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Something dark and old and very cold moves in my chest. I think about following him. I think about it for a long, long second.

Then I lift her wrist to my mouth and kiss the marks. Once. Soft.

“Does it hurt?” I ask.

She shakes her head. She’s staring at me. Her lips are parted. Her pupils are huge.

And her scent hits me so hard I almost have to grab the table. Honey and heat and slick, thick and sweet and rising off her in waves, right here in the middle of the harvest fair, in front of everybody.

Auntie Marigold fans herself with a pie plate.

“Rowan,” Hattie says, in a very small, very calm voice. “Pack up the honey.”

“Why?”

She’s already untying her apron. “Because if I don’t get you alone in the next five minutes, I’m going to climb you right here in front of the mayor’s wife.”

I pack up the honey.

* * *

She drags me into the woods.

Not far. Just past the edge of the field, where the trees start, deep enough that the fiddle music goes faint and the voices disappear. The leaves are gold and red and falling all around us, and the ground is soft with them. It smells like home in here. Moss and bark and rain and everything I was for so long.

She pushes me back against a big oak and starts pulling at my shirt.

“Not this one,” I tell her.

She stops. “What?”

“That’s an oak. Very old. I knew her.”

Hattie stares at me. “Rowan. Are you telling me you don’t want to fuck me against your auntie?”

“I’m saying she’s watching.”

She laughs so hard she has to lean on me, and I pick her up while she’s laughing and carry her deeper in, to a little clearing full of moss and fallen leaves where there’s nobody old enough to have opinions. I lay my coat down on the moss and put her on top of it.

Then I look at her.

Her yellow dress is spread around her in the leaves. Her ribbons are coming loose. Her skin’s shining with sweat, she’s breathing hard, and she’s looking up at me with her pupils blown wide, and she smells so good my mouth is already watering.

“He touched you,” I say.

“I know.”

“He put his nose on your neck.”

“I know, Rowan.” She reaches up and grabs my shirt. “So fix it.”

I kneel over her and put my face right where his was. Right at her throat. I drag my nose up the side of her neck, slow, and rub my jaw against her skin, my cheek, my lips, pressing my scent into her everywhere he breathed. She shivers and arches up into me.

“Every human in that field is going to smell me on you when we walk back,” I growl against her neck. “Every alpha for ten miles. They’re going to smell rain and wood and moss on your skin and know exactly who you belong to.”

“Yes,” she breathes. “God, yes. Do it.”

I push her dress up to her waist. She’s not wearing anything under it. Of course she’s not.