by Selena Scott
“He would have…” Caroline started, and then with a dizzying, nauseating dose of reality, realized that she had absolutely no way of ending that sentence. She turned away and busied herself with the blankets she was unfolding, ignoring the eyes of her companions until they all eventually turned away from her.
It was then, looking up at them—Jack, who’d just brought a load of firewood in from outside, Martine who was changing lightbulbs—that Caroline realized how little she actually knew of all of them.
“What do you all do for work?” she asked, turning to Jean Luc. “Well, I know what you do for work, but everyone else.”
“Demon hunter,” Martine elected, raising one hand.
“Right,” Celia muttered, shaking her silver head. “Not to compare myself to the demon hunter and the star quarterback in the room, but I’m just a librarian in the Brooklyn Public Library system.”
“Former quarterback,” Jean Luc corrected.
“No shit,” Jack mused, looking back at him with surprise. “That explains the muscles. I thought I recognized you from somewhere.”
“Yeah, the forty million billboards,” Tre said. Not unkindly.
“That also explains all the Nike crap,” Jack observed, looking at Jean Luc’s complete outfit of athletic wear.
“They just give it to me,” Jean Luc said, a little embarrassed and not quite sure why. “I have endorsements with them.” He cleared his throat. “Jack, what do you do?”
“Me? I’m a man of leisure, myself.”
Everyone in the room snorted their laughter. If Jack was a rich man, they’d all eat their hats. Just wasn’t quite the way he rolled. They all could tell.
He grinned. “Nah, I guess you could call me a treasure hunter. That, last night, wasn’t exactly the first map I’ve ever followed. First demon, though. First bear shifter transformation,” he finished thoughtfully.
“Jack Warren?” Martine asked, her head cocked to one side. “You’re Jack Warren?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ve heard of you. You were the one who discovered that Aztec treasure back in ’04.”
“That’s right,” he repeated. He frowned. That one had hurt. He’d discovered it, but he’d also been knocked out and robbed before he could notify anyone of what he’d found. The whole thing had been plundered all to hell when he’d come to. All that history, gone just like that. He hadn’t gotten over the sting of it yet. The thought of it curdled inside him. He’d been testy and irritated since that morning. And he wasn’t usually a testy or irritated man. He hadn’t liked how easily Thea had just loped right out the door on those long legs of hers. And he especially hadn’t liked that he hadn’t gone after her. “Tre? What do you do?” he passed the baton and the spotlight.
“Oh.” The back of Tre’s neck, at least the part that wasn’t covered in colorful tattoos, lit up as red as his hair. He shoved his thick glasses up his nose a little further. “I’m in I.T.”
“Is that right?” Jack was unconvinced. “You ‘pull a lot of jobs’ in I.T.?” he asked, quoting Tre’s phrasing from earlier.
“Ah, yeah, well, I guess I’m more of a hacker-for-hire than I am an I.T. guy, but it’s a lot of the same skills,” he insisted, a little defensive.
“What kind of things do you hack?” Caroline asked. He could feel her pretty brown eyes on the side of his face, assessing him, and it was making him nervous. She was so perfect and neat in her fancy, rich-lady clothes. He felt like a total scrub in comparison with his faded gray T-shirt and black jeans.
He cleared his throat. “Whatever my clients want. Bank accounts mostly.”
“You’re a thief,” she said, and if his discomfort hadn’t clouded his hearing, he would have realized that there was fascination in her tone, not judgment.
“Call it what you want,” he said, his voice dropping to an octave so low they could barely hear him.
“I’m just a housewife,” Caroline said to Tre’s turned back. “But Peter’s hired a lot of people to do the things I’m not very good at, so there’s not always very much for me to do.”
Tre turned back just in time to see a strange, fleeting expression on Caroline’s face. Something like loneliness, he thought.
The group moved from one room to the next, opening up the house to the sun and wind, airing it out. They also ran linens through the wash and took stock of the pantry.
“I’m going to head to the grocery,” Celia told them around lunchtime. “I’ll bring back some pizzas, too.”
“I’ll go with you,” Jean Luc volunteered, wiping water from his mouth where he’d just been slurping it straight from the faucet. He hated dirtying a glass if he didn’t have to.
“Oh, no, that’s okay,” Celia shook her head, not sure why she was saying no.
“Do you think it’ll be alright for me to go that far?” Jean Luc asked Martine.
She studied him for a moment. “It won’t be comfortable, but it’s a discomfort you’re all going to have to get used to. It’s a part of you now.”
Jean Luc nodded, the matter settled in his mind, and followed Celia out to the car. He could tell she didn’t want him to come, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to let a public librarian pay for all the food they were going to need.
They were quiet on the ride into town. “You alright?” Celia eventually asked as Jean Luc shifted uncomfortably in the passenger seat. Her rental Ford Fiesta was comically small for him. Even with the seat pulled all the way back, his knees were up to his chest. He’d put the window down and Celia was fairly certain it was so that he could let his giant, muscled arm have a little room out the window.
“Just getting used to my new reality,” he said, planting one huge palm flat on his chest.
“It hurts? To be away from them?”
“Ah,” he searched for the words; he’d never been good at words. “I think what that psycho did yesterday still hurts. But being away from them just kind of tugs.”
He liked this chick. She was unique and funky with all her piercings and tattoos. Something that was generally a turn-off for Jean Luc, but on Celia, it definitely suited her. She was cute, like he could put her in his pocket if he wanted. When they unfolded themselves from the car, Jean Luc realized that she barely came up to his ribs.
“How tall are you?” he asked in surprise, looking down at her silver, silky hair.
She peered up at him, her eyebrow raised. “How tall are you?”
They glared for a second, before breaking into shy smiles. Jean Luc went and grabbed a shopping cart.
Celia noticed him rubbing a hand over his chest every few steps, the unhappy set of his mouth.
She dumped things into the cart and so did he. Everything she chose he just ended up grabbing twice as many of that same thing. “I eat a lot,” he told her, the tips of his ears turning pink.
When they were almost all the way through the store, and she was feeling a little bit more comfortable, just the tiniest bit, she spoke up again.
“It’s kind of cool, if you think about it,” she told him, grabbing an economy-sized pack of paper towels. “This connection you have with Jack and Tre.”
“Hmm?” he asked, reading the back of a sports drink box.
“Yeah, it’s like you instantly have two new brothers or something.”
She was turned away, grabbing laundry detergent, so she didn’t see the way the pain lanced across his face at her statement. Like she’d stabbed him. And he almost felt as if she had. He’d come here to say goodbye to Hugo. Not to replace him. The thought made Jean Luc sick to his stomach, physically ill. In that moment, he missed his brother so much he could barely breathe. He resisted the urge to put his hands on his knees and bend over to gasp for air. A few deep breaths later and he was just barely staving off a panic attack. Just barely.
Celia, oblivious to it all, turned back to him and tossed the laundry detergent in the cart. “You know?”
“No,” he responded curtly, not even bothering to look
her in the face. “I don’t know.”
Celia pulled up short as she watched him push the cart down the aisle away from her. His shoulders nearly took up the entire aisle.
Rude! Super rude!
For a minute, she was incensed with anger. How dare he talk to her like that! Just because he was famous and rich didn’t mean that he got to treat her like she was nothing. But then the wording of her question echoed back to her and she realized what she’d said to him. Everyone in the world knew about the car accident that had ended Jean Luc’s career as a quarterback and taken his brother’s life.
Oh God. And she’d gone and run her mouth about him having new brothers? She winced, one hand over her face. Oh man, Celia. Good one. Just great. Really top-notch friendship-making.
She groaned and forced her feet to start moving. She’d need to apologize. Like yesterday. As one of ten kids, Celia hated apologizing. It was something that her parents had made her and her siblings do automatically, without any sort of reflection, simply to put some kind of ending punctuation on an argument or dispute. Apologies to Celia were rote and meant nothing.
It was something she was working on.
Because apparently, the rest of the world felt differently about that particular point.
She took a deep breath and rounded the corner of the aisle, the apology on the tip of her tongue. She found the faster she spit it out the easier it was.
But she stopped short.
Because there was Jean Luc, smiling like she’d never seen him smile before. Well, in person. On TV and in advertisements, she’d seen that smile plenty of times. It really lit that plain face right up. His heavy brow slashed across his eyes and his long face went from an oval to much more square. His teeth were a white slice against his chestnut beard. And man, he looked big. All ripped and leaning on the shopping cart, one hip cocked out and the toes of one of his shoes balancing on the floor.
Celia finally tore her eyes away from the vision of Jean Luc smiling to finally narrow in on what exactly Jean Luc was smiling at.
Celia’s burgeoning butterflies abruptly caught pneumonia and died. He was smiling at a woman whom Celia could only categorize as ‘Instagram model’. She was gorgeous in a quirky way. In tight clothes with shiny hair and looking utterly fuckable. She leaned toward Jean Luc and said something to him that had him both laughing and scratching at the back of his neck at the same time.
Celia rolled her eyes hard.
Of course.
She took a moment to be brutally honest with herself. Here it was. Real Talk Time: She was currently fighting with a little bit of a crush on the ripped, good-smelling, gigantic, wildly famous man standing ten feet from her. And somewhere, somewhere deep in her heart, she’d fostered a tiny little fantasy about what it would feel like to be the One He Chose. Out of all of them. All the women who inevitably threw themselves at him. In the fantasy, he was on this crazy map-following-demon-fighting-bear-shifting-adventure with her and he’d inevitably think, You know what I want? A punky, bookwormish nerd with piercings and clothes from the dollar bin at the Salvation Army. Yum.
She watched him nod at something that the Instagram model was saying and Celia kissed that little fantasy goodbye. Waved adieu as she kicked its burning ship out in the ocean. If she had had bagpipes she would have played Amazing Grace just so that dumbass fantasy would have known it was good and buried.
That was over now.
Jean Luc LaTour was a superstar. He probably waded through pussy.
Celia had spent so much of her life feeling like she was just one amongst many. Her parents had been too busy and too distracted to make her feel any sort of special. She’d had to do that herself. She knew one thing for sure, it was dangerous to assume that Jean Luc would ever see something in her that he hadn’t already seen in a thousand other women.
She was special. She repeated this to herself ten times in a row before she approached the cart and smiled tightly at the two of them. It didn’t matter how these two demi-gods saw her. She, Celia Lamplighter, was special and smart and kind and just a little mixed-up. Who cared? She wasn’t going to lust after him anymore.
Wanting Jean Luc LaTour was suicide.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Come nightfall, Jack’s mood still hadn’t lightened. And that in itself irritated him. He was a fast healer. From everything. Pain and heartbreak had never left a dent on him. But it was midnight, he was stuffed full of grilled chicken and veggies, he had this whole adventure sprawling out in front of him, and he was grumpy.
All because some little chickadee had decided that his priorities were not her priorities.
He didn’t even know her, for God’s sake!
He. Did. Not. Know. Thea. Redgrave.
He was not the kind of man who liked to keep a leash on a woman at all. He was a true lone wolf. He’d been that way for twenty years. Jack liked to walk into a poker game knowing exactly how much he had to put on a table, so to speak. A man simply couldn’t do that if he was making tabulations for two.
He had never had any ambitions for a woman past a pleasant, sweaty evening or two. Which was why it perplexed him as to why he was so bothered that this Thea Redgrave apparently had the exact same laissez-faire attitude.
She’d made the decision that was right for her. Jack respected that. Hell, he lived by that code himself. So why did he keep replaying the moment she’d disappeared out the front door? What made her so special?
He rolled over so as not to face the bed she’d slept in the night before, and laughed humorlessly at the wood-paneled wall. He knew exactly what had made her so special—
“You’re killing me.”
Jack sat bolt upright as his door swung open and Tre sagged against the doorjamb, his red hair a burning blaze in the silvery moonlight and his eyes squinting without his glasses. He wore no shirt, just pajama bottoms, and Jack saw that his entire torso and arms were covered in tattoos.
“‘Scuse me?”
“I said, you’re fucking killing me with all this obsessing you’re doing in here.”
Jack furrowed his brow. “What are you talking about?”
“I mean,” Tre said and knocked his forehead into the doorjamb just enough to make a few good thumps, “that that asshole sent that blue light straight through our idiot-gentlemanly hearts and now you and me and Goliath are all cosmically connected. Which means that I can feel you in here obsessing about something when I’m tired as hell and I just want to sleep. So I came in here to tell you to let it fucking go and go to sleep already so that I can finally relax, alright?”
Jack blinked at Tre for a minute. “Damn. This shit really runs deep, doesn’t it?”
“You mean this link between us? Yeah. Did you feel it when Jean Luc went into town today?”
“Yeah. I felt it.” And he’d hated it. A displaced estrangement from even his own body. He’d wanted, needed, Jean Luc to get back here already. When the big guy had returned, two bags of groceries in each arm, then and only then had Jack felt like he could breathe again. It was terrible. Especially for a lone wolf.
Tre studied Jack for a second. “It’s the girl, isn’t it. The one who left?”
“Huh? Yeah. She’s making me toss and turn. Not sure why, though.” Jack dragged a heavy hand over the back of his neck. He was exhausted.
“You have a crush on her. And you wish she’d stayed,” Tre said, shrugging, as if it really were just as simple as that.
“Is that right?”
“From where I’m standing.”
Jack looked up at Tre then, really looked at him. This whole time he’d been looking at him as more of a boy than anything else. With his blush and glasses and millennial skill set. But Jack couldn’t deny that standing in the doorway with his five o’clock shadow and skeptically raised eyebrow was a grown man.
“Not used to having my thoughts picked apart like this,” Jack said.
“Hey, I’m just trying to get some shuteye.”
“I’ll try to ke
ep it down on my end,” Jack agreed.
Tre nodded and knocked his hand against the doorjamb. A kind of goodbye without having to say goodbye.
“Hey!” Jack called after him, making him pause.
“Yeah?”
“Why do you think I’m not keeping Jean Luc awake?”
“The guy ran seven miles when he got home from errands, ate a chicken and a half at dinner, and weighs 260 pounds. Something tells me that giant isn’t having sleeping problems.”
They grinned at each other for half a second before Tre banged the doorjamb one more time.
***
Jack forced himself into a fitful sleep, more for Tre’s sake than his own, and awoke with a blue light in his eyes.
He blinked blearily and realized he was standing in the middle of the room, sort of swaying. He was in his underwear and knew that he should probably get some shoes on. And pants and… no need.
He followed the blue light out into the hallway, palming the walls as he passed like he was aboard a rolling cruise ship.
He hesitated first outside of Tre’s door and then outside of Jean Luc’s, wondering if he should wake them and invite them along on this journey of his, but there went that blue light and damn. Couldn’t let it go, could he?
Always had been a sucker for those shiny, pretty things.
Like Thea. Beautiful and delicate and strong and shiny. He swayed for a second on the back porch, barefoot and shivering in the night even though it was warm.
Thea.
Huh. He stuttered on the steps, wondering, for a single clear moment, what the hell he was doing in the backyard, down by the lake. Shouldn’t he be in bed? Wouldn’t Thea tell him to get back inside?
Didn’t matter. Girl was gone and that blue light felt like home. It beat in his chest and led him into the forest. It was so easy to follow. Just step by step by step. He ignored the stinging of the raspberry bushes against his exposed arms and legs and didn’t even notice when he stepped into the springy moss, bitterly cold with the clear spring water, fresh from the earth.