AllFreeNovel
Share Us
When he smiled, it definitely felt like she knew him. “Why do I recognize you if not from today? We really haven’t met?”
“I would have remembered that.”
She tried to separate her towering fear from reality. A man who’d apologized and, more importantly, had an alibi for her abduction would probably not eat her. She played back his protests. “Punk kids?”
He scratched his nose and flinched away from the feather that drifted down. “I don’t know for sure, but I will find out. I promise you that.” His grin escaped for another half second. “Twice.”
She’d thought they were young when they’d dropped her here. Relief warred with irritation. She was relieved because her coven might have a prayer of containing this fight if the alpha wasn’t involved but irritated that she’d let a couple of kids capture her.
She reminded herself that they were a couple of kids with apex predators at their beck and call, and they’d knocked her out twice and left her here forhimto find. On a scale of harmless to getting eaten, he had to be worse than them.
He didn’t feel worse. He felt decent, hungry, and harassed. And he’d double-promised to take her home.
“Okay, Wolf Man, I accept.”
“I’m Aiden Scott, and you accept what?”
“Your promises and apologies, mostly your offer of a ride home.”
She held out a hand, and he took it carefully. His was warm and strong with roughened callouses. Aiden Scott. She recognized that name but didn’t know where she’d heard it.
“And you are?” he asked when the handshake lasted a second too long.
“Goldie Abbott of the Abbott Coven.”
“They stole anAbbott?”
“Yeah, they did.” She realized she scared him, too. Her coven would come after her; they would go to war for her. No wonder he wanted to dump her back at home. “Let’s go.”
“I promise you—again—that I will get you home tonight,” he said, holding her gaze. “But if you wouldn’t mind, I want a really fast shower first.”
She looked him up and down and smiled ruefully. “Good idea.”
Goldie took a shower too in the downstairs bathroom with a clawfoot tub from the turn of the century she could probably sell in New York for five figures. Then she put on the clothes he’d left her, jeans and a plaid shirt that fit her suspiciously well. She’d questioned him more sharply than she wanted about the owner of the shirt—the opposite of her business—but he’d answered that he was a wolf. Everyone had clothes in every size in every building. She learned something every day.
But there was no more learning to be had; she was going home. The man with the million-dollar house was going to return her, didn’t kidnap her, and hadn’t known what was going on. She had to keep repeating that because every time she paused, her heart rate went up and her hands started shaking. It was pathetic.
She searched the bathroom and couldn’t find a hair tie. Apparently, female werewolves weren’t fans of ponytails afteremergency shifts, which was another useless piece of knowledge from the day. She retied it in a knot at the back of her head and slipped out of the bathroom.
She jolted when she saw a figure looming over her on the stairs, but Aiden didn’t notice, or he pretended not to as he came down. “Ready?”
She stepped into the light. “Ready.”
He wore a plaid shirt a lot like hers and jeans slung low on his hips. Her mouth went dry. He had to be one of the most beautiful men she had ever seen.
“We might wanna go out the back,” he said ruefully, looking down at the ruined foyer.
She cringed. She’d tried to stick to natural substances like molasses and dish soap so as not to ruin what was probably an expensive antique floor to go with the expensive antique house. She wasn’t sure she succeeded.
She clapped her hands together and brazened it out. “Good plan.”
Without warning or any preparation, he leaped over the banister and landed beside her. It took everything she had not to scream and flinch away.
He wound to the back of the house through the kitchen to a door that opened the second he touched it. She tried and failed to follow him. “Who made this spell?”
He froze on his back stoop. “What?”
“I can’t get out.”
