Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #27) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,132

him to back off.”

“I’m not his boss,” Win said.

Bobby’s eyes flashed up at Win, and he was afraid as he tried to sit up straighter with Olaf’s body almost touching him. For the first time since we had come into the little room, Bobby seemed to realize that he wasn’t safe, that maybe bad things could happen to him and Newman might not be able to help him. Good. Maybe he’d stop playing games and tell us the truth.

Olaf asked the next question damn near curled around Bobby. “Why did your sister want to see you change form?”

“She’s not my sister,” Bobby said, and he sat up so suddenly that if Olaf hadn’t moved back, Bobby’s head might have hit him in the face. Why had that question upset Bobby?

“You were raised together,” I said.

Bobby looked at me, and he was angry. “That doesn’t make us brother and sister. Uncle Ray never formally adopted Joshie, just me, so even legally, we’re not related.”

“Everyone in town calls her Jocelyn Marchand,” Newman said.

“We’re the Marchand family, and when Joshie and I were younger we didn’t even know that her last name wasn’t Marchand.”

I had an idea. It was kind of twisted, but his anger and defensiveness were coming from somewhere. “When did you start having sex together?”

Newman said, “Blake!” at the same time that Bobby said, “It wasn’t like that.”

“So, you and Jocelyn didn’t have sex together?” I asked.

This time Newman didn’t say anything. He was trying to do his best blank cop face, because his mind was having trouble with the detour.

“We love each other,” Bobby said.

“How long have you loved each other?” I asked.

“I’ve had a crush on her since she was in her teens, but she still thought I was her brother, so I didn’t say anything. I figured I was just wrong. I mean, you’re right, we were raised together, but I didn’t feel like a brother. But if she felt like my sister, then I could live with it.”

“What changed your mind?”

“She said she had feelings for me, and I finally told her how I felt.”

“Then what happened?” I asked, because apparently this line of questioning was my lead, or Newman didn’t want to touch it.

“We couldn’t date exactly, because people do think of us as siblings here. We were planning to tell Uncle Ray how we felt, and then we were going to move away to a big city where no one knew us. We weren’t doing anything wrong, but Jocelyn didn’t want to have to explain it to the people we’d grown up with. It bothered her more than it bothered me.”

“Would you have just told everyone if she’d agreed?” I asked.

He nodded. “I’m in love with her. I’ve been in love with her for years. I was engaged once, but I realized that Joshie had been my first love and still was, so it wasn’t fair to marry anyone else, not if I couldn’t really love them.”

“Noble,” Olaf said. “Many men would have married and tried to forget what they could not have.”

“It didn’t feel noble. I thought maybe if she found someone else and married, I’d finally be able to let it go, but she couldn’t find anyone either. We finally both realized that it was because we were meant for each other.”

“But you weren’t able to tell anyone,” I said.

Bobby shook his head. “She knew we weren’t really brother and sister, but to the rest of the town we were, and so she made me swear that I wouldn’t tell anyone that we were in love.”

“Or that you were lovers,” I said.

He nodded. “Or that.”

I was beginning to see why Jocelyn might have been a little hysterical in the hospital. She’d been hiding the fact that she was having an affair with the man who was raised as her brother; it’s legal, but if she hadn’t felt conflicted about it, she wouldn’t have made Bobby swear not to tell anyone.

“Why did she want to see the whole transformation from human to leopard?” I asked. Maybe if I concentrated on what we didn’t know, I wouldn’t get hung up on what we’d just learned. Was it incest if you weren’t blood relations? I mean, technically, legally no, but if you were raised together it just felt . . . wrong.

“I proposed, and she said she couldn’t decide if she didn’t see me change. She was comfortable with me being a wereanimal as her brother, but not sure about as a husband.”

“What happened that