by Selena Scott
And then he’d returned home from veterinary school in California and met the newly eighteen-year-old Kaya. He’d been young thirties and disgusted with himself for lusting after a teenager. He’d more than doubled down on his convictions that they were not meant for love. The Durant boys were going to have to be loners. Sad but true.
It wasn’t until they’d met Bauer, until Seth and Sarah’s love had proved him wrong that Jackson had begun to rethink things.
Unfortunately, there’d be no rethinking his situation with Kaya. She was too young. He was too dangerous. That was as far as that story was ever going to go.
Seth turned. “Oh, I didn’t realize the girls were here. I’m gonna go say hi.”
Raph and Jackson watched him go, Jackson turning the chicken. He cleared his throat. “I know why I’m avoiding them. But why are you avoiding them?”
Raphael looked up, clearly surprised at Jackson’s candor. In the five years he’d been harboring these feelings for Kaya, he’d never once mentioned them, and certainly not casually alluded to them. But his candid conversation with Raphael the other day had opened a door for Jackson. His secret was easier to carry if he didn’t have to carry it all by himself. And he figured that Raphael had offered to help him share the burden by bringing it up in the first place.
Jackson lifted his eyebrows at Raph. Raph looked down and adjusted his tie. “I’m not avoiding them. I’m just… avoiding them.”
They both laughed. Raph had never been good at lying. “Why?”
“Can’t say. Promised I wouldn’t.”
Jackson’s curiosity was fully piqued. He’d never known Raphael to avoid anything. Like, ever. Raph was not an avoider.
“Is everything all right?” Jackson asked, carefully watching his brother’s face. Maybe Jackson had screwed everything up in the past by being overly tough with his brothers, but that was honestly because of how much he loved them. If Raphael ever, ever needed help, Jackson was there.
“Yeah, I mean, I’m not sure—” Raphael cut off. His words seemed to just keel over and die. He was staring through the sliding glass door that led to the kitchen and something had arrested his attention so fully that he’d apparently forgotten how to speak English.
Jackson followed Raph’s gaze and saw that it was Natalie who’d captured his attention. Natalie looking colorful and bright and attractive in all sorts of colors, her head thrown back, laughing at something Seth was saying.
“Bye.” Raphael spoke abruptly and was already halfway across the porch, apparently drawn toward Natalie on some sort of tractor beam.
Jackson watched his brother go with raised eyebrows. That was… new.
He turned back to the chicken and started loading it onto the platter he’d brought out. He wondered what the hell was going on between Raph and Nat. His mind wanted so badly to stray to one particular topic that was directly adjacent to the idea of Raph and Nat: the idea of him and Kaya. But he’d disciplined himself too strictly to really let his mind wander there. He only indulged in those kinds of fantasies when his brain was lazy and unguarded, in the moments right before sleep.
He closed the grill and turned with the plate of food in his hands. Knowing that Kaya was somewhere in his mother’s house, Jackson kept his eyes down as he entered the kitchen, not wanting to be caught unexpectedly in the sight of her. No matter how much he steeled himself for seeing her, the first glance of her always sent a zipping electricity through him that was getting increasingly harder to conceal.
But he looked up and saw that the kitchen was empty. He set the food on the counter, caught his mother’s eye in the living room, letting her know it was there, and then quickly washed his hands. He could hear the guests in the living and dining room, laughing and chatting, and he knew he wasn’t ready for that. He needed another few minutes on his own before he subjected himself to a night of avoiding Kaya.
Luckily, his old bedroom was still a place of sanctuary for him in this house. His mother had kept their rooms largely the same for whenever they wanted to stay over. He could hide out there for ten minutes without it being explicitly rude. Maybe he’d call and check in at work. There was a Labrador who he’d become partial to over the years who was undergoing a small surgery tonight. He wanted to hear how all that had gone.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and was just clicking through his contacts when he stepped into his room. Without looking up or bothering to put on the light, he strode over to the bed and sat down.
“Oh. Sorry,” said a smooth, quiet voice that Jackson felt all the way down to his toes.
He looked up from his phone slowly, as if seeing her in increments would lessen the jolt to his system, but of course, all that succeeded in doing was giving him a slow-motion perusal of her, from feet to face.
Kaya stood at the other end of his dim bedroom. She was barefoot. That was the first thing he noticed. Her bare feet were pink from cold but her toenails were lavender in color. The gray of her dress was almost invisible in the twilit room, making her melt into the color of the wall behind her. But her eyes were shockingly bright, as always. Light blue ringed in dark blue. Her hair was messy, though she’d obviously attempted to keep it neat. He was rocked by the sight of her in his bedroom, looking like a fairy princess, all silver and blue, a daughter of the moon.
“I didn’t mean to intrude,” she said in that quiet voice. “I was just returning this.”
He realized belatedly that she was holding a book in her hand that she was reaching up to put back on his shelf.
“I borrowed it last week and… yeah, I’m returning it. Like I said. So. Um. Sorry.”
She took a step back from him.
He was alone in a room with Kaya. This was something he’d successfully avoided for five years. Since the moment he came home from vet school in California and realized just how unbelievably alluring a woman she really was.
But here they were. Alone in a dark room. He sat on a bed while her feet were bare. Jackson swallowed and set his phone aside. She took another step back, jolting a little when she pressed up against the bedroom wall, nowhere else for her to go.
He meant to ask her what book she’d borrowed, but a different question popped out. “Are your feet cold?”
She blinked at him in surprise, clearly taken aback at his line of questioning. Then she tore her gaze from him and blinked down at her feet. “Oh. Yes. Always.”
“Your feet are always cold?”
“Always.”
He absorbed this information like water into parched ground. He knew a lot about Kaya, but all from just having generally lived in her orbit over the last five years. He’d never gained a piece of information about her directly from her mouth to his ears. His eyes wanted to linger on her face, on the curve of her breasts and hips, so instead he dropped them to her feet.
“Why didn’t you wear socks?” He’d been striving for an unaffected tone. Actually, he’d just been trying not to sound like he was impossibly in love with her. Instead, though, even he could hear the cold note that had entered his tone. His voice made it sound like he thought she was an idiot. Which he didn’t actually think at all.
She bristled accordingly.
“Socks make my boots too small.” She gazed at him imperiously, as if this were the perfect answer, but instead it only opened up a whole other host of questions.
“Why don’t you get new boots?”
She opened her mouth and snapped it closed, glaring at him for a moment before her eyes dropped to the floor.
Oh.
Right.
Like a dumbass, he’d forgotten that Nat and Kaya were always pretty tight on cash. They got less than zero help from their parents and to Jackson’s knowledge, Kaya had taken out loans to put herself through undergrad. She definitely didn’t have money to burn.
And now, here he was, rubbing her face in it, making her feel less-than. All because he was attempting not to tell her that she looked utterly lovely with bare feet.
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She opened her mouth to reply, but he cut her off.
“Never mind. You want to borrow some?”
She furrowed her brow. “Borrow some of what?”
Without answering her question directly, Jackson rose up and stepped over to his old dresser where he still kept a small supply of clothes in case he stayed the night over there.
He dug through the sock drawer and found a pair of athletic socks and a pair of large wool socks. He pulled them both out and held them up to her, putting the question in his facial expression. He didn’t trust himself to speak again without insulting her.
“Oh.” It might have been a trick of the light, but he could have sworn her face softened. “The wool ones, please.”
Pleased that she was actually going to accept this kindness from him, he tossed them across the room to her.
He thought of the way Raphael had seemed to be dragged toward Nat on some sort of tractor beam and suddenly he understood exactly what that probably felt like. He felt himself drawn toward her. But he didn’t move. He didn’t let his feet move. Even as she walked to his bed and sat down in the exact place he’d just been sitting. She put on one sock and then the other. The socks swallowed up her legs, almost to the knee. She wiggled her toes and looked up at him.
“Thanks.”
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. His voice had gone low and gravelly and he was sure that it was painfully apparent to her that seeing her in his clothing had deeply affected him. “Of course.”
She stood up.
There was an intensity between them. Jackson wanted so badly to be relaxed and distant with her, but at that moment, it felt impossible. It would be like picking up a pot of boiling water with his bare hands and carrying on a casual conversation with someone.
“I’ve been doing that for a while.” She pointed to the bookshelf and then crossed one arm over her middle, holding her opposite elbow.
“Borrowing my books?”
She nodded.
It was more information that he absorbed immediately and completely. He couldn’t help but look at the shelf, wondering which ones she’d handled, held, read.
“They’re all there!” she said defensively. “I always return them!”
He laughed a little, caught off guard by her defensiveness. Although he knew that it was well deserved. He’d always been an ass to her. “It’s too late,” he told her. “The jig is up. I know you’ve been stealing my used paperbacks. I’ll never trust you again.”
Her mouth dropped open and her cheeks went pink. A small chuckle escaped her before she bit her luscious bottom lip. “I… didn’t know you made jokes.”
He laughed again, a little more than the first time. “It’s been known to happen. I’ll bet you didn’t know I share socks either.”
She looked back down at her socked feet and wiggled her toes. “That was definitely a shocker.”
She looked slightly more comfortable now, though she still held her opposite elbow. Jackson was reminded of what Raphael had told him the other day. In fact, the words were seared into Jackson’s brain.
When you’re not around, Kaya is kind of… soupy. She’s always lounging around, falling asleep on the couch. She’s very observant, sure. But in a kind of happenstance sort of way. But when you’re around, she sits straight up, goes dead quiet, her eyes miss nothing. She’s like the ninja version of herself.
It was true, that whenever he and Kaya were in the same room, she was all eyes. Watching him the way a wary cat watches a stranger stomp around a living room. Tonight, though, she was a little different. Softer. Blushier. She was obviously extremely on edge and aware of him, but he’d also caught her off guard with his jokes. He’d warmed her up just a bit.
It hit him then how desperately he wanted to see this soupy, lounging version of Kaya. He wanted her to fall asleep on the couch when he was around. He wanted her to be that comfortable.
He shifted on his feet, just enough to creak the floorboards underneath him and Kaya’s eyes darted upward. She took stock of where he was, watching him to see if he was moving.
Her wariness was back and this time it reminded Jackson of something. It hit him all at once. She looked like… prey. She stood there, completely still, in her dress that was perfectly camouflaging her into the shadows, and he knew, suddenly, that it was because of him. With a sort of preternatural intuition, he knew that she sensed what lurked under his civilized exterior.
She knew he was a wolf shifter, of course. Both of the Chalk sisters had known about the Durant brothers for over a decade now. That secret had long since flown the coop.
Ever since Raphael had told him that Kaya was different around him, Jackson had held onto that little piece of information like a rough-hewn stone he’d found in the ground. He hadn’t let himself get too obsessed with it, not knowing what lay beneath the raw exterior of the fact. If he polished that information down, would he find a diamond waiting for him? Or coal? He hated that he’d begun to hope. On some internal, unstoppable level, he’d wondered if her awareness of him was anything like his awareness of her.
Jackson felt his rising good feeling spiral away. As he eyed her from five feet away, it was painfully clear to him that she was not aware of him as a man, no. She was aware of him as a predator. She, more than the others, must sense the wildness that lived within him. She must be naturally wary of it.
For just a few moments, he’d been enjoying the tight spooling of this moment between them. He’d enjoyed being alone with her. Making her blush. But now, immediately, he saw it in a different light. He was, after all, standing between her and the door. Maybe he was holding her hostage in here, his mere presence terrifying enough to have her freezing in fear.
Disgusted with himself, he made to get it all over with as quickly as possible.
He strode to the bed, holding his breath as he passed her so as not to torture himself with her scent, and grabbed his phone. She flinched as he leaned past her and he singed it into his brain.
She’s scared of you, you idiot. Remember that.
“I’m going to get back.” He made sure to make his voice sound as if he were bored, as if she weren’t worth his time. It was easier that way.
At some point, he figured he’d be grateful for her reminder of who and what he was. But as he turned and left her standing in moonlight in his bedroom, it only hurt.
CHAPTER NINE
Who had Raphael been kidding thinking that he’d use the space from Natalie to think clinically and analytically about what was happening between them?
He’d never been much of an analyzer.
He’d gone straight from making out with her to shifting on his own for the very first time. Then he’d spent the entire day setting up for Seth’s wedding and thinking of nothing but Natalie. Specifically, thinking of nothing but kissing Natalie.
He’d had lush, expansive daydreams of kissing her on a beach. In a movie theater. The back seat of a car. He’d imagined kissing her up against a wall. On a couch while a movie played. In the morning while she was all dolled up for work.
He’d, more than once, had to be called back to attention by a member of his family that day. Only Bauer suspected the real reason for his empty-headedness. The rest of them just assumed it was because he was amped over having successfully shifted last night. Which he was. Just not quite as amped as he was that he’d made out with Natalie.
However, when it came time to go home and shower, Raphael had found himself swamped with a very unusual case of nerves. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d had butterflies like this. But there he’d been, standing in his bedroom, frowning down at two different ties in his hands, his stomach flipping, because he was going to see Natalie in an hour.
He was suddenly feeling extremely underprepared for seeing her. He should have spent more of the day planning what he was going to say to her. He should have thought much more academically about this situation and less emotionally. Because what was going to happen if she
walked into his mother’s house for the rehearsal dinner and frowned at him? What if she avoided him? What if she’d fully changed her mind? What if she’d made up her mind and decided that it wasn’t in the cards for them?
Shouldn’t he be prepared for any outcome?
But try as he might, he couldn’t tame his mind to do anything but feel nervousness, punctuated, of course, by the occasional daydream of kissing her again.
Confused, worked up, and a little irritated at himself, Raphael had just chosen one of the ties at random and driven to his mother’s house. The house had begun to fill up with guests. Normally the most social of his brothers, Raphael found himself out on the back porch with Seth and Jackson, avoiding the crowd for a minute.
He’d heard Natalie coming into the house and instead of going to greet her, found he needed just one more moment to himself. If this was the last moment he was going to have before she told him that the whole thing was a terrible idea, well, he wanted to relish it.
But then, he’d looked up and seen her standing in the kitchen.
Jesus, she’s literally glowing.
The warm light from the kitchen overheads set her dress alight, making her look like a sunny autumn day. In an instant, his nerves evaporated like a drop of water on a hot pan.
Because he’d forgotten one thing in the last hour. This wasn’t a random person he was freaking out over. This was Natalie.
And even better than that, it was Natalie, the other version of her who had kissed him stupid on his kitchen floor last night.
And then he let gravity take over and he was gone, across the porch, sliding past the glass door, and weaving past a few people to stand directly next to her.
It was almost perfect. It was almost exactly what his body wanted him to do. It was everything except for the part where he wanted to wrap his arms around her and bury his face in her neck. He wasn’t sure how well that would go over in this room full of people who had no idea they’d kissed last night.
