by Selena Scott
He drew a deep breath and furrowed his brow, wondering if he’d fully gotten his point across or if he’d gotten a little lost along the way.
“I love you,” she whispered.
His eyes shot down to hers and she clapped her hands over her mouth, her eyes wide like she couldn’t believe what she’d just said. Her cheeks turned pink.
“I mean,” she tried. “I didn’t—I meant to say I love you. Dang it! It just keeps coming out.” She rolled and buried her face in the sheets.
He rolled her back over but she kept the sheets over her face. “What did you say?” he whispered.
“I said that I love you.” She peeked her eyes out of the sheet. “Because I do. Like a whole lot. And I’ve been trying to play it cool and not move too fast, but I guess I’ve been holding it in too long because I can’t stop saying it. I love you.”
He pulled the sheet fully off her face and stared at her lips with intense scrutiny. “Say it again.”
Her lips trembled. “I love you.”
Still as ice he moved his eyes back to hers. “No one has said that to me in over four years. No one has felt that for me in over four years.”
She didn’t know what else to say. She was hollowed out and tender, full of stinging, electric vulnerability. Every bit of her past experiences told her to clam up, close herself off and not show him her soft, exposed innards. But he’d just told her that he hadn’t felt loved in four years and there was no closing him out. “I love you,” was the only thing she could say. “Very much,” she added when his face continued to be a mask of bemused, overwhelmed emotion.
He thumped down on her. Not his full weight, which might have collapsed one of her lungs, but enough to make her ‘oof’. She laughed and cradled him in her arms and legs.
“I’m still really scared of what may happen. With you and me. I’m scared of being known as the random girl who Jean Luc LaTour dumped. I’m scared of being judged. I’m scared of getting used to a good thing and then having it taken away. I’m scared of changing my life around. I’m scared of my sisters, Jean.”
“I am, too. They sound like a bunch of gremlins.” He lifted his head, smiling when she laughed. His brow furrowed, a thought occurring to him. “Do we have to, like, see them at the holidays and stuff?”
She went very still. “Are you saying that you want to be around for the holidays?”
He rolled his eyes. “Celia. Yes. I want to be with you. Together. Nobody else. Okay?”
She took a long, shaky breath. “Okay, then, yes. We’ll have to see them at the holidays. And they’ll be bitches to me and rub their cleavage all over you.”
He winced. “Maybe we can go abroad?”
“I love you.” This time, she felt absolutely no trace of regret at saying it. She’d found, over the last few moments with him, that he’d succeeded in doing something again that he’d done before. He’d pulled the blanket over the two of them. Not physically this time, but emotionally. He was really, really good at blocking the rest of the world out. Cutting everything away so that it was just the two of them. And he was right, in this world, they were just two people. Celia and Jean. Right now, the only question she needed to be fretting over was whether she could handle that. And she could. She could handle this love she had for this man. She could give it over to him.
The time would come when certain aspects of their relationship would be held up for public scrutiny. She’d always have to deal with the fact that to the rest of the world, he’d always be Jean Luc LaTour. And she’d probably always be that rando punk girl from Brooklyn who won the lottery and ended up with one of the world’s most famous men. In the public eye, she’d be whatever the tabloids made of her. In her family’s eye, she’d probably be whatever her sisters made of her. But in her eye, in Jean’s eye, under this blanket he’d pulled over their heads, she got to be herself. And that made loving him very, very easy.
He grunted against the words, giving her a little bit more of his weight. She said them again and he gave her more weight. She wheezed, laughing. “I feel like I’m using a magic spell to lure you into submission or something.”
He lifted his head. “You kind of are.”
She lifted her lips to his and said the words against him, into him. He groaned. They’d just had sex not half an hour ago, but they both felt as if it had been a lifetime. His hands snaked under her shirt.
He tugged at her breasts almost clumsily, like his body wasn’t quite working right. He was heavy and out of breath. Beside himself with emotion. Celia knew what she had to do.
She rolled them over using every bit of strength that she had. He sat up as she took him into her mouth, swallowing him down. She sprawled across his legs and lap, one hand twisting and working him and her throat closing around him. He planted his palms and couldn’t help but push his hips up into her mouth.
She came up for air, breathing hard, and straddled herself over his lap. With no preamble, no warm up, she came down on him, taking him all the way inside. She pushed his shoulders back onto the bed and rode him, slow at first and then faster and faster until the bed slammed against the wall. She held his hands against the bed, her fingers twisted in his and stared down at his eyes. His neck was pulled tight and corded, his body tight and stiff, holding himself completely still as she rode him.
She couldn’t hold on any longer. Her body contracted around his and the words tore out of her again. She was coming and telling him she loved him and tightening down like she’d never let him go. He held her still, grabbed her hips and speared up into her twice before he stiffened as well, acute pleasure lining his face.
They fell in a heap and their hands twisted together again. He kissed her long and slow. He pulled back to look in her eyes. “Once I start loving someone, I don’t stop.”
Her stomach tightened and her heart flipped over to one side; she wondered if it would ever go back. “Okay,” she said slowly.
“So you better not change your mind about me.”
“Okay,” she said again, this time with a smile on her face.
“There’s no going back, Celia, to a time when I didn’t love you.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They took the airboat out that evening, when they still had enough light to navigate toward the star on their maps.
The group was both jittery and exceedingly nervous. The men had wanted the women to stay at home, but that argument hadn’t lasted long at all.
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Thea had said. “You’re all gonna head out there to fight Arturo, he’s gonna immediately realize that we’re separated and then he’s gonna come back here to suck our souls out of our ears or whatever he does.”
“She’s right,” Martine had agreed. “Well, not about the ear sucking thing. But the fact that separating would be very dangerous. We need to stay together.”
So they’d all crammed onto the airboat while Jean Luc navigated them through the twisted, green gloom of the Everglades. It was the bluest twilight that Celia had ever seen. Something about the caved hallways made by the Cypress trees seemed to capture the otherworldly glow of the dying sun.
Shadows slid snakelike over the floor of the boat, over their faces. Bats swooped in great, tangled clouds and every so often, they’d see something large and dark slip into the water at that impending roar of the airboat.
Finally, after half an hour, Jean Luc, squinting at the map and at his GPS, idled the boat, flipping it off and landing an anchor into the swamp water.
Night sounds of swamp animals plinked and chirped in the immediate, heavy silence left behind.
Celia couldn’t help but pull closer to Jean Luc. She hadn’t known what to expect exactly, having never been out in the Everglades before. But she hadn’t expected it to be quite this spooky. She hadn’t expected so many tiny islands, so much algae. She hadn’t expected everything to shiver with life.
“This is the scariest place I’ve ever been in my life,” Celia whispered to
Jean Luc who merely smiled and hooked a heavy arm around her.
He pressed his lips at her temple, feeling the thin layer of damp sweat. “I won’t let anything get you.”
“I won’t let anything get you, either.” Her eyes scanned the deepening dark all around them, so she didn’t catch the surprise in his eyes. She was being serious. She honestly meant that.
He tightened his arm around her chest in three rhythmic pulses. One, two, three. It was him silently telling her he loved her. She just kept scanning the dark.
They all knew the plan. They’d talked about it ad nauseum over the last few days. They were silent in their wait for Arturo.
It wasn’t until the moon peeked its face above the Cypress trees that the men started quietly shucking off their clothes.
Jean Luc and Jack both kissed their women before they slipped, naked, into the black swamp water. Tre merely ducked his head at Caroline and Martine. Although once his feet were over the edge of the boat, Caroline couldn’t seem to resist lunging forward and pressing a kiss to the side of his head. He grinned, not turning around, and followed his brothers down.
Celia shivered, couldn’t stop it, as she imagined what it would feel like to be naked in that dark water. To know, without a doubt, that snakes and alligators and God only knew what else could be reaching for them. But they didn’t protest.
They stayed quiet in the water.
The women stayed quiet on the boat. Martine’s knives glinted in the moonlight. They waited and waited.
“Celia,” a man’s voice, clear as a bell, said over her shoulder. She thought for one wild second that it was her father speaking, and then maybe one of her brothers. But no. Of course it was Jean Luc who was speaking to her. Only Jean Luc spoke with that kind of reverence in his tone, that soothing note that made her want to curl up in him like he was a fleece blanket on a cold night.
She turned. And there he was. Her love. He was standing in a copse of trees on a small island that she hadn’t noticed from before. Naked, swamp water dripping off him in rivulets.
“Celia,” he repeated.
She nodded at him and watched in sleepy fascination as he lifted one hand to her.
“Come here, love.” He pulled his hand toward his chest and Celia felt herself tugged toward him, like he had her heart on a string. Well, she thought to herself, he basically did. He had her all wrapped up like a birthday gift. She would give herself to him over and over again. That’s just what love made you do.
The water, she found, wasn’t cold like she’d expected. It had a strange warmth, a mossy scent. It touched her everywhere when she slipped into it, let it close over her head.
She came up on the shore of the tiny island. She expected sand, but it was a knotted, holey system of roots under her fingers that she gripped onto as she pulled herself out of the water.
She heard something like shouts behind her, but she was too busy reaching toward Jean Luc, toward her love, who was reaching back to her where he stood back, amongst the trees.
“Come here, love,” he said again. This time, when he spoke, the image of him before her became grainy for a second, tugging to the side like a projection gone wrong. Underneath the image of his face, another image came through. A different face. Handsome. Darker. Cruel.
She pulled back for a second, but then, he was Jean Luc again and her heart once again swelled with love.
He held out that familiar hand and she held out hers, stepping toward him.
Then a noise nearly split the earth in two. It was an animal’s roar, so deep and so incensed that she knew, inherently, it had come from the gut of whatever beast had made it. It was the most horrifying sound she’d ever heard and Celia found herself clasping her hands over her ears and screaming along with it.
The sound came again and this time it was accompanied by a tremble of the island under her feet. She curled down onto her side and streams of water nearly drowned her as a humongous, dripping animal came to stand over her. She looked up at the grizzly bear standing over top of her and realized then that it was Jean Luc. There was no other being on earth that would stand over her like that, protect her with every cell in his body.
She glanced over at where Jean Luc the man had been standing moments before and she saw a different man. There was a sneer on Arturo’s face, a grim brightness, as if he were looking forward to what was about to happen. Celia felt a hand at her ankle and she jolted in surprise as she looked back and saw Tre dragging her away from the scene. He dragged her into the water and swam her immediately back to the boat where Thea and Martine’s arms came around Celia’s chest and dragged her aboard. The next second, Tre had shifted back into his bear form.
“What happened?” Celia gasped, shivering against the warm air and going to her knees to look back at the island where Jean Luc and Arturo faced one another. Bear vs. Man.
“The plan got royally fucked is what happened,” Thea muttered, reaching into her bag and pulling out two Taser guns and a bottle of mace that she passed around to Celia and Caroline. Good thing they’d been practicing.
“Arturo got to you,” Martine said through clenched teeth, coming to stand. “He lured you off the boat.”
“I thought he was Jean Luc,” Celia muttered.
“I really hate that guy,” Caroline said, her eyes narrowed on Arturo.
He was saying something to Jean Luc, though none of them could hear it. Jean Luc lurched forward, charging the man. But he was no longer standing there, he was ten feet away, and then he was no longer a man. Arturo was a dark, twisting shadow, velvety black and void of all light. He twisted in on himself and grew, larger and larger. The shadow seemed to solidify and then, in a stiff, bracing wind, the shadow blew away, and there stood a bear. Larger even than Jean Luc and blacker than the night.
Jean Luc pulled back for a moment in surprise, and that was all the advantage Arturo needed.
The two bears charged one another and smashed backwards into the swamp. Their collision was louder than a car accident, a roaring crash that tore through the night.
The bears submerged and Arturo came up first, roaring and spraying water. He lashed out with one horrible set of claws and turned the black water red with Jean Luc’s blood. He came next for Tre and got another clawful. Blood sprayed through the air like a firework. Jack was next, charging with ferocity and fury.
“NO!” Thea screamed, but it was too late. Jack was clawed across his chest, torn open to the pink meat underneath.
Tre was up and onto Arturo’s back, shoving him into the water. Jean Luc was there, too. No holds barred, Jean Luc’s great bear jaw closed around Arturo’s throat. There was a wheezing sound and then a roar and Arturo’s claws found Jean Luc’s gut and Jean Luc had no choice but to release.
Celia saw, with horror and understanding, that Arturo was coming for the women. He must have been able to see that the men were too strong for him as a pack. There was no picking one of them off. But the women, all he had to do was get to them and then this would all be over. He’d win.
Half of Celia considered jumping into the water toward the monster that was Arturo, reaching out to him, making it easy. If she sacrificed herself, then her friends, and Jean Luc, would no longer be in danger.
Hell to the no.
She’d spent the last 20-something years convinced that she wasn’t worth anything, that she didn’t matter. There was no way in hell she was sacrificing herself right when she’d actually gotten a lid on all that crazy self-doubting horseshit. There was no way in hell she was going down without a fight.
Arturo was closer now, ten feet from the boat.
Celia lunged backwards, toward the motor. She did exactly what she’d just seen Jean Luc do and she started it up. It roared to start and the boat lurched. Martine, understanding what she was doing, helped to heft the anchor up out of the water, but instead of laying it on the boat floor, Martine used every ounce of her muscle to swing the anchor over her head and launch it toward Arturo.
The great, horrible bear howled and submerged under water as the teeth of the anchor lodged in his sides, at his ribs.
The airboat skittered away twenty feet, keeping at a distance.
It was just enough time for Jack, Tre, and Jean Luc to gather to one another in their bear forms, shoulder to shoulder on the banks of the island.
***
Jean Luc had never known pain like this. Not even from the car accident that had taken Hugo’s life. This was the feeling of his soul threatening to leave his body. He knew it. There was something about the swipe of Arturo’s claws that threatened more than just the body. He stood there on his back feet, chuffing, his claws wheeling out at the night air, shoulder to shoulder with his brothers.
He could feel Jack’s pain. He could feel Tre’s. He knew now that just like the first time they’d shifted voluntarily, it was up to him to bring them along. He had to ignite this. This thing they’d practiced a hundred times over the last weeks.
He forgot the pain in his gut and across his back, inflicted on him by Arturo. He blocked out the sounds and smells of the environment. There was only room inside him for a few things. There was room for his own soul, that indescribable singularity that made him him. There was room for Jack and Tre, his new family, the extensions of himself in the form of a clan. And there was room for Celia. For the healing, growing, wildly audacious love that had grown between them.
It was that that Jean Luc concentrated on as his gaze narrowed on the thrashing beast in the water, trying desperately to dislodge the anchor in its chest. Jean Luc focused himself, rooted in all the things that made him who he was, and he reached out, not knowing what he would find.
Detecting and gripping onto Arturo with his mind was like trying to grip a snake around the middle. Jack and Tre’s feelings were alive and warm-blooded and pulsing. Arturo’s feelings were dead and dry, hissing and twisting against Jean Luc’s grip. He felt the stinging bite of Arturo’s mind trying to fight its way free of Jean Luc’s. He trembled and almost lost control. But then there was Jack at his side, gripping on with his mind as well, and Tre, too. The three of them held tight, side by side.