Page 45 of Beasts of Mine

I'd stared at both of them.

Tavian had opened his mouth. Then, in what might have been his greatest display of good judgment in years, he'd closed it again.

Luca had returned to his herbs.

Nobody had asked a single question.

I'd almost been proud of them. They knew there was a human Omega. They knew she returned regularly, knew enough of her scent by then to recognize it whenever I came back from the creek, and had certainly realized that my continued presence here had stopped being about recovering from the trap.

What they didn't know was Evie herself.

Once my side stopped interfering with movement, I'd resumed most of my normal schedule. I patrolled early enough to cover the important boundaries before the worst heat collected beneath the canopy, hunted when necessary, and returned to the temple whenever something required my attention. Tavian, Luca, and I had also spent hours searching the surrounding territory for some explanation for the snare.

Someone had gone much farther into our land than they should have.

We'd found partial footprints in two places and vegetation disturbed along an old game trail farther west, but heavy rain had destroyed almost everything useful. There had been no second snare, no discarded supplies, no hidden camp, and nothing that told us whether whoever placed the wire understood exactly where they were.

I disliked not knowing. I disliked it considerably more now that Evie spent so much time walking these trails. That was one reason I'd started checking the paths around the research station more often.

Only one.

The rest of the reason carried two cameras, argued with birds, and arrived at the creek every afternoon with food she insisted was for my recovery. I'd arranged my days around her visits so consistently that the older capuchin hadn't needed to be particularly observant to figure it out.

I waited for her because I liked seeing her.

Simple as that.

I'd known she was an Omega almost immediately despite the blockers. Human suppressants were intended for human senses, and mine had little trouble finding the warmer scent underneath. It had caught my attention from the beginning, and over the days that followed it had become as familiar as the sound of her boots approaching the creek.

I knew how it changed when she was worried. When something embarrassed her. When she was exhausted after spending hours following animals through the forest. When she laughed so hard at something Red said that she forgot to be annoyed with him.

I liked her scent.

More inconveniently, I liked Evie.

She'd been terrified when she first approached me. I'd smelled it even while she pretended the hand reaching toward my side wasn't trembling, but she'd helped anyway. She'd sat in the mud, cleaned blood from my coat, removed debris from the wound, wrapped my leg, and argued with me when I objected to being handled.

Then she'd returned.

And kept returning.

She brought food and filled the quiet around the creek with stories about delayed flights, terrible hotels, photographers she'd worked with, cameras she wanted but refused to buy, and countries she'd spent just enough time in to know which places she wanted to visit again. She complained about humidity while willingly lying in wet vegetation for forty minutes to photograph one bird and had once spent most of an afternoon explaining why a lens that cost more than some humans' vehicles was, apparently, completely reasonable even though she had no intention of purchasing it.

She'd asked before photographing me.

That had mattered.

Evie made her living taking pictures of animals most people would never see outside a screen, yet once she'd understood that I could answer her, wanting the photograph hadn't been enough. She'd lowered her camera and waited until I agreed.

Then she'd called me beautiful and embarrassed herself so thoroughly afterward that I'd been tempted to remind her of it every day since.

The storm had changed something else.

She'd trusted me enough to sleep beside me. Evie believed I was a wild leopard. An irritatingly opinionated one, perhaps, but still a predator capable of hurting her if I chose. She had curled beneath those roots anyway, let exhaustion take over, and slept deeply enough to tell me she was tired of leaving without even realizing she'd spoken.

I'd thought about those words more than once.

She talked about travel with excitement, but there had been something different in her voice while she slept. A weariness she rarely admitted while awake.