Chapter Ten

Dully, he drove from the airport back to his house. She hadn’t come back the night before and hadn’t answered her phone. Layla had come to take him to the airport but had been very closemouthed about where Megan was.

As she dropped him at the airport she’d turned to him. “If you let my sister slip through your fingers you’re an idiot. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you. Don’t let your fear f**k this up. Is it so bad? To be a werewolf? To accept what you are as well as what she is? Because it’s pretty wonderful. It’s what I am. What Sid is. What you are. Do

it, for your sake and for hers. You’re so very close to losing her forever. If you don’t wise up now, you’ll never have a close bond with her. But she has an Anchor, about that. And you tell that mother of yours if she ever calls my sister again unless it’s to apologize I will fly to Vegas and smack her ass down myself. She’s messed your head up big time but I won’t allow her to make my sister feel ashamed of what is right and natural. The bond is right, and you know it. It’s not too late.”

But she wouldn’t tell him what his mother had said and he’d gotten out of the car and onto the plane.

His house was empty. Stale. A pretty façade with nothing inside, just like he was.

He went through the motions as the days passed. He tried to call, over and over but she never answered. The ache of her absence burned a hole into him until heliterallyhowl out his frustration and loneliness.

At first he’d just dug in. Worked fifteen hour days. Slept when he wasn’t working, but the ache, the need of her sizzled through him every moment of the day, interrupted his dreams. He knew he was wrong, knew she was up there alone and he wrestled with going to her.

It was as if he were outside his life, looking in while someone else lived it. Had he always been this damned disconnected? He didn’t seem to care about anything. His entire day was shuffling to work, calling Megan and leaving yet more voicemails, trying to get his mother to give him answers and wondering what it would feel like should his f**king life ever get turned on.

“What thefuckety f**k is your issue?” Layla demanded when she called him two weeks later. “Okay so when I was all, you’regonna lose her and stuff when I dropped you off at the airport did I was practicing lines for some play I was going to be in or what? Shane, what is wrong with you?”

“I don’t know! Look, why can’t things be easy?”

“Shut the f**k up. Did you just whine to me? You, a nearly forty-year-old man. A successful doctor, a man with ahella amazing wife who is broken into pieces over his seeming lack of emotion where she is concerned. You have everything and you’re pissing it away to live alone with human women who occupy your bed for twenty minutes and no friends and no real connection to your family? And look at me! You’re making me talk in italics and stuff. You know how I hate that. Why are you not here?”

He actually laugh for the first time in weeks. God he had so missed Layla, and talking to her just made him miss Megan even more and the laugh died away. “There are no other women. I wouldn’t do that to her. Anyway, she told me to go.”

“So, you want to guess who came to dinner at Lex and Nina’s on Sunday with Megan?

Adam. Yeah, he’s being a very good friend right now. An Anchor. Of course Megan just walks around with dead eyes and her skin looks like hell and she doesn’t see the way Adam looks at her. But I do and you’re a damned fool. Get over your childhood already.

Stop acting like you’re starring in a Woody Allen movie. Put on your big girl panties and get up here. If you don’t I will beat you.Dumbass . Sid sends his love.”

She hung up before he could argue and he put his phone down with a long sigh. Woody Allen movie indeed. What did she know about it? Her and her damned perfect family.

He had to get out of the house and he needed to eat so he headed to a diner on the outskirts of town. Away from the lights and the tourists. This was old world Vegas where the food was cheap, came in heaping portions and the waitresses called him sugar and put an extra scoop of vanilla on his warmed apple pie.

“Hey there! It’s Doctor Shane Rosario.” Gina, the woman who’d been serving up his pot roast and slice of pie for as long as he could remember, winked at him as he came in.

He kissed her cheek and she squeezed his arm. “The usual? Although we got some cherry pie tonight, better than the apple.”

“Okay, I trust you.”

As he sat and looked out at the waning light fading from the bruise-purple sky, he opened himself up and took a look. Not pretty. Sort ofwussy for a man who’d always prided himself on doing the grown-up thing.

He looked out over the restaurant after his food arrived, taking in the clientele ranging from twenty-something, pierced punk rockemo kids to old guys with sandals and socks.

“You okay?” Gina propped a hip on the edge of the booth across from him. “You look down tonight.”

“How’s your husband, Gina? Last time I was in he’d had some problems with his diabetes.”

She smiled. “Aww, such a good boy you are! Thanks for asking. Don is good. His medication is working and he’s finally taking care of his diet. Him and the sneaking off to eat junk! But you know, in the big picture he chose me over lots of bread and potatoes and boxed food. I’d rather have him alive and with me than not. Thank goodness he feels the same.”

Her husband was a retired air force pilot. She’d worked as a waitress at the Silver Dollar since his dad had first brought Shane there for pie when he was nine or ten years old.