“The man they arrested was my father,” Titus said in a low voice. He didn’t like talking about this. Not at all. “And they didn’t let him go. He was the one with Hypertrichosis. They all thought he was an animal. And in a lot of ways, he was. But not like that. My father didn’t kill Hilary’s sister. Heidi Allenwood was killed by my brother.”
Kylie struggled to sit up in the bed. She reached for the sheet to cover her breasts. “Hilary said you fled the area right after it happened. Why would you do that if it was your brother who murdered the girl? Why not turn him in?”
Titus pressed his lips into a tight line. This was where the entire thing got way too complicated. “I’m not just a human, Kylie. You need to understand that. I’m a wolf shifter.”
“You have the Hypertrichosis?” She looked confused. “But you don’t have hair all over. I know it’s a gene and that you probably carry it.”
Titus rolled onto his back and stacked his hands behind his head. He stared at her in the moonlight and wondered if he could start this from the beginning. “Just hear me out. All right? Then you can ask questions.”
“All right.”
At least she was willing to agree to let him say his peace. He might actually make sense if he had a chance to start at the beginning. Except, where was the beginning exactly? “I come from a long line of wolf shifters. I don’t know the origins of the shifter gene, but I do know that the gene is responsible for the Hypertrichosis gene in humans.”
Kylie nearly opened her mouth, but at the last second, she seemed to remember her promise to let him speak and pressed her lips into a tight line.
“The gene comes from line breeding.” This was painful to admit out loud. “Sometimes, shifter families have this bizarre desire not to breed with humans and it generally results in some bad blood. Too many generations of it in fact. And that is what happened to my father.”
“Your father,” she said before pressing her lips closed again. “Sorry! Keep going.”
“Shifters have heightened senses. We can smell things, hear things, see things, like our animal can. We’re super-fast and incredibly strong, more so than the beast or the human sides of our genetics every could be. And we have very good health. In fact, we’re nearly impossible to kill. It’s,” a dark memory whispered through Titus’s mind, “let’s just say it’s nearly impossible to do and leave it at that.”
“But your father had Hypertrichosis? How is that possible? It doesn’t even seem like that could be a thing if he was already a wolf shifter.” Funny, but she didn’t seem to be having difficulty absorbing this. “If he was already furry, what did it look like?”
“He would have looked like I do,” Titus explained. “I shift when I want to. I don’t have to walk around with fur on my face like some wolf man. It’s a choice. A part of my nature.”
Her brow furrowed. “Whoa, wait a second. You mean you literally turn into a wolf?”
“Yes. But my father couldn’t. You could say that Hypertrichosis is the disease that afflicts our race the same way that cancer does yours.” Titus mused on that for a moment and then continued. “And since my father didn’t have the healing abilities or any of the senses, he was a pariah in our community. He married his sister and had two children. Myself and my brother, Jason.”
The look of horror on her face made his stomach knot with fear. “Oh my God. Your parents were first siblings?”
“Yes. They were the last of their line. And now I am the last and I refuse to allow my line to continue any farther.” Titus could not even begin to make this clear enough. “My father was mad. My mother wound up… let’s just say she left civilization after what happened to my father.”
“How?”
“She shifted into a wolf and went wild. It happens sometimes with our race. It’s easier I think, depending on the person and what their individual situation is.” Titus didn’t want to think about his mother. She’d made her choice and she’d left him to deal with Jason. “You have to understand that we lived in a tiny community in Montana.”
“Bitter Spring,” she whispered.
She had been doing her research. “Yes, Bitter Spring. It’s a dot on the map, but people knew about my father’s condition. He never left our property. At least he rarely did. But when that girl turned up dead, they all knew she’d been dating my brother. And since the girl had injuries that looked as though she had been slaughtered by an animal, the authorities called it a bear or a wolf attack. But the townspeople knew different.”
“They thought it was your father.” She looked thoughtful and then she frowned. “But the man was let go. They must have realized he wasn’t the one.”
“No. The record says the man was let go,” Titus corrected her. “They weren’t going to admit that they lynched my father and strung up him from a tree like a convicted criminal back in the old days. So, they made up a story about letting him go and how he wandered back to his land and was never heard from again and good riddance. But the truth was they murdered him.”
“But who killed the girl?”
Hadn’t she guessed? Titus pursed his lips. Damn. Dredging all of this up made him feel angry all over again. “It was my brother who killed Hilary Allenwood’s sister, Heidi. I don’t know why. He never said. But then, Jason wasn’t quite right in the head. He was wild too. In his own way.”
“What happened to him?” Kylie’s voice was tight. “He was a shifter, right? You said that it’s hard to kill a shifter. And it’s probably not that easy to catch them if they can change into an animal. So, how do you punish one for murder?”
Titus gazed at her for a long moment. “Shifter justice,” he said quietly. “That’s how you punish a shifter. We handle our own. And so, I took my brother’s life for the life of the human he stole. I had to.” Why was he being defensive here? Titus had no regrets. “He wouldn’t have stopped.”
She reached up and touched his face. “I believe you, Titus. You’re not a killer. I know that. But now I think I understand why Hilary is so obsessed with the fact that you fled the area right after all of this happened. You were leaving because your family was just done. And she thought you were a guilty party fleeing the scene of a crime.”
“And apparently, she was never told what the town of Bitter Spring did about her sister’s justice,” Titus murmured. This bothered him a little. Hilary needed to know it had been a life for a life. In fact, it had been two lives for the life of her sister. Some shifter communities wouldn’t have stood for that. There would have been retribution against the town. Titus was smart enough to know it wasn’t the way to help anything. “I don’t know quite what to think about that.”
“Is there a way to prove it to her?” Kylie asked thoughtfully. “God knows she’s not going to believe you if you just tell her outright.”
“I don’t know.” This was an interesting idea, and one Titus had never considered. “I don’t guess I ever thought to sit down and have a heart to heart with Hilary Allenwood.”
Kylie gave a wry chuckle. “I’ll admit the idea of it sounds pretty distasteful. Like worrying whether or not you could really trust her. But in this case, what do you have to lose? She’s bound and determined to see you punished and that pretty much means the story is going to come out in a public forum one way or another. Don’t you think?”
Actually, Titus hadn’t thought of that. “I suppose I thought I would just leave well enough alone until it all died down.”
“Yeah.” Kylie gently tapped the end of his nose. For some reason, he didn’t mind the familiarity of the gesture. It felt right. “I don’t think that’s going to happen, sweetie. I think that woman is like a dog with a bone. She’s going to gnaw at this until you put a stop to it.”
“Or I leave,” Titus said without thinking.
She craned her neck around to look at him. “What did you say? Did you just say you’re thinking about leaving?”
Hell. He’d really stepped in it now. Titus had been intending to keep that littl
e detail to himself. Now though, he didn’t really have a choice. But then, she had been the one doing all of the talking about moving on and new beginnings right? Titus cleared his throat. “You’re in between careers and ready for a change. Right? And this whole thing with Hilary obviously isn’t going to go away. What if we just left it behind? Got in the truck and drove off and found someplace new to start over.”
“Titus Holbrook, are you out of your mind?” She wasn’t tapping now. She was shoving at his arm. “That’s not a solution! That’s running away from the problem and you know it. You can’t do that. It won’t work.”
“If we’re not here, there’s nothing for Hilary to bother about. She can chase shoplifters or something equally amazing. Maybe cover a few fall festivals and then there’s the big holiday show season to write about for the paper. She’ll be too busy to worry about following us across country.”
“Titus!” Kylie said sharply. “You realize this whole thing started in Montana, right?”
Titus frowned. “Yes. My family was from there.”
“And Hilary’s family?”
“Her sister was going to Montana State in Bozeman. I think they were originally from somewhere nearby like Wyoming.” Funny, but Titus hadn’t actually thought about that in a very long time. In his mind, it was just done. “I don’t know where Hilary was before she came here.”
Kylie was still staring at him. Even in the dim light he could see her incredulity. “But you realize she got here not long after you did, right?”
Titus wasn’t sure what to say. He’d known this perhaps, or rather, he’d been aware of it on some level of his consciousness. But he hadn’t really considered what it might mean. “You think she followed me here?”
“Can I just go ahead and say duh?” Kylie snapped. “Yes! She followed you here. I think that’s freaking obvious. The woman has gone to a great deal of trouble to jockey for a position in that newspaper where she can put pressure on you too! You don’t just walk away from that, Titus. It doesn’t work that way.”
It did work that way, but only in the shifter world. As Titus’s brain began to absorb everything Kylie was telling him, Titus realized there was a really big snag with falling for Kylie Overton. He couldn’t just shift into a wolf and melt off the grid with Kylie in his life. Not even leaving town would help. And living without her was quickly becoming less and less of an option.
Chapter Eighteen
Kylie was pretty sure she had never been so happy or so tired the following day. Titus had gone home at dawn. She hadn’t wanted him to go. It didn’t matter that he had literally kept her up all night making love to her. She didn’t mind. He was the sort of lover that women dreamed of having but didn’t actually believe existed. The kind of man you never got tired of even if you had done the same exact thing over and over again. She would never get enough of looking at him while they made love. There was nothing more intimate than that moment when two lovers’ gazes met during sex. Erotic didn’t even cover it. It was beautiful. It was…
Kylie very nearly ran her SUV off the edge of the parking lot and up onto the sidewalk. Thankfully, her reflexes kicked in and she managed to slam her right foot on the brake before she wound up decimating the landscaping on the other side of the walkway in front of the building. She wasn’t especially happy to be there in the first place. In fact, she was pretty sure she was making a huge mistake. But the thought of Titus leaving town just to get away from Hilary Allenwood had made Kylie desperate.
So, she got out of her vehicle in front of the office of the Branson Register for the second time in a week and tried to steel herself for the confrontation she knew was coming. The key was to stay calm. Yes. Calm and perfectly rational. No yelling. Yelling just made everything worse.
Hilary makes everything worse to start with and she makes everyone want to yell too.
But those were not helpful thoughts coming from her brain, so Kylie tried to shut it all down as she reached for the front door and let herself into the office. Of course, Jeffrey Tutt was still camped out at the front desk banging away on his computer keyboard at a million miles a second.
“Oh, hello again,” Jeffrey said when he looked up from his computer. Then he shoved his glasses up his nose. Never had a kid been more of a stereotypical nerd. But he was really too good of a kid to be caught between a rock and a hard place like this. “My dad still isn’t here.”
“I know,” Kylie told him with a sigh. “I need to talk to Hilary.”
“Hilary.” Jeffrey’s quizzical expression did not help Kylie’s confidence. “Let me see if she’s available.”
But he didn’t have to buzz Hilary’s office. She was already pushing her way out the door with a snide expression on her face. “Again? What is this? Twice in one week? Did you tell your lawyer you’re over here harassing me again? I’m sure he’ll be interested to know that you are.”
Kylie was pretty sure her attorney would tell her not to talk to Hilary at all while the lawsuit was still pending. But this wasn’t about Kylie or Hilary or this stupid, petty war about libelous allegations against Kylie. It was about something else.
“I need to speak with you in private,” Kylie told Hilary tersely. “I promise I have information you’ll want.”
That last bit was a shot in the dark at best. Kylie had no idea what Hilary actually wanted out of her attempt to chase the man she thought responsible for her sister’s death. But it was easy to see Hilary was intrigued. Maybe at this stage of the game that was all Kylie could hope for.
“Fine,” Hilary said flatly. “I’ll give you five minutes. Not a second more.”
Kylie wasn’t going to argue with that. “Fine.”
Hilary led the way into her office, but she stood by the door with her arms crossed over her narrow chest until Kylie walked past her. Then Hilary shut the door and Kylie had the impression of a prison gate closing with a clatter. But this wasn’t a prison. Jeffrey was right outside and Kylie had a cell phone. And why was she having these thoughts anyhow? They were ridiculous! She wasn’t trapped. She was there because she wanted to be. She needed to get a grip on her imagination before it drove her absolutely out of her mind with all of the could be situations that might or might not happen.
“So?” Hilary said expectantly. She didn’t even move away from the door. She stood there as though waiting for the moment when she would open it and shove Kylie back outside.
“I want to talk to you about what I heard you and Caroline discussing at the library yesterday.” Kylie figured this was not the best way to start a conversation, but at least it would make things short and sweet. “I want to talk about what you told me. That you think your sister was dating Titus.”
“She was dating a Holbrook, end of story.”
Kylie bit her lip. The expression on Hilary’s face was so closed. It was like she wasn’t willing to learn anything new. “Do you know who the man was that they arrested for the murder?”
“No.” Now at least a flicker of something approaching uncertainty crossed her face. “When I got to Bitter Spring from Casper, the authorities were really weird. They said the man was a local recluse. Some weirdo with a strange medical condition. They let him go. And then they told me they were calling it an animal attack.”
Kylie could not begin to imagine the cover-up that had to have happened in that tiny town. If she hadn’t been sure Titus was telling the truth, she could have easily thought that all of this was just a story. “The man they arrested was Titus and Jason’s father.”
“Why are you talking about Titus and Jason as though they were two people?”
This was the important part. This was the part that Hilary had gotten wrong! “Titus and Jason were two different people, Hilary. Your sister was dating Jason, not Titus. And the man they arrested in town was their father. Mr. Holbrook. He had a condition known as Hypertrichosis.”
“Werewolf syndrome,” Hilary whispered. She finally stepped away from the door. Then she glared hotly at Kyli
e. “How do you know all of this all of a sudden?”
“Titus.”
“That rat bastard!” Hilary sneered at Kylie and put her hands on her hips as though she was about to deliver a lecture. “He’s lying to you and you believe him!”
“No. It makes sense,” Kylie said, trying to stay calm. “What Titus told me fits the facts. Do you honestly think they just changed their minds?”
“So what? Titus’s father did it?”
“No. His brother did.” Kylie felt like she was standing on a cliff. “His brother was a bad seed. Bad blood I think Titus called it. Jason killed your sister. He was the one dating her. I don’t know what happened. Maybe they had a fight. But Jason’s father was arrested because people in town already thought he was an animal.”
“Because of his condition,” Hilary said weakly. “They arrested him and what? They let him go!”
“They lynched him like an animal,” Kylie said quietly. “And that was that.”
Hilary’s face was set in lines of disbelief. “Then why did Titus run away?”
“Wouldn’t you have run away if you were related to the man the people in the town had just strung up from the nearest tree without a trial or due process or a proper defense or any of that?” Kylie tried to keep herself on the right track. “He was killed and they covered it up.”
“Then what happened to Jason?” Hilary demanded.
Kylie swallowed. This was the tricky part. She couldn’t divulge this part of the secret. “He died. They all went on the run, Titus, his mother, and his brother. His mother and brother died up there. Montana isn’t exactly a hospitable place to be on the run out in the country.”
“He died.” Hilary’s flat tone suggested she was not satisfied with this idea. “And so now there’s no proof that he existed?”
“You’re the one who has your sister’s things. Does she have proof she was seeing Jason?”
Hilary shook her head. “No. No, you’re not doing this. My sister was seeing Jason, but later he changed his name to Titus after he ran from the law. That’s the end of it.”
Rock Wolf Investigations: Boxset Page 108
