Still, I chose not to turn around. I wasn’t sure what I’d see in his eyes if I did, and either way I was worried that it would frighten me. I heard the footsteps come closer until I was sure that Sam was behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sam place his plate on the counter top near mine, but I still couldn’t make myself look up.
Suddenly, I felt Sam’s hands slide around my stomach and he pulled me gently around to face him. Hot tears had already begun to bleed into my eyes by the time I looked up at him. His eyes were serious and understanding. He didn’t say a word, but pulled me closer until my body was firm along the line of his and my head rested on his chest.
“I’m so sorry,” I sobbed, hating myself for my moment of weakness.
Sam stroked my hair with his hand and held me tighter as though there was no way he was going to let me go. Soft, wet tears ran from my face and onto Sam’s warm, bare chest. His skin smelled of honey and I couldn’t help but breathe him in. I slowly began to calm, even though I could still feel unfinished sobs tugging at my chest from where they lay trapped.
Eventually, most likely with red eyes and blotchy cheeks, I lifted my head from his chest and looked up at him. “Don’t let me run away, okay,” I begged him. “Even if I say I want to. It’s not what I really want.” I looked fiercely up into his eyes trying to force the seriousness of the issue and Sam looked back down at me with pursed lips and furrowed eyebrows. “Okay,” I asked again, needing a positive response before I’d feel alright again.
“Okay,” he answered. Sam looked as though he meant it, but something in his eyes seemed to scare me. Sadly, I knew what it was. If I really wanted to run away, to leave him, there was nothing he could do to stop me. Ultimately, it was my choice and he had to respect it. He couldn’t force me to choose either side; he could only protect me until I chose. I laid my head back on his chest and let out a long sigh. I was not looking forward to what I felt was coming.
Eight: Werewolves of Saint Jean
Sam had left me in his room, curled up on his bed, while he went into the bathroom to have a shower. The water had finally stopped just a minute or two ago and now I could hear Sam fiddling around in the cabinets. I moved my eyes from where they were staring dully at the ceiling and looked out the window. From where I lay, I could see that the rain clouds had vanished and that the now clear sky was already darkening with night. Within a half hour or so it would be a jet, black carpet full of glittering stars.
After my little cry in the kitchen, I’d told Sam about what had happened earlier in the day with Max. Just as I had feared, Sam had pretty much seen and heard everything, but he was glad that I’d made the effort to tell him. Then, he told me to ring my Mum. He was not for any reason letting me out of his sight until I was safe at home, he’d said. So, he wanted me to let her know that I was okay and that I would be coming home a little later than expected. Apparently, I wasn’t allowed to walk home alone in the dark anymore. As instructed, I’d passed on the message, but to Mum’s answering machine, instead of her.
I stared out at the darkening twilight and wondered if Mum was okay. I hoped she’d forgive me for what I’d said to her this morning. Surely, she must have noticed that I wasn’t myself. I felt as though I had so many things to tell her and so many questions to ask. I was trying to convince myself to tell her everything I’d learnt in the past two days, when Sam opened the bathroom door.
I peacefully turned my head in his direction from where I lay and had to catch my breath. I was sure my pulse had stopped just from looking at him. Sam walked towards the bedroom, running his fingers through his long, damp fringe to get it off his face. He was once again naked from his hips up, wearing only the navy track pants that he’d given to me to try on. The pants sat low, revealing a tiny, golden trail of hair leading from his bellybutton down, that I hadn’t noticed earlier in the kitchen. I had to bite my bottom lip as I started at the top of his pants and looked up. His skin was pale, but with a tinge of honey, and was wrapped tightly around the lean muscles of his stomach and chest. His shoulders were strong and broad, leading down to firm, muscular arms that looked just as sexy as they were dangerous. Although he sure didn’t act like one, Sam certainly had the body of a soldier.
I looked back up at his face and saw that he was smiling sweetly at me. My body went hot with embarrassment.
“You look so serene,” he said.
I breathed a sigh of relief. I was glad I looked serene, because I really didn’t feel it. My insides were warring, fighting to make me obey my instinct and run away. All I could do to fight them was lie still, scared that if I did move, I’d follow the wrong instinct.
“So,” he said, coming to sit on the bed beside me, “how are you doing?”
I screwed up my face, hoping that that would give away enough of an answer without me having to actually say anything. I was sure that if I tried to verbalize how messed up I felt inside again, this soon after my last breakdown, I was definitely going to have another.
Sam frowned at me and put his hand gently on my cheek, reassuring me without words. I mirrored his frown with a frustrated one of my own and then turned my attention back towards the window. The sky had almost completely faded to a midnight blue color and the air was beginning to chill. I felt Sam’s hand drop from my face and his weight disappear from the mattress beside me. I looked over at what he was doing as he pulled a blanket from the closet and came back over to me. He threw it over me and pulled it up close to my face.
I gave him an insolent glare and pulled my arms free of the warmth, using them to flatten the blanket over my stomach. “You don’t have to mother me, you know,” I said, my voice still a little husky from my cry earlier.
He raised an eyebrow at me and left me to arrange the blanket around myself the way I wanted to. I decided to sit up and lean against the wall by the bed, just next to the window. I was tired of feeling sorry for myself and was finally starting to feel like I’d gotten control back over my thoughts and actions. Well, some control, anyway. Sam was grinning at me with his hands on his hips, by the time I’d finished arranging myself.
“What,” I asked, pretending to be defensive. “You got a problem?”
Sam raised a hand to cover his smile and shook his head, clearly trying not to laugh. “No,” he said, in more of a chuckle than a statement.
I glared at him and went to throw a pillow, but in a second he’d already snatched it from me and had joined me, sitting up against the wall, on the bed. I pouted as I watched him twirl the pillow around in his fingers.
He smiled at me and then looked back down at the pillow in his hands. “I’ve got to take you home soon,” he said.
Even with the smile, it was obvious that he wasn’t looking forward to leaving me. I glanced away from him, focusing on my feet wiggling at the end of the blanket. “I know,” I breathed.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sam stop playing with the pillow and drop it next to him. He relaxed back onto the wall and entwined his fingers loosely across his stomach. His arm rested warm against mine. I looked over at him and the deep shadows of the room mixed with the light of the bathroom, seemed to make his face appear sharper and more angular. It hurt me when I saw him this sad and serious. I felt as though his mind was brooding over deeper, darker, more heart-breaking things than I could have imagined. As though he’d disappeared into the constant torture of his thoughts and I wasn’t sure if he’d be able to come back.
I turned my body to face his and then reached out and put my right hand over his. Immediately, he was back with me, away from whatever past pains or future worries he was dwelling on, and now focused on my hand on his. He covered it with his own hands and then brought it up to his lips. After touching the back of my hand to his mouth, Sam then pulled it away very slowly and stared at it. He held my hand in his and seemed to analyze every inch of it, caressing it with his fingers and matching my hand up against the size of his. Once he was done studying it, he laid my hand gently on his chest
and covered it lovingly with his own hand.
Sam looked over at me with a clearly miserable smile. “I should go check on our clothes,” he said. But, he didn’t make a move to get up. He stared at me with painfully sad, violet eyes and softly tightened his hold on my hand.
I moved closer to him until my chest was half across his and I gave him an awkward hug. I rested my head on his shoulder and his other arm came round my back to hug me in return. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say that would make the situation better. I knew that he didn’t want to leave me, that he was worried about the choices I might make while I was alone or in the company of others, like Max. But what could I say to fix it. Promises didn’t mean anything, while I couldn’t even control my own actions and desires. And telling him that I would miss him, that I didn’t want to leave him either, would just make the situation harder. So, I did the only thing I could think of. I stayed quiet.
After a moment, I started to hear a low growl. Thinking it strange that my stomach should make a complaint about being hungry when it had just eaten no more than an hour earlier, I lifted my head off Sam’s shoulder. The expression on his face told me that he had heard it, too. I released Sam from the hug and sat back, confused. Then, I heard the noise again. It was louder the second time and I was almost certain that there were two growls, not just one.
I frowned at Sam’s questioning look, afraid that I knew what the sound was coming from. I knelt up on the bed and peered out the window behind Sam. I was right. The memory I had blocked from the night before, rushed back into my mind and I remembered it all. But, this time instead of one good puppy, there were three.
With glistening white fangs and glowing yellow eyes, the three huge wolves glared up at us angrily. Deep down, I knew that I should have been scared, that most normal people in this situation would be ready to wet their pants, but all I could manage was a curious frown. For some reason they just didn’t seem all that menacing all the way down there on the cobblestone path of the alleyway below. In fact, the one with a silver grey stripe on its left side even looked a little cute, if werewolves could be cute that is.
“Uh, Sam,” I said, as I looked down at the three snarling werewolves. “You weren’t expecting visitors tonight, were you?”
Sam spun around and looked over the edge of the window with me.
“Because I think,” I continued, “that Max’s pets have found us.”
“Bloody hell,” said Sam and he stuck his head back inside with lightning speed.
“Wow,” I said, astonished. “For an angel, you sure do like to curse a lot.”
Sam glared at me, clearly not impressed with my comment under the circumstances.
Pushing himself hastily off the bed, he ran over to the chest of drawers. He snatched something out of a large wooden box on top and began fiddling with it, with his back towards me. I moved away from the window, ignoring the eerie howls and snarls from the werewolves and jumped off the bed.
As I walked over to Sam, he turned to face me and I saw what was in his hand. A gun. “Um, what are you going to do with that,” I asked, cautiously.
He looked up at me as he cocked the gun, and then went to walk past me over to the window again. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to shoot anyone,” he said. He knelt on the bed and peered over the window frame. “Unless I see Max,” I heard him whisper under his breath.
“What,” I asked, a little shocked that the angel was thinking about shooting the vampire.
Sam ignored me, stepped off the bed and walked past me again. When he reached the door, he turned back to face me. “Stay here,” he ordered, “I’m going to check downstairs.” He stepped out the door and then stopped as though he’d remembered something. “And keep this closed until I come back,” he said, and shut the bedroom door behind him.
The room went dark. Only the dim light from the starlit sky illuminated the room. I stood still for a moment, with my hands on my hips, glaring at the door in shock. I couldn’t believe that Sam had gone downstairs, all by himself, to face whatever creature might have made its way inside. Frustrated that I hadn’t had a say at all in his plan of action, I considered leaving my post. I had my hand on the doorknob just as a savage snarl and then a gunshot ripped through the night. In a second, I was back on the bed starring out the window, looking outside to see if I could see what had happened. There were only two werewolves now and I couldn’t see Sam anywhere. I jumped off the bed again and took a step towards the bedroom door.
“Tsk tsk, bad Kitty,” came a whispered voice from the darkness behind me, “you know that Soldier Sam told you to stay put.”
I whirled around just in time to see Max lunge at me. He pushed me back hard into the door and held his hand tightly over my mouth. I struggled, trying to wriggle my shoulders free of his body weight and shake his hand from my face. But, it was useless. Nothing I did had any impact on his hold over me.
Max laughed low in his throat and put his lips close to my ear. “Kitty, Kitty, Kitty,” he purred. “I told you we were going to have to do this the hard way.” He leaned back to look at me and cocked his head to the side with a grin. “What have we here,” he said innocently as he looked me up and down. His eyes met mine again and they seemed to sparkle with mischief.
I felt the fingertips of his free hand slip just beneath the elastic of Sam’s boxers and caress the skin of my hip. My breath caught in my throat and body shivered involuntarily as a warm tingling sensation spread through the lower half of my body. A part of me that I tried hard to ignore loved the sensation of his cool fingers on my hot, soft skin and yearned for more. It took all my willpower to stop myself from letting out a whispered moan and from turning the tables and jumping on Max right then and there. Furious at myself and at my body’s response to him, I bit the inside of my cheek hard and let the pain give me back my moral focus.
Clearly loving my reaction, Max moved his face close to mine until our noses were almost touching. “It seems as though I’ve interrupted something,” he breathed. “How naughty of me. What were you and Angel Boy up to then? Anything I can help you with instead?”
I felt his hand slip slightly lower and again I tried to struggle free, but my squirming only seemed to please him and his grin widened. “Tell me,” he said, looking deep into my eyes, “will you cry when I kill your angel?”
I stopped struggling and glared at him. He’d kill Sam over my dead body. But somewhere, deep inside of me, that half of me I’d been trying to ignore, howled in fury. It believed everything would be better if Sam was dead. It wanted, no needed everything good out of my life. And it screamed for Max to save me.
I shook the thought out of my head, but it was too late. By the look on his face, Max had already seen his answer in my eyes.
“I knew it,” he whispered.
His look of satisfaction chilled me and brought forth a protective anger that I hadn’t realized I had. With the little movement I had, I raised my knee hard and fast into his groin. Max’s body buckled over slightly and his hand slipped from its tight hold around my mouth.
“Sam,” I screamed.
“Bitch,” Max groaned.
I almost managed to struggle free, but Max regained his strength in seconds and moved quickly to hold me back in place. Just as his hand had wrapped itself over my mouth again, the bedroom door swung open with a mighty force and Max and I were thrown onto the floor.
“Kitty,” I heard Sam yell as footsteps pounded into the room.
I crawled up onto my hands and knees, about to stand up and face him, when a strong arm grabbed me around the waist.
“Don’t even think about it,” Max said, but I couldn’t tell to whom.
I was lifted to my feet in an instant and my body was dragged backwards until it slammed hard against Max’s chest. He held me in front of him like a shield, one arm tight around my waist and the other against my throat. I looked across the room to where Sam had stopped dead, just a few steps inside the door. His
face was pained, but his stance was strong and the gun in his hands was pointed straight at Max and me.
“Let her go,” Sam said, firmly.
Max just laughed at him and rested his face softly against mine. “So, you’re the guardian angel,” Max chuckled. “You’re not doing a very good job at guarding, are you?”
Sam’s face turned hard and his voice deepened. “Let—her—go,” he said, menacingly.
“Oooh, scary,” Max said, sarcastically. “Geez, Sam. Kitty scares me more than you.”
Sam glared at Max and took a step closer to us.
“Uh-uh,” Max said, now almost nuzzling my neck. “Come too close and Kitty’s pretty little neck will get bitten. And you don’t want that, do you?”
“No,” I said. “And I don’t want to be shot either.” As fast as I could, I raised my foot up and tried to smash my heel hard into Max’s right shin. Unfortunately for me, it seemed to have no effect on him except to make his hold on me much tighter.
“That wasn’t smart,” Max whispered into my ear.
“Don’t try to help me, Kitty,” Sam said, now ordering me from across the room.
I sighed in frustration. I just wanted out of this whole situation. The boys could fight it out amongst themselves for all I cared. I looked back at Sam, who was still pointing the gun directly at us, and I hoped that he knew what he was doing.
“I think I’ve overstayed my welcome,” Max said, smugly.
“You were never welcome,” Sam snarled.
Max rubbed his cheek lightly against mine again and held my body tightly against his in a more affectionate position. “Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure about that, Sam,” he said.
I watched Sam’s eyes narrow fiercely as I felt Max’s lips touch my cheek. I tried to pull my face away, but couldn’t.
“Sweet dreams, Kitty cat,” Max whispered into my ear.
Suddenly, the firmness of Max’s body behind me was gone and I stumbled backwards in surprise. A loud gunshot pierced the silence of the room and I heard Max groan in agony from somewhere in front of me as a hot, wet substance burst across the side of my face. I shook my head, trying to rid myself of the ringing echo, and then I touched my fingers to my chin. A warm liquid smeared across my fingertips and I brought my hand down to look at it. I licked my lips. It was blood.
Innocently Evil (A Kitty Bloom Novel) Page 8
