Wanted: Wild Thing

Chapter Eight

We drove back to work in silence, and I had to fake a cheery mood at the agency for the rest of the night. If Everett noticed anything weird about my now stretched-out clothing or the holes in my white espadrilles where my toe-claws had forced through the leather, he said nothing. Good man.

Hugh was silent and surly, too, though he didn’t hover. Instead, he crossed his arms and sat on that stool and watched me as I worked. I pretended to be busier than I actually was, poking with flyers and updating calendars for the next five years just to have something to do. So I wouldn’t have to look at him and be embarrassed that I’d cried because I couldn’t have a man hold me without going all Godzilla on him.

Life wasn’t fair. I’d just have to suck it up and make lemonade with my lemons, or I’d soon find myself with no lemons at all. And besides, I still had hope. My True Love could be out there. If I met him, he could solve all my problems. Hugh wasn’t it, that was for sure. His kiss had triggered an instant change. Brad hadn’t been it, either—I could tell that just from the handshake. So someone else was still on the playing field.

The rest of the night passed slowly, but by the time 3:00 a.m. rolled around, even coffee couldn’t keep me my usual perky self. When Everett offered to lock up, I thanked him and headed out with Hugh, ignoring the strange looks that Everett was tossing in our direction. No doubt he was wondering what kind of client wanted to hang around until three in the morning, but he didn’t ask.

That was the good thing about working with shifters and supernaturals in general. They tended to be a secretive lot, so if you were equally secretive? They didn’t pry too much. Just a side perk of the job, I supposed.

My stomach growled, and as I pulled out my car keys, I looked over at Hugh. “There’s a twenty-four-hour Chinese takeout place nearby. How do you feel about fried rice and mu shu pork?”

“I have no feelings for them.”

I chuckled despite myself. “Then you don’t mind if I order them. Get in the car.”

We drove to the place. Since I had company, I ordered two family-sized meals, complete with a myriad of dishes and all the rice and hot and sour soup a person could possibly want. When we got back to my condo, I took the food into the kitchen and began to unpack tray after tray of steamed vegetables, lo mein, rice, chicken, and pork. It all smelled delicious, and I was starving. Hugh arrived at my side to sniff everything.

“Help yourself,” I told him. I made myself a plate and sat down.

He followed my lead, and I couldn’t help but giggle when he sat down with three of the cartons in front of himself and a spoon (Hugh didn’t like forks). He’d gone straight for the main course. Couldn’t blame him. I studied him as he ate, noticing the way his eyes widened as he took a bite of General Tso and then ate more of it. Seemed like my were-saber-tooth liked spicy food.

“So. You knew that kissing me would change me,” I pointed out. “I don’t think I ever told you that.”

He looked uneasily at me. “It is common knowledge that fledgling changelings are unable to control their sexual impulses.”

Oh, great. “I like how that is common knowledge to everyone but the changeling herself. I had to find out the hard way. What else do you know about changelings?”

He hesitated.

“Oh, come on,” I said, getting annoyed. “What’s the harm in telling me? It’s pretty clear that I know some of the basics. I just want to compare notes. That’s all.”

He took another big mouthful of General Tso and chewed, thinking. After he swallowed, he looked over at me. “Changeling is a human word. The fae have adopted it because it amuses them, but when I was young, your kind were called fionn gainne. It means ‘pretty scale.’ ”

I snorted. “Nothing pretty about it.”

He looked amused at my reaction. “Your kind are quite prized.”

I waved my chopsticks in the air. “So I’m told. Go on.”

“Fionn gainne are very rare, and in childhood, very fragile. The fae realm is harsh and unforgiving, which is why the fae have flourished despite human encroachment. Their realm is safe for them precisely because it is so dangerous. No one else would dare live there.”

I said nothing. I’d had my taste of primordial town and had agreed that it wasn’t for me. “So the fae leave the baby changelings with humans because it’s too dangerous on home turf?”

“The children are glamoured to look human and hide their natural form. And yes, then they are exchanged for a human child.”

My eyes widened, and I shoved my chopsticks onto my plate, my stomach suddenly churning. “What happens to the human child?”

“The fae are callous with life,” Hugh said in a flat voice. “They think nothing of toying with others as long as it serves their purposes.”

I wanted to touch the brand on the inside of my thigh, the mark Finian had left so he’d recognize me as “his” property. The more I found out about the fae, the less I liked. “So I was left out here. Does . . . does this happen often? The baby switching?”

He shrugged. “I have heard rumors, but the news we get from the fae realms consists mostly of what they choose to tell my kind.” His expressive mouth grew wry. “Luckily, they like to brag.”

“So it seems.” I studied him curiously. “You’ve seen another like me, though, haven’t you?”

“I have,” he agreed. “It was some time ago. Months. Perhaps years. The fae thought she was very interesting. She had a very wild streak until they settled her down and bred her. You might even be one of her pups. I think her name was Jer-See Dayvil.”

“Jer-See? Oh, my God. The Jersey Devil?” My mouth dropped open in horror. “I’m related to that?” Every kid had heard of the Jersey Devil—the big, scary, winged monster in the woods that terrorized early settlers of America.

Hugh looked uncomfortable. “It’s possible. There are not many of your kind. That is why you are so highly prized. I know of less than a dozen. Owning a changeling is quite a status symbol for the fae. Finian has been waiting for you for many years.”

I blew out a breath. “So the Jersey Devil, huh? I guess she never found her True Love.”

Hugh turned his catlike gaze to me. “You speak of this, but I am not familiar with it. What is this ‘true love’?”

“A fortune-teller that had fae blood told me that there was one person on earth that is my perfect match. My True Love. If I find that person, I will succeed in circumventing my curse and won’t transform when he touches me.”

Hugh gave me a pitying look. “Ryder. You are not cursed. The other form is what you are. That is your real form. There is no true love that can fix it. She lied to you.”

I swallowed hard. “No. That’s not true.” It couldn’t be.

“It is true. Your real nature overcomes the glamour when you get excited. That is why you lose control of it. That is who you are. You are not a human with a creature side. You are a creature who pretends to be human.”

Hot tears pricked my eyes as desolation sank in. What he said had the ring of truth, and Hugh couldn’t lie to me. “So there’s no one who can save me?”

“I have never heard of such a thing.”

I wanted to bawl like a baby. It felt as if the rug had been dragged out from under my feet. All hope, vanished in an instant. “Then I’m screwed.”

“I am sorry, Ryder.” Hugh set his food down and his big hand clasped my shoulder again. “I know you think I am cruel, but if there were another way for you, my task would not be so easy.”

This was easy for him? I felt bleak. “Well,” I said. “Thanks for the kiss, at any rate. The ones I get are few and far between, and they always end badly.”

He gave me a curious look. “Was it a good one?”

“To be honest, it was so brief that I didn’t exactly critique it.”

Hugh stared at me for so long that it made me nervous. Finally, he said, “Are . . . are they longer?”

“Kisses?” I was so surprised for a moment that I couldn’t answer. My body felt suddenly flushed with arousal, but I didn’t transform. He hadn’t touched me, after all. I could get turned on, as long as I wasn’t triggered by touch. “There are lots of different kinds of kisses, Hugh. Some are short and sweet, and some take so long that they leave both parties breathless at the end.”

Or so I’d heard.

His gaze went to my mouth, and I felt my nipples harden in response. “Breathless? By merely pressing mouths?”

“It’s not just that,” I told him, licking my lips. “That’s not the only way you kiss. You can nibble on the other person’s lips, or suck on them, or you can use tongue.”

“Tongue?”

“Yes. You . . .” I blushed. “You thrust tongues into each other’s mouths. It’s very erotic.”

“Tell me more about this. Are you very experienced?”

My mouth twisted into a wry smile. “Not at all. I have a problem, remember?”

He looked skeptical, one heavy eyebrow arching. “Then how do you know how it is?”

I laughed, because he looked so very put out at the thought that I might be lying to him. “I have eyes, of course. I see what people do. And then there is always the television.” My eyes widened and I stood up, forgetting about dinner. “Holy cow, I haven’t shown you the television, have I? Come on, follow me.”

He did, carrying one of the cartons of takeout with him as he followed after me. “What is this ‘television’? You will explain it to me.”

“I’d be better off showing you,” I told him. “Sit down and I’ll get the remote.”

He thumped down on one end of my sofa, still eating and watching me with curiosity. I noticed that his gaze was following my figure and that it focused on my behind when I knelt to pick up the remote from its place on the TV stand. So Hugh was checking me out? Must have been because we’d been talking about sexy things and his experience with women was limited. If I had no experience with men and one was right in front of me, I supposed I’d stare at him, too.

Still, it made me feel warm, and I might have rolled my hips a little more as I strode back across my living room to sit next to Hugh on the couch. I pointed the remote and immediately the TV clicked on, the news blaring. I appreciated the way that Hugh jumped, startled, at the sight, his eyes going wide. I glanced at the TV, trying to see it through his eyes. Nothing exciting was on, just a weather report. “It’s a box that transmits pictures,” I explained to him. “And we can pick what we want to watch. Let me see if I can find something with kissing.”

I flipped to the next channel, and Hugh jerked as horses galloped onto the prairie—an old western. I flipped past it again, and Hugh turned to stare at me.

“Where were those horses going?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just an old western clip.”

“Western?” He pointed his fork at the screen again. “I wish to see more of the horses. They are tasty eating and rare creatures in my world.”

“They’re not rare here,” I told him. “And no one in the United States eats horses.”

He snorted. “Then they are fools.”

I clicked past a few more channels, ignoring his sounds of protest as we passed by interesting item after interesting item. But I needed to find kissing, darn it. Why was it that I couldn’t find anything remotely romantic at three in the morning? I looked over at Hugh, who was shoveling General Tso into his mouth, his wide eyes fixed on the TV as someone held up a hand mixer on a shopping channel.

I glanced at my small DVD collection, but I didn’t see anything that screamed sexy moments. Time for desperate measures. I clicked over to a paid channel and selected the first porno that came up. “We’re only going to watch the first few minutes of this, okay?”

“What is it?”

“You’ll see,” I told him and clicked Play.

I winced as cheesy music filled the room and a pizza boy walked down the hall of an apartment building. I wanted to cover my face with shame over the cliché, but I snuck a peek at Hugh instead. He watched, rapt, no longer eating, as the pizza guy rang the doorbell and began to converse with the scantily clad blonde who answered the door.

Then his eyes bugged.

I stifled my giggle at his look of shock and peeked at the TV again. Sure enough, the blonde had the pizza boy by the collar of his shirt and was dragging him into her apartment, her mouth locked on his. There was lots of tongue, and deep, breathless moans coming from both of them as they smooched loudly and made tons of noise. The girl kept making this high-pitched whimper in her throat as she kissed the man. The sound both embarrassed me and fascinated me, and I felt my monster prickle. I bit the inside of my cheek to hold it back and glanced over at Hugh.

His eyes had narrowed, and he stared at the TV so hard that his face was drawn into stark lines of concentration.

For some reason, that made my changeling side prickle harder, and I felt my body begin to ache with the need to transform. I quickly lifted the remote to turn the TV off again.

Hugh stilled me, careful to grasp my sleeve and not touch my skin. “I want to see.” His gaze remained locked on the TV screen.

I lowered my hand and left the TV on, but I didn’t look at the screen. I couldn’t look at it any longer. I stared at Hugh instead, trying to blot out the noises coming from the TV as I watched his profile.

He was utterly fascinated, his eyes shining with the reflection from the screen, every muscle locked rigidly in place as he continued to watch.

It occurred to me that this might have been his first experience with any sort of sexuality, given that his people—the primordials—had no women in their little dimension. I wasn’t sure that a porno flick should be his gateway to carnal knowledge, but I didn’t know what else to do.

“Yeah, you like that, slut?” one of the voices on the TV said.

That caught my attention, and wide-eyed, I turned back to the screen. The man on camera had his pants unzipped and his dick out. The woman was kneeling in front of him, and as I watched in a mixture of arousal and horror, he took his penis and smacked her face with it.

“You want that, slut?” the man asked again, and the woman on TV moaned and rubbed her face against him.

I felt a hot pulse scorch through my body. “I can’t sit here,” I told Hugh and jerked to my feet. It was too awkward. And arousing. One touch from Hugh and my wings would burst out of my back. I left the remote on the couch.

If Hugh noticed my hasty retreat, he certainly didn’t follow.

I suspected I wouldn’t see him until the movie was over. I shook my head to clear it. A nice, cold shower, and then I was off to bed. I’d try my hardest not to think any more about Hugh watching porn in my living room, his eyes gleaming catlike as he watched people fuck on-screen.

I certainly tried not to think about what would have happened if I’d stayed in the room with him. Would he have looked over at me at some point? Wanted to try something out? My breath quickened and I touched my cheek . . . and imagined him feeling my ugly scales.

Sadness washed over me. Yeah. Not in this lifetime.