Enough to keep Sera safe.
Safe. The one thing Franklin had begged of him as Julio had dragged him out of his burning, destroyed clinic a year earlier. He’d been terrified of dying and leaving Sera in her suffocating marriage—or worse. Of Josh picking up and running, making them both disappear forever.
Julio had promised, somewhere in the middle of all those ranting mutters, that he would take care of it, and he would. Because for all his other faults and weaknesses, he always kept his promises.
Sera drifted to sleep wrapped in blankets that smelled of Julio, her mind full of plans to wake early enough to repay his kindness with a hearty, home-cooked breakfast.
She woke to a rumbling stomach and bright midmorning sunlight spilling across her face.
Sleep had never been easy for her. Her childhood had been plagued by vicious nightmares, her dreams stalked by monsters who sent her screaming into her father’s room, where he’d hold her and soothe her and promise the monsters couldn’t find her.
Those were the good nights—the nights she jerked awake as a human girl able to express her fears instead of a terrified young coyote tangled in a nightgown, unsure when she’d shifted or where she was.
Mahalia had been the one to cure her childhood terrors. After a particularly bad week after her eighth birthday, Franklin had packed her into his truck and driven into New Orleans, to Mahalia’s bar in the French Quarter, where the spell caster had taken Sera upstairs and let her watch as she carefully constructed a charm against dream monsters.
Probably nothing more magical than a light soothing spell, but Sera had slept with the damn thing clutched in her hand for five years, and she’d believed so hard, so totally, that the dreams slowly disappeared. By then she’d had other dreams—dreams about boys, dreams about owning a restaurant, dreams of traveling, dreams of life.
The nightmares hadn’t returned until after her twentieth birthday, when Josh had begun to make pointed comments about how long it was taking her to get pregnant. She drifted to sleep every night, fretting over where she’d hidden her birth control, and what she’d do if he found it.
She was too old for magic charms, and her monsters were flesh and blood now. But twelve hours of interrupted, glorious sleep made her wonder if Julio was better than any magic Mahalia could twist. She almost didn’t want to slip into the bathroom and take a shower, loath to lose the lingering scent on her skin.
Vanity won out, and she ventured into the living room with freshly washed hair and the cutest of her thrift-store T-shirts, one that almost made her eyes look more green than hazel.
She found Julio pulling a covered bowl from the refrigerator. “I thought I heard you moving around in there. Hungry?”
So much for making breakfast. “Starving. I didn’t mean to sleep all morning.”
“I guess you needed to.” He’d laid out everything for sandwiches, and he gestured to the cupboard as he opened a bag of sliced Italian bread. “Want to set the table?”
“Sure.” It felt intensely intimate, edging around him to perform such mundane domestic tasks.
She’d had sex that felt less personal than setting the table with his dishes. Plain white with a brown rim, serious and adult and a refreshing change from Kat’s collection of mismatched dollar-store dining sets.
By the time she’d laid out silverware and glasses of water, Julio had prepared two sandwiches bigger than her head and brought them along with the bowl, which turned out to be pasta salad. He set both in the center of the table and sat. “How’d you sleep?”
“Good. Great, really.” She was hungry enough to eat half of the sandwich, and she decided to credit its amazing taste to the good night’s sleep, and not the fact that being around Julio brought every one of her five senses to life. “Did anything happen with Josh while I was asleep?”
“Heard from Anna, and she says he hasn’t come home yet.” Julio shrugged. “He could have gone to a friend’s, or tied one on and passed out somewhere.”
She knew what Julio couldn’t. “Josh doesn’t really have friends. He has coworkers at the mill, but no friends.”
“Well, he’s not in New Orleans anymore.”
Not so comforting when he could come back at any time. She studied Julio’s face, trying to find some indication of his thoughts, but he only spooned more pasta salad onto his plate and kept eating.
She followed his example, feeding one hunger while denying another. It wasn’t okay to sit at his table and imagine that she belonged here. Illicit fantasies of being chained to his bed and ridden to exhaustion would be safer than the sweet daydream of sliding smoothly into his life.
A dangerous fantasy when she was drunk on his dominance and tenderness, not on him as a man. Not just dangerous, but unfair—to both of them.
So she choked it back. “I don’t think I can go back to life as usual. Not if we don’t know where he is.”
He popped the top on a can of soda. “You can stay here for a while. Anna said she plans to hang out up in Arkansas for a few days, anyway. Ask some questions.”
“I’ve still got to work.” John might be able to replace her in the kitchen and on the floor, but she needed the money as much as he needed a worker. “But I’m safe there.”
Julio nodded. “I can drop you off and pick you up, if you’re okay with that.”
There was something off about the offer. Not that he was giving her the choice, though Anna sure the hell wouldn’t have, but that it came with an undertone of self-deprecation. As if she might not believe he was suitable protection.
It killed any urge she might have felt to insist on driving herself. He needed to do this, and she could give it to him. “Sure. If you come in a bit before close, I can even feed you.”
He grinned. “The sandwiches aren’t doing it for you, huh?”
Sera pushed away her empty plate with an answering smile. “I ate it, didn’t I? But you shouldn’t have to cook for me every day.”
“It’s hard to make most of my best meals for only two people.”
“So what are your best meals?”
He toyed with the edge of his plate. “Anything you can dump in a big pot. Chili, stew, soup.
That stuff.”
“From when you worked as a firefighter?” She tried to make it sound casual, as if that hadn’t been inspiring its own brand of fantasy since the first time she’d met him.
“Yeah, those bastards made me cook all the time, and our captain let them. He said I was the only one who didn’t make everyone sick.”
“So let me cook for you.” Rising, she picked up her dishes and held out a hand for his. “I can practice my recipes, and you probably won’t die, being a manly virile shapeshifter and all.”
“Probably won’t die?” he teased.
She plucked up his dish as well and took them both to the kitchen. “I have some very experimental recipes.”
His eyebrows shot up. “John’s not getting you tangled up in that hoodoo shit, is he?”
Laughter bubbled up. “No, no hoodoo. He won’t even teach me some of his Cajun recipes.
Family secret or something. I’d have to marry him first.”
“John Gravois doesn’t much believe in marriage, from what I’ve heard.”
Though she spent hours and hours with John, she knew almost nothing about his personal life. “He doesn’t?”
“Nah. If you ask him about it, he’ll tell you. Marriage isn’t important but family is, and they’re not the same thing.”
Sera returned to the dining room, slid into her chair and tried to smile. “I guess I should know that well enough, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Julio eyed her over his soda can. “Do you want to go back to work, or is it that you need the money?”