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Tori woke feeling perfectly comfortable. Everything except her face was warm; she must have pointed the fan right toward her, bringing a cool breeze and the smell of a high mountain summer field.
She opened one eye and realized she was staring at a high mountain summer field.
She opened both eyes and looked down to see a giant black wolf sprawled over most of her. They lay at the edge of the grass and the fire pit.
Consternation warred with comfort. Last night, she’d watched the biggest wolf she’d ever seen lope into the darkness and tried to decide what to do. She’d sat down by the fire, unable to bear walking away, and must have fallen asleep. Sometime in the night, he must have returned. She was a little sorry she missed it, and now they were cemented together.
First, she had to extract herself from her current situation, and then she had to figure out the rest of her life.
What was she thinking?
She thought that he was a very nice man, in addition to being completely gorgeous. Nice was the wrong word—damning with faint praise when you couldn’t find a better description of somebody—but in his case, there was a core of consideration, kindness, and interest that couldn’t be described any other way.
She never would have associated it with a werewolf. Even now, her heart beat strongly in her chest at the proximity of her vulnerable neck to his teeth. Though clearly, he passed the entire night without eating her.
Heroic restraint.
She rolled her eyes, trying to quiet the nightmare fairy tales from her childhood and her coven’s litany to stay vigilant and within city limits. The twins drilled into her the importance of never going alone, never going to another city without worrying about where the lines were drawn, and to carry half a backpack’s worth of defensive potions and weapons.
She was fighting anger, she realized, at how much mental and emotional space this fear had stolen from her. In all of her childhood, she had never imagined this—that she would meet a werewolf and he would be nice. And gorgeous. And warm.
A prudent voice said that she’d met exactly one wolf, and painting the entire population as harmless was a similar overreaction, but dammit, what was more likely? Covens and packs everywhere were on the verge of war that had not broken out in several thousand years, or that shifters were people too, just trying to live their lives with no particular feelings about witches.
She glanced down at the wolf, who had a proprietary paw over every inch of her. Okay, maybe neutral wasn’t the right word.
She experienced the heavy freedom of understanding that maybe they didn’t have to live like this. There was a cost to being careful. It was a life lived inside the lines, missing out on beautiful people, freedom of movement, and mornings like these. She settled back into the grass. She didn’t want to miss any more of her life.
It was a resolution tested less than five seconds later as her phone rang and the black wolf’s eyes opened, and tension spiraled through the body that had been relaxed and warm on top of her. Her heart rate doubled as he carefully stood up and stepped away.
With suddenly dry lips, she said, “Morning.”
Her phone stopped ringing, and she took a breath. It started up again.
She frowned and scrambled at the pocket of her jacket that was completely inadequate for the morning chill now that her heat source was snuffling around her like the secrets of the universe lay in the dirt next to her hip.
She answered it with a groggy, “Victoria Griffin.”
“You gotta move the cars.”
She blinked and looked at the screen. It was an unknown number with a local ZIP code.
“I beg your pardon?”
“We got three rounds of heavy equipment out on the main road, and we can’t get up the hill ‘cause there’s a van and an SUV in the way.”
She pulled the phone away from her head. “Oops.”
She looked at the werewolf, who was snapping its jaws at a butterfly, and then looked down at herself, half covered in dirt and sticks from a night in the woods. She didn’t even want to touch her head and find out what her hair was like.
She put the phone back to her ear. “I can move the van, but the SUV is stuck.”
“You didn’t put towing on the request list.”
The man sounded grumpy and resentful, and she missed her normal crew with every fiber of her being. “Well, could we add it?”
“What?”
“Could you tow the SUV out of the way?”
The wolf looked up at her, suddenly caught by those words for some reason.
“Okay, fine,” the voice on the phone said.
“I’ll be right there,” she said and staggered to her feet. She looked at the wolf. “Do you—”
In moments, a man was crouched at her feet on all fours, completely naked.
His skin was pale, and the muscles on his back looked to be carved from marble.
She realized she was staring and spun around.
“Morning!” she shouted to the rising sun.
She heard him take two steps in the grass, then the rustle of fabric and the quick hitch of a zipper.
“I apologize for my wolf…” Matt said haltingly, and she spun back to see him wearing only the stained and damp khakis he’d traveled in.
“What are you talking about?” Visions of nighttime bloody animal attacks replaced the V of his hips in her head.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “For the whole sleeping thing.”
“Don’t apologize for that.”
He met her eyes for the first time this morning. The front of him was as beautiful as the back, and her mouth went dry for entirely different reasons.
“I think I would’ve frozen to death without him.” That was a lie. It was July. No one was freezing to death anywhere but the snowcapped continental divide. She would’ve gotten really cold, woken up, and either gone to the house, her van, or back home.
“Well, in that case, you’re welcome?”
“The earth movers are here to give you a road. I’ve got to go move my van.”
“Do you like sushi and Boba?”
She blinked twice. “I’ve had both of them.” Which was more than she could say for some of her sisters, who rarely left Silver Spring. She went to Aspen, had eaten at the restaurant she’d recommended, and even got down to Denver occasionally. They weren’t the first things she’d choose….
“Or is there another restaurant closer?”
“There’s a coffee shop. We don’t have a restaurant. Why? I can get food delivered to you here.”
“Would you like to go to dinner with me?”
She froze with one foot half off the ground, ready to stride toward the road, realized she’d been staring at his pecs, and finally met his eyes. “What?”
“The only restaurant I know about in the state is the sushi Boba place, but presumably, there are other restaurants in this state, right? Can we go eat at them together?”
“Like a date?”
He rubbed his neck again. “If you want it to be.”
“You’re asking me out on a date?”
“I guess I am?”
She put her foot back down on the ground very carefully. “We can’t date.”
“Why not?”
“You’re a wolf!”
“Only sometimes? Is that a dealbreaker?”
“Yes! Didn’t we have this entire conversation about how enemies and treaties worked? We can’t go out on a date.” All her hazy morning musings about a different path died when she tried to actually contemplate how this could possibly work.
“I also thought we had the conversation that we don’t want to kill witches and you don’t want to kill wolves, so why the hell are we avoiding each other?”
He was so nice. She didn’t deserve it.
He spread his hands wide, tapped the sides of his thighs, and then spread them wide again and took a step back. “Don’t answer now. Think through all of world history and get back to me.”
He spun on a heel and headed toward the house.
“Oops.” She looked around, scrambled for his shirt, and jogged after him.
She caught up and handed it to him.
“Oh yeah,” he said, looking surprised.
“Welcome.” How was he not covered in goosebumps? The air was warming rapidly as the sun rose, but it wasn’t the weather to forget about the existence of shirts.
They strode together around the house and headed down the hill, wordlessly passing his stuck SUV.
She squinted at the three yellow pieces of heavy equipment parked by the side of the road, relieved to see that it was shiny and new, especially because the crowd around it looked like they’d stepped out of the 1870s. They all wore brown trousers and beige shirts with leather suspenders. What construction crew didn’t have a pair of jeans between them?
As she got closer, she noticed they also all had varying shades of blond hair and looked impossibly young.
The breeze shifted, and Matthew crouched with one hand on the ground.
The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and she pivoted toward the men again.
She’d already learned that, contrary to the twins’ insistence, you couldn’t tell a wolf just by looking at him, but she could make a damn good guess.
Extremely fit, young, and very good at physical labor requiring insane heavy lifting?
“Oh my god,” she said and spun in a circle. She was alone on a dirt road with a werewolf, facing an entire pack of other werewolves whom she’d invited onto his land.
The men marched toward them in an arrowhead formation.
Matthew levitated to his feet. From her angle, it didn’t seem like he pushed off the ground at all.
“What are you doing on our territory?” the front man asked, and to her surprise, Tori realized he wasn’t the oldest or the largest wolf in the clearing, but the rest were deferring to him. Was their alpha dude barely out of his twenties?
“Your territory?” Matthew asked with a snap in his voice.
Somebody gasped from back in the ranks.
“The lost pack,” a voice murmured.
“Yeah, we weren’t lost,” Matt said.
“These mountains are ours,” the kid said.
“Do you think you can defend the entire Rockies?”
“There’s only one of them,” another said speculatively.
“There’s never only one,” someone answered with a snap.
Matt took a huge breath. “I thank you for your help with the road and welcome you temporarily onto Amato Pack lands.”
Tori spun to him and gaped. “Welcome?”
“We still need a damn road, and wolves aren’t going to automatically kill each other either, right? We have our territory.” He turned back to the construction crew. “You didn’t make the slightest effort until today to claim this. Make us a road, send us your actual boundaries, and we’ll all live happily ever after.”
The crew erupted in murmurs, and Tori realized they were no longer speaking English. It sounded like German or something Slavic. She wasn’t sure.
“Great, all we need are the Germans fighting the Italians. That’s historically gone so well,” Matt murmured as he ran his hand up and down her back. She melted into the touch, which seemed as much for his safety as hers.
Then she frowned. “Weren’t they on the same side?”
“Yeah, that really didn’t go well.”
The young man in the front said, “Halt,” which seemed to confirm the German hypothesis.
He turned toward Tori. “We will build your road because we keep our word, but that is not an admission of a loss of territory.”
“You never had the…” Matt took a huge breath. “Fine. We can let our alphas sort it out later.”
“Who says I am not the alpha?”
Matt gave him a flat look, then turned to Tori. “You need help moving your van?”
She’d forgotten the existence of her van. “No, I got it.”
“I’m gonna help,” Matt said the moment she got three feet away from him. She couldn’t say she was sorry to have a werewolf at her back when facing another pack.
How did her life become this? She’d never even spoken to a werewolf in her life, and now she was standing amidst the pack that avoided people and modern life like the plague. The Koenigs lived deep in the woods west of town. They were currently standing not very deep in the woods just east of town.
She looked up at the brightening sky and muttered, “What else could go wrong?”
“Just about everything,” Matt said. “Remember the whole I hear everything problem?”
Tori closed her eyes and nodded.
How in good conscience could she ever keep this from the twins and the rest of her coven? But how could she bring them into this? The last thing this situation needed was crossbows.
Were they really just going to happily build a road and leave?
She moved her van and then watched as the crew started walking up the road with weed whackers.
She shared a long look with Matt. Yes, it seemed they were going to get away with this. They would all just pretend like the magic half of their souls didn’t exist.
“Could you move the car?” the kid asked.
“No,” Matt said patiently. “That’s why we asked you to tow it.”
“No, I mean, could you turn it on and put it in reverse?”
“Oh, sure,” Matt said and jogged for his SUV.
The boy gave her a curt nod, but Tori frowned, not liking the intensity in his eyes.
She had no empathy magic, or any receptive talent at all to perceive the world around her, but she didn’t get where she was without the ability to read people and what they wanted. This boy wanted blood.
She pivoted and was about to shout out toward Matt to wait up, when she heard a rumble and spun toward the cliff face along the road and watched in horror as huge boulders tumbled right for him.
He dove away with shifter speed, but he couldn’t outrun a rock avalanche.
Her magic was in her fingers before she consciously called it, and she shoved with all of her might, sending the rocks careening off course directly toward the rental SUV.
She cringed as they hit, but couldn’t worry about that as she spun back toward the kid. “What did you do?”
“You can control rocks!”
The pack erupted with shouts of condemnation in two languages. The only two words she understood were witch and hex. Several crouched like she’d seen Matt do, preparing for shifting.
She braced for an attack, pulling more magic toward her. One man stepped closer to her, teeth bared and eyes dead.
“Ho!” the lead kid shouted.
To her complete shock, they listened to him. The wolves froze.
Her eyes darted around, still braced for pain.
“You are Annie’s sister,” the man said.
“Yes,” Tori said. Annie was another foster kid the twins had taken in.
The man shouted two words she didn’t understand, and the wolves stood up.
“Do you know her?” she couldn’t help asking. “How do you know—”
The wolf turned on his heel and backed up. The others melted away behind him.
She took two deep breaths, seriously worried about her heart rate.
What did he want with Annie? Maybe the rocks were just a coincidence and fell on their own? Were they going to go to war over erosion?
She looked back at Matt, who was dusting himself off forty feet away as the rock settled against his SUV.
She looked up at the cliff a hundred feet above her and saw no sign of anyone, but that didn’t mean they were innocent. They were shifter faster. They could be up there and away in minutes.
Was this the opening salvo in a feud between two packs, where the battleground was literally her home? Or was this a stupid act of chaos that was going to ruin everything? Was there ever a difference between malice and chance?
Matt approached, thoroughly covered in dirt.
“You okay?” she asked.
He tried to dust off his khakis. “Thank you for saving my life.”
She swallowed. “After I endangered it by unknowingly calling a rival pack onto your territory.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“I could’ve done my due diligence. I didn’t know they had a business. For the longest time, we thought they were just crazy doomsday preppers in the woods; they hardly come out.”
“Not your fault,” Matt repeated and gave up on his pants.
She tried to summon a smile. “Still interested in a relaxing sojourn in the mountains?”
Matt’s eyes were glued to the rocks that demolished his SUV and the heavy equipment still parked on the side of the road. The wolves had walked away into the trees.
“Yes.”
