by Selena Scott
“What?” Orion asked with a laugh.
“Look, big guy,” Wren said, leaning back in her chair. “Right now you’re coming on too strong. Not only with your actions, but come on. You’re built like a brick shithouse. Your eyes, your eyebrows, your wingspan, your smile, that voice, that ass, have you seen your thighs?, your hands, your big ass feet—”
“I fear you’re losing your way in the weeds, Wren Dear,” Ida cut in.
“Right.” Wren shook the dazed expression from her eyes. “My bad. I’m trying to say that you’re hot, Orion. And you’ve obviously been gunning for her. And she’s obviously gun shy. So maybe if you give her a little room to breathe, show her just how nicely you can play, then she’ll realize that she wants to play with your bazooka.”
“Good point,” Ida said, pointing at Wren. A thoughtful expression came over her face. “Besides, Diana runs the center. It was romantic when Phoenix quit the center to be with me. But when a shifter unexpectedly quits, it kicks up a tornado of paperwork for Diana. Plus, if too many shifters defect from the program, she could really be in danger of losing a lot of grant money, which would be a nightmare for her. The center is her baby. I think if you show that you care about it, that you care about her job, you might soften her up. You say you want to make her life easier, well, she’s been telling you how to do that pretty much this whole time. I say you take her at her word.”
Orion chewed his lip and dragged a hand over the stubble on his chin. It needed a shave every day, Wren had told him when she’d first started trimming his hair, but he only got around to it every few days. “But what if she thinks I’m not interested anymore?”
“Then all the better!” Wren crowed. “You’ve seen Diana. She’s pretty much a goddess incarnate. Don’t you think she’s got men expressing interest all the time?”
He scowled. “I hadn’t really thought of that.”
Of course he knew how gorgeous Diana was. But he hadn’t thought of that beauty in the universal sense. He’d just seen her, been instantly and completely drawn to her, and felt immediately as if they’d belonged with one another. He honestly hadn’t considered that another man might feel that way as well. He instantly discarded that thought. Another man might be attracted to her, might hit on her, but Diana had a place in his heart that he really didn’t think another man could possibly feel.
“You think it would set me apart from other men if I stopped showing her that I wanted her.” The thought made him uneasy. They were asking him to play a very human game, when all he really knew how to do was to show exactly how he felt.
“I just think that it would get her attention more than anything else you’ve been doing.” Ida sighed. “Look, Wren’s right. Diana has definitely already decided whether or not she’s attracted to you—”
“Spoiler alert. She is.” Wren polished off the rest of her ice cream.
“But she’s resisting for a whole set of reasons that are just her own and maybe she sees you really trying and she opens up a little bit, you know?”
“Okay.” Orion agreed after a long moment of parsing out the information. It did sort of make sense. “Okay. Tomorrow I’ll go into the center and I’ll… be good.”
“A good little wolf,” Wren agreed, a little grin on her face.
He scowled at her.
“A nice, tame, little wolfy-kin smoochie-poo,” she added, screaming with laughter when Orion jumped up from the table and chased after her.
***
It was the haircut that bothered Quill more than anything. He’d dealt with the new clothes. The touch of makeup at her eyes and mouth. The earrings and silver rings on her fingers. He could even live with the faint trace of perfume she’d started to wear. But this haircut? Oof. Sometimes he thought that whatever all-seeing being existed up there in the sky got a real kick out of screwing with his life.
Dawn had always been kind of a question mark for Quill. Even when he’d first met her and he’d realized that the shy, under-the-lashes thing that she did wasn’t actually her playing coy. It was her straight up not trusting him. It had taken months and months for him to gain her trust.
Unfortunately for Quill, this trust thing was apparently a two-way street. Because he found himself trusting Dawn right back. And he didn’t trust anybody. It was unsettling.
Which made his whole life a hell of a lot more complicated. And that was B.H.
Before Haircut.
After Haircut, his life was pretty much screwed. Before Haircut, he’d often been able to ignore how cute she was. She had a benignly pretty face, eyes he avoided locking with at all costs, and a very attractive voice. But she’d also had a sheet of black hair that fell over that benignly pretty face at the slightest provocation and blocked her from his view, from the world’s view. She’d hidden everything behind that hair. And then Wren had gone and chopped it all off.
Now Dawn had stylish bangs and a swing of hair around her chin and there was no avoiding her face. Or her eyes. It was freaking annoying.
Because in order to do what he was going to have to do in a few months, he could have no distractions.
This haircut was a distraction.
It had been three weeks and he still wasn’t used to it.
He kicked the porch swing they sat on into motion and refused to look at her.
“So,” Dawn said after a moment. “What’d you bring me?”
Six months ago, she wouldn’t even answer a question directly asked of her. Now she was comfortable poking her nose into a canvas bag he’d brought, snooping around like a kid on Christmas Eve. What a difference teaching someone to read could make.
He opened the bag to show her and cursed himself for not preparing himself for that look on her face. That eyes-wide, zap of light and excitement and joy that she always got when she was staring down a stack of unread books.
“Oh my gosh!” she breathed, diving her hands in and pawing through the lot. “So many!”
Quill knew that he was a good mentor. He worked hard to crack open the shifters who Diana assigned him with. But he also knew that he’d had very little to do with Dawn’s apparent transformation. Sure, he’d taught her how to read. And sure, he brought her stacks of books every now and then. But it was what was inside those books that brought that shine out of her smile.
Her enjoyment of the written word was shockingly palpable. She immersed herself in whatever she was reading, fully and completely. She was the kind of reader who wouldn’t even hear you call her name when she was reading. She required a touch on the hand or arm to get her attention. Which, unfortunately for Quill’s resolve, meant that he’d had to touch her a lot more often recently.
Books opened up a part of Dawn that Quill couldn’t unsee. She laughed, she gasped, she cried when her favorite characters died. She was just so… sensitive. But in a good way. Dawn, so closed off from the world, from strangers, from human culture, laid herself out on the railroad tracks for a good book. Opened her heart and handed the book a scalpel, said carve me up.
Quill reluctantly admired it. There was nothing that touched him so much as a good book touched Dawn.
There was pretty much nothing that touched Quill at all. Not since he was a kid. Not since before his family was discovered to be a family of shifters. Not since they’d been split up and sent to different internment camps. And especially not since he’d found out that, like many of the shifters who’d been quarantined into the camps, his family had not survived. Just like that, his parents and his brother had been blinked out like a light. He was all he had left. All he had in this world.
The idea of opening his heart up to anything -a book, a piece of art, a person- just sort of lost its appeal after that. His life had already turned him raw, he didn’t need to serve himself up as a piece of meat.
“Ooh!” Apparently she’d found one she wanted to dig into right this very moment. She stood up for a second, dug around in her pocket, and came up with something that shocked Quill way more than they had a rig
ht to.
“Glasses,” he croaked. “You got glasses.”
“Yeah. They were giving out coupons for eye exams at the library the other day and I thought I might get one, because now that I read, my eyesight is the most important to me. And I went to the place and got an exam and the guy said that I’m actually a little farsighted and could use reading glasses. So, I bought these!”
She held up a pair of wire-rim spectacles that were dorky and cute and he all but groaned when she slid them on. Her haircut framed them perfectly on her face and he cursed himself for his predilection toward nerds. There was just something about a dorky woman that really ground his gears and right now, Dawn was checking all his boxes.
Carefully keeping his tone neutral, he looked away from her. “That’s great. I’m sure your eyes won’t get as tired now.”
He could feel her eyes on the side of his face. She had this intense stare that always made him want to squirm, like she could see right through him. He never wanted to know what she saw when she looked at him.
“Are you all right?” Dawn asked quietly after minute.
“Yeah. Why?” He swung his eyes back to hers for just a second before he had to look away again.
“You seem… tired,” she decided. “How was the full moon for you?”
She was obviously aware that Quill was a shifter as well, but he’d been careful never to shift in front of her. Or anyone really. Shifting was a tender, vulnerable thing for him. And it would become clear exactly who he was if anyone ever saw him in his bear form.
“Fine.”
“You always spend them alone, huh?”
He shifted uncomfortably. They’d spoken about their lives as shifters very little since he’d become her mentor. Thought he desperately wanted to know more about her shifting life, as was everything with Dawn, sharing was a two-way street. And he couldn’t justify giving up almost any information about his personal life to her. Things were complicated enough.
“Yeah.”
“Well, if you ever wanted…”
Don’t invite me, don’t invite me, don’t invite me, he chanted inwardly.
“You could come with—”
“Hey, you two.” Phoenix strode up onto the porch and interrupting Dawn.
Quill nearly sagged with relief that she hadn’t been able to extend her invitation to join she and her brothers on the full moon.
“Hey, Phoenix.” Quill took his opening. He had to get out of here. “I’ve gotta split. Dawn, enjoy the books. I’ll see you sometime this week.”
He didn’t even wait for her to look at him, or to say goodbye. He launched himself off the porch and into his car, practically peeling out of the driveway in his haste to say goodbye.
If she’d invited him to come shifting with them, he would have had to tell his boss. Not Diana. His real boss. His secret boss. The Director. And the Director would have forced him to go with them. To learn everything he could about the Wolf siblings’ shifts. He would have had no excuse not to go. Right now, his excuse was wearing thin as it was. He told the Director over and over that they didn’t trust him enough to bring him along on the full moon. And in that way, he’d been able to make sure they were still safe from him. From the Director. From everything that Quill had to do to them.
His stomach cramped. Watt had failed six months ago, to bring Phoenix in. And now he was gone. Disappeared. Quill was the only one left. Fo so long, this whole thing had been simple. Quill was just doing his job. Not his job as a mentor at the center, but the job he’d been recruited for years ago, as an angry, tortured kid in the internment camp.
Watt had failed, and Quill couldn’t fail.
But that didn’t mean he had to take every opportunity that fell his way. He could take this slow.
Dawn’s face flashed in his mind, grinning at him, her glasses catching the light, framed by her haircut.
Slow. He had to take this slow.
CHAPTER FOUR
Something was off in the center. It was… too quiet. Shifters were usually an energetic group when they were all put together. There was always someone yelling or laughing. There was always a frenetic energy whipping off the nervous ones, hiding in plain sight. There was always some overzealous, unruly predator at the top of the food chain who didn’t realize he was scaring the daylights out of the hare shifters.
But today, there was a really calm vibe in the center. And it was freaking Diana out. She didn’t understand it. She was sitting in her office, tearing through her paperwork, but she couldn’t stop glancing up at her open door, trying to get a glimpse into the main room of the center, figure out what the hell was making everything so calm out there.
She was much too busy to investigate, mostly thanks to Orion Wolf and his endless need for new mentors. Did he not realize how much reassignment paperwork she had to do every single time he tantrumed himself out of a mentor and into a need for a new one?
“No, of course he doesn’t realize that,” she muttered to herself. The man might have been living in the human world for a year, but that certainly didn’t mean that he understood anything about bureaucracy. Why would he assume paperwork if she’d never even told him?
“Diana?” a timid voice said from her door.
“Ah. Claire. Come on in.”
Claire was one of the newest mentors and had a little bit of a church-mousy thing going on. Did Diana think that she would even remotely be able to handle Orion as her mentee? Um. Not exactly. Was Claire one of the very last mentors on the roster whom Orion hadn’t yet run through? Yes. Definitely.
“You, um, said you wanted to discuss something with me?” Claire crossed and re-crossed her legs, eventually tucking her fingers under her thighs, her bottom lip between her teeth.
“I wanted to talk with you about placing another mentee in your schedule. I’ve been impressed with the work you’ve been doing with your current roster,” -that much was true at least- “And I think you could do with a bit of a challenge. Someone who will help you expand your skill set a little bit.”
Claire gulped audibly. “You’re not talking about Orion Wolf, are you?”
Crap. Diana cleared her throat. “Actually—”
“Because I’m pretty sure he worked things out with Carl,” Claire rushed into saying, apparently not caring that she was cutting her boss off.
Diana must have misheard. “What’s that?”
“Carl and Orion. I’m pretty sure that they worked things out. I think they’re still matched up.”
“That… would be very surprising.”
“I’m almost positive. I just saw them out in the bull pen going over their plan for the next week.”
The center was housed in a renovated police station and they still referred to a lot of the rooms with the same names that the cops had when they’d been using this facility. The bull pen was the main room right outside Diana’s office. The one where the palpable calm was emanating from.
Without another word to Claire, Diana rose from behind her desk and strode to her open office door.
The calm hit her like a down pillow to the face. There were, in fact, four or five mentor-mentee pairings scattered around, chatting softly about this or that, some of them going over paperwork, some of them sharing cell phone screens or books. In the distance there were two mentors heating up lunch in the small, but workable, kitchen. And, lord have mercy, tucked into a far corner, sat Orion Wolf, listening intently to something that Carl was saying to him.
Diana blinked, unwilling to believe what she was seeing. She’d spent months praying for the very sight in front of her. Orion Wolf playing nicely with a mentor she’d assigned to him. And now it was happening and she could barely believe her eyes.
As she stared, Orion said something to Carl who nervously laughed, shook his head and gestured at the papers in front of him, apparently explaining some process or another that the two of them were going to have to go through.
Stymied, Diana continued to watch. A few seconds pa
ssed before Orion, sensing her gaze, looked up and made eye contact with her across the room. She braced for him to leave his mentor in the dust. For that proprietary look to come over his face. For him to ignore every other living thing in a fifty yard vicinity.
But…
He simply nodded to her, acknowledging her, and then turned back to Carl, pointing at something on the papers in front of them and asking a question.
Diana did some more blinking.
A single nod. And not a dude-bro-‘sup sort of nod. There’d been nothing cocky or smarmy about it. No. This had been a professional dip of the chin. Solemn eyes, no mirth.
Huh.
Claire made a sound behind her and Diana realized that she still had business to attend to. Giving her slightly confused head a little shake, she turned on her heel to walk back into her office. Normally graceful and aware of her surroundings, Diana’s shoulder accidentally clipped the doorjamb and she stumbled on her heels. She glanced involuntarily back over her shoulder, but Orion hadn’t been watching her, his eyes, instead, were trained on Carl.
Weird.
“Diana?” Claire asked, halfway rising from her chair. “Are you all right?”
“What? Oh. Yes. You know what, Claire, I’ll need to check into Carl’s status as Orion’s mentor and get back to you, but for now, there’s nothing else I need from you today.”
“Okay!” Claire chirped, jumping up and practically sprinting out of the office. Apparently that was exactly what she’d been hoping to hear. “Bye! Have a good weekend!”
And then she was gone and Diana’s only company was her racing mind.
***
She worked until quitting time, deciding to go home at a reasonable hour tonight, even though most nights she worked well through dinner time. The bull pen was cleared out and the last cars were pulling out of the parking lot. Diana raised her hand in a wave to her departing employees as she rounded the corner of the building to her car.