Moon Dance (35 page)

Larissa picked up the remote
and switched off the screen. “Don’t lie to me, Dana. It’s just us
girls. There
is
something between you and Cole, and it’s not just
history.”

Well. Dana wasn’t sure this
conversation was much better than watching TV. She just shook her
head. She didn’t know what to say.

“
You did it somehow,” said
Larissa. “You tamed him.”

Dana raised her eyebrows.
“What are you talking about?”

“
I never heard an apology
come out of his mouth before,” she said. “I never heard him take
notice of anyone’s feelings. The Cole I knew was cold and distant.
He was intelligent, and I even thought he was attractive, but
whenever I was close to him, I always thought, ‘There’s something
off about this guy. There’s something missing.’ And then when I
found out he was killing people, I felt like an idiot, because I’d
always sensed something, but I’d just brushed it off.”

Dana squared her shoulders.
“There’s still something missing with him.”

“
Maybe,” said Larissa.
“Maybe, but not as bad as before.”

Dana let out a little laugh.
“This is like your lecture earlier. Saying that letting him rape me
is turning him human.”

Larissa sat up straight.
“Wait, he
raped
you? Is
that
why you have a child?”

Dana swallowed. “It wasn’t
exactly… I mean, I wouldn’t be with him if I didn’t… Forget
it.”

Larissa took her hand. “If
he’s hurting you—”

“
He’s not.”

“
You can tell me,” she said.
“I can help you.”

“
It’s not like that.” Yeah,
Dana was pretty sure that the TV would have been easier than this
conversation.

Larissa raised her eyebrows.
“You know, a lot of times women blame themselves for things that
aren’t their faults. If a man does something to you that you don’t
want to happen, then it’s his fault, not yours.”

“
I know that.” Dana got up
of the couch, pulling her hand out of Larissa’s.

“
I don’t want you to get the
impression that I don’t think rape is a big deal from my lecture.
There’s a big difference between things that happen in fiction and
things that happen in real life. A book never hurt anyone, no
matter what it says inside.”

Dana went over to the
window. She peered out at Larissa’s back yard. The grass needed
cut. “So, you think your lecture only applies to books,
then?”

Larissa sighed. “There are
things about it that I’d like to apply to real life. The dual
surrender thing would be nice. But, you know, what mostly happens
is that one side surrenders and the other side doesn’t. So one side
has all the power. Sometimes it’s the man and sometimes it’s the
woman, but most relationships are lopsided.” She paused. “I think
you can take back your surrender too. You can surrender at the
beginning, but you can put all your walls back up slowly, one brick
at a time. And then one day, you wake up, and you’re married, and
you don’t touch, and everything that comes out of his mouth annoys
you, and when you think of surrendering to something like him, you
just feel disgusted.”

Dana turned away from the
window.

Larissa smiled wryly. “I
speak from personal experience.”

“
Marriage isn’t easy.” God
damn it. Avery. Was it going to hurt this bad every time she
thought of him? Every time for the rest of her life?

Larissa put her hands in her
lap. “I think we tell stories for lots of reasons. Some of it’s
selfish wish-fulfillment, but sometimes it’s to show us the way
things
could
be,
in a perfect world. I think romance novels do that. Show us an
ideal. Most people claim that they read them to escape, though, so
I think we all know how much they’re actually like real
life.”

Dana looked back out the
window. She placed her fingertips against the glass. “In real life,
surrendering to a beast-man doesn’t make him civilized. Instead, it
changes you. It makes you a beast-woman.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Cole lounged in one of the
easy chairs in Larissa
’s living room. It
was dark, and Dana sprawled out on the couch, asleep. She looked
peaceful lying there. Peaceful and beautiful, and he watched her
chest rise and fall with her easy breath, thinking that he wished
she could always be that peaceful. Thinking that he was selfish to
have thrust himself into her life, thinking of all the things he’d
done to hurt her.

He was supposed to be asleep too, but
sleep eluded him.

He’d spoken on the phone to
an old acquaintance, and that person had told him Enoch funneled
the kids to his sister Deedee. Apparently, it was what Deedee had
wanted to do after getting out of the relationship with Enoch.
She’d wanted a large group of kids to take care of, and so she was
in charge of all the children from the SF.

It was good news, but Cole
wasn’t sure of Deedee. He hadn’t spoken to her in years, and he’d
always thought her heart was in the right place.

Of course, he’d thought that
about Angela, too, and he remembered the cavalier way that Angela
had dismissed Enoch’s SF whores. She hadn’t seemed to care about
their suffering one way or the other. Still, maybe that was because
of the way they’d grown up. Their father Jimmy was always adding
new girls to his stable, and though the girls on Hunter’s Moon Farm
weren’t physically harmed (
except Tasha,
except goddamned Tasha, and it was my fault
), they weren’t respected either. They weren’t treated like
people.

Thing was, he and all his siblings were
screwed up.

He kept tabs on the children
who’d been released from Hunter’s Moon Farm. Most were being
shuffled around in foster care, but Cole was still convinced they
were better off than they had been in that awful place.

He wanted to trust Deedee,
and in the end, he’d made the only call he knew to make, which was
to tell his acquaintance to pass along his contact information to
his sister.

He hoped that Deedee would
talk to him without involving Enoch, but he couldn’t be sure. Now
that she had his phone number, she could pass that information off
to Enoch, and Enoch could trace the phone. Enoch could be on top of
them in days.

Cole had the phone that
Deedee would use to contact him turned off for now, because his
acquaintance had assured him that he wouldn’t be able to get in
touch with Deedee until tomorrow. So, there was no chance of Deedee
knowing until then.

Hopefully, she’d simply call
Cole, and then he could set up a way to get Piper back.

If she didn’t, though, well,
they couldn’t be near Larissa anymore.

It was one thing to be here
with the SF breathing down their necks. If the SF discovered them
at Larissa’s house, nothing would happen to Larissa. But if Enoch’s
men found them here, they’d be likely to kill Larissa.

Cole planned on waking Dana
up before dawn so that the two of them could leave quietly. He
still wasn’t sure where they could go.

Part of him wished he could
leave her behind. Not because he wanted to be away from her—he
didn’t. He never wanted that. But simply because he was worried for
her safety. He didn’t want her hurt any worse than she’d already
been hurt. He wished he had someplace safe to sock her away, so
that he could go and get back her daughter. Then he’d reunite them,
and he’d walk away, leave them to themselves.

But for now, it was too
dangerous for Dana to be alone. So, he had to bring her along.
After all this was over, then he’d find some way to make sure
she
could
be safe.
But first, he had to get her daughter back.

Footsteps behind him. Larissa was
coming down the hall.

He peered around the edge of the chair
and saw her in her pajamas, her hair in a sloppy bun on top of her
head.

She saw him too. “You’re
still awake?”

He got out of the chair and
went out into the kitchen. “I am. So are you.”

She sighed. “Guess I’m still
keyed up after everything that happened today. Besides, you did
make me take a long nap in the middle of the afternoon.”

Cole looked down at his
feet. His shoes were off, and he was barefoot. “Yeah, sorry about
that.”

She eyed him, her hand on
the door to a cabinet. “I was coming down to get myself a glass of
wine. Sometimes that helps me fall asleep. You want
one?”

“
Sure. Thanks.”

She got the wine out of the
cabinet. “She’s the one you used to talk about it, isn’t she? The
girl from high school?”

Cole furrowed his brow. “I
talked about Dana?”

She took a corkscrew from a
drawer and began to twist it into the cork. “Only once or twice. I
didn’t make the connection until earlier this evening, when you
said something to her, and I heard the way your voice changed when
you said her name. Then I remembered. She was important to you.
She’s always been important to you.”

He shoved his hands into his
pockets. “She’s the only important thing.”

Larissa poured wine into the
glasses and walked over to the table, setting them down. “I
remember you telling me that no one was important to
you.”

He went over to the table
and picked up the glass of wine. He took a sip. “I said that,
huh?”

She sat down, taking a sip
of her own wine. “You said that interpersonal connections muddled
the natural order of things. You said that humans only sought to
pair bond because of our extremely helpless young, but that we had
evolved improperly and that our urge to mate was stronger than our
urge to love.”

Cole snorted. ‘Yeah, that
sounds like something I might have said.”

“
Well, I agreed with you. I
haven’t been very lucky in love myself. I don’t see much use for
it.”

“
And yet you study
literature about epic love stories. It’s ironic.”

“
I don’t think so. I think
that I can understand love better from the outside. I can observe
it, and it doesn’t cloud my judgment.”

He took another sip of wine.
“Really?”

“
You disagree?”

“
No, not necessarily. I
don’t know much about love one way or the other.”

It was Larissa’s turn to
snort. “You’re in love with Dana.”

Cole made a dismissive
noise. “No, I’m not. I don’t know how to love things.”

“
Yeah, it’s probably not
necessary to understand love in order to feel it.”

He drank more wine. “Well,
she could never love me, so it doesn’t matter.”

Larissa raised her eyebrows.
“What did you to her?”

He fiddled with the stem of
the glass. If it had been daylight, maybe he wouldn’t have
answered. But it was dark, and the wine was making his stomach
pleasantly warm, and it seemed easier to speak. “I tried to kill
her. I kept her chained up in my basement and forced her to shift
back and forth between her human form and her werewolf form. I
stalked her. We ended up mated, and I preyed on that. I preyed on
her attraction to me. I forced her…” He shook his head.

“
Forced her to
what?”

He looked down into his
wine. “Why are you asking me this?”

“
I don’t know.” She gulped
at her wine, and her fingers were shaking. “I wasn’t expecting you
to say things like that.”

“
I’m sorry.”

“
It’s only that you were so
quiet and calm with me. So controlled. Even when we had sex, I felt
like you were holding back. Is that what you were holding back,
Cole? Violence?”

He ran his tongue over his
teeth. “I would never have hurt you. I’m not going to
now.”

“
That isn’t what I asked.”
She caught his gaze with her own.

He tried to look into her
eyes, but he couldn’t. He looked down at the table. “Yes. I suppose
that’s what I was holding back.”

“
And you don’t hold back
with Dana?”

He rubbed the back of his
neck. “I can’t hold back with her. I’ve never been able to. She
makes me feel… unchecked.” He picked up his wine glass. “I guess
she gets all of it. All of me. The good parts and the bad parts.
But she… she takes it. And she always comes back for more. And I
try… I try to stay away from her, but I…” He took a drink of wine.
“It’s not love, Larissa. It’s obsession.”

* * *

Cole woke Dana up while it
was still dark outside. His breath smelled like wine, but she
didn
’t say anything about it. She was
afraid of what it meant. When she saw the two wine goblets in the
sink, it was like a stab in her heart. Larissa and Cole. Drinking
wine together.

She didn’t like
that.

But she didn’t say anything,
because she thought of Avery, of the way he’d begged her not to go
away with Cole. The way his face had twisted when he’d told her
that she would break him if she slept with Cole.