The Better to Hold You (27 page)

“Well, I do have a toothbrush in my bag …” And then I remembered something that drained all the humor out of me. “Red, this is probably not an appropriate time for me to be flirting, let alone anything more.” I took a deep breath. “I’m pregnant.”

Red cocked his head to one side, considering. “Listen, Doc, I don’t like to be the one to break this to you, but I’m pretty sure you’re not.”

“What do you mean you’re pretty sure I’m not? I’ve gone to the doctor. It’s confirmed.” And then I remembered her concern about some of my hormone levels.

Red crouched down on his heels, so that his face was more or less level with mine. “It’s the virus,” he explained. “It’ll play all hell with your hormones at first, and then …” He hesitated, as if searching for the right words. “You don’t smell pregnant,” he finished, although I had the sense that he’d started to say something else and then changed his mind. “Not to make you feel self-conscious, Doc, but you smell like you’re close to the change.” He cleared his throat. “Which means, uh, that you’re also getting your period.”

I cried out in dismay. It was too much, too fast. I’d just been told that everything I’d been building my life around was false, and even though I understood on one level that there was no baby, I felt as though I’d just lost one.

Red moved toward me as if to draw me into an embrace, and I began to flail my arms at him, striking out blindly. Water splashed, wetting his chest, his shorts.

“It’s not fair,” I kept saying. “Not fair.”

“I know, darlin’, I know.” He knelt beside me, our bodies separated only by the porcelain rim of the tub, his hands stroking the back of my head, animal-tamer hands, calming and wise. But my heartbeat was tripping over itself, unable to slow down. “I’m here. I’m going to take care of you.”

“I’m not pregnant,” I said, trying to get used to the idea. I recalled the doctor telling me that my hormone levels were unusual. “I never was pregnant.”

I felt his hands grow still and pulled back to see his expression. He must have known, or else he controlled his reactions better than anyone I’d ever met.

“Did you really want to be?”

“Yes.” But I was looking into his eyes, and know he saw that the truth was more complicated than that.

Red slipped his hands around to cup my face. “Abra,” he said, then stopped to take a breath before starting again. “I’m sorry about the pregnancy, because I want for you what ever you want for yourself. But in a way, I guess I’m not sorry, because it might have made you stay with Hunter. And even though you probably know it, I’ll say it anyway. I’m in love with you.” Red looked at me with a look of such intensity that I found it hard to keep meeting his eyes. “I’ve never said this to another woman, Doc—I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

And then, because I didn’t know how to respond, I said, “Do you know that my father had a television series back in the eighties?”

Red shook his head, clearly befuddled.

“Well, he did. It was called I Married a Werewolf. Pretty ironic, huh?” And then I found myself laughing until tears ran out of my eyes. I guess Red must have thought I was laughing a little too hard, because he started stroking my hair and murmuring to me as though I were crying.

“I went too fast,” he said. “I’m sorry, Doc, I rushed you.”

“No, no, I’m sorry.” I looked at him, realizing how vulnerable he must be feeling. “I remember Halloween. How you—what I did to you, how you changed …” I stopped because I was naked in the bath, and I had just reminded Red of how I’d been desperate to have him in my mouth. Recalling it, I felt a rush of heat between my thighs. “How was it for you when you first found out you had the virus?”

Red cleared his throat again. “It’s a little different for me, Doc.” His amber eyes flared gold, their pupils dilating.

“Your eyes—did they just—glow?”

“You have no idea how much I want your mouth on me again. How much I want to put my mouth on you. Ah, God.” Red went up on his knees and wrapped his arms around me, and I could feel the waves of desire rolling through him, making him shake as my wet body soaked through his clothes. “Let me put my mouth on you.” He kissed my damp hair, my forehead, and then he was kissing me on the mouth, a deep, ravenous kiss that he broke off, gasping for breath. “Abra, oh, God.” He leaned over and took one of my nipples in his mouth, suckling so strongly that I felt my response between my legs. As if he knew, he switched his attention to the other breast and reached down to touch me, his callused fingers surprisingly deft and gentle—more so than Hunter’s had ever been.

“You’re so slick down there—ah, Jesus, woman,” Red said, and just as his light, skimming touch made me want a deeper contact, his finger began to slide inside me. But thinking of Hunter had broken the spell.

“Hey, hang on—slow down there,” I said. “You’re moving too fast.” Despite myself, though, my internal muscles gave a little clench as he withdrew his finger.

“I’m sorry, Doc.” But he didn’t look sorry; he inhaled my scent from his hand, and then, as if he couldn’t help himself, tasted me on his skin. His eyes were bright with mischief and desire.

“It’s just happening a little fast for me, Red.”

He pressed a kiss to the top of my collarbone. “I got you. You want me to help you out of there?”

“Thanks.”

Red lifted me out of the bathtub, and I realized that he was astonishingly strong, much more so than his wiry build suggested. He wrapped me in a towel, and said, “Do you want to see me do it?”

“Excuse me?” I wasn’t sure what he was asking, but assumed it had something to do with sex.

Red grinned. “What I meant was, do you want to see me shift?”

“Oh.” I felt myself flush. “Yes. I would.”

“Okay. I can’t quite concentrate like this. Do you have any clothes here?”

“In the other room.” I held the towel shut with my hands and walked into the bedroom, followed by Red. “That’s my bag, over there,” I said.

“How about this?” Red held up a thick red flannel robe.

“That’s fine.” I backed into it and let the towel drop. When I looked over my shoulder, I realized Red hadn’t looked away this time.

“Jesus,” he said, his eyes wide. I instantly recognized the expression in his eyes. It was what Lilliana had always called the “My God you’re naked and a goddess” look, and I had nodded and pretended I knew what she was talking about. It was such a wonderful reaction that I didn’t have the heart to chide him. I belted the robe.

“Can you concentrate now?”

Red turned around. “You’re still very naked under that, but—yeah, I can handle it.”

I sat on the bed, wrapping my arms around my knees. “So what happens now? We wait for the moon to rise?”

Red sat down beside me. “It’s easier when the moon’s full, like now, but I’m not a werewolf, so I can change at other times.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lycanthropy’s a virus. What I’ve got is more, ah, gene tic in nature. I’m Limmikin—a shapeshifter.”

“I’ve just accepted the idea that lycanthropy can actually turn people into werewolves—Unwolves—whatever. And now you’re telling me there’s more supernatural weirdness around?”

Red threw back his head and laughed, revealing canine teeth sharper than I remembered. “Doc, around these parts, I’m what passes for normal.”

I felt my eyebrows rising up. “So prove it.”

“Right here?”

“Right here. Turn into Red the coyote.”

Red flushed his splotchy, hectic redhead’s blush. “A wolf. A red wolf, not a coyote.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“I know I may not be quite as big as some of the timber wolves …”

“Sorry, I just remembered that in Texas, some red wolves had interbred with the local coyote populations …”

Now Red narrowed his eyes. “Coyotes are tricksters, Abra. I am not a coyote.”

“Okay, I believe you.”

Red stood up so that he was looking down on me and the bed. The look on his face made my breasts tingle and my nipples harden. “A Limmikin doesn’t require the moon,” he said, his gaze dropping down to my mouth. “All that’s required is that I be naked and in an ecstatic state.”

In a sense, all women are shapeshifters. But even though I’d thought I was pregnant until a short time ago, I had found it hard to imagine myself undergoing the dramatic transformation into moon-bellied hugeness. Picturing myself with an actual baby had been even harder. My mind had accepted it; my gut had not.

So even though I didn’t think Red was lying, I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the image of him turning into a wolf, and imagining myself transforming felt even more outlandish.

Except that I still had the guilt-blurred memory of Halloween night, the sudden storm of intimacy between us, and the unexpected climax of that intimacy. My mother had always insisted that as a child, I’d had some sort of strongly empathic ability that I’d blocked out when I became a teenager. I would argue that I’d had a very good reason for embracing rationality as my religion, and in any case, doesn’t every mother want to believe that her child is special, gifted, magic? Even when she knows she is only the absolutely plain and ordinary daughter of an extraordinarily vivid woman?

My defense had been to grow up and resolutely not believe in it, any of it—no to my mother’s bags of aromatherapy herbs, no to her crystals and runes and astrology charts, no to her psychic dreams and votive candles and hand-painted leather voodoo charms.

Ye t here was Red, telling me if he just shucked his clothes and, presumably, his inhibitions, he could turn himself into a wolf. And if he could, then presumably, I could, too.

The one thing I’d wanted more than magic, as a child, had been to be a dog.

With all these things running through my mind, I couldn’t quite sort out what to say when I opened my mouth. But Red seemed to understand. Because he knelt down between my thighs, as if he were about to propose, and waited.

“What do you need to do?”

Getting up to sit beside me on the bed, Red reached over to cradle my head between his hands, then raked his fingers through my hair, tugging gently at the hairband until it came loose and my hair tumbled down my back. That almost familiar sensation his hands induced in me, a kind of mindless sensual relaxation, kicked in and I felt my eyes go heavy-lidded. “I need to take off my shorts. Anyone likely to come in here? Disturb us?”

I shook my head no. My mouth was kind of dry.

Red drew in a sharp breath. “Jesus, Abra, you smell … you smell like you want me.”

I swallowed, with difficulty. “I do, Red. But I’m not going to make love to you.” I couldn’t. Not five minutes after believing myself pregnant with another man’s child.

He nodded. “I just need to get a little—you know, reptile-brained. Instinctive. I can do it with the right ritual, or music, but that would take a while. Don’t suppose you happen to have any pot?”

“My mother probably does but I have no idea where.”

“So it might be quickest if you—if you let me kiss you.”

“Just a kiss?”

Red’s eyes crinkled with amusement. “Doc, a kiss done right is a pretty powerful thing.”

“All right then. Just a kiss.” As if I hadn’t had my mouth on his penis a month ago.

Red pulled down his shorts. “One thing, though.”

“Yes?” I tried to look away, but it was hard. I mean—well, yes, I guess I meant that, too. I hadn’t been with many men, and I hadn’t really thought much about size before. It wasn’t that Red was that much longer than Hunter—it was just that he was, well, thicker. And I couldn’t help but wonder how that would feel. I put my thumb and finger around him, trying to measure.

Red gave a sharp gasp and his eyes closed. “Just … just wanted to mention that …” I moved my fingers slightly, and he moaned. “Wanted to … Jesus, wait, I can’t think when you do that …”

“Yes?” I took my hand away.

Red swallowed hard and opened his eyes. “In my other state, I might not be as, ah, restrained.”

I nodded in mock-seriousness. “You think your dog-self is going to try to mount me?”

I guess the tone of my voice fell somewhat short of diplomatic. Red looked at me with something that was mostly amusement but ever so faintly tinged with annoyance. “Oh, just shut up,” he said, and kissed me.

At first it wasn’t much, just a press of his thin lips to mine, just an angling of his jaw to set his mouth more firmly over my mouth, just his big hands cradling my cheek, my jaw. And then I became aware of his bare chest against my breasts, the red robe must have slipped down off my shoulders, and as I reached for it he took my wrists in his and held them captive, and that one small gesture did me in. I moaned, and the next thing I knew Red was biting his way down the side of my neck, sharp little nips like nothing Hunter had ever done. Red lifted one of my breasts, the skin underneath so sensitive it nearly hurt, and took one of my nipples between his teeth, sending a shock of painful plea sure straight down to my womb.

I grabbed ineffectually at his hair with my bandaged hands and he pulled his head away. “I thought you said just a kiss.”

Red grinned, and his eyes were an intent, wolfish yellow. “I lied,” he drawled, and buried his face between my breasts.

“Stop,” I said, and he opened his mouth wide, engulfing most of one small breast. My thighs fell open, and Red made a strange groaning sound. “Really stop,” I said, and tried bringing my knees together.

“Little pig, little pig, let me in.” His hands parted my legs.

“Red. Red!” I was crying now, and he looked up, all humor gone.

“Doc?”

He came up until my head was level with his strong chest and pulled me into his embrace. “Ah, Jesus, Doc, I’m sorry. Please, don’t cry. I stopped, all right? I stopped.”

“Red.” I cried his name into his mouth and felt his startle, and then his comprehension. He started kissing me again, and again I could feel that barely restrained wildness in him, sharp teeth leaving faint marks of possession, my heart thudding with fear and excitement. But when his eyes met mine, I could feel the strength of his love for me, holding his hunger in check. This time, as he slipped down my thighs and I started to cry, he understood and held my wrists all the tighter, and I finally let myself go and wailed as he found me with his tongue.