Haunted by Your Touch

He shrugged as if it didn’t matter either way. “Well, I can’t let you do that. Look. Let’s make the best of the month. I’ll show you a good time.” He scratched his square jaw. “And given your new condition, you’re going to experience urges. Why not experience them with me?”

His words sounded cavalier enough. And simple. But she knew there would be nothing simple about it. In a month’s time, she would either shift into a werewolf… or die—by his hand.

She had opened her mouth to resume arguing when her stomach rumbled.

“Let’s take care of that appetite of yours.” He held up a hand to stop her protests. “And then you can keep trying to convince me why I should let you go.” His gold eyes fixed on her, hard, probing. “And why I should believe you when you say you’ll come back.”

“This is beautiful,” she murmured, sipping her coffee on a deck overlooking miles of wooded hills. “I don’t get to see this in the city.” She gazed again at the stretch of countryside. “Doesn’t appear that anyone besides you enjoys the view, either.” She arched a brow and nodded around them. “No neighbors.”

“I like my solitude.” He bit down on a buttery croissant, identical to the one she had just consumed.

She reached for another croissant and stared out at the sea of treetops. She couldn’t even spot a road. “More like isolation.” At the sudden quiet, she glanced across to find him staring intently at her, no longer chewing, no longer moving at all.

“I’m not human,” he said succinctly, each word a hard bite on the air. “I have no business being around humans.”

She nodded slowly, nibbling her croissant as she studied him, knowing he meant her to take some sort of lesson from those words. Swallowing, she asked, “I suppose you think I should do the same?”

“Yeah. You especially.”

“Why me especially?”

He leaned back in his chair. “I’m a dovenatu, a hybrid lycan. I can control my impulses. Can fight the urge to feed at every moonrise. You can’t. I shift at will. You can’t. Every full moon, you will shift and you will kill—”

“Yeah, Curtis covered this already,” she snapped. “I get it.”

“Do you? Because you have no business going out into the world until this is… rectified. One way or another.”

One way or another. She couldn’t stop the shiver from trickling down her spine. “So instead I should stay here and keep you company.”

His eyes glowed. He idly traced the rim of the glass of juice before him. “The company was good, wasn’t it?”

She felt herself blush, the burn crawling all the way to the tips of her ears. She stabbed at a chunk of pineapple and replied quickly, “As you’ve said, I have a month. I won’t hurt anyone until then. I’m going home.” Popping the fruit in her mouth, she chewed. It was all bravado. She knew he could chain her downstairs again. Could seduce her with a look or crook of his finger and keep her happily in his bed. But she was hoping he wouldn’t. Hoping that whatever impulse had motivated him to free her of that dark basement still held true.

“Very well. You insist on leaving the premises. Fine.”

Relief rushed through her. Her words spilled forth in a giddy rush. “I promise I’ll come back—”

“I know you will.” He cocked his head to the side and relaxed back in his chair. “Because I’m going with you.”

Chapter Eight

Luc followed her into the Sun Valley Rest Home and was instantly assailed by the odor of astringents and decaying mankind. He understood how some people could be uncomfortable with the reminder of their own fleeting mortality. It only made him wishful. Wishful to have lived a life wherein he’d… lived. Instead of merely existing. It made him yearn to age and die in the natural order of man. As God intended, not some witch who’d started the lycan curse over a thousand years ago.

You’ve lived since Lily crashed into your world—your bed.

He shook his head and watched Lily smile and nod to both the staff and the wizened infirmed trudging down the corridors with their walkers and wheelchairs. She showed no sign of discomfort. She seemed right at home here.

“Where are we—”

“This way. She’s in the TV room.”

They entered an airy room with several well-worn sofas and armchairs. Three women played cards at a table. Another sat alone on the couch, staring vacantly at the television set.

Lily eased down beside her. Luc hung back, leaning against a bookshelf of paperbacks so old and worn that the titles on the spines could hardly be read.

“Hello,” Lily greeted the old woman on the sofa.

The woman looked startled for a moment, blinking warm brown eyes several times.

“Hello.”

Lily glanced at the television before looking back at the woman. “I like Paula Deen, too.”

The woman gave an eager nod. “She doesn’t skimp. Fried is fried. Like it should be.”

“Absolutely,” Lily agreed.

“Do you like to cook?”

“A little bit. My mother’s an excellent cook.”

The woman patted Lily’s hand. “Well, you should get her to teach you.”

Lily blinked fiercely and glanced away, the back of one hand swiping at her eyes. And in that moment, Luc knew that the woman with whom she was conversing wasn’t a stranger.

“She did teach me how to make a mean turtle cheesecake,” Lily offered.

“Hmm, I love turtle cheesecake.” Her brow wrinkled in concentration. “I think I might know how to make that.”

Lily gave a shaky smile. “I bet you do.”

He looked hard at the woman on the sofa, studying her face, the confused gaze, the melting brown eyes— and knew it was Lily’s mother.

In that moment, he didn’t know what was worse—being alone and not having anyone to love or having someone you loved no longer know you.

“She wasn’t always that way.”

He flexed a hand on the steering wheel and weaved through traffic. “I’m sure she wasn’t.”

“I don’t want your pity.”

He snorted. “Any pity I feel for you has nothing to do with your mother.” Only partially true. The stark sorrow, the total loneliness he had seen in Lily’s face as she’d sat on that couch, had struck a much-too-familiar chord. It echoed the way he had felt growing up, when he’d endured the hatred of a family that did not want him. When Ivo had fallen to darkness. When Danae had chosen his cousin—and darkness—over Luc.

“So you do pity me?”

“What do you expect me to feel for you, Lily? You’re in a shitty situation here.”

She shook her head. “Couldn’t I just lock myself away every full month? Or sedate myself?”

“That’s a hell of a burden to carry. If you slip up, innocents die.”

She jammed her eyes in one tight blink and rolled her head side-to-side against the headrest with a heavy sigh.

He continued, “You would need one hell of a friend to pull something like that off. Someone to confine you three nights out of every month and then free you. Someone to sedate you if needed. They could never fail. To fail would mean innocents dying.”

“Innocents?” she bit out. “Like me.”

He nodded. “Like you were.”

Her face tightened, the smooth features pinching in distaste at the truth of his words. Her new ugly reality. “Yeah. I don’t have anyone like that in my life.”