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Daniel just nodded again.
“It’s beautiful,” she went on. “We had no idea.”
Daniel took another long sip of his coffee, trying to parse that sentence and finally failing.
“Who’s ‘we,’ and what did you have no idea of?” he asked.
“The task force,” Charlie said. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, but kept running the fingers of one hand over the freshly sanded wood, the ewe’s not fat mug in the other hand. “And we didn’t know that Kade had a mate.”
Daniel swallowed coffee, watching her finger trace patterns on the table top.
“It isn’t a secret,” he said. “Not that I’m aware.”
“I don’t know how we missed it,” she said. “It makes me wonder what other intelligence we got wrong.”
Before Daniel could think of and then articulate a response, the bedroom door opened and Kade walked out, wearing both pants and a shirt, though he was barefoot.
“I’m going to go grab a deer for dinner,” he said. He only looked at Daniel, practically pretending that Charlie wasn’t there. “Back in a couple of hours.”
Daniel nodded once.
“Watch for wolves,” he said.
“They know better than to come for me,” he said, and then he left through the front door, still barefoot.
Charlie shook her head slightly, still looking down at the table.
“Not used to shifters?” he asked.
She chewed on the inside of her lip like she wasn’t sure how to phrase what she was about to say. It took her a while.
“I’m not used to... bachelor pairs, I guess?”
She paused.
“Do you have a female mate somewhere?”
As she asked, her cheeks turned a pleasing pink color, and Daniel found himself fascinated by it.
“No,” he said quickly. “Definitely not. Not even a little. Zero.”
Could you be more awkward?He thought.
Briefly, he had the urge to shift and run off into the forest, where beautiful human girls weren’t sitting across the table from him in nothing more than his dead mother’s bathrobe.
Charlie just turned redder and drained her coffee mug, like she was trying to hide her blush.
“I actually grew up with a lot of shifters,” she finally said. “Back in Cumberland.”
“What are you doing out here?” Daniel asked. His coffee was finished, too, and he itched to do something with his hands.
“Figuring out who killed those wolves,” she said. “Shifter-human relations are fucked up enough as it is. We don’t need shifters killing other shifters over territory disputes to make things worse, you know?”
Daniel stood, unable to contain himself anymore, and walked to a workbench across the room. He grabbed a few tools: a whittling knife, an exacto, and a half-carved, half-round wood sculpture of a mountain lion.
“They sent you alone?” he asked.
“They didn’t want it to be a big deal,” she said, and he could hear in her voice that she was nervous, on edge again.
