Part 29 (1/2)

”I hope not.” She looked around the room. ”How long are we staying here?”

”Part of the night. After I get some rest, we can head back to my campsite.”

They sat down, and he took a sip of soup. She nibbled on a piece of cheese.

He managed to take a couple more swallows before saying with studied casualness, ”You'll feel better when you tell me about Falcone.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

LOGAN SAW RINNA almost choke on the piece of cheese in her mouth. Deliberately she chewed and swallowed, probably to give herself time to think of what to say.

He wondered where his last line had come from. It hadn't been what he'd planned. He'd wanted to tell her how much he cared. He wanted her to understand that they had bonded. But he'd never practiced in-depth man-woman communications. So he'd stuck to business, and the words he was thinking had popped out of his mouth. Probably from her point of view, he'd issued a challenge.

She folded her hands in her lap before asking, ”Why will I feel better?”

He turned his spoon over and examined the back. ”Because when you hold bad stuff inside, it eats at you. It affects your mind and your body.”

She tipped her head to the side, watching him with unnerving intensity. ”You know that from personal experience?”

”Yes.” He wanted to look away, but he kept his gaze fixed on her. If he could show her he wasn't afraid to share his painful memories, maybe she would, too.

”From when I was a kid. My father was a hard man who expected that his sons would do what he ordered and not buck his authority. I had a lot of questions about what it meant to be a werewolf, since the only werewolves I knew of were in the Marshall family. And we hid that trait from the rest of the world. But I kept my feelings bottled up because...” He shrugged. ”Dad never brought up that kind of stuff.”

He s.h.i.+fted in his seat and went on. ”You said you first changed to another form when you were a little girl. But in my heritage, we don't change to wolf form until we're s.e.xually mature. It's a big deal not just because it means we've turned from boy to man. Unfortunately, half of us died trying to make the change.”

She gasped. ”Why?”

”n.o.body knew. That's the way it was, through all the generations. My cousin Ross's wife, Megan, says it's hormonal. She thinks she can fix the problem for... the children. But when I was facing the change, I got more and more upset and angry because I was sure I wasn't going to make it. I thought I was going to die because three of my brothers before me had already bought the farm. It all came to a head one day when I was helping my father clean out the garage of all things. I threw down the armload of fireplace wood I was carrying and started screaming that I wasn't going to do it.”

He saw that she was hanging on every word. In truth, he had always been ashamed of the way he'd taken out his fear on his parent. Dad hadn't set the rules. He'd just had to live by them the way all the Marshalls had.

But that outburst had truly wiped the slate clean in an odd sort of way. And now Logan seized on the confession as a way to deepen his relations.h.i.+p with Rinna. So he kept talking.

”My father understood why I exploded, and he calmed me down. He said he'd felt the same, way when he was facing the change. He told me how sad and angry he was that my brothers had died. For the first time in our lives, we had a really good talk. He explained about our heritage, and he gave me some ways to get through the transformation. Just having that conversation with him-man-to-man-made me feel a lot better. Maybe it even saved my life.”

”You chant when you change?”

”Yes.”

”What does it mean?”

”It's in an old language. Gaelic. It's asking the G.o.ds for special favors. My cousin, Ross, figures some long-ago Druid ancestor asked to become a shapes.h.i.+fter, and he got his wish. The gift, or the curse, has been pa.s.sed down through the men in my family.”

She nodded, then asked. ”What about the girls?”

He hadn't planned to get into so much detail on the Marshall curse. But he answered the question. ”For us, the werewolf trait is s.e.x linked. So all of the girl babies died at birth. It's different now. Megan and Ross have a daughter. That's a big milestone for our family.”

”So the wives of your brothers and cousins don't have psychic powers?” she asked.