But she'd just told him someone was pulling her past out of filing cabinets and leaving it at her door, and what she needed right now was someone who believed her, not someone adding another claim to the list of things closing in on her. Even though he figured she may have similar impulses, especially since she felt the need to share something about her. Not too personal, but enough.
"I'll find out who left the note," he said instead. "I've got people asking the right questions already. If this connects to the name I'm tracking, I'll know soon."
"And if it does?"
"Then we figure out why."
"We?"
"You'd rather deal with it alone?"
"I've been dealing with things alone for a while."
"How's that been working?"
She almost smiled. It didn't quite make it to her mouth but it showed up somewhere around her eyes, and he caught it in the candlelight making it hard to ignore his growing attraction to her.
The cottage had gotten cold. The rain and wind had pulled the temperature down fast, and without power the only heat source was the cast-iron woodstove in the corner near the hearth. He'd noticed the stacked wood beside it when they'd come in. Birch and pine, split small, dry.
"Your stove," he said, and pushed back from the table.
"You don't have to."
"You're shivering."
"I'm wet."
"Yeah, and a fire fixes both." He crossed to the stove and crouched in front of it and opened the door and started building a base with the birch, because the alternative was staying at that table with the candle playing light across her collarbones and her voice low and honest in the dark, and if he sat there another five minutes he was going to reach across and kiss her.
He struck the match and held it to the kindling and watched the flame catch and build.
12
ISLA
She watched him build the fire and tried to figure out why she'd told him anything at all.
It wasn't trust. She didn't trust him. She didn't trust anyone with the specifics of what had happened at Ardenmere, and she'd held that line for years across four towns and a dozen conversations designed to pry it out of her. Twyla had gotten close. Moira had gotten the records. Neither of them had gotten the version she'd just handed to a wolf shifter she'd known for less than a week, sitting at her kitchen table in a storm with a candle between them like some kind of confession booth.
So why him? Why now?
She pulled her knees up in the chair and wrapped her arms around them as she watched the firelight start to push the shadows back from the stove corner. He was crouched with his back to her, feeding birch into the base. The orange light caught the wave tattoos on his forearms and the line of his jaw. The particular set of his shoulders was something she was starting to recognize as his version of restraint.
That was part of it, she realized. The restraint. After their first confrontation outside the inn, he'd come back and beencalm. Not friendly, not warm, but steady. He hadn't pushed. He hadn't demanded the full story or made her earn his patience by performing contrition. He'd been sharp with her at Corin's, yes, and she hadn't forgiven him for it, but even that had been honest. He said what he meant. He didn't circle.
And there was something else. Something underneath the practical reasons, a pull she had no word for. Physical, low, sitting just below her sternum like a second heartbeat she hadn't asked for. It had been there since he'd grabbed her wrist outside the inn and it had gotten worse every time she'd been near him, and she did not know what it was but she knew it was the reason she'd opened her mouth tonight, and that infuriated her.
He was an infuriating man. Calm when she expected anger. Quiet when she expected demands. Present when she expected him to leave.
The fire caught properly and the stove began to tick with heat. He closed the door and turned around. She realized she'd been staring and didn't look away fast enough.
"Better?" he asked.
"Getting there."
He came back to the table but didn't sit. He stayed by the counter across from her, arms crossed, the firelight and the candle splitting his face between warm and shadow. The rain was still heavy on the roof but the wind had dropped to something less violent, the worst of the front moving east over the ridge.
"You don't have to tell me the rest," he said. "About your father."
