Kong chuckled and surprised her to her bones when he reached over and rested his oversize hand on her thigh. His knuckles were swollen and cut. From the fight last night? She was wearing jeans with holes in them, and he worked a frayed part just above her knee with his finger, brushing her skin and making her stomach turn molten. “I wanted to say I’m sorry for leaving like that last night.”
“You freaked out.”
“I didn’t freak out.”
She gave him a pointed look, and he caved. “I freaked out. Look, I signed this contract. It’s why Rhett and Kirk are here. Their entire job is to follow me around and make sure I don’t break the contract.”
“What aren’t you allowed to do?” she asked, hugging the crinkling bag of Mac’s breakfast tighter to her stomach.
“Have sex. Really, I’m not allowed to do anything intimate with a women. They call it tainting the seed.”
She inhaled deeply. “Wow.”
“Yeah, pretty crazy.”
“Why did you sign it?”
“Didn’t have a choice. My mom knew what my birthmark meant the minute I was born, but she ran away from her family group. She was different. She felt things differently, wanted different things than the family group provided for her.”
“Like what?”
“Like love. She wanted a single mate. The group let her go because they thought she was a bad gorilla who would infect the others with her weakness. She didn’t want me to be the Kong. She wanted me to have a choice, so she raised me outside of our people. I went to school with humans as soon as I could control my shifts, and anytime she felt other gorillas got too close, we packed up and moved.”
“How did they catch you?”
“The nurse who delivered me had given me up when my mom had taken me from her family group. She told Fiona about my birthmark, and they let my mom think she was hiding me well enough all those years. Fiona tracked me down as soon as I hit breeding age though. I was twenty-three when she sicced a couple of mature silverbacks on me and hurt me until I signed it.”
“How long did it take?”
“Layla,” he warned.
“I want to know it all, Kong.”
“Three weeks. I was ready to die before I signed my life away like that, but they brought my mom in. They threatened her, and I was too weak by that point to put up enough of a fight to help her. I signed it to save her life.”
“At the expense of your own,” she murmured, feeling nauseous.
“At the expense of my own,” he repeated in agreement.
“What happened to your mom?”
“Fiona put her back in the family group she ran from. She likes it okay, but she liked her freedom more.” He took a right on Eckle and gave her a quick glance. “I told her about you.”
“You did? When?”
“I’ve talked about you a few times over the past year. She gets it. I’m different like her. She wishes I could settle in Saratoga. She says she wishes she would’ve cut the mark off my back when I was a baby. It got too big as I grew older.”
“Oh, Kong. I thought shifters had it all figured out. The bears get along so well with their crews, and they’re nice and decent and honest people, but it’s not like that for all of you, is it?”
“No, not all of us. The bears are lucky.”
“If you refused to take over your family group, what would they do?”
“Kill me. After they force me to watch them kill you.”
“Jesus,” she whispered. “So there is no choice then. You have to go.”
Kong parked in a space at the back of the Tender Care parking lot. His massive shoulders lifted in a sigh, and he gave her a sad smile. “At least I had last night with you, and I got a few minutes this morning. It’s more than I thought I would ever get.”
“Kong, did you like me before last night?”
“What?”
“Don’t think, just blurt out the first answer you think of.”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Since the first time you served me a beer at Sammy’s. Three years.”
“Shit,” she said through her tightening vocal cords. “Me, too. And I feel different about you than I have with other men. Like I know you. And still, I can’t have anything meaningful with you. I hate this.”
“I do, too,” Kong said, pulling off his sunglasses and folding them onto the V shape in his T-shirt neck. His face was black and blue, but it didn’t make any sense. It was the wrong eye from the cut Harrison had given him in the fight.
“Kong!” she exclaimed in shock, brushing her fingertip over the discolored skin of his cheek. “What happened?”