Come Moonrise (8 page)

She turned her head away, unable to stand
one more second of his icy regard. "I see."

"No, you don’t. I want you to marry me, all
right?" He sighed, the sound impatient. "I need to know if you were
telling me the truth last night when you said you belonged to
me."

She swallowed, focusing on the white snow
contrasted with the bright blue Montana sky out the window. "I’ve
always belonged to you."

"I guess you believe that right now."

She jerked her gaze back to him. "Why are
you so cynical?"

"I stopped believing in fairytales a long
time ago."

"And marriage between us, love...it’s all a
big fairytale in your mind?"

"No." He cupped her chin, his gaze burning
through her. "It’s very real. I need to know if it’s real for you
too."

"It’s real."

"Then we get married."

"Just like that?"

"If you love me like you say you do, you’ll
marry me."

"And do you love me?"

"Will you refuse to marry me if I
don’t?"

She considered that. He wasn’t acting very
excited about the prospect of marriage between them even though he
said he wanted it. In fact, he was downright cranky, but this was
Ty...her best friend for more than a decade and the man she’d loved
almost as long.

His current attitude not withstanding, she
knew he cared about her. A lot. He’d been watching out for her for
years and usually, they enjoyed each other’s company more than
anyone else’s. He’d also proven beyond the shadow of a doubt last
night that he desired her physically. But was that enough for
marriage to work between them?

"I’m not sure. Before I can
answer that, I have to understand why you
say
you want to marry me, but
act like
you’d rather
ride an unbroken bronco sidesaddle."

He took a deep breath and let it out before
settling more comfortably against the headboard. "To understand,
you’ll have to learn some things about me, things that very few
outsiders know. I can’t tell you any of it unless you promise me
that no matter what you decide, you’ll keep my family’s secrets
safe."

"I promise," she said without
hesitation.

"I’m a werewolf."

She shook her head, feeling
like she had marbles rolling around inside it instead of brains. Ty
was the most practical man she'd ever known. No way had he just
said what she thought. "
Come
again?
"

"I'm a werewolf." He
paused, glaring at her impatiently when she remained silent. "A
lycanthrope...
a shape
changer
."

"I know what a werewolf is.
They’re the guys who get all hairy during a full moon and kill
indiscriminately..." Oh, yuck. This
revelation
had all the makings of a
nightmare she wanted to wake up from. "Ty, this isn’t funny. You’re
no killer."

"No, I’m not, but I am a werewolf.
Werewolves aren’t the myths of folklore." His face twisted with
distaste. "Though most of what the world believes about our kind is
no better than that. We’re human and yet we’re not. The animal
nature humans fight to suppress plays a bigger role in our makeup,
but we don’t lose our humanity because of it."

"So, it’s just an inward thing?" She
couldn't believe they were having this conversation.

Of all the post-mortem discussion she had
imagined having with Ty MacAnlup, him trying to convince her he was
some kind of monster was not one of them. He didn't look or sound
crazed, but his words were the kind of thing that got people locked
up on the funny farm.

"No. It's much more than an inner delusion,"
he said, indicating he knew the direction of her thoughts.

And why shouldn't he? He knew her better
than anyone else in the world. But if what he was saying was true,
she didn't know him at all. "You can't be serious, Ty."

"I am. Very. Moonrise comes at 4:16 this
afternoon and with it I will shape change into a wolf, but inside I
will still be me with all my knowledge, all my thoughts, all my
feelings. You will still belong to me."

She wasn't even sort of
going there. She belonged to a wolf? Not likely.
"
Today?
" she asked
in a squeak as the significance of what he was telling her hit
her.

"Yes."

"You’re going to get all hairy?"

"I’ll get more than hairy, I will take on
the form of a wolf completely."

For some reason, an image of the wolf she
had met as a teenager came to her, but she pushed it away. The
situation was bizarre enough with her getting fanciful. She wanted
to dismiss Ty's words as a bad joke, or maybe even temporary
insanity, but he was too serious, too obviously convinced himself
for her to do that. "You mean it, don't you? You really think
you're going to turn into a wolf later this afternoon."

"I don't just think it, I know it."

She shook her head, unable to believe
despite his strong conviction.

He let out an impatient breath. "Do you
remember the wolf that came to you when you were crying by the
swimming hole when you were fifteen?"

A shiver skated up her spine. "Yes, but I
told you about him. I suppose now you are going to claim that was
you, or something."

"It was. It was the first time I kissed
you."

"You didn't kiss me."

"Yes, I did."

And she remembered how he'd licked the salty
tears from her face. She made a strangled sound in her throat, but
nothing would come out.

"It was me."

"No." She felt tears welling in her eyes.
Either he was serious and needed psychological help, or he was
trying very hard to drive her away. Either way, it hurt.

"You never told me what you did after the
wolf ran away."

No, she hadn't. No way would she have told
him that.

"You took your clothes off and you went
swimming. I watched from the trees. You were so beautiful and I
wanted to join you so bad, but I couldn't control my change and I
knew if I went back to you I would scare you."

"I..."

"But you didn't just go swimming...you came
out of the water and you dried off in the sun. Then you closed your
eyes and you touched yourself...you said my name when you came."
His eyes burned into her with an angry passion she didn't
understand. "I wanted to howl with frustration, you were so
beautiful, but I could not have you."

Embarrassed heat climbed her cheeks and she
averted her face. He'd seen her all right because he couldn't have
guessed that happened. He'd watched her pleasure herself just like
last night, only that time she hadn't known she'd had an
audience.

"You couldn't have heard me say your name,"
she said, trying to stick within the realm of reality. "No one was
close enough."

"I was. Wolves have far superior hearing to
humans. You know that."

Yes, she did, but in order to accept that he
had heard her, she had to believe he had been the wolf and it was
too fantastic. And yet nothing else made any sense.

"You never even noticed me back then."

"You're wrong."

"But you always flirted with the other
girls."

"They were safe. I didn't want them...or
they were femwolves."

"Female werewolves?"

"Yes. Don't look so shocked. As a vet, you
know every animal species has to have two sexes to mate."

"But you mated with me last night...I mean
had sex." She couldn't call it making love because he'd said
nothing about loving her.

"Werewolves and humans can mate."

"Can they have babies?" her scientific mind
demanded to know.

"Sometimes. When it's a sacred bond."

"What's that?"

"The simplest answer is that it is a mating
between two werewolves or a werewolf and a human that results in
offspring."

"Oh." She wanted to ask more questions about
that, but something else he'd said took precedence. "You said it
was your family’s secret? Is this like a genetic mutation?"

"From what our scientists can tell,
werewolves have existed as long as their single form
counterparts."

"Humans."

"Yes. We co-exist, but our ways are
different. Pack law takes precedence over human law."

She stared at him and an irrefutable
knowledge settled inside of her. He totally believed what he was
saying, but even more than that, she believed him too. She'd
suspected for years that werewolves existed, but she'd dismissed
her thoughts as foolish fancy. She couldn't dismiss that sense of
rightness about what he was saying now.

That encounter with the wolf...Ty...oh,
gosh, she still couldn't believe it had been him...but the
encounter had been real. She'd never doubted it and now she had to
accept that the reason it had such an impact on her was because
she'd met not a wolf, but a werewolf.

"You belong to a pack?" she asked in barely
a whisper, her mind still trying to wrap around this new reality
she faced.

"Yes. Dad is pack leader."

That didn’t sound nearly as farfetched as it
should. King was definitely a leader among men, why not
werewolves?

Oh, man...lycanthropes in rural Montana. She
shook her head, trying to clear it, but her thoughts swirled like a
motorized merry-go-round. "If what you are saying is true, why
didn’t I know about it? We’ve been friends since I was twelve years
old."

"We’re good at keeping our secret. We’ve had
millennia of practice."

"But I’ve been your
best
friend for fourteen
years...wouldn’t you have told me?" The thought he’d kept something
so integral to his nature from her for so long made her wonder
again how well she really knew him.

"Obviously I didn’t, but I always
half-expected your aunt or uncle to."

"They know? Who told them?" If all this was
real, then her family knowing while she didn’t would hurt as much
as the fact he’d withheld the information from her in the first
place. And it did hurt. She felt betrayed even if she might have no
right to that feeling. "And Marigold?"

"Yes, she knows." His lip curled derisively.
"Too much."

"Why them and not me?" she asked with a
catch in her voice she was powerless to suppress.

It seemed to bother him and he frowned, then
pulled one of her cold hands between his, rubbing her knuckles
absently. He’d comforted her this way many times over the years and
she wondered if he was even aware of doing it now.

"Your aunt’s great-grandmother was femwolf,
a female werewolf, but there have been no wolves born in the family
for two generations."

"
Aunt Rose is a werewolf,
femwolf...whatever?
"

"No, I told you—"

"Her family. Okay, I understand, I think,
but I still don’t...I mean...why never tell me?"

He sighed. "You didn’t need to know. It
didn’t impact our friendship."

Hadn’t it? It seemed to her like he’d
withheld a pretty big part of himself. So had her aunt for that
matter.

"If we did get married and had children,
would they be puppies?" she asked on a sudden thought that
frightened the life out of her.

"No, cubs don’t go through their first
change until puberty. In a wolf-human mating, there is no guarantee
any of the offspring will be born wolf."

"Does that bother you?"

He cocked his head to the side, as if
thinking about it for the first time. "No. I don’t think it does.
I'll love my kids regardless of what they are, but even if they are
human, as long as they choose to belong to the pack and participate
in its rituals, they are subject to pack law."

"That sounds scary," she said with a
shiver.

"It can be." His tone was grim and she
didn't doubt him.

"And if they choose not to belong to the
pack?"

"Then they are subject only to human law,
but they also forego the protection of the pack."

"And if I marry you, will I belong to the
pack?"

"That's not a decision I can make. My father
would have to approve you joining the pack and you would have to
want to, but I will always protect you, no matter what."

Remembering the cold way King had always
treated here, she thought her chances of being approved as a pack
member were pretty slim.

"Is your father going to be angry if we get
married?"

"Yes."

Her heart contracted. "Oh."

"But he will accept the marriage."

She said nothing to that, not as convinced
as Ty was that his dad would accept anything.

"Is the werewolf gene the recessive one?"
she asked, not wanting to dwell on future problems while her mind
was all but mush dealing with the ramifications of what Ty was
telling her.

He shrugged. "It’s more complicated than
that, but werewolf science still hasn’t figured out the whys of it
all. All we do know is that if it was a totally recessive gene, out
of kind matings would never result in wolf offspring and sometimes
they do."

"Out of kind?"

"When one partner is non-werewolf."

"You didn’t want to mate with a human," she
remembered. "I mean it was a big thing with you if you've been
avoiding me since I was fifteen." A lot of stuff was starting to
make sense. "Even yesterday, you told me you didn't want that with
me."

"Oh, I wanted you."

"Your body did, but your mind didn't."

"Right."

"You always tell the truth, even when it
hurts," she said with a pain-filled laugh.

"It's a wolf trait. We're good at hiding
what we are, but not lying outright."

She nodded, her knowledge of animals making
perfect sense of that remark. "Everyone told me you were interested
in Olivia..."

"She's our kind."