“There’s more. Besides, I can always go furry.” He gave me an incredibly sexy grin, and my whole body reacted with a jerk of awareness.
As though suddenly embarrassed, he turned away and walked back to the crate. He took out more blankets and a couple of sleeping bags. He unzipped the bag and laid it down fully opened and spread out. “Thought we could lay down together, share our bodies’ heat,” he said, indicating that I should stretch out on the bed he’d made. He was still holding the one sleeping bag. I figured he was going to cover us with it.
I’d never slept with a guy before—and even if all we did was sleep, we were still going to be in bed together, our bodies touching, maybe curling into each other. I didn’t know if I was ready for the intimacy. On the other hand, absorbing his warmth in this cool cavern sounded heavenly. But sleeping together, even innocently, seemed too soon.
“Uh, after everything that’s happened, how can you even think about sleeping?” I asked.
“Honestly, I’m about to collapse.”
I’d somehow shoved to the back of my mind that he’d gone through an ordeal. Been shot, no less. Or maybe it was just that he was so good at covering up what he was feeling. Or maybe he was superwolf. But I’d been leaning on him since his escape, when maybe I should have been letting him lean on me.
“What do you need me to do to help you?” I asked.
“Just sleep.”
I looked at the makeshift bed again.
“I’m not going to attack you the way Mason did,” Lucas said.
I glanced over at him. “I know. The thing is—I’ve never slept with a guy before.”
A corner of his mouth hitched up. “It’s easy. You close your eyes and dream.”
And I could imagine all the things I’d dream lying so close to Lucas. Still, I nodded and stretched out on the sleeping bag. Lucas eased down beside me. Cautiously. I didn’t know if it was because he was so exhausted or he thought I might bolt. Or maybe he sensed how stiff and still I was. I’d spent a lot of time thinking about what it would be like the first time I slept with a guy. I hadn’t expected it to be in a cave with a guy as dark and dangerous as Lucas. Even though I knew he wouldn’t hurt me, for some reason tonight my body didn’t feel as though it belonged to me. It wanted to roll over and snuggle up against him.
“Are you okay with the dark or do you want the light left on?” he asked.
“The dark is fine.” It wasn’t, but no way was I going to admit I was scared of what I was feeling toward him. It seemed like the dark would only intensify it.
I heard the click and the light went out. My eyes quickly adjusted and I could see the waterfall. The moonlight made it look like falling glass. It was somehow very comforting. I slowly began to relax.
“This is my favorite of all the lairs,” Lucas said quietly.
I wondered if he’d lied about being able to read my thoughts only when he was in wolf form. Maybe he could read them anytime.
“Looks as though you set this place up like you were expecting trouble,” I said.
“We always expect trouble.”
He scooted a little closer. I could feel tiny tremors going through him. “You’re cold.” I didn’t mean for my voice to sound accusing, but it did.
“No, just the aftershocks of an adrenaline rush and a shifting. Warmth helps.”
He’d risked everything to save me from Mason. How could I not risk my emotions by moving closer to him?
I rolled over until I was sprawled partway over him. I knew all about adrenaline rushes. When my parents were killed, I’d thought I’d never stop shaking. His arm came around me, holding me close, and I snuggled even closer with my head nestled in the nook of his shoulder. He brought the other sleeping bag over us. We were warm and cozy in our little cocoon. Being next to him like this was wonderful. My body grew limpid. I could smell the heat of his skin, feel the heat of it beneath my cheek and fingers.
“Is it a rush?” I asked quietly, not wanting to disturb the peace settling over us, but wanting to deepen the connection. “Being a wolf, I mean.”
“It’s not something I think about. It’s what I am.”
“How did it happen? I mean I know you said it was genetic, but how? Was the first one bitten by a wolf or something?”
His deep laughter rumbled through the cavern. “It’s so stupid when they do that in movies. Why would anyone think getting bitten by anything would turn you into that thing? Same with vampires. So stupid. But no. Lycanthropy isn’t something that started because of a bite.”
“Then how?”
“We’ve been here since the dawn of time. But self-preservation made us secretive. Centuries ago, we lived in the general population, but there’s always an awareness when we meet our own kind. You’ve probably felt it when you’ve met people, but because you didn’t know we existed, you might not have recognized it for what it was: like calling to like.”
I thought about the first time I met Lindsey last summer. It was as though we were instantly best friends. I’d felt a connection, a history. I’d been able to tell her anything. “Is Lindsey…?” I couldn’t say it. It was too incredible.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “She hasn’t had her transformation. She’ll turn seventeen next month.”
“We’re friends. Why didn’t she say something?”
“Would you have believed her? If she couldn’t show you?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I believe you—I believe that you can transform, okay. That I’m going to—I’m not convinced. But you’re saying there are others like you living out among people?”
“Sure. At schools, universities. We live in communities. We’re doctors, lawyers, cops. We’re like everyone else, except we shift.”
“Excuse me, but that makes you not like everyone else.”
“Okay, you have a point. And yes, there is some risk to us living among the Statics, but it’s easier for us to fit in than to have our own country or something. Yes, sometimes we’re outed. Our kind has been burned at the stake as witches, hunted down as demons. So centuries ago, the elders created a brotherhood of…I guess you can think of them as knights. They’re young warriors. We call them Dark Guardians. They’re charged with protecting other Shifters.”
I scoffed. “I don’t think much of their protection techniques. Where were they tonight when you needed them?”
He cleared his throat. “Well, the code is—if a Dark Guardian is stupid enough to get discovered, he’s on his own. We risk our lives for others. We don’t ask others to risk their lives for us.”
I pushed myself up until I could see his face. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me you’re a Dark Guardian? That you’re a knight or whatever?”
“Yes, exactly. My job is to protect you. That’s the reason I sent the others on and I stayed back, to make sure no one hurt you and to be there when the full moon rose.”
He was my protector? That explained the way he always watched me. I wasn’t ready to face the full moon and all those ramifications. I still had way too many questions about Lucas. “So you can die.”
“Sure. Fire. Bullets.”
“But I saw you heal.”
“Pretty amazing, huh?” His voice held a hint of pride. “I was just lucky that moronic Mason doesn’t know that silver is our Achilles’ heel. That part of the Hollywood crap is true. For some reason, a wound inflicted with silver doesn’t heal like a normal wound. Knife, sword, bullet—if it’s made from silver, we’re in some deep shit.”
I realized that he trusted me with the secrets to destroying them. Maybe it wasn’t trust. Maybe it was self-preservation. Silver had suddenly turned from an accessory to the source of my potential demise.
“Is there any way not to become…” My mind was screaming a freak, but I couldn’t say that. Surely he’d take it as a major insult.
“No,” he said quietly. His hand curled around my neck and he eased me back to his shoulder, his arm holding me close to his side as though he could p
revent me from feeling the blow of that word. “But it’ll be okay. Trust me. I know you have a lot of questions, but I’m fading, Kayla. Let me get some sleep and I’ll answer everything tomorrow.”
“Okay.” I heard his breathing go shallow and felt the slow rise and fall of his chest against my cheek.
I watched the waterfall streaming past. I thought about getting up and just walking straight into it. Let it push me beneath the water and hold me there. I didn’t want to be a wolf. Maybe Mason thought that it was totally cool and that people would buy recreational drugs for a couple of hours of being furry, but I wouldn’t have taken it if it were free.
I hoped Lucas was wrong. That the connection he felt was something else. Maybe his perception was skewed and he had misread me. I couldn’t be a Shifter.
And as far as I was concerned, if I was, my life was suddenly going to suck. Big time.
I was crouched at the edge of the cave, listening to the thundering waterfall, studying my nails. I’d crawled out of the bed while Lucas was still asleep. I had a lot to think about. Part of me wanted to start running from him, from all this, and never stop.
Lucas was so quiet that my heart nearly burst through my chest when he dropped down beside me. I was proud of myself for not giving any indication that he’d startled me.
“You’re up early. You okay?” he asked.
Was that a serious question? My world, my life, might not be what I thought it was. Of course I wasn’t okay. But I managed to do little more than sigh. “Just thinking. I’ve never had much luck growing long nails. I guess that’s about to change.”
He chuckled. Or at least I thought he did. With the waterfall, we had to talk loud, so low chuckles were difficult to hear, but he was smiling. Then, as though he thought we were at risk of ruining our throats if we kept trying to have a conversation where we were, he jerked his head to the side. I followed him back into the cavern.
“Do you know if my adoptive parents know…about me, I mean? What I am? Or what I’m going to be?”
“I don’t think so. When your parents were killed, you were whisked away before a Dark Guardian could be sent for. Once the government gets involved, it’s a little hard to reclaim our own.” He opened a crate and tossed me a can of V8.
“I thought wolves were carnivores,” I said dryly as I popped the top.
“Wolves are. Shifters aren’t.” His tone said that I’d insulted him. He handed me a protein bar. “Need to eat. Keep up your strength.”
I tore open the wrapper and eyed him dubiously. “You don’t think of yourself as a wolf.”
“I’m not a wolf. It’s a shape I shift into, that’s all.”
“That’s all? Most people don’t go all furry and snarling. Not to mention the loonies who are trying to capture you for research.”
“What you—what they—see as unusual is normal for me. I’ve always known it was in my DNA. I couldn’t wait until I turned eighteen.”
I felt a little hitch in my heart. “I thought you said seventeen.”
“Seventeen for girls. Eighteen for guys. Has to do with that whole girls-mature-sooner-than-guys thing.”
“Oh, I thought maybe I was going to have a reprieve.” The protein bar tasted like sawdust in my mouth.
He opened a snack-sized bag of Double Stuf Oreos and handed me a cookie. Tears sprung to my eyes. I loved these. I looked up at him. He was watching me intently.
“I guess you read my mind about these, too. Will I be able to do that? Read minds?”
“Yeah, but at first it’s just confusing babble. You have to learn to sort the voices coming in.”
“Is there a werewolf school or something where I can learn all this?”
“We prefer not to use the term werewolf. That has such negative vibes. Name one movie where the werewolf is the good guy. We’re Shifters. And no, we don’t have a school, but we do have training. It takes place in these woods.”
I finished my cookies, drew my knees up to my chest, and wrapped my arms around them. “Does it hurt?”
He knew what I was asking about, and it wasn’t the training. He knelt in front of me. He was still barefoot and shirtless. Didn’t any of the boxes contain clothes? I wanted so badly to just reach out and run my fingers across his chest and over his shoulders. Instead I focused on his silvery gaze.
“Not if you trust me,” he said quietly.
I released a brittle laugh. “Are you sure you’re not wrong about me?”
Abruptly he stood up and held out his hand. “Come on. I want to check the perimeter. Then we can relax and enjoy the beautiful day. After all, we’re not vampires.”
Lucas found a T-shirt. It either wasn’t his or it had been his before he’d developed muscles, because it fit him like he’d melted his body into it. I was really beginning to suspect he was reading my mind even when he wasn’t in wolf form.
I followed him as he went a short distance into the woods that circled our refuge. He was so graceful—like a Cirque du Soleil performer who is all muscle but moves with powerful grace over the stage. I’d always noticed how buff he was, but now I could see the predator in his movements.
I didn’t think they were going to take him by surprise again. And if they did catch up with us, I suspected he’d go after them with a vengeance. Like a Hollywood werewolf. He might not like the way his kind were portrayed on film, but I sensed in him a determination to defend me. It was almost frightening—but it was also thrilling.
Would he be willing to die for me? Did I want him to be willing?
Of course not. But it was still a turn-on to know he took protecting me so seriously. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about the “mate” angle yet. I couldn’t deny that I’d been drawn to him from the beginning—with a fierceness that had been so scary, I’d shoved the attraction away and focused on Mason. What I’d felt for Mason, I could deal with. What I felt for Lucas was out of control.
It was even scarier to think maybe Lucas was thinking the same thing about me—but he was strong enough to control it.
As we walked he would suddenly become very still to listen and to sniff the air. It was a rush to think that soon my senses would be heightened—if I truly was a Shifter. It just seemed impossible.
I probably should have been paying attention to how he was checking things out. I should have been trying to learn whatever it was I was supposed to learn. Instead I was thinking about clothes. Shifting into a wolf was going to be hell on my wardrobe. And what was I supposed to do? Have hidden stashes of clothes all over the place?
“Yes,” he said quietly, then stiffened.
But he didn’t go as rigid as I did.
“You can read my thoughts even when you’re not in wolf form,” I accused.
He plowed his strong fingers through his gorgeous hair. “Only when I’m concentrating on you.”
“And you’re concentrating on me now?”
“How can I not? You smell so good—”
“Are you kidding me? I’m filthy.”
“But beneath that is the natural fragrance of your skin. That’s what I smell.” He started striding back toward the clearing. “Come on. Let’s take a swim.”
I nearly tripped trying to keep up with him. I was still somewhat in shock over the fact that he was so aware of me, was smelling my skin. “So what? You’ve got bathing suits stashed in boxes somewhere in that cave?”
He glanced over his shoulder and gave me an utterly wicked grin. “Who needs bathing suits? Haven’t you ever heard of skinny-dipping?”
Okay, there was a chance that tomorrow night he was going to see me in the flesh before he saw me in fur, but I still made him turn his back while I stripped out of my clothes and dove into the pool. It was cool, refreshing, and amazingly clear. When I broke through to the surface, he was already in the water, several feet away. So maybe he was a little bashful, too, about being naked in front of me. Even though I’d already seen his backside.
Treading water, I asked, “So that tattoo o
n your shoulder. What’s it mean?”
“Every male gets a tattoo when he’s ready to declare the girl he has chosen to be his mate. It represents her name, written in the ancient language of our pack.”
“Who did you choose?”
He gave me a look that asked if I was really that dense.
“Oh.” I swallowed hard. I was totally amazed that he could feel something that strongly and not let on. How could he declare his feelings to a tattoo artist without knowing if I returned them? “I didn’t even think you noticed me last summer.”
“Oh, I noticed. It was like bam, right to the gut.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“You’d just turned sixteen and were still in high school, and I was going off to college.”
“I’m still in high school and you’re still in college.”
“But you’re older. And it’s just a year until you’re finished with high school. Once you graduate, you could go to the same university I do.”
“So I’ll see my adopted parents again?”
“Sure. You’ll return home at the end of summer—a little different than you were when you arrived here.”
That’s an understatement. Even if I didn’t shift, I was never going to forget everything I’d learned—and I’d be looking everywhere for Shifters.
“We live out in the world, among the Statics,” he continued. “Pretty normal. Or as normal as we can be when we’re charged with guarding the secret of our existence.”
I was still dumbstruck by what he’d decided last summer when he met me. “But the decisions you made last summer about us—what if you never saw me again?”
“I knew where you lived, Kayla. I would have come for you, if Lindsey hadn’t convinced you to join us here this summer. I wouldn’t have let you discover the truth about yourself alone.”
“So Lindsey knew what you felt.”
“Yeah, but there’s a code. You don’t tell someone who a guy has chosen.”
I was flattered—and unnerved.
As though he was a typical guy who wasn’t comfortable discussing his feelings, he began to swim across the pool. Long, powerful strokes. The muscles in his back bunching and flexing. The tattoo—my name in ancient letters—seemed to pulse.