by Selena Scott
“Why did you say that you weren’t good for women? That night when I slept in your bed?”
He sighed. And here they were. So soon.
“Well.” He tightened his grip on her and coasted a warm palm down her back. He spoke slowly, honestly, choosing his words with extreme care. “I said that because I’ve never been good for a woman before. Not the way Jack and Jean Luc are.”
She was quiet for a while again. “Did you ever try?”
“Yes and no.” He shifted his hips, uncomfortable with the conversation but determined not to close down on her. “I tried with a couple girls when I was younger. But when I think on it now, they were kind of random choices. Like, I didn’t have a crazy connection with either of them. We were just sleeping together regularly and I thought, might as well try my hand at being a boyfriend. And they both wanted more. Needed more. Deserved so much more than I could give.” He deflated. “When it was all over, I felt so helpless. And like such a piece of shit. They were both so wrecked. I thought, never again. I’m not cut out for this.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty with the first girl and twenty-two with the second.”
“That’s how old I was when I got married.”
He blew out a long breath. “It’s so crazy that you were married that young. Like, who let you walk down the aisle that young?”
“Let?” Caroline laughed. “My mother would have frog-marched me down the aisle if I hadn’t been so excited about it on my own.”
“Why did she want you to get married so badly?”
“She wanted me to lock down a Boston Clifton, obviously.”
His eyes widened in surprise at what she was implying. “What is this, the 1800s?”
“Might as well have been. East Coast money can be weirdly incestuous. They want you to keep it where they can see it. And in the hands of people they trust. My family trusted the Cliftons to build their social cache and not to drain the coffers. Ironclad pre-nups for all.”
“Did you sign a pre-nup?” Tre asked, his eyes wide.
“Of course. So did Peter.”
“Wow. I can’t imagine signing a pre-nup. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, of course! I just… man. I get by just fine, but pre-nup money? That’s a different ballgame.”
“Love and money are two very strange ingredients to the marriage soup,” Caroline said, still tracing his tattoos. “For me and Peter, they weren’t two flavors that complemented one another.”
“So, you did love him?” Tre asked, ignoring the weird, scratchy, bratty feelings rolling over in his chest. He found he was in a strange place of wanting to know Caroline, but not really wanting to know certain parts of this particular truth.
“Of course,” she answered, holding his eyes. “I’m not the kind to get married if I wasn’t in love. No matter how much pressure I was under.”
Her words softened him. He could picture her, young and in love, eager to be married. He found that the petty jealousy that had risen up in him was extinguished by his stronger desire for her happiness.
They'd talked about her divorce many times before. He knew that Peter had pushed her toward an open marriage without providing her any of the emotional support and patience it would have required to make it work. But honestly, nothing she’d said made Tre think that their marriage had been particularly happy before that, either.
“When did things start to go wrong with Peter?”
She scrunched up her face and rolled over, facing the ceiling.
“Sorry,” he said immediately. “You most likely don’t wanna talk about your divorce right now.”
“No,” she waved a hand floppily through the air. “It’s okay. You’re entitled to want to know. It’s just something I’m still trying to figure out myself, you know? I don’t know if I’ll ever have all the answers.”
“That makes sense.”
“I just don’t think either of us actually married who we thought we married.” She lifted up one of her feet and watched the shadow it cast on the far wall. “I thought of Peter as this super steady guy who had his feet under him. The kind of guy who could support me through anything because he had his life together. He was grounded. He thought of me as this ever-happy ball of sunshine who could bring light to his life and charm the pants off his business partners, so to speak.”
“And you weren’t those things?”
“No. I mean, yes. We were those things. But neither of us wanted to be exclusively those things. Peter is steady and reliable. He had all the fixings of being a supportive husband. Except for the fact that he didn’t want to be one. Same with me. I’m sunny and happy and charming. But after a while, I stopped wanting to be trotted out during parties like a parlor trick. I stopped wanting to do the thing he’d married me to do. And same with him.” She rolled back to face Tre. “I realized that I’d much rather have a sloppy, absent-minded, trainwreck of a husband who tried to support me than a stalwart one who didn’t care.” She sighed. “I imagine Peter must have come to a similar conclusion.”
They were quiet for a long time. Caroline could feel something turning over and over in Tre’s mind. She had no idea if she had gone too far or said too much. And frankly, she couldn’t afford to care. If there was one thing that she’d learned from her divorce, it was that the only thing she could afford to be in the business of was telling the truth about who she was. There was no reason at all to cultivate some sort of perfect image, or waste time telling Tre what she thought he wanted to hear if she was just gonna show her true colors someday. Caroline had no interest in building a house of cards, even with someone she was as into as Tre.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to enjoy the heck out of this while it lasted, though. She’d never been made love to like that before. She swore he had some sort of magic spell within him. Some sort of internal furnace that just went ahead and swallowed her up in the heat of him. She loved his red hair. And his almond flavor. And his colors. She’d never met anyone like him. And she loved that, too.
“Caroline, love.”
“Hmmm?”
“Will you tell me what happened with Arturo?”
“Oh.” Caroline sat straight up then. Making love to Tre had discombobulated her so thoroughly, she’d halfway forgotten that anything freaky had happened with Arturo. She shivered as she remembered the feeling of his blue energy racing over her skin. Searching for a way inside of her, like a virus of some kind. “I’m not entirely sure what happened. But whatever it was, I think it hurt him as much as it hurt me.”
“Thea said that he was alright,” Tre reminded her. They’d been interrupted maybe two hours ago by their very worried friend who’d seemed like she was begging for a reason to march back out there and kick Arturo’s ass.
“I know. I guess I don’t just mean physically, though. I felt something… strange when we kissed.”
Tre stiffened and let out a long, tight breath. He wasn’t going to be a jealous asshole. He was the one that had driven her to be interested in Arturo in the first place. He couldn’t blame Caroline for that. He could, however, blame Arturo. Somewhere, in the darkest corner of Tre’s mind, he chained Arturo to a wall and kicked him right in the dick. There. That made things a little better. “What do you mean ‘strange’?”
“I think I felt what Arturo was feeling. I think he lost control and sent me some of his emotions through the energy that came out of him.”
“Huh.” Tre almost laughed. It just figured that after the three bear shifters had tried so hard for so long to break through Arturo’s wall, it would be Caroline who got there first. Well, you catch more flies with honey, he supposed. An idea occurred to him but he instantly hated it so much that he shoved it back into its drawer and turned his attention back to Caroline. “What was it that you felt coming off of him?”
She scrunched up her face again. “Grief? I think? And love? I think I remind him of someone that he once loved. And for a second, I felt like it was me that he loved. B
ut then everything just sort of shifted and I realized that he was lost, confused. Stuck between two realities. It wasn’t me that he was imagining in his arms. It was someone else. And he realized it, too. And then the blue stuff happened and we both kind of fell down and he got knocked out, I think.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah.” She turned up to face Tre and spoke carefully. Tre would never make fun of her for taking a stab in the dark, wild as it might be. “Tre, I wonder if…”
“What?”
“I wonder if Arturo used to be like us?”
“Human, you mean?”
“Yes, but no. What I really mean is that I wonder if Arturo was once on a mission like ours? With the maps and the race for a soul and fighting the demon.” She bit her lip and tried to read his reaction. “Honestly, Tre… he kind of reminded me of you.”
The look on Tre’s face went immediately from pensive to shocked. “Me? What do you mean?”
Caroline studied him. Tre knew just how intelligent she was. But there were plenty of people who didn’t think that Caroline was smart. She didn’t care one way or another. She knew who she was. And right now, she put those smarts to work. She decided that she understood something that Tre didn’t quite yet. And her point-blank telling him was likely to make him freak out. She pulled back and told him half the truth. “I can’t quite explain it. But when he was confused, halfway caught between two realities, I got a little window into his past. And I think he may have done exactly what we’re doing now. And I think he might have been very similar to you in the past. Kind of… skeptical and funny. Like all of this would never be something that he believed in except for the fact that all of his friends believed it. He seemed loyal and determined to protect everybody.” And he’d been ass-backwards in love with a woman and had absolutely no idea what the hell to do about it. But she didn’t say that part out loud.
“I guess,” Tre said slowly, looking at the ceiling and tracing a hand through his hair, “that we never really stopped to ask ourselves how Arturo became the demon’s right-hand man.”
Caroline leaned forward and traced the lightning bolt shaved in the side of Tre’s coppery hair. “You really did this because you hoped I’d like it?”
“Caroline, I do everything because I hope you’ll like it.”
She laughed and halfway crawled back over his chest. “You can quit trying to impress me, Tre. You bagged me.”
He laughed. “I’m not trying to bag you.” I’m trying to keep you. He fell immediately quiet as those words rose up within him. Keep her? What the hell was he thinking? He couldn’t keep Caroline! He’d never be that selfish to trap her in a relationship that could never go anywhere. With a man who’d never feel more than lust and friendship for her. Sure, he would always treat her kindly and respectfully, but he’d never be able to give her the kind of love she truly deserved.
All Tre could do was appreciate this moment while he had it, and try to keep her safe through all this mayhem with Arturo and the demon. Once all of this was over, and she was truly out of danger, Tre would have no reason to keep pursuing things with her. In fact, when that happened, she’d be safer away from him than she would be with him. Her heart would be safer. The thought cramped something in his chest. He felt sick just thinking about it. But that was tomorrow’s problem, he told himself. Right now, he had two arms full of Caroline Clifton and every reason in the world to keep her there, warm and safe in his bed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Something about you looks different this morning,” Jean Luc said to Tre over the breakfast table the next morning. It was just the three of them, Jack sliding into the seat next to Jean Luc with a plate full of omelette and toast.
Tre looked up at Jean Luc and rolled his eyes at the deadpan look on his friend’s face. He knew what was coming. Not too long ago, he’d been on the dishing-out side. Now, apparently he was on the taking-it side. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” Jean Luc said slowly, his eyes serious but the corners of his mouth flicking upwards. “It’s almost like you’ve… become a man.”
Jack snorted into his orange juice and Tre rolled his eyes, stuffing toast into his mouth.
“Oh my Lord,” Jack said, pretending to wipe a tear out of his eye and clapping a hand on Jean Luc’s shoulder. “Has our little baby given up his flower? Has he embarked on a journey down the hallowed halls of manhood? Has he punched his V-card? Lost his manginity? Popped the old—”
“Shuddup,” Tre groaned, balling up his napkin and tossing it across the table. “Yes, I had sex with Caroline, alright? Are you happy now?”
“Over the moon,” Jack grinned. “What about you?”
“Huh?”
“Are you happy now?”
“Seems pretty fuckin’ happy,” Jean Luc muttered through a mouthful of eggs.
Tre shrugged. He was happy. Happy enough that he felt like there was a tiny tap dancer in his gut, threatening to scramble up the breakfast he was trying to choke down. Was it normal to feel so happy you felt a little sick? He cleared his throat. “We gotta talk about Arturo.”
“What about him?” Jean Luc asked, glancing at Jack quickly.
There was no hiding the look, and no hiding the feeling that washed over the two of them.
“What?” Tre asked, looking back and forth.
“Nothing. Just that…” Jack trailed off and squinted at the dark hallway that led to Arturo’s room. “You know what? Finish your breakfast. We’ll talk outside.”
They did just that, and on their way to the far field where they’d been practicing, Jack and Jean Luc filled Tre in on everything that had happened with Arturo the night before.
“You believe him?” Tre asked. “That he was actually worried about her?”
“Yeah,” Jean Luc answered slowly. “I mean, he seemed really freaked out. I don’t think he was faking it. If there was some kind of evil angle he was working, I couldn’t tell.”
“Me neither,” Jack shook his head. “But I don’t get it, either. I didn’t anticipate him becoming nice to one of us.”
“Yeah,” Tre scratched at his short hair, his fingers sliding over the lightning bolt in the side of his head. He smiled as he thought of Caroline pressing her lips there, the way she did before she finally fell asleep last night. “Caroline doesn’t seem to think he’s trying to kill us. She thinks…”
“What?”
“She thinks he might have been one of us at some point.”
To Tre’s surprise, Jack and Jean Luc weren’t surprised. They merely nodded.
“Yeah,” Jack finally muttered. “I was wondering the same thing.”
“Why?” Tre asked.
“Well,” Jack thought for a minute. “I think it was something in the way Martine and Arturo were acting last night. I mean, I know that she’s fought him before and that they’ve known one another for centuries. But when he was all torn up over Caroline last night, it almost seemed like they were friends or something. Like she fully understood where he was coming from.”
“There was definitely a camaraderie there,” Jean Luc agreed. “Something I’ve never sensed before.” Jean Luc glanced at Tre. “He let us in. Just for half a second. But when he was so freaked out over maybe having hurt Caroline, he accidentally let us into his feelings.”
“Wow.” Tre couldn’t even imagine what that might have been like. Being let into Jack and Jean Luc’s feelings was strange, but becoming more and more familiar. Jack’s feelings were passionate and usually tinged with humor. Jean Luc’s were slow and desirous, tinged with sadness and loneliness, much less so now that he was with Celia. Tre couldn’t even imagine what Arturo’s would feel like. Maybe rage tinged with deceit?
Tre took a deep breath, barely believing that he was about to say this out loud. “I was thinking… maybe we should try being nice to him?”
Jean Luc and Jack just sort of looked at him.
“I mean, look,” Tre tried, pacing in front of them, the long prairie grass getting tr
ampled under his feet. “Aren’t you guys starting to get uncomfortable about the fact that the demon hasn’t tried for us at all? Like, we’ve evaded him completely twice, we stole his right-hand man. Don’t you think that he’s probably pissed and planning some fucked-up shit? Aren’t you getting freaked out with all this waiting and no way to prepare?”
“It is sort of an ‘all dressed up and nowhere to go’ feeling,” Jack agreed, his eyes on the sky and one hand scraping over his stubble.
“Exactly. But the thing is, we have a demon cheatsheet sitting in that house right now. Drinking our coffee as we speak, you know? We have to figure out a way to open up Arturo. We have to know what he knows or else we’re screwed.”
“You’re saying you want to befriend Arturo so that we can use him?” Jean Luc asked, his eyes in a thoughtful squint.
“Eh.” Tre paused his pacing and started stripping off his clothes. Later, he’d realize that he was so agitated, he was turning to his bear form to calm down. Something he had never done before. “Not exactly. I just think there’s a chance that befriending him might pop the top off the can, you know?”
The other two followed Tre’s lead with shedding their clothes, though Martine hadn’t even joined them for their training yet.
“That makes sense,” Jack said slowly. “Except for the part where Arturo isn’t someone we should ever think of as a friend.”
“Because you don’t trust him?” Tre asked. “Or because of his role as the demon’s right-hand man?”
“Well, son,” Jack said dryly. “Arturo hasn’t tried to murder the woman you love, the way he’s done for Jean Luc and me, so excuse us if we’re a little reticent to hold hands and skip down the road with him.”
“I’m not sure he tried to murder me,” Thea said from behind the men.
All three of them basically jumped out of their skins. And considering the fact that they were all naked at this point, it was quite a sight to see.
