He laughed softly, then pointed his knife at the pot. “Hachee is a traditional Dutch stew. It’s my mother’s recipe.”
I slid onto a stool at the counter, watching his hands as he continued slicing onions. “What were your parents like?”
“About as traditional as this stew.” He picked up the cutting board and slid onions into the pot. “They wanted me to be a doctor, but I didn’t like the thought of blood.” He flashed a rueful smile. “Then I grew up and became a werewolf.”
My heart did a little flip. “Did you see them again after you turned?”
“Once,” he said, “after the war. They wanted to see me settled with a wife and children.” He picked up a wooden spoon and dipped it into the pot, stirring slowly. “I let them think they were getting something close to that. It wasn’t the truth, but it made them happy.”
I thought about that later, lying in bed. The way he’d said it—not sad, just matter-of-fact, like he’d long since made his peace with the things he’d had to let go. With people who were never going to understand him. For a lot of reasons.
He’d always put others first. His parents. Philippe.
And he was still doing it. He fed me. Trained me. Kept me supplied with clean towels and fresh bedsheets. He never made me feel like a burden. I kept waiting for a magical gift to appear—for power to rush into my fingertips so we could both stop worrying about the Council of Elders executing me.
But nothing came.
I made a list of questions on the laptop, adding new items every night before bed. Then I lay there staring at the ceiling while the moonlight moved across the floor.
One question was a constant presence in my head. I never wrote it down.
Why hasn’t Jesse tried to touch me?
He’d said he wouldn’t unless I wanted it. And he’d stuck to that. He looked plenty, which kept my ego sufficiently stroked. But he never made a move.
The start of our fourth week in France, the full moon was so bright it was like a helicopter searchlight shining into my bedroom. After half an hour of tossing and turning, I pulled on a T-shirt and went down the hall.
A strip of soft yellow light shone from under Jesse’s door. I knocked once, my heart rate picking up.
“Come in,” Jesse called. But, of course, he’d heard me. I’d listened to both sides of his conversation with Sterling Moray. Jesse had probably known the second I stepped into the hall.
He sat propped against the pillows with a book in his lap. No Syracuse T-shirt this time, just his bare chest with its dark hair that held my attention like a fire alarm. The blanket lay across his thighs, exposing a pair of navy blue gym shorts.
The bedside lamp cast a soft glow, and moonlight spilled through the big windows on either side of his bed.
“Is everything okay?” he asked, big and solid against the white sheets.
“I had a question.” I leaned against the doorframe. “About the moon,” I added, gesturing to the window as if the moon was a novel concept.
Fuck, I was so lame.
He closed the book and set it on the nightstand. “You want to know whether it affects us.”
Embarrassment washed over me. I rubbed the back of my head. “I guess I’d probably know by now, right?”
His eyes softened. “I should have told you everything from the start.”
“Well.” I lowered my hand. “We were kind of busy.”
The air shifted, a charge filling the bedroom. We were both still and moving toward something at the same time. And I fucking wanted it. Wanted him.
“What else do you want to know?” he asked. “Ask me anything.”
I thought about my list. “How did we get into France without going through customs?”
“When you have enough money, you can bypass certain rules.”
I huffed. “I feel like you need alotof money to bypass those rules.”
