Bound by Moonlight (6 page)

Max didn’t understand their new bond. He didn’t know how to use it, just as he was unfamiliar with many of the skills lying dormant inside him. He’d had no one to teach him, to show him, until Rollo—his greedy, opportunistic father—slipped briefly into his life with some precious information and a few dire warnings. That he was rare and valuable, one of a kind—and in danger because of it. His bonding to Charlotte made him even more of an oddity because, to his knowledge, no other human woman had ever survived it.

Now she shared special abilities with him: a physical ability to heal herself that had saved her life. A mental communication of feelings and thoughts that had saved his. She wanted to explore it more, but he’d pulled back behind the shielding his mother had taught him. Afraid of what she might discover, afraid of what she’d awaken, he prevented her from reaching out to him, from touching his mind and his experiences.

He was afraid it would make her a target.

She murmured in her sleep, rolling onto her side. Her luscious rump pushed against him, wiggling to get comfortable until he placed a hand on her hip to still the provocative movements.

Even in her sleep, she drove him wild.

How selfish to thrust her into danger just to soothe his aching heart, to calm his raging needs.

Would she now be hunted just as he was, the human mate of the Shifter king?

He eased out of bed to dress in the misty half light. He’d pulled on jeans and was taking a sweatshirt out of his drawer when unexpected movement at the edge of the dresser caught the corner of his eye. A rattle of sound made him hop back in alarm, stifling a startled yelp as he sought the potential danger.

On the floorboards, coiled where they had fallen, was the string of pearls he’d given Charlotte.

He started to reach down for them, but his toes curled under, his muscles pulled taut. A low, instinctive growl rippled out of him as he sensed threat where there seemed to be none. He snuffled the air just in case.

His breathing grew tight as panic strangled him. Hot dampness welled up from a dark place deep inside him, flooding his eyes, skewing his vision, changing the beads into the shadow of something else.

A small sound escaped him, breaking his trance.

Jumpy, anxious, he took a few quick steps back and gave the area a wide berth on his way to the door. Out in the hall he swallowed the acidic taste of fear and put on his sweatshirt, grateful for the fleecy warmth against his goose-bumped skin.

Then, he hurried downstairs and outside, running from what he didn’t want to recall, from secrets his mind had buried but which wouldn’t rest quietly.

His housekeeper Helen found him on the side porch, tense and inwardly trembling in one of the wicker chairs. Helen had served Jimmy, and now him, with an efficiency that bordered on telepathic.

“Beautiful morning. It’s going to be a warm one,” she said quietly, never sure if he’d respond.

“Do you remember where Jimmy and your Sam said they found me?” Max asked abruptly.

Helen’s composed features betrayed none of her surprise. Max never spoke of the past. Until his policewoman, he’d barely spoken at all. She continued putting place mats and glasses out for two, pouring his juice before she answered.

“I believe it was over near Rayne.”

“Tell me.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

His tone was adamant, but something in his eyes made her hesitate. She began matter-of-factly, while inside her heart went soft with sympathy. “You were just a little thing, four, maybe five years old. You’d been out there for days, just you and your poor mama.”

“Did you . . . did you see my mama?”

“Yes.” How could she ever forget? They’d brought her out of the swamps in the trunk of Jimmy’s big town car. He’d never been able to get the smell out of it— that hot, ripe, putrid stink of decay. The same stench that clung to the little boy even after they’d scrubbed his skin raw.

“Did you see what happened to her?”

“She’d been shot. I don’t think she suffered, Max.” Not like he did, both then and now.

His gaze flickered away. He swallowed hard. “I don’t remember much. Jimmy wouldn’t talk about it. But I have dreams sometimes.”

Yes. His screams and eerie howling cries had kept the household up nights for almost a year after Jimmy brought him home. She hadn’t known he still had
them. “Just dreams,” she told him with a comforting certainty.

“You think so?” His gaze lifted to hers, huge green eyes flooding up in unimaginable anguish. The eyes of that little lost boy.

“Yes, I do. Jimmy was right to keep the past in the past. He always knew what was best where you were concerned. They’re just dreams. Don’t let them pull you back.” Back into madness.

She took a step toward him, and because he didn’t automatically draw back the way he usually did, she slipped an arm about his shoulders and gathered him close. Her own eyes welled up as she stroked his dark head. He’d never let her hold or comfort him as a child, though she’d longed to. Back then, she’d wanted a child so desperately. But Jimmy was the only one young Max would let near him. Such a strange, somber boy with his unnatural quiet and haunting sorrow. Even now, even as he leaned into her, he was so still.

“Do I smell coffee?”

They moved away from each other as Cee Cee stepped out onto the porch. Helen immediately filled her cup and nodded good morning. The sight of the police detective making herself at home in Jimmy Legere’s house no longer seemed a sort of blasphemy. Not when Max’s expression brightened enough to vanquish the shadows the second he saw her.

“Breakfast, Detective?” she asked.

Cee Cee took the coffee cup in one hand and Max’s chin in the other. “No, thanks. I’ve got everything I need for the moment.” She bent to kiss him as if she could survive on the taste of him alone.

“Morning, baby,” she murmured against his lips as Helen tactfully withdrew. Cee Cee laughed as he pulled her onto his lap without spilling a drop from her cup.

She was wearing one of his tee shirts and a pair of gym shorts. His palm roamed the long stretch of her legs as he tucked her bare feet up beside him in the chair. She buried her face in his dark hair as he nibbled on her kneecap. He was the only thing she’d go for before her kick start of caffeine. And she went for him in a big way.

“You should have stayed in bed a bit longer,” she whispered. “I woke up with a need to ride you hard.”

“Yeah?” He looked up at her, brows lifted. “And where did you want that ride to take you?”

“To work,” she grumbled, “since I no longer have a car.”

He made an unsympathetic sound. “It’s not like you have to hitchhike.”

“Yeah, but I have to listen to the guys’ bullshit after your driver opens the limo door for me like I was royalty.”

Max cupped the back of her head to tip her face up to his. His eyes glowed with hot intensity. “You are royalty. You are my queen.”

She gave an unregal snort. “And where, pray tell, is my kingdom?”

He placed her palm flat upon his chest. “You rule my heart.”

“So you’ve decided to subjugate yourself to my royal whims without argument. I like this job.”

“I don’t believe that’s quite what I said.”

She chuckled and leaned back against his shoulder,
smiling as she sipped her coffee. “It’s good to be queen.”

They relaxed with one another for a long, contented moment, then she felt him tense as Alain Babineau joined them on the porch.

“Morning.”

“Help yourself to some coffee, Alain. What brings you all the way out here?” Cee Cee asked without changing her indolent pose.

“Thought I’d give you a lift in.”

A growl vibrated silently through Max. She patted his rough cheek.
Down, boy.
“Thanks.”

Her partner dropped the morning paper on the table as he settled into a chair. “You made the news.”

She reached for it. “I hope they got my good side.”

“A rather flattering shot of me, don’t you think?” Max commented as he saw the prominent photo in an article on last night’s event. It showed them dancing, with her hand very obviously copping a feel of his butt.

Babineau cleared his throat as if to get out an unpleasant taste. “Tina wants you two over for lunch tomorrow.” He added grimly, “She said no excuses. She wants to say thanks, and the boy’s been asking to see Max.”

“What time?” Max asked.

Babineau met his gaze with thinly veiled distaste. “Noon. It’s going to be outside, real informal.” No need to get up close and friendly.

“Am I supposed to bring something?” Cee Cee asked in horror. “Like some kind of Jell-O salad thing?”

Babineau laughed. “No, don’t make us suffer that. Tina’s got it all under control.”

Tina, the perfect woman, wife, and mother. “At least we can talk about the case,” Cee Cee said.

“Ah, no. She made me promise no shop talk.”

“What the hell are we going to talk about, then?” Her dismay echoed his.

“Polite things that civilized people discuss,” Max asserted. “I’m sure we can think of something.”

She eyed Max doubtfully, picturing a long, horrid silence in which they gobbled up the food and snuck out as fast as possible.

She turned the topic to something more agreeable. “What did you find out on the street?”

Babineau’s gaze touched on Max. “We can talk about it on the way in.”

“I want to know now. Come on up with me. You can fill me in while I change.”

She was off his lap and the two of them had gone inside before objection hit Max between the eyes like the slug of a SIG Sauer. She was taking Babineau upstairs to his bedroom—
their
bedroom. And she was going to get dressed just as comfortably as you please in front of a man who wasn’t sharing that bed with her.

Alain Babineau and I were lovers.

Images of them together filled his mind, and for a moment he was plunged back into the hot madness that plagued him the weeks before he and Charlotte had bonded. That same dark, furious need to claim and guard her as his own snarled through him with teeth-bared possessiveness, startling him with its intensity and his inability to just shake it off.

He’d been taught only one way to deal with a threat that came into his yard. And for a moment, he considered
killing Alain Babineau as if it were a rational solution.

“S
O, WHAT’S THE
story?”

Babineau hesitated just inside the room, trying not to look at the big unmade bed. Savoie’s bed, where he’d been sleeping skin to skin with Charlotte.

“Like I figured,” he began, awkward at first, then falling into the familiar pattern, “no one is eager to give anything up to the cops. I tapped a couple of my usuals, asked them to sniff around. We’ll see where it goes.”

Cee Cee snagged a pair of black jeans out of a dresser and carried them into the bathroom, leaving the door open so they could continue their conversation.

Babineau watched her reflection as she stepped out of the shorts and wiggled into the stretch denim. She had the most amazing legs he’d ever seen. That hadn’t changed.

“Dovion should have a report for us this morning,” she continued, rummaging through her makeup bag. “We need to stop there first. Hopefully they’ve ID’d the vic by now and we’ll have some photos to circulate.”

“There’s something we need to talk about first.”

“Yeah? What’s that?” When he hesitated, she called out, “Don’t be shy. Spill it.”

“Ceece, the guys were wondering . . .”

“What?”

“What to do about Savoie.”

Her head poked out of the bathroom, her eyes narrowed dangerously. “What do you mean, ‘do’ about him?”

“It’s been bothering us. All of us. We didn’t want to say anything until you were back to one hundred percent.” His hand raked through his sandy blond hair, his bewildered relief over her amazingly quick recovery evident. Then his expression tightened. “It’s not like we can forget what we saw him do. What we saw him . . . turn into.”

“Your point?” she snapped out, anger covering her sudden leap of alarm.

“Ceece, I don’t know what to tell them. I don’t know what the hell he is. What do you want me to say?”

Charlotte felt blindsided, though she should have seen it coming. She’d been aware of Max’s world long enough to accept it without the doubt and confusion she saw in her partner’s eyes.

He had seen what Max was. How he reacted to that information had to be carefully controlled before any damage was done.

Her response was forceful and fierce. “You tell them that Max Savoie saved your son when no one else could have. You tell them that I owe him my life several times over. You tell them that if they have a problem with him, they’d better bring it to me first. And they’d better keep their mouths shut about what they think they saw.”

“Think?”
His tone said there was no mistake about what took place before their shocked eyes. “Or what— they’ll end up in an alley minus throats and hearts?”

“No!” She had to get them to see Max as an ally, not as a monster. There was nothing natural about Max, but that didn’t necessarily make him a threat.

“No, Alain,” she continued with an exasperated laugh, as if the very thought of violence was ridiculous. “He would never harm them. But I’m not going to let them”
—or you—
“harm him, either.”

Cee Cee watched her calm, rational partner trying to make sense of the unbelievable.

“Did he kill Cummings’s daughter?” Babineau asked.

“No. It was another of his kind.”

“Another?” He latched onto what she hadn’t meant to give away, then anxiousness jumped in his eyes. “There are
more
of them here? How many more?”

She grew guarded and vague. “Max protects them, I protect him. That’s all you need to know.”

“There are these . . . these creatures prowling our streets, and you don’t think I need to know? What
are
they? How are we supposed to act around him, now that we know?” His chiseled jaw worked for a long moment before he got right to it. “How can you—be with him, now that you know?”

She went stiff with outrage as she saw his disgust. “Excuse me?”