Beneath the Skin Page 5

  since I’d just revealed the death of my bond mate, but she clearly wanted to get back into the party and not dwell on death and other unhappy things. It seemed to me she had the right of things.

  Rudi smiled and put his hand on top of mine.

  “We met as teenagers at a Great Gathering a few years ago.”

  “We had our first hunt together. Hilariously disastrous because, of course, we had to sneak behind everyone’s backs to do it,” I explained, because I knew that would make Roxanne laugh and I was right. Everyone at the table joined in and the party atmosphere was restored.

  We stayed together all that night, the five of us. We ate huge amounts of food, drank enormous amounts of alcohol, danced and flirted with each other, and had the best time together.

  The best time I’d had in years--two of them to be precise.

  Grey and Elena retreated to a dark, unlit room in my mind. They were part of me, they always would be, but for the first time I allowed myself to envision a future that didn’t include them and didn’t feel as if I betrayed them or myself.

  Lucy and Rudi turned out to be bond mates. I marveled at the odds of it as I looked between them and gauged their relationship. They loved each other, but I could tell they were not precisely in love, merely very comfortable. Had Rudi settled for her because he couldn’t have me? It was a disconcerting thought.

  Rudi and I danced together several times during the night. As it grew closer to the last dance, the songs slowed, became more seductive, less strenuous.

  Rudi wrapped his arms around me and held me close while above us the crystal

  chandeliers glowed and gleamed like magic. It was all magic that night.

  “I don’t know why but I feel so right with you like this,” he confided. “I always did, Stanzie. Why is it we didn’t bond together?”

  “We were too young,” I replied as Madonna crooned Crazy for You in the background and other couples slowly revolved around us, satellites in the passion-drenched night.

  “Not the second time,” he remonstrated. “You were with Grey, but we could have still become a triad.”

  “Your English wasn’t as good as it is now, Rudi. Grey could never understand what you said. I always had to explain things to him.”

  “I know.” Rudi’s face darkened at the memory and I longed to wipe away all of his

  frustration and resentment. That was years ago in a past that didn’t exist anymore. It shouldn’t have any power over him. “I went home from that Gathering and I threw myself in the study of English. I swore the next time I saw you I would be able to talk to him and maybe then he would consider me.”

  I decided not to bring up Elena. We’d both made lives for ourselves after we’d met, but he had always hoped one day I would be in his while I had never even imagined him in mine. I compared my happiness with Grey and Elena to his with Lucy and felt a stab of guilt that his had apparently fallen short.

  “Was it so important to you, Rudi?”

  “To bond with you? With you?” Rudi gazed at me, incredulous. “Don’t you know,

  Stanzie, that I have adored you since that night we shifted for the first time?”

  “How could you adore somebody who ran around the cane field yelping and screaming

  like a baby, trying to outrun her own heartbeat?” I giggled. I’d had a lot of champagne and the conversation was becoming way too serious for a night like this, for a song like this. I didn’t want the sulky boy to come back. I wanted the confident, happy man.

  “It was because you took the time for me. To try to understand me. The others brushed me off. I was the only German that year in our group. I couldn’t get anyone to understand me but you. Only you, Stanzie. You helped me, I helped you.”

  Rudi brushed some hair from my face. My French braid was undoing itself. There had

  been a lot of very fast dancing and even more champagne. The room swirled and tilted in the most marvelous way. The way he looked at me, clutched at my heart. I was somewhere

  suspended between the past and present and, what was even better, the future.

  He smiled at me then kissed me. It was one of those perfect kisses, perfect because the song, the room, the air and, most importantly, the other person was right.

  We didn’t stop dancing as we kissed and that added to the perfection. I felt him smiling against my mouth as his hands cupped my face and he tasted of champagne and something indefinable, something him, something I hadn’t tasted in years, not since we’d said a tearful goodbye the last night of the Great Gathering when we’d both been eighteen.

  “Tomorrow is the Great Hunt,” he reminded me when the kiss ended. We were breathless and our hands traveled over each other’s body, because we wanted more than just kisses. “Hunt with me, Stanzie?” His eyes were very blue as he looked down at me.

  Transfixed, I nodded. I knew I should tell him about my wolf, but the champagne and music made me feel powerful, as if anything were possible. The hunt with him would be full circle. Our first hunt had been together. We’d become adults together. Now this one would herald something too. I had no doubts.

  “I would very much like to bond with you, Stanzie. Please? It’s rushed, I know, but not really because I’ve waited over ten years for this. It feels like forever to me. You will like Germany, I promise. And if you don’t, we can go where you want. Wherever you want. What do you think? Will you even consider it?”

  Consider it? It was everything I wanted. Everything I had come for. I hadn’t even

  dreamed Rudi would ever figure in my future, but I could never tell him that. To me he’d been the past, but that could change.

  It was fast. It was very fast. But I’d come to the Great Gathering to find a new bond mate.

  Last night I’d been alone and everyone had snubbed me, or looked right through me. Tonight I had made friends and been asked to become a bond mate. My head reeled at the strangeness of it all. Sometimes things went fast in our world because nobody liked to be without a pack.

  “What about Lucy? We have to consider her too, Rudi,” I pointed out. Even champagne could not make me forget everything.

  “Lucy will be fine with this.” Rudi was impatient because he wanted an answer.

  “You ask her first. I can’t answer you unless she agrees to this. You don’t speak just for yourself, Rudi. She’s your bond mate too.”

  “I would sever ties with her for you,” he told me and he was serious.

  I tried to feel flattered and not overwhelmed. I didn’t want to think I was an obsession to him. He’d said he adored me, but he hadn’t said he loved me. This was so fast and my head spun with so much champagne.

  I wanted to lie down and sleep. When I woke life together with him would all make

  sense.

  “I’m scaring you,” he declared. He probably smelled my unease. His expression turned remorseful. “I’m sorry, Stanzie. Forgive me. Of course I’ll ask her. You are right and wise. I’m too fast and too forward. It’s just you always slip through my fingers. I don’t want that to happen again.”

  “My old pack severed ties with me because they think I was reckless and careless and I killed Grey.” I heard myself say it before I could stop the words.

  His blue eyes went very wide.

  “I was driving the car. We went over an embankment. Grey died in my arms, Rudi. I was driving the car and a Councilor from the Great Council had to come and decide whether I was innocent or guilty. Not the Regional. The Great Council.”

  Rudi digested this information silently for a moment.

  “What did he decide? Not that I care,” said Rudi, but it was clear from his expression a part of him did.

  “I was absolved of blame.” I swallowed an obstruction in my throat and most of the

  magic of the night disappeared. I wanted to disappear.

  Rudi tilted my chin up so I was forced to look at him.

  “Fuck your former pack,” he said, his words slow and distinct. His eyes blaze
d. “I don’t care, Constance. Nothing you’ve done has changed my feelings for you. The Great Council cleared you. Accidents happen.”

  I wondered if he thought this particular accident had been opportune for him and I

  mentally slapped myself. That wasn’t fair. That wasn’t right. And if I allowed myself to go there, I might never find my way back to feeling good about him ever again. And he was good. Rudi was a good man.

  “Oh, Rudi,” I said, unsure of everything and he hugged me, more like a friend than a lover, and that helped so much. I was drunk and stupid.

  We sat together on the bus back to Paris, huddled in each other’s arms. It was cold at first, even with the heat blowing full blast, but when it did become warm we still held each other.

  Roxanne and Theresa sat slumped together, asleep, in the seat behind us. Lucy was across the aisle, also asleep. She’d put her hand on my shoulder as we’d boarded the bus, and that gesture let me know she had no objections to me. She had told me without words that she would not stand in the way and she welcomed me.

  “Yes,” I murmured dreamily as the bus chuffed to stop in front of my hotel. Rudi and the others stayed at a different hotel, another stop or two away from mine.

  “Yes, what, Stanzie?” Rudi roused himself from a semi-doze and brushed more hair from my face as the bus doors creaked open.

  “I will bond with you and Lucy,” I told him and his whole face lit up adorably.

  “I will make you so happy,” he vowed and I believed him. I really did.

  He kissed me goodbye, and I nearly didn’t make it off the bus before the driver pulled back into the sluggish, early morning traffic.

  I stood on the cold sidewalk and watched Rudi wave goodbye through the bus window

  and wished I’d gone with him to his hotel. There was no reason for me to sleep alone at mine. I could have taken the Metro back in the morning to get dressed.

  As I thought to myself that this would be the last night I would ever sleep alone, I smiled.

  Chapter 3

  The Great Hunt commenced at sunset. The ballroom had been transformed into what

  could be described as an orgy room--pillows on the floor for some, mattresses swathed in bold-colored sheets and screens set up for those who preferred privacy, but there was plenty of room for those who wanted to be seen and joined.

  There was music but no alcohol. Instead, grandmothers and grandfathers passed out

  bottled water. Half the bottles had blue labels, half of them pink. It was an affectation, a frivolity.

  A lively old grandmother handed me two bottles when I walked in alone.

  “Pink for you, blue for him, dearie!” She gave me a lascivious wink.

  We avoided alcohol before we shifted. Alcohol dehydrated, and if we drank too much

  before shifting, the day after was an agony of muscle cramps and soreness. Instead we drank water. Lots of it. Instead of muscle cramps the next day, we pissed a lot. I’d experienced the muscle cramps and I much preferred staying close to a bathroom.

  The bottles were ice cold and dripped with condensation. I held them away from my body as I looked around for Rudi. He’d given a presentation the last half of the afternoon, something to do with his job. He had tried to explain his work to me on the bus ride back to the chateau that morning, but I was lost in the technicality of it. He was an inventor. He’d made his pack rich with a patented device he’d come up with that aided telecommunications. He’d gotten that far before my eyes apparently glazed over and he’d laughed and changed the subject to spare me.

  The presentation was technical and deadly dull, he informed me when I told him I would attend. “Don’t be silly, Stanzie, we’ll see each other at the Great Hunt.”

  So I’d spent the latter half of the afternoon with Roxanne, Theresa and Lucy, wandering around the chateau and talking. Roxanne and Theresa planned to participate in the Great Hunt.

  Lucy decided to sit it out. Because of me, of course, but she confided she didn’t much like group hunts and she’d see us afterward at the late-night supper.

  I liked her more, which was a good thing considering we would be bond mates soon.

  Two nights from tonight, the bonding ceremony would take place. My head was full of the idea that I was going to move to Berlin and join a pack and be a part of things again. I would have time to truly fall in love with Rudi, something I felt as if I were already doing. He reawakened so many things inside me. It was a jumble of desire, longing and anticipation and, yes, fear. Fear of the unknown. Anything could happen. I was not the same Constance who had boldly bonded with Grey, then Elena, secure in the knowledge I was loved and would be with someone until I was old and either they died first or I did. It would be so far in the future as to be almost unimaginable.

  Rudi had secured one of the mattresses behind a painted screen of a Paris street, which featured a brasserie and wrought-iron tables and chairs, the hint of a waiter lurking behind a door.

  He was sprawled on the mattress as he drank from a bottle of water. It had a blue label. A pink-labeled bottle rested beside him.

  I tossed him my blue-labeled bottle and he tossed me the pink one.

  “Properly hydrated.” I sank beside him, smiling. I felt a little shy, a little turned-on. This would be so much easier, this group thing, with alcohol, but it dehydrated. Plus it disoriented.

  Everyone wanted to be sharp in wolf form. What was the point of blunted senses? All afternoon I’d both looked forward to and dreaded this moment. I wanted so much to participate, but I was also scared. Today no champagne clouded my judgment and I knew I should tell Rudi about my wolf and what to expect, but I found myself tongue-tied with lust. It drove all sense of responsibility and trepidation out of my head.

  Later, I told myself. You can tell him later, Stanzie.

  Rudi had on a pair of dark jeans and a blue sweater. It had rolled up a bit to reveal a slice of his taut stomach. I reached out and ran my hand up under the fabric to his chest. Yes, he was muscled in all the right places. I hadn’t had sex in so long. No one had touched me, or had been there to touch back. I craved it like a drug that drove all sense from my mind.

  Your wolf needs to be discussed, Stanzie, I lectured myself, but in the next breath the thought was gone and all I wanted was the connection with another person from the Pack. And him. I wanted him.

  He grinned as I touched him and tossed his empty water bottle to the floor. Something flashed across his face, a grimace.

  “Your hand’s cold,” he told me. Of course it was. I had an ice-cold bottle of water. He unscrewed the cap of the bottle I’d given him and drank some. I finished my first bottle, and as I reached for the second, he playfully grabbed me and pushed me down onto the mattress so he could kiss me.

  “Why are you so serious?” he wondered between kisses. At first they were light, but gradually they deepened. He slid his hands beneath my sweater and I didn’t mind that they were cold. Besides, he only teased me. Before I knew it, he sat up, back propped against the wall.

  “Drink more water,” he suggested with a slanted grin. He touched his bottle to mine.

  An amorous couple passed by then. They almost had to walk across us to get to the

  screened mattress near ours.

  I looked up at the interruption and found myself staring into the face of Liam Murphy. He was being tugged along by a gorgeous brunette with sultry brown eyes.

  He gave me one of his damned grins, and I almost threw my water bottle at his face, but that would have been a waste of good hydration.

  Instead I ignored him. The brunette said something that made him laugh and they were gone, thankfully.

  I turned back to Rudi. I was going to say something disparaging about Murphy, but I didn’t because Rudi was very pale. He was sweating too.

  “I don’t feel very well, Stanzie.” His blue eyes slitted against some internal pain.

  “Maybe you should drink some water,” I suggested, not knowing what the hell t
o do. And he did. “I’ll go find a grandmother. Do I think I should?”

  A grandmother would know what to do. Maybe he’d eaten something bad at lunch. I felt a momentary relief that I probably wouldn’t be participating in the Great Hunt and was immediately ashamed of myself. Coward.

  Remorsefully, I reached out to touch his face and he grabbed my wrist with his hands hard enough I thought I might scream, only I was too shocked.

  “Stanzie,” he gasped, his eyes locked pleadingly to mine. Then he died.

  The light left his eyes. Something bright and essential leaped from his still body and dissipated into the nothing.

  His body convulsed, his fingers slackened and his arms fell to his sides. His eyes--his empty eyes--stayed open. But he saw nothing.

  “Rudi?” I choked out. My disbelieving hand reached out to touch his face and my fingers communicated the truth to my stuttering brain.

  I screamed then. I screamed and couldn’t stop because this was not happening. This was not real. It was a nightmare and if I screamed loud enough I would open my eyes and be in my little single bed in the Paris hotel. The day would just be starting, it would not be ending. Not this way.

  The screen collapsed when I blundered into it, as I shrieked both his name and my

  wordless horror.

  Somebody grabbed me, forced me down to the ground and I struggled, kicking and

  clawing, but he was stronger.

  “Stop. Constance, stop screaming. Stop screaming right now!” There was an Irish lilt in the man’s voice, more Irish than he’d sounded the night before when I’d met him. He was scared too but in way more control than I was.

  “You’ve got to stop screaming and tell me what happened!” Liam Murphy had lipstick on his cheek. His white shirt was half unbuttoned. His hair was tousled as if someone had passionately run her fingers through it. He hadn’t shaved and my scrabbling fingers rasped against the stubble on his cheeks and chin.

  “He’s dead! Rudi is dead!” I screamed at him. I hit out at him, tried to hurt him because Rudi was dead and there was nothing I could do about it.

  I couldn’t take a deep breath and my head felt as if it were full of helium as it tried to float away from my body. My eyes wouldn’t focus. Murphy’s face alternated between huge and miniscule as I struggled to drag enough air into my lungs to keep from suffocating. My skin was clammy with cold perspiration one moment and then dry and burning hot the next.