Chapter One
Will
I swear, nothing can ever be peaceful in this damn house.
It’s God knows how early, I’m sleeping alone (to my slight dismay), and I’d literally just staved off insomnia when my bedroom door flies open and slams against the wall with a crack.
I sit up in bed, fire flaring in my veins, the instinct to shift clawing at me.
Down, boy.
Because it’s not an attacker. It’s not a sleepy, beautiful girl here to slip into my sheets after having a nightmare, either—and that thought stirs a different instinct in me.
Again: down, boy.
No, it’s just some redheaded bastard waking me from my beauty sleep.
“The fuck?” I croak.
Rob grins. “Good morning to you, too.” He flops onto my bed. “Glad you’re awake.”
“I’m not,” I say, as he flops—uninvited—onto my bed. “Oh, by all means, come on in.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” His grin widens, and I feel my heart squeeze—among other things.
Maybe it’s from spending my formative sexual years at all-boys prep schools, or maybe I’m just such a slave to the white-hot lust that seems to come with being part fire-breathing beast that I’ll fuck anyone of any gender, but at this point, it’d be hopeless to deny that I don’t look at Rob the way the other guys do.
Especially when he appears to be fresh from the shower, that auburn hair still damp and the hem of his T-shirt riding up just enough to reveal the light thatch of hair above his belt.
I swallow. It’s love as much as lust, some complicated thing I could probably unpack if I felt like doing another lifetime or two of therapy.
Besides, nothing compares to her.
An ungodly, downright pornographic image of Maren flashes in my mind.
Fuck me.
I fist a hand in the sheets, will the blood to flow back to my brain, and, once I’ve resigned myself to not getting any more sleep, fumble around for the switch to my bedside lamp. It throws a gentle glow up the walls and over the sheets from behind its rice-paper globe, and, squinting, I glance at what the clock says.
It’s 4 a.m. Jesus Christ. I scrub at my hair and draw my knees to my chest under the covers.
“What do you want?” I mutter, glaring at Rob.
“Oh, you know,” he says, rolling to one side and propping his head on his hand like a girl at a sleepover. “Thought we could gossip and braid each other’s hair and shit.”
I grab a bolster pillow and throw it at him.
“Hey!”
“You’re in a good mood for four a.m.,” I mumble. “ Too good.”
“What’s not to be in a good mood about?” Rob stretches out, looking at the ceiling. “I’m young and healthy, I’m back in my goddamn house, it’s going to be a beautiful Virginia day, and Gisbourne’s a goddamn grease stain on the floor of his own greenhouse.”
At his words, something contracts inside me, tenses. I’ve long come to terms with being a criminal, God knows, but until recently I’d always been very solidly white-collar—or, fine, non-violent, at least—in my crimes of choice. Victimless, you could argue— I would argue.
You can’t argue that about murder. I—we—killed a man.
A fellow shifter.
Not that I regret it. Not that we had literally any other choice, the way he was going for Maren.
But still.
I’m a murderer now.
“What do you want?” I say again, a little shorter than I mean to.
Rob springs to standing, somehow full of energy yet moving at that irritatingly languid pace everyone south of the Mason-Dixon seems to favor.
“Inventory,” he says, turning on his heel and fixing me with his grass-green stare. “Just went through the whole ground level.”
“At three a.m.?” I squint. “Are foxes even nocturnal?”
Rob lifts a shoulder, smiling. “Too wired to sleep, I reckon. And I wanted to know just how bad they’d picked us clean.”
It’d been a good few weeks since the night Gisbourne and the sheriff seized the house. A good few miserable weeks of living like, well, animals in the woods, hunting and fighting and—occasionally—rutting. And slightly less time since we’d let Maren face down Guy Gisbourne the way she’d wanted to: with the truth, and no fucking fear.
Thank God we didn’t let her go alone.
Truthfully, I never thought we’d be back here. I was mentally packing my passport, flirting with what it’d be like to change my name, and possibly my entire wardrobe, and live a life on the lam.
But in the chaos of the aftermath, it was easy to flee. And with Gisbourne gone, the sheriff’s department appeared to turn tail and take a self-protective stance, because when we got back here, there was nothing guarding the place but a padlock, a CONDEMNED sign, and a few skimpy strands of yellow tape.
All, for the record, highly flammable.
So we stole our home back.
And God, is it good to be home.
Or was, before I was so rudely awoken.
“And?” I ask, impatient but a bit curious in spite of myself. Personally, I needed at least a few days to recover from our little impromptu camping trip before I had the strength to tackle any kind of housekeeping. I’d made sure all the security systems were online—obviously—but after that? I’d crashed hard. I hadn’t had a chance to take stock of the state of the place beyond the outwardly visible vandalism—some broken windows, tire marks in the yard, that kind of thing—and I certainly didn’t know what had or hadn’t been “seized as evidence.”
“ And ,” Rob says, “I’ve basically gone through everything now—’cept LJ’s quarters, that is, but I’ll leave him to handle that on his own, since I don’t really want my face clawed off.” He rubs his jaw. “Anyway, they took shit—stupid shit.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, you know. Rinky-dinky stuff.” He ticks off on his fingers. “Sound system in the living room, Tuck’s computer—”
“I’m sure it’s encrypted to hell,” I say. “They’d be lucky to get it to play Pong.”
Rob nods, continuing. “—a lot of whiskey,”
“Damn.”
“I’ll say. They were mixing Pappy with Coke Zero like it was fuckin’ Evan Williams,” Rob says, wincing. But then he shrugs. “Some of the cars—I only glanced, but the garage is definitely light. And they busted up a ton of windows and shit. Nothing that ain’t replaceable or fixable, in other words. So long as your panic room’s safe—”
“Untouched,” I confirm. There was no way to even know it’s there unless you...know it’s there, hidden behind the mirror with the palmprint scanner.
Rob nods. “So yeah. I reckon that we are sitting pretty, my Northerner friend.” He grins again.
Something about his...lightheartedness irks me. More than it usually does, I mean. Rob’s always had that easygoing, shit-eating “what, me worry?” attitude that’s half Tom Sawyer, half Artful Dodger. It’s charming as hell, and he knows it—hell, it’s the whole reason I linked up with him in the first place. Never really had a friend like that before.
Me? I’m so uptight you could shove coal up my ass and make a diamond. It’s my birthright as a WASP: I like control, certainty. Keeping things contained, doing what I want them to do.
A vision of Maren, arms up and wrists locked together, sprawled on my bed, springs unbidden into my mind.
Not now, I tell my mind. Which is not keen to obey. None of us—so far as I know—has done anything more physical with Maren than a quick kiss or a lingering hug since we got back here.
And, of course, that is no issue. She’s not interested, I’m not interested—period. But it doesn’t mean I don’t miss it.
Hard.
I blow out a breath. Focus . A few feet away, Rob has taken a glass paperweight from my desk up and started tossing it up and catching it like it’s a tennis ball.
“At some point, we might want to be concerned about someone coming after us, you know,” I say sharply.
Rob swipes the air dismissively. Toss. Catch. “What are they gonna do? Wheatley’s scared shitless, I guarantee it. After what he saw the other night—”
“ Did he see anything?” I interject. I know the sheriff was at Gisbourne’s stupid fundraiser, but once things got bloody and fiery I wasn’t exactly taking roll call.
“I dunno,” Rob says. “Probably. Either way, he’s chickenshit and lazy and always has been. With no more Guy leading the witch hunt, I don’t reckon Wheatley’s brave enough to take up the mantle and smoke us out.”
I rub my jaw. I don’t dis agree, but I’m also not one to handwave something as consequential as a felony investigation.
“What about the house?” I say, gesturing around us. “Make no mistake, I love having a memory-foam mattress and running water as much as the rest of us, but—”
“Squatter’s rights.” Rob shrugs. “I ain’t worried.”
I close my mouth. Yes , I think, and that’s exactly the problem.
That’s always the problem with Rob. Happy-go-lucky, it’ll work out, don’t worry, be happy, hakuna ma-fucking-tata.
My stress must show on my face, because Rob catches the paperweight and cocks an eyebrow at me.
“Can’t say the same for you, though, huh?” He chuckles. “You Yanks are so uptight, damn.”
“This has nothing to do with me being a Yankee,” I grouse, “and everything to do with common sense.” I look around my bedroom, to the clean, calm comfort of all my things, the space I’d carefully arranged to feel like mine.
I don’t want to lose this. Not again.
Rob pauses his little toss-and-catch game. “How so?”
I sigh. “We haven’t even really contended with what we’ve done, Rob. Setting aside the literal blood on our hands”—I try not to shudder, mind flashing to the gory melee at Gisbourne’s house—“we made a real mess of things around here.”
“And?” Rob’s eyes are on the paperweight again, tossing it gently and snatching it from the air with ease. Damn vulpine reflexes.
“ And ,” I say, exasperated, “you’re acting like we can just go back to...to normal. Like we’ll just settle back into our cat-and-mouse routine with the sheriff: we steal, they bitch about it, rinse, repeat. Don’t you get that it’s entirely different now?”
“Sure,” Rob says, still not looking at me. Toss. Catch. Toss. “We’ve got a few broken windows to patch up, for one thing. And they stole my fuckin’ Maserati.”
Toss. Catch. Toss.
That’s it. I fling myself out of bed, grab Rob by the wrist, and snatch the paperweight out of the air before he can catch it again.
“Quit it,” I grit out, “before I brain you with this goddamn thing.”
His pulse thuds, irritatingly steady and strong, under my fingers. I swallow, and let his wrist go.
“Damn,” Rob says, casual as ever even as I can see something darker skate across his eyes. “What’s your problem?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say, setting the paperweight back on the desk where it belongs. “Maybe take something seriously for once in your fucking life? This isn’t some comic book where everything just resets to status quo after the big battle is over, Rob. This is real life. And...look, I don’t even care about this place—not like you,” I clarify, shrugging. “You know that. The only reason I’m here and not Rio de Janeiro or Bangkok or fucking Siberia is because of you and your goddamn loyalty to this ever-loving backwater. Because, frankly, so long as we have each other, I don’t give a fuck where on earth we are. But you want to be here, so here we are. That’s the only reason any of us is here.” I spread my arms wide. “Okay. Fine. But for someone who claims to want to save Sherwood, you sure don’t seem to have a problem with ripping a big hole in the middle of it, do you? You’re perfectly content just knocking everything down like a goddamn tower of blocks and then scampering away. Well, now what? What’s everyone going to do now that you’ve played the hero?”
Rob opens his mouth, frowns, shuts it. Smiles.
“You’re cute when you’re angry, Scarlet.”
He chucks me lightly on the chin.
My face flushes, and I’m suddenly acutely aware that I’m wearing nothing but silk boxers and a scowl.
Goddamn you, Robin Locksley.
“I’m being fucking serious,” I mutter, folding my arms. Rob’s face goes still.
“No, I know.” He lets out a long sigh. “I just...shit, Scarlet, I ain’t the civic duty type. I don’t wanna get involved in all that.” He shifts his weight. “Besides, you take charge of something and then the target’s on your back. From both sides. No thank you.”
God, the psychodrama is positively Shakespearean. I roll my eyes. “ Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ,” I murmur.
Rob gives me a quizzical look. “If you fuckin’ say so,” he says. “Anyway, look, I’ll...give it some thought, okay? Right now, all I care about is the fact that I’m here, you all are here, and two bedrooms away is a pretty lady sleeping peacefully with visions of sugarplums dancing in her head. That’s what matters, right?”
I snort, work my jaw.
He’s not wrong, though.
Dammit.
“Right,” I agree.
“Good.” He reaches out to ruffle my hair, but I dodge. “We’ll pick this up later, all right? Maybe get some sleep for now, ya silver fox.” He throws the bolster pillow back at me from where it’d glanced off his shoulder.
“Who you calling fox ?” I grouse, but I catch the pillow as Rob heads for the door.
“Sweet dreams,” he calls. “Don’t let the—oh.”
He runs into something as he goes, and my heart stutters in my chest.
It’s Maren.
She looks half-asleep, her hair tousled, wearing just a loose black T-shirt I’m fairly certain is LJ’s and barely reaches the tops of her thighs.
My mouth goes dry.
“What’s with all the arguing?” she says. Her voice is raspy with sleep in a way that has no right sounding as sexy as it does.
“Scarlet had a bad dream,” Rob says, flashing a grin. “Might need you to rock him back to sleep.
Maren rolls her eyes, God bless her.
“Did not,” I say, realizing too late how petulant I sound. I can feel every thrum of my pulse in my neck, looking at her. My fingers tense lightly with the itch to reach for her, grab her and sweep her onto the mattress, but I resist. “But you’re welcome to—”
Maren doesn’t let me finish, just sweeps past me and burrows into the bed. “Tired,” she says.
I look at Rob, who gives a small shrug: welp, there you go.
I throw him a small grin. Lucky me.
“Get out of here,” I say out loud, and Rob obeys, ducking out with exaggerated deference as he pulls the door shut.
“Come here?” Maren mumbles from the bed. “And kill that light.”
Don’t have to tell me fucking twice , I think.
I click off the lamp and slide in next to her, wrapping my arms around her form, all soft skin and curves, the sweet cedar scent of her enveloping me and lighting my senses aflame. My cock stirs in earnest, but her eyes are already fluttering shut, so I bite my lip and resist, again, even though my whole body is straining for her, clenching with need.
Deep breaths, Will.
I settle for curling around her, my arm draped over her waist, pulling her close, as close as I can, cradling her hips against mine and hoping she doesn’t care I’m hard as iron under my boxers.
Rob might be wrong about a lot of things, but he’s right about this.
We’re safe. She’s safe.
At least for now.