Page 69 of It's You
Her glance darted to his hands, but he kept them unmoving in his lap. Her breathing was shallow and ragged as she looked toward the bedroom door. He blocked her escape.
“I won’t stand in your way if you want to go.”
He looked up at her, and she was shattered by the pain she saw there. She had never seen such misery, such anguish, such languid despair. Her eyes filled with tears of pity and grief, and even grudging compassion, as she stared at him. At Jack. At the face of this man whom she loved. Had loved? Still loved?
She didn’t know. All she knew was that he held a terrible, terrible secret inside.
“Or we could talk.”
His voice was a whisper, but she heard the glimmer of hope, and it twisted her heart.
“Willow told you what I am?”
Darcy nodded once, drawing her legs against her chest, still leaning back against the headboard, her body tightly coiled, protecting itself.
“I need you to know…everything I said was true, Darcy.Istrue. Everything…” He put his head down and ran his fingers through his hair, looking down at his lap as his voice got softer. “Everything.”
“Did you kill somebody in your garage?” She stared at him and felt angry with herself for feeling relief when he shook his head back and forth. But it coursed through her body, warm and comforting.
“No. It was?—”
“It waswhat?” she demanded in a whisper, relief cooling back to fear.
He looked up at her, his face twisted. “Fresh dead.”
“What?” she demanded with a sob, repelled by this new, gruesome language. “What isthat?”
“It was a buck I hunted on Sunday night.”
“Deer. Willow said?—”
He nodded. “Deer is…atypicalfor someone like me. Most of my kind prefers…”
Darcy swallowed.Control.
“This is what you meant? What you learned while you were away from me? You learned?—”
“Yes. And more. So we could…So we could be toge…”
His voice trailed off in a tortured whisper. He didn’t bother finishing the word, let alone the thought. He must have suspected how absurd it would sound to her right now.
Darcy looked down. She was having trouble understanding. Part of her didn’t want to understand at all. Just wanted to walk out of Jack’s house, out of Jack’s life forever. But while they’d been apart over the last few days, she’d felt a ceaseless, throbbing yearning to be with him again. She owed it to herself to understand who and what he was before making the decision to leave.
“Do you know I love you?” he whispered, his eyes entreating hers.
“Tell me everything,” she murmured, looking away from him, ignoring his words.
He didn’t speak immediately, and she sensed he was trying to figure out what to say. She had the insane urge to laugh at him. He’d had two decades, a veritable lifetime, to figure out how to tell her everything, and now he was stalling. She hugged her shivering body. A moment later, he placed a blanket next to her feet. She stared at it and tears rolled down her face.
“You’re cold,” he said.
“I didn’t think that,” she said quietly in a small, broken voice.
“I know you didn’t,” he said gently, as she knew he would. “You shivered.”
Darcy pulled the blanket around her body as he started talking.
“Willow was right. I’m a blooded Roux-ga-roux, which means by birth. I wasn’t turned. A Roux-ga-roux, or um…We say a Roug. It’s, um…It’s a wolf-man hybrid. Also called a skinwalker by the Métis. My eyes turn yellow when I shift or when I feel intense emotion, but I try to control it as much as possible. Your skin burned because when we had sex, my body threw off extreme heat. Not extreme for me or another Roug, but extreme for you, for a human. You lose time when we’re together because we’re onmytime, which feels fast to you. Soul flight is the way Roux-ga-roux connect over time and distance with their mate. Except they don’t call it that. They call itDansmatête,which means inside my head.Eyespeak is the way they communicate when they hunt together at night. Only it wouldn’t work with you because your eyes don’t glow. We can only eyespeak in the light. In the light.” He said this slowly and wistfully, his voice breaking. He paused before continuing. “The binding…Darcy, the binding was irreversible.”
