Chapter 6
Decklan
She waits until the fire is down to coals on our third night, and the question she’s been sitting on all evening finally comes out. She wants to see it.
“See what,” I say.
She gives me a look. “You know what.”
She means the wolf. She’s known I’m a shifter for a day and a half and she’s asked me about everything except this. She’s waited—patient in a way that surprised me—and now she asks with her chin on her hand and her eyes direct and nothing put on about it.
“Tomorrow,” I tell her. “Sunrise.”
She’s awake before I am. She’s sitting on the sleeping pad outside the tent in every layer she has, watching the sky go grey and then pink, and when I come out she looks at me and her mouth quirks. “You didn’t say what time at sunrise.”
“Early,” I say.
“Got it. Very helpful.”
I strip all the way down—base layer, jeans, boots—because clothes don’t survive the shift and I’ve replaced enough of them.
She watches every second of it with the same focus she’s had on me since the canyon.
I fold the pile onto a rock and I look at her.
“Stay back ten feet until I’m shifted. Don’t move fast.”
“Got it.”
“When I come to you—let me. Don’t approach me.”
“Got it.” She’s holding her knees to her chest, eyes wide and alert. “I’ve got it, Decklan.”
I shift.
It’s fast for me—three years of daily shifts keeping the change fluid. My wolf hits the ground running, nearly, and I turn to face her.
She’s gone completely still.
My wolf is big. I know I’m big. I’ve seen it in windows, in water, in the faces of the two clients who’ve seen me shift. She’s sitting very still with her hands at her sides and her eyes on me and I can smell—not fear. Awe, and something underneath it I don’t have a word for.
I cross the ten feet between us at a walk. She doesn’t move.
When I’m close enough, she raises one hand. Slow. Deliberate. Her eyes on mine.
I lower my head and let her touch me.
She makes a sound so quiet it’s almost nothing.
Her hand moves through the fur at my neck, the thick ruff, dark brown fingers buried in all that grey, and it hits me the same as her hands on my human skin—everywhere, routed directly to the animal instinct that has been telling me mine since the parking lot.
My wolf settles under her touch and stays settled.
“Hi,” she says softly. To my wolf. Like she’s saying hello to someone.
I stay there for a long moment. Her hand moves to the top of my head, between my ears, and her touch is steady and sure. She’s not afraid of me. She never has been.
I pull back, shift before she’s lost the warmth of it, and I’m standing in front of her in the cold mountain morning with nothing on. I dress fast—base layer, jeans, boots—and pick my coat up off the rock, because the ridge will be colder than this.
She’s beaming. Whole face, all of it. “Okay,” she says. “That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Come on.” I hold out my hand.
She takes it and I pull her up and run us through the early morning camp, through the tree line, up the shoulder of the ridge I’ve been watching since we set up yesterday—the one that catches the first light.
She’s breathing hard behind me, hand in mine, keeping up because she has the stride and the stubbornness for it.
We hit the ridge at the moment the sun breaks over the eastern peaks.
It’s gold and pink and enormous, the whole valley spread below, Harlow a scatter of lights going off one by one as the day comes up. She stops. Stares.
“Decklan.” Soft. Like the word doesn’t want to be any louder than it is.
I put my hands on her shoulders and step close. She leans back against me without a thought, like that’s just where she goes.
For a while we’re just there. She doesn’t talk. I don’t either. The sun comes fully up. The valley fills with light.
Then she turns in my arms and looks up at me and the light is in her face and my wolf says now.
I back her up to the nearest pine. She goes without resistance, hands already at my collar. I pin her wrists above her and she makes a soft sound and arches into me.
“Cold?” I ask.
“Burning,” she says.
I take my time getting her there. My free hand goes down inside her waistband, and she’s already slick, she’s been slick since she put her hand in my fur, and I tell her so.
She breathes in short punched sounds. Her hips chase my fingers.
She says please twice before I give it to her and she comes against the tree with her wrists still in my hand and the whole valley going gold underneath us.
I let go of her wrists. I get her leggings off one leg and my belt open, and then I lift her.
She isn’t light. I don’t want her light. I take her whole weight on my forearms, her thighs hooked over them, her back against my coat against the pine, and I hold her exactly where I want her and lower her onto my cock an inch at a time.
“Oh—” Her head goes back against the trunk. “Decklan?—”
“I’ve got you.”
“You’re holding all of?—”
“I know what I’m holding.” I lift her off me almost to the end and bring her back down, slow, all the way. “This is nothing. Say when you want it faster.”
“Faster.”
I give it to her faster. Nothing under her feet, nothing to brace on, no way to take any of it back—she’s got both arms around my neck and the sun coming up over the eastern peaks behind me, full in her face, and she takes every stroke I give her.
The sounds she makes carry all the way across the ridge.
“Mine,” I say. My voice isn’t working right. It comes out low and stripped of everything except what’s underneath. “You’re mine.”
“Yes.” She doesn’t hesitate.
“Stay.” I press into her deep and hold. “Don’t go back.”
“Decklan—”
“Say it.”
“I’m not going back.” She takes my face in both hands and makes me look at her, and her face is undone and certain at the same time. “I told you. I told you at the fire.”
“I need to hear it again.”
“I’m not going back.” She pushes into me. “Now move.”
I move. The knot starts to rise and I go down with her—knees, then back against the trunk, her in my lap and still on me when it locks.
She says my name with the sun full on her face and both hands fisted in my hair, and I know—the way my wolf has known since the parking lot—that the three years of fine are over.
We sit there half an hour on a ridge in the cold with my coat around her shoulders. She talks for about ten of them. I let her.
After, I zip her jacket up to her chin. She lets me. Her hair is everywhere and her mouth is swollen and she’s watching my hands on her jacket zipper with an expression I’ve never seen on anyone before.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing.” But she’s smiling. “You’re a caretaker.”
“I’m practical.”
“Sure.” She pats my chest. “Very practical. Perfectly unsentimental. Got it.”
I tuck her hair back from her face. She goes still and lets me.
“Eli Calloway,” I say. The full name comes out before I’ve decided, which is how I know I’ve already decided. “The one I told you about. He’s the pack’s enforcer now. Rhett’s younger brother.”
She looks up. Says nothing.
“I should fix that,” I say. “When we’re back.”
It’s not a question. But she nods like it is.
“Yeah,” she says. “You should.”
We stand on the ridge in the full morning light and she leans her head against my chest and neither of us says anything else for a while, and my wolf has gone quiet, and everything is very simple.
She’s here. She said she’s staying. Eli needs a phone call.
The valley is beautiful in the early light.
I hold her and watch the sun work its way up.