Chapter 17 Holly
HOLLY
“... set an alarm,” Holly mumbled, opening her eyes.
Her bedroom was washed in a soft gray light, somehow timeless—but definitely too bright to be merely the Christmas lights. She was tangled comfortably in someone else’s warm limbs. It was almost too hot under the covers. Moving, however, would wake Jace.
She had vague memories that he had twitched and stirred frequently during the night, but each time, when she nestled close against him, he settled again. Holly had always been a deep sleeper, with no difficulty falling back asleep if she was awakened by something unexpected in the night.
Now she tried to move slowly and patiently, attempting to roll over without waking up Jace, enough to see her bedside clock.
Once she did, her eyes flew wide.
“J—” She hastily lowered her voice from the startled yelp that tried to emerge. “Jace!” she hissed against his ear. He twitched and jerked. “Jace, it’s almost 6:30—my dad is definitely up—and he didn’t knock on the door!”
“That’s bad?” Jace murmured. He had a soft, sleepy look that at any other time, she would have found luxuriously wonderful.
Right now she was terrified of discovery. She pushed the covers back. Jace made a displeased noise as cold air flooded their hot and slightly sticky blanket nest. Holly scrambled for her clothes, dropped the ones she had been wearing yesterday, and tried to find something clean.
Jace was getting dressed too, at what seemed to her the pace of a geriatric snail. “Jace, we have to get you out of here,” she whispered. “Oh no!” She froze; there was the creak of a floorboard downstairs, then the sound of something clattering in the kitchen. “Can you go out the window?”
“I think trying to hide it is just going to make it worse,” Jace whispered back. “You said yourself that you’re an adult. You can make your own decisions, and your dad needs to respect that.”
“The question is whether he’ll remember that before or after he goes ballistic,” she retorted in an undertone, whacking her hair with a brush.
She still felt warm and sticky between the legs—wonderfully so, but there was absolutely no way she could get away with going downstairs without a shower.
With shifter-sharp senses, her dad would notice instantly.
“I’m going to take a shower. You are going out the window. ”
“I don’t have a coat or boots,” Jace pointed out.
Good point. “I can, uh. I can go down and get them, and bring them back up here.”
“Without being seen? Or setting off the canine burglar alarms?”
“Darn it,” she moaned. “Why did we have to, why didn’t we—ugh!”
“Do you regret it?” Jace asked quietly, looking up at her. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands—perfectly normal and human—laced together between his knees.
“No.” The word came instant and unquestioned to her tongue. If there was one thing she was sure of, it was that. Jace still looked unsure, so she took his face in her hands and kissed him firmly.
She was still kissing him when a door closed downstairs. Holly jumped up and went to the window. “Oh, thank goodness,” she sighed. “Dad’s going out to the barn. Maybe he doesn’t know.”
“He knows,” Jace said. “I still think coming clean is the best thing.”
“We’re going to.” Soon. Somehow. “But let’s not do it while reeking of sex and coming out of my bedroom together, all right? I’m going to take a shower. Why don’t you go back up to the cottage and, uh ...”
“Pretend to come in the front door like I didn’t just spend the night holding you after we made love?”
“Yes!” Holly said. “I mean, no! But now’s our only chance. If Dad comes back, we’ll be trapped again. Go, go, go.”
She pushed him out the door of her room, with Jace making only minimal, token protests. “He’s your dad, not your prison guard.”
“I know, but you’ve seen him as a bear. Do you want that after you? Do you know how many places there are on this farm to hide a body? At least let him have coffee and get some yard work out of his system first!”
This argument seemed to convince him, or at least it got him moving. Holly waited until she heard the door close downstairs, then ran into the bathroom, flung her clothes off, and took a very hot shower with lots and lots of body wash.
She knew it was stupid as she did it. Dad definitely knew.
(But maybe he didn’t?) And they were adults and had nothing to hide.
(But she and Jace were both dependent on Dad’s goodwill for a roof over their heads and food on their plates.) She was a fully grown adult and could get a job. (But what if she couldn’t?)
Hastily brushing her wet hair after the shower, she frowned at herself in the steamy mirror. What was that, some dirt on her neck? Leaning closer, she flushed when she realized that at some point last night, he’d given her a hickey. Amazing. Just like a couple of teenagers.
She realized she was grinning stupidly. That had been fun.
The aftermath would be considerably less so.
Poking her head out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her, she heard the sound of someone moving around downstairs.
That better be Dad and not Jace. She tiptoed back to her room, leaving the bathroom door open to fill the house with sweet-smelling steam and indicate that nothing more untoward was going on up here than a shower, no sir.
(And if it covered up incriminating smells in the bedroom, so much the better.) After getting dressed and brushing her damp hair properly, she put on a little perfume, decided that was too much since she never wore perfume at home, wiped it off and dropped the tissue in the wastebasket on top of last night’s incriminating evidence.
“Get a grip, Holly,” she muttered to herself. She rearranged her sweater to make sure the hickey was covered up and went downstairs, practicing her cheerful expression the whole way.
SQUEAKA! came from the general vicinity of Rocket’s dog bed, causing her to stumble on the last step.
“Good morning, Cupcake,” Holly muttered, hopping sideways a couple of steps before she got her balance again.
On that note, she made her entrance into the kitchen.
“Good morning, Dad!” she said brightly. “I can’t believe you let me sleep in.
That was so sweet of you. I can’t wait to get started on the Christmas tree farm.
And Noelle’s coming today, right? I can drive to the airport and pick her up. Ooh, is this coffee?”
Her dad was sitting at the kitchen island. He had a cup of coffee in front of him, but nothing else. His expression was difficult to read. Holly noticed two more plates on the countertop, each with an empty glass beside it. Clearly he’d been waiting for them to get up for some time.
“This coffee smells great,” she said as she mixed creamer into it. Her bright facade began to crumble. “Dad, is everything—uh. All right?”
Her dad cleared his throat, and said in a tone nearly devoid of expression, but somehow tight, “Anything you want to tell me, kiddo?”
Oh crap. Crap on a pancake. That was the Voice. The “you stayed out after curfew” voice. The “you’ll never believe what Mrs. Wozniewski says she saw you and the Ingram kid doing at the Halloween bonfire” voice.
Holly set down the creamer carefully.
“First of all,” she said, turning to face him, “I’m not a kid.”
“I know,” her dad said, and she thought she might have heard a slight hint of a break in the Voice, but just then, the kitchen door opened and Jace came in on a swirl of cold air.
“Good morning,” he said, not quite meeting anyone’s eyes as he took his coat off.
“You,” her dad said, getting up from his stool.
Holly tended to forget how big her dad was.
He was not just tall, but wide. To her he was, had always been, simply Dad.
But he could also be intimidating as hell, and right now he was radiating intimidating vibes.
She saw Jace stop in his tracks, and realized that some of what she felt from Dad right now was actually a shifter thing.
Not being a shifter herself, she had never really been able to feel it, but she knew that there was a .
... something. Merry used to playfully call it their dad’s Alpha Waves, which had made Ivy (the self-proclaimed know-it-all) insist that alphas weren’t a real thing, in wolf packs or otherwise.
But there was something. It was a presence in the room, like a whole entire other person. And Jace clearly felt it even more than Holly did.
Which was one reason why she put herself between them.
She didn’t know if her dad would actually attack Jace, although she hoped not.
But she knew he wouldn’t attack her. In all their childhood and teen years, for all the groundings and scoldings and threats of spankings, her dad had never laid a hand on a single one of them.
“Dad,” she said, in a voice that barely sounded like her own. “Back down.”
And to her shock, her dad took a step backward.
He steadied himself a moment later, but Holly felt something strange flush through her body, a sense of assertiveness that she had never felt before.
“I know where you both were last night,” her dad said.
“So what?” Holly demanded. She stepped back, but only so she could stand side by side with Jace. “So what, Dad?”
“So,” her father said, turning a stare on Jace, and his eyes actually seemed to vibrate, the gold was so vivid. She had never seen anything like it. “So this—this boy lied to me.”
Beside her, Jace went completely tense.
“How dare you talk to Jace that way,” Holly seethed. “Or me! So what, Dad? So I didn’t tell you there was anything going on with Jace and me. So what?”
Her dad barely seemed to hear her. He was entirely focused on Jace.
“You lied, Jace.”
Jace stared at her dad. Then he squared his shoulders and confronted him.
“I didn’t.”
“I told you to stay away from my daughter until you had your wolf under control.”
“You what?” Holly snapped, flooded with offended rage. “Dad! That’s none of your business! How dare you!”
“My wolf is under control,” Jace said. His voice remained calm, and through her fury, Holly couldn’t help being desperately proud of him. “I didn’t lie to you, sir. I would never have put a hand on your daughter if I was any danger to her.”
“If your wolf is completely under control,” her dad growled, “then tell me something. Have you shifted yet? Even once, since you’ve been on the farm?”
Jace stared at her dad. His face remained flatly calm, but gold flickered in his eyes.
“No,” he said.
“Then don’t lie to me.”
Jace’s face twisted. He turned his back, opened the kitchen door, and strode out.
“Dad!” Holly yelled. “You—how dare—Jace, come back!”
She grabbed Jace’s coat and ran out into the yard after him, coatless herself.
“Jace!” she shouted after him. “Jace!”
He was walking fast, but she caught up on the hill. She thrust the coat at him. Jace took it without looking at her.
“Don’t listen to him. He’s being a controlling asshole.”
“He’s right,” Jace said, so faintly she had to strain to hear him. He held the coat, making no move to put it on. “I thought I had it under control, it feels so much better around you, but ... he’s right. It’s not under control. Not really.”
He flicked a tormented glance at her, his eyes pure gold, and when his hands tightened on the coat, she realized that the backs of his hands had changed. There was thick dark fur there, and it was claws, not blunt human nails, that dug into the coat.
“So we’ll learn together,” she said, reaching for him.
Jace snarled at her—actually snarled. She jerked her hand back in shock and hurt.
He looked just as shocked, his eyes filled with guilty fear. “You don’t understand,” he said, his voice hoarse.
Then he whirled away from her and half-walked, half-ran up the hill.
It was brutally cold, and she was shivering. She hadn’t bothered with a coat or hat before running after him. “You’re right!” she yelled after him. “I don’t understand! So explain to me instead of running away like a—like a coward!”
His shoulders hunched up. He just kept striding away from her.