Chapter 15 #4
Both were true. The city was good and dangerous at once.
That made the problem harder, because valid concern did not become authority just because it kept me awake.
I had no right to secure what she hadn’t asked me to secure or improve a life already functioning on its own terms. The only right I had was to respect the choices she had made before I met her, and I was still learning what that respect looked like without the costume of protection.
We talked about the project. The farmhouse property next, then the log-cabin guest house, then the flagship in Shelton once the construction was further along.
She had ideas for each one. Detailed, considered, rooted in an understanding of how spaces felt that went deeper than aesthetics.
I listened. I ate. I tried very hard not to solve anything.
When the check came, I reached for it. She let me. A small grace.
We walked to her building, which turned out to be one block from where I’d parked, and I cursed my own luck for picking a restaurant that put us back at her door in six minutes flat.
I’d wanted the walk to run long. It ran short.
We covered the distance just past dusk, in the quiet after something difficult had been said and neither person was rushing to fill the space.
The street felt different in the lowering light.
Warmer. The shop windows had started to glow, interiors lighting up against the dusk in the ones still open.
She stopped at her door. Keys in hand, the fresh bouquet from Sable tucked under her arm, the proof folder with my signature safe in her bag. I stood on the sidewalk beside her, close enough to smell honeysuckle through the city air. The space between us belonged to her to close or keep.
“Thank you for coming down,” she said. “The approval helps. Miner would have done it by email, but—” She shrugged with one shoulder, and the unfinished sentence stayed between us.
“But Miner knows when to stop talking,” I said.
She laughed. The sound was low and genuine, and it hit an unarmored place no risk assessment had prepared me for. “He does. You could learn that.”
“I’m working on it.” I felt the smile happen before I decided on it, and worse, the heat that climbed up my neck right behind it.
Flirting looked effortless on everyone else: Isak did it breathing, Miner did it without seeming to try.
I’d landed one line clean and felt absurdly proud of myself for it, like a man who’d cleared a bar set at ankle height and wanted a medal.
“I know.” She looked at me. Really looked at me, long enough that I felt seen under the surface. “You’re trying. I can tell.”
Her mouth held for half a second before she let the words stand. She was giving me credit for effort when the result was still lacking, and the generosity of that limitation was worse than criticism would have been.
I kissed her. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t run the contingency first. My hand found her waist, careful, asking without words.
She stepped into the space I’d left open, and her mouth was warm and certain against mine.
Honeysuckle filled every corner of my awareness until there was only the taste of her, her hand on my chest, and the sound she made when I deepened the kiss just enough to tell her I’d been thinking about this since the hotel.
My body remembered her instantly. Her body found the old angle, my hand settled into the small of her back like it belonged there, and my other hand rose into her hair.
I hadn’t kissed her like this during her heat.
That had been hot and needed and half out of both our minds.
This was soft, warm, and slow, and it did the exact same thing to my body anyway.
My scent came flooding out of me in a wave of warmth that started low in my stomach and went everywhere, toasted pine and tangelo filling the space between us before I could think to contain it.
She pulled back first. Her eyes were dark, her breath slightly uneven, and she smiled at me for real, brief enough to hurt.
“Drive safe,” she said. Then she turned, unlocked her door, and stepped inside her shop with the bouquet under her arm and the proof folder in her bag and the life she had built intact behind her.
I stood on the sidewalk until her light came on. Then I walked back to the Suburban with the taste of her still on my lips, and the city around me remained what it had been before me: complicated, beautiful, and unconcerned with my opinion of its safety.
The drive home took forty-five minutes. I kept the radio off and the windows up.
The scent and feel of her stayed on my lips, in my lungs, all the way back to the guest house, where Miner and Isak had both worked late and were only now starting dinner, Miner at the stove and Isak losing at something on his phone.
The ordinary life of the pack waited exactly as I’d left it.
I walked in. Miner looked up from the stove. Isak set his phone down.
“How’d it go?” Miner asked.
I couldn’t answer, just smiled and felt the same undignified blush bloom over my cheeks again.
Isak grinned. “Told you.”
Miner sighed. Isak laughed. The problem did not resolve because I’d had one good night. My scent match was an hour away, by herself, in a city she loved, and my life was here with her other scent matches, pining.