He eases out of me. Steps back and tucks himself away. I slide off the washbasin on legs that don’t entirely cooperate and pull my dress down. My underwear is twisted and damp, and I straighten it with hands that are not steady.
We stand in a bar restroom a foot apart, both breathing like we’ve been running, and neither of us speaks for what feels like an eternity.
“Are you okay?” he asks. His voice is rougher than it was.
“Yes. Fine. I’m… Yes.” The words come out in fragments. I don’t stutter. I’m not a woman who stutters. But my brain isn’t fully back online, and my body is still rippling with aftershocks. My wolf is doing something inside my chest that I can’t interpret.
He glances back at the door. “Should we—?”
“I have to go!” I blurt.
“Can I get your number? Or—”
“No.” I’m already moving. Adjusting the dress, finding my balance, reaching for the latch. “I need to— I- I have to go.”
His hand catches the edge of the door. Not blocking me. Just holding the question open.
I look at him one more time. Dark eyes still dazed. The scar through his eyebrow. His shirt half untucked where I grabbed it, revealing an expanse of taut belly.
God, he’s gorgeous.
He looks as undone as I feel, and the urge to stay—to close the distance and press my mouth to his again and find out what happens when we’re not in a bathroom but somewhere with a bed and hours ahead of us—is so strong I have to physically turn away from it.
“Goodbye,” I say quickly. And then I’m through the door, through the hallway, through the bar. I don’t look back. If I look back, I don’t know what I’ll do next.
The night air hits me like cold water. Stars. Trees. Gravel under my boots. I stride to the truck, clamber in, and pull out of the parking lot. Fast. The motel is a couple of miles out of town, and it passes in a blur, the dress riding up my thighs with every gearshift.
What the fuck was that?
Not the sex. Sex I understand: stress, adrenaline, a good-looking man, an evening that got away from me. The sex makes sense. At least I’m not in cycle—pregnancy isn’t a risk outside of my wolf heat—but I still should know better than to let a stranger that close without knowing a thing about him.
What doesn’t make sense is my wolf. The way she went quiet when he was inside me. Not restless the way she normally is, butsettled. Like she’d found a den she’d been looking for. Like he was a place she belonged. And the pull I feel now, leaving him, is physical. A hook somewhere behind my breastbone, tugging me back toward a man I don’t know, in a town I can’t trust, in the middle of a mission that doesn’t have room for whatever this is.
I keep driving. The pull doesn’t fade. It aches.
Briar is sitting in the dark when I get in. By the window, legs crossed, knife across her knee. She looks at me—my hair messed, dress creased, face flushed—and says nothing.
I wait for the comment. The raised eyebrow. The lecture on why sleeping with a local is a compromising move.
“I found a secondary approach to the creek crossing,” she says. “Gonna take a closer look at dawn.”
“Good.” I don’t say more, just turn and stumble out of the room, my cheeks burning.
I change out of the dress in the bathroom, then stand under the tepid shower, scrubbing as if my life depends on it. I get out. Pull on a T-shirt and shorts. Lie down. Close my eyes.
I can feel him. Not just the physical aftereffects: the pulse between my legs, the tenderness where he gripped my thighs. Something else. A thread, thin and new, stretching from somewhere deep in my chest toward a house I’ve never been to, attached to a man whose last name I didn’t ask for.
My wolf curls tight inside me, facing the echo of him, and does not let go.
Chapter 5
Conner
I can still smell her on my skin. The shower’s running hot enough to fog the mirror, and it doesn’t matter. She’s in my hands, on my shirt where it’s crumpled on the bathroom floor, caught in the collar where her fingers gripped the fabric. Something warm and alive, like spring leaves and creek water, and underneath it a sweetness that isn’t perfume. Skin. The way she tasted when my mouth was on her throat in that locked restroom with her legs around me, and neither of us pretending this was a good idea.
I stand under the water and try to think about anything else.
It doesn’t work. My wolf won’t let it. He’s pacing, agitated, fixated on a woman who walked out of the Railhead five hours ago and disappeared into the dark without giving me her number or her full name.