He sighed, his shoulders tense. I needed to find him a shirt, or a shroud, or something. His muscles bunching was distracting me from the fact he could be a goddamn murderer.
“It was five years ago. You’ve probably blocked it out, but I haven’t.”
I registered his voice and it set off faint echoes in my mind that snowballed into an avalanche of memories.
“The accident? The… monster?” He was just looking at me and nodding slightly as if I’d made the right connection, but I was floundering and just as confused as ever.
A sad smile twisted his face. “I guess ‘monster’ is just as good of a description as anything else. Maybe too good.” His face shuttered, and then he was perfectly neutral again. “I’m a supernatural. A Lycanthrope to be exact. It’s why I heal so well.” Micah nodded towards his now healed shoulder.
I slumped back into the couch, feeling faint. “I don’t understand.”
I searched him for any other resemblance to the creature that haunted my dreams. He was big, but nowhere near that huge. He wasn’t all that hairy either, though he had a smattering of curls across his chest and in a thin line down to his…
Yep. He needed pants and I needed to pull my mind out of my vagina ASAP. My eyes quickly darted back to his face, and he raised a perfect eyebrow. He looked nothing like the animal who had rescued me that night, but something inside me recognized him now. Maybe it was the eyes? Or the voice?
“How?” How did this man before me turn into a giant, hairy… thing?
“I can shapeshift into my semi-canine form whenever I like, however on full moons it is compulsory.” He let me process that piece of information. “You caught me on one of my… compulsory nights. It was pretty lucky really, otherwise I would have been in Boston and you would have been dead.”
I’d waited so long to have answers to what really happened that night, and here he sat, with all the knowledge I’d craved for so long, but my brain had stuttered to a stop.
Actually, there was one question though that had plagued me for five years, one question that had haunted my dreams even when I tried my hardest to block that night from my mind.
“What did you do to me that night, when you licked me? Was it because you were hungry, or was it something else?”
He huffed out a laugh. “I healed your wound slightly. I coagulated the blood to slow the bleeding long enough to get you to safety. It’s a Lycan thing.” He ran his hand over his forehead, pressing his fingers a little more firmly into his temple. He yawned and his eyes started to droop, but I wasn’t finished yet. “Do you have any more questions?”
“How did you know my name? I don’t think we got down to polite formalities while I was dying from blood loss.”
He shrugged. “I stuck around for awhile. Made sure you weren’t suffering any lasting effects from my healing. I learned your name in the process. Anything else?”
“Um, only the one I’ve asked a million times before; who was it that shot you?”
“Hunters, like I said. Actually, they’re bounty hunters of a sort. They get paid hundreds of thousands for the life of one Lycan, more if you can get the pelt before we morph back.” Micah’s eyes narrowed in disgust. “As we get fewer, the reward on our heads gets higher.” His explanation just bred more questions in my mind.
“What about the murdered people?” His beautiful eyes turned sad, his expression world weary, which seemed out of place on his youthful face.
“Maybe other supernaturals, or just genetically unlucky people with all the physical markers of a Lycanthrope. The height, the eyes, the immortal face, it wouldn’t be the first time the hunters have made a mistake. The safest way to be sure a Lycan is a Lycan is to hunt them down on full moons. It’s more dangerous though. They’re more likely to end up dead in our jaws. No, bounty hunters are cowards who prefer to hunt us when we are in our weaker human form, which means innocent people die.”
I breathed a sigh of relief that I wasn’t harboring a cold-blooded killer. I’m pretty sure the ‘he’s not a murderer, he’s a mythical creature’ defense wouldn’t really cut it when I was being tried for aiding and abetting a serial killer.
4
Micah said it would be at least a week until he was at full strength again. So he puttered around my place helping with the chores, but only the manual labour. The barn animals went into hysterics whenever he went near them. When he tried to milk Gladys, she stepped on his foot, fracturing a bone. Micah assured me that it would heal fine in a day or two without being set. He also didn’t seem to feel the cold, even in the middle of winter, chopping wood without his shirt on in the snow, his back muscles rippling as he swung the axe with absolutely no exertion.
Honestly, watching him do chores might have been the hottest thing I’d ever seen. Maybe I was changing my man-hating ways. I walked toward the barn to milk the cows, and wondered if this is what it would be like to get married and have a husband. Then I slapped myself on the forehead for being so damn pathetic.
“Hey Monster,” I said to the horse, who chuffed back at me. “What do you think of him? Other than the whole, ‘ooh he’s a predator and could possibly do bad things to me’ vibe you get? I mean, I get it too. Only I kind of want him to do bad things to me, and that's probably not right either.”
I swear Monster rolled his eyes and I turned back to the cows. “Pfft, what would you know, you’re a guy. The girls know what I mean. Sometimes you just see a guy, err bull, with a nice rump and all logical thought goes completely out of your brain.”
I walked into Gladys’ stall and she let out a plaintive moo. I looked over my shoulder at Monster. “See?”
Unfortunately for me, Micah was also standing there, his face stretched into a smile so wide it made my stomach do flip flops.
“I think both me and the horse see your point now.”
My face flamed. Well, shit. “Uh, we were talking about, uh some other guy. From Roseau. Yeah. I better milk these cows. They aren’t gonna milk themselves.” I stared at Gladys’ udder with so much intensity, it was a wonder the milk didn’t turn to cheese.
Micah chuckled. “Layla.”
I milked into the pail and pretended I couldn’t hear him over the tinny clang. Slide, squeeze, slide, squeeze.
“Layla, come here. Otherwise I’m coming in there and Gladys will try to bite me again.”
Yeah, Gladys wasn’t Micah’s biggest fan, despite her understanding the lure of a good rump.
I swallowed hard and stood, moving the bucket so Gladys didn’t kick it over. For the first time, I kind of regretted pretending I was crazy. I didn’t fall nearly high enough on the hot vs. crazy scale. Guys weren’t willing to take a chance that I’d be fantastic in bed, if they were likely to wake up to me staring at them in their sleep. Which I never did.
Okay, maybe like once. But the guy had sleep apnea and I was honestly worried he was about to die.
I dragged my feet to where he was standing in the doorway. “Who’s the guy?”
“What?”
“Who’s the guy you were talking to the livestock about?”