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“I’ve saved pretty much everything I’ve made since I started working a long, long time ago. Living in Moon Ridge is dirt cheap, and it’s not like I have many expenses outside food and gas.” He lifted a shoulder. “If you want to travel, we’ll travel. Might have to stop here so I can work for a few months every now and then if we drain the savings, but that’s fine.”
My eyebrows shot upward. “You’re insane.”
He leaned toward me, over the table a bit. I resisted the urge to lean toward him too, to erase the distance between us.
“You’re my mate. I expected a long hunt, though I didn’t expect it to happen quite the way it did. There’s a debit card in the drawer next to the fridge that my wolf or pack members would’ve given you had you stayed here, and it would’ve taken care of you damn well. I know I screwed your life up, but you’re not going to be on your own anymore. Never again.”
I stood.
My body was still flushed and needy, but my thoughts were spinning too fast on too many topics other than sex for me to be overwhelmed by the lust.
I had expected him to tell me that next, we would have sex.
Not ask me what I wanted to do with my life. I had no idea what the answer to that question was, and even if I had, I wasn’t ready to share it with him.
My instincts were telling me to run.
I couldn’t just leave, though—not again. It hadn’t gotten me anywhere before, and it wouldn’t get me anywhere in the moment.
So I couldn’t leave… but I could take a break.
Get away from him for a bit, until I was ready to talk more.
That would work.
“I need a few minutes,” I told Zed, striding toward the stairs.
“You’ve got all the time in the world,” he reminded me, as I climbed the stairs like hell was on my damn heels.
My wolf moved a bit, tugging at my chest a little, but the needy heat in my lady parts seemed to help ground me in my human body.
Shutting the door behind me, I leaned against it and let a slow breath out.
I’d expected to hate Zed. Not to have him treat me kindly. Men were assholes; it was a rule I’d proven so damned many times over. But what if he wasn’t?
That wasn’t possible, though.
Was it?
I shoved a hand through my tangled, still-damp hair, pushing it out of my eyes and off my face. I was hungry, and tired, and horny. That was all. I couldn’t let the confusion that accompanied this weird-ass phase of the mating cycle stop me from living my damned life.
So I stripped my clothes off, and threw myself into the bed in the spare room that was apparently mine. The door remained closed, though I heard the microwave shut downstairs.
Zed was cooking for me—of course he was.
He couldn’t just act like the asshole I knew he had to be somewhere deep down, to make things easy for me. He’d want to manipulate me, or use me somehow.
That had to be it.
And though it didn’t logically make a ton of sense, that was what I forced myself to believe.
Because what was the other option? That he was actually a good guy?
Yeah, right.
When he brought food up to my room, I thanked him politely before shutting the door again, closing myself away from him and the world and everything else.
Putting headphones in, I opened my laptop and my video editing program, and got to work going through old footage that I hadn’t had time to work through yet. I had probably a decade’s worth of video I hadn’t even touched, not having the time or the focus for it.
Now that the only other thing to do was the werewolf downstairs, editing old shit sounded fantastic.
As I worked, I managed to get my mind (mostly) off how horny I was, and whether or not Zed was a decent guy. We didn’t speak again until he brought me more food.
I knew I was being a shitty guest, but I didn’t know what else to do in the situation. If I tried to leave, he would chase me. If I tried to hide, he would find me.
So I escaped into my work, and it distracted me from the uncomfortable truths of the life I had started living through no choice of my own.
