by Selena Scott
He squeezed his eyes closed again, like she’d struck him a fatal blow. “There you go again.”
She clapped her hands over her mouth and spoke through her fingers. “What!? What am I doing? I don’t get it!”
“It’s just been a really, really long time since anyone assumed I’d do the right thing. And you’re not just assuming, you’re believing. You have complete faith in me to keep you safe, Dawn. It just hasn’t happened to me in a long time. Someone thinking so highly of me.” His eyes opened now and his hands were in her hair. “For so long, I’ve been valued because of the bad things I’ve been willing to do. What made me good at what I did was my lack of morals. My lack of a conscience. But that wasn’t the way I was raised. That’s not the man my parents hoped I’d be. So now, to have you see me the way that they did… it feels good. It hurts. But it feels good.”
“Wow.” She leaned forward and kissed his brow, wiped the wetness from below his eyes. “I didn’t have any idea that me saying that was going to make you feel this way. I’m glad, but I had no idea.”
“That’s not the only thing that’s got me feeling this way.”
“There’s more?”
“Yeah,” he said gruffly. He swallowed hard and put two hands on her cheeks, tilting her face to look directly at one another. “You said that people do crazy things when they’re in love. And you said it so naturally. So matter-of-factly.”
She squinted at him. “Are you about to tell me the crazy thing you’re planning on doing?”
He laughed. “No. You’re fixating on the wrong part of that sentence.” He let out a long, thin stream of air. “I’m not about to tell you the crazy part. I’m about to tell you that I’m in love with you.”
This wasn’t news to Dawn. She’d figured it out a while ago. But even so, hearing it from his lips, his lashes wet with tears, this newborn wonder on his face, well, that was a real kick to the heart. Every muscle in her body went tight. Her heart skittered around her chest. Even her mouth went dry.
“I—”
He put his palm over her mouth to keep her from replying. “I love you, Dawn. So much. I’m in love with you and I love you. You feel like everything to me. Like my girlfriend, like my best friend, like my family.”
She was pretty sure that what he was describing was a wife, but she didn’t see the need to put too fine a point on it.
“I can’t believe that I get to have you here with me in this moment,” he continued. “It’s almost like you’re a match for the person I was before I was in the camps. And even though all that awful shit happened, for some reason, the universe has decided that I still get to have you. Right here. Right now.”
There was something, some small, nagging thing about what he was saying that pricked her ears up. But she didn’t get a chance to dwell on it because his eyes were glassy again and that just killed her.
She wiped at the moisture with her thumbs and leaned her forehead against his. “Quill, I—”
But again, he stilled her mouth with his palm. “Don’t say it,” he said gruffly. “Don’t say anything. If you do, I’m gonna get greedy. Let’s just let it be.”
She could see how overwhelmed he was. How big of a step it really was for him to confess his feelings for her. She could see that processing her feelings for him was going to be a whole other can of worms. Maybe one for another day. Obviously, words meant a great deal to Quill and as much as he obviously wanted to hear her say she loved him back—she could see that all over his face—he knew it would be too much for him to handle in that moment.
So she didn’t say anything. Nothing at all.
Instead, she leaned down and kissed her way into his mouth, sighing into the heat she found there. His arms banded around her waist immediately and there was a fervor in their kiss that had never been there before. It wasn’t just desire. It wasn’t just heat.
This was passion. The kind that two people could only have when they loved one another with their whole selves.
When they knew the whole story. When they completely understood the person in front of them. When they loved each other knowing all the quirks and flaws and mistakes. That’s what was in this kiss.
Their kisses were long and heated and as the sun crept in a hot line across the car, shrinking the shadow, urgency crept in as well. It was like they both knew that if the pool of shadow they sat in were to dissolve, this moment might dissolve along with it. She broke their kiss to breathe hard and then set to work, her fingers grappling with his belt buckle. She pulled him, hard and hot, from his pants and gave him two long strokes that had him hissing breath through his teeth, knocking his head back against the head rest.
His hands were rough at her hips, lifting her, pulling her pants and underwear off, tossing them in the passenger seat. When she sat back down on him, she took him inside of her and Quill tensed as if he were in pain.
“I love you,” he groaned, kissing her so deeply she couldn’t respond. “I love you.”
He kicked his hips upward into her, but there wasn’t much room. That didn’t end up mattering much at all. They clutched one another hard, grinding, taking deep pulls of one another’s flavor into their mouths. Dawn felt certain that she’d never forget the exact layout of his fingers on her back.
Each firm fingertip branded her, left a constellation of sensation behind. He was leaving himself behind, against her. Like a signature. A myth finding its home in the stars. He was making her his universe and she could feel it happening. Every point of contact was a star in their night sky. The sun cut across the car and diffused the shadows, but the silky, tender black of their nighttime only grew. Behind both of their eyelids was a perfect darkness where they had one another, found one another, clung to one another in the coordinates of their connection.
She knew he didn’t want her to say the words out loud, so she told him with every touch. She made her strokes—over his shoulders, his neck, his cheeks, his arms, his back—strong and firm and sure. Because she was sure. She’d never been more sure of how she felt about anything.
He went over the edge first, but not by much, and Dawn was thrilled to watch the press of his eyelids, his slack mouth, the sweat at his hairline. But then her own ecstasy took over and she saw nothing as she tightened down hard against him. Nothing mattered, not even the air in her lungs.
When she collapsed against him, their hearts raced, their breath was shared over and over, in a puffing cycle between their open mouths.
His scent filled her nose, his taste filled her mouth. The moment was perfect, everything was perfect. She felt a heat at her ankle and looked down to see the hot line of the sun had finally breached their bubble of cool shadow.
Clink clink clink. Something metal knocked against the driver’s side window, six inches from their heads, and Dawn and Quill nearly jumped out of their skins. They turned and standing right there was a man in a state trooper uniform looking discreetly in the other direction.
Wow. She’d been so caught up in Quill that neither of them had heard him pull up or walk over. She hadn’t even scented him. Which was basically a world record for her.
“You folks wanna get decent? Ma’am, can you get back in the passenger seat?”
His voice was mild and questioning, but there was a line of steel under his words that strongly suggested these were not suggestions, they were orders. “I’ll be back in just a moment.”
He turned on his heel and went and stood next to his state trooper cruiser.
Dawn, her heart still racing from the most intense experience of her life, sexual or otherwise, looked down at her naked bottom half, still connected with Quill.
Quill glared at the cop in the rearview mirror, obviously hating that another person was this close to Dawn in all her naked glory, but there was really nothing they could do. He gently lifted her away from him and helped her get back into her underwear and pants before he tucked himself away as well.
“I love you,” he told her one more time before the state trooper w
as back, clinking on the glass again.
This time, Quill rolled down the window to speak to him.
“Can I see some license and registration, please?” the cop asked, his voice just as mild as before, but again, Dawn sensed something extremely sharp just below the surface. She couldn’t get a read on his scent. He wasn’t a shifter, but there was something very animalistic about this man, brutal almost.
“Of course,” Quill said quietly. “It’s in the glove compartment.”
Dawn pulled hers from her pocket and Quill did the same, handing over all the necessary documentation. The cop looked at their licenses and then his eyes immediately bounced to their faces. He’d obviously seen the little line below their names that identified them as bear and wolf shifters.
But again, Dawn couldn’t tell if the expression on his face was one of approval or disapproval. He was really hard to read.
“I’m going to run this through the system. Hang tight.”
And then he was back in his cruiser for a long minute. Dawn and Quill watched him in the rearview mirror.
“If we get arrested and tossed into jail, at least the Director won’t be able to assassinate us,” Dawn said hopefully.
Quill shook his head at her. “Only you could joke about something like that.”
Then the trooper was back. “What are y’all doing in Florida all the way from Oregon?”
“Seeing the country,” Quill supplied smoothly. “She’s never been away from the west coast before this.”
“You’ve been staying at hotels along the way?”
“Uh, yes,” Quill replied, obviously unsure what direction this was headed.
“Then you have access to private places that don’t require trespassing.” The steel was in his voice, full force this time.
A bolt of inspiration hit Dawn and she leaned across Quill, putting a smile on her face. “Yes, we do, officer, of course. But, see,” she smiled beatifically and laced her arm through Quill’s. “He just asked me to marry him and we got a little, um, carried away.”
Quill’s arm went tense under hers but he nodded along. “Right. Sorry about that.”
The officer looked back and forth between their faces. “Congratulations,” he said blandly. “Where’s the ring?”
“Oh, I didn’t have time to get one yet.” Quill’s muscles hadn’t untensed yet.
The officer made a show of looking around at the stubby brown field on one side of them and the wild, tangled overgrown forest on the other. He glanced over the interior of their car, at the takeout containers and old coffee cups. “Romantic,” he said, in a tone—if possible—even more bland than last time.
“Look, folks,” the officer said, adjusting his wide-brimmed trooper hat. “I probably don’t need to tell you that you’re trespassing on private property. State-owned land, in fact. And I also probably don’t need to explain that I could arrest you for public indecency.” He paused. “But I’m not going to arrest you. Although, I happen to think that an arrest might be perfectly on brand with the magical proposal you cooked up,” he said drolly. “Even so, my wife would likely make me sleep on the couch if she ever found out I arrested somebody on the day they got engaged. So, go celebrate. Somewhere legal.”
***
Officer Jajka watched the car pull out of its illegal parking space. He followed them back down the gravel road and back onto the two-lane highway. He followed them down the road for a bit and then, when he was sure they were on their way, he pulled off and let them continue along.
The truth was, he hadn’t arrested them for a different reason than the one he’d divulged to them. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about their engagement day. In fact, he didn’t even believe they’d just gotten engaged. It would not be the first time an overly amorous couple faked a proposal just to get out of a ticket and a fine.
The reason he hadn’t arrested them was one that didn’t sit well in his gut, but it was true nonetheless. Florida wasn’t exactly known for its tolerance of shifters. He’d heard, firsthand, a fair number of his colleagues talk about what they would do to a shifter if they ever got one in holding. He was sure that most of it was just bluster and talk. But when push came to shove, he just hadn’t been able to bring that young couple in. What if he arrested them and one of those colleagues made good on their promise? That would be on his head.
Now, Officer Jajka had no love lost for shifters. He’d only ever met one or two in his life. He didn’t have anything against them personally, he supposed. But to him, the whole thing was unnatural. Unnerving. When he’d found out, along with the rest of the world, just how torturous and squalid the conditions had been in the shifter camps, he’d been horrified. He didn’t want to return to a day when the government imprisoned shifters just for having been born, but he wouldn’t have minded a way to keep normal humans separate from shifters.
He wasn’t bigoted. He was just practical. Friction happened when humans mixed with shifters. And where there was friction, there was often violence. And from violence came death and pain and despair.
Although, he supposed as he looked down at his ringing phone and saw it was his soon-to-be ex-wife, it probably wasn’t possible to avoid pain no matter what anybody did.
He sighed. Pain was part of the human experience. And if those shifter camps were any indication, pain was certainly part of the shifter experience as well.
She left a voicemail and the two-tone trill of the notification sent a shiver down his back. He used to love listening to her voicemails. They used to be filled with affectionate asides and sweet words. Now they were blunt and annoyed and businesslike. He’d referred to her as his wife to the shifter couple. All his colleagues and friends knew about the pending divorce, and it had felt nice, just that once, to pretend that his marriage hadn’t gone down in flames. It had been nice to pretend that somebody still wanted him to come home at night.
Yeah, pain was certainly part of life.
He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel and looked in the direction the young couple had just driven.
A strange intuition curled in his gut. He’d had this feeling before. It was part of the reason he’d become a cop.
Say they actually had gotten engaged. Didn’t they deserve to be looked out for, at least for today? What if they ran into one of his less generous colleagues? What if… the list of bad things that could happen to two young shifters was endless. And unforgiving.
He pulled onto the road and drove in the direction they’d gone. If they were gone already, so be it. If he found them and saw the chance to keep an eye on them, he would. Pain was inevitable, he figured, but maybe kindness could be as well.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“So, how do you know the psychic?” Sasha asked Jesse as the two of them stood outside the SUV while its tank filled with gas.
That morning, ungodly early, Orion and Phoenix had come banging at their bedroom doors. They’d ended up staying the night in Celeste’s brother-in-law’s house, just like Jesse had known they would the second she’d “casually” mentioned it. He’d known they would because that was just how it was with Celeste. Nothing was casual with her. Basically, in Jesse’s experience, if she was mentioning something, she was willing it into existence.
He wasn’t sure what else she’d willed into existence, but the two brothers had roused everyone in the house extremely early and had pretty much said, Look, we got in contact with Quill. We know where Dawn is. It’s gonna be dangerous. You in or out?
All of them had said in.
Jesse was the only one who didn’t know Dawn or Quill. And thus, he was the only one who totally could have walked away from this situation with a clean conscience. And maybe he would’ve. Because he’d given them free use of his SUV, he’d brought them to Celeste, who he was certain had helped them out, though he wasn’t sure of the details. And that was probably enough to guarantee him some good karma for a while.
But when Orion had banged on his door, Jesse had rolled over,
picked up his phone, and seen a text from Celeste waiting for him, sent only seconds before. It said two words only.
She’s there.
Now, Jesse didn’t have any idea who “she” was. And he didn’t have any idea where “there” was. But he’d spent a lot of his life interpreting Celeste and he was pretty sure this was her way of telling him “go with them”.
Besides, what was he gonna do, wait around in Biloxi with his thumb up his ass? Nah. This was best. With the group was best.
So, now, here they were at a gas station just outside of Pensacola. He held back his smirk at Sasha’s quasi-casual question. Jesse knew how Celeste could get under your skin. Make you wonder about her. About how she came to be. Who she was. Why she was the way that she was. Sasha wasn’t the first man to kick the dirt, hands in his pockets, and casually bring up Celeste to Jesse, fishing for information.
“She say something to you?” Jesse asked.
“Huh?” Sasha said, his wide-featured face halfway caught between innocence and deception. He was hiding something and didn’t know how to do it very well. Jesse found it endearing. Sasha was like a big, lost puppy. Thrilled to see every stranger that crossed his path, certain he was about to be invited into their family. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I’ve known Celeste for a long time and I know how she has a way of sticking in your head. She says one little thing and it bothers you for a month. I’ve been there.”
“Right.” Sasha’s brow came down and he kicked at the dirt again. A long minute passed. Jesse watched the others inside the gas station, purchasing snacks and drinks. “I guess I was just curious about her, is all. And you, actually.” Sasha scratched at his head. “Back in Salt Lake, well, my whole family lives there, all my friends, most of whom I’ve known since elementary school. I guess I don’t meet many new people, and you and Celeste, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody like either of you.”
“Hmm.” The gas tank clicked and Jesse went forward to put the nozzle back and twist the gas cap closed. Generally, Jesse didn’t go around talking about his past to just anybody, but Sasha had a good vibe about him. There was something innocent and sweet about him. It made Jesse want to shock him, just a little, with the truth.