Page 40 of Marked By Moonlight

Yet a small voice rose up inside her.Were you even alive before you became a werewolf?

CHAPTERTEN

A pack species, dogs are social creatures.

—Man’s Best Friend: An Essential Guide to Dogs

Now what?” Claire asked, eyeing the long length of weathered bar—stained and sticky from unidentifiable fluids—for its dish of complimentary peanuts.

“We wait,” Gideon replied, scanning the room without glancing her way. He thrust a beer into her hand with a terse “Drink.”

Wrinkling her nose, she looked askance at the beer in her hand. She never drank beer. Occasionally, a glass of wine. But never beer. Her father drank beer. By the truckloads.

She stared at the bottle in her hand as if it might sprout teeth and bite her. Looking up, she caught the hulk of a bartender leering down her cleavage from behind the bar. He smoothed a hand over his forest of a goatee and blew her a kiss.

Stifling a shudder, she turned and watched Gideon take a swig from his bottle. Growing up, she usually closeted herself in her room when her father sat drinking in front of the television. A safe place to avoid the path of his red-eyed gaze. Of course sometimes not even the barrier of her door could protect her.

“I hate beer,” she muttered, her father’s slurred insults echoingin her mind. Her nose twitched, almost smelling his foul beer breath hissing in her face.

“And why’s that?”

She shrugged. “When my father wasn’t working on a job, he was home. Drinking.” She nodded. “And that was pretty much it.” She snorted, a pained smile curving her lips. “God, we couldn’t wait for him to leave.”

Silence fell between them, filled by the din of the bar. She wondered what had inspired her to bring up her father. She never talked about him. Not with anyone. Not even with her mother.

“Was he a mean drunk?” The question fell hard from his mouth, almost startling her.

“Mean better describes him sober. Drunk, he’s something else.” Something worse. “I learned to stay out of his way.” She crossed her arms, rubbing flesh that suddenly felt chilled as she remembered the times she had not escaped his notice. “For the most part.”

He stared out into the bar, the rigid line of his profile resembling carved stone. Suddenly, he said, “The timid little mouse suddenly makes such sense.”

Heat crawled over her cheeks. Their conversation at dinner flooded back over her. “I’m not passive, remember,” she snapped. “Not a mouse.”

He turned his gaze on her, eyes a cool and steady green.

Dropping her arms, she met his stare directly, challenging.

“If you are—were,” he amended, gaze flicking over her, taking in her shiny halter top, slowly roaming over the swells of her breasts, “it sounds as though you had good reason.”

“To be weak?” she growled. Vulnerable? Submissive?Her mother?She shook her head fiercely.

“No,” he countered, eyes burning as they drifted back to her face, drilling into hers. “To be human.”

Human.Something she could no longer lay claim to either. At that moment, he must have realized the same thing, too.

His eyes changed, the green deepening, assessing her with a burning intensity. The air between them altered, grew charged. Hunger pumped through her veins and her nipples hardened against the thin, satiny fabric of her top. The muscles along his square-cut jaw knotted and she scented his reaction to her—visceral and immediate, earthy, a spicy musk on the air.

He tore his gaze from her and looked out at the bar again, severing the moment.

She gripped the cold, wet bottle and did her best not to shatter the glass in her hand. Studying him, she tried to steady her breathing and suppress her annoyance that he no longer looked at her, that he had clamped down hard on the desire flaring between them, snuffing it out like a flame between his fingers.

Leaning his elbows back on the bar, he took another long swig of beer. Casual. Calm. She watched, mesmerized by the play of muscles in his throat. God, he was… incredible.

Tearing her gaze away, she tried to shake off this damned attraction for him. In a very short time, she’d either be dead or wimpy again. In either case, Gideon didn’t fit in to the equation, so there was no sense getting worked up over him.

The Eagles crooned “Take It Easy” in the background, mocking her tension. Taking a delicate sip of beer, she wet her lips and asked, “What are we looking for?”

The small sip of the Texas-brewed Shiner rolled down her throat in a bitter trail. She tried to hide her wince, wanting to appear tough, the kind of woman who hung with the guys and tossed back a few bottles. The kind of woman he might like.

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