Bayou Moon - Andrews, Ilona [132]
“What did you do?” William asked. She couldn’t tell by his voice what he thought about the whole thing.
She grinned. “Well, he wanted to go to the Broken. Kaldar and me, we put him in a sack and took him down through the boundary. Kaldar stole a car, and we drove him down to New Orleans, to the big city, and left him, sack and all, on the courthouse steps. The Broken is a funny place. They really don’t like it when you show up there with no ID.” She tilted her face up. “Would it bother you if I’d killed him?”
He looked at her. She must’ve thawed a little, Cerise decided, because she had to force herself not to lift up and kiss him.
“No,” William said. “But I know it would bother you.”
She snuggled closer to him. “Your turn.”
“What?”
“Your turn to tell me a story about yourself.”
William looked away. “Why?”
“Because I told you mine and asked you nicely.”
William growled under his breath. Amber rolled over his eyes and vanished. How in the world hadn’t she put two and two together before?
“There was a girl,” he said. “I met her in the Edge. I liked her. I did everything right. I said all the smooth things, but it didn’t work. I don’t know why, but it just didn’t. I guess, she didn’t need another fixer-upper in her life. She had two brothers to take care of, so she went off with my best friend. It was good for her. He’s steady, and he always knows the right thing to do and does it.”
She winced. “You’re not a fixer-upper.”
He bared his teeth. “Don’t kid yourself. You saw me this morning.”
Cerise took a deep breath. “Do you like me the way you liked that girl?”
“No.”
It felt like a slap in the face. He was in love with some other girl. And the idiot didn’t even want him. How could she not want him? He ran into an open field to save a kid everybody shunned.
Cerise bit her lip. She wouldn’t be a consolation prize; she had some damn pride left.
But before she cut him loose, she had to be 100 percent clear where they stood. If it cost her a tiny bit of pride, that was fine. Nobody but the two of them would ever know.
“How is it different?”
He rolled his head back, sable hair falling down on his shoulders. “With Rose I knew what to say. I could take a step back and talk to her. I remembered all the crap from the magazines. It was easy.”
“And with me, it’s hard?” Why? Because she was a swamp girl? And how did the magazines fit into it?
William looked away from her. “I don’t like it when you’re away. If I don’t see you, I can’t settle down. If I see you talking with another man, I want to claw his throat out. And none of the things you’re supposed to say fit.”
Oh, this had to be good. “What sort of things?”
He sighed. “The lines. Like ‘You’re my everything,’ or ‘Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?’ ”
She lost it and laughed. She sounded hysterical and broken, but she couldn’t stop.
He sighed again. “Why are you laughing?”
It was that or crying.
“Cerise?”
“Are you going to ask me if my daddy was a thief, because he stole the stars and put them in my eyes?”
He pushed away from her. “Forget it.”
The laughter finally died. “It’s called the rending, isn’t it?” she asked. “The thing you did this morning? Your kind does it when you become overwhelmed—”
He lunged at her. A blink and he pinned her to the floor, his big body bracing hers, his eyes on fire.
Excitement zapped through her. She felt her muscles tighten in all the right places.
Now or never.
Cerise bit her lower lip. “Well, this is quite a predicament, Lord Bill.”
William snarled. She stared straight into his eyes, at the savage thing he hid inside. “Wolf,” she whispered. “I think you are a wolf.”
“When did you know?” His voice was a ragged growl, as if she was talking to a beast.
“For a while now. Yesterday when you found me here, I was reading a book about changelings, because I knew.”
Cerise caught her breath.