Chapter 9 #2
“Look, I know this is coming at you pretty fast,” Carl said.
“Ya think?” Julie answered with her first show of temper since the danger had passed. Mark counted that as a good thing.
Then Carl cut in. “Normally, we reveal ourselves in a more controlled manner.” He shot Mark a glare, but Mark just shrugged. So he broke protocol. What was Carl going to do? Shoot him? “We need you to not talk about this just yet. There are a lot of people who don’t know.”
“Like Stevie,” Tonya said.
“And the ME,” Mark added. Damned if he knew how they were going to get around the woman now.
Carl shook his head. “No, I brought her in when we found Theo. Had to.”
Oh, right. And completely off point.
“In short,” Tonya cut in, her gaze cutting to the front where Stevie was running around the corner with two paramedics in tow, “we’d really like you to confine your freak-out to us. For now.”
Julie shot the woman a glare. “Do I look like I’m freaking out?”
“Yes, you do,” Tonya said. “Though in a quiet way, which I really appreciate.”
Julie looked at them one by one, ending with Mark. “On a scale from one to ten, I’m about twenty-seven on the freak-out scale. I start screaming at twenty-eight, so don’t push it.” Then she paused, and her body tightened as if bracing herself. “Any other surprises in store for me?”
“A ton, actually,” Mark said and both Carl and Tonya shot him a glare. “But the worst is over. The rest will come once your logical mind comes back on line. It’ll have doubts and questions and whatnot, but that’s all perfectly normal.” He shrugged. “At least as normal as this thing gets.”
She looked at him then, holding his gaze while her eyes seemed to fill with all sorts of things he couldn’t read. But she didn’t speak because the paramedics had finally made it around the scattered body parts to start futzing with Carl.
Mark refused help. That was his norm. Nothing any doctor could do to help him.
But he did stand around trying not to hover as they checked out Julie.
She was good, but it was reassuring to hear them say it.
As for Carl, his shifter healing had kicked in to stop the blood loss, but he still needed stitches.
Not to mention a gallon of hydrogen peroxide.
Tonya had to go to the hospital with Carl. That was her job as beta to his alpha. She covered by claiming she’d take his statement. Stevie tried to grasp the opportunity to interview Julie, but Mark forestalled him.
“Tonya already took our statements. We can come by later to give more detailed information if you like, but for now, she’s been through enough.”
Stevie didn’t like it, but it was hard for anyone to fight Mark when he used his don’t-mess-with-the-dying-bear gaze.
It was cold, hard, and filled with the subliminal threat to tear the guy limb from limb if he got annoying.
The poor newbie caved, though it took him an impressive amount of time to give in.
So Mark turned to Julie as if he were going to escort her back to her house. Even a grizzly could be chivalrous, right? But she was already halfway up the backyard, her face carefully turned away from the body beside her back door.
“Oh, shit,” he mumbled, then jogged to her side. Only, once there, he wasn’t exactly sure what to do. He settled for a lame, “I’m so sorry, Julie—”
She held up her hand. They’d made it inside her house, but he was still a couple steps behind her. He desperately wanted to touch her, but her muscles were rigid, and her shoulders hunched. The body’s way of screaming Back off! even if she was too polite to say it out loud.
He released a sigh. How quickly they’d fallen from where they’d started this morning. Pointless to pretend it didn’t gouge a deep hole in his chest. Dying men didn’t have the luxury of denying their feelings.
“I…I guess I’ll just grab my clothes and go home,” he said. Then he looked at his filthy hands. “Though, maybe I could take a shower first? If you don’t mind?”
He could run home filthy. It wouldn’t be the first time, but he was hoping to delay their separation. Maybe if she got a little time to process things, he could talk to her after he was fully clean. After he looked and smelled like a man instead of a beast. Maybe.
“Uh, sure,” she said, her voice quiet. “Go on upstairs.”
“I won’t take long,” he said, easing around her. Maybe if he could catch her eye. Maybe if she would look at him, things would be okay. But she stepped away from him into her father’s office.
“Take as long as you like,” she said, keeping her back to him.
He waited a moment, hoping she would turn around. He wanted to grab her and force her to face him. He wanted to beg her to not shut him out. Everything would be okay if she just gave it a little time. If they talked it through like human beings.
Except he wasn’t a normal human being and even people who had been raised inside the shifter community didn’t want to date him. He was too volatile and too close to feral. Which meant he really ought to just go.
He didn’t.
He went upstairs and dove into the shower.
He scrubbed himself three times, making sure to clean away anything and everything he could.
He didn’t worry about her safety. There were scores of police handling the mess in the backyard.
That meant he could linger a while in the bathroom just to give her a little more time to process what had happened.
And while he scrubbed, he mentally went through a dozen different scenarios of how he might approach her.
Should he start with facts? Give her the history of shifters as they knew it?
Or how about silence? He could sit and wait for her questions, then answer them as best he could.
Maybe he should feed her? They hadn’t had breakfast and it was already lunchtime.
He could handle her core needs, starting with a honey-cream latte at his house.
He could make her another steak or order a pizza if that’s what she preferred.
Whatever she wanted, he would be there for her.
Eventually, his skin was rubbed raw and he couldn’t lie to himself anymore.
He was delaying facing Julie because he had no idea what to say to her.
But he wouldn’t find any answers until they were face-to-face.
So he stepped out of the cold shower and toweled off.
He delayed a few seconds longer while he buried his nose in her towel.
He gloried in her scent on the fabric and then he walked to her bed.
The scent of sex was still thick here, and it nearly brought him to his knees thinking that it was all over so quickly.
Eventually, he dressed and went downstairs to find her. He tried to scent her, but she wasn’t in the den and with so many people tromping through the house, it was hard to isolate her. Maybe she was outside?
Five minutes later, the ME shook her head as she zipped a body into a bag. “Sorry, Mark. Julie drove off twenty minutes ago. Something about seeing her father in the hospital.”