by Selena Scott
But on wine-dishes-chocolate night, apparently Arturo was sitting down at the far end of one of the couches and tucking in for an evening with a superhero dressed like… a Viking? Good Christ.
Already bored, Arturo chose to sip his wine and look around at the people in the room instead of the movie itself. Caroline and Tre had made a floor bed and were completely wrapped around one another, buried in a pile of blankets and pillows as they watched the movie. Thea and Jack were on the far couch. He had one hand over the feet she rested in his lap, his hat pulled low over his eyes as he dozed.
Jean Luc and Celia were cuddled up together on the other end of Arturo’s couch. Celia was watching the movie, but Jean Luc was glancing down at her, adjusting the blanket over and over. As Arturo watched, a sheen of sweat appeared on Jean Luc’s brow. The big man shifted again, looking acutely nervous.
Strange.
Arturo would have kept observing them, but, of course, his eyes commanded him to seek out Martine. Who was sitting in a poofy, leopard print armchair kitty-corner from Arturo. She was clutching her wineglass and leaning forward, apparently completely enraptured by the film. Arturo did a double take.
This ethereal, otherworldly creature, who was literally made of light, was barely blinking as she watched the television screen. She gasped as the huge blond man on screen swung a top-heavy hammer toward a bad guy. She laughed too loud at a joke made by someone else on the screen.
Arturo stared at her. Apparently she was super into movies. Or… A light gold glow had started on her skin and Arturo narrowed his eyes suspiciously. He turned and studied the screen. He supposed that many would consider this actor to be attractive. Large and blond and blunt-faced.
He was pretty much the opposite of Arturo, who was dark and angular. He was toned but not built like a tank the way the actor was.
He turned his eyes back to Martine who was still dimly glowing away. He had the sudden urge to turn the television off.
Arturo jumped as Celia gasped at the other end of the couch. It wasn’t a normal gasp. It was the kind that preceded a torrent of tears. And, yup, there were the waterworks. Celia was suddenly crying and laughing and sitting in Jean Luc’s lap and staring in disbelief at her hand.
“Oh my God!” Caroline shouted, jumping up to her feet so fast Tre actually ducked and covered to avoid flying limbs. “Did you just propose? He totally just proposed! Oh my God he proposed!”
“Actually,” Jean Luc said, a light pink spreading over his cheeks, “I just slipped the ring on her finger. I haven’t gotten around to the actual proposing yet.”
“Oh no! Am I ruining it?” Caroline asked in horror. “I’m totally rui—” She was cut off abruptly when Tre helpfully pressed a palm over her mouth. He grinned and rolled his other hand through the air.
“Carry on, my dude,” he told Jean Luc.
When everyone turned back to Jean Luc, he was on one knee in front of the couch, holding Celia’s hands in his while she still openly wept.
“Celia,” he started, his voice gruff with emotion. “I was as good as dead before I met you.”
Arturo shifted in his seat. Part of him couldn’t look away from this and part of him wanted to dissolve into the shadows. There was so much love emanating from the couple that he almost couldn’t stand to look directly at them.
As good as dead.
The words clattered around in Arturo’s head.
“Playing footsie with you while we watched movies was such a simple thing, but that flirtation, that energy with you, that hope… it brought me back to life. You taught me that it was possible for me to have a future. Something I never thought would be true. I l—”
Jean Luc cut off when a crying Celia launched herself forward and bowled him over backwards. “Yes, I’ll marry you. Please. Of course. But I can’t hear anymore. I’ll never stop crying. Tell me the rest later. I can’t hear it now. I love you. I wanna get married. Immediately. Let’s go to Vegas. God. Yes.”
He was laughing and lifting her off the ground, her ring, a rainbow of gemstones, catching the light as she gripped him tightly. Jean Luc strode out of the room with his woman in his arms.
A stunned, joyful silence was left in their wake.
“Oh my GOD,” Caroline said, still muffled by Tre’s hand. And then she was kissing the crap out of Tre and he was chuckling and shuffling them both backward toward their wing of the house.
Thea and Jack were laughing into their palms. It was obvious that Thea’s confusion about the engagement ring had been cleared up at some point. It wasn’t awkward between them one bit. “When I propose, I’m not going to do it in the middle of some lame movie night,” he told her.
“Well, you’ll have to beat me to it, cowboy. Because when I propose, it’s going to knock your socks off.”
“Thea!” He looked incensed in a very un-Jack-like way. “I’ll be the one proposing.”
She shrugged. “We’ll see.”
He stood up and took her hand, marching her out the room. “Damn right, we’ll see.”
Arturo and Martine were left in the room alone. The movie flickered on innocuously at the edge of the room.
“Wow,” Martine said, her eyes wide.
Arturo had no words. He was entertained and confused and a little grossed out by all the untamed human emotion that had just been slathered thick as peanut butter all over this room. He wanted a small dark space where he could just think. He wanted to go to bed. But he knew that when he went to bed, Martine would go, too. And the hasty exits of the three other couples were way too fresh on his mind. He could practically feel the imprint of them on the space.
In self-defense, he turned back to the movie, hoping that she’d want to finish watching it and then by the time they wanted to go to bed, there’d be a little less come and get it, big boy on the air.
But it wasn’t ten minutes later that Arturo nearly jumped out of his chair. He’d had to surrender to the fact that he was much more connected to the other three bear shifters in the house these days. They were in sync when they were practicing and, whether he liked it or not, they were starting to see eye to eye in their human forms as well. There was an accord slowly being struck between them. Which meant that he was naturally much more susceptible to the pipeline of feelings and emotions that ran through all four of them. If one of them was feeling something particularly potent, Arturo could feel it, just as the others could. Usually, though, he was fairly good at tuning out the incoming information.
Tonight, however, he found that he had no hopes of tuning out three separate horny motherfuckers practically megaphoning their lust straight into his brain.
Great. All three of them were fucking their girls. And Arturo, sitting in the middle of the house, was third-party experiencing it in stereo. It wasn’t as if he was perving on them, he wasn’t in their heads. He couldn’t read their minds. But he sure as hell couldn’t fight the intense wave of lust that rolled off of all three of them.
“Are you all right?” Martine asked, looking away from the movie when he groaned and nearly tugged his hair out of his head.
“Fine,” he grated out. “Bed. Going to bed.”
He was up and striding out of the room, Martine staring confusedly after him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Martine emerged from the bathroom in her nightgown just a few minutes later. Arturo stood with his arms crossed on the other side of the room, staring out at the black night. She was a little irritated that he’d left halfway through the movie. She’d wanted to see the rest of it, but she wasn’t about to leave him unprotected while he slept. He was vulnerable then and she wasn’t leaving him alone. No matter how cute that actor had been, slanging those muscles all over the place, squinting for the camera and growling in that deep voice.
She frowned at Arturo’s back. He winced and grabbed his head. She wondered if he had a headache.
“Those bastards,” he muttered.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked again. He see
med completely agitated. Jumpy, like the wrong word from her would send him fleeing from the room. Well, she couldn’t say that she hadn’t been expecting this. Personally, she’d thought that convincing Arturo to sleep in her room would have taken a lot more convincing than it had. She’d been surprised when he’d come along with so little fight. But maybe the fight was just a few days late.
“I’m fine,” he said curtly, his back to her. He wore his jeans and no shirt. The lighting in the room was dim and she couldn’t ever remember seeing so many shadows play over him. Realistically, she was certain that she had. She’d seen him naked in so many situations. Strangely, though, in some ways it always felt like the first time.
“You were the first man I ever saw naked,” she said. The words just slipped right out, because she was thinking them, because they were true, and perhaps most incredibly, because she was comfortable around Arturo.
He finally turned from the window. “What?” his shadowed face asked her. “When do you mean?”
“All those years ago. When we first met. Back in the old country.”
Arturo looked pained and whether it was because of the reminder of his mortal life or if it was because they were talking about her seeing him naked, she wasn’t sure.
“It was just after we’d all come together as a group. You and Amelia hadn’t fallen in love yet. Edmund and Victoria had just done their whole sweeping romance thing. Charlotte and Benjamin were already married.”
“How did you see me naked?” He looked equal parts pained and fascinated.
“You were bathing in the same stream that I was. You didn’t see me, though, when you came splashing down. I hid.”
“It’s a good thing I hadn’t seen you,” he admitted. “I probably would have slipped on a rock and drowned. This whole situation would have ended very differently.”
“Why would you have slipped on a rock and drowned if you’d seen me naked?”
“Because you’re basically Helen of Troy, Wings.” He said this in a tired, almost defeated voice.
“I don’t know who that is.”
“It means I think you’re the most beautiful woman in the world. And if I’d seen you naked and bathing when I was a mortal I would have bitten my own tongue off.”
“Oh!” She flushed with surprised pleasure. She’d known that he was attracted to her, his various erections that she’d encountered were proof enough of that. But to hear him lay it out so baldly, in such stark lighting, well… it buoyed her, filled her with a sparkling, organic chemical she’d never encountered before. A question bloomed within her. “You thought that… even then?”
Arturo took a long time to answer. He looked angry at himself when he finally did. “I loved Amelia, Martine. I truly did. I also thought you were unbelievably, devastatingly gorgeous. But unapproachable. Like a goddess or an angel on high. There was something so untouchable about you. And that was before we even knew you were a shifter. Or about the energy. Even when I thought you were human, I still…” He trailed off and the tense, angry look folded into something softer, something lined with questions. “Why did you hide yourself from us, Wings?”
She sighed and stepped back so that she was sitting on the bed. It was a question she’d asked herself over and over again. Since the day Arturo had sacrificed himself, she’d been berating herself with that very question. “Because I thought it would be better if I fit in with you all. The middle ages was a different time!” she insisted. “There was every possibility that you all would fear me or even try to hurt or kill me if you knew I was a shifter. So I just pretended that I was a human like the rest of you. Only…” she fiddled with the silk that kissed over the tops of her feet. “Only, I’m not very good at blending in as a human. So you all knew there was something off about me. And I ended up distanced anyways. Which meant that I couldn’t adequately protect all of you.” She sighed. “That’s why I came clean about being a hawk shifter immediately with this group. And why I showed them my energy shifting as well. I don’t want what happened before to happen again. Even so, there’s still a distance between me and them. I’m not human. I never will be. I just hope the distance is small enough this time that I’ll still be able to keep them safe from the demon.”
Again, that night flashed before Arturo’s eyes. The night all those centuries ago that Arturo sacrificed his life to the demon. He remembered it clear as day. The demon had struck twice that night. Once several hours before and Martine had shifted to her hawk form to fight him. She’d held him off long enough for the group to stumble back through the Forest of Dean. She’d answered all of their incredulous questions. She’d answered them honestly. It had been there that Arturo’s beliefs were finally confirmed. That Martine was on some other level above other women. She was as close to a god as his mortal body was ever going to get.
And then she confirmed the worst. That she was going to kill the demon. And she would die when the demon did. Her life for his. It was, in her calm eyes, exactly how it was supposed to end.
“This time you’re not going to be fighting him alone, Martine,” he told her, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.
“If I recall, I didn’t fight him alone all those years ago, either,” she replied quietly.
In each of their mind’s eye, the memory of Arturo flinging himself at the feet of the demon flashed.
The moment wasn’t tense or tight, though. It was velvety sad. Until she patted the bed beside her and innocently looked up at him.
“Let’s just go to bed.”
He stared at her hand as it patted the bed. His eyes slicked sideways and landed on the dark valley of cleavage in that fucking black nightgown. What he wouldn’t give to actually crawl into bed with her. He wanted to taste the back of her knee. He wanted to pull her hair and make her eyes dilate. He wanted the cold night air in through the windows so she trembled and clung to him. He wanted to punish both of them for all these years of pain.
It didn’t make sense. He breathed roughly and viciously blocked out the stereo sex feelings that were still beaming in from all three of his comrades. He wasn’t having sex tonight. And he wasn’t ever having sex with Martine. The demon was going to come, they were going to kill that motherfucker, and then he and Martine were going to die. The end. The fucking end.
She patted the bed again, her hair tumbling over her forehead.
He cracked.
“Martine, I can’t take another night of this. I don’t care. I’d rather lay myself on a silver platter on the demon’s dinner table than take another night of that.” He pointed toward her white bed, which seemed to glow a little bit in the dim blue light of evening.
“Oh.” She immediately cast her eyes down. “I understand.”
Arturo nodded then strode toward the door of her room. He paused at the threshold and turned to her, his hand knotted up in his hair. “Wait. What exactly is it that you’re understanding? Because something tells me you’re jumping to the wrong conclusion.”
He was really going to make her say it out loud? She smoothed her warm palms over her thighs and took a deep breath. “Because a man wants only to lie beside a woman that he feels something… special for. And I’m not exactly a normal woman. You don’t like being close to me. In that way.”
“Jesus Christ.” Arturo pinched the bridge of his nose and slammed his eyes shut. He kicked the door closed behind him and paced the length of the room. “You really think…”
She watched him fill the space with his agitated pacing. His intense energy had the effect of making the room seem to shrink. She stood up and stepped toward him.
“Martine,” he turned to face her abruptly and immediately his eyes swept over her in an agitated way. He took her in from head to toe. Suddenly his hands were on her shoulders and he marched her backwards so that she was, again, sitting on the bed she’d come to think of as theirs, though she’d never say that out loud now.
He strode all the way across the room and pressed his back to the windows, as
far from her as he could possibly be.
“That is the opposite of what is going on,” he finally told her, his black eyes burning and his hair messy from where he’d been grabbing it.
“What do you mean?” she asked, carefully choosing her words so that she’d be able to understand.
“I mean that I can’t sleep here because—” He let out a frustrated groan and knocked his skull backwards against the window a few times. “Because I want you so fucking badly it is torture to lay next to you and not touch you.”
She ran the words through her mind again. And then another time when they didn’t make any more sense the second time. “You…”
“Want you.”
“Want me.”
“That’s right.” He was grabbing his hair again and looking at her so hard, she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he could see right through her. “This is a complete surprise to you?”
She thought for a long time. Was it? “I wasn’t sure what was happening. I’ve never…” she trailed off and watched as his eyes darkened further, harder, ruthlessly dark. “I didn’t think for sure that you’d want me. Considering I’m not exactly human.”
He laughed humorlessly, almost as if his last reserves of calm were about to be used right up. “Wings, you wake up every morning literally glowing for me. How could I not want that? You?”
She smoothed her nightgown over her knees, trying to keep up. “So, you want me. Which means that you’re going away from me? You won’t stay here with me?”
“I can’t trust myself.” His words were simple but they didn’t clear anything up for Martine.
“Being close to me causes you pain.” She was desperately trying to clear everything up. Arturo had come to mean so much to her over the course of her existence, and she could feel her relationship with him balancing on a knife’s edge. She didn’t want to push him away simply because she wasn’t understanding what exactly he was saying.
