by Amanda Milo
I’m very careful to keep my eyes on the food and not on him, and my mindfulness is rewarded with Deek sounding so relaxed you’d think he was a normal person, not a man who was so stressed he was turning into a wolf a few short hours ago.
“We mostly like to cook our meat when we’re in human form. When we’re wolves though…”
“Different rules?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks for satisfying my curiosity,” I tell him brightly. I add the broccoli, turning all the heads until they’re buttered and crisping.
“You’re welcome.”
I get a plate down from the cupboard and fish a steak knife and fork out of the silverware drawer. “Do you have any questions so far?”
“I don’t know yet.”
I tip my head, keeping my attention down. “Fair enough. And this is done.” I serve it all up on the plate and move the pan to a cool burner.
“It smells wonderful,” he praises. Hungrily, he adds, “Looks wonderful too.”
I grin at the yearning in his voice. “Want to eat alone?”
I’m surprised by the pause. I’m even more surprised when he ventures, “No… I don’t mind if you stay. If you like.”
“I’d love to,” I tell him. But then I’m not sure where I should stand or if I should sit. Will it make him too uncomfortable to have me sitting across from him? I decide to ask. “Where would you like to eat? Standing at the counter, sitting at the bar…”
“Across from you at the bar is fine,” he murmurs, just the littlest bit of hesitation creeping back into his voice.
But he’s making an effort. And it really would make me feel better to know him better before I leave Maggie alone in his care.
I rearrange the stools so that he has one on his side of the bar before I plop down and sip my now-cool tea. When Deek tentatively sinks onto the seat, I keep my stare focused on the fridge which is off to the side of him. It helps that I purposely positioned his stool so that we aren’t directly across from each other.
Deek slowly cuts into his steak, and the moment he fits that first bite into his mouth to savor—
The groan he lets out is heartfelt and gratifying. “Frigging hell,” he moans around his mouthful, prompting me to burst out laughing.
“Sorry,” he grunts sheepishly. He tries a broccoli crown next and sounds like he could cry. “I didn’t know food could taste like this…”
“It’s the browned butter,” I say sagely. “Tomorrow I can make you cookies with it that will change your life.”
He actually woofs.
Grinning into my tea, I take a breath. “Speaking of tomorrow. Let’s see, that’s Sunday, so just let me know where I should take you for church. And then Monday, I leave for my shift at seven-thirty. Charlotte leaves at about the same time for school. It’s the tail end of summer break, and I don’t know how much Finn told you, but Maggie will be home all day with you.”
When Deek continues taking slow, savoring bites of his food rather than answering, like he can’t tear himself away from it, I smile and keep talking. “Charlotte will be back and forth. She’s got a lot of activities she’s involved in this year, including academic decathlon meetings. Her friend Ginny is here whenever Charlotte is, just so you know. But she’s a good kid.” She has a shit parent, but she’s a good kid.
Deek catches me off guard by asking, “What was that look?”
Startled, my eyes fly to his, effectively chasing his gaze away—but not before I catch his eyes for one tiny moment.
They’re butterscotch. His eyes are a brown sugar gold, and they are as lovely as his face is. He’s not as overtly pretty as Finn, but as far as ruggedly handsome goes, he’s doing just fine. In other words, no one in their right mind would kick him out of bed.
Don’t think of your borrowed nanny in bed—that’s so inappropriate!
“Ah,” I pip, trying to regain my equilibrium. “Ginny.” I force my eyes off of his popping and clenching jaw and move it back to the safety of the fridge, which has magnets that spell Welcome, Deek! on it. I didn’t even realize Maggie had done that before bed, but that was sweet of her. Maggie knows how to spell her name and your typical consonant-vowel-consonant words, so I think Charlotte must have helped.
That was very sweet of Charlotte too.
“What about Ginny?” Deek prompts softly. “Your face looked… sad.”
I grimace and almost make the mistake of glancing at him again, but I manage to catch myself. “She’s… her mom needs help. Ginny’s mom tells everyone she meets that the love of her life died before Ginny was born, and losing him ruined her. And maybe it did. She must have really loved him because she’s gone off the rails. I knew her when we were growing up and she wasn’t a bad person. But now she struggles with serious addiction problems. And she attracts the worst boyfriends. I think—” I hesitate. I shake my head a little. “I think some of them have hurt Ginny.”
Deek has gone very still, no longer devouring his steak and vegetable manna. “And Ginny has to stay with her mom?”
“CPS—Child Protection Services—have stepped in before. She always ends up back at her mom’s though. And things get better until the next boyfriend enters the picture. Suffice it to say, when Ginny wants to spend the night, she’s always welcome. And if there’s ever a day that she says someone hurt her, believe the girl,” I add with an inward frown.
“You’re just going to wait for her to be… hurt?”
I can’t stop myself from looking at him then. And to my distant surprise, Deek holds my eye contact. Not only that, he’s doing it with a surprising amount of force.
I shrug helplessly. “The law can’t protect her from circumstances that might happen. They can only punish or take action on what’s able to be proven or reasonably proven. And whatever has happened to her in the past is apparently not violation enough to remove her entirely. So she’s at the mercy of her mom’s choices. Poor kid,” I add sadly. It’s me who breaks our gazes.
It’s a good length of time before Deek returns to eating.
I get up and round the island on the opposite side to start cleaning the cast iron. I’m drying it and preparing to coat it with oil when Deek stands and says, “Susan?”
Surprised that he’d address me, I glance over my shoulder. “Yeah?”
Eyes fixed somewhere around my chin again, he says with sincerity, “Thank you. This was very kind of you.”
“It was no trouble,” I assure him. “And just leave your plate. I’ll get it tomorrow.” I send him a smile.
His dark gold eyes flash up, meeting mine once, and his lips curve up for a brief moment. “Thanks again. And goodnight.”
“Night.”
He leaves the kitchen, quietly padding on bare feet down the basement steps.
And in the morning when I shuffle to the sink to fill the coffee pot, I find his plate and silverware washed and set in the drying rack.
CHAPTER 5
SUSAN
“Signal.”
“MOM, I know,” Charlotte stresses. With a frustrated shake of her head, she flicks her fingers up to activate the blinker.
“Deek? Did you see her? This is my horse,” Maggie loudly whispers to Deek, who is situated in the right rear seat, behind me. He’s dressed nicely for church, complete with a tie. When I voiced surprise—and shock—that he’s wrinkle-free despite his things arriving in a duffel, he explained that simply hanging clothing in the bathroom during your shower works as a pretty decent steamer.
Huh. The things you learn.
He’s got the window rolled all the way down hoping fresh air will keep him from hurling. (And to stop the other windows from making that awful thumping noise from the air pressure as we speed along the road, everybody else has their windows cracked open.) He’s also gripping a salad bowl on his lap… just in case he has to toss his cookies.
Maggie’s in her car seat on the left, oblivious to the level of his misery. (To be fair, he’s being a really good sport about bei
ng driven around in a car that makes him want to die.) She’s showing him her handheld game.
“That’s a very nice horse,” Deek replies, voice so much lower in decibel than hers. “I like the pink bow in her forelock.”
The words strike me as funny—something about the polite sentiment delivered in his masculine voice. I stifle a snicker.
Charlotte glances into the rearview mirror. “Which way, Deek?”
“Keep going straight,” he responds. “Do you know where Culvers is?”
Maggie shouts, “CULVERS!”
“Shhhh, Maggie—” I start.
“Ice cream…” Maggie whimpers.
“Maggie?” I say.
Her whimpering stops. “Yes, Mom?”
“Not now, and remember the rule while Charlotte is practicing?”
“Be quiet,” sighs Maggie.
“That’s right. Thank you,” I confirm.
“Yeah, Snow Pea,” adds Charlotte. “I’m driving.”
Maggie giggles.
“Why… Snow Pea?” Deek asks haltingly.
“She used to tell me she’d snap me like a snow pea,” Maggie shares.
“Oh.”
“How’s your legroom situation?” I ask him. I don’t twist to look over my shoulder at him like I would anyone else. It’s a little strange, but I’ve only known him a few hours and I’m already getting the hang of it. I notice though that Maggie’s direct attention is no problem for him at all. She looks right at him and he doesn’t seem nearly as affected. He’ll look over at her if she asks him a question and everything. I guess she’s perceived by him to be less threatening? A child has little to no social hierarchy.
“I’m fine,” he claims.
In our ancient Ford Fiesta, his long legs are crammed up to his chin; he’s a polite liar. But he can’t sit in the front because he isn’t a licensed driver himself, and while Charlotte is working toward her fifty hours of certified driving, the law requires a licensed individual to be seated beside her. (Unfortunately, our schedules are such that we can’t always have her drive before I go to work and I’m often too tired after work to get back in the car and stay alert enough to watch the road (although we have managed to complete her ten hours of night driving), so it’s the daytime hours on weekends when we can log her time in.)
Thus, we’re crippling our werewolf.
“Ice cream,” Maggie sing-songs to herself as we pass Culvers.
“Turn right at the stoplight,” Deek directs.
Charlotte shoots me a brief look and pointedly flicks on the blinker. “Got it.”
Smiling, I tell her, “Good job.” Although I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of my fourteen-year-old driving, our State allows kids her age to get a permit, and Charlotte is very good behind the wheel. I really just need to check myself to prevent me from being a back-seat driver.
“Thanks, Mom,” she says dryly.
Deek shifts, his knees pressing so tight to my seat and therefore my spine that I could draw you a topographical map of his patellas. “You’ll follow Wolf’s Hollow Road til the end.” He’s panting slightly, and from the slice of him I can see out of the side mirror, he’s white-knuckling the bowl he’s clutching.
“Got it,” Charlotte chirps, and our bodies start to feel the change in our state of motion strongly as we take the tight curve to a tree-lined road.
Deek gags at the four-second relentless tug of gravity.
Meanwhile, I want to stop and take photos. “This is breathtaking.” The way the sun lights up the end of the road makes it feel like we’re driving through a tunnel of green. Even the tree bark is green, some kind of lichen that—fungus aside—makes the entire place a picture.
Deek coughs. After a moment of recovery, he agrees softly, “I’ve always thought so too.”
Charlotte is nodding. “It is really pretty.”
“Are there any horses?” Charlotte asks dubiously.
I feel my mouth quirk. This girl and horses. “Sorry, kiddo. Horses don’t grow on trees.”
“Ha,” honks Charlotte as the forest-lined road stands tall before us like a verdant wall.
Deek shifts again, his knees jammed hard against me with not a centimeter of space and therefore no relief. He makes an odd grunt.
I know it makes him uncomfortable, but I risk a peek back at him. “Still okay?” I whisper.
His eyes meet mine and then flicker away. “I’ll be fine, Susan. We’re almost there.”
“Maybe once Charlotte gets her license, she should teach you to drive,” Maggie offers. “Then you can sit in the front. Okay, now look at my horse. See her blanket?”
“That’s a very nice blanket. And the red bow is also nice.”
“I thought so,” Maggie agrees, a worldly tone present in her six-year-old voice that has me silently laughing.
“We could,” Charlotte begins, “instead of that plan, just get a bigger car.”
I pat her knee. “When you get a job, we’ll talk about an upgrade. Right now, we’re strapped tight, and this gets the job done.”
Charlotte nods, understanding our circumstances perfectly. “First: permit. Next: job.”
“Good plan,” I confirm.
“It will be just up ahead,” Deek announces. And then the trees stop and the world opens up into a meadow and our quiet two-lane road turns into a gravel path that weaves up to the most incredible stone structure I have ever seen.
A square bell tower sits impressively in front of a humbly-sized church, both structures made entirely of Gothic stone—with the exception of stained glass windows in the latter, all depicting wolves and lambs.
“Why aren’t there lions? There shouldn’t be wolfs,” Maggie observes, peering out her window as Charlotte follows the winding road.
“Wolves, not ‘wolfs,’” Charlotte corrects. “And you’re right, Maggs.”
“Actually,” Deek says cautiously, as if he’s afraid of being reprimanded. “A lion lying down beside a lamb isn’t in the Bible at all. It’s a wolf that dwells with the lamb, the leopard lies down with a kid, and a calf and a young lion are what’s mentioned.”
“Huh,” Charlotte says.
“I didn’t realize that,” I murmur.
Charlotte coasts to a stop in the gravel parking lot, which has a surprising number of cars packed into it. As in, Sam’s Club on Black Friday packed.
I guess werewolves go to church.
Deek’s seatbelt clicks. “Thank you for the ride. And you drove excellently, Charlotte.”
She beams and turns in her seat. “Thanks!”
“It was no problem to drive you,” I tell him as he unfolds himself and escapes the confines of his temporary sardine can. He places his borrowed salad bowl on his empty seat.
I roll down my window all the way so we’re not obstructed. “What time should we pick you up?”
“Oh,” he’s pinned his eyes to my throat. “I can ask for a ride back to your house with someone else if it would be easier—”
“Deek, we’re going to do grocery shopping and stuff. Don’t worry. We can get you… unless you have a friend with a bigger backseat. We totally understand if you don’t want to play clown car with us twice. What time?”
His lip quirks at the clown comment. “Noon.”
“Okay.” I try to send him a reassuring smile, but he still can’t meet my eyes. “We’ll be here. Bye for now.”
He manages a tentative smile of his own. “All right.”
Charlotte and Maggie wave and we start to roll forward—but then I tap Charlotte’s arm. “Stop.”
She does. I lean out the window. “Deek!”
He turns, looking confused. He trots to us, and I notice the way his thigh muscles bunch in his dark jeans. He’s wearing a rust-colored sport coat that brings out the color of his eyes—and I’m able to admire this fact for about the length of a heartbeat before he lowers his gaze and stops by my side of the car. “Yes?”
“What’s your cell phone number?” I as
k him.
He frowns again. “I don’t know.” He reaches into his pocket and draws it out like it’s the remote to a spaceship.
He hands it to me.
“Oh,” I croak—handling it like it’s a remote to a spaceship. “I don’t do technology. Hang on.” I start to pass it over.
Charlotte’s already snatching it, snickering. “Give it here.”
I tip my head to Deek. “The eldest child wields the tech in our household.”
“But I’m in training,” Maggie pipes up.
Deek’s lips curve upwards, and his eyes crinkle, his gaze flicking in her direction.
“She’s in training,” I confirm. “How do you not know your phone number?”
His shrug holds a world of bafflement. “I’ve never needed one. It’s new. I’ve never looked at it.” I’ve never seen a spaceship before. I don’t know how anyone expects me to fly it; I’m not qualified for something this advanced.
I really feel him on this. It took me a month to get used to my latest phone, and for half of it, I just handed the stupid thing to Charlotte and asked her to figure it out. “Ah.”
“Done,” Charlotte announces, and passes the phone to my hand and I in turn hold it out for Deek.
“‘Preciate it,” he murmurs, tucking it back into his pocket.
“Have a good service,” I tell him. “Bye for real.”
He meets my eyes. “See you again soon.”
With that, we pull away.
CHAPTER 6
SUSAN
Deek texts us one word: Ready.
The return trip to the werewolf church is uneventful, and because Charlotte got plenty of driving time while we tooled around town, I’m in the driver’s seat, which means the circumstances are set for a much more merciful excursion where Deek’s legs are concerned: he gets the front seat and four more generous inches of legroom.
“DO YOU WANT ICE CREAM?” Maggie orders more than asks the moment his butt hits the passenger seat.
“Umm…” He sends me a look asking for help without ever actually making eye contact.