Page 34 of It’s You
At one time, Jacques looked forward to the binding with anticipation, for the pleasure he would find with his mate and the completeness her partnership promised him.
But lately, he couldn’t think of anything or anyone but Darcy Turner, and he started to wonder if even the binding would be able to banish her from his heart and mind.
Of course it would. It was the most powerful bond known to his kind.
It was just that what he felt for Darcy was so all-consuming that he had trouble imagining how much different and more intense the binding could possibly feel.
Jacques finally got his body under control and followed the rest of the cast to the area behind the stage, where they changed into their costumes before the performance.
He put on the white pants and striped jacket quickly and went to stand at his favorite place on stage right.
He felt her standing there watching him every night, saw her hopeful smile out of his peripheral vision as she tried to catch his eyes.
He pressed his nose against the musty velvet curtains and inhaled, picking through decades of DNA to find hers and savor it.
A short time later, Jacques found himself on stage singing “It’s You” for the final time when he felt a deep and sudden stirring inside. His body stood on stage singing, and if he had a soul, it would have felt the desperate, poignant melancholy of his dwindling time near Darcy Turner.
He thought of her walking into the library that first day, a beautiful, pale angel of blinding light walking into the murky, brooding darkness of Jacques Beauloup’s Roux-ga-roux world.
For the first time in his life, he admitted to himself that he despised that soulless part of who he was.
The hunter. The killer. The monster. He cursed the unfairness of his birth.
He wished for a moment that he was a full-blooded human with a right to touch her, kiss her, take her out on a date, marry her, and father her children.
Unlike others of his kind, he struggled against the weight of his dark destiny when he wanted her light in his life so terribly. He wanted her light. He wanted her .
His thoughts pressed further, and he had a rash, passing notion, standing on that stage, that he would do anything to have her, anything—as impossible as it was to even dare to dream—to be bound to her.
I will do anything for the chance to love her and be loved by her.
And for that moment, the desperation in his heart echoed and reverberated off the walls of that old high school auditorium as the sheer power of his longing took flight.
The song ended, and he bowed with the others, but something had changed inside of Jacques.
As he approached Darcy for the last time, he knew he wouldn’t be keeping his promise to himself tonight.
Just for tonight, just for one moment, he would act like a normal, human teenage boy.
The binding would commit his heart elsewhere soon enough.
Tonight, it beat for Darcy Turner, and he would surrender to his desperate hunger for her in these last moments they’d have together.
He watched as her green eyes lifted to his, twinkling in the near darkness of the stage right curtains.
She seemed surprised by his frank attention after months of offering her his cool, disinterested glance.
She stepped back as he approached, but once her eyes met his, she never looked away.
Not when he breathed her name. Not when he touched the wild fluttering of her heartbeat in her neck.
Not until his lips found hers in the darkness.
Then he felt them finally close, her lashes fanning softly against his cheek as a single tear escaped the well of her eye.
If touching her arm weeks ago in the parking lot had felt magnetic, touching her lips with his felt like another force of nature altogether.
Time stopped. The world around them disappeared.
For a prolonged moment, as their lips touched for the first time, Jacques’s heart stopped beating.
He felt it grind to a halt, the valves still and dormant, the blood stagnant in his dying body.
Then he kissed her again. And as though his heart sought and found the rhythm of hers, the valves opened again with a whoosh, and his blood started rushing.
His heart had been reborn, vibrant, alive… bound .
Though he’d never felt the sensation before, he recognized it with absolute certainty.
Jack drew back in horror to look at Darcy’s face.
She was a full-blooded human, and he was a blooded Roux-ga-roux.
This is impossible . He couldn’t be bound to her.
In the history of time and tribe, he could never recall a story of a binding between a Roug and a being of a different race.
The members of his pack were only bound to one another.
Never, ever to an outsider, and certainly never to a full-blooded human.
“It can’t be,” he murmured, appalled by the permanency with which his actions, his broken promise, had just impacted both of their lives. But there was no escaping it. As Jack stared at her beautiful face, soft in the half-light, he felt the certainty of their fate. He could feel it. “It’s you .”
He wasn’t the same person he was before he had kissed her.
He was no longer a boy with a crush on a girl.
He was a man staring at his woman. The deep, unerring, unrelenting longing he felt for her had been requited, had been transfigured into the unmistakable, undying love that accompanied the binding.
I belong to you.
Overwhelmed with tenderness, he gazed at her, allowing himself just for a moment to acknowledge the permanence of their bond and the fullness of his heart.
For the first time in his life, he understood the binding as he’d never understood it before.
It was the closest he would ever come to understanding what it was to have a soul.
He would live for her. He would die for her.
Her life was his, and his life was hers.
On the heels of celebration, however, was confusion and fear.
He trembled with the weight of the irrevocable contract he now had to her and turned away, but not before finding her hand in the darkness and lacing his fingers through hers.
Her flesh pressed against his, cool and familiar, and he couldn’t tell where her body started and his ended.
His body accepted hers as an extension of his and only reconfirmed what he already knew.
And you belong to me.
He would have to leave her tomorrow. Now that it had happened, he needed to go home to Portes de l’Enfer in the Faunique des Laurentides, also known as the Northern Bloodlands, to declare the binding to the elders, seek their acknowledgment and ask for their guidance.
Surely there was a precedent. Surely he wasn’t the first Roug to bind with a human.
Surely they could explain to him how it happened and what came next.
He would return to her as soon as he had some answers.
His heart wouldn’t let him stay away from her for long. A few days would be painful enough.
She looked up at him, and he met her eyes in the shadows, fighting the urge to kiss her again. There would be plenty of time for that. A lifetime. He couldn’t bear to be away from her for long. He placed her hand on his arm as they skipped onto the stage together.
He would get his answers and return immediately to his woman, to his love, to Darcy Turner.
For what is bound cannot be broken.