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The taste of woman and whiskey exploded across his tongue, and Matt immediately felt a disorienting combination of bliss, peace, and arousal that he had never felt before in his life for about two seconds until it was ripped away from him, and she launched herself directly over the fire. She crouched on the other side with her hands in her hair, babbling.
His wolf surged, and it took a second for his senses to return to human and her waterfall of meaningless sounds to turn back into words.
“Oh my god. I’m so sorry. You’re a client! And a werewolf! I just wanted to see if it was true, but that’s insane, and you didn’t sign up for that, and an entire pack of werewolves is descending on Silver Spring, and we can’t do this.”
He’d just kissed a witch. Well, to get technical, a witch had just kissed him. He wasn’t worried so much about the employee thing. She was a temporary contractor. It wasn’t the smartest idea; she wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t going to let that ruin the best kiss of his life. The rest of the tirade filtered in.
“You wanted to see if what was true?”
She slowed to a halt and met his eyes. Something in him lurched at the eye contact. That hadn’t happened ten minutes ago.
“It’s nothing. I don’t even really believe it. And the information is third-hand at this point. It’s stupid.”
“You sound like you’re talking about a stock buyout. What is it?”
She dropped her hands and stared moodily into the flames as if they held the answer. Matt let himself look at her and noticed all sorts of things he hadn’t before, like a spray of freckles across her nose, the sweep of her eyelashes, the perfect angle of her shoulder, and the vulnerable skin of her neck where her scent was strongest.
He started making calculations. He had planned to return to New York on the jet that would bring the pack to the woods, but why would he miss watching the billionaire traipse around in a world of sushi/Boba joints? That would be its own source of amusement. They would probably have a thousand last-minute requests, and Matt would need a lot of help to fulfill them because he was also basically useless out here.
She still hadn’t looked away from the fire.
He blinked away dopey thoughts of flirty emergency texts over baked goods and steaks or thoughts of what her clavicle would taste like.
“Look at me,” he said.
Finally, she met his eyes, and he felt another blow to his solar plexus.
“Another witch ran away with a werewolf,” she whispered, then started to pace again, “which is not to imply that we’re going to run away together or that this is at all serious. We literally just met. It’s ridiculous. It’s a rumor.”
He was surprised to hear about the witch and another wolf. He’d never heard of another in his life. But at the same time, it wasn’t earth-shattering. Two people fell in love who shouldn’t have. Country music would not exist if that didn’t happen daily.
“Okay?”
“It’s nothing,” Tori repeated.
All the problems of falling in love with the wrong person flowed into his mind, and suddenly he realized her consternation. They shared a single kiss. Thinking about forever was a ludicrous thing to do, but given the violent history of witches and shifters, the huge and insane lengths they still went through to avoid each other, and how everyone reacted when they encountered each other, it was also not not stupid to consider the implications of this.
Even a fling would break every taboo. If it turned into anything more than that, and every cell in his body was screaming at him that this would definitely turn into a lot more than that, where would they live? What would they do? Witches and shifters divided up the world into a patchwork of territories. How would they cross those lines? In some crazy, irrational corner of his brain, he knew he would already die for her if called upon.
She licked her lips, and want spasmed within him.
“What happened to the couple?” he asked when she said nothing. Especially the wolf, he thought but did not say.
“I’m not sure. She disappeared after—”
“After—” he echoed.
“A small disagreement.”
“Is that like a small inconvenience when you move heaven on earth and haven’t slept for 48 hours to make it happen?”
“Yes.”
“So if your coven found out you are here…”
She laughed hysterically for five seconds and then stopped without a single expression on her face. “It involved crossbows. And chainsaws.”
“Chainsaws…”
“And a moose.”
Instinctively, he looked around. “You have moose?”
A ghost of a smile crossed her lips, and he was intensely relieved to see it. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.”
“How will you protect me?” Then he remembered. “Oh.”
“I guess I should also give you the spiel, but if you see a moose, don’t get near it, because it’s the craziest animal in the woods. There are also bears, but they’re harmless unless you have food anywhere in your car. And by food, I also mean a cheeseburger wrapper or a fruity shampoo that smells like food. We also have mountain lions, but just don’t act like prey.”
He snorted.
“I guess none of this applies to you.”
She sat next to him on the bench to his eternal relief. He was aware of the heat of her body again in a way that he hadn’t really let himself be before the kiss. It was so distracting, not that he was complaining, but he wondered if he would have this reaction going forward.
He looked around in the dark. Full night had fallen, and they were basically blind this close to the fire.
“So what happens now?” he asked, without the slightest clue what was going to come out of her mouth.
She kissed him again, and it took even less time for his body to go from 0 to 500, and then she pulled away again, but this time he was ready and caged her in his arms.
“Don’t run away,” he muttered into her hair.
“This is a stupid idea,” she said to his collarbone.
He scooted her closer to him and wrapped his arms more snuggly about her.
“Yeah, but the thing about stupid ideas is you need to have a lot of them to find a good idea, right?”
He was rewarded by the slightest increased pressure against his side as she leaned toward him an inch.
“Does your coven have to know?”
“You think we’re going to successfully keep a werewolf pack secret? I don’t know how much time you’ve spent in a small town, but fifty percent of everyone within twenty square miles already knows you’re here. It’s going to be seventy-five percent by morning.”
“So you’re saying this isn’t going to happen…” He kept his voice light, but he felt like he was ripping himself in half.
“What are you going to do?” she asked. “Traipse into Silver Spring and pick me up at the purple house?”
“The what?”
“They painted the house purple. That’s not some secret magic code.”
“Right.”
“Or I come here and wave to your alpha person before you take me out for… Well, there’s a bar, a coffee shop, and a grocery store. We don’t really have a restaurant.”
Matt looked back at the outline of the house, barely visible against the darkening sky. “He’s not here now. If a witch and a werewolf kiss in the woods and there’s no one there to see it, did it ever really happen?”
She kissed him again and didn’t pull back two seconds later.
Their tongues clashed together, intensifying the taste and his want. He pulled her toward him until she hitched one knee over his thigh. She ground down onto his quad, and he felt searing heat take his breath away as he tried to drink every bit of passion and desire from her lips and hitch her closer.
She undulated against him as her hands roamed over his head, neck, back, and arms. He wanted to explore more, but he also wanted to keep her close, so he let her have her way.
He felt dizzy as blood flowed south, and she hitched closer again, rising against him, gasping with pleasure. He had half a thought to take this further, to drag her into the house and choose any one of nearly twenty beds but just lay back on the stone bench instead.
A branch snapped.
He pushed her back, suddenly aware of how far down he was leaning, almost prone.
“What is it?” she asked with swollen lips as blown pupils met his.
He put a finger to his lips, every sense on alert.
They both listened for a second, and then he heard the high, clear howl of a wolf and went cold.
He shoved her off of him and was halfway to his feet with his hands on his shirt to tear it off and shift when she put a hand on his leg.
“Wait, wait, wait,” she said. “Sound carries in the mountains. I don’t think it’s that close.”
He looked back at her, eyes blazing, and reached for the smallest shred of control.
“Plus, it could just be a normal wolf. There’s a ton of wild ones now. This is your land, right? They wouldn’t cross, would they?”
“Yeah, wolves don’t really understand things like property lines,” he said and was relieved to find he still had access to speech. “It won’t be our territory until I get a little busy with…”
“Oh gross. You’re going to go pee in the woods all over the place?”
“It’s how wolves mark territory. What do you think your dogs are doing on the walk, just waiting to sample a toilet every fifty feet?”
She sat back. “That must be super confusing for them.”
“Yeah. Not great. Then try New York City.”
She shuddered. “No, thank you.”
Something in him quailed at her disgust. They had no future. It shouldn’t have even gotten started.
Another howl started up, an answer to the first—high and bright—and then three more.
He had ripped his shirt off without even realizing it and turned back to her. “I have to shift.”
“Okay,”
“My wolf will never hurt you.”
“Yeah, if we believed that, several hundred years of history would be different…”
“Right,” he said, but he was finding it harder and harder to stay human.
“I know you won’t hurt me,” she said hesitantly. He realized in the last hour, he had penetrated her poker face. She was good, but he knew she was lying.
There was one way to prove it. He shucked out of his jeans and shifted before he could say anything else, flowing into the wolf.
Immediately, his senses sharpened, and color faded. The fire suddenly looked white and yellow, and he could hear the faintest snap in the woods.
It was always a disorienting overwhelm for a couple of seconds before he adjusted to this level of perception, but this time, it took longer.
Sound assaulted him from all sides. He thought the forest was quiet, but it was teeming with life. He could hear small animals nestling down as nocturnal creatures woke up. He could hear the pine needles whispering in a slight breeze he couldn’t even feel as a human, and he could see for miles in the dark. Not well. He didn’t have magic vision, but everything was better and sharper.
And the scents. Dear god, the scents took his breath away. The fire and smoke were overwhelming, but even they smelled different than a fire in New York. They were burning pine, and he could smell the fragrant, almost antiseptic notes to it, like someone had lit a bottle of Pine-Sol on fire. Beneath the sharp, crisp smell of the needles, there was a sweet, almost butterscotch smell of sap, as well as dry dirt and the high mountain breeze, which brought hints of snow even in summer.
He walked further into the meadow around the house, smelling the delicate wildland flowers of the high mountains and the sharp scent of the skunk from the afternoon.
He chuckled to himself as the wolf looked back at the woman, now far above his head and already beloved, and trotted toward the woods.
Nonna was right. Why was he even surprised? Nonna was always right. Mateo needed to do this. The entire pack needed to do this. The pack went for runs on a preserve in upstate New York where they had five whole acres of wilderness around them. Sometimes they snuck through Central Park wearing a collar and pretending to be stupidly large dogs, but he had never felt his wolf like this, with every sense alive. He didn’t know if it would fix a fertility issue, but he knew that something had been broken in him for a very long time, possibly forever, and it had just been healed.
The howls came again, and every fiber of his wolf focused on them.
They were not on his territory. They were on the other side of the mountain, but they were coming this way.
