Marked by Shadows: MM Paranormal Romance Mystery (A Simply Crafty Paranormal Mystery Book 2)

by Lissa Kasey

  “Where’d they go?”

  “Home to Lukas’s place. He was blazing with a need to claim her after our teasing.” Alex grinned. “I thought we could use some quiet. I ordered food. It will be here in a bit. Do we need to go to the shop?”

  “Brad is handling it today. He’s been working a lot of hours.”

  “Time I was supposed to, yeah?” Alex said.

  “Yes, but it’s okay. I think he’s trying to earn his independence.”

  “From Tim?”

  “More general independence. He’s very young.” Brad had not traveled the world like I had. He came from small town Louisiana and hadn’t gotten far. He wanted to see the world, and meet people, which I didn’t think meant good things for Tim. “Not everything is sex work or small-town life. Even if his town is the Big Easy.”

  “Alien impregnators have ruined him for everyone else,” Alex said with a completely straight face. “Narwal Dickmaster strikes again.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh, thinking back to the shock on his face the first time he’d ever seen them, heard of the elaborate dildo, or that I had an adult section in the back of my shop. “Perhaps. Though new worlds featuring males with giant dragon dicks are an unlikely prospect.”

  “Dragon dicks…” Alex said. “We have the weirdest conversations.”

  And that was okay. It felt normal, natural, like maybe things hadn’t really changed? I worked through two more roses thinking about a half dozen scenarios of Alex and I working out or breaking up. It was too much.

  Alex waved at all the stuff I had laid out at the table. “How about we curl up on the futon? Might be more comfortable.”

  I studied him. “Are you mad at me?”

  “No. Why would I be mad?”

  Because a lot of people hated my silence. Even if it wasn’t a true silence. Part of the way I was raised, to be seen and not heard. Respect and honor were very important to my father. Some parts of the world were the same. Even some parts of the United States, but I didn’t really want to spend a lot of time explaining. So I opted for simple instead. “My head is loud.”

  “Is that my fault? Is it loud about me? Do you want me to go?” Alex asked.

  “No.” A little tick of anxiety raced through me at the thought of him leaving.

  “Okay. Can I help somehow? Make your head less loud?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “Do you really want to go to the convention?”

  “If you don’t mind me being there, I think it would be fun. I’d like to meet your friends. You can teach me all about fabric.” He said nothing for another minute and then, “Can I hold you? I’d like to hold you if that’s okay.”

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  He got up and made his way to the futon. “Show me how you do that.”

  “What?” I asked, looking down at the mess in my lap, but gathering it up to find a place curled up in his lap. Settling back against his chest, feeling his heartbeat at my back, the anxiety eased almost instantly.

  “The magic of how you take string and turn it into a rose.”

  “It’s yarn, but okay.” I dug through the bag to find another hook, I only had a thousand of the stupid things laying around, and a spare ball of yarn. “It’s only four rows, and pretty basic, chain stitch, single, V-stitch, double.”

  “Sounds like a foreign language. Good thing I excel at languages.” Alex took the hook and yarn, copying how I held things and mimicking until he seemed to get the chain stitch down. It was more about rhythm than skill. “We need fifty-six of these little stitches,” I told him as I got up to answer the door and retrieve the food he’d ordered. It smelled like burgers.

  By the time I got back to him he had his chain done, waiting. “Food first?”

  “Sure,” I held out the food. We ate spread out on the futon, sharing half of each burger, one beef with a giant stack of toppings, and the other a spicy chicken thing, that was fantastic. We had fries and onion rings, plus a handful of fried random veggies. By the time I washed my hands after cleaning up the food remnants to get back to the crochet work, I realized Alex and I had barely talked the entire meal. He hadn’t pushed either. There was no taint of awkwardness in the air like with most people. It made me examine him to try to read his mood, but he focused on his own little slip of yarn, having made a giant tail of single crochets in practice. My silence didn’t bother him at all.

  “What did you and Lukas fight about?”

  Alex blinked and looked up. “His job. He wants to bother some of his co-workers for more details. What they might know about what happened to me, but I’d rather he didn’t lose his job over that.”

  “Even if it got answers?”

  “What would it change? It won’t erase the month I lost. I want to move forward,” he paused, gaze intense, “with you, hopefully.”

  I smiled, feeling my anxiety ease a bit more. “Even if it’s getting to know me and my weird cosplay friends?”

  “Even if,” he said, then glanced toward the door. “What if we hear something?”

  Like a middle of the night monster. Years of being plagued by that odd squawking monkey thing, though it sometimes sounded like cats or other not quite benign things, left me more than a little raw. A month of brutal silence while praying for a sign of Alex’s return had worn at me. I slept hard when I finally slept, but never peacefully. The fact that Alex heard it too, experienced the same things, gave us one more thing to bond over. I hated that it would stalk him too, but finally felt like I wasn’t alone for the first time in years. I was not naïve enough to think it was gone forever. Even if I wasn’t hearing it right now.

  I closed my eyes for a moment and sucked in a breath, steadying myself as the internal noise descended again. So much in my head. Alex’s lips touched mine in a soft kiss, and I opened my eyes to look at him. He pulled away with a little smile.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said.

  “Not upset.” A thought occurred to me then. “Did you hear it last night?”

  Alex glanced down as though considering for a half a second whether or not to lie. “Yes.”

  I leaned forward and rewarded him with a small kiss. “Thank you for not lying. As for the noise… It follows wherever I go. Sometimes it will go quiet for a while, and I’ll think it’s finally over, then it returns.” I shrugged, refusing to focus on something I didn’t seem to have the power to change. “The place we are staying has six rooms in the main house and three small cottages a few feet from the back door. We are staying in one of the cottages.”

  Better to not subject everyone to the weirdness of my reality. Noises in the night, shadows dogging my footsteps, and occasionally the feeling of fire beneath my skin did not need to be shared with anyone. Except maybe Alex, who never looked at me with pity or disbelief in his eyes. “The main house is supposed to be haunted, but I’ve been there twice and never experienced anything.”

  “Like the thrift shop you sent me to?” Alex wanted to know, reminding me of the ghost who had helped him shop for clothing.

  “I’ve been by there a half dozen times in the past month…”

  “No seventies ghost girl hanging out?”

  I shook my head. He appeared thoughtful. Was he wallowing in his own anxiety about whatever had been awakened inside of him? Perhaps he’d always seen things and written them off as normal until presented with something that couldn’t fit the narrative.

  While I didn’t know all the details about what he’d seen in the deserts of Afghanistan, Alex compared it to the djinn of Islamic legend. Djinn were mortal creatures, though longer lived than humans. They were also made up of fire and tended to take over people a lot like a demonic possession might. Whatever it had been had killed his teammates and somehow spared Alex, leaving him with memories everyone denied were possible. When he’d vanished, I vaguely recalled a dream of him, fire glowing beneath his skin as he was sucked into a grave. Terrifying, and yet I’d only been an observing party to it. I suspec
ted he remembered a lot more than I did of the event.

  Of course remembering it made my heart race and my skin prickle with fear. I set aside the crochet work, wanting more to bask in him for a little while. He was home. We’d have to take that for what it was—a blessing.

  “How about we get in the bath and you let me rub you down with some lotion?” Sex was easy, a good distraction. Most men took sex as intimacy, letting the physical relationship sustain a relationship. Alex never let me get away with it. He wanted more than just my body. Which while thrilling, was also terrifying. Were there enough interesting things about me to keep him around? Would that have changed in the short time he was away? Maybe he would let me take care of him for a while, and that was okay too.

  “Bath sounds good. My skin still feels tight,” Alex agreed. “As long as you show me how to finish this later?” He held up the yarn string.

  “Sure.” I promised and held out a hand. He took it, his grip warm in mine and we headed to the bathroom. There was time for worrying later.

  Chapter 3

  A few days of normalcy went a long way in restoring my faith in life. Alex and I prepared for the trip, I made him eat at least three times a day, feeding him as many avocados and bananas as he could manage to eat since they were full of potassium. And we both worked the shop with an edge of lighthearted humor. While he was a horrible dancer, mostly because it kicked his hip out of place, he swayed with me on slow evenings. I enjoyed his laughter and smile, and the way he never hesitated to touch me in public. Alex seemed unchanged by the stolen time. Wary sometimes, but he’d had that before. His easy affection, and interest in learning everything there was to know about me, the shop, the tours, and even the city I called home, made my anxiety relax, and heart squeeze with happiness I hadn’t felt in a long time.

  He had returned to his brother’s place once for a night, which ended up being a fitful night of sleep for me, and the first time I’d heard the noise outside in a long time. I’d ended up texting him in the middle of the night, when a rare panic attack had taken over my brain. While he hadn’t come running to my house because I insisted he stay home, he did text me back until sleep finally took over and shut my brain down.

  I felt bad for using him to stave off the terror though he didn’t mind at all. Having him in my space helped quiet my mind even when it raged in insane circles of logic. He’d also become quite a master at crochet roses, completing dozens of the things while he practiced. My anxiety over the trip increased even though I’d planned it to death, although Alex’s childlike excitement renewed my own.

  I rented a smaller SUV for the trip, mostly to fit my sewing stuff. Two machines, a couple of boxes of fabric, several zippered garment bags of current projects or completed works, a suitcase of regular clothes, and I was about as ready as I was going to get. Alex arrived with a duffle bag full of what little he owned—I’d have to remedy that—and eyed the contents of the car.

  “I guess this explains why we’re driving?”

  “It’s a bit of a sewing retreat. The convention doesn’t start until Thursday. Runs through Sunday, but we are there through the following Wednesday.” Since it was Sunday and the shop was closed, it gave me more time to think. We weren’t doing an early morning drive, my intent instead to arrive in time for dinner tonight. “It’s a little over five hours, six if we have a lot of stops on the way.”

  I loaded a small cooler full of food behind the passenger seat. The bed and breakfast offered two meals a day, but I needed to make sure Alex kept eating, and hated the idea of shoving fast food into him. He wasn’t a picky eater at all, for which I was thankful. So the chest full of sandwich supplies, fresh fruit and veggies, and a couple of bento boxes would hopefully get us through the drive. The cottage had a small kitchen not unlike my own. Which meant I planned to stop at a grocery store near the hotel.

  The hardest part of the day was getting Alex to leave Jet. He spent a ridiculous amount of time with the cat in his lap while he crocheted roses. He didn’t have the sewing it into a round flower part down, but could race through the four rows and cast off like a pro. He liked to have his hands busy. And unlike most guys or people I’d ever known, he didn’t need to fill the silence with chatter. Alex rolled back and forth from petting the cat to crocheting roses while I ran around preparing things from lists. His calm presence was enough to keep me from pulling my hair out.

  “Where is the convention again? Houston?” Alex asked as he got in the car with his faux leather bag filled with crochet hooks and random yarn balls. I’d found a tutorial online this morning to teach him how to make an amigurumi dragon. It was a bit on the cutesy side, more a child’s toy version than something an ex-soldier might covet, but Alex had been fascinated and already completed the round section of the body. Nothing about this trip stressed him out. When asked, he said it was because he trusted me and knew I’d point him in the right direction. While that was more stress, it was also comforting to know he had faith in me.

  “We’re staying north of the city, near Conroe, not far from the Sam Houston National Forest.”

  That made Alex stop and look at me. He frowned. “National Forest?”

  “Yeah, you know, where trees grow?” I half joked. “Did you know the planet is covered in like 700 million acres of forest?”

  “We are not camping,” Alex clarified. I didn’t think he had an issue with camping, more a concern I might vanish again.

  “No. We’re in town. Though the hotel backs up to an area of trees, it’s not officially part of the National Forest. That’s a couple miles away. Our group didn’t want to stay in the city, and a lot of area outside Houston is oil rigs and fracking. Freya’s place specializes in crafters. She does a lot of quilting retreats, and the like. So she’s close to the city, without being on top of it.”

  “Sounds… interesting?” Alex finished, obviously less than enthused with the idea we wouldn’t be staying close to the city.

  “You don’t have to go. I can drop you off at Lukas’s.”

  Alex narrowed his eyes at me. “I’d like to go. Didn’t realize this thing was so expensive. Maybe we can work out a way for me to pay you back on the drive?” He got comfortable in his seat and shut the door. I checked over the contents of the back again, then double checked to make sure the door to my place was locked. Sky would be over later to install herself as guardian of my cat.

  When I got in the driver’s seat and adjusted it until it was comfortable, Alex was working on his dragon.

  “Cost?” He prodded me again as I turned the car on and guided us out toward I-10 which would take us out of the state and directly into Houston. We would have to divert north once we got into Texas, but that was a few hours away.

  “This was already planned, so you coming along is not costing me any more than it already did.” Except the ticket to the convention.

  “Convention?” Of course Alex had looked up the cost.

  I sighed. “I’ll take crochet roses in exchange for the ticket cost. Technically, since you’ll be learning about stuff that helps Simply Crafty, I should be paying you for your time.”

  Alex scoffed. “Paying me to have fun?”

  I couldn’t help smiling. He really did enjoy the job. Loved all the weird little nuances that made up Simply Crafty as a shop, and a lot of its customers. He also seemed genuinely interested in crafts and fabric. He enjoyed the history of the tours, but was less enthusiastic about the haunted aspect of it, for which I didn’t blame him. Sometimes we saw or felt things that sparked more questions than answers, and Alex seemed to be really good at capturing something unexplained on camera. His photos had gone viral, even being featured in major television station commentary.

  “There will probably be a lot of boring sewing chatter,” I told him.

  “I may not understand it, but I find your sewing stuff fascinating. I’ve watched a few quilt videos. They make it look easy, cutting squares into other shapes, but I’m sure there’s more to it.”
>
  “It’s a bit like the game Tetris,” I said.

  “I can see that. Maybe I’ll see if I can take a class when we get back. Teach me some basics. Videos are okay, but I need some hands on to really start.” He waved his hands at the crochet project in his lap. “Wouldn’t have known what half of this meant if you hadn’t showed me.”

  “Crochet is really about getting your hand placement correct.”

  “Lots of things are about getting your hand placement correct,” Alex teased, making it sound somewhat suggestive.

  I smiled at his ease. He continued to focus on his crochet work.

  “Let me know if you need your space,” Alex said. “We don’t have to be stuck together at the hip. You are not obligated to show me a good time. I love being with you, but that doesn’t mean I can’t exist if you need a few hours to yourself. If you meet some hot guy at the convention, however…”

  “Ask you to join in?” I teased.

  Alex’s face turned pink with that telltale flush of his. It was sort of empowering, how small things I did turned him on.

  “Really?” I teased him.

  “I can’t help that I spring boners every time you bring up sex. Note that it is not the idea of you and some random other guy. It’s you and me. I’m glad we’re in this cabin thing. I don’t like the thought of everyone else listening to us.”

  “Planning to sex me up regularly?” Our sex life had been a slow exploration. Alex was not the kind of guy to throw me up against the wall and take what he wanted. Not yet. His bedroom shyness made him adorable and sweet. It was also something else I could teach him, since my own experience surpassed his. “Maybe more like this morning?” I’d started with lotion, massaging it into his skin until he melted into jelly beneath me, then I’d teased his prostate until he’d been screaming for release. I had never been with a guy who lasted as long as Alex. I could probably edge him for days and bask in his sweet heat.

  Alex’s moan was almost sexual. “Can we not talk about that while driving?” He shifted in his seat. “I seriously feel like my ass is throbbing for your fucking fingers. How is that normal?”