by Chant, Zoe
“I keep forgetting you probably understand all this stuff even better than I do.”
She scoffed. “Please. I understand it from the outside. I’ve spent a lot of time watching how wolves behave, sure. But I’ve spent a lot of time watching other animals, too, so I haven’t had time to pick up all the—lupine subtleties. You know them from the inside-out. You have them.”
She slid off the bed and stood up, gloriously, enchantingly naked.
Colby had a hard time taking his eyes off her. “I hate to say this, but if you actually want us to wind up with any kind of dinner, you might want to get dressed again.”
He might have hated saying it, but she definitely didn’t hate hearing it. Her face lit up even more, and she did a little shimmy that just about snapped his brain in two.
He couldn’t believe she wasn’t used to being admired—or feeling like she should have admiration. It was self-evident to him that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. That was just a fact.
“I’ll have mercy,” Aria said primly, “and put some clothes on. But you have to do it too. Just because it’s not as obvious when a woman gets turned on doesn’t mean I don’t—unavoidably respond to you being naked.”
His wolf radiated smugness.
Actually, screw it, he radiated smugness.
“I’ll put on some clothes,” he said.
He kissed her on the forehead.
He still felt like he was going to wake up from a dream.
*
He might have struck up a new and better relationship with his wolf, but that didn’t mean his wolf was tremendously helpful in this whole “cooking dinner for Aria” scheme. You couldn’t get much further apart than “wolf” and “chef.”
He had to stand in the middle of the kitchen for almost a minute, silently reasoning with the mutt.
No, I don’t just want to go out and hunt down a “tasty deer” for her and then drag it back here. Humans like cooked meat, remember? And a lot of them are still traumatized from Bambi. Just because Aria knows that nature can be gory isn’t any reason to dump a dead deer on her kitchen floor, all right?
Muskoxen? his wolf said hopefully.
Colby felt like tearing his hair out. Have you ever actually seen a muskox, buddy? Because I haven’t. I don’t think we’re going to find one in the backyard.
His wolf sulked a little and then very tentatively said, Blueberries? Apples?
Those—weren’t terrible suggestions. And he could feel his own stomach growl just thinking about them. Whenever he and his dad had spent time on four legs in the woods, he’d always enjoyed foraging for sweet berries and fallen apples and pears as much as he’d enjoyed hunting. Wolves could have pretty flexible appetites.
And he figured he should encourage the mutt taking a more sensible approach.
Sure, he said. Maybe blueberries and apples.
It earned him a tail wag.
He was starting to feel like as much of a pet owner as he was a werewolf, and he didn’t think he minded that at all. It was one way to be a little easier on himself.
Luckily for him, Gretchen really knew how to stock a kitchen. There was a whole pork roast in there.
Since Colby was feeling ambitious, he started prepping it, layering onions and carrots at the bottom of the scratched-up roasting pan and seasoning it thoroughly. His dad had always added brown sugar to a roast once it was in the final cooking stages, so he hoped to find a bag of that in one of the cupboards—the dry goods in safe houses tended to build up, since they didn’t expire at the same rate as the stuff in the fridge.
To salve his wolf’s ego, he decided to cut up some apples, too, so the juice would help flavor the pork.
Aria had decided to shower before she’d gotten dressed again, so when she joined him in the kitchen, her hair was still damp and glittery with stray droplets of water. She was dressed in fresh new clothes she’d retrieved from her overnight bag. A soft, cranberry-colored dress clung to her body, highlighting her luscious curves; it ended only partway down her thighs, drawing attention to her legs. Attention that her legs infinitely rewarded.
He stared at her, and only belatedly realized that she was staring back at him with equally fervent attention.
“You look incredible,” he said.
And at the same time, she said, “You’re making a pork roast.”
At least then their laughter was simultaneous.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You look incredible too. I mean that. But I already knew you were gorgeous, and I didn’t already know that you could cook. Let alone ‘come into a strange kitchen and start putting together a perfect Sunday dinner’ cook.”
He smiled and moved over so she could stand beside him and see what he was doing.
He liked standing shoulder-to-shoulder with her, like they were taking on the world together. Or at least taking on the roast.
“My dad taught me. He came from a long line of really devoted cooks—his parents owned a restaurant together, an old-fashioned barbecue shack. I think making dinner relaxed him, no matter what kind of day he had. It does that for me too.” He slid the roasting pan into the oven. “Sometimes when you have a rough day, it feels like a miracle that you can take a bunch of separate things and make something delicious out of them.”
“I never thought about it like that. You might get me to try making something more ambitious than trail mix.”
“I do still want to try your trail mix. Especially the s’mores kind.”
“We can definitely make that happen.” She looked through the oven at the roast. “I don’t know that I really have anything in my life that comes together with that kind of consistency. I can do everything right when I’m out in the field, but sometimes the perfect shot just doesn’t happen—there’s too much you can’t control. And then I come home, and I do everything I can to make sure Mattie’s growing up okay, but of course sometimes she’s cranky or she wants something I can’t give her. I don’t have anything that just... always works.”
Colby put his arm around her.
“I think my dad felt that way too,” he said quietly. “It’s got to be hard raising a kid all on your own—no matter how great your parents are about helping out. And having a job that you love doesn’t mean that you’re going to love every day of it. It’s nice to have something be simple. I could teach you some of the family recipes.”
Moose, his wolf suggested.
Unhelpfully.
“But,” he went on, “if it helps, you have me.”
She looked up at him, a question in her lovely brown eyes.
“You have me,” Colby repeated. “No matter what your day has been like, when you come home, what’s between us is always going to work. That’s what being mated means.”
She nuzzled into his shoulder. “Every time you tell me something else about what it means to be a shifter, I like it even more.”
“Well, I can change that in a hurry,” he said dryly. “My wolf keeps telling me to go out and get you a muskox like a real provider would.”
She giggled. “Yum, I love country-fried muskox.”
See? his wolf said. I was right!
Colby groaned. “Don’t encourage it.”
She stayed pressed against him. “I’m glad you and your dad had such a good relationship.”
“Me too. My mom took off when I was a kid—I guess maybe that’s why I used to think that werewolves were needier than other people. It was like I’d asked her for too much.”
“You were a kid,” Aria said fiercely. “Your parents are supposed to be there for you. If she wasn’t, that’s because of her, not because of you.”
“I’m starting to believe that. Thanks to you.”
“Good.”
“And my dad always tried to convince me of that too. I was a real pain when I was a teenager, and I’m sure I gave him a lot of grief, but he never stopped letting me know I was important to him. Your dad reminds me of him, actually.”
“I
think Dad would be really flattered to know that.” She hesitated. “You said he died a few years ago...”
He didn’t mind talking about it, not with her. “Yeah. He got sick when I was overseas, and when I came home, I took care of him. That’s when we moved here. He wasn’t that mobile in the last couple of years, so I lived with him for a while. Tried to take care of him the way he always took care of me. It was slow, I guess, but most of his last days were good ones. And I’m glad I got to soak up the time we had left.”
“I’m sure he knew how much you loved him,” Aria said.
“I think so.” He kissed her on top of her head. “I’ve been sort of... adrift, since he died. But it’s better now. I wish he could have met you, though. He would have liked you right away.”
“Photography buff?”
He shook his head. “He would have seen how happy you make me. And he would have seen the light in your eyes. He was a good judge of character.”
*
It was almost midnight by the time they settled down to have dinner, but Colby felt like he had somehow powered through his sleepiness and found a new reserve of energy.
One that would probably vanish, he had to admit, as soon as his stomach was full. But it was nice to sit across the table from Aria and get to appreciate her in full, without being distracted by any need to yawn.
He hadn’t done much besides the roast—even he had his limits—but he’d thrown some vegetables into the pan and opened up a box of cookies. Then they had sliced up some of Theo’s hostess cheese and paired it with some slightly stale back-of-the-cupboard crackers.
It wasn’t the most romantic dinner the world had ever seen, especially since the only candle he’d been able to find was an enormous “holiday-scented” one that had been left in a closet, but as far as safe house date nights went, he thought he had done a pretty good job.
Aria had even higher praise. “Oh my God, Colby, this is amazing.” Her eyes had dropped closed with her first bite of roast. “You really do have to teach me your recipes.”
“It took a lot of trial and error as a kid before I could even follow them right. I remember trying to make this for my dad for Father’s Day once, as a surprise—I was probably around twelve—and I didn’t realize until right at the end that we were out of brown sugar. I thought, hey, sugar’s sugar—and dumped about a pound of powdered sugar all over the pork roast. That one didn’t turn out so well.”
“I can imagine.”
He told her a few other embarrassing anecdotes from his childhood since there was sadly no shortage of them. But eventually, as they got down to having nothing on their plates but cookie crumbs, he had to admit that he wasn’t really making conversation. He was stalling.
He didn’t want to remind her of Eli Hebbert right when she’d relaxed.
But they had to think about Eli, because there was no way Eli wasn’t out there somewhere thinking about them.
Colby had killed his brother. Even if Eli was the worst pack leader in the history of all wolves, even if he was the one who had started the fight, he wouldn’t be able to let that kind of challenge go unanswered. He would want both Colby and Aria dead now.
And Colby wasn’t going to let anything happen to her, no matter what it took to keep her safe.
“Aria,” he said.
The look on her face said she already knew what he was thinking. “Yeah. We have to talk about how we were almost dinner.”
“If it helps, I don’t actually think they would have eaten us.”
She waved her hand. “I know, I know. Wolves don’t generally gnaw on humans.”
“And while the Hebberts might be into denying their human sides, even they’d probably get a little squeamish about cannibalism.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Yuck.”
“I keep thinking about something that happened at the end of the fight,” Colby said, wanting to get the subject as far away from cannibalistic werewolves as possible. “You had the gun pointed at them, and they both knew that by then, they were weak enough that it would be a dumb idea to risk being shot point-blank. Wolves are brave, and we’re good at accepting death, but we’re not suicidal. Eli ran when he was the only one left. Weston should have run too.”
“But he didn’t,” Aria said slowly.
“He didn’t. But I think it took him a minute. He didn’t want to fight, and then something persuaded him to go ahead and do it anyway.”
“You’re right,” she said, resting her chin on her hand. Her eyes were clouded with thought. “He was waiting, trying to figure out what to do, and then he put his tail between his legs and started whimpering. I’ve seen it before in wolves. Submissive behavior. I thought he was submitting to me.”
She offered Colby a slightly embarrassed smile.
“Because at the time, I thought I’d really tricked him with that silver bullet line. But he wasn’t submitting to me, was he? He was submitting to Eli.”
Colby nodded. “And that means Eli’s alpha skills are strong. Freakishly strong. It’s hard to get someone to walk straight to their death for you. I mean, most people, especially most criminals, wouldn’t like finding out that their brother would throw them away like used Kleenex. But Weston found out—and submitted anyway.”
“So what does that mean?”
It made an intuitive kind of sense to him, but it took a moment for him to figure out how to best explain it.
“When I’m human, I still have some wolf characteristics, even if it’s not obvious. I have a pretty heightened sense of smell—not quite up to my wolf’s standards, but better than any human would under normal circumstances. Don’t even get me started on how much it sucks to walk through a mall with one of those perfume counters.”
“I’m not the biggest fan of those either,” Aria said. “Allergies.”
He made a note of that for future gift-shopping.
“So what I’m thinking is that Eli maybe has heightened alpha powers because he spends so much of his time as a wolf. Those are the skills he’s developed.”
“He certainly hasn’t been spending his time learning how to make friends and influence people.”
“Exactly. Ninety-nine percent of Eli’s back-to-nature act is bullshit, but maybe one percent of it isn’t. So he’s even more compelling than a normal wolf would be. And I think maybe his sense of smell is even stronger than mine. I couldn’t have tracked you that quickly.”
The realization made his stomach sink like a stone.
But Aria shook her head. “It’s not just his nose. My neighborhood runs almost right up to the preserve, remember? He’s been in the area before. Susan—the jumpy neighbor who stopped by—has even seen him a few times in wolf form. He could have smelled me before.”
“Maybe. Probably. But he’d still have to find you through a whole neighborhood of other smells, and I would have had a harder time with it than he did. Between that and the sheer alpha sway he had over his brother, I think he has some advantages I don’t.”
He hated feeling like he was failing her. He didn’t want her to have any reason to be scared.
But Aria didn’t look afraid at all. If anything, she looked a little amused.
“That’s only fair,” she said. “Because we have plenty of advantages he doesn’t.”
Colby smiled. He wanted to believe that, sure. “Like what?”
“Like the fact that, between the two of us, we know wolves a hell of a lot better than Eli Hebbert knows humans. Like the fact that we have each other, and right now, as far as we know, Eli doesn’t have anyone. He ditched his cousin, and he used his brother as cannon fodder. You’ve been saying it yourself: wolves need packs. And Eli’s fresh out.”
“True.” He thought it over. “But guys like that always seem to have a gift for recruiting new blood fast. And he might bite someone—that’s what I’m really worried about.”
Aria gasped. “Wait, that actually works? Can you bite me?”
“Yes, it does, and no, I can’t.” He
felt scandalized by the suggestion. “It’s a horrible thing to do to someone. Their odds of surviving it are terrible—a body that’s been human its whole life isn’t prepared to suddenly launch into being a werewolf. Think about it like being a total couch potato three hundred and sixty-four days of the year and then trying to run a triathlon. It’s a recipe for disaster.”
“Not the most flattering metaphor for us poor humans,” Aria said, grimacing, “but sure, I get it.”
He made a note to show her more of the inherent werewolf strength later. Preferably by picking her up again.
Aria moved back on topic. “Do you think he’d really do that?”
He felt torn on that. “I don’t know that he’d want to do a human the honor of turning them into a werewolf, and I think that would be how he’d think about it. Most of the time, anyway.”
“See? You understand him just fine.”
“I’ve met his type before. They’re nothing but assholes and petty criminals with delusions of grandeur. I’ll admit Eli Hebbert becoming some kind of super-wolf is a new and incredibly unwelcome development, but I’m guessing that even with that, the rest holds true.”
He drummed his fingers against the table, trying to think.
“I don’t know that he would want to turn someone,” he repeated, “but he’s low on options. He might risk it. And in addition to worrying me because someone might die, it worries me because he’d be able to have an even stronger alpha sway over someone he turned. I’m worried that was what happened with Amanda Briar, the girlfriend of his who died. Maybe he’s decided he wants to bump up the numbers on his pack, especially with a woman, a lover. But Amanda didn’t survive the transformation.”
“That poor woman.” She bit her lip. “And if he’s done it before, he’ll be more likely to do it again.”
“Exactly. But I don’t know who he’d want to target. Your neighbor, maybe? She’s seen him.”
“But only in wolf form. It doesn’t fit with his old habits.”
“You’re sure she hasn’t been dating him?”
Aria nodded. “I described him to her, and she didn’t even blink. Besides, she’s chatty in general. I think if she did have a boyfriend, she would have mentioned being glad he was around to make her feel safer with all this craziness going on. Something like that, anyway.”