Her jaw dropped. “That could have happened?”
He leaned back against the kitchen counter, resting his hands on either side of him. “I hate to admit it, but yeah. That guy was being a jackass, and sometimes when I get mad, or fired up, or worried, my inner werewolf can come out on its own.”
Lacey leaned back against the opposite counter as she considered that. “You mean like it did at Bensen’s junkyard?”
“Yeah. Exactly like that,” he said softly.
In the silence of the kitchen, the microwave dinged. Alex grabbed the potholders she kept on a hook near the stove and took it out. She took her time using a spatula to get the steaming food out of the casserole—one burrito for her and two for him. Alex reached over and took the spatula out of her hand, adding another burrito to her plate and two more to his. Then he carried both plates into the living room before she could complain.
“Were you mad at the junkyard?” She glanced at him beside her as she picked up her knife and fork. “Is that why you shifted?”
He cut into one of the burritos, not looking at her. “No, I wasn’t mad.”
She waited patiently for him to say more.
“We had Bensen’s junkyard under surveillance. Supposedly, he’s moving drugs through one of his properties,” Alex said, still staring down at his plate. “When I saw you on that surveillance camera, stumbling around in the dark about to get yourself killed, I kind of lost my mind. I’d had uncontrolled shifts before, like you saw at the press conference, but that night at the junkyard, I shifted further than I ever had in my life.”
A crappy feeling slid down her throat to settle uncomfortably in the pit of her stomach. But at the same time, she felt another sensation too, one she was sure she’d never felt before. “Because you were worried about me?”
“Because I was terrified.” He turned his head to look at her. “You could have died in there. I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
“So you came and saved me, even though you knew I’d see you as a werewolf?”
He turned his attention back to his plate. “I didn’t have a choice.”
But I did.
They ate in silence for a while. The burrito was very good, hot and spicy, just the way she liked it. Wendy wasn’t usually quite so adventurous in the kitchen.
While the food did a good job of distracting her for a bit, it wasn’t long before that recriminating voice in her head stepped up and pointed out that Alex had been forced into shifting because she’d been stupid. And in return, she’d treated him like a monster.
Suddenly, she didn’t really like herself very much.
Deciding she wasn’t hungry anymore, she placed her plate on the coffee table and sat back on the couch.
As the quiet started to stretch out longer and longer, she felt the connection that had been developing between them start to fade, along with that funny sensation in her chest. She didn’t want either of those things to go away.
“Can I ask you something?” she asked softly. “If you don’t want to answer, I completely understand.”
“Go ahead.”
“How did you become a werewolf?”
Alex took a bite of the third burrito on his plate. “Everly didn’t tell you?”
Lacey shook her head. “All she told me is that werewolves are born with a gene and that it takes a traumatic event to trigger the change. Usually something bad.”
He took another bite of burrito, then set his plate down on the table and leaned back on the couch next to her. “It happened when I was a cop up in Rochester. I got a call for a noise disturbance in a residential area. Since it was right after the Fourth of July, I assumed it was some kids messing around.”
His face took on a distant look, like he was replaying that night in his head.
“When I got to the address, the neighbor who reported the noise wasn’t really sure what he’d heard or where the sound had come from. I wasted some time talking to him before I heard a noise coming from the home across the street, then pissed away another few minutes checking around the outside of the house like an idiot.”
Lacey wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the rest of this. She had the feeling it was going to be even worse than she’d imagined.
“If you haven’t figured it out yet, the house belonged to Jessica—the girl in the photo you saw at my place,” he continued. “She and her parents were victims of a home invasion. An old guy and an eighteen-year-old kid broke in. We never really figured out why they’d done it or why they’d picked that particular house. The kid was a runaway and had been missing since he was eleven. We never ID’d the old guy. By the time I stopped screwing around and got into the house, Jessica’s parents were already dead. I got upstairs just in time to stop the two psychopaths from killing Jessica and her dog, but in the process, I got shot twice. If I hadn’t been a werewolf, I would have died.” He let out a derisive snort. “Considering how badly I screwed up, I probably should have.”
Lacey’s head was swirling with emotions at the thought of Alex getting shot. She now realized that those barely discernable scars she’d seen along his rib cage when they’d made love really had been as terrible as she’d thought. The idea of him being hurt so badly twisted her insides up in knots so intensely she thought she might be ill. She was still trying to figure out why she was reacting this way when she finally comprehended what he’d said.
