The Devil's a Werewolf

by Thalia Eames

“A beautiful bad boy bastard?” he said, his feigned helpfulness not helping at all.

  Jules paused. Cash didn’t flinch. He never did. He liked the truth plainly stated, just like she did. She wondered if that ran in his family. Then she imagined Daz as the brutally honest captain of an animated pirate spaceship and groaned. Time for a subject change.

  “Where are you getting all this?” she asked.

  “I overheard you and Gran talking,” Cash said, leaning back into the couch. “I appreciated your use of alliteration on that last one, babes. Nice.” He kissed the top of her head. “So, we’re done here? You’re good?”

  Her teeth scraped her bottom lip but she nodded in agreement. Jules had to make sure the restoration of Averdeen Manor returned the house to the beautiful home Lennox had left—before her friend and her husband got back.

  “Fuck me.” She flopped back on the couch beside Cash. His eyes warmed the way they always did at some point in their conversations.

  “Daz definitely wanted to.” Cash said. “Fuck you, I mean, but I told him how much you were going to absolutely love that he’s a former Shifter Mixed Martial Arts fighter when you found out.”

  Jules leaned forward, totally on edge to hear what Daz thought of her love for fighters. “Yeah?” she asked. Cash reached out to tuck her blue streak behind her ear. Everyone did that. It annoyed her.

  “What did he say?” she asked again.

  “Your thing for fighters completely turned him off. Daz refuses to raise his fists again, for anything or anyone, which means he isn’t interested in you anymore.”

  Okay, good. Right? Cash had given Jules what she wanted, a wall between her and Dashiell Warren. So why did it feel like she’d gotten punched in the head instead?

  Chapter Six

  “What are you doing?” Daz asked no one in particular as he leaned against a large Angel Oak in Dr. Reardon’s backyard. He’d already pretended to wander around for ten minutes to give Jules a chance to collect herself, but he’d run out of patience and wanted to get down to the business he’d come for.

  He glanced up into the leaf-covered branches overhead. Jules gasped, her back straightening like a cat’s. Good. At least she’d stopped holding her breath. He didn’t want her to get brain damage from oxygen deprivation. Why she thought holding her breath would keep him from hearing and smelling her, he couldn’t say. Plus, he’d watched her climb up there as though she did it everyday when she saw him walk out of the peach orchard.

  Hell, she’d done a terrible job of avoiding him the entire week, but maybe that had more to do with the connection between them. Whenever they got anywhere near one another his awareness of her seemed to hum inside him.

  Unleashing his claws and using them to dig into the bark-covered trunk, Daz climbed into the tree easily. He found a heavy bowed branch parallel to Jules’s and let it cradle him. Relaxing, he threw his arms behind his head and let one leg swing. Jules watched him settle in and mouthed the word “wow” before she leaned back against the Angel Oak’s massive trunk. Daz’s lids lowered in that lazy way they always seemed to in the daylight. He preferred the night.

  “What are you doing?” he asked again.

  Jules exhaled. “I was sitting up here, hanging out, trying to get my head straight. But now, I’m mostly trying to avoid you,” she said.

  Daz glanced at her in his peripheral vision. The tree didn’t work out for her today and the bushes hadn’t worked a couple of days ago. He’d sensed her as soon as she stepped onto the Averdeen lawn. “More practice. Less shrubbery,” he said.

  Jules started to say something but he held two fingers and a thumb up to stop her. “Don’t quote Monty Python. If you do, we’ll be here for a while and we’ve got other things to talk about.”

  “Okay,” she said. She drew her legs up in front of her on the branch and hugged her knees—an easy start to what would be a tough conversation.

  Daz forced himself to relax to the point she probably thought he’d fallen asleep. “Why are you avoiding me?”

  A pause, a tug on her right ear, then she answered, “Because you’re a classic danger boy and I don’t want that in my life.” Blatant honesty. That surprised him because he enjoyed truthfulness so much. This time Daz started to say something and she stopped him. “And don’t you quote Aeon Flux or we’ll be here longer.”

  Her shoulders lifted with geek girl pride and he wanted to kiss her again. Daz took her scent in, orange blossom and a hint of shifter heritage. He wondered what kind of animal ran through her blood. Not a wolf or a cat, definitely not a wolverine. At the same time he pondered her bloodlines he hoped her senses weren’t acute enough to hear his pulse pick up. The effect she had on him made his blood pound, and he knew why. Jules represented the ideal woman he’d pictured most of his life, from pubescent wet dreams all the way through to manhood: A tough, honest, geeky woman with small breasts and an ass curvy enough to sway a man off his feet. He’d dreamed her up so many times. Especially in the last five years when he’d prayed he’d never meet someone like her so he wouldn’t have to walk away. The woman he wanted deserved a man who fulfilled all her needs, wants, even her fantasies the way she did for him.

  Despite wanting to jump between branches to be near her, he stayed on his side of the tree. He’d made a decision based on two things, both their pasts and his condition. He wasn’t about to backtrack.

  “Define danger boy for me,” he said.

  “A bad boy taken to the next level. Adrenaline junkie, thrill seeker, never serious, does whatever he wants, hurts whomever he wants—”

  Holding up his hands, Daz stopped her. “That defines me, Blue. You’re right. Now tell me about him.”

  She didn’t ask him who or what he meant. She didn’t hedge and make him beg. She simply gave it to him straight.

  “He is Adam Cross of the rock band Cross. We were together for about two years.” Before he could respond, she jumped to clarify. “Not a celebrity couple’s two years, which usually adds up to less than six months total, but a real two years. Not to mention, Adam and I had an everyday kind of love. I toured with Cross and managed their socials, so we were together all the time. I thought we were a team.” She took a breath.

  Adam Cross. Daz knew him. They were both into motorcycles and three-wheel roadsters. And they’d partied together a time or two.

  “Yeah?” he said, using the single word to encourage her to keep going.

  Her gaze slid to the left and her right foot tapped the branch. If they were playing poker Daz would’ve called her on her tell. Each time Jules got embarrassed she did the same thing.

  “At one point,” she said, “there were a bunch of incidents where underage girls exposed band guys who’d sexually harassed them. These instances happened one after the other and the safety of girls at music festivals and shows became a hot topic. Sometimes the accusations were true, other times they weren’t. In a few cases it ruined the guy’s career but the girls got accused of lying every time. Evidence didn’t seem to matter. It bothered Adam and he had definite thoughts on the whole thing.”

  She looked across at Daz and he gazed back at her. “You’re talking about CrossGate,” he said, “that time Adam posted about girls protecting themselves and broke the internet?”

  Back when the scandal broke, Daz remembered thinking Adam’s team meant to say something completely different from what went up on their site. There’d been an inkling of a point about the need for society to teach both boys and girls to respect themselves and each other, but other stars had taken blows in the media for making similar points. When one athlete mentioned women should never drink to the point of passing out after the notorious rape of a high school student, fans had accused the tennis player of “slut shaming” and not holding the male rapists accountable. Much like the athlete, Adam Cross didn’t have the skills to finesse such a potentially controversial viewpoint. Ada
m’s post had taken a major detour into tone-deaf victim blaming, seeming to hold women responsible for violence committed against them. The blowback nearly cost him his popularity.

  Of course a great publicist can spin just about anything and spin they did. The Cross PR team blamed Adam’s ramblings on his then girlfriend, saying she’d written the offensive post in a misguided play to show her support for the men in the music industry. Somehow Cross’ PR team made everyone feel sorry for the rock star when they finished the job but his “misguided” girlfriend, not so much.

  Daz sat up, letting both legs hang. “You’re that girl.”

  Jules’s eyes widened. “She is me and I am she.” She knocked her head back against the tree trunk several times. Daz knew what it was like to fight a memory determined to take you down. He had a bunch of them; many involved his fists and claws pounding or slicing another shifter into oblivion, others involved not being loveable enough for not one but two mothers to keep. He definitely understood the hold bad memories had on a body, so he gave Jules a moment to work through her feelings. Finally she swung toward him. “I didn’t write that post, Daz.”

  He got the feeling she needed him to believe her. He did. “I know you didn’t, Blue. You’re too savvy and too kind to write shit like that.”

  A hard exhalation eased out of her, the only sign his reaction brought relief. “They blamed me,” she said. “Doxxing came next. Cross fans called me things no one should have to hear. They stole my identity, maxed out my credit cards. And that was just online.”

  On impulse Daz stood. Balancing on the branch he took a couple of steps to the thickest part. Measuring the distance and his own weight, he jumped from his branch to hers so lightly it barely disturbed the leaves. Jules scored his landing a perfect ten by holding up both hands and waving all her fingers. Daz took a bow and sat as close to her as he dared. Not much scared him. Somehow she did.

  The amusement of the moment lasted for a second more before the past crashed back into her. He saw it in the way she seemed to deflate.

  “Out here in the real world Adam’s fans broke out my windows, they physically pushed me around at concerts, and one night three of them poured their cocktails over my head.” She shivered.

  If I’d been there that wouldn’t have happened to her. Why hadn’t Adam protected his woman? Then again, why had Adam allowed her to take the blame from the start?

  “Bitch,” Daz answered his own question.

  Jules sighed. “Yeah.” Silence followed, neither of them feeling the need to fill the space with words that didn’t need to be said. After a while Jules tugged her ear. “If I lean on your shoulder, will it hurt you?”

  Do whatever you want to me. Use me. “I’m wearing long sleeves,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  She took her time wrapping her arms around his, and then slowly, so goddamn slow it ached, she laid her head against his bicep. Rubbing gently against him she shifted, finding a place where her cheek fit perfectly into the indentation in his muscles. Wild black waves with a stream of blue fell across his shoulder and he breathed her in. Her orange blossom scent and the warm weight of her body erased everything around them. Sound muted. Peach blossoms no longer filled his nose, and the feel of the wind in his hair lost out to the sensation of Jules leaning on his shoulder.

  One of her hands released his arm and slid across to rest on his chest. She tapped him there, gently, and squeezed. Her knowing touch acknowledged his heartbeat had revved up without embarrassing him.

  “I can’t imagine the torture you must be going through. Five years without skin-to-skin contact. I wouldn’t have made it,” she said.

  “I don’t know that I have made it, Blue. I’m not doing a great job of dealing with it.”

  “I think you’re amazing,” she said. “You still care about people, you treat everyone well despite being in pain.” She tapped his chest again and his heart stuttered. “What caused your condition?”

  “I don’t know.” He breathed the words out more than said them. “It has to be supernatural, though. There’s nothing in human medicine that accounts for it.” He rubbed his cheek across the crown of her head, loving the tickle when strands of her hair combed through his beard. “If I’m being honest with you, and I’ll always give it to you straight, Blue, I think it’s penance for all the people I hurt in the fight game.”

  Her fingers strummed him. “But isn’t getting hurt a part of fighting?”

  “Not the way you mean it.” Daz kept talking to keep from cupping her chin and kissing her. He already knew her touch brought pleasure, not pain. He didn’t speak about it with many people, but he could feel the needles of his touch aversion through fabric, not as well as with skin-to-skin, but definitely there.

  “Do you run or play sports?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I swim.”

  “Then you’ve pulled a muscle or pushed too hard and hurt yourself.”

  “Yeah, I have.”

  “Fighting is like that. You hurt as a function of your sport but most times you don’t truly get hurt.”

  She nodded her understanding. He hoped she’d also understand the next part without judging him for it. “But I hurt people, in the truest sense, long term, because I didn’t know when to stop. I needed to dominate my opponent. To let them know they’d been destroyed by the Wolverine.”

  Another silence as she thought things over.

  He had one more confession. “I used to need to dominate everything in my life, so that no one could say I wasn’t good enough to keep around.”

  This time her heartbeat sped up. Its erratic pace echoed in his ears.

  It took her a few tries before she got her next question out. “Because you were left in a trashcan as a baby?”

  Daz had no idea why relief flooded him, but it made him glad Cash had already told her he’d been found in a Dumpster behind a diner in Oregon, barely a week old. “Nah, not because of that,” he said, “more because of things that happened later.”

  “What things?” She lifted her head off his bicep but continued to pat his chest. He hoped she never stopped doing that, even though he knew she had to someday. For good.

  Their gazes locked and held. “I don’t want to get into that part of my life right now.”

  “You said you’d always give me honesty.”

  The set of her jaw told him she’d hold him to his promises. He’d keep them too. “And I am being honest, this is straight up not a conversation I’m going to have right now.” He softened his words with a grin. She accepted, her expression rueful.

  “It doesn’t mean I won’t tell you one day, Blue. That’s the reason I climbed this tree to find you. Your rules about danger boys and my touch deprivation bring us to a certain synchronicity.”

  Her mouth formed a soft O. “They do?”

  A short, quick jerk of his chin in affirmation. “We’ve both got issues that cut off how far we can go together. I’m dangerous for you because I’m beyond bad and you neither need nor want my kind in your life. You’re scared for all the right reasons and you’re right to stay away.” He took a breath. “You’re dangerous for me because you seem like the only pleasure in a world of pain. I can touch you, hold you. Hell, I could fuck you if we both decided we wanted it. Which means you give me hope.”

  She smiled. “That’s—”

  “No good,” Daz finished the thought his way rather than hers. He’d already realized they’d never have a true relationship. Now he needed Jules to understand it too. “What if my ability to touch you is only temporary? What if I get used to it, make you mine, and it ends?” He held up his first two fingers and thumb to block her answer. “The answer is, my oasis would become my worst torture. It would fuckin’ kill me. No survival.”

  “I can see that,” she said. He hated himself for hoping she’d argue with him. But he wanted what he wanted and he wanted her to
disagree, which made him a hypocrite.

  “Also, I want a fighter,” she said, “and you don’t do that anymore.”

  “There’s also that.” He paused, preparing to make a proposal. “But I need to know you, Juliana Perlas. And you want to know me just as bad.” The rhythm of the rise and fall of her chest stopped. She held her breath and waited. “Do you think we can be friends?” he asked, between breaths. “No touch, no danger, but let our bond grow into a friendship?”

  Jules let her forehead fall to crash into his shoulder. “That’s all we can have, isn’t it?” she mumbled into his muscles.

  “Yup,” he said, exhaling the word.

  Her eyes darted up to find his. “All right, Dashiell Warren, let’s make the most of what we can have and be the best buds to each other.” A pixie grin. “Okay?”

  “All right,” he said, grinning back.

  “So. How are we going to get down outta this tree?” She let go of him and peered at the ground.

  He mourned the loss of her warmth and made a play to get it back for a little longer. “You want to get down the normal way or the fun way?”

  She held up a finger. “The first thing you need to know about me, Dashiell Warren, I opt for the fun way every time.”

  Good God. That face.

  Daz reached beneath the weight of her hair and untied the scarf she’d used to hold the waves off her face. Shaking the scarf out and flipping it, he tied it around his own neck, making a show of protecting his exposed skin. Then he gave her his back. “Climb on,” he said. Jules didn’t hesitate. She pulled her light cotton sleeves down to cover her hands and wrapped her arms around his neck, avoiding skin-to-skin contact.

  “Ready?” Daz didn’t wait for an answer. He unsheathed his claws and leaped to the tree trunk. He released and sank his claws in and out of the wood a few times to get into position; once he had a clear view of the ground, he released slightly so his claws skimmed the trunk. They plummeted toward ground, sending long, curly wood shavings into the air as they went.