by Nora Roberts
She needed time alone before she faced the pity and the condemnation she would see in his eyes.
She heard him come in. “It won’t take long,” she said quickly. “Help yourself. If you’re hungry, I’ll—” She jerked back, stepped far back when he reached for her. “Don’t. Don’t touch me now. Its scent’s still on me.”
Moving fast, she unlocked the back door, jerked it open to let the dog out. The air was full of mists and morning scents, and made her want to weep.
“I’ll be down in a few minutes.” She had to force herself not to run.
She started to strip when she reached her bedroom door, peeling off clothes, heaving them aside as she rushed into the bathroom. Her breath was snagging in her throat, tearing out in gasps when she turned the water on as hot as she thought she could bear.
Yes, she wanted to weep, but couldn’t have said why. He’d stayed, and his compassion was more than she could ask. More than she could expect. So she only braced her hands against the tile when she stepped under the spray of water. And squeezed her eyes tight against the useless weakness of tears.
She lifted her head again, slowly, when she scented him, and her eyes were already searching when he nudged back the shower curtain.
“I could use a shower myself,” he said casually and took off his shirt.
“Don’t.”
“No point in being shy now. I’ve already seen you naked.”
He stripped down, stepped in behind her. “Jesus, hot enough for you?”
Her body went rigid when he trailed his fingers over her shoulder, over the only scar she bore from the attack. The bite that had changed her.
“How can you touch me?”
“How can I not? And what’s this here?” He skimmed those fingers over her other shoulder, and the small tattoo of a full moon.
“A reminder, that it’s always part of me. I need to—” She broke off, shook her head. When she reached for the soap, he took it first, and began to lather her back.
“Let me give you a hand.”
“Don’t be kind.” Her voice broke. It took all her will to mend it again. “I need a little time to settle before I can deal with kindness.”
“Okay, check the kindness.” His lips glided over her damp skin, just at the curve of neck and shoulder, as his soapy hands slithered over, and up to find her breasts. “What’s your stand on lust?”
“You can’t want me now.”
“I can’t begin to tell you how much you’re mistaken on that point. Turn around, look at me.” He didn’t wait, but took a firm hold, shifted her. Water streamed over her, pulsing over the sleek blond hair. It was the shame in her eyes, the same he’d seen when she’d waked him, then again in the kitchen, that told him she needed more than his love, more than any hopeful words he might offer.
She needed his desire.
“I’ve got just one question right now, and that’s why do you avoid saying my name?”
“I don’t.”
“You do. Why?”
“Because names are personal. Because I thought it’d be easier to walk away, for both of us.”
He eased her back, back against the shower wall, with his hands running over her, down her flanks, up her sides, through her hair. “Say it now.” His lips touched hers, retreated. “Say my name now because nobody’s going anywhere.”
“Gabe.” She shuddered back a sob. “Gabriel.” Threw her arms around him. “Gabe.”
“Simone.” And now his mouth crushed against hers, not in kindness, not with patience, but with a hunger and demand that struck the shadows from her heart.
“It’s not pity,” she managed as his greedy hands explored, and took.
“This feel like pity to you?”
“No.” On a laugh, a moan, she arched back to let his mouth feast. “No.”
Her body was long and sleek, the muscles taut and tight, the skin soft as rose petals drenched in dew. She was trembling again, but now he knew it was arousal that shook her. Need that brought her mouth to his in an endless kiss, of warm, wet lips, and seeking tongues.
Steam billowed, but the almost blistering heat of the water was nothing now, a chill compared to the fire that kindled and burst through him.
He pressed his mouth to the scar on her shoulder in a gesture of acceptance. Whoever, whatever she was, she was his. And he wanted every part of her.
“I need you so much.” She locked herself around him. “I didn’t know I could need anyone this much.”
“It’s just beginning, for both of us.” He gripped her hips, and she braced for him, opened for him, watched his eyes as he slipped inside her. He took her slowly, deliberately, even when her vision blurred and he wondered if he would burn up before release. Took her while her head fell back, when she cried out.
And when her hands slid limply down his wet back, and her long, low groan slithered over his skin, he took them both.
IT was the first time she could remember feeling self-conscious with a man. Shyness wasn’t a part of her nature, but she felt oddly shy now as she dressed in front of him. “I know we need to talk.”
“Yeah, we do.”
“I have to eat. I need to eat.”
He stepped closer, tipped up her chin. “You need sleep, too. You’re exhausted.”
“I will, I’ll sleep. Later. I’ll go fix breakfast.”
“I’ll do it.”
“No. I need to do something. Keep my hands busy.”
She went down, got out eggs. Because she wanted Amico to understand Gabe’s place in the house, she asked Gabe to feed him.
“I didn’t think you’d be here this morning.”
“Where did you think I’d go?”
“Anywhere but here.” Because her system still craved meat, she started bacon in a skillet. “You saw what I am. But you’re here, and you haven’t said anything.”
“I saw what happened to you, and I’ve got a lot to say. I’ll start off saying I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t watched it happen. I could have watched all the tapes you have—and I scanned a number of them through the night—but I wouldn’t have believed it. It’s not the sort of thing you’re supposed to believe when you’re an adult. And sane.”
When she said nothing, he moved to her, touched her lightly on the shoulder. “It hurt you.”
“The change is painful, yes.”
“Have you tried painkillers, sedatives, something to ease the transition?”
“From time to time. They don’t help all that much, and they don’t stop the change. Nothing does. Yet.”
“You’re trying herbs.”
“That’s how I got into them. Combatting, I thought, the unnatural with the natural. I’ve tried spells. Witchcraft, voodoo, charms, potions, and lotions. Medical science, paranormal science. I’ve had eleven years to try.”
Eleven years, he thought. Alone. How had she stood it? “Have you found anyone else with the same condition?”
“No. You’d be amazed how many people think they’re lycanthropes. There are web sites devoted to it, and all sorts of tales of wolfmen and women. But I’ve never found anyone who’s actually infected.”
“Interesting term. Infection.” He sipped his coffee while she broke eggs into a bowl. “I read some of your notes. A blood infection, one that alters DNA, and somehow combines with the canine. A rabid infection that not only resists but prevents antibody production.”
“A type of blood infection. But it’s not rabies.”
“No. A distant cousin. Where did you get the drugs, Simone?”
“Illegally. Through the black market.”
“You can’t keep medicating yourself this way, using experimental drugs—and not all of them for humans—with unknown side effects or consequences.”
“I can’t think of a side effect or consequence more injurious than howling at the moon every month.”
He closed a hand around her wrist until she stopped and met his eyes. “How about psychosis, paralysis, stroke, emboli
sm? Let’s try death.”
“I’ve considered all of that, and the risks are worth it.”
“Alone, in a basement lab.”
“What’s the alternative?” She pulled her arm free, whipped eggs with a vengeance. “Going public? Taking a trip to Johns Hopkins, for instance, and saying, hey, guys, check this out?”
“Between two extremes is a lot of space, a lot of options.”
“Going wolf every month is pretty damn extreme, and so would be the talk-show bookings I’d get if this ever gets out.”
“You’d be a real crowd pleaser on Letterman. Stupid Pet Tricks would never be the same.”
The laugh snorted out before she could stop it, and half the stress pressing on her shoulders melted away. “You can make jokes?”
“Sorry, baby. I—”
“No. You can make jokes.” She set the bowl down long enough to clutch his face in her hands and press her lips hard and quick to his. “I’ve been looking for a miracle, and it came running around a corner at me. You didn’t leave. You touched me, you made love with me when I thought you’d be revolted by me.”
With a sigh, she poured the eggs into the skillet. “And you’re standing here waiting for me to cook these stupid eggs and making jokes. You’re rational. I’m amazed you can be here, be funny, be rational after what you saw.”
Because it was there, he picked up a strip of bacon she’d set on a plate and singed his fingertips. “I’m not going to tell you I wasn’t freaked,” he said as he tossed the bacon from hand to hand to cool it. “Still am, but I’m working through it.”
“Bottom line, okay? Bottom line, I can’t possibly go through mainstream options. You were freaked, Gabe, because that’s what I am. A freak.”
“You’re not. You have a disease.”
“And if I don’t find a cure, I’ll be like this all of my life. If it doesn’t drive me mad, or to suicide, I’ll live a very long life. One of the happy benefits of this condition is robust health. Ridiculously. I haven’t had so much as a sniffle since I was eighteen. And injury? Try this.”
Before he realized what she was doing, she laid her hand against the side of the skillet. He was on her in one leap, yanking her hand clear.
“What’s wrong with you? Let me see. Where’s the first aid kit?” He tried to drag her to the sink and couldn’t budge her an inch.
“Stronger than I look, especially in cycle. Just like I heal very quickly, abnormally. Look.” She held her palm up. “Just give it a minute.”
He watched, fascinated, as the ugly burn, fiery red from fingertip to wrist, turned healing pink, shrank, and disappeared.
“Nice trick.” He breathed in, breathed out. “Don’t do it again.”
“I’ve thought of killing myself,” she said calmly. “But that’s giving up, and I’m not ready to give up. There’s a cure, and I have to find it.”
He turned her healed hand over, kissed her palm. “We’ll find it.”
She turned back to the stove, scooping eggs out before they burned, and struggled to curb her emotions. “Why are you so willing to accept, and more than accept, to help me? To stand here this morning, talking about this, what should be horrifying and revolting to you while I fix bacon and eggs?”
“A lot of reasons. One? The bacon and eggs is because I’m hungry. Another is it’s tough not to accept what you see with your own eyes. Then, the scientist in me is pretty damn fascinated—then add a little irony. I mean, wow, the vet and the werewolf. Sorry, lycan. The vet and the lycan. It’s like kismet.”
“If I could have gotten out of that cage last night, I’d have ripped you to pieces. Do you understand?”
“Yeah.” He thought he did understand, quite a bit. “You tried to get out for a while. Threw yourself against the bars. Without your amazing super healing powers, you’d be black and blue this morning. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was scared shitless, even when you settled down to pace the cage, snarl and howl. You know what else I felt?”
She shook her head, kept her eyes averted as she dished out breakfast.
“Staggered, humbled, moved beyond words that you would trust me that much. Even honored, Simone, that you’d share with me something you’d kept from everyone else for more than a third of your life. You had that much faith in me. Then we come to the big, overall reason I’m standing here this morning talking about this and hoping we’re going to be digging into those eggs in a second. That would be because I love you.”
Chapter 8
FOR the first time in days she slept easy. Maybe it was hope, or love, or having Gabe dozing beside her for a long Sunday morning nap, but the changing dreams didn’t follow her.
Before he’d opened this door inside her, she would have considered sleep during the cycle a waste of valuable time. Now it was a renewal of energies and strength, and she woke rippling with both.
She was surprised to find him gone, and like a love-struck moron raced to the window, sighed with relief when she saw his truck still in the drive.
“Well, Amico, look at me.” She patted her chest so the dog could happily leap up, plant his paws on her shoulders while she scrubbed her hands over his head. “A lycan in love. Broke a big promise to myself, didn’t I? Never get emotionally involved, never get emotionally attached. Not with anything, not with anyone. Broke it with you, too, though, and that’s worked out, right? God, don’t let me ruin his life.”
She danced with the dog, one of his favorite games, then dropped down to wrestle with him before going downstairs to let him out for a run.
Fall was biting at the air, and its nip had turned the trees to gold and red, pumpkin orange and burnt yellow. Fall meant the sun set sooner, and the nights stretched longer and longer. Soon her hours as a wolf would rival her hours as a woman.
She would have less and less time to work, to be, and more time trapped inside the beast.
She wished for summer, endless summer with its long, bright days and short nights. How she dreaded the coming of winter, and its bleak, white moons.
She closed the door, closed it out. And followed Gabe’s scent to her lab.
“Hey.” He took a long look at her, the sort that seemed to drift casually over her face but measured every inch. “I’d hoped you’d sleep longer.”
“I don’t sleep much during cycle. I generally have dreams. They’re disturbing.” He was surrounded by books, hard-copy files, and the computer screen was filled with an analysis of one of her blood samples. “What are you doing?”
“Boning up. Got to go a ways to get current here. Did you ever consider going into medicine? Your case notes are excellent.”
“I’ve done some lab work here and there, but it was self-serving. I’m happier making herbal soaps and skin cream. I like the smells and textures. Labs are cold, and sterile. If I—when I,” she corrected, “find a cure, I never want to look through a microscope again.”
“I guess that scratches any idea of you working with me.” He pushed back in the chair, and however light his tone had been, she saw something darker on his face. “I need to talk to you about some of your experiments, and the fact that you have, with some regularity, ingested poisonous substances.”
“I’m careful with the amounts and the combinations. Cancer patients are routinely bombarded with poisons.”
“Simone—”
“I have to kill what’s inside me. I can’t do that with aspirin, for God’s sake.”
“And from your notes,” he continued in that same steely tone, “I’m aware you’ve considered the possibility that if you kill what’s inside you, you go right along with it.”
“I don’t want to die. I don’t have a death wish. I got over that. On my twentieth birthday I drew myself a hot bath. I drank three glasses of cheap white wine. I got the razor blades. I had Sarah McLachlan on the stereo. I was ready to do it, to end it.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I realized it’s bullshit. What happened to me isn’t fair, it i
sn’t right, it isn’t even natural. But so what? I’m not just going to lie down and die because of it. But if I die fighting it, fine.”
“I’m completely crazy about you,” he stated calmly. “Terminally in love. And being a selfish sort, I’m not going to have you die on me and leave me shattered, heart and mind, over the loss of the love of my life. So let’s eliminate poisons and untested drugs for the moment, and focus on less radical solutions. I see that you tried a rabies course in 1999.”
“Obviously, it failed.”
“Yeah, but there’s a lessening of manic behavior, of violence in the tapes following the course. You noted it yourself.”
She cocked her head, arched her eyebrows. “Funny thing, though, I’m just not content to be a friendlier sort of lycan. And if you studied the tapes and notes, you’ll see while less agitated, I wouldn’t have sat politely and offered my paw to you if you’d offered me a nice treat. I’d have bitten your hand off and eaten it along with the Milk-Bone.”
“It’s still something to pursue. And while you’ve been dealing and studying and living with this, you haven’t spent years studying veterinary medicine, or practicing it. I’m going to do some homework with the Center of Veterinary Biologics. See if I can get an angle there. And I want a sample of blood after the change.”
“Just how do you propose to do that? You get within a foot of the cage, I’d be the one drawing blood. Yours.”
“Not if you’re sedated. I’ve got a tranquilizer gun out in the car.”
“You’re going to shoot me?”
“Yeah.” He pushed back enough to prop a foot on the table. The casual position, the hair tousled around his face, made him look like a man discussing where they might have dinner later. “I’m hoping you’ll get on board with that. But if not, I’ll do it anyway. You won’t be able to object once you’re locked up.”
“Amico would—”
“Be sedated, too, if necessary.” And there was that steel again, she noted. “You can either give him the command to obey me, or I’ll give him a nice nap while I do the work. We need a sample from you, Simone, in lycan form. For comparison, for study. You’ve never taken one. Just as you’ve never been able to try any of the drugs or serums on the lycan.”
