Page 3 of Lost Touch

But that little bit of dark humor broke my tension, and I managed to look back at him again.

Dark eyes met mine as if they’d been waiting for me.

Drew. Kind of a plain, bro-like name for someone so amazing, someone who’d literally carried me out of hell like some kind of legendary hero.

And now that I looked at him again, I could totally see him in a backward baseball cap with a red plastic cup in his hand. Yeah, Drew looked like a bro, and that made me vaguely uncomfortable for reasons I couldn’t begin to understand, let alone articulate.

No, no, nothing about my missing and mysterious past. I’d only panic again.

And then Drew smiled, his wonderful eyes softening.

I smiled back, the necessary muscle movements horrifyingly unfamiliar. How long had it been since I stretched my lips like that? The corners were so dry they separated slowly and stickily, as if they were splitting.

“I guess ‘fucking awful’ doesn’t really cover it,” he went on, echoing my thoughts so perfectly. “But there’s time to think about it and deal with it later. Right now, we’re in my house in Boise, and I have a pack here—a family, people who’ll watch our backs if we need it. I’m a shifter, by the way. Werewolf.” He cleared his throat and his hands twitched slightly. “As if that wasn’t obvious by the claws you saw—there. When I took you out. I hope that doesn’t bother you.”

A pack. A family. A werewolf. Did I know any shifters? I had no idea, but either way the thought didn’t disturb me…as if any thought could disturb me more than I’d already been disturbed. Boise. I didn’t have any associations with Idaho except potatoes, and I was pretty sure my feelings about potatoes were strictly neutral. Hopefully that was mutual. After what I’d been through, I wouldn’t rule out a sudden attack by aggressive tubers.

I kept all that to myself, instead asking, “Why would it?”

Drew shrugged. “Sometimes humans get nervous around us.”

Oh, fuck. I bit my lip hard, feeling wetness where I’d broken through, my skin too thin and dry to be abused like that. Human.

That sounded right, but…I hadn’t consciously known I was human until he mentioned it. How could I not know that as readily as I knew how to breathe? How did I know my name but not my ownspecies?

“How do you know?” I rasped, paranoia rearing its ugly head again, my heart starting to pound. Drew’s eyes. His worried eyes, staring at me now like he didn’t know what to make of me. His eyes meant he wouldn’t hurt me. “I mean, I know I am, I think, but—what—how do you know anything about me?”

“Easy,” he said, lifting his hands in a universal calm-the-fuck-down gesture and leaning back in his chair, maybe trying to make himself less threatening. “You were in really bad shape. I didn’t know what was wrong with you and I was fucking terrified that you’d—” He stopped abruptly.

Die. He’d thought I would die. That didn’t unsettle me as much as it probably should have. Being unsettled required surprise, didn’t it? And being alive, in a real bed in a real house in Boise of all the damn mundane places, surprised me far more than dying would have.Thatunsettled me.

“I called in a shaman and a human doctor,” Drew went on after an uncomfortable pause. “The regular doctor couldn’t do shit except bandage you and teach me how to do it too, and the shaman couldn’t do much either. He couldn’t heal you with magic. He said a bunch of shit I didn’t understand about your body’s energy flow being, like…he didn’t say ‘fucked-up,’ but it sounded like that’s what he meant, to be honest. But he did say you were for-sure human.”

That all sounded…well, unsettling as hell.

But before I could do more than open my mouth, Drew leaned forward again, frowning.

“Hold on a fucking second, here. You know you’re human, youthink?”

The noise as I swallowed hard enough that it should’ve hurt sounded too loud in the ensuing silence.

Would he throw me out on my ass when he learned that I wasn’t only injured, helpless, and weak, not to mention human—because whatever he said about humans being nervous around shifters, shifters were often less than friendly with garden-variety humans, so I’d heard—but also that I had a fucked-up head to go with my fucked-up energy flow?

Only one way to find out.

“I don’t remember anything.” I licked my dry lips, wishing for another giant glass of water. Or for a meteor to hit and make this conversation unnecessary. “I know my name, I guess. My first name. I think my last name is Stern. I heard one of them talking about me in there, he said my name. Being human feels right. And I seem to know the stuff that a normal person would know about the world, like what a werewolf is. Or where Boise is. But I don’t remember anything about my life before…before.” In for a penny, in for a pound, even though my heart started to race like it might explode out of my chest. At least I could feel that? Yay. “Also, I can’t feel much. Pain. You asked me how much pain I was in. The answer’s none. I can’t feel pain anymore. They cut on me and it was like a touch.”

Drew looked at me for a long time, his face going hard and set and his fists clenching where they rested on his legs. Was I imagining the faint golden glow in his eyes? Didn’t only alphas have that? Now that I thought of it, his eyes had been glowing in my cell too, only I’d been so focused on their expression I hadn’t cared. But those eyes meant safety and gentle hands. I liked them the same either way.

He let out a long sigh, seeming to force himself to relax. A prelude to telling me he didn’t have time to deal with my bullshit? After all, he’d already done so much. More than enough. He’d saved my life and cared for me after, brought me home. And he’d been there too, as much a victim of that evil as me. He didn’t need me hanging around his neck like a millstone.

“That’s fucked,” he said at last, low and hard. “But we’ll figure out what they did to you. We’ll fix it. And in the meantime, all you have to do is eat, drink, get your strength back. A real hot shower. Pizza. Coffee. Okay? Ice cream. Anything you want, I’ll get. And I’ll take care of everything else until you’re up to more than that.”

That watery sensation came back to the corners of my eyes. Shit, I didn’t want to start crying. How pathetic could I be? Ice cream. God, I wanted it, and I wanted to let him take care of me. Take care of everything, with those big capable hands and his big capable body that had already saved me. I wanted…but I couldn’t take advantage of him.

“You were there too. Tortured,” I choked out. “You need someone taking care of you, too. And you don’t have any obligation—”

“Fuckthat,” he spat, making me jump. He leaned forward again, this time fixing me with a gaze so intense out of those gilded black eyes that it pinned me like an insect. “I was only there for a little while. Like, a couple of months. Nothing at all compared to you or the others we escaped with. I’m fine. And even if I wasn’t fine, you’re a lot less fine. You’ve been unconscious for more than two weeks. You’re nowhere near fine. And no obligation? Fuck. That, Ash. We escaped from there together. We’re sticking together.” As he spoke, a red flush bloomed across his cheekbones. “Iwantto stick together. You’re—” He stopped abruptly, and his eyes flicked away from mine, from too intense to shifty as hell.

---