Page 71 of It's You
Anger welled up inside of Darcy. For the kiss that had changed her world. For the confused years of soul flight. For the man who walked into her life almost two weeks ago, who she loved more deeply, more completely, than she had ever loved any other being, whom she knew she would love for as long as she lived. And anger bubbled up inside of her like spewing lava. Anger for his deception. Anger for his choosing her. Anger that he wasn’t just a regular human man. Anger that his nature was so brutal. Anger that she loved him, but was also repulsed by him. White, hot anger, the type that made people say hurtful, unforgivable things.
Her eyes brimmed with furious tears as she stood broken before him.
“You’re a fool if you believe that,” she said evenly, holding his eyes with hers. “You’re amonster.”
His eyes flashed fire, narrowing at her words. Pain, then fury.
“We’rebound,” he growled.
“I don’t believe that.” This was a lie. She wished she didn’t believe it, but she did. No matter what he was, her heart belonged to him. She would deal with that later.
“Yes, you do…and you can’t break it, Darcy. It’s for life. We belong?—”
“Maybe.” She got up from her seat and crossed the room, picking up her shoes by the door and stuffing her feet into them. In her mind, she positioned a knife over her heart, took a deep breath, then pushed it in with all the strength she had. “But I can let it die inside of me. I can choose never to see you again.”
He winced as if she had taken the knife to his flesh too. Tohisheart, as she had to her own. He stood to face her, clenching his jaw, and blinking his eyes quickly with emotion.
“Please don’t do this.”
“Youdid this,” she lamented bitterly, biting back more tears. “I don’t want any part of it. Leave Carlisle.”
“I love you, Darcy. I’ll love you until I die.”
She swallowed, looking down, her heart bleeding out beside his.
“If that’s true, then leave here. Please leave and never, ever come back.”
“I belong to you, Darcy, and you?—”
She stopped him with her eyes, which were shining with tears, angry and absolute.
“Belong to no one.”
Then she turned and walked away from Jack Beauloup—out of his house, out of his life, away from his heart—without looking back.
Part Two
Anguish
The Binding
He could feel her eyes on the back of his head. Again. His heart pounded in his chest, thumping uncomfortably against his ribs, and it took every shred of his self-control not to turn his head to look at her green eyes and pinkish-blonde hair.
Everyshred. And for a seventeen-year-old skinwalking Roug, that’s saying something.
Jacques Beauloup took a deep breath, slunk further into the theater seat, and kept his nose in his book, reading. Or rather, pretending to read. He read the words, but he was too distracted to actually process them or relate to them. She shifted in her seat, releasing pheromones, and her scent made him shudder and harden. He ground his jaw and closed his eyes, trying to calm down.
Auditioning for this play had been a mistake, but when he overheard her tell a friend that she was spending her summer attending the high school musical theater camp, he couldn’t get the idea out of his head. He had no real interest in musical theater, but two months of rehearsing for a play meant two months of seeing Darcy Turner every day. While he knew hecouldn’t have her—and heck, he barely knew her—he wanted to be around her as much as possible before things changed. Before he changed.
Speaking of mistakes, coming back to New Hampshire had been a mistake, a huge mistake, and Jacques couldn’t help resenting his parents for their decision to try to reclaim the Southern Bloodlands. Others had tried to return and resettle in Carlisle, but it had never gone well. Jacques agreed with the pack elders. The land was irrevocably cursed, and they should tear up the deed or sell the land back to the nefarious Proctors and be done with it. But Jacques’s father, Dubois, was looking for a fresh start with Jacques’s mother, Tallis, and had convinced her that they could find it in the woodland cabin still owned by the pack and located in the Bois Loup Garou.
The move really hadn’t helped things at all. Aside from isolating their family from the support of the pack, Tallis Beauloup wasn’t ready to forgive her cheating husband and could barely stand to glance at his infant daughter, Lela, whose care was mostly left to Jacques’s less-than-enthusiastic twin sisters, Jemma and Jeanette. Jacques’s five-year-old brother, Julien, escaped to the woods more and more often to evade the near-constant, and often explosive and bloody, battles between their parents.
On one topic, all four siblings were in perfect agreement. Their father shouldn’t have broken the binding. His reasons for straying with Lela’s mother didn’t matter. His actions were indefensible.
Darcy cleared her throat behind him, and his thoughts scattered like feathers in a tornado, his insides whirling with want for the pale-skinned, freckled, green-eyed girl behind him. He hadn’t had a woman yet. What was the point? He knew that he wouldn’t be able to reach any sort of climax with some random girl, so why get involved? Better to wait for the binding,which would happen by the equinox on September 21, after returning to the Northern Bloodlands tomorrow.
And yet, imminent binding or not, he still couldn’t get Darcy Turner out of his head. Not since the first moment he laid eyes on her.
