“Into kink?” Jesse offered, his dark gaze steady. I must have looked like a deer in headlights, because he laughed softly. “I don’t mean to embarrass you. But you looked like you needed some help.”
My nape heated as I pushed away my empty bowl. “You don’t have to answer,” I mumbled.
“It’s normal to wonder about the person you’re sleeping with, Caleb, especially when that person’s bedroom activities aren’t exactly vanilla. For the record, dominance among werewolves isn’t the same as dominance in bed.” He smiled a little. “Or other places you might enjoy yourself.”
I knew my cheeks were red. Damn genetics.
Jesse took pity on me and kept talking. “As wolves, age and the strength of our gifts determine rank. If you walked intoa room full of werewolves, you’d sense the hierarchy without anyone telling you. That said, personality traits definitely influence our beasts, and our wolves often take cues from our human halves. Philippe was someone who needed to be in control, and that need manifested in every area of his life.”
“Including sex,” I said, my dick stirring because why the hell not? Why not get hard while discussing my boyfriend’s dead lover’s sexual practices? Totally normal stuff.
Jesse nodded. “We didn’t call it kink or BDSM or anything specific back then. No one did. But the concepts were similar, and they’d been around for a lot longer than you might suspect. Consent wasn’t as formal as we make it in modern times, but Philippe made sure I was on board with whatever he wanted to do.”
“And you let him take charge?” I couldn’t picture it.
“Submission is about ceding control, not giving up power.” Jesse’s dark eyes grew unfocused, as if he was seeing another time and place. “I was young, and unlike a lot of people turned under traumatic circumstances, I embraced being a werewolf right away. I’d seen so much death, and Philippe was so…alive. He was larger than life, really. I wasn’t a virgin, but I was damn close. It would be an understatement to say I was sexually frustrated. So living in France, being immersed in Philippe’s glittering, libertine world, was like seeing in color after a lifetime of black and white. I would have done just about anything to please him.”
My fucked-up, fledgling desire died a swift death. Philippe’s world sounded like a party. But I didn’t need a counseling degree to know that going from the trenches of war to a libertine’s ballroom was a mindfuck of the highest order. Would an ancient French nobleman know that? And if he did, would he care? Something in Jesse’s voice made me think he’d spent all his time with Philippe squishing himself into a role that didn’t quite fit.There was more to Jesse’s story. Things he wasn’t saying. Had Philippe hurt him? Did Jesse miss him?
The latter shouldn’t have bothered me as much as it did. It was wrong to be jealous of a dead man. It was callous to care more about Jesse mourning Philippe than Jesse suffering from something Philippe had done. But knowing I was wrong didn’t stem my resentment. A new feeling tightened my chest, the sensation altogether different from the constriction that seized me whenever Jesse ordered me around. That restriction was good. It was protection. Security and safety.
This was a weight. It was barbed and merciless, its points dripping poison that threatened to slide into my veins.
Jesse had fallen silent, his gaze fixed on some hazy spot over my shoulder. He was lost in thought, his mind in a place where I couldn’t venture. I hadn’t known Philippe and never would, which meant I could never truly know what he’d been to Jesse.
The jaws of jealousy clamped tighter.I would have done just about anything to please him.What kind of man had Philippe been to command that level of devotion? More questions swirled in my head. How had Philippe taken his own life? Where had he done it? How long had Jesse lived with him? Had Jesse loved him?
The last put a hitch in my breath, the sound drawing Jesse’s attention. He frowned as he looked at me.
“What is it?”
I couldn’t voice my question. Because I couldn’t bear to know the answer. But Jesse was waiting, his dark brows drawing together, so I opened my mouth and asked, “What was Philippe’s gift?”
For a moment, Jesse stayed as he was, frowning and expectant. Then his expression shifted into something neutral. Polite.
“Teaching,” he said, “the same as mine. We inherit our gifts from our sire.” As that little nugget of knowledge landed in my lap like a bombshell, he gathered our bowls and carried them to the sink on the other side of the kitchen.
As with painkillers and alcohol, I hadn’t given much thought to gifts. Once again, I’d been too busy being on the receiving end of Jesse’s gift. I’d let himteachme all kinds of things, like how to shift onto four feet and how to scream into a spit-soaked wad of my shirt so my fellow co-eds didn’t bust into the dean’s office and see me getting fingered to an orgasm.
But I was a werewolf now, which meant a gift of my own. And maybe I should have been more excited by the prospect of gaining a superpower, but I wasn’t, really. Aside from enhanced strength that only showed up when I was close to losing it, all the physical changes I’d experienced were more of a nuisance than an asset.
“I was sired by a rogue,” I said. “How does that work with gifts and stuff?”
Jesse loaded the bowls into the dishwasher, his back to me as he spoke. “Gifts can take a while to manifest.”
“How many gifts are there?” I asked. “Is there a list?” I slid off the barstool. “If we don’t know who turned me, how will I know what kind of powers I’m getting?”
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.” Jesse turned, a dish towel in his hands. He returned to the island and ran the cloth over the ring of condensation that had formed under my bowl. “I’m heading back to Hale Valley first thing in the morning. I need to take care of the rogue before he hurts someone or exposes us to the human world.” He stopped wiping and looked at me. “I want you to stay here.”
I was shaking my head before he finished his sentence. “No way. You can’t ask that of me.”
His frown reappeared. “I’m not asking, Caleb. You’re staying here where it’s safe.”
“So it’s not safe hunting the rogue? Is that what you’re saying?” The anxious, jumpy feeling from the dining room rushed back. Images of Jesse sprawled on the ground splashed through my mind. He stared up at the sky with sightless eyes, a trail of blood trickling from his mouth. My throat went dry, and my heart thumped faster. “If you’ll be in danger, I should be with you.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’m an experienced fighter. And the rogue wants you, not me. Which is precisely why you can’t return to Hale Valley right now.”
Nervous energy vibrated through me, traveling down my legs until I wanted to…do something.Like leap over the counter and wrap my body around Jesse so he couldn’t leave. Instead, I curled my hands into fists and said, “If the rogue wants me, that’s all the more reason for me to go. I can lure him to you.”
