Bayou Moon - Andrews, Ilona [35]
How long does it take to clean up anyway?
A door swung open behind him. “Done,” Cerise announced.
He turned around and froze.
She’d lost the cap, the jacket, and the grimy jeans, and found a pair of shorts and an oversized T-shirt that hugged her breasts. Her hair, very long and dark, spilled down to her waist in a combed wave. William took in her tan face, full mouth, narrow nose, large almond eyes framed in sable eyelashes . . . The eyes laughed at him and he forgot where he was or why.
Her scent drifted down to him, her real scent mixing with the fragrance of soap. She smelled clean and soft . . . like a woman.
The wild in him lost its head, clawing at his insides.
Want. Want the woman.
“Lord Bill?” she asked.
His thoughts tumbled in a feverish cascade. Want . . . So beautiful . . . Standing so close and so beautiful. Want the woman.
“Earth to William?”
She was looking at him with those beautiful dark eyes. All he had to do was reach for her and he could touch her.
No. Wrong.
She hadn’t given him permission. If he touched, he would take her. Taking women without permission was wrong.
William pulled himself back, regaining control. The wild buckled and snarled and screamed, but he reeled it in, forcing it deeper and deeper. Remember the whip? Right, everybody remembered the whip. Everybody remembered being punished for kissing a girl without permission. The scars on his back itched, reminding him. Humans had rules. He had to follow the rules.
He was a changeling. And a changeling could never be sure if the woman wanted him unless he paid for her or she said so. This woman didn’t want him. She wasn’t taking her clothes off, she wasn’t trying to close the distance between them, and his instincts told him he couldn’t buy her.
She was off-limits.
“My turn for a shower,” he said. His voice sounded flat. William walked past her, giving her a wide berth, and forced himself to keep walking into the bathroom, where he closed the door and bolted it to lock himself in.
CERISE swallowed, listening to the sound of the water hitting the shower tiles. Her whole body hummed with tension, as if she’d just survived a fight for her life.
The look of total shock as he’d stared at her in stunned silence had been priceless. She’d almost laughed. And then William had turned feral. Something wild glared at her through his eyes, something crazy and violent and full of lust. For a second she thought she’d have to fight him off, and then it vanished, as if his internal shutters had slammed closed.
She’d knocked his socks off. She’d planned to—if he had called her a hobo queen one more time, she would’ve strangled him. But she didn’t expect . . . that.
She’d figured he might stare, maybe flirt. But he’d gone from zero to sixty in two seconds flat, as people in the Broken said. She had never seen a man do that before.
She’d never met a man who’d looked at her like that before. Like she was irresistible.
Cerise dug through her backpack, fished out a sweat-shirt, and pulled it on. He’d made himself back down. Point for him, but no need to tempt fate.
The rush of adrenaline inside her cooled down. Warmth washed over her, followed by soft fatigue. What do you know—Lord Bill almost lost his head over a Mire girl. She grinned. Hobo queen, shmobo queen, took you by surprise. “Lost his head” didn’t even begin to cover it. He’d stared at her like he was some sort of maniac.
It shouldn’t have mattered. For all she knew, William looked at every woman that way. Well, maybe not quite that way, since he did manage to make it to adulthood somehow, without being murdered.
Still, it did matter. She sensed a sharp, dangerous edge to everything he did, and it pulled her in like a moth to a flame. She thought back to the fight. He’d pushed her out of the way. It wasn’t a hard push, but she had been barely