“I have you, mo stoirín,” Ethan promised her as he carefully sat down in the tub filling with cold water and shifted the screaming woman in his arms so that she was laying with her head resting against his chest as she struggled to catch her breath.
“Please, don’t,” she whimpered as she grabbed hold of his shirt and buried her face against his chest.
“You’re safe, mo stoirín,” he said as he placed his hand on her back and moved it in an awkward caress as Noah shut the water off and left without a word.
It had been so long since he’d held someone like this. The last time had been when Trace was a little boy. Trace hated carriages, hated being thrown side to side in the overcrowded, rickety old things. The carriages barely had a chance to take off before his son would crawl onto his lap and bury his face against his chest. Within minutes, Trace would be fast asleep and Ethan would sit there, content to hold his son in his arms. It made him wonder what his son thought of his first car ride.
He probably hated every last minute of it, Ethan thought, chuckling as his movements became less awkward until running his hands over her back felt like the most natural thing in the world to do. His wife always hated this sort of thing. She’d been a prim and proper little thing with a mischievous smile that used to drive him insane and she could never seem to stay still.
He’d loved Emily, but she used to drive him insane, he thought with a fond smile as he shifted so that he could lower Indie into the water, careful of her incision. Chasing after Emily had been a fulltime job. She’d hated sitting still, loved staying busy, and she especially loved doing all those things that women did to make everything perfect for a baby and-
He never should have listened to her.
She’d wanted to wait until Trace was older before he’d changed her, afraid that the baby would need something during the day or manage to wander outside and they’d be helpless to do anything about it. If he’d known the hell that waited for her…
“I don’t like cold water,” the small woman holding onto him whispered as he continued rubbing her back beneath the water.
“I know you don’t, mo stoirín,” Ethan murmured absently as he closed his eyes and dropped his head back against the wall, wondering what the hell he was doing.
Chapter 26
Westdrom, Maine
She was definitely calling in sick today, Samantha decided as she opened her eyes only to squeeze them shut again when the sunlight streaming into her room caused the searing pain currently tearing her skull apart to explode.
Definitely calling in sick, she thought as she blindly reached for her phone only to remember where she was. That led her to biting her lip to stop herself from crying as she shifted her search from her phone so that she could call in sick to the extra-large bottle of Advil and bottle of water she kept by the bed for just this reason. After she swallowed three pills, she slowly exhaled, sat up, and was forced to bite back a wince when her head protested the move.
It took a few minutes, but she finally managed to make it to the bathroom. After she spent thirty minutes standing in the shower, waiting for the hot water to make the pain bearable again, she got dressed, walked back into the bedroom and decided that she didn’t want to spend another depressing day alone in bed.
Deciding that she’d rather spend a depressing day on the couch waiting for the phone to ring instead, Samantha grabbed a pillow and blanket off the bed and went downstairs. She wasn’t really surprised when she didn’t run into Trace along the way since he’d been avoiding her for the past few days, which was fine with her. She was just here to make sure that he was safe, which she decided meant driving him somewhere else if something happened and making sure that he had plenty of blood.
Since she didn’t want to find out what would happen when he ran out of blood, she’d decided to call in an order for blood the other night when she noticed that he was drinking more than fifteen bags a day. She’d considered asking him where all that bagged blood in the refrigerator came from, but since he would have just ignored her, Samantha searched the kitchen instead and found the business card on the bottom of a cooler. After the creepiest phone call of her life, she’d managed to order more blood, which had been delivered promptly at two in the morning by a guy that hadn’t been able to stop staring at her neck.
She’d just barely managed to stop herself from asking him if he was like Trace when she realized that she had no idea what Trace was. Other than cranky that is, Samantha mused as she dropped her stuff on the couch and headed to the kitchen, knowing that if he was in there that he would take off as soon as he heard her coming, because that’s what he did. Well, that and glaring, Samantha thought as she grabbed a package of blueberry Pop-Tarts out of the box, popped them in the toaster that she’d ordered off Amazon before she grabbed a can of dog food off the counter and popped the top for the asshole that followed her into the kitchen.
Ignoring the look of disgust that he was sending his food, the same food that he would bitch and whine about if she didn’t buy it for him, she grabbed a Coke out of the fridge, put her piping hot Pop-Tarts on a plate and headed back to the living room. There, she spent the next thirty minutes eating her Pop-Tarts and debating what she was going to watch today. After grabbing another Coke, she decided that it was time to do some research on her current situation and settled on a horror movie marathon.
Deciding to ease into this, Samantha put on A Werewolf in Paris, curled up with her blanket and settled in. Thirty minutes later, she was regretting her decision not to start with something else like Scooby-Doo or pretty much anything else that wouldn’t have her laying there, hoping that werewolves really didn’t look like that and-
“What is this?” Trace asked as she watched in horror as another unfortunate party guest was torn to pieces.
“A movie,” Samantha said because right now, that was all she could mana
ge as she tried her best not to imagine what would have happened if the men in her basement had turned into werewolves. She probably would have passed out as soon as they started sporting fangs, she thought as Trace sat down on the end of the couch. Her grip on the blanket tightened right around the time that her breaths started coming a little too quickly as she watched a werewolf tear apart some poor bastard who hadn’t been able to run fast enough and-
Found herself frowning when Trace started laughing.
For a moment, she was distracted by the unexpected sound and unable to help but notice that he had a nice laugh, it was deep and incredibly sexy and…was starting to unnerve her a bit considering that he was laughing his ass off as a werewolf gouged a man.
“What’s so funny?” Samantha asked, and to be honest, she wasn’t sure why she did that, not when she really didn’t want to know the answer.
“This is fake,” Trace said, chuckling as he reached over and helped himself to her Coke.
“H-how do you know?” Samantha asked, really hoping that this wasn’t the part where he broke the news to her that he was a werewolf.
“Because werewolves don’t look like that,” he said with an incredibly sexy smile that made it difficult to focus.
“They don’t?” she asked, sounding hopeful.