Light Beyond the Darkness (4 page)

“Miguel, please,” she said as she continued to struggle beneath his weight. He wasn’t even trying to keep from pressing her into the mattress, making it difficult for her to breathe.

“Oh don’t worry, I’m about to give it to you,” he promised, as if she’d asked him for something other than a chance to pull in a decent amount of oxygen. His hand slid between her knees, pushing them apart, and then his body fell between her legs, relieving some of the pressure on her sternum. She gasped as she sucked in air.

“Will it hurt?” she asked tentatively. She didn’t know her new mate. They’d hardly said three sentences to one another prior to the mating ceremony, which had only commenced that afternoon. Now, the sun dipped below the horizon and she was officially mated to another, and she still didn’t know anything about him—or the act of mating.

“It always hurts the first time,” he said as he slithered out of his briefs. “But you’ll get used to it.”

“Get used to it?” she echoed, thinking that wasn’t a very romantic way to describe what she had heard was supposed to be something very special between two mates.

“Oh yeah,” he said, and then he thrust.

* * * *

Carley came awake with a start, one moment thrashing about in her sleep, as if she was reliving the terrible nightmare, and the next, she was wide-awake, propped up on her palms and blinking at the window where the sunlight poured into her bedroom.

She sucked in several deep breaths, as if she truly had been suffocating while she’d been trapped in the nightmare. The fog cleared from her mind, and she reminded herself it was just a dream. It wasn’t real.

At least, not anymore.

She hadn’t had one in a while. When they didn’t happen, she didn’t even think about them, but when they did, they often managed to consume her life for at least a day afterward. She climbed out of bed and wrapped a thick terry cloth robe around her body. As she padded down the hall to the bathroom, she silently cursed that damn shifter for coming into her restaurant last night. No doubt his presence brought about the reminders of her past life, stirring the subconscious memories and causing the nightmare.

She shivered as she cranked the hot water in the bathtub. All the nightmares were bad, but that one, the memory of her first sexual experience, was one of the worst. She climbed into the blistering hot shower and hoped the steamy water would rinse away the remnants of the nightmare. There was no place in her life for those memories.

She was with the humans now, and if she could help it, Miguel would never, ever find her. Ever.

*

“Are you waiting for your dining companion, sir?”

The maître d’s nostrils quivered with recognition when Reid stepped into the restaurant on Saturday evening.

“No,” Reid said shortly, as he continued to gaze impassively at the tall, thin human who was, Reid suspected, normally a bully when it came to people’s desire to eat at his restaurant without a reservation. But Reid could be ten times the bully this man was.

“S-so would you care to dine at the bar?” the maître d’ suggested with a flourish of his hand.

“No.”

It took the man a moment to recover from his abrupt refusal, so Reid decided to make it easy. He was eager to be seated anyway.

“I want a table near the kitchen. As close as possible.”

“N-near the—the kitchen?” the man stuttered, clearly struggling to comprehend Reid’s intentions. Which was fine. He didn’t need the man to comprehend.

“Yes.”

He stared until the man’s entire body shook like a leaf, and then the maître d’ finally turned to the nearby podium and consulted his master floor plan. Finally, he pulled a menu out from behind the podium, cleared his throat several times, and said, “Right this way, please.”

Reid stuffed his hands into the pockets of his pants and followed. He’d dressed tonight in navy wool slacks and a blue V-neck sweater with a white T-shirt underneath. He recognized that he wasn’t quite up to this restaurant’s dress code, but he didn’t care.

He settled into his chair, ordered a bottle of excellent cabernet and a rare steak to go with it. He ignored the salad the server placed in front of him, and then he settled in to wait. He doubted it would take long for the lovely lightbearer to figure out he was in the building.

*

“Ohmigod, he’s back!” Sara, the server who’d waited on Reid the night before, hurried into the kitchen and made the announcement in a high-pitched, excited voice. She fanned herself with her notepad. “And he’s just as freaking hot as he was last night!”

Carley’s hand slipped, as she sliced thick chops from a smoked tenderloin, and she cursed as she nearly sliced off her own finger. She wasn’t a healer, so slicing off a finger would really not be a good thing. She took a deep breath and placed the knife on the wooden cutting board.

“I hardly think someone’s looks would change so drastically over the course of twenty-four hours’ time, Sara,” she chided, even as she thought,
He’s here? Ohmigod, he’s here!

Her inner excitement was a fair replication of Sara’s enthusiasm.

“Are you talking about that guy who barged into our kitchen last night?” Vivian asked as she walked around the stainless-steel counter and peeked through one of the round windows carved into the swinging doors. She stepped back into the kitchen and said, “He’s sitting at that table that most people hate to sit at. It’s right outside the door. He can practically hear what we’re saying.”

Not practically
. He was a shifter, so he could, without a doubt, hear every single thing they were saying, from that short distance.

“Back to work everyone,” Carley called out as she took a deep breath and resumed slicing the tenderloin.

A short time later, Sara returned. “He ordered a steak. Rare. And key lime pie.” She offered the ticket to Carley.

She waved it away. “Give it to Sean.”

All activity within the kitchen came to a stuttering halt.

“What?” Carley asked innocently.

Vivian spoke on behalf of the entire kitchen. “You make all the steaks, Carley. It’s your thing. And Sean’s brand new. He’s so green behind the ears that he probably doesn’t even know the difference between a butcher block and a butcher knife.”

Sean, the subject of her comment, turned puce in the face and stuttered that he did, indeed, know the difference between those two objects.

“I’ve had Sean’s steaks,” Carley insisted. “And there’s a reason we hired him so fresh from culinary school. It’s because he has talent. Now give him the ticket.”

Sara turned to Vivian for confirmation, and when that woman shrugged her shoulders, she handed the ticket to Sean. He eagerly stepped up to the open flames of the grill, and set to work trying to impress both his coworkers and the customer on the other side of the door.

* * * *

“He sent it back?” Carley asked in disbelief.

Sara nodded. “He said he can tell you didn’t make it, and he refuses to eat anything from this kitchen that does not come specifically from you. He suggested you could come out and talk to him about it.”

Carley shook her head and rolled her eyes. She would just bet he was open to her going out into the dining room to talk to him.

“Tell him I’m not making steaks tonight. Tell him I’m focusing on the vegetarian dishes,” she said suddenly. She grinned when Sara walked away. That ought to teach him.

The waitress returned a moment later. “He wants the vegetarian special,” she said. “And the key lime pie.” She tilted her head and gave Carley a quizzical look. “What’s going on with you and that guy? I thought you said you didn’t know him?”

“I don’t,” Carley insisted. “I know…someone close to him,” she said. She knew Tanner and his mother, Ariana, Finn, and Lisa, the shifters who were currently living in what had once been Carley’s home, the lightbearers’ coterie. Whether this shifter knew them or not, she had no idea. But they were the same species. That meant he was closer to them than any other species, right?

She washed her hands and nudged Eric away from the vegetable station. “He wants our vegetarian special? I’ll make him a vegetarian special,” she announced, and she set to work chopping every damn type of vegetable she could find.

When Sara returned with the empty plate from the shifter’s table, she held it up for Carley’s inspection and said, “He wants to speak to you. He said he’ll summon the manager if you don’t go out there.”

Carley’s heart sank. The manager would undoubtedly force the issue, if it was brought to his attention. He saw no reason why his chef wouldn’t want to go out into the dining room and schmooze customers.

“Fine,” she grumbled as she sliced a wedge from one of the key lime pies she had made earlier in the day. She deliberately dropped it onto its side on the plate and didn’t add garnish before shoving a few strands of hair behind her ear and stomping out of the kitchen.

“Here,” she said as she unceremoniously dropped the plate onto the table.

The shifter gave the sloppy slice of pie a cursory glance before lifting his pale blue eyes and focusing so wholly onto Carley that she was certain he saw absolutely nothing else in the room at the moment. How could someone be
that
focused? She didn’t think she’d ever had anyone pay her such full attention in her life.

She fidgeted, nervously twisting her hands together before she realized what she was doing and clasped them behind her back. The shifter continued to stare at her.

“You owe me for that one, Carley.”

She visibly jerked at the sound of his voice, low and deep and smooth as whiskey.

“For what?” she asked, wondering how in the world he knew her name and for what she could possibly owe him. As far as she knew, she’d never met the man before yesterday.

“That dinner. As enticing as it was eating something with your magical stamp on it, forcing me to eat vegetables does not put me in a particularly good mood.”

She blinked owlishly. “I didn’t force you to eat vegetables.”

“You refused to make me a steak.”

“Sean’s steaks are practically as good as mine,” she protested.

“‘Practically’ isn’t yours.”

With a great deal of effort, she pulled her gaze away from his and made a swift perusal around the restaurant. All human, and none were paying them any particular attention, other than the ones she knew were listening at the door behind her.

“Do I know you?” she asked.

“Not yet,” he replied.

She frowned. “What is that supposed to mean?”

His voice pitched low. “It means I intend to get to know you, every inch of you, from the inside out. I intend to possess you. I intend to do things—” He reached for her, and she pulled away as if he was about to hit her. He froze, midreach and midsentence. And then he slowly lowered his hand.

“You’ve been abused,” he stated, matter-of-factly.

She shook her head, trying to deny it.
Don’t go there. Don’t go there
.

“Past lover?”

She shook her head again. How had the conversation turned to this?

“Family member then.”

“No,” she finally managed to get out.

“Who?”

“Stop,” she said as she lifted her hand, palm facing out. “Just stop. This is none of your business. I don’t know you. I don’t even know your name, and I have no idea how you know mine. I—” He cut her off.

“My name is Reid. And one of your employees referred to you by name yesterday, when I went into the kitchen to meet you.”

“Fine. Fine. Reid. Look, Reid, obviously you know what I am, and I know what you are. So can we just be honest with each other? What do you want from me?”

“I was in the middle of telling you when you flinched away as if you expected I would hit you.”

Carley blew out a breath. Damned instincts. But it was hard to change the only way she knew how to interact with men.

“I don’t know how you found me, but—”

“It was purely by accident.”

She drew in a ragged breath. “Fine. By accident. Whatever. Look, I’m trying to establish a nice, normal life here. One that doesn’t involve shifters or lightbearers or anyone else from the magical community for that matter. That means there isn’t any room in that nice, normal life for you. So the best thing for you to do is just finish up that key lime pie and go back to whatever pack you came from, okay?”

“I can’t go back,” he replied. “And it isn’t acceptable that you have no room in your life for me.”

Was he serious? She stared at him. He certainly looked serious. If he was joking, he was doing a damn fine job of acting deadpan. Too fine a job.

“I don’t understand,” she finally said.

“Which part?”

She flapped her hand. “All of it. What do you mean, it isn’t acceptable? Since when do you have any say in my life?”

“Since I entered it and decided I want you.”

She stared again, her jaw falling open. “You want—”

“You.”

“Me?”

“Clearly it isn’t for your quick wit.”

She snapped her mouth shut and stabbed her finger at the restaurant entrance. “Get out of my restaurant. You can’t have me. Get out. Now.” She didn’t wait to see if he complied. She turned and stalked back into the kitchen with her head held stiffly, refusing to turn around and look at him again. She didn’t need to, to know he was watching her. Lights above, she could feel the intensity of his stare without having to look.

Just as soon as the kitchen door swung shut behind her, she leaned against the wall and took great, gasping breaths. Her entire body shook as if she was in shock. Hell, she probably was.

Someone thrust a glass into her hand. The stench of bourbon assaulted her nose.

“Drink,” Vivian commanded. Carley obediently drank and then sputtered and gasped when the amber liquid slid down her throat.

“What did he do to you?” Vivian demanded, clearly having decided she was coherent enough to speak of the incident.

“Nothing,” Carley said.

“Well, what happened, then? You’re shaking like a leaf. Something scared the crap out of you. What was it?”

Carley shook her head, but Vivian was a tenacious human being. Finally, Carley admitted, “I’ve never stood up to a man like that before.”