I scanned the menu—all manner of New England seafood, particularly lobsters and clams, but fresh fish as well. “It all looks good.”
“They have an appetizer here that’s one of the best kept secrets along the coast.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, they do amazing fried clams with bellies.” He lowered his voice even though it was just the two of us. “But don’t tell my trainer.”
“Your secret is safe with me.” When I said the words, tingles spread from the back of my skull to my shoulder blades as if something important had witnessed my silly promise. I took a sip of water to clear the sensation. I’ve been spending too much time with witches. “Oh, and here’s something else that’s been safe.”
I pulled the envelope with his six hundred dollars from my jacket and slid it across the table. “I appreciate you being willing to replace my things, but it’s fine. I’ve got an income, so I feel silly with your money. I shouldn’t have taken it in Boston, but I was flustered.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Yes.” I put all the conviction I could behind the word.
He picked up the envelope and didn’t look inside it, just put it in the inner pocket of his sports coat. “All right. And I’ve never seen you flustered. You’re always very in control.”
“I used to be. Times have changed.”
A waiter came in to take our drink orders, and Jared ordered a bottle of wine and the appetizers. The wine—a crisp white from Italy called Orvieto—appeared almost immediately. After the opening, tasting, and pouring ritual, the waiter bowed out, and Jared raised a glass.
“To celebrate old friends meeting,” he said.
“And the discovery of a cure for CLS,” I added and clinked my glass against his.
“Right.” He didn’t say anything else because the appetizers appeared, but once the server left, Jared told me, “I was excited to hear it. I bet it’s been tough for you.”
I looked around even though we were supposedly in the room alone. There was nowhere to hide.
How did he know? I’d been careful not to let news of my illness be public knowledge. His statement didn’t entirely surprise me, though. There must have been speculation when I’d disappeared from society.
But still, CLS wasn’t the first thing that people would think. It was still relatively rare among adults who didn’t have it as kids.
“It’s been hell,” I admitted. “But I have to ask—how did you know?”
“I guessed from your reaction on the phone yesterday. You sounded shocked but relieved.”
Oh, right. “I was. Both.”
“Plus I’d wondered if that’s what happened to you. Was it one of the contaminated flu vaccines?”
I nodded and studied the lemon seed that was floating on an ice cube in my water. “Lucky me.”
I thought I’d sensed a current of interest, but now he would finish lunch, politely excuse himself, and never want to talk to me again. Why would he want to hang out with a freak and failure like me? I blinked against the burning at the corners of my eyes. Who was I to think I could do this?
The old Kyra would have brazened through lunch, put on a confident face, drunk the wine, and taken what she could. I didn’t think I could keep up the act. I was about to excuse myself when he checked his watch.
Yep, here we go, prelude to the polite brush-off. Lunch was nice while it lasted.
“I looked at the phases of the moon online,” he said. “Full moon is tomorrow night. Will you be all right?”
I raised my eyebrows. “I suppose.”
“Do you need someone with you?”
“I don’t think so.” Veronica had offered to let me know where it would be safe to run.
Why was he so interested? I took a sip of wine and focused on the burn on my tongue to calm my panic. What if he was the freak? Was he going to proposition me for some full moon sex with my inner animal? Most CLS sufferers only acted like wolves during the full moon.
Boy, would he be surprised if he knew the truth.
The waiter came and paused at the door as if he sensed he was entering at an awkward moment.
“Are you ready to order lunch?” he asked.
“Not at the moment,” Jared said. The waiter bowed out.
I took a deep breath. “Look, if this makes you uncomfortable, we can just call it a day. It’s not like it would be the first date that’s ended because someone found out something about me they didn’t like.”
“So this is a date,” he said. He looked at me over his wine glass, and his lips curled into a smile.
“A business date,” I amended.
He leaned forward. “What if I told you that getting the inside scoop on Max and Lonna Fortuna isn’t the only reason I asked you to join me?”
Now we were back to the freaky-in-bed hypothesis, but I wanted to make him say it so he would be as embarrassed as I felt.
“What else do you need to know?” I asked.
He looked away, and his throat moved as he swallowed. Yep, he was embarrassed.
“I remember you as a straight shooter and as someone who is very discreet.”
And here we go…
He looked at me, and I noticed the dark blue rim around his irises. “I’m afraid I’ve developed something like Chronic Lycanthropy Syndrome, but worse.”
7
Pre-Revelations
Of course Jared’s revelation occurred just before the waiter peeked back in. We gave him our orders so he’d leave us alone for a while. After topping off our wine, he disappeared.
The irony of a pharmaceutical drug company CEO coming down with some sort of mysterious ailment wasn’t lost on me, but I had no reason to be a bitch right now. He trusted me enough to reveal something sensitive—and, boy, did I know how worrisome this sort of thing could be. But he had a host of underlings to help cover up whatever was wrong with him. I had been running my agency on my own with just an admin, and even she had disappeared once my illness became full-blown and my brain took longer to recover from the changes.
Then I had been a bitch in every sense of the word.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He took a big swig of wine. “I haven’t told anyone.” He shook his head. “That is, it’s not normal for the Steel siblings to all be in the same place unless my parents are having some sort of event they demand our presence for. They know something is up. Somehow we can all feel it when one of us is in trouble.”
I tamped down my jealousy. My siblings couldn’t care less if I was in trouble. In fact, it was their fault I was here and not tucked away in the Ozark Mountains. Jared’s loss of composure also fascinated me.
“I don’t know your siblings that well, but I did think it was odd they were all visiting. Doesn’t your brother live in Atlanta?”
“Yes, and Cindy is based up in Portland. I was glad for this lunch so I could get away from them for a while. And see you, of course.”
“Charmer.” I knew he was prevaricating, but I wanted to let him spill his secret on his own time. I suspected he was having second thoughts about telling me, but I wasn’t going to push. We both had secrets we didn’t want the world to know.
“I was always attracted to you.” He gently took my hand and rubbed his thumb over my knuckles. “The timing just never worked out for me to ask you out. And then you disappeared.”
A new wave of bitterness welled up from that broken place in my chest that still grieved what I’d lost. Here was yet one more thing I’d missed out on. Not that I’d been the type to need a man to define me. My independence had always drawn them in. But I’d been attracted to him, too.
“I never knew,” I said.
“Bumping into you at the airport was a stroke of luck.” He grinned. “Even if it wasn’t quite as pleasant for you.”
I shrugged, but before I could come up with a witty reply, our lunches came, a lobster roll for me and a cod dish for Jared. They arrived more quickly than I’d anticipated, and Jared
seemed surprised, too. He released my hand so the waiter could set down the plates. I suspected the rumor of our pairing off would hit the gossip websites even before we left the restaurant and wondered how much the waiter was getting paid on the side to spy. Or maybe he was just a courteous guy doing his job.
In my experience, it never hurt to be suspicious.
We assured the staff we didn’t need anything else for the moment, and they let us be. Jared stood and locked the door.
“I don’t want anyone else overhearing this.”
“Are you sure the room isn’t bugged?” I asked and then regretted my words when he looked around with a frown.
“Good point.”
I couldn’t accuse him of being paranoid considering I was just suspecting the waiter of being a spy for the gossip industry. He took his phone from his jacket and turned on an app that sounded like white noise with a high-pitched whine in the background.
A throbbing pain immediately started at the base of my skull.
“It’s got a frequency that’s too high for humans to hear but will create interference with any listening devices,” he explained.
I nodded and reminded myself not to clench my jaw. He didn’t need to know that the closer I got to the full moon, the more canine my senses became.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I tried to speak, but couldn’t. He shut off the app.
“Some people have sensitive hearing. We’ll talk about this after lunch. I’m sorry.” But the look he gave me was one I was familiar with—slanted with suspicion.
“Thanks,” I said and gulped some of my water. The throbbing subsided to a dull ache that I hoped would disappear quickly.
Jared kept the conversation light as we ate, but he didn’t have much appetite. Unlike me. I found myself happy that we didn’t live in an era when women had to keep up the appearance of being delicate and starve themselves to be acceptable to the opposite gender…
Oh, wait. Yes, we did. I didn’t care. My wolf was hungry.
The metabolism CLS gave me would have been the envy of any of my former clients—or my former self—and the restaurant did make very good fried clams with bellies and lobster rolls.
I pushed away the thought that with my former career I had helped perpetuate unrealistic ideals for women. But maybe I didn’t eat as many of the fries after I remembered how I used to watch everything I ate. Plus Jared nearly made me do a spit-take with the wine.
He was asking me about my grandparents’ house and what I remembered of it when he said, “I had the strangest dream last night.”
“Oh?” He must be killing time if he’s talking about dreams.
“Yes, I was in a house like you described, but I was trapped in one spot, and then a wolf came down the hall.”
I put my wineglass down. I’d seen and experienced too much weird crap to discount this as an odd coincidence, and I had originally thought he was astrally projecting. “And then what happened?”
“Well, it turned out that the wolf was you.” His cheeks colored further beneath the tan he’d picked up sailing up that morning, but he didn’t say anything about me being naked.
My own face grew hot. “That’s interesting. You must have been thinking about my CLS.”
“And other things.” He cleared his throat. “Speaking of which, tell me about what brings you up this way. You said you had work?”
“In a sense. Mostly I’m up here to check on the grandparents’ house.”
“A new project?”
Reluctant to lie but not ready to reveal the whole truth, I just shrugged and tried to remember what it felt like to look mysterious and evasive. I was afraid I came across as constipated, but he nodded.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We can talk about it later.”
I hoped he would forget.
Once we left the restaurant, Jared was all business. I wondered if I should have taken advantage of the moment and pushed for him to reveal his secret. I also wondered if I should tell him that I suspected his dream the night before was more like a chaperoned visit.
He put his sunglasses on, and I did as well. The lenses, which had formerly hidden the golden ring around my eyes from the world, now seemed an extra barrier between us. Although he had remained polite, his manner had chilled, and I wished I hadn’t accepted his offer of a ride back to Salem from him.
“Tell me about Lonna Marconi-Fortuna,” he said as we walked toward the parking garage where he kept a car in a rented space.
I shrugged. “I wish I could help you, but I only met her a couple of times and don’t know her at all.” Which was true. I didn’t mention that one of those times I’d chased her and her friend through a junkyard because I was just off a full-moon change, my brain hadn’t shifted out of animal mode yet, and I was pissed that her friend had stolen my boyfriend. The guy I’d wanted to be my boyfriend. Because at the time he had been the best option and I had been lonely and confused, not because I’d actually cared for him.
And I realized it was true—I hadn’t loved Leo Bowman. The question was, had I ever loved any guy?
Damn, fried clams make me philosophical.
“You look like you just had a long train of thoughts,” Jared said. “I’m sorry. I know you had contact with Ms. Marconi-Fortuna during a tough time for you.”
“You could say that.” Mindful of the possibility of disappointment, I didn’t want to ask what I really wanted to know—did he plan to license the CLS cure to manufacture it in the States? The thought gave me an unfamiliar warm sensation—hope—followed by a too-familiar bitter feeling—expectation of being let down.
We arrived at the car—another Jaguar, this one a sporty convertible—and he unlocked it and held the door open for me. He waited until we had left and were on the road before he said, “Are you going to tell me what’s really going on?”
I turned to him. “Are you? I’m still waiting for you to tell me what’s wrong with you. Do you have cancer?”
His lips assumed a tight line, which made a dimple stand out in his right cheek. “No, although at least there’s treatment for cancer.”
“Do you have CLS? No, wait—you said what you had was worse.”
“I’m not sure what I have, only that I know it’s serious because otherwise my brother and sister wouldn’t have shown up here.”
It seemed odd to me that he found no strangeness in his siblings showing up to indicate he was very ill, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what a close family did, so maybe it wasn’t that weird.
“What are the symptoms?”
“I…” He shook his head. “I can’t explain it. I have to show you.”
I found myself hugging the passenger door of the car. Not that I didn’t want to see his, er, assets, but this wasn’t exactly the romantic lead-up I’d hoped for.
“Nothing like that, Kyra.” He grinned, and both his dimples showed. “I keep forgetting that we’ve only just reconnected.”
I wish I could. I wanted to take his hand, but he needed it for the standard transmission. He’d reminded me of a party we’d both attended when we ended up chatting for about ten minutes before either he or I got pulled away. During that time, it had felt like we were the only two people in the room. I’d allowed myself a few moments of mushiness after, but he hadn’t called, and I had dismissed the feeling as me being overly hopeful he’d been interested in me because I had liked him. Like a teenager in Veronica’s shop asking her friend on her phone, “Do you like him, or do you like him?”
I had liked him.
“Why didn’t you ask me out before?” I blurted, nothing like the subtle approach I’d thought about. “You said the timing was never right, but what does that mean?”
“Would you believe I was intimidated by you?”
I snorted. “You, the country’s most eligible bachelor, intimidated? No, I don’t believe that for a second.”
“Then you’ll have to accept my explanation about timing. One of us was a
lways traveling, or I had a big project coming up, or you had disappeared.”
“That’s not fair.” I stuck my tongue out, and he flashed his right dimple in response. “Speaking of projects, are you going to try to cooperate with ILR to manufacture the CLS cure here?”
“I’ve been trying to get hold of them, but I can’t get past their administrative staff, even when I call myself.” His brows touched the tops of his aviator sunglasses frames in a frown. “They’re very polite and Scottish, but—” he attempted a Scottish burr “—Ms. Marconi-Fortuna and Dr. Fortuna aren’t available to speak to anyone right now.”
“That was a horrible accent imitation,” I told him, but I might have giggled at his try. “Maybe they’re not ready to wheel and deal yet.”
“Even if it was a leak, it means they’re getting close.”
“No, scientists like to show off. Or maybe they wanted to take credit for discovering it first because someone else is about to.”
He smiled. “That’s more like it. The pharmaceutical industry is cutthroat, and we like nothing better than to be the first. Consider the power Ambien still has even now that it has a lot of competitors.”
I suppressed a huff. It felt like he’d been testing me, and I finally made a worthy answer, but why did he care what I thought? To see if I was smart enough to handle his secrets? And why did it matter to me whether he thought I was intelligent? It was not like we had any plans beyond the afternoon, although if he were to actually share his secret rather than teasing me with it…
We turned into my grandmother’s neighborhood, and I directed him to the house. He opened the car door for me, and I led him inside.
“Well, this is it, my grandmother’s house,” I said. I turned to see him looking around the front hall. He hadn’t taken his sunglasses off, but his eyebrows arched above the frames, and his jaw muscles stood in tense relief.
“Are you okay?” I asked. I reminded myself to breathe. Here it was. If he was remembering his “dream,” then I would have to accept more possibility than I was ready for.
“I… I don’t know. This place looks really familiar. I dreamed about it last night.” He lowered his sunglasses and looked at me with smoldering eyes. “And you. First you were a wolf, and then you were naked, and…” He rubbed his temples. “This is the sort of thing I was talking about, the strangeness I can’t explain.”
Lycanthropy Files Box Set: Books 1-3 Plus Novella Page 85