Page 39 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
More important: Why on Earth did she care?
Too many questions, not enough answers. Jack supposed she could go round and round with herself like this for days, without getting anywhere. In the interim, it seemed there was only one right thing to do.
“Hawk,” she said softly. When he didn’t turn or respond, she said his name again.
“What?” The word was hard, wintry cold.
“I apologize.”
Slowly, he lowered his hands to his hips. His head turned a fraction, and he stood there in silent profile, waiting, a breeze ruffling his dark hair. The rising light gleamed soft off his bare back and broad shoulders, and she thought he looked like a pagan god in a sky kingdom of green and gold and sapphire blue.
“That wasn’t nice of me. That comment about your . . . um . . . fangs.”
Wishing he’d put his shirt back on so she wouldn’t have to wrestle with the compelling desire to ogle his spectacular physique, Jack dropped her gaze to the fruit. “My dad always ridiculed me for not eating meat, and it sort of felt like . . . like you were doing the same thing.”
After a moment, in a voice slightly less frigid than before,
Hawk said, “I wasn’t.”
For some reason, Jack actually believed him. She said, “Okay,” and sat there with her shoulders rounded in a posture of defeat, wondering if the world would ever make sense again.
She heard a low, vexed exhalation, the sound of feet brushing leaves. Then he was standing before her once more. He crouched down and put a knuckle under her chin, forcing her to meet his eyes.
He said solemnly, “We’re not all like Caesar. We’re not all bad. Most of us just want to be left alone to live our lives in peace.”
Jack whispered, “Ditto.”
Hawk dropped his hand from her face and nodded, and in the span of one moment to the next, it felt as if they’d come to some sort of silent agreement. A subtle change took place; there was a tacit understanding that they were no longer enemies . . . but neither were they friends.
What exactly they were was a subject Jack wasn’t inclined to investigate.
Turning her attention to the lovely array of fruit presented to her by this maddening, confusing, beautiful predator she was so determined to hate but unfortunately didn’t, Jack selected a dusky fig, pear-shaped and perfect, and began to eat.
They made better time through the verdant maze of the rainforest than Hawk had anticipated, primarily because Jacqueline was in incredible shape. Her endurance was remarkable, matched by surprising sure-footedness and that stoic resistance to uttering anything resembling a complaint.
To be fair, she wasn’t saying much of anything at all.
After she’d shocked him—again—by apologizing for her snide remark about his fangs, there had been a moment when Hawk had felt certain they’d reached some sort of new understanding. But she’d retreated from it like a snail curling back into its shell, and had barely spoken a word to him in the two days since.
Considering his conviction to keep his emotional distance in spite of their forced proximity, he should’ve been grateful. But gratitude wasn’t the word he’d use to describe his feelings about the silence that stretched between them. No. It was closer to raw discomfort, paired with a gnawing compulsion to ask her again who Garrett was.
He guessed therein lay the key that would unlock the thousand closed doors she kept around her heart. Though he knew he should let them stay closed, finding out what made her tick was like an itch he needed to scratch.
Maybe when he had all the pieces to her puzzle, the itch would be satisfied, and he could finally leave it be.
So when she started asking him questions—tentatively posed, as if both fearing and needing the answers—Hawk abandoned his prior game of tit for tat and simply gave her straightforward answers.
“How many of . . . you . . . are there, where we’re going?”
He held a thick, low-hanging branch aside for her, waiting as she passed beneath it. They were deep in the ancient heart of the forest now; everything was a tangle of roots and trees and fast-running streams, cloaked in humidity, teeming with an opus of birdsong. The occasional low rumble of thunder shivered the canopy high above, and, as it did most afternoons at this time, it had begun softly to rain.
“I couldn’t give you an exact number, but it’s probably quadrupled over the last three months.”
“Why’s that?”
He released the branch and moved ahead of her, careful to point out a log, on which she might twist an ankle, half buried in leaf litter. She fell into step behind him as he led them up a gently sloping hill, the trees above dripping water onto their heads.
“The other colonies have been evacuated here.”
