CHAPTER TEN || HARRIS
Over the next few days, Reed and I found a strange rhythm. We’d wake up each morning and he’d make breakfast and coffee. He insisted on sleeping on the couch, claiming it was safer that way, in case anything tried to get into the cabin.
Nothing did.
In fact, there was no sign of the monster at all, despite that members of the pack were watching for it round the clock—mostly from near the town.
Emma, Daniel, and Sarah were attempting to research it, but they weren’t having much luck.
The only things we really knew were that silver could hurt it, it was fast, and its claws were coated in some sort of paralytic toxin.
Apparently, that didn’t narrow it down as much as it ought to have. An unsettling thought.
Reed left a few times—always during the day—and was gone for a few hours at a time to check on the bar, which he had the twins running, and then on the rest of the pack.
I was getting worried about him. There were dark circles around his eyes and he always woke up in the mornings seeming less rested than the night before—probably the result of stress. Or maybe the couch wasn’t that comfortable to sleep on.
But I wasn’t as worried as I ought to have been.
Hell, I used to get like that on some of the worst cases I’d worked.
Real evil isn’t only appalling, it unsettles you, getting under your skin, disturbing things deep inside you.
Paul had gotten like that sometimes, too.
The only real cure for it is mundane routine and embracing the good things in your life until they drown out the bad.
Paul and I had been that for each other. I hoped I could be that for Reed.
Maybe Reed was just worried the monster would return.
Daniel had placed alarm spells around the perimeter of the cabin, so that if anything tried to get in, at least we’d have advance warning.
And when Reed returned to the cabin, he always seemed a little more lucid.
And, without fail, he brought back something for us to share: bottles of beer, containers of steaming takeout, and once, even some overpriced chocolates from one of the shops in town.
“I’m trying to figure out what you like,” he explained, when I asked him about it on night four of this newfound domesticity.
“All of it,” I said, digging into the takeout spaghetti he’d gotten from the Crescent Springs Bar & Grill—they had pretty much everything on the menu. “I’m not picky. No tomatoes and we’re good.”
“No tomatoes.” Reed eyed the bite of pasta on my fork, which was covered in marinara. “Right. Except, um, maybe don’t eat the spaghetti, then? Since the sauce is basically ninety percent tomatoes.”
“No raw tomatoes,” I explained, shaking my head at his incredulous expression. “It’s a texture thing.”
“Got it,” Reed said, nodding to himself, as if filing this piece of information away for later use. Then he stifled a yawn against the back of his hand.
“Tired?”
“I’ll be okay,” Reed said, maybe just a little too quickly.
After dinner, we read another chapter of the book on the couch and chatted about it.
He teased me some more—lightly—about how odd it was for his hardened big-city detective to be reading something so cutesy and whimsical.
But I could tell he was getting into it as well, because he had a harder and harder time putting the book down at the end of every chapter.
After we’d watched a bit of TV and drunk a few beers, it came time to sleep.
That’s when I pushed any lingering unease to the side and put my foot down. “I want us to share a bed.”
Reed’s eyes widened and he downed the last slug of beer he’d been nursing. “Oh. Uh—okay. I thought you said…”
“Look, we’re fated to be together, right?” I pointed out. “That probably includes sharing a bed at some point. We might as well get it over with now.”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Careful with laying on the sweet talk so thick. I might get the wrong impression.” But he led the way to the bed and pulled the covers back.
I stripped off my shirt and my pants until I was just standing there in my boxers.
I moved with brisk, matter-of-fact motions, but my heart had begun to pound at the idea of being physically close with him.
I had never done this with another man. Definitely not with the express purpose of deepening some sort of connection.
I was nervous—heart-pounding, blood-in-my-ears nervous—but I also wanted to.
Reed watched me, still fully clothed. “If you’re not ready…”
“Get in the bed.”
“I’m the alpha,” he reminded me.
“Not with me, you’re not. That shit only works on your pack.”
Reed considered me, then stripped off his shirt. My gaze lingered on his lean muscles, the hair across his chest. And I wanted to touch him. To feel his heat and solidity against me.
He unzipped his jeans and stepped out of them. His ass was perfectly round in his boxer briefs. I started to get hard just looking at him.
I climbed into bed and pulled the covers up before he could see.
Reed stood there, blinking at me, amused.
“Huh—that was fast.”
“It’s cold. I’m preserving body heat.”
“You won’t be cold for long,” Reed said, turning off the lamp on the nightstand and climbing into bed beside me. “Wolves run hotter than humans.”
Once he was in bed, I realized I had no idea what to do next.
I wasn’t ready to have sex with him yet, even if he was my fated mate.
I wasn’t even sure how it was going to work with another guy.
But now that we were here, I realized he might expect that from me.
He might want me to know what I was doing.
Was he going to get pissed if I got him into bed—quite literally, albeit with the intention of sleeping—and then put the brakes on?
“You said we ought to take it slow,” Reed said quietly, no doubt reading the tone of my thoughts through the bond the same way I sometimes read his. “I’m willing to wait.”
Relief flooded through me and my breath—which I had been holding—escaped my lips in a rush.
“Yeah, that’s probably good,” I replied. “Thank you.”
“Sometimes I’m even a gentleman,” Reed said with a self-deprecating smile. “Every once in a while.”
That decided me. “I want to… uh, can I hold you?”
Reed’s expression went molten. “Yeah.”
He rolled over onto his side and slid closer to me. I wrapped an arm around his waist, his back against my chest. I was fully hard when he settled his ass against my groin, but neither of us said anything about it. We both just breathed in the darkness.
“I’m sorry I was a dick to you that first day,” Reed said quietly, after a long moment. “I shouldn’t have been.”
“You had your reasons.”
“And for the dreams. Not telling you for months. I was…” He hesitated, his breath catching. “There’s no excuse. I was wrong.”
“I forgive you.”
“Thanks.”
Then I froze. “Wait—the dreams…”
Reed was perfectly motionless in my arms. He said nothing.
“We haven’t had one of those dreams since I got here. It’s been days. I thought you said we’d have them for the rest of our lives.”
“We will,” Reed said cautiously. “Nothing has changed.”
I went silent, waiting for him to explain himself. Because obviously something had changed, otherwise we would have shared our dreams at some point over the last four days.
“We’re not sharing our dreams because we both need to be asleep at the same time for that to work,” he said at last.
“Wait—you’re not sleeping?”
He winced, his eyes fixed on the wall. I could feel the way he tensed up at my question. His voice was careful and measured when he said, “I’ve been catching naps here and there. In the back office at the bar, mostly. I have a cot set up in there.”
“Why?”
“You know why. I can’t protect you if I’m passed out. You injured that thing in the woods. It might come for you now and I need to be awake in case it attacks.”
“If that happens, we’ll fight it off together. And we’ll have advance warning—Daniel’s been putting up spells daily to let us know if anything crosses the outer perimeter around the cabin!”
“I’m okay, Harris. Quit worrying about me.”
A flash of anger tore through me. “You’re sure as shit not okay! You’re running on maybe a couple of hours of sleep, tops, over the last four days! What the hell is wrong with you?”
He sighed. “Wolves don’t need as much rest as a regular human. I’m fine.”
Right then, I realized my feelings weren’t really anger at him.
It was because Reed hadn’t gotten any proper sleep in days and I somehow hadn’t noticed.
Maybe Reed was just really good at hiding when something was wrong, or maybe I was fundamentally self-centered—which is why I hadn’t been paying close enough attention.
I sensed the ripple of dismay from Reed a moment before he rolled over to face me. He fixed me with a steady look. “Don’t be dumb.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, playing dumb. I was pretty sure he’d sensed my emotions.
“It’s not your fault you didn’t know. I kept it from you.”
I tried not to let him see the way his admission affected me. “Seems like a pattern,” I replied coolly.
“I’m still trying to figure out how to do this, okay? It’s only been a couple of days.” Then, when I didn’t reply after several moments, he added, “Dammit, Harris. I just wanted to protect you. That’s all.”
“I thought we already established that we protect each other.”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice going rougher. “I guess we did.” Then he followed that up with a grimace. “Sorry. Feels like I keep having to apologize to you.”
The last of my anger left me, even though I wasn’t sure I was ready to let go of it yet. I was starting to suspect I was going to have a very hard time staying mad at Reed. “For the record, I get it. This is all new to me, too.”
He let out a breath and nodded. “Yeah, I know.”
“Being in a relationship with someone was the last thing on my mind. And with another guy on top of that. And a werewolf, so there’s a whole new set of rules. It’s a lot to get used to.”