Free Broken Heart 08 Must Love Lycans by Michele Bardsley Page A

numerous times, and how worry weighted a gaze I once thought so cold.
    He rose from his chair and moved into the darkness where I could no longer discern his figure. I heard the clink of ice and the sweet sound of pouring liquid. He returned to the bed, sitting gingerly on its edge. Carefully, he slipped his hand behind my head and held me gently as he lifted the glass to my mouth. “Sip only,” he said.
    I did as he asked, even though I wanted to gulp it all down. My stomach roiled at even the small tastes I allowed myself, so I reluctantly stopped imbibing.
    “What’s wrong with me?” I asked.
    His expression was wintry. “Nothing that you asked for, I assure you.”
    His response confused me, but I couldn’t croak out any more questions. Exhaustion battered me, competing viciously with the streams of agony that flowed from temples to toes.
    He put the glass on the nightstand, and then readjusted the mountainous bedding that covered me. “We are dealing with too many unknowns. Despite the legends and myths surrounding werewolves, the truth is that until now, lycans were born, not made.”
    Something about his tone, not to mention the actual, crazy words, caused alarm to leap through me. “Lycans?”
    Not this again! It seemed as though my contact with Damian had infected me with his delusion, for why else would I keep having conversations with people who believed werewolves to be real?
    “This is not how I wanted to introduce you to my world,” he continued, his words clipped. “But the choice was taken from me. I did us no favors by rescuing Damian from his captors.” His smile was thin and sharp. “Had I known he would take what I sought for myself, I would’ve left him to rot in his prison.”
    His tone was strangely formal, and the words still on this side of infreakingsane. I was trying to take it all in, but my aching head felt stuffed with cotton. Surely I was dreaming again, having dropped out of a forest where a goddess and her wolf-mate told me outrageous lies and into this nightmare of Jarred spouting nonsense.
    “Lycanthropes are real,” he insisted. He brushed limp strands of hair away from my face. Bitterness turned his gray eyes as flat and hard as river stones. “Like it or not, you’ve been claimed by the prince of werewolves.”
    Jarred’s preposterous announcement propelled me back into the exhaustion of illness and nightmares. Every so often, I would surface from the fevered terrors, feeling as though I had somehow ripped away my own skin to reveal my true self: a dark, craven creature that pawed and growled and bared its teeth. This was the very creature Robert Mallard had said that I bore inside me, the one he wanted to set free. He’d wanted to kill the “outer me,” so that the “inner me” could join him in his life’s work. He’d even brought along a present for the occasion: a seventeen-year-old girl with long blond hair and terrified blue eyes.
    No! I pushed away the images. I couldn’t relive those moments again. I’d gone through that agony numerous times already—talking to police detectives and FBI agents and psychiatrists. I knew the firmament of my own mind. I was not broken. Robert had taken so much from me, and from the world, I would not give him anything else.
    “Sshh.” I felt a tender hand upon my brow; then a cold, wet cloth was pressed against my burning face. “Rest, Kelsey. It’s all you can do now.”
    I closed my eyes again and slipped once again into nightmare-ridden slumber.
     
    “How long will it stop the change?”
    Jarred’s voice filtered through the twilight of my consciousness. I struggled through the thickness of sleep that didn’t feel natural.
    Had I been drugged?
    The thought panicked me. I couldn’t get my limbs to move, or my eyes to open. My ears were working fine, however, and I strained to hear the low conversation. I teetered on the edge of sliding back into oblivion, which made it difficult to concentrate.
    “You know we