by Selena Scott
A fist squeezed around Orion’s heart and then just sort of hung limply in his chest. He’d spent so long taking care of his siblings in the wilderness, he’d never even imagined what it might feel like to have someone else help him take care of them in the human world. And when that someone was Diana? A woman he trusted above all else? Well, the relief was almost painful it was so acute.
He suddenly got the very intense urge to pay her back somehow. But what could he do for her?
“That’s, um, my house, actually,” Diana said, pointing out the window toward a small house with a surprising tangle of bushes and plants and trees in the front yard. “It’s a little overgrown right now, but it’s home.”
“We don’t live very far from one another,” he remarked in surprise, recognizing the edges of the neighborhood he lived in with his siblings.
“Really? I never came to see the site that you guys moved out to. I just trusted Ida and Quill to tell me that it was good enough for you three.” She was quiet for a second as he steered her down the last road that led to his house. “For some reason I pictured us living a lot—”
“Farther away from one another?” he chuckled. “Me too. I always think of myself as still living in that cave in the woods. And I guess I pictured you in some sparkling castle on a hill.”
She laughed. “Far from it. You saw how much of a fixer-upper my house is. I bought it with the best of intentions, but who has the time?”
Her mouth dropped flat open when he pointed her toward the driveway that led to his house.
“This is where you live? I’ve always wondered who the hell would ever…” she trailed off, her cheeks going pink. “I, uh, always thought this was a hair salon.”
“Wren, our landlord runs her hair salon on the first floor. But the kitchen, dining room, and the top two floors are all ours.”
He understood Diana’s reaction because honestly, he’d never really seen another house like this one before either. It was layer up on layer, tall and skinny. Pink and old fashioned with white curlicues of woodwork adorning it at every corner. He couldn’t imagine a much further aesthetic from what he’d grown used to when they’d lived in the mountains, but maybe that was part of what he liked about it. He appreciated the distinction between his life as a wolf and his life as a human.
“It used to be her grandma’s, I guess,” Orion continued. “She left it to Wren. And Wren lets us stay for free because she doesn’t want to live there but if there isn’t someone there every night then her brother breaks in and does illegal stuff.”
He froze and slapped a hand over his forehead.
“Shoot. I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.” He turned and looked at her with chagrin on his face. “Can we just pretend that I didn’t say anything? There’s nothing going on in that house. It’s a perfectly perfect place for us to live. There are no secrets. Nothing to wonder about. Nothing at all. It’s just a big, pink house that our friend is kind enough to let us live in. The end. No one is keeping secrets from you. And it definitely wasn’t Ida’s idea to keep it a secret—”
Diana burst out laughing and leaned across the console of her car, slapping a hand over Orion’s mouth and preventing him from saying anymore. “Good grief, you tattle tale, stop talking!”
When they’d grappled in the hallway that morning, Orion hadn’t fully allowed himself to sink in to the sensation of her so close to him, touching him. The moment had been too fraught, too upset, too intense. But now? In her dim car, her leaning over toward him, her warm hand on his face and her hair messier than normal? Well, now Orion let all those warm-hot feelings rush over him.
Her eyes were lit from the side by a streetlamp and they looked otherworldly, like some gemstone that only the gods knew of. Those high cheekbones were lifted in a soft smile, the high arches of her eyebrows flattened with mirth, and her mouth? Her mouth pulled over her teeth, her lips going tight in a way that made Orion want to pull her mouth open with a thumb, make her lips plump again. He was fascinated by this new version of Diana that he hadn’t even imagined. He hadn’t even known she was an option. But here she was in sandals, tempting him to push past friendship immediately.
No! He couldn’t. She’d asked for friendship and that’s what he was going to give her. It would be beyond pervy to kiss her right now. He didn’t want to say one thing and mean another. He didn’t want to disrespect her like that.
“I’m no good at secrets,” he told her from behind her hand.
If possible, her expression went even softer. “I know. It’s really disarming.” She pulled her hand back. “Annoyingly so.”
He wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but he sensed that he hadn’t ruined anything by accidentally spilling the beans to Diana about their living situation. Ida had been scared that the illicit nature of the terms of their rental agreement wouldn’t sit well with her rule-following boss and had thus instructed everyone not to mention it. But Diana seemed inclined to ignore the offending information.
“Can I see the house?” she asked after a second, both of her hands on the steering wheel, her fingers tapping in a way that said she was nervous, which surprised Orion, because he’d never once seen her nervous before.
He was charmed for all of a moment before a blanket of suspicion fell over him. He narrowed his eyes. “Why?”
She took in his expression and burst out laughing. “Orion, suspicion doesn’t exactly look good on you.”
“Well,” he said, wiggling uncomfortably, “I don’t want to bring you in to see the house if you’re suddenly gonna decide that it’s not an okay situation and kick us all out. Because we really, really like living here!”
She eyed him for a long time, her smile fading eventually into a thoughtful look. “You really think I have that power, Orion? The power to kick you out of your house?”
“Not physically. I’m significantly stronger than you are.”
She laughed and rolled her eyes.
“But yeah,” he finished. “If you told me it wasn’t a good place to live, I’d listen to you. And I’d bring my siblings with me.”
And there was that soft expression on her face again. She shook her head, like she had no idea what the heck to do with him. “You really like living there? It’s clean? The building is safe? Ida and Quill both visit and think it’s an acceptable place for you to be?”
He nodded.
“Then I won’t rain on anybody’s parade. I promise.”
But now he was just plain confused. “Then why do you want to see it?”
She tossed her head back into the headrest, her eyes on the ceiling of the car. “Oh my gosh, forget it! I was just curious about where you lived, how you lived. But if it’s just inconceivable to you that—”
Her words cut off with a muffled squeak when it was his hand that covered her mouth this time.
When she’d done it to him, he’d thought of it as almost a utilitarian gesture. The fastest way to get someone to stop talking. But he’d never done this to anyone before and he was startled by the intimacy of it. He could feel the heat of her mouth, the softness of her lips. His fingers twitched and he had her by the jaw in a loose grip. It was a heady feeling, to have a grip on a woman like Diana.
He’d heard a children’s nursery rhyme the other day and it popped up in his head at that very moment. Catch a tiger by the toe.
He’d been left to wonder why anyone would ever want to do that. The tiger would surely maul you if you caught it by its toe. But now, he understood. No matter how dangerous an animal was, sometimes you just had to be near to her.
Diana’s eyes burned into his over the top of his hand and his fingers flexed, his hand large enough to press softly into the flesh on the underside of her chin. Some emotion part of the way between anger and curiosity was simmering in her gaze. Her mouth opened under his palm and he snapped his hand back, not wanting to get bitten.
“Come inside,” he said after a fraught moment of silence between them. “Come see where I live
.”
CHAPTER SIX
She really had not thought that this night would end up with her sitting on Orion’s bed. But here she was. She felt like a teenager over at a boy’s house for the first time. He was sitting in a desk chair on the other side of the room but he was so large that she felt the presence and heat of him regardless. The only room that they were ever alone in together was her office and she was firmly in charge in there.
In his room? With his flannel sheet-ed bed and black and white photographs of wolves on the walls, well, she wasn’t sure who was in charge in here but it certainly wasn’t her.
No one else had been home when he’d given her a tour of the place and she’d been grateful. It had been both gratifying and deflating to learn that her employees were keeping a secret like this from her. On the one hand, they were keeping the secret because she was a good boss who made it a point to make sure her clients were always safe, with no bent rules along the way. On the other hand, it made her feel strict and unyielding. It made her feel like the heavy. She felt dorky and un-fun and… old. She was only six or seven years older than Ida. Just about the same age as Orion. But still, nobody wanted to be the old, grumpy boss who put the kibosh on the sleepover.
Not that their living situation was simply a sleepover. She’d been thrilled to see that the kitchen was clean and tidy, stocked with everything they’d need. The front two rooms on the first floor were the salon, and Orion didn’t take her through there out of respect for Wren’s space, which she thought was sweet. But the back dining room was cozy, large and packed on one side with a gigantic sectional couch and dining table on the other side. Then there’d been nowhere to go but up the stairs and Diana had followed Orion, asking herself the entire time just what exactly she thought she was doing.
She was following a client up to his bedroom.
She was following a very sweet, very patient, very kind, very attractive client up to his bedroom.
And now she was sitting on his bed, her knees pulled up to her chest, her sandals in a pile on the floor and her eyes bouncing from his face to his walls, having no idea where to look.
She spied the small pile of books on his desk. “Oh. Are you thinking of learning how to read and write?” she asked. When she’d gotten him the moving company job, he’d explained to her that he wasn’t interested in improving his literacy skills at all, so a labor-based job was the way to go for him.
He sighed and dropped his head back.
“Yeah. Dawn says I have to. She keeps giving me those picture books hoping I’ll get into the stories and want to learn how to read them. I’d do anything to make her happy, but it seems like a lot of work to me.”
“Can I see them?” She held her hand out for the stack of books and he leaned across the room to hand them over. She saw immediately that they weren’t picture books, they were graphic novels of varying levels. Some of them were manga and some of them were re-tellings of classics. “Wow. She has good taste. These are very cool.”
She flipped through them quietly for a long minute until something nudged her knee. She glanced up and saw that it was his socked foot. His legs were so long that he hadn’t even had to scoot the desk chair closer to reach her. “Don’t read,” he groused. “Dawn’s always reading. Makes me feel like a toddler needing attention.”
She laughed, shaking her head, unwillingly charmed by him. “Well, you certainly sound like a toddler right now. Here. I’ll read one out loud, that way you won’t be left out.”
He pursed his lips, unconvinced.
“It’s a good one, I swear.” She held up the graphic novel adaptation of American Gods. “It’s one of my favorite books and the artwork in this one is beautiful.”
“Oh, all right.” He leaned forward to see the pages as she started reading but it wasn’t more than a page she’d gotten through before she realized that he was squinting and straining to see the pages from where he sat.
“Orion,” she said slowly. “Have you ever had an eye exam?”
“Yeah,” he said with a shrug. “At the hospital when Phoenix was still recovering, some doctor gave me one when they gave me and Dawn our, um, what do you call those?” He snapped his fingers in the air, searching for the word. He and his siblings had been fluent in english when they’d come to Portland, it was their first language after all, but a lot of the vocab still tripped them up considering they hadn’t lived in the human world for very long. “The kind of doctor’s appointment where they take your blood and ask you a thousand questions and grab your balls while you cough, because apparently that’s a thing in human culture?”
Diana spluttered and laughed. “Oh, Orion.” She was a sucker for how candid he was. “They’re called physical exams.”
“Physicals, right. I remember being confused about that at the time because I thought they were gonna do stuff like see how high I could jump and how long I could hold my breath and how fast I could run. But then they just got me naked, sat me bare-assed on a metal table and poked me with a needle fifty times. What a world.”
She tucked her tongue in her cheek. “Uh huh. And what did the doctor say about your eye exam results?”
“Oh. That I needed glasses.”
Her mouth fell flat open. “You never told me that! I would have helped you get glasses!”
He quirked a look at her. “Who wants glasses? Ida’s are cute, and Dawn uses hers to read. Why would I need them?”
“I don’t know,” Diana mused. “Maybe to see properly?”
“I can see just fine. And anything I can’t see I can use my sense of smell for. I don’t need glasses.”
Resolving immediately to get him in a pair of glasses if it was the very last thing she ever did, Diana decided to let the matter drop for now. “Well, either way, why don’t you come over here so that you can see the book while I read it.”
The speed with which he rose up, strode over, put one knee on the bed, and crawled over her to get to the open side made Diana think that maybe he’d been wanting to get on this bed with her the entire time.
The thought made her fingers tingle. Made her breath come in a little fit-like gasp for a moment. She rearranged herself so that gravity wouldn’t have her rolling into the crater he’d created with his body and held the book out so that they could both see it. She started back in on the book, pointing to each part that she was reading so that his eyes could follow the pictures.
He was so quiet, his breaths so even, that after about twenty minutes, Diana turned her head to peek at him, just checking to see if he was still awake. He was. His face was closer to hers than she’d thought it would be and he blinked at her with big, alert eyes, apparently as wrapped up in the story as she was.
“You good?” she asked in a husky voice that barely sounded like hers. “I’m not wearing out my welcome, am I?”
“Keep reading, Diana,” he said with a small smile on his face, snuggling down into the bed in a peaceful, relaxed sort of way that spoke of a man who was exactly where he wanted to be.
So she kept reading.
***
Diana blinked awake at dawn. She knew exactly where she was and exactly how inappropriate it was for her to be there.
She wanted to stiffen and groan and press closed fists to her eyes, but she was terrified of waking Orion up and having to actually talk about the fact that she’d fallen asleep in his bed with him. And her car was parked in his driveway. And it was very likely that at least one, but maybe even two of her employees knew exactly where she’d spent the night.
Good Jesus. This was a mess.
Her only saving grace was that they both slept with their clothes on, the stack of books strewn between them. She peered down their bodies, registering a weight over her ankle and saw that his foot was hooked over hers. But he still had his socks on. All things considered, this was a fairly innocent way to wake up in a man’s bed.
Holding her breath, she braced her arms underneath her and started to slide her body to the edge of the
bed, her eyes on his face, waiting for any tiny indication that he was rousing at all.
He gave no tiny indication. No stuttered breath, no yawn, no rustle, no stretch. He simply opened his eyes, focusing on her, completely alert and awake, as if he hadn’t just been deep asleep.
He growled low in his throat, a deep, almost feral sound. His eyes went wide and he laughed at himself. Stirring for the first time and dragging a hand over his features. “Sorry,” he murmured. “Sometimes I forget I’m not a wolf all the time anymore.”
Now hers were the eyes that were going wide. “Are you saying that that growl was you speaking to me in wolf language?”
She kept her voice at a whisper, mostly because that’s just what people did in the muted dawn light, moments after waking up, but also because she remembered what he’d said about hearing Phoenix and Ida having sex a few rooms away. She wasn’t sure how well sound carried in this house and she wasn’t willing to offer herself as a sacrifice to finding out the answer.
He chuckled. “No. Not really. It’s not like me and Orion and Dawn really spent a ton of time conversing when we’re in our wolf forms. But there’s some level of communicating that goes on. Maybe it’s more of a sibling thing than a wolf thing.”
“What did you say to me? What did that grunt mean?” For a moment, as interested in this as she was, she forgot that she was supposed to be sneaking out of the house right now.
“I just asked if you were all right.”
“And if I am doing all right, how should I have responded?” She did a low grunt in her own throat, trying to imitate the noise he’d made earlier.
He laughed, tipping his face into the pillow beneath his head for a moment before he rolled back and looked at her, just one eye visible. “Yup. That’s it. You nailed it.”
She laughed too. “I obviously sounded like an idiot.”
“A cute idiot.”
And then there was no other way to explain what they were doing than to say that they were laying in bed together and staring in one another’s eyes. Things like socks and jeans and the books between them started to seem dangerously irrelevant.