Khan (Bowen Boys, #2)(21)

“And what? What did she say to you?” She took his hand and he laced his fingers into hers. “Tell me all of it, Khan.”

“The first time we had sex…I know now that we never made love. It was the first time we’d had sex that I knew there was something about her that was different. It wasn’t like she was a paranormal like me, but something about her mind and heart were different. She was cruel to anyone that she considered lesser than her. She treated her servants with little to no respect, and she treated me…” He let go of her hand to get up and pace. “It was as if she had me around because I was something she wasn’t supposed to have. But I was okay with that because I thought I loved her.”

“Her parents didn’t like you?”

He nodded and then shook his head.

“Then what? They liked you?”

“They liked me because I was able to make Roseann happy for a time, but they didn’t want me to marry her. They actually tried to pay me off when I asked for her hand. I was too stupid to realize then that they weren’t paying me off so much as they were giving me an out. I should have taken it.” He paced more around the room and then opened the refrigerator. He took out the pitcher of tea and filled two glasses with ice. He poured her one then one for himself as he continued. “I told her what we were. I showed her what I could do and how that I could shift. She asked me so many questions that I should have… No, I had no way of knowing that she was thinking along the lines of what I could get her rather than spending the rest of her life with me.” He drained his glass and refilled it. “A week or so later, she comes to the house. She’s so excited because she has this amazing idea. She wants us to get married right away. I said yes.”

“Then what happened? She wanted to marry you, so she must have felt something.”

He looked at her and wondered why he’d never seen the difference in the two of them before.

“Khan?”

“She wanted to get married right away, and she wanted me to convert her to what I was. She thought it would be great if the two of us could run in the woods behind her home and be free to do what we wanted.” He sipped his drink this time. “But that’s not what she wanted. She wanted me to convert her so that she could kill people. Anyone and everyone who pissed her off, she wanted to kill. She told me that when I explained to her that I couldn’t change her, that humans died most of the time, and that I wouldn’t take the chance in killing her.”

“She didn’t believe you, did she?”

He shook his head at Monica’s question.

“She didn’t, and decided that if I wouldn’t do it, she’d get one of my other brothers to do it. She started with Reed. He was barely twenty when she approached him. But he wasn’t as stupid as she thought and he turned her away. Then she claimed that he’d raped her. And that he was an animal. He was arrested the next day. When she did that, she came to me and told me that if I did as she asked then she’d drop the charges.”

When Monica stood up, he thought she was going to leave him, but she didn’t. When she stood before him, she sat on his lap and put her arms around him. He moved his chair back so that he could hold her. When she told him to continue, he did without stopping.

“There was no proof that she had been raped. The test that they had done had shown that she’d not had brutal sex, the kind that she said that Reed had done to her. So she changed her story three more times. First, Reed raped her, then Sebastian had beaten her, and then, finally, I robbed her. All of it was dismissed, so that’s when she came to me with proof of what we were. It was video that she’d taken one afternoon while we were out in the woods playing around. She’d told me that she erased it, and like a fool, I believed her.”

“What happened to it, the video? I would have remembered seeing it if she had blackmailed you. And I’m pretty sure that a man changing into a panther would have been on some news feed.”

He kissed her nose. “Caitlynne found it and destroyed it. I don’t know when because I’ve never asked her, but she said she’d found it when she’d been looking into something else she’d been involved in. Roseann not Caitlynne.”

She laid her head on his shoulder and didn’t say anything. He wanted to ask her all sorts of questions like, was she leaving him? Would she help him become a better man? Would she please give him another chance? But he didn’t ask anything of her. He simply held her. When she did talk, he wanted to go and find Roseann and rip her f*cking heart out.

“So you hate me because some other woman hardened your heart and your head to anyone else. You have a family that worries about you, yet you let her continue to triumph over you. You’ve hidden away the best part of you because someone, a bitch of a someone, hurt you.” She looked up at him. “I never really thought of you as a coward.”

He started to say he wasn’t when he really was. He’d been hiding behind her hurting him for a long time. And because of that hurt, he’d been missing out on a great many things. Like loving the woman in his arms.

Monica stood up. “I have to leave here. That man will figure out where I am and he’ll come here and hurt you all.” He took her hand to stop her. “Don’t do this, Khan. You know I’m right.”

“No. Yes, you’re right, but you can’t leave here.” He kissed her hands. “I’m not ordering you to stay, but begging you to. He’s here. Barr is right here in Washington. And Caitlynne said that he’s murdered his parents.”