Page 27 of A Pack of Lies and a Big Bad Wolf

"Kieran — oh, fates — I'm—"

She breaks. She comes with my name in her mouth and her nails in my back and her entire body clenching around me, and I last exactly three seconds longer before I follow her over, spilling into her with a growl that rattles the windows in a way that has nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with the woman in my lap.

The fire gives one final pop and settles. A log rolls gently forward in the grate, nudged by nothing visible.

For a while, the only sound is our breathing and the fire ticking down to embers.

She's slumped against my chest, boneless, her face tucked into my neck. I've got one hand in her hair and the other on the small of her back, and neither one is moving anytime soon.

"The rug is uncomfortable," she mumbles into my chest. “I…I should go home.”

My wolf growls. I snort in derision. As if I’d let her go. “My bed is very comfortable. You’re staying here.”

"Fine. Bed. But this still doesn't mean anything."

I smile at her. “Of course it doesn’t.”

I carry her to the bedroom because I want to carry her to the bedroom, and she lets me because her wolf lets her, and I let her pretend yet again that this is only for tonight, while my wolf rolls over in complete and transparent satisfaction.

Chapter 12

Olivia

It's been two weeks since the night I told myself I was only staying over because it was late, and his bed was comfortable, and walking back to my cabin in the dark seemed like a safety hazard.

We’re both politely ignoring the obvious. I go to his house after dinner, and he opens the door, and neither of us comments on the fact that my toothbrush has moved into his bathroom and there's an entire section of his closet that contains clothing in my size, tags still on half of it, that appeared one morning.

I haven't asked where the clothes came from. He hasn't mentioned buying them. We are two adults engaged in a sophisticated mutual fiction in which I am a guest who happens to sleep in the Alpha's bed every single night.

"This still doesn't mean we're mates," I told him last night, while wearing his shirt, in his bed, with my leg thrown over his.

"Absolutely not." He grinned, and pulled me closer.

My days have settled into a rhythm that I refuse to call a routine, because routines imply permanence.

But in the meantime, mornings are training with Bram and Rose, and then the library, where I've set up my new bindery on the big table under the window and I'm working my way through the damaged collection one book at a time. The cracked-hinge ledger was first — an afternoon, just as I'd promised Peyton, and when I set it back on the shelf with its new hinge toned to match, I may have petted it. Nobody saw.

The herbal is my real project. Washing cockled pages is slow, precise work, and I lose hours in it, and the hours feel nothing at all like the hours I used to spend in Mississippi wondering how to make rent. Peyton brings me tea without being asked. Gemma stops by to check on progress and stays to ask questions about hide glue. Rose comes in to complain about Kieran and ends up holding bone folders while I explain grain direction.

I have friends here. I haven't had friends since high school, and even then, friend was a generous word for the girls who tolerated me at lunch. These women sought me out, and they keep showing up.

It’s at the library that Kieran seeks me out one afternoon, and I can see from the wrinkling of his forehead that he’s not happy.

I set down my bone folder. “Hello, tyrant Alpha. Come to bark orders at me?”

"Have you noticed anything different about Amaryllis lately?"

I purse my lips, trying to think. "Different how?"

"The eating. She ate an entire pie at the pack dinner last night." He pauses, then leans in and lowers his voice. "Do you think there's any chance she's pregnant?"

I actually snort-laugh. "Not unless it’s a virgin conception. I promise you she is not secretly sneaking off and doing the boom-boom with anyone.”

That earns me a snicker. “The boom-boom?”

“The horizontal mambo. The beast with two backs.” I give him an amused glance. “Is it time we had the talk? When a male shifter and a female shifter like each other very, very much-”

He holds up his hands. “Stop! My virgin ears.”