“Going to bed with me? Of letting me?—”
“No,” she said, cutting him off. The last thing her semi-drunk mind needed was a reminder of what they’d done this morning. Of how thoroughly he’d gotten her off and how much she really wanted to do that again.
“Repulsed, then,” he said, not even expressing it as a question.
“No,” she repeated more firmly. “I’m freaked, that’s for sure.” But still thoroughly aroused. “I mean what if you’d…you know, changed right in the middle?”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t happen.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Don’t know. I mean, sure, if it’s two shifters—usually teenagers—they’ll do it simultaneously. I think they feed off each other somehow. But the magic doesn’t work when intimate with a human. I don’t know why. And believe me, people have tried.”
“Magic?” Not a word she could possibly use as simple fact. And yet, the way he spoke, it was like he completely believed in fairy dust and magic potions.
He arched a brow. “Yes, magic. Energy. Whatever word you want to use. Just the weight differential alone can’t be explained by science. I’m a big guy, but I’m not carrying the five hundred pounds I do as a grizzly.”
She would have guessed more, but that was because to her brain, huge was just huge. Five hundred or five thousand pounds made little difference when the creature was stretching up to face her in the tree. And now she sat across from the same creature, only he was a man and he looked uncomfortable perched on the edge of her dad’s recliner.
“So you call it magic?”
“I do. It’s an easy catchall phrase. Talk to the scientists if you want something more technical.”
On her to-do list, though she doubted she’d understand it. She was not the science type. “And those things that attacked. They were shifters?”
He shook his head. “They were wrong people.” He held up a hand before she could question. “They smelled wrong, so that’s what I’ve labeled them. It’s like they were half shifted. A muzzle, some fur, weird eyes.”
She hadn’t noticed the eyes. She hadn’t wanted to look that closely.
“Carl talked to the ME an hour ago. It’s preliminary, but she thinks their animal DNA was triggered somehow. But they weren’t natural-born shifters. They didn’t have the full ability to change and so only parts of them did. It shouldn’t be possible.” His shoulders twitched and his face tightened in revulsion. “They were just wrong.”
“But why would they come here? Why would they attack my father?”
Mark held up his hands. “I don’t know. Maybe they want your father’s research.”
“But why? They’re fairy tales.”
“About shifters.” He leaned forward onto his knees, but the gesture wasn’t casual. Nothing about his movements ever was. “Think. You’ve just learned that magic is real. What would that mean about all those obscure local fairy tales that fascinate your father? What if they contain answers? Magic spells, incantations, stripping naked and braying at the moon. They’re all in those stories, and we have no idea how much is truth and how much is fiction.”
“But Dad just thinks they’re silly.”
“And yet he’s spent the last decade studying them.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I asked him point blank this afternoon. I said, ‘What if people really could change shape?’”
“And wouldn’t you deny it if you were him? If you suspected that magic was real and that shape-shifters walk around with us every day. You’ve just had a triple bypass, you’ve got a fever and are hospitalized. Last thing you want is to give anyone the idea that something’s wrong with your brain.”
She bit her lip. Okay, so that made sense. “We should tell him?—”
“No!”
She recoiled backward from the force of his word. But a moment later, she felt her anger surging to the fore. “You’d let my father spend his life researching stuff and withhold the answer?”
“It’s not the answer.”
“It’s part of it!”
His fingers turned white where he gripped his knees. That was it. The rest of him was still as if he held himself back by sheer willpower. “Will your father keep this secret?”
