I’d do anything if it meant she got to stay.
But for one more minute, I didn’t move.
I held my mate in the quiet barn and let the minute stretch as long as it wanted.
12
MAISIE
The plan worked until lunch.
Honestly, that was probably longer than anyone should have expected from us.
We were supposed to be careful. Separate rooms. Clean skin. Polite distance. A trial arrangement that would look perfectly boring to anyone who came to inspect it.
Then I walked into the kitchen wearing one of Kazan’s flannels and nothing else.
He’d been reading through cider ledgers at the table, and when he looked up, his body went completely still. His eyes did that molten gold thing that made all my good sense shut off.
So the plan died.
Neither one of us gave it a proper funeral.
There had been the kitchen counter, which I couldn’t look at now without my whole body remembering things I didn’t need to be remembering while holding a knife.
There had been the night I was grateful his nearest neighbor lived far enough away not to hear us.
And last night, under the fig tree in the orchard, there had been something I absolutely wasn’t going to think about right now because I enjoyed having all my fingers.
I was standing on a stool, chopping star-figs into a pan, while he leaned in the doorway and pretended he wasn’t just watching me.
“You’re in my light,” I said.
His tail moved slowly across the floorboards. Content. Lazy. Completely unfair.
“I built the window,” he said. “It’s my light.”
I glanced over my shoulder. “That’s not how light works.”
“It is in my house.”
I flicked a piece of fig peel at him. He caught it without even looking.
Show off.
The same hand that had once thrown a grown man into a freezer was now catching fruit because I was being a brat in his kitchen. I hated how much that worked for me.
I was about to say something else, probably something I’d regret, when an engine came up the ridge road.
Kazan’s expression changed instantly.
So did mine.
It wasn’t Lorkin’s truck. I knew that rattle by now. This engine was smooth, and quiet, and expensive. It came into the yard like it had permission to be there.
My stomach dropped.
Kazan straightened from the doorway. His tail stopped moving.
