“What did you want to study?” Breck asked, putting a plate in front of her.
Darla had to gaze at it, awed by the spread. Beautiful plump strawberries, a selection of pastries drizzled in icing, a few slices of bacon — cold, but fragrant with salt and smoke — and a fan of sliced cheese and crusty bread.
“This is too much,” she said, though her stomach growled in protest. She automatically added, “Wo
n’t you share it with me?”
She glanced up and made the mistake of meeting Breck’s eyes. He was gazing at her in hunger that had nothing to do with the food before her. He wrenched his eyes away and nodded courteously, settling onto the stool across the stainless steel counter from her as she pushed the plate between them.
They were painstakingly careful, never reaching for the plate at the same time, not exactly looking each other in the face.
“What did you want to study?” Breck asked again.
“You’ll laugh,” Darla warned him.
“I won’t,” he promised. He took one of the strawberries. Darla looked at her orange juice to keep from watching him eat it.
“I wanted to fix things,” she said. “Electricity, or plumbing, or cars, or something. I wanted to learn to do useful things.” She laughed at herself, nibbling on a piece of creamy cheese. “It’s ridiculous, of course. I don’t know the first things about tools or machines. My car got a flat tire once, and you know what happened?”
“Tell me,” Breck encouraged.
“My mother bought me a new car.”
Breck did laugh at that and the sound was somehow settling. “Just like that?”
“Just like that,” Darla said, shaking her head. “I thought maybe I could change the tire myself, but I couldn’t find any of the tools, and I wouldn’t have known what to do with them if I had found them. And my mother freaked out because it had left me stranded in the middle of a terrible neighborhood. One with apartments, and children playing in the street, of all the horrors.”
“I could teach you,” Breck said unexpectedly. “I fix the cars around here, and I could show you a few tricks.”
Darla looked up again and regretted it at once. She could drown in those eyes. “Yes,” she said. Her brain caught up with her. “I mean, no.” The food went tasteless in her mouth and she swallowed.
“I’m sorry,” Breck said immediately. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have offered.”
There was a moment of silence. Neither of them reached for the few things left on the plate.
Breck finally said, “Do you do anything for fun?”
Darla clung to the conversational lifeline. “Mother finds it acceptable for me to volunteer for charities, so I spend a few days a week at a retirement home for shifters. She has no idea what the home entails, or I’m sure she wouldn’t let me. I think she figures I arrange flowers and maybe fluff pillows and read to people in comas. But it can be really dirty, hard, heart-breaking work, and I love it. All of them are so sweet. Mrs. Asher is like a grandmother to me. And Mr. Danby — he’s non-verbal, but you can tell that he’s still in there, and we play chess. That’s... where I met Liam. He runs the home.”
She had managed to stop looking at Breck at some point, so she only heard the slight hitch to his breath at the reminder of Liam.
“Do you love him?” he asked, as if he couldn’t help himself.
Darla shrugged miserably. “Yes. Not… like love love, but he’s my best friend. He’s my only friend. I don’t want to leave him in a lurch.”
Breck was quiet a long moment. “You’ll be happy with him,” he said, as if he desperately needed to believe it.
Just a day ago, she would have said that she would have been perfectly happy with Liam. Then she’d met Breck and gotten a glimpse at what happiness could be.
“I have to marry him,” Darla said, and she didn’t realize that she was crying until the first tear fell on the counter below her. It made an imperfect little wet circle on the shiny stainless steel. “I’m sorry, Breck,” she said, as boldly and honestly as she could. “I wish things were different. I wish we could be together.”
“I’d do anything,” he said simply. “I’d wait. I’d fight. I’d change. Tell me what to do, and I’d do it.”
At the word fight, Darla’s head rose. “There’s a challenge…” she said, barely daring to hope. Maybe she’d been wrong about Breck’s animal.
“I’ll challenge,” Breck said swiftly. “How do I challenge?”
“It’s a battle in shifted form,” Darla said, heart in her throat. “Your animal…”