Tempted by My Evil Lycan Stepbrother novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Boathouse

Sybil stepped out of the pantry with a jar of honey in her hand.

She was in a long gray robe, her white-blonde hair down for once.

I yanked the T-shirt back up over my shoulder.

Leander stood in front of me without seeming to decide to.

"How long have you been in there?" he said.

"Long enough to be bored." She set the honey on the counter. "I couldn't sleep either. Warm milk. An old habit of your mother's."

"Get out."

"It's my kitchen, darling. It has been for three years."

She looked past him at me.

"Wolves never could keep their teeth to themselves," she said pleasantly. "I did tell you."

She took a cup of milk and went upstairs.

The next day my things had been moved.

I came back from a run around the lake and found my room stripped and my wet suitcase gone.

The housekeeper wouldn't meet my eyes.

"The Speaker's orders, miss. The guest wing's being aired for the Council."

My new room was in the family wing.

It shared a wall with Leander's.

It shared a balcony with Leander's.

At dinner Sybil tapped her glass with a knife.

"A reminder for the Rite season," she said. "Court dress code applies at table. No hats, no gloves."

She smiled at me.

"Some of us find them so unfriendly."

The King looked confused. My mother looked at my bare hands, then at me.

I ate my dinner with my hands in my lap and didn't look at Leander once.

I could hear him through the wall that night.

Pacing.

The floor creaked steadily with his pacing, back and forth.

At one in the morning I knocked on the wall with my knuckles.

It stopped.

A minute later, he knocked back.

I went out on the balcony.

He was already there, in jeans and a black T-shirt, his hand still taped, both arms on the rail.

The lake was black and still. The mountain was a white ghost behind it.

"She wants this," I said. "She's putting us in a box and waiting for you to bite."

"I know."

"So we're doing what she wants."

"We're not doing anything."

"Leander, you can hear me breathe through that wall. I can hear you walk. That's not nothing."

He laughed once, without any fun in it.

"What do you want me to say? That I lie there listening to you turn over? I do. That I think about the kitchen every five minutes? I do."

"Every five?"

"Four, tonight."

I turned and faced him.

"Then here's a new rule," I said. "Mine, not hers."

He looked at me.

"Everything but the bite," I said. "Your teeth stay off my shoulder. At the Rite I still refuse you. My mother still gets married. But until then, I'm not spending three weeks lying awake next to a wall."

He went very still.

"You've thought about this."

"I'm a paramedic. I always have a plan."

"Say it again. Slowly."

"Everything. But the bite."

He reached out and took my hand on the rail.

Silver ran up both our arms and lit the balcony.

He looked at the light. Then at the dark windows along the wing.

"Not here," he said. "She'll be at her window."

"Where?"

"The boathouse. The loft over the water. Nobody's used it since my mother."

We went down the back stairs barefoot, our shoes in our hands.

The grass was wet and freezing.

The boathouse was a long timber shed on the water with rowing shells racked along the walls and a ladder up to a loft under the eaves.

The loft had an old iron bed piled with quilts, a round window over the lake, and the smell of cedar and cold water.

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