An American Werewolf in Hoboken (20 page)

Oh. No fear of that. Already taken care of. But he had a point, and she said as much. “Good point.”

Taking her hand in his, he held it, running his fingers over her skin. “Has any of this sunk in at all?”

Yeah. Yeah. Sinking.
“Explain the life mate thing.” She couldn’t help it. She’d seen it on TV shows, read it in a book or two, but she wanted to hear his theory out loud.

“As a werewolf, you’re supposed to mate with whomever the universe chooses. It’s fated at your birth. When the time comes, a prophecy’s handed down, and you go on your life-mate journey.”

“And where does this prophecy come from?”

“Each werewolf pack has a prophet. Ours is my aunt Eva.”

“So she told you JC Jensen from Hoboken, New Jersey, was your life mate?”

He winced. “It doesn’t quite work like that. She reads signs from objects, and typically doesn’t have specifics like names. Just a general location.”

“From what object did she read the sign that I was your life mate?”

He winced again, shifting in his chair. “Her chicken noodle soup.”

“Like Progresso or Campbell’s?”

Now he looked confused again. “Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters, Max. It’s all about the brand. What if it was cheap store-brand chicken noodle soup?”

“That’s crazy.”

“You’re calling crazy here?”

“Absolutely fair. It was homemade chicken noodle soup.”

“Does it happen like this for everyone in your pack?”
Pack. Oh, Jesus Christ and a Rainbow Brite.

“Yes. Aunt Eva gets almost all of her prophecies in her chicken noodle soup.”

“So you all have to pair up with someone you don’t know, and might not even like, when Aunt Eva finds the sign in her soup?”

“I know it sounds hokey, but yes.”

“Bet everybody can’t wait for soup night.”

“I admit it can be uncomfortable.”

“Okay, so all the magical, mysterious, werewolf-Fluffy stuff aside, dating me and making me fall—” She paused, checking herself and her earlier internal admission of love. “Making me like you, were what? Just a ploy to get me here to Crazies R’ Us?”

Now Max actually looked pained. “Yes and no. It wasn’t a ploy to get you here to Cedar Glen. It was a way to get to know you before this interfered. But I knew the second you stood in front of my cage.”

“That?”

“That I would love you. That even though I didn’t right that second, I would. I knew you were the one,” he admitted, his voice so painfully low, so raw, she had to fight to remember what he’d just told her.

And there it was. Not the leaving-Hoboken flaw, but the
real
big, ugly flaw. The one she knew existed but couldn’t find.

Until now.

Max was crazy. Gorgeously, perfectly, wonderfully crazy.

It only made sense that she would find the one man on earth who thought he was a werewolf and fall head over heels for him.

That was just how her love life was meant to be.

Crazy.

She’d gone from thinking this was some sort of cult, to understanding what Max’s mother had meant when Faith said she just needed to come inside and listen. Maybe they’d tried to help him, to no avail? He wasn’t exactly a child—maybe they couldn’t force him to get the therapy he needed? It was obvious his family loved him. Maybe this was something they all just lived with, like when children had imaginary friends?

But that didn’t explain Jerry, and it didn’t make sense that his family would let him roam the planet telling everyone he was a werewolf.

The trouble here was, she was in love with him. She couldn’t be in a relationship with him this way—with him believing he was a werewolf—but love him she did. Grasping at straws, she mentally tried to sort through this. Maybe there was help for him? Maybe some psychiatrist, or some medication, or something—something that would heal him.

“JC?”

Her head popped up. “Hmm?”

“I can show you, if you’d like.”

“Show me what?”

“That I’m a werewolf. I don’t want you to be afraid, J. What you’ll see can be pretty scary, I suppose. But I swear to you, once I shift, I’ll be Fluffy.”

God. He really did believe he was a werewolf. If she agreed to let him show her, was she indulging him and his sickness? If she said no, would he lose it and hurt her, or even himself?

But the way he looked at her, the way his eyes implored, made her soften. He wasn’t frantic or anxious right now. There’d never been a single inclination he was violent thus far.

He was just Max. Something inside told her he was the same Max, just with a quirk. A quirk that would require severe medical intervention, but he wasn’t violent.

So she smiled at him, fighting tears of helplessness. “Sure, Max,” she whispered softly. “Show me.”

Chapter Seventeen

Max rose, pushing the chair back, rolling his neck on his shoulders and cracking his knuckles.

He closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. JC heard a crunching, a harsh cracking, heard him moan, and then…

Sweet fancy Moses!

It happened.

This was really happening, right before her very eyes, like some surreal movie—as though she were in a theater watching this all play out with 3D glasses on.

She gripped the arms of her chair, frozen in place. Her heart crashed against her ribs so hard, she thought she might pass out.

Tufts of gray and black hair sprouted from Max’s face as his nose elongated and grew to a snout. Each muscle in his body rippled, tensing and flexing as his clothes ripped apart and he shed his human skin.

Max fell forward on what was left of his hands, swiftly turning into paws with sharp nails. Throwing his head back, twisting it as each muscle realigned, muffling a cry when they shifted into place.

And then his legs gave way, dropping out from under him, melting into back legs shaped just like a canine’s.

JC crawled up the chair using her arms, pushing off the floor with her feet until she almost tipped over. Pressing herself against the back of the chair, she fought a hysterical scream. Her chest heaved as Max completed this insane change, this mind-bending trick.

Maybe they’d put something in her food at dinner? Some drug? No way was this really happening.

But then Fluffy was there, right in front of her, letting his muzzle rest on the edge of the chair like he’d done a hundred times since she’d adopted him. His enormous brown eyes sought hers, watching, pleading.

This was
her
Fluffy. The Fluffy she’d dropped off for a nice long weekend of cuddles and pedicures and obedience training.

Tears began to roll down her face just as she began to shake her head. No. This was not happening.

She slid down on the chair, too weak to hold herself up, too terrified, too in awe by what she’d just witnessed.

Fluffy did what he always did if he sensed she was sad or tired. He put his nose on her leg, unmoving, watching her.

With a trembling hand, she reached out, tentatively touching his nose before snatching her hand away, afraid her delusions had suddenly become that real. The kind of delusions where you didn’t just see things, you felt them, experienced them with sound, color, texture.

And Fluffy sat right by her side—the way he always did.

* * *

Max sat opposite her again in the bathrobe his mother had loaned him, as though he’d never twisted and grunted his way into being one of the best circus sideshows in the history of Barnum and Bailey. He looked ridiculous in the pink and mint-green fuzzy fabric, his chest bursting out of the front. Yet still, he was adorable.

He waited patiently as she processed, ran over in her head the outlandish scenario. He didn’t push. He didn’t prod. He certainly didn’t make threats the way she thought someone who wanted to welcome her to the crazy-fold would.

But their silence was substantial, overwhelming her. Someone needed to do something—say something, make a move. “I can’t believe what I just saw,” she managed with unsteady words.

As stoic as Fluffy once was, Max’s words mirrored that stare he used to give her. “I understand.”

He was so calm. So together. Damn him. “Do you? Do you really? You’re asking me to accept what I just saw, Max. Did you drug me? Put something in my food—something that would make me hallucinate?”

His eyes held hers, deep and brown. “No. What you saw is real.”

“How can I,” she waved a finger between them, “be your soul person, or whatever you call it? I’m
human
. Is this like all the stories I’ve read where I have to be just like you in order to become part of your pack?”

Max’s face was bleak, rigid with tension. “No. You don’t have to be like me, and I won’t kill you, gut you, or eat you. We live quite peacefully here in Cedar Glen, J. We don’t pillage and plunder either. We just have abilities for which we’d be locked up and experimented on by the very government you think we work for if we revealed who we really are. We’re just like you, except we can do what we call shift. Much of the violence of a werewolf’s myth is just that—myth, folklore. I would never hurt you, or anyone. I’d die rather than hurt you.”

He’d
already
hurt her. And the thought of him dying stung—stung as though he’d struck her. “Do you remember when you said if I still wanted to go home after we talked, you’d take me?”

His jaw tightened, the dark stubble on it shifting over his olive skin. “I do.”

“I want to go home.
Please
, just take me home. I need to think.”

Max rose from the chair, placing a hand on her shoulder—a warm, gentle hand. “I’ll go change and grab your bag, but I want you to know something before we go, and then I won’t say another word.”

His tone held defeat, and it shouldn’t be slicing her up like a knife, but it was. “What?”

Tilting her chin up, he looked down at her, his eyes dark and serious. “I knew from the second you found me in the shelter you were the one.
I knew
. No matter what you decide to do from here, if it means you can’t accept who I am, what we all are, I’ll understand. But I need you to know I fell in love with you these past weeks. I lied to you about who I really was. I pretended I was your dog, but I didn’t do any of it to hurt you. I did it because I didn’t
want
you to hurt, and I didn’t want to scare you. And no matter what you decide about us, if you decide my world isn’t something you can handle, I’ll love you anyway.”

Her heart throbbed, ached. Her arms shook to keep from pulling him to her, inhaling his scent, returning to the embrace that brought her the most peace she’d encountered in a long time.

But she couldn’t—because this was too much. Because she was afraid she still didn’t believe his story entirely.

But if he took her home, it would be a start.

Squeezing his hand, she slipped past him, fighting the desperate urge to bury her face in his chest, and headed out of the kitchen. “I’ll wait by the car.”

* * *

“Fuck, Max. I’m sorry, man,” Derrick said, clamping a hand on his shoulder as his family hovered around him in his house. “I thought Jerry was all tucked into bed. I’m sorry.”

“Language, Derrick, please,” Faith warned. When she turned to Max, her eyes were full of tears as-yet unshed. “Honey, you have to tell her.
Please
.”

He shook his head, dropping her shoes into her bag. “Not a chance, Mom. It’s enough that she’s got crazy thoughts like we drugged her so she’d hallucinate werewolves—or that we’re some cult. Her mental state is fragile. Add in my dying and she’d tip right over the edge. I won’t do it. None of you will do it,” he ordered, waving a finger at his sisters and Derrick.

Derrick grabbed Max’s jacket and threw it at him, his eyes hard. He stood in front of him, keeping him from moving to the front door of his house. “Dude, this is your life we’re talking about.”

“Yep. But I can’t force her to want to become part of the pack, Derrick. That’s not gonna happen. Maybe the curse and the damn universe should’ve thought of that before they matched me with a human. Either way, I don’t want a woman who’s here by manipulation. So shut up and
move
. Or I’ll damn well move you myself.”

Natalie began to cry, fat tears splashing off her cheeks. “I know this is awful, Max, and I don’t know why the stupid universe and this curse gave you a human as a mate, but you
have
to tell her. I can’t just let you die!”

He couldn’t hear anymore. All that mattered now was keeping his promise to JC so she wouldn’t be more frightened of him. He couldn’t see his mother’s tears. Couldn’t hear Derrick’s protests.

Pushing Derrick out of the way, he said over his shoulder, “I’ll see you all in a day or two.”

He shoved the door open and headed toward JC.

* * *

The ride back to Hoboken was filled with a palpable silence, broken only by the sounds of the country whizzing past the windows and the return to the bright lights of the city.

JC couldn’t speak if she wanted to, anyway. Not now. He’d done what he’d promised to do—take her home without another word.

When they pulled up beside their apartment building and Max came around to let her out, she took one last glance at him before pushing her way past his solid body, stumbling on the strap of her overnight bag.

She ran up the stairs to her apartment and jammed the key she’d had at the ready into the doorknob, slamming the door behind her and taking a deep breath.

Closing her eyes, the horror of what she’d seen assaulted her mind’s eye, making her tremble.

How would she ever, ever get past what she’d seen?

How would she ever get over being in love with a man who was really a werewolf?

Max was really a werewolf.

He had a family of werewolves.

Everything began shutting down, her brain, her exhausted body, her will to stand.

JC grabbed her cell from her bag, dropping everything else and letting it scatter. She kicked off her shoes and began stripping off her clothes, letting them fall to the floor until she stood in nothing but her underwear. Without bothering to wash the makeup off her face, she found the old T-shirt Max had loaned her the other day after they’d taken a shower together and put it on.