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She was unselfconscious, unapologetic, and mercenary as hell. His beast was a goner.
Fortunately, she came sauntering back in a few minutes and dropped the clothes on him. The button on his jeans was busted, and all the buttons on his shirt were just missing, but the fabric was more or less intact. He slipped on the sleeves and pulledup the jeans. “My boxers weren’t under a tree somewhere?” he asked as he zipped up.
She stood with her arms crossed, watching him with a glow in her brown eyes. “Nope.”
The little witch.
He approached Bonanza and took the reins. The horse started munching on his shoulder. “I didn’t bring an apple to the desperate peace negotiations. Sorry, dude. Let’s go.”
He heard a howl far off in the woods and tensed. “Last chance.”
“Last chance to what? Go back to the bosom of my family as they plot to end yours?”
“That doesn’t have to be your problem,” he said.
“You’re paying me a quarter of a million to make it my problem. And…”
“And… Wait, how much?”
She stepped away from him and toward the horse. “And I have just as much skin in this game as you. We have to keep this from spiraling.”
How on god’s green earth did he not know what his dining room was worth? He ate breakfast every morning, spilled coffee, and scratched up hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of wood?
She patted Bonanza. “Nice horsey.”
He chose Bonanza because the horse could take both their weights, and he was smart enough to do what he was told when it mattered. He wasn’t nice. Aiden wasn’t nice. He was getting the feeling that Goldie wasn’t exactly nice, either. She wasn’t nice, but she was perfect.
He sent a prayer out to the universe that one thing had gone right today; his idiot cousins had kidnapped the right witch.
6
Goldie gritted her teeth as she pulled herself into the saddle with minimum grace and maximum help, and Aiden leaped up effortlessly behind her. He didn’t give her a warning and didn’t seem to give the horse any instruction before it started through the woods. This time, as he pulled her against him, she felt his bare skin and nearly lost her mind.
Girl, his family kidnapped you. What are you thinking?
Yeah, buthedidn’t do it. He was trying everything to get her home and protect her family. And his.
Nice excuse.
When he’d gone off to negotiate, she’d stood where he put her for five seconds before she’d lost patience, slid off the horse, and started after him, crafting the look-away spell as she went. She had a small rotation of spells she could count on, and she’d written that one before kindergarten.
In the clearing, she’d seen Aunt Sonia and her cousin Charlotte with her new mate and his father, the alpha of a neighboring pack. They were normal werewolves without the speed, cloaking, or poison of the dire wolves in the woods. If there was such a thing as a normal werewolf.
Things had been going not great, and then between one breath and the next, Aiden shifted, and her family went after him like braining a random dire wolf would bring her back to them. She’d spent the fight debating whether revealing herself would make things better or worse. Truly, she didn’t wish anyone harmed.
Yeah, she wascompletelyselfless.
She hid because she wanted to help, not because if she stayed away for thirteen days, she’d get a whole dining room set out of the deal. It didn’t hurt that she could also ride around plastered against washboard abs that seemed to steam in the cold winter air.
Aiden pulled on the reins. “Whoa.”
She gripped his forearm as the horse danced to a stop, and the momentum threw her forward. “People actually say that?”
“What should we yell? Stop?”
“No. I don’t know. Why’d we stop?”
“Shh,” he said, running a hand down her arm like she was a frisky horse. She shivered.
