by Selena Scott
“Are you asking about my manhood, angel?”
Yeah, that was exactly what Tre had wondered.
“Well. Gosh.”
Tre could practically hear the blush on Caroline’s cheeks.
“I was just curious, I guess?” she finished.
Tre heard dishes clinking around and then a still silence. He knew, without even having to look, that Arturo was touching her. He had reached out a hand to stop her from scurrying away. He was touching her.
“I’m a man in the ways that count, angel. Especially where you’re concerned.”
“What the absolute fuck?” Tre couldn’t help himself. He strode into the bedroom and surveyed the scene. It was exactly as he’d intuited. Caroline stood next to Arturo’s bed, a small pile of dishes in her hands. Arturo’s hand laid on her elbow, stilling her as he leaned halfway out of the bed. His dark eyes were trained on Caroline, seductive and deep, until they snapped to Tre and immediately filled with scorn. “Are you hitting on her?”
His eyes were on Arturo, so he missed the fire that flashed across Caroline’s expression, the momentary flash of pain.
“It’s been known to happen, Tre.” Her voice was soft and though nothing Arturo had done or said had truly shredded her composure, just this one moment with Tre in the room had the dishes quaking slightly.
Tre strode forward and took the burden of the dishes off her hands, but his eyes remained on Arturo. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Arturo, lazily surveying the scene and quickly putting many of the pieces together, leaned back on his hands, releasing Caroline in the process. He looked like a cat on a silk pillow, retracting and extending his claws, flicking his tail. “I’m enjoying the company of a beautiful woman. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“I—” That caught Tre up short. What was he doing exactly? “I’m protecting her!”
“Apparently.”
The snide answer had Tre’s back up. He opened his mouth to snarl something back when he finally registered the empty space where Caroline had just been. His mouth popped closed while he turned a circle, scanning the room for her. Realizing that she’d left, he strode out of the room without another word.
Arturo watched him go, a shrewd expression on his face. It was followed by a small, thoughtful smile.
Tre jogged down one hallway and up a set of stairs. He got to Caroline’s bedroom door just as it was closing.
“Caroline, love,” he grunted as he got a foot in the door to keep her from closing it.
She immediately opened it back up. “Tre! I didn’t mean to close it on your foot.”
Her cheeks were rosy and her eyes were having trouble settling on any one thing, but beyond that, she looked just like herself. Cheery and sweet, neat as a pin. Her chestnut hair waved down her back, her navy slacks were perfectly hemmed above little red flats, a white shirt tucked in. Her small breasts barely pressed against the fabric of her shirt, meanwhile her ass nearly overflowed the confines of her trousers. The overall effect pretty much had sweat popping out on Tre’s forehead. She looked so damn good standing there, backlit by the window across her room.
The thought that perhaps he wasn’t the only one who’d recently admired the way she looked in that outfit had some of the starch rising in Tre again. “I really don’t think you should be getting too friendly with Arturo.”
Her brow immediately knit together, but she didn’t say anything. The woman of a thousand questions didn’t ask a single question.
Tre shifted on his feet, disconcerted by the bright beam of her honey eyes. “It’s just not a good idea,” he said awkwardly. “We don’t know anything about him, including his agenda or what he’s capable of. I wouldn’t want you to get too close to someone who could hurt you.”
Her brow slowly unknit and the expression was replaced by something that looked like just a flash of sadness, but she smoothed that away as well. Soon, she was left with just her regular, wide-eyed Caroline Clifton look. The one that never failed to zip adrenaline through Tre’s veins.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” was all she said. Then her eyes flicked down to Tre’s hands. “Would you mind putting those in the dishwasher? Thanks!”
She leaned forward to buss Tre on the cheek, the way she’d done a hundred times, and then gently closed his door.
Tre looked down in confusion at the dishes he was still holding in his hand. He hadn’t even realized he’d carried them out of Arturo’s room. He looked back up at Caroline’s closed door.
I’ll keep that in mind, she’d said. Tre was not reassured.
***
Though the pain in his gut was not receding, Arturo allowed the beautiful and guileless Caroline Clifton to convince him to take a walk around the property. It was his first time out of bed since he’d walked to the kitchen that first time. She’d given him clean clothes and pushed him toward the shower that was attached to his room.
Arturo emerged, scrubbed and strangely normal looking in Thea’s brother’s old track pants and high school T-shirt. It was almost impossible to tell that he’d been the right-hand man to an evil demon for centuries. Only something about his eyes truly gave the game away.
“Have you ever worn a suit?” Caroline asked Arturo as she looped her elbow through his and the two of them made slow progress down a path through Thea’s side yard. Fields rolled out like a giant yellow carpet in nearly every direction. In the distance, a rising shadowy green showed the beginning of the forests and the end of Thea’s land, and beyond that, gray, misty behemoths reached toward the sky. The mountains.
Arturo was intrigued by the strange question. He was again reminded of Amelia. There was so much wonder, so many questions. “Not a modern one.”
“Right! You weren’t born in our time.”
“No,” he shook his head. “I was born in the 1700s.”
“And then you met the demon,” she said solemnly, sadness in every syllable.
Arturo couldn’t help but chuckle at her sweet moroseness. “Well, some things happened in between. I was already 34 years old when I met the demon.”
“You had a whole life before that.”
“Yes.”
“So you’re not like Martine? You weren’t born to do what you do?”
He slowed their pace a little bit. That was a very complicated question. And one that he was no longer equipped to answer. He felt the rising pain in his gut and the bright sunlight and fresh air around him turned noxious and cloying. He didn’t want to be out in the world. He wanted darkness and damp and dying. He didn’t want to be the man that he used to be. He didn’t want to remember it or think of it or explain it. He wanted nothing more than to be left alone. Eternally. Death was what he supposed he was asking for. True death.
He felt a strange pressing at the edge of his feelings and he knew, with a burst of rage, that they were doing it again. Those children back there, the younglings, novice bear shifters with their huge, human feelings and their nobility and honor and simple hearts. They were probing at his feelings, attempting to learn him, learn his game. They, who needed surgeon’s tools but used butter knives instead. They were sloppy and untrained and every time they attempted to read him, they made the pain in his gut fifty times worse.
Arturo gasped and bent over, his hands at his knees. He felt sweat at his temple as the feeling grew and intensified like a fist slowly closing over a severed finger.
“Arturo!” Caroline was on her knees next to him, her cool hands on his shoulders, her frantic eyes looking up into his. “What is it? Oh, gosh. Here, sit. Just come and sit for a minute.”
She guided him to the ground where he fell like a sack of potatoes. He fought the urge to curl in on himself like an infant in the womb.
“Your friends are going to torture me to death,” he growled, wiping sweat from his forehead onto the sleeve of his shirt. It was a figure of speech, of course. If it were true, he wouldn’t have any problem with it. He would have welcomed it. But
they were too clumsy and inexperienced to do anything more than torture him indefinitely. As if that were such a change of pace for Arturo.
“What?” she gasped. “They’re hurting you?”
“When they reach out to find out how I’m feeling. It’s painful.”
After a moment, most of the pain had passed, but the walk was over for him. He needed the dark cave of his room, curtains drawn and sweat on the sheets. He needed privacy.
Caroline, naturally understanding this, helped him around the side of the house and back to his room.
The rest of the group, having watched most of the exchange from the living room, raised incredulous eyebrows at one another.
“Looks like they’re becoming fast friends,” Jack said, the laziness in his tone belying the genuine concern in his heart. He played with the ends of Thea’s hair who sat next to him on the couch.
Tre, who was in the process of slugging back a glass of orange juice, leaned on the doorway between the sunny living room and the kitchen. “He’d like more than friendship if you ask me,” he said, his words dripping with venom. “I caught him hitting on her yesterday.”
Celia and Thea exchanged glances and Jean Luc, sprawled in a hamstring stretch on the floor, immediately popped his head up. “Hitting on her how?”
“I don’t know,” Tre said. “Hitting on her. Trying to butter her up. Get in her pants. He was giving her the eyes and talking about his manhood.”
Martine slipped from the room without any of them noticing.
“Was it working?” Jean Luc asked incredulously.
“Of course it was working, it was Caroline.” Tre slugged back the rest of the orange juice.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Celia asked in outrage on behalf of her friend.
“I mean that she’s so innocent, she didn’t even know what he was doing. But she was laughing and blushing and playing right into his hand. He could have peeled her like a banana if I hadn’t interrupted.”
Even saying the words left an acidic burn in his throat. He forced his white knuckles to unwhiten against the thick glass in his hand. But the memory of that slimeball hitting her with the do-you-wanna eyes was enough to make Tre want to jog into Arturo’s room and give him a reason to buy dentures.
“Give her a little credit,” Thea said, again exchanging eye contact with Celia.
“Can we afford to?” Jean Luc asked, leaning backward on his hands. “We have no idea what this asshole’s endgame is. We have no idea what he’ll do to get his way. All we know is that he’s started showing interest in the sweetest, most vulnerable one among us. We can’t treat that like it’s a coincidence.”
Caroline stepped into the room and all heads swiveled toward her. But she didn’t appear to have heard Jean Luc’s comment. Her arms were crossed over her chest in a defensive gesture that Tre had never seen before. Her bottom lip was worried insistently by her teeth. “You’re hurting Arturo,” she said, looking all three men in the eye.
“What’s that, darlin’?” Jack asked.
“When you probe at his feelings like that. You make the pain in his stomach worse.”
The men didn’t have to exchange eye contact to feel one another’s instant skepticism.
“How do you mean?” Tre asked.
“I mean that he fell down on the path out there because you were all trying to figure out how he was feeling with your feelings with whatever bear shifter magic you use to do that. And it hurts him. And he’s experiencing enough pain without you all pulling crap like that!”
“Caroline,” Jean Luc said carefully. “We’re not ‘pulling crap’, we’re trying to get a read on a man whom none of us trust.”
“But you’re hurting him while you do it!” Tears sparkled in her eyes and color rose high on her cheeks.
Something twisted cruelly inside Tre to see her this emotional over Arturo. As if his pain was her pain. As if they were connected on some cosmic level. It sickened him, made the hairs on his forearms rise.
“Let’s take a time out,” Celia said, rising up slowly and crossing the room toward Caroline. “I think we all need a break for a second. We’ll reconvene at dinner time?”
None of the men looked particularly convinced.
“Don’t you all have some shifter practice to do?” Thea asked, rising up too. That got the men moving.
Thea and Celia bustled Caroline through the kitchen and back toward her room. Thea paused just long enough to grab a pitcher of iced tea and a set of cups.
They went right into Caroline’s room and closed the door. Thea poured a drink for each of the women and folded her incredibly long legs underneath her.
“Spill,” she said to Caroline.
“I won’t spill it!” Caroline responded, eyeing her glass of iced tea and the bright white comforter cover underneath them.
“Not the tea,” Thea said dryly. “I meant whatever secret you have that has your cheeks so pink.”
“Oh.” Caroline looked back down at her drink and swirled it lightly, her cheeks going even pinker. “You mean about me and Arturo?”
Celia’s stomach absolutely plummeted. Like straight through the floor and through the basement and pretty much all the way through the earth’s core. Celia’s stomach basically plummeted all the way to Australia. “Is there a you and Arturo?” she asked carefully.
Caroline shrugged. “I think there could be, if I let it happen.”
“You’re attracted to him. To Arturo.” Thea attempted to keep the disgust out of her tone but she didn’t completely succeed.
“He’s very handsome.”
“Caroline, he tried to kill all of your friends.”
Caroline blanched. “You’re right. I know you’re right. I’m so sorry.” Caroline set her drink aside and covered her white face in her palms. A soft, broken breath came out of her.
“Shit.” Thea had really not meant to make Caroline cry. It was as bad as she’d ever imagined. She felt like she’d just told her that hamburgers were made out of puppies. “Caro, don’t cry.”
“No, I’m sorry. I’ve just been really lonely lately and no one wants me. Arturo, I think, wants me. And it’s been a long time, since way before my divorce, since anyone has looked at me with anything more than polite disinterest and I just wanted… you know. What you guys have.”
Celia and Thea’s eyes snagged on one another. It was true that they’d both found the loves of their lives over the last few months. It was also true that neither of them had thought too hard on how it must have felt to everyone else to watch it happen. Especially Caroline who was very fresh off a divorce.
“My husband used to want me,” Caroline said quietly, her fingers playing in the loose threads of the duvet. “He used to be crazy for me. But then I think he realized that this is really who I am, who I’m gonna be forever, and he just kind of… got sick of me.” She sighed hard. “I’m tired of getting rejected.”
“Has someone else rejected you? Besides your husband?” Celia asked gently, her brain moving at warp speed.
Caroline stilled, her fingers quit plucking at the threads on the duvet. She didn’t want to tell the truth, because it was sad and maybe a little embarrassing, but she wasn’t a liar, she never had been. “I thought that maybe Tre would want to fool around with me. But,” she shrugged, “he didn’t.”
Thea’s eyebrows went into her hairline. Tre had turned down a shot with Caroline? After he’d spent the last two months watching her out of the corner of his eye, surreptitiously smelling her hair, laughing at every joke she made, rearranging pillows on the couch so she’d be more comfortable, all but rubbing her feet at the end of the night???? Something did not compute to Thea at all. She would have put her farm up as collateral on a bet that he had his head up his ass about something.
Apparently, Celia had drawn the same conclusion. The two women exchanged complicated eye contact that was only interpretable by a set of great friends. Celia beseeched Thea to just play along for a minute. “Car
oline,” she said carefully. “If Arturo would make you happy, then maybe it’s okay to bask in his attention.”
Caroline’s eyes snapped up to her. “But you hate Arturo and I’d never want to betray you guys.”
Celia shifted. “Well, whether we trust him or not, Arturo is kind of on our side now. And more than anything we just want you to be happy.”
Thea watched Celia carefully. “Right.” She turned to Caroline. “Why don’t you just let your heart tell you what to do?”
It was a decidedly un-Thea-like thing to say and it showed just how mixed up Caroline was that she didn’t even notice that her friend had just started quoting Hallmark cards.
Celia and Thea left Caroline there, deep in thought, and tiptoed out the side door and to the barn where Thea had a ton of afternoon chores to tend to anyways. In the far distance, they saw the three men practicing their shift. Seemed like they were attempting to learn how to shift on the fly, mid-sprint. It didn’t appear to be going particularly well.
“I get such a kick out of the fact that they have to train naked,” Thea said, chuckling.
“I know. Did you see how much sunscreen Tre bought at that drug store? He’s white as a pearl. Jeez, I swear he catches the sun like a mirror.”
They laughed and glanced around to make sure that they were well and truly alone. “So,” Thea started. “Obviously Tre has his head up his ass about something.”
“Obviously.” Celia kicked at a stone, rubbing one of her palms over the tattoos at her shoulder. “I think she likes him.”
“I think so, too. And he obviously likes her. I mean, the man can barely keep his tongue in his mouth when she’s around.”
“I’ve noticed. It’s pretty cute, actually. But I don’t think Caroline would have wanted to hear that. Because I don’t think she cares why someone has rejected her. I think she’s just sick of getting rejected.”
“Right. So you encouraged her to go after Arturo… why?”
“Because we’re gonna convince Tre to pursue her. And I don’t think he’s gonna do that unless there’s some sort of noble reason. Like making sure she’s safe from Arturo.”
