Chapter 7 - Finneas
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Finneas
Andrea went inside an hour ago. I was still on her porch.
I should have left. Should have shifted back, gotten dressed, driven home, and dealt with the fact that I told my mate to “keep things professional” while my canines were half-extended and my eyes were burning gold behind my contacts.
Should have done a lot of things today that I didn’t do, starting with not crossing my office floor in three strides to grab a client’s wrist because he put his hand on her shoulder.
God, I was a fucking idiot.
My wolf wouldn’t settle. Hadn’t settled since this afternoon, since that whole goddamn disaster.
Clark showing up early, parking himself at Andrea’s desk with that easy grin, that confident lean like her workspace was a bar and he was about to order a drink.
I watched through the glass while she handled him, polite and warm and going nowhere, and I should have left it alone.
She didn’t need my help. She’d been handling men like Clark her whole life, and she was better at it than I’d ever be because she did it without wanting to rip someone’s arm out of its socket.
But then he put his hand on her shoulder.
His palm on her, fingers curling over the top, casual and easy like he had the right, and my wolf lunged so hard against my control that I was out of my chair and through the door before my brain caught up.
I heard myself say words that came out controlled and measured while every cell in my body was screaming to do far worse, and I nearly shifted in my own goddamn office.
My eyes almost turned in front of a human client, and if Clark had looked at me half a second sooner he would have seen amber where brown should be and this whole thing would have gone from bad to catastrophic.
And then, because apparently I had zero self-control where Andrea was concerned, I spent the rest of the afternoon hovering near her desk and staring at her through the glass.
Coming out with files I didn’t need delivered, standing too close, holding eye contact until she spilled coffee on my desk and I heard her voice crack when she answered the phone.
I knew I was making it worse and I couldn’t goddamn stop.
She was angry at me. I could see it in the way she set the coffee mug down too hard, liquid sloshing, and in the rigid line of her shoulders when she walked past my office without glancing in, and in the tight smile she gave me when I handed her that file, a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, that said I am being polite because this is my job and I will deal with you later.
She had every right to be furious. I’d embarrassed her, implied she was being unprofessional when she was just doing her job, standing at her own desk, handling a handsy client with more grace than I’d managed in the entire two years I’d known her.
My wolf did not give a shit about any of that, only knew that another man’s hand had been on her and that we needed to be near her right now, and no amount of rational thought was going to override that.
The light in her bedroom had turned off a while ago. I should go.
I didn’t go.
Her back window was cracked open. She always left it like that for ventilation because her house ran warm and despite three increasingly sarcastic emails I’d watched her compose from her desk, whoever it was that was supposed to fix it never came.
I padded around the side of the house and nudged through the gap in wolf form, landing silently on the kitchen floor.
I’d done this before, on nights when she fell asleep on the couch and I couldn’t make myself leave.
That’s what I told myself: that it was about checking on her, making sure she was safe, that the door was locked and the stove was off.
But it wasn’t about that. It was need, pure and simple, getting worse every week.
If anyone in the pack knew what I was doing, their King breaking into a human woman’s house through a cracked window to lie on her floor while she slept, I would lose every shred of authority I’d spent eight years building.
Aldric would have a field day. The council would question my judgment, my fitness to lead, my sanity.
And they’d be right to, because this wasn’t the behavior of a King.
This was the behavior of a man who was losing a war with himself and didn’t care anymore who won.
She wasn’t in bed. The bedroom door was open and the bed was empty, covers thrown back, which meant she’d tried to sleep and couldn’t.
I found her on the couch with a book open on her chest and the lamp still on, casting warm light across her face, her hair loose and fanned across the throw pillow she always used.
One arm hung off the edge with her fingers almost touching the floor.
She must have come back out here to read and lost the fight against exhaustion.
The tension from the office was gone from her face.
All the tightness in her jaw, the stiffness in her shoulders, the careful blankness she’d been wearing since I said “professional,” all of it gone.
She looked soft and open and completely unguarded and my wolf went quiet for the first time all day.
This close, the bond was almost unbearable.
Not painful, not exactly, but intense in a way that made my skin feel too tight and my chest feel too full.
Being near her in human form was hard enough, but in wolf form, with my senses dialed up and her scent filling every breath, it was a different kind of torture entirely.
I could hear the blood moving through her veins, count her heartbeats, smell the vanilla in her hair and the lavender from whatever lotion she used on her hands and underneath all of it, her, the scent that was just Andrea, that I’d been addicted to since the day she walked into my office.
I lay down beside the couch, close enough to feel her warmth radiating off the cushions, and closed my eyes. Her heartbeat, slow and even. The creak of the floor settling, the hum of the fridge, distant traffic muffled through the walls. My wolf settled against the floor and I just listened.
This was the only peace I got. These stolen hours on her floor, beside her couch, listening to her breathe while she had no idea I was there.
It was fucked up. I knew it was fucked up.
I was sneaking into my mate’s house in the middle of the night to lie on her floor like a goddamn stalker because the bond was eating him alive and he was too much of a coward to just tell her the truth.
But the truth would change everything, and right now, lying beside her in the dark with her heartbeat in my ears, I was too goddamn chickenshit to let everything change.
Minutes passed. Twenty, maybe more. I wasn’t tracking time, just tracking her breathing, the rhythm of it, and every time she exhaled I felt my own body ease a fraction.
She stirred. Her head turned on the pillow, cheek pressing into the fabric, and her lips parted as she mumbled something half-asleep, barely audible.
“Finneas.”
My eyes snapped open and my wolf went rigid.
She was lying on a couch with a dog beside her and she was dreaming about me.
The human version, the one who grabbed a client’s wrist today and told her to be professional and then stared at her for hours, who she’d ranted about on the porch with her face flushed and her voice cracking between anger and what sounded a hell of a lot like want.
And even after all of that, even after I humiliated her and confused her and spent the day being every kind of wrong, she was saying my name in her sleep like it was safe there. Like I was safe.
She sighed and curled deeper into the pillow and didn’t wake. Her fingers twitched once where they hung off the couch, then went still.
I stayed beside her for another two hours.
Wide awake, my wolf so still it ached, replaying my name in her voice until it wore a groove into my brain.
She’d said it soft, almost tender, with none of the edge she used at the office, none of the sarcasm or the “Mr. Kingsley” she pulled out when she was pissed.
Just my name, unguarded, like it belonged to her as much as it belonged to me.
The house was quiet around us, just the hum of the fridge and an occasional car passing outside, headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling.
Andrea shifted on the couch and her hand slid off the edge and her fingertips brushed my fur, light and accidental, and my wolf pressed up into the touch so fast I couldn’t stop him.
She curled her fingers in, still asleep, still dreaming, and held on.
I wanted to hear her say my name when she was awake. Looking at me. Knowing exactly who she was saying it to. Wanting to say it anyway.
The neighborhood had gone completely silent. No cars, no TV light from the house across the street, nothing. It was late, deep into the night, and I had to leave.
I got up slowly, careful not to brush the couch, and padded to the back door. Nosed it open, slipped through, nosed it shut behind me. The yard was dark, every house on the block asleep, and I crossed the grass to the fence line where I’d left my clothes folded behind the garden shed.
I shifted back. The change rolled through me, bones lengthening, spine straightening, fur pulling back under skin. A few seconds and I was crouching by the shed, reaching for my pants, when the back door creaked open.
Shit. Everything in me went cold.
“Fin?” Her voice was groggy, thick with sleep. “Fin, is that you?”
No. Not now, not like this.
I could hear her bare feet on the porch boards, and then a flashlight beam swept across the yard, the white-blue glow from her phone cutting through the dark.
It caught me at the tail end of the shift, my body still settling, the last of the wolf receding under my skin.
Crouched by the shed, naked, human, fully exposed.
The beam froze on me.
For a second, nothing. Just silence so thick I could hear my own heartbeat and hers, both of them racing, and then:
“What the fuck?”
Her voice cracked through the quiet of the yard, sharp and high, and the phone flashlight was shaking because her hand was shaking. I could see her on the back porch, barefoot, shorts and a t-shirt, hair messy from the couch, and her face was white in the glow of the screen.
I grabbed my pants and pulled them on. My hands weren’t shaking even though my pulse was hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat.
“Andrea.”
Her name came out rough, lower than I meant it to.
She was staring at me, her face cycling through confusion and disbelief, her mouth opening and closing without sound.
Her eyes went from me to the yard where Fin had been minutes ago and then back to me, and I could see her putting it together, the pieces clicking into place behind those wide eyes.
The dog and the man, same yard, same moment.
I watched it land. The exact second she understood. Her whole body went rigid, her hand tightening around the phone so hard her knuckles went white, and her breath left her in a sharp exhale like she’d been hit.
“Finneas?” Her voice cracked on my name. Not the way it had in her sleep, soft and warm and unconscious. This time it sounded like glass breaking, and I felt it in my chest like a fist.
Two years. Two fucking years of hiding, of lying beside her as a dog while she poured her heart out to me, of knowing her better than anyone on this planet and letting her believe she was alone.
Two years of telling myself I was protecting her when really I was protecting myself, because the truth was I was terrified.
Terrified that she’d look at me exactly the way she was looking at me right now, like I was a stranger, like everything she thought she knew had just been ripped out from under her feet.
And it was over. All of it, done, in five seconds and a flashlight beam.
I didn’t move. Didn’t try to explain, not yet.
Just stood there, shirtless, pants barely on, a few feet from her back porch, and let her look at me.
Let her see what she’d seen and make sense of it on her own terms, because anything I said right now would sound like an excuse and she deserved better than excuses.
She deserved the truth, and the truth was standing in her backyard in the dead of night with his shirt off and his heart in his throat.
Her phone hand dropped to her side, the flashlight beam hitting the porch boards and throwing long shadows across the yard. I could hear her breathing from where I stood, fast and shallow, and her heartbeat was racing so hard it filled the silence between us.
She hadn’t screamed, hadn’t run inside and locked the door or done any of the things a human was supposed to do when they watched a dog turn into a man in their backyard in the middle of the night.
She just stood there, barefoot on her porch, staring at me.
And I could see her face working through it, the confusion and the shock and underneath both of them something raw that I couldn’t name, something that wasn’t fear, wasn’t anger, was just Andrea looking at me and trying to reconcile the dog she trusted with the man she couldn’t figure out.
The silence stretched. Ten seconds. Twenty. The longest silence of my life, and I had sat through council meetings with Aldric.
Then her chin lifted. Her shoulders squared. And I recognized that posture, because I’d seen it a hundred times across my desk when she was about to tell me exactly what she thought of me and didn’t give a damn about the consequences.
She opened her mouth.