13. Silas
Chapter thirteen
Silas
The dock eases back into its rhythm once the guys clear out.
Racks roll across the concrete inside, metal wheels catching and releasing in the steady cadence that usually fades into background noise within thirty seconds of me arriving anywhere in this building.
A press releases a long, low hiss somewhere deeper in the warehouse.
Someone near the sorting line says something that gets a short laugh, and the sound is swallowed quickly by the size of the space.
All of my attention stays fixed on Norah.
Her shorts leave most of her legs bare, and my eyes drop before I can stop them.
I picture those legs around my waist, and my balls contract, and for a minute, I’m fourteen years old again.
I almost groan with frustration. This isn’t me.
I’m way too strategic to be into a human woman.
The boner rising in my pants says otherwise.
This is not the reaction I should have after spending yesterday convinced I’d scared her off.
I want her physically. That part is obvious. But I’ve also spent weeks finding reasons to be near her without pushing too hard, and after yesterday I was certain I’d ruined it.
She climbs the concrete steps and stands on the dock apron.
The wind catches in her hair, pulling loose the strands that didn’t quite hold where she tied it back.
The strands float across her cheek, and she brushes them back with an impatient flick of her fingers, like they’re a distraction she doesn’t have time for. Her eyes don’t leave mine.
I have been with enough women to know when my body has decided ahead of my brain, and right now my body has made a very clear decision. My history with women has never been complicated—I find one I want, I pursue, the situation resolves itself. Clean. Simple. Norah is not resolving.
Shit. She’s driving me mad. I’ve never felt this way about a woman.
My history of sport-fucking is legendary in the pack.
But Norah is different. She thrills me physically; yes, there is no doubt about that, but this is about more than getting in her pants.
I’ve been plotting and scheming about how to spend more time with her without scaring her away.
And now, after yesterday, I knew I’d blown it.
My first thought is that she drove into this part of town, stepped onto a loading dock full of wolves and let Matt interrogate her without flinching. She shouldn’t have had to come here to prove anything to me.
The second is that she came anyway, and my wolf has been aware of her since before I stepped through the warehouse doors, since I heard Matt call my name and smelled her scent wafting across the dock and through the pressing room.
My wolf knew.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
My voice comes out rough, edged with irritation I don’t bother smoothing over.
Norah crosses her arms slowly. “That’s a strange way to greet someone who drove across town to see you.”
The wind changes again, loosening another strand of hair across her cheek. She brushes it back with the same impatient efficiency, not breaking eye contact.
“You came alone,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Into wolf territory.”
“It didn’t stop me.”
My pulse kicks harder. I drag a hand across the back of my neck and look past her toward the empty lot, the small sedan sitting near the fence, the absence of anyone with her.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I say.
Her eyebrows lift slightly. “Done what? Come to see you? Come alone?”
“Yes, both.”
She glances briefly over my shoulder toward the open warehouse, then back. “It’s a business, Silas. Not a war zone.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
I exhale. “This part of town isn’t welcoming to humans. You know that.”
“Does that include you? Anyway, I came.”
She shrugs, staring me down with a determined look on her face.
I search her face for fear or second thoughts. There aren’t any.
She drove twenty city blocks and walked onto my loading dock because I left her standing across the street yesterday without giving her a chance to tell me what she thought.
I go very still.
“You saw the wolf the other day,” I say. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”
“Yes, I saw the wolf. I also saw a fight,” she says.
No hesitation. No softening of the word, no search for an easier one.
I study her face, waiting for the second part. The part where the reality of it catches up with the bravado, where the instinctive human pullback kicks in and she walks it back.
It doesn’t come.
“And that doesn’t bother you,” I say.
“No.”
“You say that now.”
“I said it then, too. I’ve had time to think about it.”
“Thinking about it usually changes things.”
She stares at me, openly incredulous. “Well, it didn’t. Do you think I drove down here to tell you I changed my mind?”
“Did you?”
“No.” The word comes out clean and flat. “I came because you looked at me across that street like you already knew how this was going to end. Like you’d already written the last page.” She holds my gaze without blinking. “I don’t like being written off before I’ve said anything.”
The wind brings her scent straight to me, warm and familiar now. My wolf reacts immediately, and my head lifts to breathe her smell in.
I lock it down. Firm, immediate.
“You shouldn’t be this close to me,” I say.
Her chin lifts slightly. “You keep saying things like that.”
“Because they keep being true.”
“Why?”
Because I can feel you. Because my wolf has been tracking you since before I walked out here and hasn’t stopped for one second. Because the closer you get the harder it is to hold it all in place.
But I don’t say any of that.
“The wolf knows you’re here,” I say.
Her heartbeat jumps. I hear the small, immediate spike of it, quick and then working to steady.
“And?” she says.
“And it makes things complicated.”
“For whom?”
I don’t answer that, because the honest answer is both of us, and saying it out loud feels like crossing a line I haven’t crossed yet.
She takes a step closer instead of waiting for the answer.
The distance between us shrinks until I can feel the heat of her body. I hold my ground because my wolf won’t let me move back.
Her eyes find mine and stay there.
“You thought I came here to walk away.”
I don’t say anything. Because I did. Because that is what I thought when I caught her eye after losing control.
I’ve seen humans recoil from wolves often enough that I expected the same from her.
She sees what lives under the surface, and she leaves. That’s how it goes.
“So that’s what you think of me,” she says. It’s not accusatory.
“I think you saw something most humans don’t see and can’t unsee.”
“You’re right,” she says. “I can’t unsee it.” She steps closer. “I don’t want to.”
I stop breathing for a second. Even my wolf quiets.
She lifts her hand and presses it flat against the front of my shirt, the contact light but pointed, and I feel it everywhere. The warmth of her palm through the cotton, the way the touch is anything but accidental.
“You’re shaking,” she says.
She’s right. The tremor is low and contained, the residue of the wolf being held in check at close range. I hadn’t realized it was visible until she said it.
“Norah.”
“I know,” she says. “I know it’s complicated. I know what this part of town is, and what the wolf means and how people usually respond to it.” Her hand stays where it is, steady against my chest. “I know all of that.”
She looks up at me.
“I came anyway,” she says. “Because you matter to me. And I need you to know that I’m not going anywhere.”
For weeks I’ve been waiting for the moment she decides being with a wolf is too much. Instead, she drove into my territory to tell me the opposite.
I stop holding myself away from her.
I reach for her.
My fingers find the back of her neck where the hair has come fully loose, and I feel her breath catch at the contact. That small response is enough.
I pull her in.
The kiss starts carefully, measured. The restraint of a man who is still trying to hold his desire in check. Her mouth is warm, and she rises onto her toes to close the last fraction of space between us.
I kiss her carefully at first because I still know where we are and because I need to know she wants this. She rises onto her toes and wraps her arms around me.
That answers the question. The careful part lasts approximately three seconds before it doesn’t. When she wraps her hands tightly around me, my wolf comes forward.
The next kiss isn’t careful. My wolf surges forward, but this time I’m not fighting the fact that I want her. I’m fighting what I want to do about it.
I could ravage her. The realization lands with a kind of horror that doesn’t make me want it less.
I hold onto the last working part of my brain hard enough that my hands shake with the effort of it.
I pull her closer, and she lets me. I’m hard, and she knows it. I look down at her hazel eyes and the smile starting at the corner of her mouth.
She chuckles and presses herself into me. I groan and shake my head.
I want her against the dock wall with her shirt off and her legs locked around my waist. I want to find out exactly how loud she can be, hear what she sounds like when she stops worrying about who might come through the warehouse door.
My hands tighten at her waist. I could take this too far very quickly, and the fact that she is pressing herself against my erection is not helping.
When I pull back, it is only enough to look at her, and what I find is her breath coming faster than usual and her hands around my neck now, her eyes finding mine with an expression that is searching as if she’s looking for confirmation that I want this as much as she does.
I don’t have words for what changed.
I don’t think she does either.
We stand there in that charged, suspended moment, the warehouse noise filtering back in around the edges, the wind still moving across the dock, Larkin in the background, beyond the fence line.
And then I hear it.
The even gait of someone who moves through this building with the authority of a man who has been moving through it for thirty years.
Greer.
I know it before I see him. My body knows it before I consciously process it, some combination of scent and sound absorbed in childhood and impossible to unlearn, the same way you can’t unlearn the sound of a particular voice in the house you grew up in.
I step back.
Norah feels the swing and I see her read it, her eyes moving to the warehouse entrance before I can say anything.
My father’s best friend and brother, Greer, appears in the open doorway.
He’s older than most of the men in this operation, broader through the shoulders, softened slightly with age but not much, someone who stopped needing to prove himself a long time ago. His face is that of a man who has been in the middle of things for long enough that very little surprises him.
He takes in the dock.
He takes in me.
He takes in Norah.
His expression doesn’t change. Greer has always been almost impossible to read, and right now he gives me nothing.
Not a flicker, not a tightening around the eyes, nothing that would read to an outside observer as anything other than a man doing a routine check of the loading area.
He is the most composed person I have ever known, and that’s saying something, given the family I grew up in.
He looks at me.
“Your father’s looking for you,” he says.
Five words. Flat, neutral, professional. The same tone he uses for a schedule change or a contract renewal. That deliberate neutrality tells me enough.
I already know he’s not going to say anything about this. And he’s not going to ask.
He’s going to walk back into that warehouse and eventually he’s going to be in a room with my father and the information will be there whether he offers it directly. Because it occurs to me, finally, that Elias already knows about Norah.
The thought arrives with cold clarity. I should have anticipated it and didn’t.
Greer holds my gaze for one more beat.
Then he turns and walks back into the warehouse, his footsteps steady and even, and he is gone.
Norah says nothing.
Neither do I.