Laura's Wolf (Werewolf Marines) (16 page)

“Well…” Roy’s training and instincts told him that nothing was ever completely safe. But the clear sunlight, the cozy scents, and Laura’s presence relaxed him as much as was probably possible for him. “I think it’s safe
enough
. If anyone wanted to make another try, yesterday or the day before would have been the time, while I was down for the count.”

Laura ate more omelet, clearly mulling something over. Roy thought she didn’t believe it was completely safe either. But instead, she asked, “Were you serious when you said I should find a legit job where I can take risks?”

“Sure. I don’t get why you’re counting out money behind bullet-proof glass when you can do rescues under fire and disarm bank robbers. Unless you love being a bank teller…?”

“It’s all right,” she said, with no particular enthusiasm. “I liked my co-workers. The pay was good, considering that I never went to college. To tell the truth, I picked it because it was the most respectable job I could think of.”

“Haven’t you’ve ever thought of becoming a cop or a paramedic or something like that? Or joining the military?”

Laura shrugged, then, looking down at her plate, muttered, “I’ve thought of it.”

“Why didn’t you?”

With a flash of her old bitterness, she said, “Isn’t it obvious? Look at me!”

Roy tried to inspect her body as his drill instructor might have. It wasn’t easy, since everything the DI would probably criticize as soft only made her more sexy and tempting.

“What’s important is what you can do, not what you look like. You held up a lot of my weight, so I know you’re strong. Do you run, or work out at all?”

Laura was staring at him as if he was out of his mind. “I swim. A bit. But that’s not even the big problem. I’ve never been arrested, but if I had the police or the army checking my background, they’d probably find something. At the very least, they’d wonder why my employment record starts one year ago.”

“The police might already know about you.”

Laura almost choked on her coffee. “What? What do you mean?”

“They had to have run a check on you after the bank robbery,” he explained. “And they tried to recruit you anyway. Either you covered your tracks better than you think, or they have an idea of what you’ve been up to, but they also know there’s no legal record and you eventually went straight. My guess is that they know and they chose to let it slide.”

“Are you serious?”

Roy nodded. “Cops do stuff like that all the time. A lot of witnesses to crimes don’t have clean records. But if someone can testify about a murder, the police won’t go after them for some minor drug or prostitution or theft offense. If you did want to become a cop, you could contact the highest-level officer who tried to recruit you and feel him or her out about it. Get a sense of whether they do know and if they think it won’t be a problem.”

Laura tilted her head inquiringly. “How come you know so much about the police?”

“My mom was a cop.”

“Was?”

“She died four years ago.”

“I’m sorry. Was it—um…” Laura’s voice trailed off awkwardly.

“In the line of duty? Not the way you’re thinking. Her partner pulled up at a 7-11 to get coffee. When he came back to the car, he thought she’d fallen asleep. He was all ready to razz her about it. But she was dead. It turned out that she’d been born with a heart defect. She could have died at any time. But no one knew about it. Not even her.”

“How tragic.” Laura’s gaze was warm with sympathy.

“It was tragic that she died young,” Roy replied. “But maybe it was just as well that she didn’t know. She got to be a cop, which she loved. She raised me. If she’d spent her whole life knowing that she could drop dead at any second, she might have done everything differently.”

The rawness of his grief had worn off over the years, but the scar remained as a catch and ache in his heart. Uncomfortably, he realized that he envied Mom a little.
She’d
gotten to die with her boots on.

He didn’t want to be pushy, but he couldn’t resist returning to the subject of Laura’s career. “You’d make a good cop.”

Her smile quivered nervously around the edges. “What, you’re not going to try to recruit me for the Marines?”

“No,” he said bluntly. “I don’t think you’re suited. I get the feeling that in a bad situation, you’d rather talk your way out than shoot your way out.”

“That’s true. A guy pulled a gun on me once. I didn’t think he intended to shoot me, but he was sure as hell pissed. I started talking. Fifteen minutes later, he’d put the gun away, promised me that he still intended to pay the ransom for my non-existent kidnapped business partner, and offered to buy me a diamond bracelet as an apology for his crazy suspicions.”

“Did you take him up on it?” Roy asked, amused.

Laura grinned. “It’s gorgeous. I wish I’d brought it to show off to you.”

“Think you’d enjoy using your amazing powers of persuasion for a better cause?”

Shamefacedly, she nodded, her eyes cast down.

Roy caught her chin in his hand and tipped it upward, forcing her to look into his eyes. “Then do it. The reason I thought you’d be a good cop is because that’s what good cops do. They walk into dangerous situations, and they talk. My mom spent twenty years arresting all sorts of criminals, but she never once had to fire her gun.”

Laura’s gaze slid past him, as if she was peering into her own future. “I have to think about this. But I think you’re on to something. The other thing that occurs to me… maybe I’ve read too many novels… but I’ve always daydreamed about being a private investigator.”

“That could be the best of both worlds. You get to talk to people and there’s risk involved, but there’s no fitness tests and no chance of your past getting you in trouble. Plus, I bet there’s a lot less paperwork.”

Roy stacked the empty coffee mugs on top of the empty plates and headed for the kitchen sink.

An explosion shattered the air. White-hot light blinded him, agony splintered through his head, and the shock wave knocked him sprawling.

I stepped on a mine
, Roy thought dazedly.
So that’s what it feels like.

His thoughts felt slow and sticky, like drying blood.

He couldn’t hear. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t stand. Laura might be hurt, might be bleeding to death in front of him, and he wouldn’t be able to help her.

The blasting noise stopped, leaving his ears ringing. Light no longer blazed against his eyelids. He opened his eyes with dread, expecting to see the cabin in charred ruins around him.

He was laid out on the kitchen floor, surrounded by shattered china. The rest of the cabin was intact.

Laura hurried toward him from across the room, looking worried but otherwise fine. “Roy! Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said, though he felt like he’d been hit by a truck and thrown across the street. He managed to sit up, but he didn’t trust himself to stand. “What the hell happened?”

Laura kicked aside some broken plate pieces and knelt beside him. “The power came back on—I’d left the lights and TV on. They’re turned off now.”

The lights and the TV. That was all it took to flatten him. He wanted to kick his own treacherous body.

“Is it always that bad for you?” Laura asked. The concern in her voice made him feel even more humiliated.

Roy shook his head, then immediately wished he hadn’t. A wave of dizziness passed over him, and his vision blurred. “It’s gotten worse. It used to hurt, but not drop me like that.”

“Maybe it’s the shock,” she suggested. “Haven’t you gone weeks without being exposed to electricity at all?”

“
Exposed to
? It’s a light bulb, not a chemical weapon!”

Laura flinched back, and he realized that he was shouting.

Roy lowered his voice. “I can’t live like this.”

He forced himself to his feet, then staggered to the front door. His hands were numb and tingling, but he managed to wrest the door open.

“Roy!” Laura called after him. “Wait—”

He slammed the door, cutting off her words. The air was crisp and fresh, the ground slushy underfoot with melting ice and snow. Roy ran, mud spattering up past his ankles. To his relief, he regained steadiness with every step.

Roy stopped under a huge redwood atop a hill. A dull pain radiated out from the wound in his chest. He touched the bandage, but he wasn’t bleeding. The bruising around the bandage had faded from black to yellow. At the rate he was healing, a couple more days and he’d be good as new.

He could recover from a gunshot wound to the chest in less than a week. He could walk all day carrying eighty pounds of gear. He could beat any Marine in his platoon at hand-to-hand combat.

And none of that mattered any more, because he was broken on the inside, where it didn’t show. Like a steel box filled with shattered glass.

He had nothing to offer Laura or any woman. He couldn’t pull his own weight. He couldn’t hold down a job. He couldn’t even live in a normal house. He had no future. He’d already brought violence and trouble to her door. He was dangerous
and
he didn’t have a life.

He bitterly regretted making love to Laura. He’d led her on and raised her hopes, when he’d known all along that he could never stay with her. He knew exactly how much it hurt when people made promises they never fulfilled, and he’d sworn that he’d never do that. How could he have been so thoughtless and selfish?

His father’s voice echoed in his mind.
Good to see you, Roy. You’ve gotten so tall! Your mother tells me you’re the star of the basketball team. When’s your next game? I’ll get tickets and come cheer you on.

Guilt tore at him like the shrapnel that had ripped into his body a few months—a lifetime—ago. For the first time, he wondered if it would have been better if he’d died in Afghanistan.

He flinched at the thought. He’d known guys who came home from the war and ate their guns, gone to their funerals and felt anger burn through his grief at the sight of their sobbing families and children.

Roy had never had the impulse to kill himself, but he’d always sworn that if he ever did, he’d do whatever he had to do to get past it.
It might have been better if I’d died
was close enough to
I wish I was dead
to scare him.

He had a third option, though. He didn’t have to live like this, but death wasn’t the only alternative. He could become a wolf. Forever.

It wouldn’t be difficult. He’d felt in his bones, when he’d spent a day and night as a wolf on his way here, that if he remained in that form for long enough, he would forget that he was a man. His human self had begun to fade, and his thoughts had become a wolf’s thoughts, wordless and vivid, desiring nothing but the thrill of the hunt, the spray of blood in his mouth, and his companions, his love, his pack.

He could change right now and vanish into the woods. Three or four days without ever becoming a human again, and Roy Farrell, USMC, would be gone. Only a huge white wolf would remain, to run and hunt in the forest.

He reached into himself, searching for his wolf. Just to see…

“Roy!” Laura yelled.

He glanced down, startled. Laura was trudging up the hill in a very determined manner.

Roy had the impulse to take off or tell her to go away, but the first would be cowardly and the second would be cruel. She meant well, he was sure. Resigned to her pity, he sat down on a flat gray rock and let her come to him.

Laura seated herself beside him. He waited for her to tell him she was sorry and lie that everything would be all right.

She said nothing. He followed her gaze, not down the hill to the cabin but across, to the rugged mountains.

The pale sunlight made the snow glitter on the slopes, but
that
didn’t hurt his eyes. The hospital-lab had given him dark glasses, but they hadn’t helped; it wasn’t only the brightness of electric lights that was the problem, but their nature. It was as if he’d become allergic to modern technology.

Laura wore the same outfit that she’d had on for breakfast: blue jeans, a peach-colored blouse, and a pair of delicate gold sandals. She had left the cabin without even throwing on a sweater or closed-toe shoes, and her feet were wet up to her ankles.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“A little.”

“Here…” He put his arms around her, sharing his warmth.

She leaned into him, all soft curves and chilled skin and lemon-sugar scent, and he wished for the millionth time that things could be different. He shouldn’t even be touching her this much.

“What we did last night…” he said awkwardly. “I shouldn’t have come on to you. Don’t get me wrong, I meant every word I said. You’re sexy and gorgeous and brave and you ought to be proud of yourself. But about the sex… I don’t want to lead you on when I can’t follow through.”

Laura gave a shrug, as jerky and stiff as if she was a marionette who’d had her strings yanked. “I get it, Roy. I was upset, you’re under a lot of stress, we were in the same bed, one thing led to another. I didn’t take it as a marriage proposal. So don’t worry. You didn’t lead me on. It was nice, that one time, but we won’t do it again.”

Roy opened his mouth, then closed it, trying to figure out why everything felt so wrong. Laura was only agreeing with what he’d said himself. He hadn’t raised expectations he couldn’t fulfill, and if he hadn’t been completely up-front initially, neither had she. When he left, she wouldn’t feel abandoned.

He
was the one who felt abandoned, which made no sense. Laura was sitting right there in his arms. So why did he feel so achingly lonely?

“I’d still like to be your friend, though,” she mumbled, so softly that he might not have been able to understand her before DJ had changed him.

His arms closed tighter around her. “You
are
my friend.”

Roy knew his actions were contradicting his words. If your buddy was cold, you loaned them your jacket. And if Roy and Laura were going to be hands-off from now on, he should get his hands off of her.

He couldn’t bring himself to let go. Besides, Laura wasn’t moving either. If she didn’t want him to touch her, all she had to do was slide two inches away.