Blind Wolf (A Werewolf BBW Shifter Romance #1)(11)

"That sounds wonderful," Julia said. "I have tomorrow off, the library is closed. Just in case, you know, you don't have anything going on." She gave him her phone number, and he entered it into his phone by touch.

"This is it, right?" he said, showing her the screen to make sure he'd typed it in right.

"You got it! I, um, really... I have to go," she said.

"Of course," Damien said. She stood up and so did he. He held out his hand and she pressed his palm in a handshake. Without letting himself hesitate, and buoyed by her warm response to his jokes, Damien raised her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss onto her fingers.

It was a mistake. The connection between them before that moment had been tenuous, if intense. He could feel the separation between her emotion and his, and could untangle them if he needed to. Now, though, with his lips against her skin, he sensed the passage between them open up, widen, and take over his mind. He could no longer tell the difference between a feeling coming from his own mind or hers, and her thoughts reverberated through him. Not just emotions, this time, as he had sensed before. The emotions were there, to be sure: desire, curiosity, and a hint of fear. But his lips fell apart slightly and he breathed in a sharp breath as he now heard clearly the words that she was thinking:

...the one. He's the one. It's him...

CHAPTER SEVEN

Julia

Damien's lips were hot against Julia's skin even in the summer air, and for a moment she thought she would swoon. He pulled back quickly, though, dropping her hand from the kiss after just a brief moment of contact. His glasses fell down on his nose and she caught a glimpse of his eyes. They were hazed over, but that wasn't the strange part. The strange part was that his eyes shone golden, like there was a light coming through from behind the irises. He pushed the glasses back up on his nose and the light was hidden.

"Thanks again," Julia said. "See you later." She turned and walked away quickly so that she would not be tempted to turn back. She wanted to stay and talk to him for hours. A writer! And he seemed interested in her! She felt like a her**ne from a Jane Austen novel.

At the library, Julia hummed through the rest of her work. The hours passed quickly as she daydreamed about Damien. He had held her hand so possessively, as though she belonged to him already, and he belonged to her. And then he had kissed her hand—how romantic! Her thoughts spiraled into intricate fantasies about what other places he might kiss on her body. When her boss yelled at her for not finishing processing all of the discard books, she just blushed and went right to it. Although she had hoped that he might come back to the library to see her again, by the time she closed up and left she was still in a good mood from their brief coffee date.

Back home, Granny Dee was clipping the roses in the front of the house in the dusky light of sunset.

"Granny Dee!" Julia beamed as she came through the gate. "How was your day?"

"Not as good as yours, it seems," Dee said, smiling secretively. "Things looking better after this morning?"

"This morning?" Julia thought for a second before remembering the men who had come to see the house. "Oh, yes, much better! We'll figure something out about the house, I'm sure of it." While the situation with the mortgage was as bleak as ever, the burst of energy that Damien's attention had given Julia made her certain that good things were going to happen soon.

"So who's this lucky boy who makes my granddaughter come up the steps in a hop, skip, and a jump?" Dee said. "Come, sit on the bench here and tell me all about him."

Julia sat down, sorting through the rose clippings for buds to make a small table centerpiece, and described Damien to her grandmother. Granny Dee listened and smiled and asked all of the right questions.

"He sounds like a very nice person," she said. "You say he's blind? Was he born that way?"

"I'm not sure," Julia said. "I didn't ask him."

"It's a shame he won't be able to see your pretty face," Dee said, chucking Julia under the chin with her gloved finger. "But I suppose he'll be able to figure out what you look like by touch." She winked, and Julia blushed hard.

She hadn't thought about it, but Damien would have to touch her soon. So far he had only touched her hand, her arm. He had no idea what she looked like. A nagging worry crept up the back of Julia's mind. What if he didn't like her after he touched her and found out what she looked like? Was she misleading him by not telling him? She shook the thoughts away. They would just have to deal with that when they came to it.

"I'm going to go for a walk out back," Julia said. "Here." She handed her grandmother the small bouquet of buds she'd picked out.

"Thank you," Dee said. "These will look lovely on the table for breakfast tomorrow."

"I'll see you in a bit," Julia said, kissing Granny Dee on the cheek before walking around the house and toward the woods in the back.

Julia loved the broad meadow in the backyard, especially on hot summer nights like this one. The fireflies danced over the long grass, winking their warm yellow lights on and off. She walked out into the darkness until she was among them in the field. The lights coming from the house windows were only slightly bigger and brighter than the fireflies, and when she looked out toward the woods she felt as though she was in the middle of a tornado of lights, the blinking bugs swirling around her. One blinked, went out, then blinked again, closer. She squinted to try and see the firefly against the darkening sky, and then it blinked again, right in front of her. She quickly brought her hands up and caught the firefly between her cupped palms. She could feel its small legs tickling the inside of her palm, the place where Damien had first touched her.