"Sorry there's not much of a view," Kyrie said. "I planted roses out there, to hide the fence, but most of them died in the drought. Only a couple survive and they're tiny."
He realized she thought he was looking at the fence in horror, and he managed a smile. "No, no. It's fine. I just need to sleep . . ."
"Well, this is the love seat. It doesn't open up, but it's fairly comfy. I've napped on it on occasion."
Tom felt the sofa reflexively, even as a voice at the back of his mind asked him what exactly he intended to do if he found it lumpy. Go and sleep in a better place? Like, for instance, all the hotels that accepted barefoot men without a dime on them?
He sat down on the sofa and clutched the thin blanket to himself. "Thank you, Kyrie. Thank you."
She looked surprised. Had he really come across as that much of a prick, that she'd be surprised because he thanked her?
Apparently, because Kyrie stood there, looking at him, eyebrows raised, as though evaluating a new and strange artifact, before she said,"Good night," and left.
Tom lay down and pulled the blanket over himself. It couldn't have taken more than ten seconds before he fell asleep and into dreams populated by darkness, pierced by sharp claws and glimmering fangs—and a huge pearl, the size of a grapefruit and glowing like the moonlight at the full.
* * *
Kyrie frowned all the way to her room. She told herself that she must get her head examined, she really, really must.
In jerky movements, angrier at herself than she would like to admit, she undressed, throwing her robe over the foot of the bed.
Normally she slept naked. It was a habit she'd picked up since she'd started renting this house. All her life, up till then, she had been staying with someone else, under someone else's rules—when she was a foster child—or in a communal building, an apartment building where she didn't want someone to come in attracted by noise, while she was having what she thought of as one of her episodes, and find her naked. In retrospect, it was very foolish of her to think she didn't actually shift, since the episodes usually meant she woke up naked. At least, she told herself, she had learned to remove her clothes fast in the first throes of the shift.
Looking back, she thought it had all been an elaborate game with herself, to keep herself fooled about the nature of the shifting. After all, if she'd wakened with clothes nearby shredded to bits by large claws, she'd have had to think. She'd have had to admit something else was going on, right?
But in her own home she went to sleep naked, so that when she woke up naked she could pretend nothing at all untoward had happened in the night. Dreams, just dreams. She could tell herself that and believe it.
Only now, she stood naked in the middle of her bedroom and felt . . . well, nude. There was a man in the house. A young, attractive, and not particularly wholesome young man.
Okay, so he was in the back room and frankly, from the way he'd been swaying slightly on his feet, he probably wasn't in any state to be walking around. Not even stumbling around. And there was a locked—she paused and turned the key in the lock—door between them.
But still, she looked at herself in the mirror and she looked distressingly naked. Which meant . . . She blew out a breath, in annoyance at herself, as she scrambled to her dresser, got her loosest T-shirt and a pair of panties, and slipped them on.
What was she thinking? Up till this night she'd never found any reason to like Tom. And what had changed about this night? Well, he might have killed someone. And he was being chased by triads trying to recover something he'd been stupid enough to steal from . . . gangsters.
Yeah. There was a good reason to allow him to sleep in her house. There was a good reason to expose herself to the potential danger of a practically strange—no practically about it; in fact, she knew Tom was strange—man in the house.
She pulled back the covers on the narrow bed pushed up against her wall. The bedroom was barely large enough for the bed and the dresser—both purchased from thrift stores. It would be too small if she had a double bed.
She lay down on the mattress—or more accurately, threw herself down on it with the sort of angry fling of the body that a thin thrift-store mattress couldn't quite take.
She shifted position and flung the covers over herself, refusing to admit she'd bruised something.
There was a reason for Tom to be here. Sure there was. She didn't want to throw him out into the night, barefoot, tired, and confused.
Only, if she'd caught the drift of Tom's story right, he'd been surviving on his own, out there for a long time. He was a big man. Well, perhaps on the short side, but definitely well developed and muscular and . . .