The Cursed (League of the Black Swan) (20 page)

The lump in his throat blocked him from speaking for a few moments, and it actually took him a couple of tries to get the words out. He felt like his world had turned upside down; that gravity had quit functioning.

“Don’t thank me. Please, don’t thank me. You will never know how selfish I’ve been in keeping you with me. Monsters never get the princess in real life, but I’m selfish enough to want to keep you near me for as long as I can.”

She leaned toward him and he held perfectly still, afraid that if he moved she would flee. She kissed him gently on the lips, and he didn’t push for more. For once, his body was content with the tenderness of her offering, instead of wanting to explode into sexual need. The beast inside him quieted, its rages and lusts subsiding, until it almost purred with the peace spreading through him from her touch.

“This is going to sound completely wrong after what we’ve just been through,” she said, grinning up at him. “But I’m really starving.”

“Your wish is my command. What are you hungry for?” He stood up, taking her hands and pulling her up with him.

“Honestly? Anything but duck.”

Rio slowly woke up and stretched, feeling slightly sore in every inch of her body. The bedroom was filled with sunlight because she’d been too tired to bother closing the curtains when she’d collapsed into bed the night before. She’d plowed her ravenous way through a steak, salad, and baked potato and then fallen asleep in Luke’s Jeep on the way back to his place. He’d picked her up and carried her into the house before she’d realized what was going on, and she hadn’t bothered to try to get down. Instead, she’d snuggled up to him, knowing she was playing with fire but not caring.

The honesty she demanded, even of herself, made her admit to a somewhat different story. Maybe part of her had been hoping she would get burned. Burned with his heat, seduced by his fire, but with the out that the next morning she could claim she hadn’t really known what she was doing.

“That’s just a little bit cowardly, coming from a mighty duck slayer, don’t you think, Kit?”

The fox, currently curled up next to her on the bed, twitched one ear but didn’t open her eyes. Kit had been very interested in smelling both of them the night before, in spite of the thorough hazmat cleaning, so maybe the hair removal option would have been a good idea. She involuntarily glanced down at her underwear and shook her head. On second thought, no. There were just some places she did not want to be bare.

She showered and left her hair loose. Then she dressed in jeans, boots, and sweater, ran a mascara brush over her lashes and a little gloss over her lips, and called it done. She had things to figure out today, and there was no time to waste trying to be glamorous.

Luke was already in the kitchen, drinking coffee and scowling at his phone. His face lightened up when he saw her. “Lunch?”

He was so mouthwateringly gorgeous that she wanted to just stop and stare at him. His hair was still damp, too, and pushed back from those incredible cheekbones. He wore a blue sweater that a woman must have given him, because the color matched his amazing dark blue eyes. Faded jeans and old boots completed the outfit, and the effect of the whole thing made her want to rush across the room and jump him.

“Lunch sounds good, although I don’t know how I could be hungry again after everything I ate last night.”

“Duck wrangling is hard work,” he said, flashing her that wicked grin that melted her insides and made her nipples twinge.

He filled a mug of coffee and set it on the counter for her, then turned to the refrigerator and pulled out four different kinds of coffee creamer and proudly placed them in front of her.

“Now you don’t have to drink it black.”

She couldn’t help it. She smiled. The Dark Wizard of Bordertown had been out buying her coffee creamer.

“Butterscotch. Wow, that sounds delicious. Thank you for this. Nobody ever—well, I just really appreciate it.”

She busied herself pouring cream in her coffee so as to avoid having him see her face. Luke was extremely perceptive, and the last thing she wanted him to think about her was
poor little orphan girl
.

“Are you ready to get your private investigator on?”

She took a long sip of coffee before putting her cup down and looking up at Luke. “I think what I need to do today is try to find some answers about my past and about why everybody seems to be so interested in me all of a sudden. Would you be willing to go to the convent with me, so I can try to talk to any of the nuns who are still there?”

It was one of the bravest things she’d ever done, asking him that. She’d sworn, the day she left the convent, that she would never, ever return.

He put his own mug down, frowning at it, and then looked up, his face troubled.

“Rio, I’m sorry. I’ve just been on the phone with five different nuns, all the way up to the Mother Superior. None of them will talk to me, and they warned me to tell you they would never speak to you again,” he said gently.

The words hit Rio like a sucker punch. Not that she hadn’t expected it, or at least not that she wouldn’t have expected it if she’d ever thought she’d want to go there and ask them anything again. She’d left under bad circumstances—in fact, she’d arrived under bad circumstances—so she should have had no reason to expect help from them.

But all that logic didn’t stop it from hurting. The convent and the nuns had been home to the only years of her childhood she could remember, and the pain of their rejection quite literally took her breath away and left her bent double and gasping to try to breathe.

Luke was around the counter in a heartbeat, patting her back and holding her hair out of her face. “What can I do? Tell me what to do, Rio. I’m losing my mind here.”

She forced herself to calm down when she heard the intensity of his distress.
In and out. In and out.
The breathing exercises that she’d once learned to cope with childhood panic attacks surfaced in her mind, and she took long, slow breaths in and then steadily pushed them out.

“I’m fine. I’m really fine. It was just unexpected. I have—I guess I had, somewhere inside me, the dream that someday we would reconcile, and I would have a home. I’ve never—I’ve never had anyone who didn’t abandon me, and without that kind of foundation, I’m left feeling adrift sometimes.” She tried to smile but was horrified to realize that tears were running down her face.

“I’m so sorry, Luke. I don’t mean to be a pathetic, whiny little girl. I can’t believe I keep telling you all this stuff. I’m normally a very private person. Are you sure you didn’t whammy me with a truth potion?”

Luke whirled around, then stalked across the room and out the kitchen door, slamming it behind him. Rio sat, frozen, miserably aware that she’d driven him away. Surely it wasn’t her feeble joke about a truth potion?

Before she had a chance to even think about her next step, a thunderous explosion shook the house, and then the door burst open, and Luke stomped back in, slamming it behind him.

“I just blew up the Helga’s Tea Room van,” he announced. “Blew it to smithereens. There’s not a scrap of metal bigger than a shoe box left of it.”

Rio’s mouth fell open and she realized she was completely speechless.

He advanced on her, swept her up off the stool into his arms, and kissed her until she was having trouble breathing again, and then he walked around the counter and started drinking coffee while she sat, half-dazed, tingling in every nerve ending she’d ever even thought of having. He wasn’t even breathing hard, darn him.

“I know. Don’t yell at me,” he said, half sheepishly and half defiantly. “I’ll buy her a new van. Hell, I’ll buy her two new vans.”

“But why—” She couldn’t wrap her head around any of it.

He scowled, but somehow she knew it wasn’t directed at her. “I don’t know how to have all these feelings. I know how to blow stuff up. You were hurting, and I wanted to help, but I didn’t know how, so I blew something up.”

It was the most ridiculous and the most romantic thing she had ever heard. She started to tear up again and rubbed her eyes with her fists.

“You do realize that you can’t blow something up every time I get emotional,” she said cautiously. “This—whatever this is—can’t work if I have to worry about the imminent destruction of all human life and property in Bordertown.”

He scowled again, even more ferociously, and epiphany struck. Rio’s world tilted and then righted itself on a different axle. It wasn’t charm, flirtation, or big romantic gestures that would catch her heart and steal her soul, then. It was a hint of brokenness, a flash of need and longing that let her hope there was a chance for her to soothe a kindred wounded spirit and that maybe, just maybe, he would be able to offer solace in return.

More and more, she was coming to realize that the hole in her heart was shaped like Luke. It terrified her that nobody else would ever be able to fill it.

“I can try harder,” he promised, so earnestly that she had to fight a smile.

“I think you’re doing just fine. Maybe we should go talk to Helga about her new van before we get lunch.”

He cleared his throat and looked everywhere but at her. “You might want to go wash your face. You, ah, have some of that black stuff smeared around your eyes.”

Mortified, she jumped up and ran back to the bathroom, but when she got there she started laughing so hard that she had to hold on to the counter so she didn’t fall on the floor. Why in the world was she worried about him seeing her with a little smeared mascara, when he’d seen her covered from head to toe with filth the night before? She washed her face and started over with a little bit of makeup, feeling suddenly lighthearted.

So the nuns didn’t want to talk to her, did they? She’d go another avenue. There was more than one way to skin a duck.

Kit had decided not to join them for lunch, if the way she blinked, stretched, and went back to sleep was any indication, so Rio left her with a bowl full of shredded chicken, a plate of spring greens, and a bowl of fresh water.

“I’m worried about her,” she confessed to Luke. “I feel like there’s more I should be doing for her. Maybe take her to a wildlife rescue? Should she be in the forest, instead of in the middle of the city, especially a city like this one?”

Luke glanced down at her as they walked, a gleam of amusement in his beautiful blue eyes. “I get the feeling that if Kit wanted to be in a forest, she’d be in a forest. She’s a magical creature, Rio. She talked to you and said she’s meant to be with you. If it were me, I’d go with the flow for a while.”

“I guess so. But I really need to fatten her up a little bit. If Dr. Black catches me again while Kit is still this thin, I have a feeling that I’ll be the one she feeds to her office cat.”

“That woman is a little scary,” Luke agreed. “I once needed her help with a shape-shifting armadillo who was stuck midshift, and I thought she was going to singe the skin right off my body with the scolding she gave me before she realized that I wasn’t the one who’d caused it.”

They managed to talk about little things while they had soup and sandwiches in a sidewalk café, taking advantage of the unusually warm day. Funny adventures he’d had on cases; weird things that had happened to her on her bike messenger runs. Small talk and lunch, almost like normal people. Rio wanted to knock wood even as she had the thought, to keep the meteorite from smashing down on them.

Luke made a few phone calls during lunch. In one, he profusely apologized to Madame Helga. In another, he arranged for a new van with all the bells and whistles to be delivered to her tea shop.