Chapter 6
Zoe closed the door and turned on the car.
The sun was just starting to think about going to bed when she pulled out of the Oreads’ trail parking space and pointed her car toward yet another trailhead.
The sky still held that solstice gold at nine o’clock, that glow that refused to quit even when the day was technically done and made everything look like it was lit from somewhere generous and happy.
The longest day of the year, doing its job until the very last minute.
Had the energy at the Oreads’ party been thrilling? Yes.
Had seeing her friend so satisfied and resolved in her role, despite how she got to it, made her happy? Also yes.
Had she spent one second longer there, risking being late for the rendezvous with Officer Growly? Nope.
Rendezvous. The word sounded a little dangerous. And a little hot. A lot hot.
Saying she didn’t think something—wink wink—could happen tonight would make her a liar, and she was not one.
She’d been ready the other day. But at the same time, being so, um, enthusiastic about the whole thing worried her.
She liked sex as much as the next girl, and Rex was simply one of the most handsome men she’d ever laid eyes on, so that part tracked.
It was just how much she wanted him that didn’t quite add up.
It came from a place too deep within herself for someone she’d known for only a handful of days.
He was a magik, a big werewolf—the Alpha—and she kind of knew how that worked with them.
Not firsthand, but the knowledge was out there.
The possibility of fated mates and all that.
It was a possibility she wasn’t entirely entertaining because, well, because it seemed ludicrous. And yet the pull of him was still there, constant and unreasonable, so maybe that’s what she was reacting to. His magic.
Was that all it was? A reaction to what he was?
She didn’t think so. She worked with the pack regularly, had even dated one of them for a minute once upon a time, and it had never been anything like this. So. Not all werewolves.
Just that particular one.
She turned into the parking lot on a sigh.
Maybe she was making a tempest in a teapot—a carefully labeled, cross-referenced, color-coded tempest in the right teapot, complete with a legend and footnotes, which was arguably worse.
Maybe she should think a little less and make her decisions when decisions need to be made.
Regardless of all the mental gymnastics she’d just put herself through on the drive over, her heart went immediately into overdrive when she saw his truck already parked there and his gorgeous self leaning against it.
Alright then.
She got out of the car, then went back in to get the backpack she’d forgotten on the backseat. Perfect start. That only sank even more when she started toward him, and he smiled. He just smiled, and she was ready to bury herself in him.
What the hell? It was even worse than usual.
“Good evening,” he said. If he’d hoped to mask the tiny flare of his nostrils and the consequent grinding of his teeth before forcing a relaxed stance, he’d failed. But she wasn’t starting the night by pointing it out.
“Good evening to you, too. You’re not only on time, but early.”
He pushed off the car and chuckled, and it skidded down her spine like the first measure of a song she loved and knew by heart. “The pack is too distracted on a full moon to give me grief.”
The spike in longing—there was no other word for it, she’d tried several—when he took both her hands in his and brushed a kiss to her cheek probably needed to be studied at length.
In a controlled environment. With proper documentation.
“Hello, Zoe,” he greeted her again, but this time it was low and deep, and it held a sky full of stars and the weight of something only the night fully understood.
Then he motioned toward the trail entrance, keeping her hand in his. “Shall we?”
She just smiled, and they walked in—him first, because... safety.
The forest at nine-fifteen on the solstice was something different entirely.
The sun hadn’t gone to bed so much as it had started getting ready for it, pulling its light back in slow, unhurried degrees.
It left the sky above the tree line not dark, not light, but something in between.
The air was cooling but still carried the smell of a warm June afternoon.
The distant sound of a creek threaded somewhere close.
Everything was ripe, and soft, and slow.
She’d been in this forest at dawn, in the middle of sunny afternoons, and at dusk. Never like this. This felt different, like a secret. One she was sharing with him.
She almost said that out loud, then didn’t.
It was too honest for the first five minutes of a hike, and besides, there was something in him tonight she sensed and was still trying to read.
She filed the secret away for later and watched him instead as they walked without urgency.
His stride matched hers, as if he’d calibrated himself to her pace without thinking about it, and there was still that protection—the branches he lifted before she had to duck, how he slowed half a step whenever the trail narrowed and put himself through first, or how his free hand drifted toward her elbow on the uneven ground before she’d seen the root.
But there was a tension, controlled and banked, running through him.
She noticed and decided, for now, to leave that alone, too.
“Jade was glowing,” she offered instead, because it was true and because the silence, while not uncomfortable, had an edge to it she couldn’t quite locate.
“More than usual, which is really saying something. She was exactly where she needed to be, and she knew it.” She glanced up at him. “It was good to see.”
“Mm.” He nodded. “Letha does that. Makes all glow. Or, more.”
“Is that a general magiks thing?”
“Some more than others. Oreads and Elves are the ones most affected by it.”
“Not you? As in, all of you growlings.”
“Not particularly, no.”
“Is that why you didn’t go to the celebration?”
He shrugged, helped her through a rocky, narrow patch. “Sometimes I go, but not on a full moon.”
She nodded and would have asked him more questions, but for one, it already sounded enough like an interrogation, and for another, she had noticed that tightness again—a tightness he managed with clearly considerable effort and was obviously hoping didn’t show.
His jaw was set a fraction tighter than usual. His eyes darted for the deep trees more than the trail. His grip on her hand was slightly more present than it needed to be. “Rex?”
“Mm.”
“You’re tense.”
The trail rose slightly under their feet. “I’m fine.”
“I know you’re fine.” She watched his profile in the fading light. “I said you were tense. Not the same thing.”
He was quiet long enough that she thought he might let it go, then he exhaled through his nose. “The moon,” he said. “On a full moon, the wolf feels it more than usual. Everything is louder. Instinct. Scent.” A pause in which he glanced at her and quickly turned away. “The pull of it.”
“Pull toward what?”
His jaw flexed as he chose words carefully. “Everything; nothing specific. Just—more. Like the volume on every instinct gets turned up.” He glanced at her sideways. “It’s fine, it’s not like I get out of control.”
“I never thought you would.”
He looked at her then, properly, for the first time since they’d started walking.
His eyes were darker than usual, the brown of them deeper, warmer, and something in them not entirely human.
The last of the gold light caught in them and made them look lit from within.
The pull to him nearly made her face-plant on the ground.
“It’s harder to be still,” he said finally, quietly. “Harder to stay human. On nights like this, everything in me wants to move, to run, to—” He stopped. Looked back at the trail, back at her.
It touched her, even more now that she knew how hard it was for him to hold himself together. But there was a puzzle there, too. “We could have come here another day, you know? Or, better, another night. I hate for you to—”
He turned so fast the world blurred. One moment, he was beside her, the next he was in front of her, before she registered the movement, and the only reason she didn’t stumble was that his hands were already cupping her face, steadying her.
His palms were warmer than usual; his eyes not entirely his.
And when he spoke, his voice came from somewhere low and dark.
The line between wolf and man frayed, and it absolutely, categorically should not have done what it did to her, mind and body.
“There’s nothing,” he growled, the word dragged out like a vow, warning, and confession, all rolled into one. “Nothing I want more than having you here, tonight. The forest, the moon—” his thumbs brushed her cheekbones as he shivered a little, “—they're only complete if you’re in them.”
Zoe was fairly certain breathing was supposed to be happening.
It didn’t feel necessary. What felt necessary was staying exactly where she was, close enough to feel his pulse, or maybe that was her own; she genuinely couldn’t tell anymore.
It left her confused and a little scared, because things kept piling up inside her toward an explanation she didn’t have quite enough information to finish.
As if he could read her mind—and she was beginning to suspect he could, which would be its own problem—he brushed his thumbs across her lips. Swallowed. Ground his teeth. Nodded. “We’re nearly there. Then things will be clearer.”