Page 87 of Roguefinder

JESSE

Caleb wasn’t making sense.

I gripped his knees, torn between questioning him and scooping him into my arms and carrying him straight to bed.

“I saw France,” he rasped. “I was in the dining salon in the château.”

My heart stopped. Then it started again, knocking against my ribs like a clenched fist. Salon. Caleb didn’t say words like salon and château.

“You’re disoriented,” I said, rising and pressing a hand to his forehead. His skin was damp.

He shook me off. “I’m fine. Jesse, I was in your head. Inside your body.” His blue eyes were steady despite his pallor. “I saw Philippe through your eyes.”

I sat without planning to. Blood rushed in my ears. “What did you see?” I asked, but I already knew. The answer was in his eyes, which were certain but anguished, old hurts staring back at me.

My hurts, buried and stomped flat over a century ago.

In a low, halting voice, Caleb told me what he’d seen. The dining salon. The candlelight. The ribbon in Philippe’s hair. His crop and clamps and the bowls of wax he’d kept for the times it pleased him to drip it over my balls and press the de Boisseaux crest into it as it cooled.

Caleb described my mother’s sewing machine. My father’s strap. The horse we’d sold so we could eat.

“You weren’t lazy, Jesse,” he said at last. A tear slipped down his cheek.

My chest burned, and a curious pressure settled on it like I was pinned under a bench press. A heart attack, maybe, except werewolves didn’t have them.

I’d never told anyone about that horse. Not even Philippe.

“His name was Ridder,” I said, forcing the words past the pressure in my chest. “It means knight in Dutch. I named him.”

Caleb made a sound. Then he was in my lap, his thighs against my hips and his big arms around my shoulders.

“Fuck,” he whispered, squeezing my neck. He put his lips to my cheek and kept them there as he stroked the back of my head. “Fuck, Jesse, I’m so sorry.”

My vision blurred. I closed my eyes and held onto him. The pain in my chest faded to a stitch that comes after running too long. A feeling surfaced, and I didn’t have a name for it. Violation came close, although that wasn’t quite right. That implied intent, and Caleb hadn’t meant to go where he’d gone. But he’d slipped under my skin. He’d picked up parts I’d mended and turned them over, exposing the undersides that never saw the sun.

He pulled back, his eyes wet and bluer than the ocean. “Jesse…” he whispered, cupping my face with both hands. “You were so lonely. You were just a kid, and you were so lonely.”

I swallowed hard. He was warm in my lap—and close enough for me to count every freckle on the bridge of his nose. He hated them but I’d memorized each golden dot and trusted the sun to give him more.

Star-spangled. He was better than that sky.

“I’m not lonely anymore,” I said.

His breath hitched. He traced gentle thumbs under my eyes, rubbing away moisture that had gathered without my permission. “Good.”

We leaned into each other at the same moment, foreheads meeting, and he smiled.

“Forehead frotting,” he murmured.

I closed my eyes, pretending to be annoyed even as I was hopelessly charmed. “You’re going to ruin regular frotting if you keep saying that.”

He laughed, and the last of the pressure eased from my chest. “I think you like it,” he said, easing off my lap and settling in his chair.

I took his hand. “Maybe.”

We smiled at each other, joined hands resting on my thigh with the hushed kitchen around us. He rubbed his thumb over my knuckles.

“Why didn’t you tell me your childhood was like mine?”