by Moira Rogers
He gave her a smile. “No, probably not. Jackson’ll get you fixed up, though you don’t have to carry if you don’t want. I have a permit.”
“You gonna follow me everywhere I go?” It sounded like a tease, a joke, one meant to cover up the desperate thread of yearning.
He didn’t know if his words would engender relief or wariness. “For now? Yeah.”
“At least you’re cuddlier than a shotgun.”
Despite her words, she looked deflated, like she had back in the office when Anna had stormed in, cussing and fussing about how she’d make Josh pay. “Hey, it’s temporary. Then you can get back to all your normal stuff.”
“This is my normal stuff.” She smoothed her fingers over the blanket beside her. “I’m genetically programmed to be a damsel in distress.”
“That’s bullshit. You can be whatever you want to be.”
“Maybe.” It came out too fast, and her laugh was forced. “I’m sorry. It’s hard to be upbeat.
This night is…too much.”
Too much, and pulling her in too many different directions. “Sleep, then. We can talk more in the morning.”
“Can I…?” She swallowed. Peeked up at him. “Are you going to laugh if I ask for a hug?”
The question damn near broke his heart.
He sat on the edge of the bed and wrapped one arm around her. “I’m here. Not to run your life or tell you what to do, but to protect you. To keep you safe.”
She trembled, the shiver working through her in a wave as she squirmed closer. “I stood up to him,” she whispered. “I know it’s probably not impressive to the rest of you, but I was so proud.”
“You should be.” He stroked her hair and pressed his lips to her temple. “I’m proud of you.”
Her breath escaped on a rusty, tired laugh. “Living with Anna can make a girl feel…small.”
“Here’s a secret, sweetheart. Anna makes everyone feel small sometimes.”
“Yeah?” She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder with a soft sigh. “It’s better than Kat. Kat made me feel stupid.”
He had to laugh at that. “You’re in good company there too.”
“I had to take introductory math last year so I could qualify for the culinary program at my college. I stopped asking her help after the third assignment. I know she was trying to help, but…”
“I understand.” Kat tended to get wrapped up in her head and forget that whoever she was talking to probably had no clue what she was saying.
Sera’s body was soft, tucked against his side. Warm and pliant, and relaxing more every moment as she responded to his careful touches. “I did okay, though, for a high school dropout.”
So prickly, defensive about all those little things that weren’t so little to someone like her.
“What’re you going to do this summer?”
“Work, I guess.” Her eyelids had begun to droop, though she didn’t sound tired. More like lazily content. “See if I can find my own place. Maybe with Anna. I don’t want Kat to renew her lease just so I can keep living there.”
She’d probably buy the damn building if she thought it would keep Sera secure. “You could ask Nick about the apartment over the bar.”
“It’s only got one bedroom.” Sera smiled. “I like Anna, but not quite that much, contrary to rumor.”
“I meant if you wanted to live alone.”
Her smile faded. “I don’t think they’d let me live alone.”
Julio frowned. “Who, Kat and Anna?”
“Them. My dad. Alec. Every other dominant I stumble across regularly. Maybe even your brother.”
Maybe even him. “It isn’t that they don’t want you to live alone, and it sure the hell isn’t that they won’t let you. They don’t get to decide what you do.”
She traced an idle finger over his chest, drawing some impossible-to-discern pattern against the black cotton of his T-shirt. “Not in theory. In practice, it’s messy.”
“I know,” he murmured, then laughed as Callum’s words drifted back to him. “Maybe you could use a vacation from it.”
“A vacation?” The idea seemed to amuse her. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been on one. When we all went to Jackson and Mackenzie’s wedding? Does that count?”
“Just overnight? Uh-uh.”
“We didn’t travel much when I was growing up.” Sera’s eyes drifted shut. “I don’t think my dad wanted to take the chance that we’d find other coyotes.”
According to Carmen, Franklin had spent most of his time working. “Where would you go? If you could go anywhere, I mean.”
She seemed to consider it. “I don’t know. A beach? I haven’t been in forever. I could buy a cute bathing suit and get sunburned.”
She’d probably look adorable when her nose started to peel. “So why don’t you?”
Her sudden laugh sounded as tired as it was amused. She poked him in the chest once before letting her hand fall to her lap. “Spoken like someone who’s not often broke.”
No, he hadn’t been. He’d dropped out of college and taken a relatively low-paying job with the fire department, but he’d never been broke. “I’m out of suggestions, then.”
Sera eased away and smoothed her hair down. “You cared enough to make suggestions.
That’s what matters.”
Julio steeled himself against the vague sense of loss that flickered through him. “Even when they’re useless?”
“They’re not,” she protested at once, as if she couldn’t stand for him to think he’d failed. “A vacation is a good idea, I just need to make it work. After Josh is bored.”
Dangerous thinking. “You think he’s going to get bored?”
Silence. A sigh. “No.”
Good. He might get scared or exasperated or a dozen other emotions that would result in him going away and leaving her alone, but bored didn’t make the list. “Do you need anything?
More blankets or another pillow?”
“A good night’s sleep.” She touched his cheek, her fingers soft and warm. “Thank you. I feel steadier now.”
It was his job to protect her, and calming her down was part of it. What wasn’t part of it was the interest his body took in her touch, the way his skin heated and his brain started to run through the decidedly naked possibilities.
So he rose and walked to the door before answering. “You’re welcome. Tomorrow, you can decide what to do.” By then, he should have heard something from Anna about Josh’s activities.
Enough to keep Sera safe.
Safe. The one thing Franklin had begged of him as Julio had dragged him out of his burning, destroyed clinic a year earlier. He’d been terrified of dying and leaving Sera in her suffocating marriage—or worse. Of Josh picking up and running, making them both disappear forever.
Julio had promised, somewhere in the middle of all those ranting mutters, that he would take care of it, and he would. Because for all his other faults and weaknesses, he always kept his promises.
Sera drifted to sleep wrapped in blankets that smelled of Julio, her mind full of plans to wake early enough to repay his kindness with a hearty, home-cooked breakfast.
She woke to a rumbling stomach and bright midmorning sunlight spilling across her face.
Sleep had never been easy for her. Her childhood had been plagued by vicious nightmares, her dreams stalked by monsters who sent her screaming into her father’s room, where he’d hold her and soothe her and promise the monsters couldn’t find her.
Those were the good nights—the nights she jerked awake as a human girl able to express her fears instead of a terrified young coyote tangled in a nightgown, unsure when she’d shifted or where she was.
Mahalia had been the one to cure her childhood terrors. After a particularly bad week after her eighth birthday, Franklin had packed her into his truck and driven into New Orleans, to Mahalia’s bar in the French Quarter, where the spell caster had taken Sera upstairs and let her watch as she carefully constructed
a charm against dream monsters.
Probably nothing more magical than a light soothing spell, but Sera had slept with the damn thing clutched in her hand for five years, and she’d believed so hard, so totally, that the dreams slowly disappeared. By then she’d had other dreams—dreams about boys, dreams about owning a restaurant, dreams of traveling, dreams of life.
The nightmares hadn’t returned until after her twentieth birthday, when Josh had begun to make pointed comments about how long it was taking her to get pregnant. She drifted to sleep every night, fretting over where she’d hidden her birth control, and what she’d do if he found it.
She was too old for magic charms, and her monsters were flesh and blood now. But twelve hours of interrupted, glorious sleep made her wonder if Julio was better than any magic Mahalia could twist. She almost didn’t want to slip into the bathroom and take a shower, loath to lose the lingering scent on her skin.
Vanity won out, and she ventured into the living room with freshly washed hair and the cutest of her thrift-store T-shirts, one that almost made her eyes look more green than hazel.
She found Julio pulling a covered bowl from the refrigerator. “I thought I heard you moving around in there. Hungry?”
So much for making breakfast. “Starving. I didn’t mean to sleep all morning.”
“I guess you needed to.” He’d laid out everything for sandwiches, and he gestured to the cupboard as he opened a bag of sliced Italian bread. “Want to set the table?”
“Sure.” It felt intensely intimate, edging around him to perform such mundane domestic tasks.
She’d had sex that felt less personal than setting the table with his dishes. Plain white with a brown rim, serious and adult and a refreshing change from Kat’s collection of mismatched dollar-store dining sets.
By the time she’d laid out silverware and glasses of water, Julio had prepared two sandwiches bigger than her head and brought them along with the bowl, which turned out to be pasta salad. He set both in the center of the table and sat. “How’d you sleep?”
“Good. Great, really.” She was hungry enough to eat half of the sandwich, and she decided to credit its amazing taste to the good night’s sleep, and not the fact that being around Julio brought every one of her five senses to life. “Did anything happen with Josh while I was asleep?”
“Heard from Anna, and she says he hasn’t come home yet.” Julio shrugged. “He could have gone to a friend’s, or tied one on and passed out somewhere.”
She knew what Julio couldn’t. “Josh doesn’t really have friends. He has coworkers at the mill, but no friends.”
“Well, he’s not in New Orleans anymore.”
Not so comforting when he could come back at any time. She studied Julio’s face, trying to find some indication of his thoughts, but he only spooned more pasta salad onto his plate and kept eating.
She followed his example, feeding one hunger while denying another. It wasn’t okay to sit at his table and imagine that she belonged here. Illicit fantasies of being chained to his bed and ridden to exhaustion would be safer than the sweet daydream of sliding smoothly into his life.
A dangerous fantasy when she was drunk on his dominance and tenderness, not on him as a man. Not just dangerous, but unfair—to both of them.
So she choked it back. “I don’t think I can go back to life as usual. Not if we don’t know where he is.”
He popped the top on a can of soda. “You can stay here for a while. Anna said she plans to hang out up in Arkansas for a few days, anyway. Ask some questions.”
“I’ve still got to work.” John might be able to replace her in the kitchen and on the floor, but she needed the money as much as he needed a worker. “But I’m safe there.”
Julio nodded. “I can drop you off and pick you up, if you’re okay with that.”
There was something off about the offer. Not that he was giving her the choice, though Anna sure the hell wouldn’t have, but that it came with an undertone of self-deprecation. As if she might not believe he was suitable protection.
It killed any urge she might have felt to insist on driving herself. He needed to do this, and she could give it to him. “Sure. If you come in a bit before close, I can even feed you.”
He grinned. “The sandwiches aren’t doing it for you, huh?”
Sera pushed away her empty plate with an answering smile. “I ate it, didn’t I? But you shouldn’t have to cook for me every day.”
“It’s hard to make most of my best meals for only two people.”
“So what are your best meals?”
He toyed with the edge of his plate. “Anything you can dump in a big pot. Chili, stew, soup.
That stuff.”
“From when you worked as a firefighter?” She tried to make it sound casual, as if that hadn’t been inspiring its own brand of fantasy since the first time she’d met him.
“Yeah, those bastards made me cook all the time, and our captain let them. He said I was the only one who didn’t make everyone sick.”
“So let me cook for you.” Rising, she picked up her dishes and held out a hand for his. “I can practice my recipes, and you probably won’t die, being a manly virile shapeshifter and all.”
“Probably won’t die?” he teased.
She plucked up his dish as well and took them both to the kitchen. “I have some very experimental recipes.”
His eyebrows shot up. “John’s not getting you tangled up in that hoodoo shit, is he?”
Laughter bubbled up. “No, no hoodoo. He won’t even teach me some of his Cajun recipes.
Family secret or something. I’d have to marry him first.”
“John Gravois doesn’t much believe in marriage, from what I’ve heard.”
Though she spent hours and hours with John, she knew almost nothing about his personal life. “He doesn’t?”
“Nah. If you ask him about it, he’ll tell you. Marriage isn’t important but family is, and they’re not the same thing.”
Sera returned to the dining room, slid into her chair and tried to smile. “I guess I should know that well enough, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Julio eyed her over his soda can. “Do you want to go back to work, or is it that you need the money?”
“I—” Caught. Mortification uncurled in her gut as she fought back the instinctive rush of pride.
She could try to lie to Julio, but lies took skill with shapeshifters who could hear a too-quick heartbeat or a breathless reply, could catch the tiny twitches in body language that were all but impossible to hide.
Julio might let her get away with a lie—if her coyote hadn’t trembled at the sheer defiance of even thinking it. Focusing on his chest—that gorgeous, solid rock wall of a chest—she offered the truth. “I don’t mind it and I need the money. But I always have Sundays off, anyway, so it’s just tonight, and maybe by Monday this’ll be resolved.”
“Fair enough.” He leaned back in his chair. “I’m not trying to pry, Sera, or get up in your business. But from what I know of you, either was a possibility. I didn’t want you to feel trapped into working when you really want to get away.”
“I don’t mind working. But tomorrow…” It was like revealing an awkward secret, one few who knew her would have guessed. “I, uh, usually go to church on Sunday morning.”
“Where?”
“St. Louis Cathedral? Usually.” She eased one shoulder up, even though her shrug probably looked more defensive than casual. “Sometimes I go different places. Making friends would be awkward, since I’m fairly sure the Catholic church isn’t a fan of spell casters and shapeshifters.”
“Probably not.” He smiled ruefully. “The psychic stuff fits their dogma surprisingly well, though.”
The fact that he hadn’t laughed at her eased some internal tension. Sera relaxed and propped both elbows on the table. “I don’t know why I still go. I guess because it’s peaceful, and it makes my mother happy.”
His gaze sharpened inqui
sitively, but he only said, “It made mine real happy too.”
She’d have to tell him eventually, because the one thing she wasn’t willing to do was skip a visit to her mother. “After church, I visit her—my mother. She’s at a place outside of town. It’s a sort of…” The words felt like glass in her throat, painful to push out. “A mental institution for supernaturals, I guess.”
His jaw tightened, and he released a long, slow breath. “I’m sorry.”
“She’s been there most of my life,” Sera said quietly. “It’s how things have always been.
She’s happy, I think. The priestesses take care of her.”
“Franklin never mentioned it.”
No, he wouldn’t have, she supposed. Not only because he thought he’d failed, but because he’d spent too much time apologizing for moving on. “He can’t visit her. It upsets her too much.
But I go every Sunday. I could skip tomorrow, if I had to—” Julio spoke over her words. “Or I could go with you. If that’s all right.”
She finally lifted her gaze to his face. She hardly ever looked straight at him. She couldn’t, almost as if the unchecked dominance in his eyes sent her sliding away like pushing the wrong ends of two magnets together.
Now he looked careful. Cautious, but his dark brown eyes held a hint of protectiveness that warmed her.
She could drown in him. It would be so easy. So very, very good.
“Thank you,” she whispered, and her lips tingled. Her whole body felt wild with the urge to climb over the table. Or under it. Curl up against him, stroke and touch and kiss. Rub against him until their scents were unmistakably entwined.
She just wanted him.
“You’re welcome.” He stretched his hand across the tabletop, open and waiting.
So dangerous. She held her breath as she settled her hand on top of his, her fingers looking pale and small against his callused palm.
“What time do you attend mass? Eight? Eleven?”
“Nine.” Oh, she was breathless. “Though I have to work late, so maybe eleven’s smarter.”
“Eleven,” he agreed. “Then we’ll get lunch and go see your mom.”
“Okay.” Temptation beckoned, and she gave in, rubbing the pad of her thumb along the side of his index finger. Her skin was too tight, leaving every nerve exposed.