical.
“I asked you to give yourself to me that night. What you felt was precisely that.”
Skepticism turned to thinly veiled hostility in the space of a second. “I gave myself to you? Could you do a girl favor and break that down for me, third-grade style?” When I raised a brow in confusion, she huffed out an impatient breath. “Tell me, in small words, what precisely you mean.”
“You gave me a piece of yourself. Your inner self.”
“Are you talking about my soul?” she asked, her tone entirely too calm for the wild energy pulsing from her. It would seem, the longer we were in each other’s company, the stronger the connection grew.
Interesting. Also, potentially troublesome.
I nodded.
“For fuck’s sake, pirate. That’s what you were asking for when you asked me to give myself to you?” She looked, well, it was hard to say. Upset, certainly. But there was more to it.
“No.” I thought about it for a moment. “Not exactly.”
She unfolded her legs, hopped off the desk, and paced a line in front of me. Back and forth, twice before she whirled on me. “Explain what the hell this means.”
“It means we’re connected.” I motioned between us. “You and I.” I pressed my palm to my chest, just as she’d done. “Here.”
Her gaze flicked between my hand and my face half a dozen times. “Connected is a very broad term, pirate. Do you... Jesus... that’s why Petra wouldn’t take me in exchange for my brother.” Her hand went to her chest. “I’m not whole anymore, am I?”
Oof. That certainly wasn’t the way I’d been hoping she would see it. I held my hands up. “Maybe gave is the wrong word. You are whole. It just means you’ve shared yourself with me.” I shook my head. “I feel like I’m explaining this poorly.”
“You don’t say?”
Talking wasn’t working, and the longer she kept her distance from me, the more I felt her trying to pull away. I wasn’t letting that happen.
Standing, I moved across the room to her. She put up her hands to stop me, but the time for words was past. I brushed her half-hearted attempt to stop me aside, caught her by the back of her neck, and pulled her into a kiss meant to show her everything I couldn’t seem to tell her with my words.