Caleb turned quickly then, eyes blazing as he glared at me. “Who came to get you? What did they do to you?”
I lifted a hand then, warmth spreading through my chest at what I saw. My fingers, only a shade lighter in complexion than Caleb’s lightly bearded cheek, grazed his cheekbone, then moved up to smooth his thick eyebrows. He blinked and I smiled because the dark brown eyes that I’d always thought were so sad were now golden orbs, a slit of black down their center. He was looking at me with his cat’s eyes and I wasn’t afraid, I was enamored.
“They explained everything to me and they showed me your world, your family,” I said.
“I don’t have a family,” Caleb said, closing his eyes. “My parents are dead.”
“Like I sometimes wish mine were. My stepfather at least.” I cupped his face with both my hands then, waiting until he finally looked at me once more. “But you have so much more than a mother and father. You have an entire tribe willing to stand behind you, to support you, to go against their very beliefs to come and get me because they thought I was the only one who could save you for them.”
“I don’t need saving,” he said, jerking away from me and standing. “I don’t need their interference. I’ll never join them. Never!”
“Because your father despised them once he found out what your mother really was?” I kept talking but didn’t stand to join him. Instead, I gave him the space he felt he needed.
He spun around so fast I did jump, a little, but I kept my hands folded in my lap, my gaze focused on him. There was so much pain, so much anger, his shoulders were rigid with the weight he’d carried all these years.
“No!” he roared. “Because my mother ignored everything she was taught and fell for a man that could never understand, could never be what she needed him to be. His hatred killed her and her love for him cursed me!”
Every part of me ached for him, ached for the loss and the pain that he’d endured. I know I’d had my own tribulations through life, maybe that was why I could so easily accept all that I’d learned in these last weeks, and why I could so completely love this man.
“But I understand, Caleb. I know who and what you are and I understand what your people are and why they are here. You understand those differences too. You’re not like either of them.”
“No, I’m not like anybody and that’s exactly why I don’t belong with them and I don’t … I didn’t think …”
He couldn’t get the words out, but it was okay, after weeks of thought and with the help of Lidia I’d figured out what was behind Caleb’s sadness and this connection that had been gnawing at me since the first night I’d seen him walk into that bar. It wasn’t my romantic mind, although that kiss on the beach would make for searing pages in any book. A book which I’d buy a hundred copies of just to read over and over again. It was the companheiro calor, the scent of shifter mates. I’d learned all about its intensity and its importance and as I inhaled I thought I could even smell its sweet aroma wafting through the air around us.
“You didn’t think it was right for you to fall for a human like your mother did.” I stood up then, rubbing my hands down the front of my dress. “You didn’t think that it was right to fall for a shifter female either because she would think you were less than her, half of her. You don’t belong because you don’t want to choose where to belong. Is that about right?”
He looked at me this time as if I had two heads, as if he just couldn’t believe I would say these things to him. Well, a couple of weeks, maybe even a year ago, if someone had told me I’d walk away from the independence I’d wanted for so long, that I’d give up my room that was a piece of crap and my job that paid excellent tips but left me almost too tired to actually pursue the college degree that I wanted, to travel to Florida to convince a guy that I’d met only two months ago that I was in love with him and that we were meant to be together, I would have laughed in their face. No matter how truly romantic it all sounded.
“Everyone has their own path, Caleb. Human or otherwise. I had to accept that about my mother, that’s how I could leave her and my sister and brother there in that house on my eighteenth birthday. I walked away because that was my path to take. My mother stays because that is hers. You kept coming back to that bar, sitting there ordering wings and nachos and Blue Moons because you felt the same thing I did. You felt that we were meant to be, that we were mates or what you call them, companheiros.”
“You talk too much,” was his curt reply as he turned away from me again.
“True,” I agreed, moving closer to where he stood but not touching him. “And you don’t listen well enough.”
“I’ve heard that before,” he grumbled.
“I won’t leave you, if that’s what you’re thinking. I won’t turn my back on you to go back to my people or my world.” I stepped to him then, putting both my palms in the center of his broad back, moving them over his shoulder blades, down his sides until I had wrapped my arms around his waist. I lay my cheek against him, listening to the steadiness of his heartbeat, hearing that it now matched the rhythm of my own. I inhaled deeply and loved the scent that moved through me, swirling around and cocooning my heart. “And I won’t tell the secret because I love you and who and what you are too much to ever put you in that type of danger.”
I held on for what seemed like endless moments, loving the feel of him in my arms but really needing him to respond so I wouldn’t feel like a total ass.
If it was sweet words I really craved, they would not come. If I thought the next actions would be right out of a swooping romance novel, I would have been beyond wrong. Instead, Caleb turned to me, his cat’s eyes still glaring. His strong hands grabbed my ass once more, lifting me right off the floor and carrying us both back to that futon. He was over me seconds after he laid me on the chair, his hands ripping away my panties with one quick yank.
I opened my mouth to speak but was silenced by his lips on mine, his kiss hungrier than I’d ever experienced and sweeter than I—or any romance novel writer—could have ever imagined. So, okay, I wouldn’t talk, I’d simply take this rush of desire, this burst of heat so potent it took my breath away. His hands moved quickly, as his tongue delved deeper, dueling with mine. My hands were in his hair, nails raking over his scalp as I tried to keep up, tried to take all that I possibly could of him.
In mere seconds he’d unbuckled his pants, freeing his arousal. His teeth scraped along the line of my jaw as both hands resumed gripping my bottom, lifting me slightly off the chair to meet the quick and deep thrust as he entered me. I gasped, arched my back, then sighed as he spoke.
“I know that you’re my companheiro,” he said, his voice gruff in my ear. “I’ve known that you were mine since first seeing you.”
His words were a thin layer over the deep thrusts he made and I matched. They hovered in the air around us, cocooning us, sealing the fate we now both accepted. I loved this moment, this feeling, this complete absorption that until this exact moment I’d only had the pleasure of reading about.
“I know about the human world and the shifter world and I don’t give a damn about any of them,” he continued.
My fingers were digging into his back, my eyes half-closed, mouth opened as I gasped and whispered his name. So when he suddenly stopped all movement I wanted to stop breathing, forever.
“I don’t give a damn about anything but you.” Caleb was looking at me then, not with his cat’s eyes but with his dark brown ones, filled with lust and desire and something that pricked a tiny hole in my heart. “I only care about you and being everything I can be to make you happy, to make you understand that I love you.”