The Shifter's Embrace

by Selena Scott

  Tre flopped his exhausted ass back onto the bed. Caroline Clifton on the prowl, he mused. Hearts were about to be breaking all over Southern Florida. He fell asleep with a smile on his face, the scratching sound of pen on paper echoing in his ears.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The next week fell into a rhythm that was exhausting for everyone. The shifters were training and practicing nearly every daylight hour with the exception of when they were eating enough food to feed half a nation.

  Thea, Caroline and Celia had their work cut out for them as well. They spent their mornings scouring the books that Celia had acquired, looking for any sort of information that might guide them through this. They struck gold a few times. They prepared lunches and dinners, considering it only fair, and in the afternoons, they did training of their own.

  Thea had thought it would be a good idea to make sure they were fit enough to hold their own against Arturo and the other two had eventually agreed. Celia, who was used to the requisite New York City walking, and who liked to run anyways, wasn’t having that hard a time with it, but Caroline was doing her royal best not to be dead weight. They ran, worked out, did yoga, swam, and, at Thea’s behest, practiced some self-defense moves on one another.

  It was a strange life. For Celia, it only got stranger at night, when she’d be tucked into the side of one of the world’s most famous men. Sometimes in his bed and sometimes in hers. Hers was much too small for him, but for some reason, they both liked that. It meant that they had to sleep tangled, breathing each other’s air.

  They were both routinely exhausted at the end of the night, so it was morning time, with dawn touching their faces and shoulders, when they kissed and rolled and sweated and bit and ground out their desire for one another.

  It was after one particular lust fest that, still sweaty and hearts racing, Jean Luc didn’t get out of his bed to get ready for the day. Instead, he adjusted her so that her back was to his chest on their sides. Slowly, with one of his huge hands, he petted at her hair, traced the shell of her ear, sniffed curiously at her hairline, exploring her.

  “I wanna see a picture of your family.”

  Immensely enjoying the moment up until then, Celia’s heart froze, her knees automatically drawing up to her chest. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Just curious. Show me the most recent picture of all of you.” He didn’t ask, because he’d discovered, little by little, that if he asked, she waffled back and forth, ever unsure of the right answer. If he told her, she’d roll her eyes and do as he asked. It wasn’t an attempt to control her. It was an attempt to make things simpler for her. He was pretty sure she liked it.

  She sat up and grabbed her phone off the nightstand. She needled the corner of the phone into one eye and peeked at him with the other eye. “Are you sure you’re ready for my origin story? Don’t you think it’s sexier if I’m mysterious?”

  He laughed. He looked at her curvy, colorful body, those eyes the size of silver dollars, and he couldn’t imagine anything that would make her less sexy. “Show me.”

  She sighed and scrolled, passing over the phone. “Us at Christmas.”

  Jean Luc peered down at the image. “Jesus, there’s…” he tried to count.

  “Eleven kids, two parents. All the kids in the first row are the next generation, my nieces and nephews.”

  “Do you know all their names?” he asked incredulously.

  She laughed. “I’m not gonna dignify that with a response.”

  The family was arranged in rows, though if there was any order beyond that, Jean Luc couldn’t see it. Dark hair and dark eyes, every single one of them. Except for one. Celia’s hair, longer in this photo, was dyed a violent shade of ice blue. She wore a tight blue T-shirt and high waisted jeans. Every sister around her was wearing some form of animal print. Jean Luc was dimly aware of so much cleavage from every woman in the photo there was barely a place to safely rest his eye. So he just went back to Celia.

  She did not look happy in the photo.

  He was aware that she was nervous, lying next to him. In fact, her eyes were on the side of his face and not on the picture.

  “One of these is not like the other, huh?” she laughed humorlessly, addressing how different she looked from her family.

  He grunted, barely acknowledging the comment. He used his thumbs to zoom in on her parents.

  “Lamplighter,” he mused over her last name. “What are your family’s origins?”

  “Italy. When my grandfather came over his last name was Lampionaio. Lamplighter in Italian. He changed it to the English version at Ellis Island.”

  He absorbed that information like it was fresh rain over parched ground. He zoomed out on her chubby, smiling parents and zoomed in on her brothers.

  “Your family is French Canadian, right?”

  He grunted a yes, unwilling to change the conversation topic just yet. “You grew up in Brooklyn?”

  “Born and raised in Bensonhurst,” she nodded.

  “That’s an Italian neighborhood, right?”

  “Yeah.” She nodded again. “Used to be completely Italian. Still is, a little bit. My folks and aunts and uncles are still there. In the same houses they grew up in, even. Pretty much an entire city block of Lamplighters. The neighborhood has changed a lot, though. Lot of young families moving in. Hipsters too. Trendy bars replacing the bodegas. That kind of thing.”

  “You still live in that neighborhood?”

  “No. I work at the Central branch of the library, so I wanted to be able to walk to work. I live in Crown Heights.”

  He clicked off the phone and handed it back to her, rolling to his side and playing with her hair. “What kind of house do you live in?”

  She knew what he was asking. A common question for New Yorkers. “A brownstone. Fourth floor walk-up. It’s tiny. My downstairs neighbor is kind of a jerk. Loud music and stuff. But my landlord has the bottom two floors and I really like her. She lets me access the backyard through her kitchen in the summer if I want to go out there and hang out or read.”

  “Sounds nice.” He paused for a second. “How tall are the ceilings?”

  “What, are you thinking of moonlighting as a real estate agent or something?” She leaned back and squinted at him.

  He laughed. “Just trying to figure out if I’m gonna be able to fit in your tiny apartment.”

  She went a fascinating shade of pink as she planted her palms and sat up a little bit. She cleared her throat. “You would definitely be the largest guest I ever had…”

  Her answer was diplomatic enough to confuse him. He felt like they were having two different conversations.

  Celia’s heart was pounding out of her chest. He was pretty much telling her that he wanted to keep seeing her after all this was over. She, on the other hand, hadn’t even allowed herself to think of a time when she was back in Brooklyn, working her nine to five at the library and meeting up with friends in the evenings. Watching movies in her bed alone on rainy Sundays. Cooking for one.

  Her brain had simply not let her remember her other life.

  But apparently he’d been thinking about it. Life after the maps. What was going to happen if they all survived through this. And apparently he’d been thinking about visiting Brooklyn.

  She cleared her throat. “You have a place in Manhattan, right?”

  “Mmhm.” He shifted, not seeming to want to answer her questions any more than she wanted to answer his. “What does your family think about all this?”

  “Oh.” Her head was spinning a little bit. “Uh, I don’t know. I haven’t told any of them.”

  He blinked at her. “But you’ve already been out of town for three weeks. They don’t think that’s strange?”

  “No. They don’t know that I’m out of town.”

  “You left town to follow a mysterious map to a location in the woods and didn’t tell anyone where you were going?” There was a note in his voice that Celia had never heard before. She suddenly wondered wha
t it would have been like to play football against him. Terrifying, probably.

  “Trust me. They would not have cared where I was going. And they would have ridiculed me to no end if I’d been honest. It was better this way.”

  “I find that really hard to believe.”

  Her temper rising a little bit, she flicked her phone on again. “Didn’t you see the picture, Jean? Look at this. I am obviously the odd one out. Look, my sisters on either side of me aren’t even touching me. I’ve never been like any of them and they’ve never known what to do with me. Growing up in a family this big… I was just invisible. And so was everybody else. My parents never had enough time or energy for us, it was lord of the flies. I got out as soon as I could and yeah, I mean, I’m not like completely estranged from them. But it’s better for me if I’m away from them. My own person. I can’t count on my family to do anything more than look at me with confusion and occasionally disdain.”

  He was quiet for a long time. The sunlight through the window was fully bright now. Celia could hear the others starting to wake up. Eventually, one of his hands glided along her collarbones. “Is that why you have the tattoos and the piercings and the hair? To set yourself apart from them?”

  She could have just said yes. It was the most obvious and easy answer there was. It was the answer she’d given other people when they’d asked before and she’d never regretted it. It was, in part, true. But she found herself telling him the truth instead.

  “No. I got all this because… I’m not a naturally confident person. And when I didn’t have it, when I just looked like my sisters, I found myself about half a step away from disappearing completely. Just black hair and black eyes and nothing-special face. Sometimes I couldn’t even see myself. My first tattoo was this one.”

  She pointed to a small crescent moon on her collarbone that was now part of a much larger, colorful design. “It was to remind me that even when other people can only see one small part of me, like when you’re looking at the crescent moon, the whole thing is still there. Even when I feel invisible, I’m still alive, you know?”

  He waited, not wanting to break the spell. A few moments later, she continued. “It worked. I felt more confident with it, every time I saw it. So I just kept going. And I realized that little by little, I didn’t look like my sisters anymore. I looked like me. And I looked like someone who made her own decisions. I finally looked on the outside the way I felt on the inside.”

  “I love how you look,” Jean Luc murmured, his lips moving against her shoulder where he’d pressed himself. He could have winced at his statement, but he didn’t. She was so eloquent and well thought out and then he just says that. But whatever. It was true.

  She seemed to relax a little bit. “I could tell. From, you know, the pretty much constant boner you have whenever I get naked.”

  He laughed and, to her delight, blushed a little bit.

  “It surprises me, though,” she continued. “That you’d be into this look.”

  He furrowed his brow at her and she furrowed hers right back.

  “You have to admit I’m not your usual type,” she said.

  “I don’t have a usual type.” He pulled her a little tighter into him, ignoring that raised eyebrow of hers.

  “I’m sorry, is ‘supermodel’ not a type?”

  He kissed her shoulder. “I only dated one supermodel. So no. It’s not a type. It’s a fluke.”

  “Yeah, right! You’ve dated like twelve supermodels!”

  He sighed. “Says the tabloids. I haven’t been with a tenth of the women they’ve linked me to.”

  She turned in the circle of his arms so that they were nose to nose. “So tabloids just completely make stuff up?”

  “Sometimes. And sometimes they’d get a shot of me with a woman and they’d crop out Hugo from the picture. He was the one with all the game. He dated, like, everybody.”

  Celia had noticed that over the last little while he’d been able to bring up his brother much more casually in conversation. Though he always got quiet afterwards, his eyes heavy and sad.

  “Women were drawn to him?”

  “Yeah. Everybody was. He was hilarious and kind. And he had a great nose for character. He knew right away who was a snake or who was worth having around. There was no one else like him.”

  His voice went hoarse on the last word of his sentence and Celia watched as his eyes reddened into slits. If she could have quadrupled her size, she would have. All she wanted was to lay out over this man and protect him from the world. From anything that had ever hurt him.

  She did her best. Celia slipped her arms around the barrel of his chest and tangled her legs with his. Their foreheads came together first, then their noses and last, their lips. They were sweet kisses, though, not devoid of passion, but not defined by it either. His breath hitched and Celia knew it was from sadness, not from desire. For some reason, that drew her to him even further. She pulled back from the kiss and buried her face in the warm cove of his neck.

  I love you.

  The words were up from her gut and on her tongue so fast she almost said them out loud. She gulped them back down, but her body was seized with the terror of almost having said it. She gripped him even harder, her heart racing in her chest.

  His hands traced gently over her and she could feel, with great relief, that he was lost in a cloud of his own thoughts. She was safe for now. He hadn’t noticed that she’d damn near lost her mind.

  She opened her mouth to say something comforting to him, something about Hugo. I love you. She clapped her mouth closed. Horrified. What was happening? Why did she feel like her heart was expanding in her chest? As if soon there wouldn’t be room for her lungs? I love you.

  “You know,” he said, his voice a low rumble in his chest that was so suddenly precious to her that it brought stinging tears to her eyes. “I was thinking—”

  “Hey, QB!” Tre’s voice called to Jean Luc from outside the bedroom. “We got practice in five. Peel yourself off your cute-ass woman and get the hell out here!”

  Celia sighed, too shy to ask what he was going to have said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The morning of the new moon, almost a month after they’d arrived in Florida, Celia woke up to a warm wet petting between her legs. Jean Luc sleepily, lazily worked her into an explosion before slipping into her, moving hard and sweet inside of her body.

  They breathed hard and clutched at each other, slipping over one another’s skin. Even when it was over, when he was pulsing inside of her, they clutched hard, reticent to let go.

  The sun had barely risen over the edge of the earth yet and neither wanted to get out of bed. Martine hadn’t been completely certain about the timing of things, but she had guessed that the full moon would be a time that Arturo might resurface.

  They’d all agreed that it would be time for them to try for Arturo. It was time to attempt to locate the place marked on their maps. Last night had been a nervous, quiet evening, with almost everyone retiring early.

  Celia felt like their maps were lottery tickets and they were all waiting to see if their lives were going to be changed for the good or the bad come midnight. Either they were going to be able to capture Arturo, or Arturo was going to hurt or kill one of them. She didn’t fancy the odds. She hadn’t witnessed the bear shifting practice, but she’d noticed changes in them.

  The three men had all gained muscle and size. Jean Luc was bigger than she’d ever seen him. And even wiry Tre was looking pretty yoked these days. There were also differences that were harder to see and pin down. The men seemed infinitely more comfortable with one another, and though they insisted that they couldn’t speak to one another telepathically unless they were in bear form, sometimes they would all burst out laughing at once, or grimace or roll their eyes. They had some sort of subtle language between them. It was a brotherhood. And the closer they got, it seemed the less and less wary of the dangers ahead. They’d come through this together. They were g
oing to fight together, no matter what happened.

  As the weeks had worn on, Celia felt that she’d become the last hold out on people who weren’t so sure about this plan. Everyone else, seeing the changes in the men, had become much more gung ho about the idea of capturing Arturo.

  Now that the day was upon them, though, Celia was sure that she could taste some tension in Jean Luc’s kiss. She could feel the rising pressure of impending action within him. He was readying himself.

  “Game day,” she muttered into the curve of his neck, his pulse still racing from their sex.

  He chuckled. “Sure enough.” He rolled to his back. “Except this isn’t a game.”

  “Maybe,” she said, tracing one incredibly deep line of a muscle on his stomach, “we should treat it like it is. What are some rituals you had before big football games? We can do some of those.”

  Jean Luc scratched at his beard that he’d let get longer and longer throughout their stay. It was almost full mountain man now. Celia loved it. “I was never very superstitious. But Hugo was. Whenever it was a home game he’d come over and make me breakfast. We’d shoot the shit. He’d be so nervous. It was always me trying to keep his mind off the game instead of the other way around.”

  “I could make you breakfast.”

  He turned to her and smiled. Over the past few weeks, Jean Luc had gotten used to the twanging slices of grief in his gut every time he brought up Hugo to Celia. He hated it, but also, he knew that he needed it. Talking about his brother was infinitely better than never bringing him up, pretending he’d never existed. And Celia always seemed to know just the right thing to do. When to cuddle him. When to cry with him. When to laugh. When to move the subject along.

  “I’d like that.” A vision flashed in front of Jean Luc’s eyes, as clear as if it were a movie. Celia in her house in Brooklyn that he’d only imagined and never seen. Her in slippers in her kitchen, one of his shirts on past her knees, making breakfast for the two of them. In the silly little fantasy, he could hear her neighbor’s loud music through the floor. The window was open to autumn air. Maybe they were planning to walk to the park after breakfast. Or to take the train to a movie. The fantasy lasted only a second or two, but the intensity of the emotion within it was so dense and so layered that Jean Luc’s breath caught. It was as if he’d just seen a picture of their future. A future he really wanted to have.