by Holley Trent
Something about her wasn’t typical. She wasn’t even doing anything, but she was coming on to his radar screen way too damned strong. Every one of his predatory senses was spinning out of whack.
He needed to get the hell away from her and give his brain a chance to stitch itself back together.
“Hey,” he said weakly. “Need to, uh… Need to make a phone call. I’ll be right back.”
Keeping his gaze locked on her, he backed warily toward the office.
She sneaked a little more creamer into her mug in small, timid movements like he’d get upset with her for using it.
He didn’t care. In fact, she could have all of it.
She looked good at his table.
In his shirt.
In his house.
His inner beast was chanting, “Don’t go. Stay right there. Don’t go. Stay right there,” and Calvin wished the wolf didn’t have a say.
He did, though. The wolf was part of the whole of him, and whether the more human parts of Calvin respected it or not, he needed to have his needs met.
Fighting with himself was exhausting.
He turned on his heel and tamped down the growl rumbling in his chest.
“Chill out, asshole,” he muttered under his breath, and he didn’t know if he was talking to the wolf sharing his psyche or the man part.
CHAPTER FOUR
Julia was studying the backside of the dishwasher detergent bottle when Calvin’s prickling energy made the hairs of her neck stand on end. The same thing happened whenever Claude or Charles was nearby and she hadn’t heard their approach.
Odd.
She rubbed her exposed skin and turned to meet Calvin’s narrowed gaze. She didn’t know the man as far as she could throw him, but already, she could tell that wasn’t a good look on his face. Needing to at least appear to be competent, for her safety’s sake, she fixed her face into a cultish grin and tried not to shrink under the weight of his stare.
Looking at him was hard enough. They didn’t make them like him where she came from: dark-haired and swarthy as a pirate with piercing hazel eyes that seemed too astute. He had a strong, masculine jaw that hadn’t seen a razor in a few days and a gait that announced that he wasn’t to be messed with, except by the very bold and very brave.
She was neither of those, yet there she was, bobbing about in his kitchen and holding up a heavy bottle of detergent. She swallowed her nerves and cleared her throat. “Um. Where I come from, dishwashers are…twelve-year-old girls. Not machines.”
She’d been happy to grow out of that job, not that the next job was much better. Scouring endless piles of dishes was a far preferable task than doing men’s laundry. She’d nearly worked her fingers to nubs scrubbing out the stains. Sometimes, she wondered if they were so hard on their clothes on purpose to punish her for being good for little else.
Oh, stop it. You know better.
She couldn’t keep letting herself be oppressed by people who weren’t even in the room. She held the soap up higher and tried to keep her expression serene.
Unmoving, Calvin was still staring. Then finally, he leaned against the counter a few feet from her and crossed his arms over that broad chest, and she could take a deep breath.
“Where did you come from, exactly?” he asked, not exactly kindly.
His long fingers drummed against the sides of his arms and she watched them, entranced. Big hands. She’d always been fascinated by hands…or perhaps, the trouble they could get one into. Looking never got people into hot water, but hands were almost always suspects at the scene of a crime. Vaguely, she wondered what sort of crime scene Calvin’s hands would make of her. Would they loosen her plaits? Would they find their way up her skirt, curiously seeking out the anatomy she’d been taught to keep hidden at all costs?
Would they find her face? Would his thumbs trace along her jaw and tickle her until nervous laughter fell out of her? Until she sighed?
No man had ever made her sigh, so she didn’t know why’d she’d even thought it except that the novelty of him was making her silly.
Or maybe it was something else.
Maybe it’s what Charles promised?
She didn’t know if she could believe it. Where she came from, there was no such thing as “Fate,” except the sort that confined people to subservient roles and made them internalize that way low down was where they belonged.
She drew in a breath and uncapped the detergent. Calvin had asked her a question, and she needed to answer. “I’m from an unincorporated community near Kofa, Arizona. Lived there all my life.”
“That wasn’t what I was asking,” he said after another lifetime of silent, brooding staring.
She couldn’t keep looking at him if she wanted to think straight. That penetrating stare of his made her feel beyond inane, and she wasn’t silly. She knew that because John had told her so. Her education may have been lacking, but that didn’t mean she was unintelligent.
Naïve, perhaps, but no one could fault her for that.
“How did you end up at my house?” Calvin snapped, and she somehow managed not to flinch.
Her brothers had promised he wouldn’t hurt her. She wanted to believe them, and so she would until she couldn’t anymore. Trouble on her heels or not, she wasn’t going to stay if she was just going to be afraid. She’d run if she had to.
“I called the agency to find out how much having you on the payroll would set me back, and they said they didn’t send you,” he said.
She didn’t dare look at him. Having nothing to say in her defense, she concentrated on squirting a precise right amount of detergent into the washer receptacle and then screwed on the cap.
“Want to guess what they told me, Miss Liar Ingalls Wilder?”
As that play of words landed in her brain, some sound came out of her that was half laugh, half sob.
She stabbed the button that said POWER WASH, then pushed the dishwasher door shut. Although she preferred the silent-treatment strategy, the efficacy of that particular action plan had already waned down. “I don’t need to guess,” she murmured.
“I bet. So, what’s with the scheming? You trying to set me up for the okey-doke?”
“What in the blue blazes does that even mean?” She nudged the under-sink cabinet door closed with her knee with more force than necessary and gathered up all the righteous indignation she could muster. She crossed her arms over her chest just like him and stuck her chin out. There was no way in hell she was going to let him malign her character when he didn’t even know her. “I’ll have you know that I never explicitly stated that I was from the agency. That was your assumption.”
“And you didn’t disabuse me of the notion. That’s what my lawyer calls lying by omission.”
“I may be a lot of things, but a liar will never be one of them.” Furious, she hurled a flimsy, ratty dish sponge toward the trash.
It missed its target, but that didn’t matter.
“Don’t you dare accuse me of such.”
She hated herself for letting her voice approach that stratospheric pitch, but her integrity was one of the few things she owned outright.
“Don’t get your panties in a wad.” He scoffed and, rubbing the scruff on his chin, rolled his considering gaze toward the ceiling. “Or is it bloomers? What do you have under that skirt, honey? I bet you’re wearing see-through mesh with bows at the sides.” He cocked his head to the side, and his grin went feral. “Or maybe a thong printed with little cartoon cacti, Miss Arizona.”
“That’s none of your concern.” Turning her back to him, she snatched up the dishrag.
Sticky countertops. Dirty floors.
How hard is it for a man to clean up after himself? It’s like he was raised by wolves or something.
“Pity. You know, if you just wanted an autograph, I could have given you that on the porch. You got me to open the door. So, congratulations.”
She tossed the rag into the sink and glowered at him. “Autograph? What
would I do with your name on a piece of paper? Certainly, not even a… A… ”
What did Charles call Claude yesterday when Claude had eaten the last of the jerky?
It’d been a good insult, she remembered that much, and a bit tawdry. She needed to work on her insult repertoire if she were going to live amongst society’s most jaded.
She snapped her fingers when she remembered it. “A douche!”
Calvin raised an eyebrow.
She pointed at him. “Not even a douche like you would be so pompous to think such a thing has value.”
His mouth fell open and he stared at her through narrowed eyes. But then his shoulders shook from his laughter. “Are you kidding me? This some kind of candid camera program where you come in to get me all riled up and show the folks at home what a jackass I am in private?” He scanned the corners of the room, ostensibly for the nonexistent camera.
“There are no cameras in here.”
“Oh, there are a couple, but don’t let that concern you. If you don’t want an autograph, and you’re not from the media, then what do you want? Child support? I’m usually pretty careful, but there may have been a time or two when I was twenty-two and too drunk to remember the morning after.”
Her jaw dropped due to his entirely too-practical explanation, but she quickly fixed her face and squared her shoulders. “We’ve never made love.”
“Made love, she says. La-di-dah.” He made a twirling motion with one hand. “How ’bout sex? Have we had any of that?”
Her hands balled into tight fists on her lap, and she ground her teeth, counting away her anger. She wasn’t going to let the man enrage her. There must have been something redeemable about him besides his looks, or else he wouldn’t have gotten fed into Charles’s magical mate hopper as being “appropriate” for her. She didn’t want to believe that someone as careful and thorough as Charles had gotten it wrong.
Maybe he made a mistake. That’s the only thing that’d make sense.
Calvin was certainly someone else’s. He had to belong to some person with a high tolerance of inflated senses of self-importance.
“We haven’t made love,” she said neutrally after a minute of self-calming. “We haven’t had sex. We haven’t…screwed. We don’t have a shared offspring, if that’s what you’re getting at. And I don’t want your money. I’m used to not having any.”
And she didn’t want him. She’d had her mental guard gates locked up tight since before she’d arrived. Her brain was certainly waving little mental warning flags regarding the situation.
But oddly, her heart didn’t seem to be responding to her brain’s frantic warnings about the frustrating jerk in front of her. Her heart was perfectly at-ease, and for the life of her, she couldn’t understand why that would be…
Unless it was because of one of those defiant desires she’d always been taught to avoid.
Sweet Desert Rock’s leader, Martin Davis, had always repeated that young people shouldn’t seek the fantasy of romance. He’d said that romantic love was a falsehood devised by creators of storybooks and that it was as apocryphal as witches and magic.
He’d said that hearts were the weakest parts of people and that they got people in trouble.
She’d always believed Davis was talking out of his rear end, but he was wrong about magic. It existed. Claude had it.
So maybe he’d been wrong about other things, too.
Maybe magic and romance were different forms of the same thing, and neither was supposed to make sense.
Her dangerous curiosity about that man in front of her kept her frozen in place and waiting to see what would unfold.
“Pardon my candor, honey,” Calvin snarled, “but what do you want?”
“To be safe,” she was going to say, “while I figure things out,” but as she opened her mouth, he wagged his index finger preemptively.
“Nuh-uh-uh,” he drawled in a patronizing tone that made her want to toss that germ nugget of a sponge at him.
She’d never been the violent sort, but there he was, taunting her and getting under her skin.
She was on his turf—in his territory. She’d never liked that powerless feeling of having to play a game by someone else’s rules.
But her brothers had told her it was important.
She tried to force her agitation out of her by rolling her shoulders back and shaking her hands at her sides. That didn’t seem to help. She was still angry, still raring for a fight that wouldn’t even be fair.
“Give it to me honest,” he said. “Who are you and what do you want from me?”
She was getting so confused and frustrated by the mixed signals between her brain and heart. An indelicate sound rattled her chest: a growl. She was so busy gasping and covering her mouth that she gave up her intended mission of finding something decent to throw at him. Not that there was anything handy that would fly well besides that sticky dishrag. And not that her aim was any good. Girls back at the compound got put in the queue for reprogramming if they showed any true penchant for athleticism. Them being slow and weak made running away more difficult.
She hadn’t truly understood that until that moment, standing in front of the dark-eyed agitator.
“You want honesty?” she asked through clenched teeth. She wasn’t going to let the man bowl her over and dampen what was left of her spirit.
She was done with people talking to her like she was a little fool.
“I’ll give you the honest truth.” She strode to the living room and didn’t speak again until she was staring at the woods through the glass door. She couldn’t see the driveway from where she stood, and certainly not the road. If her brothers were still out there, they were too far away to see.
It didn’t matter, anyway.
They couldn’t help her.
The tension fomenting between her and Calvin was something Julia had to work through on her own.
Fake it till you make it, she thought ruefully.
“I was raised in a cult in the Arizona desert,” she said in a level tone. “I recently left after learning I was up next to be assigned to be an old man’s wife.”
“Wait. You—”
“My mother is borderline insane because parts of her DNA don’t play nice with each other.” Julia was going to keep talking until she said everything she needed to. He could believe it or not. She didn’t care. “She’s the descendant of a Nephilim. My father—my biological father—is a fallen angel named Gulielmus who’s now a powerful incubus.”
“You’re a—”
“There are lots of people like me.” Julia rolled her gaze to the ceiling and studied the swirls in the paint as she gathered her thoughts. “Cambions. Demon spawn, basically. I’m meant to be a succubus, but I don’t want that, so not only am I running from my human stepfather who has to report to his cult leader, but also my father, who apparently reports to devils even more powerful than him. My brothers brought me here because demons and angels and psychics are apparently blind to this spot, and my brother Charles swears you’re supposed to be my match and that you’d make sure I’m safe.”
It was quite a story. Coming out of her mouth, she realized how ridiculous it sounded.
Months ago, she wouldn’t have believed any of it.
But there she was. Living every word.
Calvin said nothing.
When Julia pulled her gaze down from the ceiling, she found him staring unblinkingly at her, and not in a kind way.
Well, then.
She cleared her throat and steeled her spine yet again. “For the record,” she said softly, “having met you, I am certain my brother is wrong about you.”
Not wanting to stay there a minute longer, she opened the door and headed toward the woods.
She needed some air or to run.
She didn’t know which, but she had to get away from him or else that disagreement between her brain and heart might turn her inside out.
CHAPTER FIVE
Say what, now?
>
Calvin was pretty sure she’d said demon spawn, but maybe he’d heard her wrong. “Demon spawn” was what the Arizona Desert Devil baseball team’s fans called themselves. Maybe his dingbat inner wolf, who was pressing at all of Calvin’s psychic seams for want of his attention, was distracting him so badly he couldn’t think straight. His wolf actually didn’t care if she was a little goofy. That was the human part of him’s hang-up.
But those things she was talking about?
Definitely didn’t exist.
If they had, certainly a Wolf would have encountered one at some point and spread the word.
Running their mouths was one of the three things Wolves were really good at. It ranked just behind locational instincts and being naked.
“Well, hold on a minute,” he called at her back as she strode up the path.
He couldn’t let her go until he’d made heads or tails of what she’d said. His gut was telling him there was something strange underfoot, and maybe that had a little something to do with that word salad she’d spewed at him about how she’d gotten there. It had sure as shit got the wolf part of him excited.
She didn’t slow.
He sighed and kicked up a bit of speed.
Chasing after a woman. Who the hell am I anymore?
Catching up to her, he got her turned back toward the house and nudged her toward it. He suspected the woman didn’t have her faculties about her, and he wasn’t going to be responsible for any harm that came to her on his property. There had to be someone he could call and have her collected if she were dangerous, but his gut was telling him she wasn’t dangerous. Just lost.
Okay, dumbass, the wolf part of his consciousness chimed in, clear as a bell.
Startled by the clarity and force of the reproach, Calvin leaned against the front door after seeing her into the house.
The wolf wasn’t usually that loud.
While Calvin generally had an awareness that part of him was there, the voice of it wasn’t so congealed and pointed.
That was probably another of the things his mother had been warning him about. She’d said the wolf would try to take over if Calvin didn’t do what needed to be done.