Chapter Eighteen

Willa shouldn’t have touched him, but she was underwater and needed air. It didn’t matter if the air was potentially toxic. The pain of inhaling it would still be more soothing than suffocation. Maybe the medicine was almost as bad as the ailment, but it was the only thing that ever worked.

She hoped that if he were going to be smug about her neediness, that his words would be drowned out by the thud of her pulse in her head. She couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t wait and watch his lips move.

She didn’t know how long she sat there squeezing his hand like a timid child afraid of a shot at the doctor’s office, only that when she got control over her breathing, the television was off. She hadn’t seen him move.

“You’re burning up,” she heard him say despite the ghosts of the past crowding her thoughts. “Normally, I’d worry that was a fever, but you’re not like normal folks.”

“I’m not hot,” she said in an undertone, rocking back and forth and letting her eyelids drift downward. “So cold.”

“You may feel like you are, but you’re putting off a lot of heat. Your face is wet.”

“I’ll be fine. You can go if you want.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You’re calling me a liar?”

“Yeah,” he rasped. The press of his other hand against the back of her neck managed to both incite her nerves so much that she practically launched off the bed and also made her head fall forward. Shocking and then soothing.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me, Willa.” He splayed his large hand at her nape, his thumb tracing a gentle line along the curve of her ear. Through the excitability she was trying to shake off, his touch was pure pleasure, and she didn’t understand why he’d bother. None of the Coyotes seemed to experience much joy when Blue touched them, just capitulation.

“Fear is how I’ve stayed alive as long as I have. I run at the first sign of trouble.”

“But isn’t it exhausting?” His hand slid slowly down her back, the press of it solid against her spine, every vertebra falling into line as his touch passed.

“Yes.”

“And you’ve never talked to anyone about it? No family or friends?” He’d worked his hand free of hers without her noticing but hadn’t stopped touching her. His thumb skated along her chin and jaw. Her cheek and corner of her eye and circled downward again. “Skin’s so smooth,” he murmured.

“Kept soft by anxious tears and nervous sweat,” she joked, but he didn’t laugh.

“Hush. Answer me.” They were hip-to-hip, thigh-to-thigh. She was practically on his lap, actually, and was appalled to make the determination that the arrangement was her doing and not his. She was leaning into him like a plant toward a source of light.

Like the nymph Clytie who’d been so infatuated by Apollo that she’d turned into a sunflower and followed his daily journey across the sky.

The comparison stung, but Willa couldn’t pull away, though. Blue was right. She kept courting self-defeat, and for the first time in a week, that sick sensation in her belly had ebbed, and she wasn’t contracting every muscle in her body for a fight that wouldn’t come. There was nothing to be afraid of. She’d known that, but she was finally starting to feel it.

“No. Not really.” She was so tired that she couldn’t care anymore about propriety. She leaned into him and put her face against his shoulder, pulling in long, ragged breaths as he looped an arm around her.

That wasn’t her imagination. He was pulling her closer to him and she wasn’t resisting.

Too tired to resist. Too exhausted to feel guilty that she’d given up on keeping someone away.

She was curled onto his lap like an overindulged cat, pinned in place by his hands on her body, his chin at the top of her head.

“There’s no one,” she said softly, not really meaning for him to hear, but of course he did.

“You chose that?”

She wasn’t rocking anymore. He was adjusting her in his arms and atop his thighs, likely trying to find some niche to settle her into more comfortably. If she’d had the energy, she would have helped him.

“At first, no,” she whispered. “I had some friends in Spain, but my father made them disappear. And there was my mother when she was alive, but I figured out that she was like me, and I was making her worse with my problems. I didn’t want to make her worse. If she’d been alive now, she probably would have been perfectly functional. Pharmaceuticals might have actually helped her. They don’t work for me.”

“Because of what you are.”

She nodded. “The doctors always want to try some other thing, but I know better so I just move on. Lola Perez, Tito’s mother, is a licensed psychotherapist in some states, and she’s offered to sit and listen if I want her to, but I just . . . It’s hard to sit in front of someone like her who’s so immaculately together and explain why you’ve been dwelling at rock bottom for so long. That’s so hard to explain without confessing where I came from and who I came from and everything that happened.”

“You don’t think Lola’s been through her fair share of trauma? A lady as old as she is has probably seen and maybe even done some seriously twisted shit.”

“I’m sure she has, but that doesn’t make starting the conversations any easier.”

“Why are you so afraid of people knowing things about you? Telling folks some things isn’t really going to piss your father off that much, is it?”

“Who knows?” She shrugged jerkily. “And I think you already know far more about me than anyone I’ve associated with in a very long time.”

“And that’s sad, because I still don’t know a hell of a lot of anything. I want to know more about you, and not just because information is power for folks like us, but because you make me curious.”

“Curious?” She tipped her head back and opened her eyes to see his.

His expression was unexpectedly tranquil. She always expected the worst of him, or perhaps the worst of everyone, and he was simply caught up in the current of her generalization. He seemed to be perfectly at home with what he was doing, as though he’d done it before.

“I make you curious?”

He let out a dry laugh that was like a chisel to her worry. A chunk of the heaviness chipped away and let in light where it was desperately needed.

“I swear,” he said, “every conversation with you ends with me having more questions than when I started.”

“If it weren’t for who my father is, I wouldn’t be all that interesting.”

“That’s bullshit. I wish you’d just rip the Band-Aid off and say who he is and—”

“No.” Just when she’d started to feel lightness after so long, the dread woke up and was ready to spread. She was trying to scramble out of his arms, but his grip got tighter.

“I swear, your instinct would be to run into a fire instead of away from it,” he murmured into her hair. “Just be still. You make me antsy when you try to bolt like that.”

“I make you antsy?”

“Why are you so incredulous about every little thing I tell you?” He laughed again, and the dread stilled for the moment. Didn’t go away, but didn’t get worse. Sometimes, that was the most she could hope for. “If I wasn’t a dominant shifter, I’d probably be just as oblivious to how messy you are as most of the folks in the Coyote pack. I’m sure if you let one of those Foyes stand close enough to you, they’d probably sense it, too.”

“What do I feel like when I’m near you?”

“Hmm.” He’d tucked her head back beneath his chin and made soothing circles with it, his scruff making the tiniest of ticking sounds against her hair as it rubbed—like hundreds of little cards being shuffled all at once. Somehow, soothing.

“When you’re near me—especially this close—it’s kinda like being close to a geyser or a hot spring or something. You know it’s gonna go off eventually, but you can’t predict it. Most of the time, I just sense the same sort of living essence under the surface that every other person has, but every now and then it erupts. When it erupts, it’s this . . . disruptive thing. My instinct as an alpha is to try to neutralize whatever is causing it to behave that way.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because—”

Closing her mouth, she shook her head. She actually didn’t have an answer for him beyond, “I just know.” She’d have to come up with something better, once she could think.

“Where’d you learn to play music?” he asked.

The question was so out of the blue that for a few seconds, she couldn’t help but to look for the trap in it. He’d jumped from one subject to another without benefit of a transition.

“Music?” she queried.

“Yeah,” he said, and she was up in his arms, then, being carried around the side of the bed.

He sat on the side farthest from the window and put his back against the headboard. Adjusting her atop his lap, he murmured something about “an old guy’s back.”

“Uh. Here and there,” she said. “Italy. Austria. Germany. France and then England, and then back again as people developed new instruments. I wanted to be one of the first to master them. I figured that if I couldn’t perform in public, I would at least know more than everyone else. I actually didn’t perform for a public audience until the nineteenth century.” She laughed, and using those deep-inside muscles felt amazingly freeing. “I was actually dressed as a boy. There was a new pleasure garden in London I was dying to get a position in, but I knew there was no way I was going to get a job unless I was a soprano with a diva attitude.”

“Can’t sing?”

“Sing? Me?” Heat crept up to her cheeks, and she was happy he couldn’t see it. That happiness fled when she remembered that with him being what he was, he could probably feel it. She groaned. “I’m a competent singer.”

Better than competent, given who her father was. There were few who’d dare challenge the patron god of music to a contest of the same.

“I’d prefer to hide behind my instrument, though,” she added.

“Gotcha.” He crossed his long legs at the ankles, and her mind skipped from thoughts of his shoes being on her coverlet to the startling recognition that he was the first man who’d ever been on her bed. On any of her beds. Platonic or romantic or otherwise, there’d never been a single occurrence.

She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to feel or if she should have felt anything at all. Worldly ventures weren’t her forte.

“So, what?” he asked. “You put on a pair of breeches and a hat and presented yourself as a young man?”

“Exactly that.” She fondled a tassel of fringe on the coverlet next to his hip.

There is a man on my bed. Now what? Kick him out? Send him home to his fiancée?

She didn’t like either of those ideas. She was tired of being some peerless mystery.

She smoothed the bit of decoration and left it alone before she felt compelled to fidget it out of its knot. “Backfired a bit, though.”

“How so?”

“I didn’t know when I went seeking a job, but the orchestra conductor was a famous pederast. Apparently, I was his type.”

“Willa.” There was enough growl in the word that Willa could tell she was being scolded. He didn’t have to elaborate. Apparently, her inability to identify the actual predators in her midst came as a shock to him.

She sighed.

“So, what, did you leave?” he asked.

“No, are you kidding? I needed the job. A lady’s got to support herself somehow, right?”

He took a long, deep breath in through his nose and shuddered as he let it out.

Oh boy.

“You know, I’m trying not to judge you here,” Blue said. “I’m trying to put things in context of the time period, but shit, woman.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, one of the dancers somehow figured out that I wasn’t who I claimed to be, and she’d run interference for me whenever she saw Maestro lurking too close.”

“I guess that’s moderately better,” he grumbled.

“Glad you think so.” Willa smiled. “She was a no-nonsense kind of lady. I wonder all the time what became of her.”

“How long did you stay with the garden?”

“About two years, and then I was a governess for a while because the job guaranteed me a place to live. Of course, living below the stairs in the homes of aristocrats brought its own set of tribulations.”

“I’d imagine so. Damn. I bet you have enough jaw-dropping stories in your memory to keep me entertained for a thousand and one nights. Probably more, right?”

A thousand and one nights like this?

Futile wishes did nothing but feed cynicism. She toyed with the tassel again to busy her hand and suppress her compulsion to look at him.

Did he have the same serene countenance? Or had his brow creased in the way it did whenever the pack gathered and he was counting heads and murmuring observations to Kenny about group fitness?

There was nothing superficial about Blue. He was observant and interested. Annoyingly assertive, but . . . inquisitive. Not a cowboy riding in half-cocked looking to shoot first and ask questions later. He was a thinker, and he didn’t make that a secret.

She’d just been choosing not to return the favor.

She looked up then because he’d stopped drawing circles in her hair, and he was just staring down at her with his forehead creased in his thinking way.

That line in his forehead was attractive.

So much of him was attractive.

“You’re looking at me like you just realized where you were,” he murmured.

Maybe I did.

She was realizing a lot of things.

“I . . . worked for an earl once.” She eased off his lap because her legs were getting numb. She didn’t want to stop touching him, though. She put her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes when he draped his fingers beneath the placket of her robe and against her shoulder.

There was a hideous burn scar there but she was tired of hiding it. Tired of hiding everything. She almost wished he’d ask about it. If she told one person, perhaps her compulsion to be freer about it with others would fade.

He turned his body so his face was against the top of her head and, curiously, his lips against her hair. Seemed intimate, but she couldn’t be sure. He was a shapeshifter. Their ideas of intimacy were different from humans’.

“What was that like?” He kneaded his fingers into her shoulder, pressed the thumb into the tense muscles at the join of her neck, and she turned more into him. Knees turned toward his, fingers walking across the fabric of his hard thigh.

“His children were entitled and often rude, but his wife tried hard to rein them back in when he wasn’t around. She was kind to me. When no one was paying attention, I helped her transcribe some of the songs her mother had taught her into music. She was afraid no one else would remember them. Music was shared differently back then.”

“How so?”

“People relied on public performances to hear new songs, and performers spun their interpretations a little bit differently, choosing their own tempos and keys and such. A song started in one city might sound completely different by the time another city picked it up.”

“Ah.” The edge of his thumb traced the outline of her scar, and she was holding her breath, waiting for his query.

But it didn’t come.

“If you want to sleep, I can stick around until you nod off,” he said and stilled his hand. “I’m sure you don’t want me to be seen coming out of your house anywhere near sunup. Might be a scandal.”

“I don’t know about scandal, but there’ll definitely be gossip.” Right then, Willa wasn’t entirely certain she cared about it—didn’t care about those few lines of policy in her employment contract that cautioned upright comportment. The worst people could say about her was that for the first time in the gods-knew-how-many-years since she’d moved to Maria, a man had spent the night somewhere under her roof. A friend. She was tired of being friendless.

“Probably best if MMS’s favorite teacher doesn’t become the center of salacious rumors.” He chuckled.

“Who said I was the favorite?”

He moved his hand again, lower down, fingering a bit of flesh just over the spot where the bony part of her chest turned pliant.

All the heat and blood that had surged into her face before fled all at once to her chest, her breasts. An unfamiliar feeling that triggered a desire to squirm away, but she knew if she did, he’d stop touching her, and she didn’t want that. She was as curious about him as he was about her, but he wasn’t hers.

Reluctantly, she nudged his had away.

“Hardly a secret,” he said, unbothered. “All the kids and their parents like you. Other teachers, too. Even the ones at the high school.”

“Short of Paul.”

“Paul’s a has-been on a power trip. When I went to swap out those instruments for you, he tried to interrogate me about what you were doing, what the kids were playing, whether the kids were marching yet, what the money situation was, and all that. I didn’t know what to tell him.”

She sighed. “If he wants answers, he knows where to get them.”

“I think he’s intimidated by you.”

“I doubt that.”

“I don’t.” His hand stilled yet again, save for the thumb, and he angled his face downward as he used the digit to nudge aside her robe’s placket an inch.

“Blue,” she warned.

“What is that?” he whispered.

Willa stared ahead unseeing at the blank television screen, trying not to hyperventilate. Trying not to behave as though she hadn’t been touched there since the wound had been applied.

She didn’t answer, leaving him room to provide his own.

“A scar?”

She gulped. “Yes.”

He moved a bit more of the cloth aside. “I’ve never seen a scar that color,” he murmured in wonderment. “Looks painted on, like gold nail polish or something.”

“Just flesh.”

Flesh no one else had seen in hundreds of years.

She held herself statue-still, immobilized by indecision. She didn’t know what normal people did—didn’t know if she was supposed to help him see more, or if she should be more dignified and try to cover up the history written on her skin.

At the tickle of his breath against her neck and his continued silence, her shoulders raised in a reflexive jerk. “My melanin isn’t like most people’s.”

“No, it definitely isn’t,” he murmured curiously. He exposed a bit more scarred flesh, skin that had blistered and oozed in violent pinks and reds before scabbing brown and then fading to the gold he was looking at.

“What caused this?”

She couldn’t tell how much he could see from that angle, but the air dancing over her nipple and down to her ribcage filled her with nervous prickles.

She swallowed and tried to force the word out twice before managing to successfully say, “F-fire. Have you . . . heard the term auto-da-fé in your academic meanderings?”

“Yeah,” he said gruffly. “Church couldn’t execute you so they turned you over to the state for them to do the dirty work.”

“Cold comfort, perhaps, but there were a dozen of us meant to die that day. Unlucky me, I was one of very few Moriscos sentenced to capital punishment. I suppose everyone assumed I died.” She’d never bothered to find out for sure. She hadn’t been back to Spain at all. Not enough years had passed, and she wasn’t sure there’d ever be enough.

“I was hysterical right after, because the logic just didn’t make sense,” she said. She nudged his hand aside and scratched at the wound. She always experienced an infuriating psychosomatic itchiness whenever she thought about that day, and it wouldn’t go away until she’d scratched the flesh bloody.

Blue grabbed her wrist and held her hand away before she could try.

She scoffed, and some of the hysterical laughter from that inauspicious day surged back with a vengeance.

“Easy, now,” he murmured, pressing the back of her wrist against his lips. “You’re all right.”

“I am?”

Her body went still with shock.

Does that count as a kiss?

She should have known if it did, but she had no frame of reference. She didn’t let people touch her, and he shouldn’t have been kissing her. He wasn’t hers. He was obliged to wed some other woman, and Willa wasn’t going to do anything to impede that.

“You don’t have to go back there.” Sliding down the sleeve of her robe, he made another warm press, a bit higher, closer to the hollow of her elbow. “It doesn’t matter anymore. They can’t get you now. No one’s going to hurt you.”

“You can’t promise me that. Maybe those people are gone, but there are others who can.”

“I won’t let them.”

“A pretty thought, but you can’t be with me all the time. Even if you liked me enough, you wouldn’t want to.”

“Who said I didn’t like you?”

“It was pretty well implied.”

Another press, at the sensitive inside of her bicep. Ticklish in a way that made her gasp instead of laugh.

He smoothed his thumb over the seam between tan and gold on her upper arm as if noting the difference in texture and in elevation and committing the properties to memory.

“Do you have sensation here?” His fingertips skipped up her arm to the gnarled flesh over her shoulder and neck that her shirts usually covered. “In all of the gold places?”

“Yes. Maybe even more than the normal flesh.” She shied away from the tickle along her collarbone, if she could even call it that. The calluses on his fingertips ignited little nervous reactions that had her nails digging reflexively into her palms and her breath caught somewhere between her open mouth and lungs.

She realized she was quivering, then, rocking toward him in anticipation of his touch and away from ignorance. She didn’t know what to do and knew it wasn’t acceptable or proper for her to entice him, only that some part of her wanted the attention.

Or maybe needed it.

“They’re all over your body? The scars?”

“No.” She forced a swallow down her tight, dry throat. Revealing was thirsty work—unplanned-for emotional labor. “Mostly on my side and on my back.”

“Would you let me see them?”

“Why?”

“Because someone should see them. Why not me? I don’t kiss and tell.”

“Kissing?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“You can’t. You have a fi—”

“No,” he said with emphasis. “I don’t.”

Incredulous, she gave her head a skeptical shake. “Since when?”

“Since I left.”

“But—”

“When doesn’t matter,” he pleaded. “What matters is that it’s done. Right now, you matter.” Blue unknotted the tie of her robe, and she watched dumbly as he nudged down the other sleeve.

No fiancée?

As the ramifications of Blue’s statement became clearer in her head, Willa tried to feel pity for the jilted woman. But she couldn’t, not when the man who’d done the jilting was right there, tearing down her walls and making her want to risk everything to finally be understood.

With her camisole still on, there was plenty of fabric covering her, but it’d been centuries since she’d felt so naked in front of someone. She could hide the flesh, but not her form. She’d spent so long shrinking into herself so that people wouldn’t play attention to her. Blue was asking to see things that she’d never revealed, and she wouldn’t be able to disguise what she was from him.

She was a woman, and he was a man, and perhaps not every act of intimacy had to result in permanence.

Perhaps fleeting connections were just as important and fulfilling.

Perhaps the very best person to finally have some intimacy with would be someone she knew was using her to achieve an end goal he hadn’t been deceptive about.

No one needed to know.

She turned her back to him, raised her shirt over her head, and covered her breasts with her forearms.

“You’ll have to tell me what it looks like,” she said. “I’ve never been able to see the whole picture.”

He sucked a forceful pull of air through his teeth. “I don’t even know if I can describe it, sweetheart.”