Page 7 of Imperfect Gifts

“You aren’t the first to say so. I tried to argue it, at first, but I’ve decided the statement probably has merit.”

“Can I ask how old you are?”

He sat and looked at her a few seconds, debating. He had a dozen ways to rebuff the question, ranging from rude to a polite change of subject, but he wanted to know more about her, and that meant he was probably going to have to share information about himself. “My kind live more than twice a human’s life span, but I’m blood bonded to a vampire in such a way that…” He sighed. “Not entirely my secret to tell, so I’m sorry I can’t explain better. At any rate, I’ve been with Brooke since sixteen fifty-three, and I was a young teenager when I went to live with her, so I assume I was born around sixteen forty. My father died when I was young. He never told my mother what he was, but I believe he expected to still be around to deal with mychange, when it came.”

Their plates had steaks, loaded baked potatoes, fried squash, green beans with bacon, and fancy dinner rolls. She’d only asked for the steak and potatoes, but the rest looked really good.

“So, you’re coming up on four hundred years old?” She tilted her head. “You look my age, somewhere close to thirty. I knew you were older, but I assumed you’d aged well and wereprobably sixty or seventy. I never imagined you’d becenturiesold.”

“Is that a problem?” He was asking if that meant she wouldn’t be interested in him as a man. It appeared to take a few seconds for her to put it together, but he was fairly certain her answer was a response to the larger question, and not merely the obvious one.

“No. Not a problem. Did I interrupt your story? Please continue. I apologize.”

She hadn’t actually, because that was all Dev had intended to tell her, but he didn’t have the heart to tell her that was it, so he kept going.

“Brooke tells me the local wolf alpha alerted her to a child who’d turned into a snake in a local market. This was in India, by the way. She was pretending to be the child of a rich British man who’d brought his family with him to oversee his shipping company. In reality, she owned the company and he was merely the face everyone dealt with.” Julien had been with her a lot longer than Dev.

“So she took you in and finished raising you?”

“She took meandmy mother in. My mother had remarried because her parents insisted, and they’d arranged a second marriage for her. However, she didn’t love him, and was in fact treated badly, though I wasn’t aware at the time. Brooke saw into my mom’s head and gave her two options: either to relinquish me and never see me again, or to leave her husband and move in with her, and have the opportunity to help raise her son once he’d learned to control hischange. Brooke told her exactly what I was, and had another snake shifterchangeto snake and back to human so mom could see — and then she told her if she chose to stay with her husband, her memories would be altered so she thought her son was dead, and she’d remember nothing of snake shifters.”

“And your mom chose you over her husband.”

“She did. A century later, decades after my mother had died of old age, Brooke told me it’d taken a year to make my mother forget her husband and most of her previous life with no risk of seeing something to trigger a memory. Mom was basically a prisoner within the coterie’s walls until Brooke could be certain my mother wouldn’t contact anyone. Officially, I was taken, and my mother killed herself in her grief. Brooke easily changed memories to make it so.

“I haven’t shared my story in at least a hundred years,” he told her. “The eight oldest vampires in the coterie know, but only because they were alive when it happened, or they joined the coterie at a time when I would still talk about it. I no longer do.”

* * * *

Genie wasn’t at all sure what to do with that, but she had to say something, so she asked, “Why tell me?” She’d asked how old he was, but she hadn’t meant to pry into a painful past, if that’s what it was, though he didn’t speak about it as if it were.

“I don’t know if your offer was true, or if you were merely putting an end to the questioning about what, specifically, brought about your nickname. Either way, whether that offer is on the table or not, I’d like to spend more time with you.”

“I’m a nurse. I can handle running an ER, and that’s what I’m usually hired to do. Right now, I’m on the floor with post-surgical patients.” She was getting off track. “When I’m not working, it’s nice not to be in charge sometimes. Also, I like sex. A lot. The bikers have helped me fill a need that wasn’t being met. It isn’t safe to go to a bar and leave with someone dominant enough to give me what I want. There’swaytoo much stress and anxiety around doing that. However, when I go to the clubhouse in the evenings, someone’s almost always going to want sex. Bestof all, I don’t have to decide what I want. I just have to follow orders and do as I’m told.”

He put his fork down and sat back, and Genie realized she was going the long way around to answer his question. She hadn’t meant to seem to be avoiding the question, but she realized that’s what she’d been doing.

“Yes, the offer was true. Is true. I’m attracted to you and I’d love to get to know you better. I know people say we’re supposed to get to know each other before we jump into bed, but in my view, sex is part of getting to know each other. The other stuff is important if there’s to be an emotional connection, but…”

She ran out of steam and suddenly wasn’t sure what to say next. He reached his huge hand across the table and cupped her cheek. She met his gaze and was overwhelmed by the warmth and acceptance of his dark chocolate-brown eyes — they were the color of coffee without cream, warm and inviting but not even a tiny bit weak, and they were entirely focused on her.

His hand wasn’t as warm as most shifters, but wasn’t as cold as a vampire’s. He was perhaps only a degree or two cooler than a human. Owls, like most other shapeshifters, had a much warmer than normal body temperature.

“If you’d allow me to take you to dinner?” He asked, his voice soft. This was a request, not an order. “I’ll pick you up, take you on a date, and return you to your home. It’ll probably be at least four days, perhaps five, before my schedule will permit. I’m not asking you to decide this moment, as I don’t know if you’ll need to check with your bikers or not.”

“I’d like that. I usually work nights, seven until seven, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Holiday weeks are different, so the week of Christmas and New Year’s will be all screwed up, but otherwise, that’s my schedule. If you’d like to take me out Thursday or Friday, that should be fine. I have plans for Saturday night.”

“I won’t know for certain that I have permission to take you out until the bikers get back with Brooke, but I expect we’ll be able to finalize our plans before Friday. If you’ll send me a text, we’ll have each other’s numbers.”

Genie wanted to protest that the bikers couldn’t tell her who she could date, but she understood Brooke needed to get their okay in this rare situation, so she asked for his number and sent him a text without further comment.

Chapter Five

Dev returned from dropping his little owlet off at the Rolling Thunder apartment complex, and was more bothered than he should’ve been that she’d directed him to take her to the business office, rather than to her apartment.

She clearly knew the biker who stepped outside the office to greet her, and Dev had a feeling she’d been acting on orders from the bikers to have him drop her off there rather than her apartment, but she hadn’t explained and he hadn’t asked.

Though, the biker hadn’t looked at all amused when she’d asked if something needed to be signed saying she’d been returned in good working order.

---