Chapter 15
Disgust. Horror. Nausea.
Carl saw all that and more fight for dominance on Becca’s face. Her eyes widened, her mouth grew slack, and he knew the moment she fought the urge to vomit.
He hadn’t been self-conscious about his physical state until that moment.
Bear shifters were fairly casual about nudity, but Becca’s reaction filled him with shame.
All of the judgmental thoughts he kept locked down rushed forward, swamping his consciousness.
He was a violent predator, unfit for civilization.
He disgusted normal people, and they were right to shun him.
He’d lost control again, and now he was exposed as a monster.
His jaw grew tight and his grizzly growled. He hadn’t intended to make a sound. Hell, he’d thought he’d completely locked himself down. But apparently he’d made a noise. It must have been bestial because Becca’s eyes shot back up to his. She was pale, and he saw her swallow convulsively.
On instinct, he reached out to steady her, but she flinched back.
Well, that answered that. Up until that moment, he hadn’t realized how deeply she was embedded in his life. He hadn’t consciously decided to propose to her. He hadn’t faced the Gladwin shifters and declared her his mate. But he’d been thinking about it.
She’d flinched back from him. Which meant that she’d seen him for who he really was and was revolted.
He struggled for something to say, anything that would ease the moment or reassure Becca that he wasn’t a monster. But he was a monster and his grizzly wasn’t going to let him apologize for it. Neither was the alpha in him. Which left the man standing there, mute and embarrassed.
He let his hand drop away from her elbow, then awkwardly reached for his pants.
But he couldn’t put the damned things on over all the blood.
And he sure as hell wasn’t going to strut his bloodied self inside.
So he turned to Tonya, who was watching the entire byplay with banked intensity.
At least she understood the monster inside him.
“Mind holding the hose?” he asked as casually as he could.
Her brows arched in surprise. “It’ll be cold.”
“Whatever,” he answered. He wondered if he’d even feel it. He felt totally numb inside.
“Sure,” she said as her phone buzzed and she quickly answered it.
It took him a moment to grab the hose from the garage and hook it up to a spigot beside the driveway.
He was excruciatingly aware of Becca watching from just off the porch, her eyes still huge and her mouth pressed tightly closed.
He wondered what she was thinking. Was it like staring at a train wreck?
She just couldn’t look away? Or was there something more to the way her gaze followed him whatever he did?
She didn’t say a word and he couldn’t guess.
Meanwhile, Tonya put away her cell and grabbed the spray gun part of the hose. “So how’d you do it?” she asked.
“What?”
“Declare him legally incompetent. You did it so Pam could have everything, right? Otherwise she and the kids would be out and penniless.”
He nodded as he positioned himself at the top of the driveway. “He thought he was a bear.”
Tonya frowned. “But he is a bear. Or was.”
“The judge didn’t know that. And neither did the therapist who evaluated him. And if he hadn’t been such a blowhard, he would have known to shut his mouth when being videotaped.”
Tonya’s laugh was the last thing he heard before icy water hit him full force.
It should have cut off his breath. It should have had him cringing against the frigid cold.
Instead, his gaze ended up on Becca, still standing by the porch with his coffee mug in her hand.
She watched him steadily, her eyes slowly softening as her mouth lost its tight cast.
What was she thinking? What did she want?
He almost went to her. Fuck the wet and the blood, he needed to touch her right then. But he didn’t get far. The very moment he took a step toward her, she flushed and turned away. He wanted to call her back, but she didn’t give him a chance.
Long before he figured out what to say, she disappeared back inside the house.
* * *
Becca didn’t know what to think. Worse, she didn’t know what to feel. The sight of Carl covered in blood had made her physically ill. She held herself together by willpower alone, but by the time she’d been able to function, Carl’s eyes had gone flat.
She knew that look. She was raising a boy, after all.
It was that moment when they just turn off and you know nothing you do or say will get through.
So she stood there waiting, racking her brains for something that would make it better.But before she’d found it, he’d stepped under the spray of water.
It was spring in Michigan, which put the temperature at a few notches above freezing.
He hadn’t even flinched when the stream caught him.
He’d just stood there taking the punishment while all that blood washed away.
Never before had she seen anything more beautiful.
A man covered in gore, slowly cleansed in the sunshine.
Inch by glorious inch, his body had emerged, flexing golden in the light, his muscles rippling with power.
She knew every curve and hollow of that body, had kissed every part of him last night.
She had lain underneath, felt him strain above her, and had climaxed around him.
This beautiful man had worshiped her last night, and she had reveled in it. In him.
That was the man who was revealed to her beneath the spray. That was the man who looked at her with such yearning that she had felt herself go wet and achy. Her nipples had tightened and her belly had contracted just from the way he looked at her.
But they were in public and he’d just killed a man in front of her.
Hell, the grizzly body lay just a few feet away.
And yet she’d wanted to strip naked and step under the water with him.
She’d wanted to feel the cold sluice down her while his body warmed her.
And if he had bent her over and taken her right there on the front lawn, she would have loved it.
She was that aroused.
Which was insane.
So she’d run inside rather than give in to such an immodest display.
She rushed inside and headed for the kitchen without any thought of what she was going to do or say.
She couldn’t even figure out what she was feeling.
Lust? Certainly. Disgust? Maybe. But not at him.
She was appalled by herself for wanting someone who was so violent it terrified her.
She was a civilized woman, and now she saw him as a primal man in all his brutal glory.
She wanted him even as she was repulsed by the violence of him.
She could have reconciled the two if this were a simple attraction.
Who didn’t love a hot, dangerous man? But the real problem was the power of her desire.
This wasn’t a lukewarm interest. Or even a fascinating diversion.
No, this was hunger—deep and raw. This was desire without inhibition.
This was a need that went beyond anything she’d ever felt before and it terrified her.
She’d never be able to control a passion like this.
She couldn’t imagine fitting it into her regular life.
This was something that would consume everything around it.
Her life, her nephew, herself. She could lose herself in a man like Carl.
And as a single parent, she had no business losing herself in anything except Theo.
“Are you okay?”
She looked up from the kitchen sink to see Alan standing in the door, his expression wary.
She swallowed and cleared her throat. “Um, yeah. I’m fine.”
He took a step into the room. “Forgive me, but you don’t look fine. You look scared.”
“Do I?” Get it together!
Alan was quiet as he poured himself another mug of coffee, but then he leaned against the counter to study her with a quiet intensity.
“He’d never hurt you.”
That was something she felt to her bones. “I know.”
“It’s natural to be freaked out. I grew up here, and challenges like that still bother me.”
“The violence?”
He nodded. “It’s pretty raw.”
He understood. She flashed him a weak smile. “It’s primal, and I’m not used to that.”
“No one is. Not even them.”
That was reassuring in a twisted kind of way. So she took a breath and reached for the coffeepot to refill her own mug. Except the carafe was almost empty.
“I’ll make some more,” Alan offered, but she stopped him.
“Please, let me get it. I think I need to be useful.”
He started to argue with her, but something in her face must have changed his mind, because he backed off. He pointed to the cabinet right above her head. “Everything you need is in there.”
“Thanks,” she said. And then she went about the business of making coffee.
It was a simple task that gave her hands something to do.
Which allowed her fears to ease their grip enough for her to talk a little more rationally.
“So when you shift, how exactly does that feel? Do you think? Can you control yourself? I mean, could you be a bear and drive a car?”
He snorted at that image, and she flashed him an awkward smile. “I’m sorry to be so ignorant.”
“It’s not ignorance. They’re reasonable questions, but you’re asking the wrong person.”
She finished pouring the water into the coffeemaker and switched it on. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t shift.”
She looked up, startled. “What?”
“It’s a genetic lottery. Shifters have human and animal DNA.
Too much animal, and they shift young and often go full beast by adolescence.
It’s the hormones. When they kick in, the beast can be too much to control.
Or in my case, I seem to have only the human side.
I’ve never shifted.” He shrugged. “I’m not even all that hairy. ”