by Selena Scott
“I made my peace with all this a long time ago.”
“Your peace with what?”
“That I’d never have a man in my life who could know all my secrets. Who could really know you boys in a real way. Who could really know me.”
Though Raphael had long suspected that, hearing her say it out loud wilted him. He didn’t want to be the reason his mother led a solitary existence. He didn’t want to be the reason that she didn’t get to experience what he had with Natalie.
The thought struck him dumb. He was still getting used to how he felt about her and wasn’t used to having such cavalierly intense thoughts about her. He shoved that line of thought out of his head—he needed to be here. Now. With his mother.
“But Bauer already knows all about us,” Raphael argued. “He knows more about being a shifter than we do. He’d never, ever spill our secrets. And you have feelings for him? Ma, it’s perfect.”
“No.” She shook her head and washed her hands. “You’re not listening. I’m telling you that I closed that door a long time ago.”
“You’re saying that a long time ago you decided not to let anyone in and so you’re just gonna stick with that decision?” Nothing could have made less sense to him.
“Raph, I made that decision when I was in a clear state of mind. To go back on it now would be reckless. Especially not when I’m all muddied up.”
“Muddied up?” He struggled to understand. “You mean you’re in love?”
She glared up at him, equal parts outrage and honesty in her eyes.
“Raphael,” Bauer growled the second he slid through the back door.
The two Durants who were squared off in the kitchen both jumped a good six inches and swung around to Bauer.
It was clear that he hadn’t heard much, if any, of what they were just talking about. It was clear that Bauer’s thoughts were in a different, more urgent, much darker place.
“What is it?”
“There’s been someone in the woods. I need your nose.”
Raphael was at Bauer’s side in a moment, but it took a long while for his thoughts to leave his mother. Even after Bauer and Raphael had both discreetly shifted and slunk out into the woods to track the strange scent left all around their property, Raphael thought of his mother’s lonely heart.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Natalie was… confused.
She looked from the blood-red roses on the white-tableclothed table to the handsome face sitting across from her. She looked at the candlelight all around them, the piano music playing from one corner of the fancy restaurant.
She replayed his words in her ears: I think I’m falling for you.
Yes. She was very confused.
They’d talked about this. A few different times. They were not gonna be that for one another. They’d crossed it off the list. She’d been operating, for the last few weeks, under the impression that anything truly romantic was off the table for them.
“I’m sorry… what?”
“I, uh, think I’m falling for you,” Paul repeated.
Natalie and Paul had seen one another three other times since he’d broken things off with her. The first time had been just a casual lunch, the second time they’d caught a movie and walked to a bookstore afterward, the third time he’d swung by her office when he’d known she’d be getting off work and persuaded her to have a bite to eat with him.
And now there was this dinner. That he’d carefully called her about and arranged with her. Well, not that carefully, considering he hadn’t told her to dress up and she was now wearing baggy corduroy pants in the fanciest restaurant in Boulder. It was a miracle they’d even let her in.
He’d said he had something really important to talk to her about which was the only reason she’d said yes to the dinner. Otherwise, she would have preferred to do what she’d been doing for two solid weeks: have dinner with Kaya and then sneak out to see Raph or have dinner and a quickie with Raph and then sneak back in to her house. It was a perfect system and she saw absolutely zero need to mix things up.
But Paul had been insistent that it was really important and she’d relented, offering up her Wednesday night to him in the name of friendship.
Friendship, however, was apparently not on the menu tonight.
Natalie self-consciously ran her hands through her hair and then leaned across the table so that she could speak as quietly as possible. “I—Paul—what?”
“I know. It’s probably kind of a shock,” he said on a little, deprecating chuckle.
“You could say that. You told me that you aren’t attracted to me!”
“I never said that,” Paul said carefully, and she knew, from his exacting tone, that they both knew that whatever he’d said, that had been exactly what he’d meant. “I just didn’t think that we’d make a good couple.”
“And now you think differently?”
The waitress came by and lifted the wine Paul had ordered out of the silver bucket of ice next to the table. She wordlessly topped up their glasses. “Your appetizers should be out in just a moment.”
Natalie internally groaned. Paul was always ordering appetizers and aperitifs and three courses and two desserts and digestifs and making meals last three freaking hours. She already felt dizzy from the wine and from Paul’s about-face and needed her main course to be there, like, now. She didn’t want to be ladylike and bite delicately into the two bites of whatever appetizer he’d ordered. She wanted a burger! Or a burrito! Or both! Why hadn’t anyone invented a thing where you could eat both at once?
To calm her nerves, Natalie downed half her glass of bubbly wine and promptly found that it had the opposite effect. She pushed the glass away and took a deep breath.
“I don’t know exactly what I’m thinking,” Paul confessed, leaning across the table toward her. “I just know that I’ve missed you these last few weeks.”
“Missed me? We’ve seen each other four times! That’s twice as much as we used to see one another!”
“I know.” He looked down at his wine glass and looked up with a hooded expression she’d never seen before. “I couldn’t stay away from you.”
She blinked.
Was she to believe that over the last few weeks Paul had been grappling with some sort of raging internal desire for her? That she hadn’t noticed in the least? Was this what it felt like to be pursued sexually by Paul? Sitting without touching in a movie and then hooded eye contact across a fancy table?
Her brain involuntarily flashed back to three nights ago at Raph’s house. They’d been chatting in his kitchen, eating bowls of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Without warning, he’d set his bowl aside and fallen onto his knees in front of her. He’d kissed his way up her skirt and made her scream indecent, unholy words at five o’clock on a Sunday evening. Something quaked within her at the memory.
Natalie had been attempting to convince herself that sleeping with Raphael hadn’t changed everything in her life. But for better or worse, sleeping with Raph had at least changed her metric for sexual desire. She knew what it felt like to be wanted, truly wanted, and she was almost positive that that feeling wasn’t present, in this restaurant, with her and Paul.
The waitress came back and set down, to Natalie’s eye, two fussy half-bites of something brown and green. Natalie didn’t care what they were and she didn’t care about being polite. She picked up her fork, stabbed one, and then the other, and jammed the whole forkful in her mouth.
Paul blinked at her in surprise but wisely didn’t comment. Natalie swallowed, barely tasting her food and then washed it all down with the second half of her wine glass.
Things were truly swimming now.
“Natalie,” Paul said gently. “Have I upset you?”
“No. Not exactly. I’m just confused. What exactly are you saying to me? Be precise, please.”
“Of course. Yes. I owe you that. I know in the past I’ve been… elusive about what I’ve wanted from you.”
Natalie bar
ely choked back a snort. Elusive was one way of putting a year and a half of completely withholding fuckery.
“I want,” Paul continued, elongating the pause as if what he was going to be saying next was of utmost interest to anyone within hearing distance, “to look down at my phone and see a text from you. I want to call you before I go to bed. I want you to be the person I see in the morning. The holidays are coming up. I was thinking that it would be nice to take you to my folks’ house for Thanksgiving—”
“I spend Thanksgiving with Kaya and the Durants.” She hadn’t meant to cut him off, but she was instantly repulsed at the idea of abandoning her family at the holidays.
“Right. Yes, I knew that. Well, maybe the day after Thanksgiving you could come, then.”
The day after Thanksgiving she and Kaya and the Durants stuffed themselves with cold turkey sandwiches and played bocce ball in Elizabeth’s backyard, but she restrained herself from mentioning that.
“I guess what I’m saying is that I want to be a couple with you. Cook dinner together, stay at one another’s houses…” He raised his eyebrows suggestively and Natalie almost laughed.
Could he have picked a more sterile euphemism for sex than ‘staying at one another’s houses’? She really didn’t think so.
Thankfully their meals came and Natalie turned her attention to her food, eating methodically through each item on her plate. The food sat heavily in her stomach, grounding her even as her thoughts whirred.
“Natalie, I’m really having trouble deciphering your reaction to all this,” Paul said gently after she’d completely wiped her plate clean.
“That makes two of us.”
“It would be natural to be confused in your position,” he said understandingly.
For some reason, all the understanding in his tone was really freaking annoying to her.
“I need time, Paul. I need to process this. I can’t promise anything.”
“Of course!” A hopeful look jumped across his face and Natalie felt suddenly terrible about guzzling the wine and scarfing down the food and wearing corduroys to the very fancy meal he’d planned. She realized that at least some part of him had expected her to reject him outright and that softened her toward him. “After all the time I made you wait, I figure the least I can do is offer you time. As much time as you need!”
It was a sweet offer, but more than anything, it just served to remind Natalie of how long she’d waited for Paul. She wondered how much of that time he’d spent already knowing that he didn’t want her. How much of that time he’d stalled, telling her that it wasn’t going to work.
Paul signed the check and they walked out of the restaurant together. He didn’t seem to notice that she was wobbly on her feet. He walked her to her car door.
She couldn’t get in without asking. “Paul, what changed? Why now?”
He stood too close to her, brushing her hair out of her face. “I’m not sure exactly. But I think that maybe with the pressure off, once you knew that we couldn’t be together, you showed me a whole new side of yourself. You were more relaxed and fun and confident and I got to see, I don’t know, the sexy side of you.”
Natalie almost laughed when she realized what he was saying, what he couldn’t know he meant. She covered her mouth with one hand, the mirth sliding away, and dizziness swooping in.
“Okay,” she said, when she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Her hand was still covering her mouth, perhaps defensively, so Paul pressed a dry kiss to her cheek and walked backward to his car. “Call me when you know, Nat. I’ll wait. I’ll be patient.”
She pulled herself into her car and turned it on, because she knew he wouldn’t drive away until she did. As soon as his taillights faded away, she pulled out her phone.
He answered in between the first and second ring.
“Hey.”
Raph’s rough, familiar voice was a balm to her irritated, roughed-up ego.
“Are you busy right now?”
“Are you drunk?”
“Yes. How can you tell?”
“Nat,” he laughed. “You sound like you’re talking to me through a mouthful of marbles.”
How could he know that she was drunk, through the phone, after one sentence, when Paul had let her get in the front seat of her car to drive herself home?
“I accidentally drank too much at Frache.”
“What the hell were you doing at Frache?”
“I’ll explain later. Can you come get me?”
“Of course. Did you drive there?”
She was confused. Why else would she be calling if she hadn’t driven? “I’m sitting in my car now.”
“Okay. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” He paused. “Lock the doors of your car, okay?”
She nodded, even though he couldn’t see her, and followed his direction, locking the doors of her car and closing her eyes.
Her eyes skittered open an untold amount of time later when Raph knocked on her window. She blinked at him and immediately unlocked the car. She turned to climb over the center console to the passenger seat and was relieved when his strong hands gripped her waist and helped her over.
She rolled her head to one side and watched him buckle into the driver’s seat, messing up all the settings on her steering wheel and her seat adjustment. “You’re in running clothes.”
“I jogged here so that we wouldn’t have to leave your car in the lot.”
Oh. That was so freaking sweet. And so him. He’d rather run the three miles to the restaurant than leave her car overnight. She sighed.
“What?” he glanced over at her and caught her staring. “Do I stink?”
“You stink good,” she informed him. He laughed but she wasn’t lying. She’d come to love the stink of his sweat. It was the way he smelled when they were having very energetic sex.
“So, what were you doing getting drunk at Frache?”
“Paul,” she answered simply.
The mood in the car changed so swiftly that even drunk off her ass, Natalie could sense it. “You were out for a fancy dinner with Paul?”
“I didn’t know it was going to be fancy.” She tugged at her baggy corduroy pants to show him. “He didn’t tell me. I felt like an idiot walking in there but by the time I got there he was worried if I left to change we’d miss the reservation.”
“He didn’t tell you to dress up?”
“He doesn’t tell me anything.” She rolled her head to look out the window. “Except for tonight. When he told me everything.”
They were driving along a dark street, pools of lamplight warming up the car and receding in rapid succession.
“What did he tell you tonight?”
“Are you taking me to your house or my house?”
“Oh.” He put the brakes on at a four-way stop. “I was driving to my house, but I’m happy to take you to either place.”
“No. I want to go home with you. I’ll just wake up Kaya if I stumble in at this hour.”
He flipped on his blinker and started the drive to his house. “What did Paul tell you tonight?”
Her first inclination was to drunkenly mock Paul’s words, but before she could, the earnestness in his expression flashed through her face and she found that even if she was angry with him, he didn’t deserve her ire. Nat scraped her fingernail against some dirt on her window before realizing that it was on the other side of the glass. “Paul wants to be a couple with me.”
Raph merged neatly onto a bigger road, but he was driving just a little too fast. “He asked you to be his girlfriend?”
“Oh.” Natalie thought back to the conversation. “Not really. No. He didn’t ask for anything. He just told me how he felt. He can’t stop thinking about me. He thinks he’s falling for me. He wants to do couple stuff with me.”
Raphael mumbled something that sounded weirdly like Stapler Paul can get in fucking line, but she knew that couldn’t be right and blamed it on her drunkenness.
�
��What did you say to him?”
Nat shrugged. “I had no idea what to say. Hence the getting drunk. I asked for time to process all of it, then I ate my bodyweight in pasta, then I stumbled out to the parking lot and called you.”
Raph seemed to relax a little and at the next red light, he reached across the car and held her hand, palm to palm. It was a friendly, comforting gesture and Nat found herself cradling their joined hands on her lap like they were a small animal she wanted to coddle.
“Are you petting me?” he asked after a minute.
“Maybs.”
“You are drunk.”
“I’m going to regret it in the morning.”
“Nah. We’ll get you some water and take a walk around the neighborhood. You’ll sober up and hydrate and be just fine.”
“Always taking care of me.”
“You do at least fifty percent of the care-taking around here.”
That was probably true. She looked out the window and was surprised when they pulled into his driveway. That hadn’t taken any time at all. She was scrabbling out of her side of the car when suddenly Raph was there, tossing her arm over his shoulder and practically carrying her up the walk.
“On second thought, maybe you are going to be hungover in the morning.”
“Told ya.”
“Either way, let’s make sure to get you hydrated.”
He planted her on his couch and came back a few minutes later with a tray that had ice water, iced tea, and hot tea. There was also a bag of pretzels that he commandeered for himself. She downed the ice water in one go and then picked up the hot tea to warm her fingers. She expected him to turn on the television but instead he just watched her. He reached down and picked up her cold toes and tucked them under his leg.
“What do you think you’re gonna do about Paul?” he asked, his voice carefully devoid of much emotion, as if he didn’t want his opinion to sway her too far in one direction or the other.
Nat shrugged and took a sip of her tea. “I don’t know. I liked him for so long, you know? I wore those grooves pretty deep. I think it would be pretty easy to fall back into it.”