CHAPTER 16

It took close to half an hour before Eli could trust her to stand on her own two feet. Before then, every time he tried to prop her up, her knees would buckle, or she would stumble over thin air, or she would just kind of melt against him in a way he appreciated, but felt constrained from taking advantage of. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why, because Josie gave no indication that she felt they required more privacy or more comfortable surroundings to finish what they had started. He was the one who decided that the rest of their business should be concluded in bed.

In his bed.

In the bed where he’d been imagining her ever since he’d walked through her back door and seen her snap in an instant from a weary, wrinkled, and grumpy stranger to the professional, efficient, and dedicated woman he knew her to be.

Quickly, he collected Bruce, who had occupied himself quite nicely digging for woodchucks, and wrangled all three of them back to the cabin, where he shut his bedroom door in the dog’s impassive face.

When Eli finally had Josie where he wanted her, he took his time.

He made love to her slowly and thoroughly, and then after a restorative break for sustenance, he allowed her to do the same to him. Or maybe he should have said, she insisted on doing the same to him and he could find no reason to argue. Nor any motivation. Afterward, they fell asleep in a purely contented tangle of hair and limbs and heartbeats and slept like kittens after unraveling a ball of yarn.

He woke a few hours later, shifting from sleep to wakefulness as he always did—in a silent dizzying rush, dreaming one moment and capable of calculating complex combat strategies entirely in his head the next. He’d always been that way, his Feline antecedents notwithstanding, and he’d come to view it over the years as quite a useful skill to have. Nothing ever caught him unawares while he slept, and that had saved his skin more than once.

Tonight, it saved Josie’s.

Even before he opened his eyes, his senses alerted him to the fact that something wasn’t right. Josie slept on undisturbed, sprawled half atop him, boneless and breathing deeply. She was exactly where she belonged. The problem was that something had changed in their environment. All was not as it had been when sleep had claimed him, and his senses clicked instantly to the problem.

A crisp autumn breeze wafted lightly over his bare skin where Josie’s body did not cover him. Only when they had fallen asleep, all the windows and doors in the cabin had been closed.

Eli felt rather than saw a movement, felt it as a shift in the atmosphere, and he clamped his arms around Josie’s back to pin her in place as he threw himself into a roll that spun them across the sheets and onto the floor while their attacker’s hand still had not reached the apex of its preparatory backswing.

They landed with a thud on the floor between the bed and the rear wall of the cabin. The impact jerked Josie out of a sound sleep and she cried out reflexively, bewildered by the abrupt change in elevation. On the other side of the closed door, Bruce barked like a hellhound and threw himself at the wooden panel until it shook on its hinges. Eli simply rolled again, pinning Josie to the floor before leaping to his feet to face the intruder.

Unlike the characters in poorly scripted action films, he didn’t bother to ask who the person was or what he wanted with Eli and Josie. Eli had always held the belief that in situations like this, it was better to maim first and ask questions later.

He dove at the man in a blur of motion and bare skin. The reflection of the moonlight through the window allowed his black-clad assailant to see him better than if he’d been dressed, but nature evened the odds with Eli’s acute Feline night vision. He could see that the figure standing across the bed was definitely male, probably fairly young, and dressed surprisingly well for a breaking, entering, and attempted murder plot, when one discounted the idiocy of targeting a sheriff—and an Other sheriff at that—with such a scheme. The youth wore a black sweater and trousers made from a light-absorbing material that covered him from high on his neck down to the backs of his hands. He had covered those hands with dark gloves, and used black greasepaint to darken the skin of his face and throat. But he had left off the requisite balaclava, allowing Eli to note that his dark hair had been shaven close to his scalp. He definitely qualified as Caucasian, and behind his left ear, he sported a dark brown mole that hadn’t received quite enough dark paint to cover it.

It took Eli all of three seconds to develop a complete description of the subject that he would be happy to share with his deputies and every law enforcement agent from San Francisco to the Canadian border. Just as soon as he made the idiot pay for putting Josie in danger.

One spring of his powerful legs closed the distance between them from approximately four feet to less than as many inches. The man’s left hand came up and something in his hand glinted in the darkness. Eli’s right forearm rose to block the downward thrust while he simultaneously drove his left fist into the attacker’s unprotected gut. The black-clad figure grunted and jackknifed forward with a gagging sound. Surprisingly, this stirred little to no sympathy in Eli’s soul.

“Josie! Out! Now!” he snapped, and was gratified to see her hand come up to drag the sheet off the bed. Two seconds later, she had the fabric wrapped around her like a toga and was flying across the room toward the cabin’s exit, calling her dog to her as she went.

He’d really thought he was going to have to argue that one.

As soon as Josie disappeared into the living room, Eli twisted his arm and captured the intruder’s wrist in his hand. He slammed it against the bedside table and listened to the clatter of an object dropping to the floor from the man’s nerveless fingers. Then he finally gave root to his frustration, picked the intruder up in both hands, and flung him across the room like a pile of dirty laundry. He landed with a particularly satisfying thunk but failed to fall unconscious. Fortunately, Eli would be happy to rectify that oversight.

He prowled around the bed, each step deliberate and malevolent. He intended to first beat this asshole a little harder; then he would find out who the stranger was and what he was doing in Eli’s cabin, threatening Eli’s mate with some sort of weapon while the couple slept. Because that was just rude.

When Eli rounded the first corner of the bed, the black lump on the floor stirred, eyes widening until the white sclera seemed to glow in the otherwise darkened room. Tensing, Eli braced himself for a renewed attack or an onslaught of frenzied pleading. He got neither. Before he could take another step, the figure rushed to its feet and poured every ounce of its remaining strength into an upward leap, throwing itself out the open window and into the darkness of the nighttime forest.

Roaring in fury, Eli gave chase, determined to catch the assailant and question him, but just as his hands closed on the windowsill in preparation for a relentless pursuit, Josie’s voice from calling to him from the front of the cabin froze him in place.

“Oh my God! Eli!”

Cursing viciously, Eli spun on his heel and raced through the door to face the new threat. Instead, he found Josie standing on the front porch in the center of a virtually unrecognizable space.

The pale pine and reed rocking chair that had always sat beside the bright blue door had been smashed into little more than kindling and scattered across the floorboards and onto the neat front lawn. A pot containing a huge sunflower that had been given to him by the PTA when he’d first moved to Stone Creek had also been broken, the tall plant now upended on the front steps. But worst of all were the vile words scrawled in red across the bright blue door.

FREAK FUCKER RACE TRAITOR ANIMALS ARE MEANT FOR SHOOTING

“It’s not terribly eloquent, but I think the author got his point across,” Josie quipped, her voice thin but steady. When she turned to face him, though, her eyes were clouded with fear and concern. “Are you okay? I heard some banging but not much else, so I figured you were doing okay. He didn’t have a gun, did he?”

Eli grabbed her hand and tugged her against him, wrapping her up in his arms like a frightened child. “I didn’t see one. He had something, but I’m thinking knife. The bastard was stupid, but he wasn’t dumb, and guns attract a lot of attention.”

Josie ran her hands over his arms and back and pressed herself closer. “He didn’t cut you, did he?”

“I’m fine,” he assured her. “Not even bruised.” He pulled back until he could look into her eyes and press a kiss against her forehead. “You did exactly the right thing by running. Thank you for doing what I asked.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “You ordered again, but despite what you may think, I’m not an idiot. I know that in matters of self-defense and hand-to-hand combat, I’m not the expert in our relationship. If we’re in a truly dangerous situation where you have things under control and I’d only get in your way, of course I’m going to leave when you tell me to. I just want you to be aware that when it’s not a directly life-threatening situation, I reserve the right to tell you to go screw yourself if you try to order me around.”

“So noted.”

“Good. Now, what happens next? I know you are the police, but after a person’s house has been broken into and they’ve been assaulted with a deadly weapon, isn’t it customary to call the cops? Maybe the other cops?”

He nodded. “I’ll radio the deputy on duty and ask him to bring a crime scene kit. He can go over it with me, and we’ll see what we find.”

“Any chance you’ll find my clothes, or are those part of the crime scene evidence now?” When he looked sideways at her, mouth twitching, she shrugged. “I like a good forensic science documentary. So sue me.”

“I’ll get you something to wear. Come on, let’s go inside. We’ll get dressed, I’ll call Cooper, and we can wait for him in the kitchen.”

“Let’s make coffee. That may I might be able to stay awake until he gets here. Seeing as how it’s about two fifteen in the morning.”

Eli steered her back into the cabin and away from the intruder’s nasty words, but Josie clearly hadn’t forgotten them. Ten minutes later when she sat at the kitchen table wearing one of his buttondown shirts over a pair of his cotton boxers, she rested her chin on her fist and watched him put together the coffee. Her free hand ruffled absently through the shaggy fur on Bruce’s head.

“Do you think I was his target?” she asked.

Eli paused for a moment, then continued measuring grounds into the filter. “I’m not sure. You may have been, but we were so close together it’s impossible to tell. He could have been going for either one of us.”

“Clearly, he dislikes me, though. Or at the very least, he dislikes the idea of me having a sexual relationship with a shapeshifter. Actually, I’m assuming he dislikes the idea of any human ever having any kind of relationship with any Other. His wording sounded a bit... sweeping.”

Eli slammed the filter drawer shut and pushed the button on the coffeemaker. Then he turned to glare at Josie. “We are not having a sexual relationship.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“We’re having a relationship. Period.”

Josie watched him, her expression very neutral. “What’s the difference?”

“What do you mean what’s the difference?” He leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest and his feet at the ankles. The better to glare at her. “One implies that our only interest in each other is how many times the other one can make us come. The other means states that we’re more to each other than a warm body on a cold night.”

“Are we?”

Fury washed over him. He darted forward and slammed his hands flat on the table across from her. Then he leaned in until their noses almost touched. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

Josie shrugged, and her gaze skittered away from his. “I just mean that we’ve only been seeing each other a few days. Heck, we’ve only known each other that long. I wouldn’t want to assume anything about the way you feel about me based on the fact that we’ve spent every night together since the third one of our acquaintance.”

He grabbed her chin in his hand and forced her gaze back to his. “Now is not the time to ask how I feel about you, Josephine, because right at this very moment, you happen to be pissing me the hell off.”

“I’m so sorry,” she snapped, sarcasm dripping from her tongue. “Please forgive me for not knowing how exactly I’m supposed to be reacting to a situation I’ve never found myself in before. Clearly, I should have read the damn manual on human–Other social interactions before I agreed to let you and the Stone Creek Alpha eat pizza at my apartment!”

Finally—and belatedly—the note of mingled anxiety and confusion wormed its way through Eli’s instinctive anger at being dismissed as less than Josie’s predestined lifemate. He grabbed a sharp hold on his temper and sank down into the chair opposite her.

“Okay, sweetie, I think it’s time we talked about what’s really going on here. What’s making you so upset right now? You tell me yours, and then I’ll tell you mine.”

Josie made a frustrated sound in her throat and bowed her head. “That sounds about as appealing right now as a root canal.” She fisted her hands in her hair and tugged sharply. “How about we just forget the whole thing and drink our coffee until Jim gets here?”

“No. Now spill.”

She closed her eyes and let her arms flop to the table. Bruce made a disgruntled sound and took refuge underneath. “I just... I feel like I’m playing without a rule book here. I don’t understand how this thing is supposed to work, and whenever I feel like I’m starting to get a handle on things, it’s like the rules have changed and I’ve said exactly the wrong thing.”

“Wait, what do you mean by ‘how this thing is supposed to work’? Do you mean our relationship?”

“See, I don’t even know if that’s what I’m supposed to call it! I’ve never done this before. Every other relationship I’ve ever had has been an ordinary experience with an ordinary guy. And now suddenly there’s you, and the last thing you are is ordinary, and I don’t get how it’s supposed to work now.”

Eli wondered briefly if she was actually speaking English, because he felt as if he were listening to a foreign language he’d studied in high school and not heard since—he understood about one in every ten words, and even then he couldn’t seem to make any guesses about the context in which she used them.

“Are you all twisted up because you’ve never dated an Other before? Is that what this is about?”

“Don’t say it like that,” she snapped, glaring at him. “Don’t dismiss it as if I’m being ridiculous. Don’t act like it doesn’t mean anything that I’m human and you’re not. We’re different species. I mean, even more than most men and women feel like different species from each other, we actually are. We think differently, see differently, sense differently. Even our bodies don’t work exactly the same way. Our cultures are different. This is not a ridiculous thing to be concerned about.”

He growled. “Yes. It is. It’s ridiculous, because you’re making it sound as if the things that differentiate us from each other are somehow larger and more important than the things that make us alike. We both live in the same world, we both know the same people and frequent the same places. We even laugh at the same jokes and like the same movies. How are any of those things less important than that we don’t have exactly the same chromosomal makeup? Where did you get these ridiculous ideas about humans and Others not being able to mix? I would have thought that growing up in Stone Creek would have made you understand that we’re a hell of a lot more alike than we are different.”

She leaned away from him and looked hurt. He hated that. He was trying to make things better, not make her feel worse. “You make me sound as if I’m a worse bigot than the idiot who wrote those things on the front door, but that’s not what I mean. I don’t think that you’re any less of a person than I am; I don’t even think you’re any less ‘human’ than I am. Whatever that means. I just think that whenever we start to talk about us, we seem to be using different languages where the words sound the same, but the meanings are just a tiny bit different. Like I’m speaking Italian and you’re speaking Spanish, and we sort of understand what the other one is talking about, but we’re actually missing half of every conversation we try to have.”

“So then let’s trade definitions,” he offered. “We don’t need to make this harder on ourselves. If what we need is an Eli-to-Josie dictionary, let’s write one. This is too important to let it fall apart over a little thing like varying definitions.”

Josie pointed at him and made a sound of triumph. “See, that’s exactly what I mean! You say this is ‘too important,’ but what do you mean by important? Because I’m a cautious girl by nature, and I don’t want to assume that when you say it’s important you mean that it’s something you expect to be part of your life for the foreseeable future, when what you really mean is that it’s a lot of fun at the moment and you don’t want to screw it up while the sex is still so good.”

Eli blinked against the glare of the light suddenly dawning directly in front of him. “That’s what this is about,” he breathed, and felt as if Atlas’s globe had just been lifted from his shoulders. “You don’t understand how I feel about you, do you?”

She blinked. “Am I supposed to? Because if you told me, I completely missed it. Was I drunk? Did I hit my head? What happened?”

He shook his head. “You didn’t miss anything, sweetie. I think we’ve just had so much going on that neither of us realized it might be important to make a few things clear to each other. Let me go first.”

He took her hand and clasped it between two of his. Instantly he felt better. Calmer. More whole. Everything always improved when he was touching her. If she couldn’t see that, she must be blind.

“I’ve been trying to be all considerate and understanding about the fact that you seem to go into this state of panic every time the subject of our relationship comes up. I kept thinking it was because you thought things were moving too fast. I thought you needed more time, and I should just play it cool and let things progress naturally until you realized what was happening between us. I thought that by going slow I was going the right thing, but if I was wrong, I am more than happy to correct that mistake right here and right now.”

He caught her gaze and held it, needing to be connected to her in every way possible while he made this clear.

“I am utterly and completely enthralled by you. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before, or how I wasted three years living in the same town with you without ever so much as really seeing you. The only way I can explain it is to say that I was a complete idiot. For some reason, I didn’t realize you existed as more than a name and a profession. And it kills me to think about how much time I wasted because of it. I could kick myself. Except that I’ve come to understand that it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that now that I’ve met you and spoken to you and felt you and tasted you, I’m done. That’s it. You’re the end for me. I am not going anywhere, so I’m going to suggest that you don’t even try to get rid of me.”

Josie’s eye widened and her mouth opened, but he leaned forward to kiss her into silence.

“No, let me finish. I don’t really care what you decide to call what’s between us. The fact of the matter is that it exists, and that’s enough for me. The only thing I care about is that it makes you happy. What I don’t want is for it to make you confused. So I’m going to lay this out: I don’t want you to tell me how you feel about me tonight or tomorrow or the next day. I want you to wait. I want you to really figure it out and get comfortable with it. It needs to stop confusing you and making you crazy, and frankly, I don’t think sanity is in the cards for us until we figure out what’s going on with Rosemary and Bill.”

Her eyes closed, and she sighed at the reminder of the mess waiting for them back in town. He squeezed her hands and waited until her lashes drifted back up.

“So here’s the new rule. No declarations, at least not until the issue with the Lupines is resolved. Then, we can talk again about how you feel and how I feel and how we’re going to deal with all of it. Now is a crappy time to be making decisions about anything, especially the rest of our lives.”

He kissed her once, briefly, and smiled at her gently.

“Just remember—the way I feel about you is not going to change. I’ve waited my whole life for you, for this, and I intend to spend the rest of my life savoring every last minute to come.”

She frowned and tried to speak, but he shushed her and squeezed her hands.

“Nope. Not until this is done. Besides, I just heard Cooper’s car pull up, so we have other things to do right now. We’ll talk again when this is behind us.”

With that, Eli rose and went to meet Jim, leaving Josie behind at the kitchen table. She would need a minute or two, he decided, before she had to deal with making a statement. She could thank him for being so insightful and understanding another time.

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