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“Hattie Ashby,” Bess calls out, loud enough for the whole lane to hear. “Who is that?”
“Evening, Auntie!” I call back, and keep walking. Fast.
“Hattie! You come back here right now!”
“Can’t! Busy!”
Behind us, I hear Marigold. “Bess… is that man made of wood?”
“I don’t care what he’s made of. Did you see his hands?”
Rowan glances back at them, then down at me. “Who are they?”
“The aunties.”
“Are they yours?”
“They’re everybody’s.”
He thinks about that for a second. “They’re very loud.”
I laugh. I can’t help it, it just bursts out of me… and he looks down at me with a strange, almost startled look on his face. Like he really, really likes the sound of my laugh.
* * *
My cottage has never looked so small. Rowan ducks under the doorframe and still almost knocks his head on the beam, and when he straightens up, the whole room just shrinks around him. My table, my chairs, my bed in the corner with the quilt my grandma made. He turns in a slow circle, taking it all in: the candles lined up on the shelves, the jars of honey, the dried lavender hanging from the rafters.
Then he looks at me.
And it hits me all at once that I’m alone in my house with a seven-foot wooden alpha who just growled “mine” into my neck. And I’m still wet. Very wet. And he can definitely smell it.
He takes a step toward me.
I swallow hard. “So, um… are you hungry? Do you even eat? I have honey. And bread. And…”
Another step.
“Hattie,” he says.
Just my name, low and slow and rough, and I swear to God I feel it in my clit.
I back up until I hit the kitchen table. “Yeah?”
He stops right in front of me, close enough that his scent is all I can breathe, close enough that I have to tip my head all the way back to see his face. Then he lifts his hand again and holds it up between us, palm open.
“Can I kiss you?”
Four
Chapter Four: Rowan
She doesn’t answer. She grabs my shirt with both fists, pops up on the tips of her toes, and drags my face down to hers.
I’ll take that as a yes…
Her mouth lands on mine, soft, warm, and she tastes like honey. Every spring I had bees crawling all over me, making the stuff right there in my branches, and not once did I think to try it. Idiot. I groan into her mouth so loud it rattles the jars on her shelves.
Then my hands find her, and that’s it for good manners.
