7

IT wasn’t love yet, but it could be. Fast. She could fall fast. She might even be halfway there. Evangeline rolled over in her bed. She’d paid a fortune for the mattress, more than she had for just about any other piece of furniture because she was always so exhausted at night. There was no finding sleep and she knew there wouldn’t be. Not with Alonzo’s words drifting through her mind over and over.

“I went . . .” He’d trailed off. “Crazy. Insane. Mad with rage, grief and fear for my brother and cousin. I killed him. Not easily, and not cleanly. Not, Evangeline, because I couldn’t, but I didn’t want easy or clean. He died hard. Very hard. And then I killed every male in the lair. It was a cold, calculated choice. If I didn’t, they would continue with their cruelties and they would kill their women and daughters. Or sell their daughters as they often did to other lairs to live the same fate as their mothers. I killed them all. Every. Single. One.”

Evangeline sat up and pushed at the heavy fall of hair spilling around her face. She’d been so agitated she hadn’t even put her hair in a braid, something she was always careful to do. He hadn’t wanted to kill his father easy or clean. He’d said that. His father deserved to die. Had to die. What human or even shifter forced his child into being a killer?

Alonzo hadn’t said anything about his life in the lair, in the bratya, as he’d called it, but she could imagine what he’d done. What was expected. If at six he was forced to kill, then that had been his way of life.

“All right, Bebe, we’re in trouble. You get that, don’ you?” she whispered aloud to her leopard, and her female rose immediately, rubbing fur along her insides to comfort her as she’d done since Evangeline was a toddler. “It isn’t goin’ to be just about sex for us, no matter how much that’s what we want it to be. I’ll fall for him. Not a little. A lot. I’ll drown in him.” She pressed her closed fist to her mouth and rocked gently back and forth.

He’d been six. She knew he hadn’t told her so she would be sympathetic. He wanted her to know exactly who he was. What she would be living with. But she couldn’t help but think of that little boy and what he’d been forced to do. Tears burned behind her eyes and clogged her throat—tears she hadn’t shed when Alonzo was with her. She didn’t dare. He would have tried to comfort her, and she couldn’t get that close.

“What are we going to do?” she asked her leopard.

Alonzo might say she was the only one safe, but living with him would be difficult at best. He was as dominant as a man could get. She wasn’t in the least submissive. She loved her bakery and she didn’t want anyone telling her how to run it or interfering in any way. What if he suddenly decided she couldn’t work?