"Love At First Bite" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kenyon Sherrilyn, Banks L. A., Squires Susan, Thompson Ronda)

Chapter Nine

The sun peeking through the trees woke Anne. She was curled in a ball, her blanket clutched around her. For a moment she couldn't remember where she was or why. She tried to move and her muscles protested. The ache between her legs brought the night before flooding back. She sat abruptly and glanced around the campsite.

Merrick sat on a log staring at her. He'd donned his trousers and sat with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, shivering. He looked human again… almost. His eyes were haunted.

"What happened to me, Anne?"

She didn't want to think about that. She wanted desperately to pretend last night had never happened… at least up to a certain point. "You turned into a wolf."

He blinked. "What do you mean? I acted like a beast?"

Anne had trouble grasping what had happened last night, much less explaining it, and to the person it happened to. She could only be straightforward. "No, Merrick. A wolf. An animal. You turned into one before my very eyes."

He ran a shaky hand through his hair; then he held his hand in front of him and stared at it. "What you're saying is impossible."

"It is possible," she countered, tugging her blanket tighter around her in the chilly morning air. "I would have never thought so… until last night."

He rose and shrugged from his blanket. "We must have dreamed it," he said, and the look in his eyes begged her to agree with him.

Could Anne pretend? Her whole life had been a pretense up until now. She must be honest with him and with herself. "Your gifts," she said. "Could this be another one of them?"

"Gifts?" he growled. "If what you say happened to me did, it's no gift, Anne. It's a curse."

"What do you recall of last night?" she asked.

His angry features softened for a moment. Merrick joined Anne, bending beside her. "Us," he answered. "Together. As one. Then the pain. The horrible pain. After that, nothing until I woke naked and shivering in the woods this morning."

Anne glanced down at her hands clasped around the blanket. "I thought I was going to die," she confessed, glancing back up at him. "When you stood before me as a wolf, I thought you would kill me."

His eyes misted and he glanced away from her. "I would never hurt you, Anne. I'd take my own life before I'd let myself, in any form, take yours." He glanced back at her. "I've got to go from here."

Today was to be her wedding day. And no, it would not have been a grand affair with flowers and a church and all of society turned out, but whatever it was, it was meant to be hers. Last night, Anne had found all she was looking for in this man. She couldn't let the dream go.

"Maybe it won't happen again." Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but Anne wasn't certain she wasn't right. Perhaps last night they were both drugged, drugged on each other, when she thought he'd turned into a wolf.

"What if it does, Anne?"

"What if it doesn't?" she countered.

He stared into her eyes for a long time before he said, "All right. I'll give it one more night. I hope it's not a mistake, Anne."

Merrick went hunting in the afternoon. His senses, always stronger, he suspected, than those of a normal man, were now heightened tenfold. He heard as he had never heard before. Saw movement in the brush and the distance no mortal man could see. At times, when he spotted an animal, he did not see the animal at all but only the blood pumping red through its veins.

Could what Anne said happened last night have really happened? Flashes had gone through his mind all day. Flashes of them together, making love, then the pain, the sight of his hand, covered in hair, claws jutting from his fingernails. He felt almost sick now with the memory of it… sick, and yet as he watched Anne move around the camp he felt something else. Something primal. The instinct to mate with her again.

Merrick shook his head and tried to dislodge the thought. He'd spilled his seed in Anne last night, certain that he would marry her today. If he really was this beast now, this man by day and an animal by night, he could not marry her. And yet he might have planted his bastard. He above all men should know better than to do that to any child.

"Anne, come here," he called.

She glanced up from throwing another handful of branches on the fire, where a spit roasted their supper. He hoped she would show wariness of him, but she did not hesitate to come to him.

"What is it, Merrick?"

She stood before him, so beautiful, her eyes etched with worry… worry for him, he realized. "Sit." He nodded toward the place next to him.

"But our supper—" she began.

"Can wait," he finished.

Anne sat beside him. He took her pale, delicate hand in his. "Tonight, once the moon is up, if it happens again, I want you to make me a promise."

"That tree," Anne said, nodding in the direction where their bedrolls were spread. "I can climb it easily if—"

"No," he interrupted, staring deep into her eyes. "I don't want you to run from me, Anne." Merrick took the pistol from his waistband and handed it to her. "I want you to kill me."

Her lovely eyes widened. She refused to take the weapon he tried to press into her hand. "No, Merrick," she breathed. "Don't ask me to do that. I love you."

His heart twisted inside of his chest. He took her hand and forced the pistol into it. "If you love me, you'll do this for me, Anne. I'll have no life. A man by day, a beast by night. I'd be better off dead."

Tears filled her eyes. She shook her head. "You can have a life, Merrick. One with me. Like we planned. I've been thinking. We could go to the Wulf brothers—"

"No," he interrupted her. "I'll not crawl begging to them. I have my pride, Anne. If they are my blood kin, our father wanted them to have nothing to do with me or he'd have seen that I was raised alongside of them. He'd have seen they knew about me before he died."

"But maybe they know what is happening to you," Anne persisted. "It is said they are cursed. Perhaps the curse is not one of insanity as all believe. Maybe they suffer what you now suffer. Maybe they know a way—"

"Anne," he said more gently. "Don't you see? It's because our father must have known something was wrong with me that he kept me a secret, hidden away, ashamed and embarrassed about me. No, I'll not go to them."

She threw the pistol down and rose, staring down at him. "You'd rather die?" she asked. "Is that it, Merrick? Your pride is worth more than your life, than our life together?"

He rose to meet her glare for glare. "We have no life together," he drew out as if she were a slow-witted child. "Not if it happens again tonight. Now, promise me."

Anne shook her head. "I will not promise you. I don't think you would harm me, Merrick. You could have last night. I was unconscious. You might not remember what happened, but I believe you are still somehow you, even when the beast has taken your physical form."

"You believed your aunt and uncle cared more for you than they did for your inheritance, too," he reminded her unkindly. When she took a step back from him, as if he'd struck her, he felt like a beast indeed. "Forgive me for that," he said softly. "It was a cruel thing to say."

Anne straightened her spine and lifted her chin. "The truth is often cruel. So while we are on the subject of honesty, maybe you should examine your own motives for refusing help of any kind from anyone. I think you like it, Merrick. Being a bastard. Being bitter. Wanting your revenge. If you have all that, then you don't need anything else, or anyone. You don't have to be responsible. You don't have to share your heart. You don't have to give. You don't have to succeed where you feel your father has failed. You don't have to one day look in the mirror and realize that you are just like him."

"I am not like him!" Merrick hadn't meant to shout—didn't mean to make her jump—but dammit, he was not like the sorry excuse for a man who must have spawned him. He'd never abandon a child of his… or would he? For all he knew, he was already doing that. Merrick was no longer hungry. He needed time to think. Time alone. He walked away.

He halfway expected Anne to stop him, but she did not. It was better that she didn't. His physical hunger had disappeared, but his hunger for her was another matter. He wanted her. But if he could not have her in love, he should not take her in lust. The man knew that… the beast that prowled inside of him did not.