Linger

More pressingly, I wondered if anyone who wore my size lived here.

I hesitated as the hall opened up. To my left, more dim hallway. To my right, a massive, dark staircase that looked like a murder scene out of a gothic horror movie. I wrestled briefly with logic and decided to go upstairs. If I were a rich guy in Minnesota, I’d have my bedroom upstairs. Because heat rises.

The stairs led me to a hallway that was open on one side to the stairs below. My toes burned against the plush green carpet as feeling slowly returned to them. The pain was a good thing. It meant they still had blood flow.

“Don’t move.”

A female voice halted me. It didn’t sound afraid, despite the fact that a na**d guy was standing in the middle of her house, so I figured I would probably turn to find a rifle pointed at me. I was acutely aware of my heart beating normally in my chest; God, I missed adrenaline.

I turned around.

It was a girl. She was pretty much drop-dead gorgeous in an eat-your-heart kind of way, all huge blue eyes partially hidden behind a jagged fringe of blond hair. And a tilt to her shoulders like she knew it. When she swept her eyes up and down my body, I felt as if I’d been judged and found wanting.

I tried a smile. “Hi. Sorry. I’m naked.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Isabel,” she said. “What are you doing in my house?”

There wasn’t really a right answer to that question.

Below us, there was the sound of a door shutting, and Isabel and I both jerked to look down toward the noise. For a brief moment, my heart yammered in my chest and I was surprised to feel terror—to feel something after such a long stretch of nothing.

I couldn’t move.

“Oh my God!” A woman appeared at the bottom of the stairs, staring straight up at me through the railing of the balcony. Her eyes swiveled to Isabel. “Oh my God. What in—”

I was going to be killed by two generations of beautiful women. While naked.

“Mom,” Isabel snapped, interrupting. “Do you mind not staring? It’s totally perv.”

Both her mother and I blinked at her.

Isabel moved closer to me and leaned across the railing at her mother. “A little privacy, maybe?” she shouted down.

This brought her mother back to life. She shouted back, with a voice growing ever higher, “Isabel Rosemary Culpeper, are you even going to tell me what a na**d boy is doing in this house?”

“What do you think?” Isabel replied. “What do you think I’m doing with a na**d boy in this house? Didn’t Dr. Carrotnose warn you that I might act out if you kept ignoring me? Well, here it is, Mom! Here’s me acting out! That’s right, keep staring! I hope you’re liking it! I don’t know why you make us go to therapy if you aren’t even going to listen to what he has to say. Go on, punish me for your mistakes!”

“Baby,” her mother said, in a much quieter voice. “But this—”

“At least I’m not standing on some street corner selling myself!” Isabel screamed. She turned to me, and her face instantly softened. In a voice a million times lighter, she said, “Kitten, I don’t want you to see me like this. Why don’t you go back to the room?”

I was an actor in my own life.

Down below, her mother rubbed a hand over her forehead and tried not to look in my direction. “Please, please just tell him to get some clothing on before your father gets home. In the meantime, I’m going to go have a drink. I don’t want to see him again.”

As her mother turned around, Isabel grabbed my arm—somehow it shocked me to feel her hands on my skin—and tugged me down the hall and through one of the doors. It turned out to be a bathroom, all tiled in black and white, with a giant claw-footed bathtub taking up most of the space.

Isabel shoved me into the room so hard that I nearly fell into the bathtub, and then she shut the door behind us.

“What the hell are you doing human so early?” she demanded.

“You know what I am?” I asked. Stupid question.

“Please,” she said, and her voice oozed contempt in a way that threatened to turn me on. No one—no one—talked to me like that. “Either you’re one of Sam’s, or you’re a random na**d pervert who smells like dog.”

“Sam? Beck,” I said.

“Not Beck. Sam, now,” Isabel corrected. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re naked, in my house, and you really ought to be a wolf right now. Why the crap aren’t you a wolf right now? What’s your name?”

For a single, crazy moment, I almost told her.

• ISABEL •

For a moment, his face flickered to someplace else, someplace uncertain, the first real expression he’d had on his face since I found him pretty much posing next to the balcony. And then the almost-smirk was back on his face, and he said, “Cole.”

Like it was a gift.

I tossed it back at him. “Well, why aren’t you a wolf right now, Cole?”

“Because I wouldn’t have met you otherwise?” he suggested.

“Nice try,” I said, but I felt a hard smile twist my face. I knew enough about flirting, out of habit, to recognize it in action. And he was a cocky bastard, too; rather than getting more self-conscious as we spoke, he reached up and held the shower rod behind him with both hands, stretching himself out rather beautifully as he studied me.

“Why did you lie to your mom?” Cole asked. “Would you have done that if I’d been a paunchy real estate broker turned werewolf?”

“I doubt it. Kindness isn’t generally my thing.” What was my thing was the way that stretching his arms above his head bunched his shoulder muscles and tightened his chest. I tried to keep my eyes on the arrogant curl of his lips. “That said, we ought to get you some clothing.”

His lips curved more. “Eventually?”

I smiled nastily at him. “Yeah, let’s get that freak show covered up.”

He made a little whoo shape with his lips. “Harsh.”

I shrugged. “Stay here and don’t hurt yourself. I’ll be right back.”

Shutting the bathroom door, I headed down the hallway to my brother’s old bedroom. I hesitated outside the door for just a moment, and then pushed it open.

It had been long enough since he’d died that being in his room no longer felt intrusive. Plus, it didn’t really look like his room anymore. My mother had packed up a lot of his stuff in boxes on the advice of her last therapist, then had left the boxes in his room on the advice of her current one. All of his sports crap had been packed, as well as his big, homemade speaker system. Once you took those two things away, there wasn’t anything left to say Jack.