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The wolf before her regarded her a long moment, then turned, and pulled aside the tent flap. When she didn’t move right away, he offered a quick, ungallant hand gesture, and she understood that he was letting her in.
“Oh. Thank you.”
She had never thought much about the courtly manners around which she’d grown up, but clearly she was used to them, and expected them unconsciously. Watching someone operate outside of those social norms was jarring.
Things like manners flew out of her head, however, once she’d stepped inside the tent, and the flap rustled shut behind her.
Two things struck her straight off: the temperature, because the brazier hadn’t been lit, and the interior was as chilled as the air outside, her breath misting white before her as she let out an unsteady exhale. And the smell: not a bad one, but a distinctly wild one. The faint, oily musk of animal fur; pine, and snow, and deep, cold water. It didn’t smell like a tent full of sweaty, long-traveling men.
Because it wasn’t.
The prickling at the back of her neck wasn’t pleasant, but she held herself stiffly upright and surveyed the space. Wolves used lanterns, apparently, or had at least not doused the ones her men had set out.
The cots were empty, though.
She walked forward, drawn by a sudden pulse of worry, to stand between the two. “Shit,” she murmured, “where…”
A shifting of fabric drew her attention to the far corner of the tent, its well of shadow. One of the injured wolves, whose name she didn’t know, lay on his side, half-curled around the seated form of another. Their pose was immediately recognizable: one packmate sitting vigil over another. When she locked gazes with the one sitting upright, she read the clear warning in his:stay back. Then, to her surprise, a low, rumbling permeated the air.
A growl. And not one created by any human. A purely animal sound of warning, impossible and primal and unmistakeable.
“Knock that shit off, Vidar,” a voice said right behind her, and Amelia wasn’t proud, but she flinched. The strangeness of it all – the scent, the sight of men cowering on the floor when there were cots ready; the hugeness of them, the confusion inspired by her dreams, and seeing Leif in the flesh, finally – had strung her tight as harp wire, and so she jerked, and bit down on a gasp, and felt her face heat in embarrassment afterward.
It wasn’t Leif, but Ragnar who paced slowly around her so he stood sideways before her, his gaze trained on the corner.
The growling cut off. She was aware of the seated wolf – Vidar – bending his head, respectful and subservient, but her attention was fixed on Ragnar.
Stripped to the waist, the lantern light painted him like a gilded marble statue. He was all muscles and scars and a dusting of dark-gold hair. More remarkable was the way he stood fully upright, hands on his hips, as though he hadn’t been shot through the shoulder by one of Connor’s marksmen hours before. He’d forgone a bandage, and so she could see the shiny, pink puckering of the wound just to the right of his left shoulder blade. A near-miss, and a rare one. More remarkablestill: Connor had been correct about the healing. The wound was closed. It looked weeks old, rather than the pulpy, fresh mark of a just-pulled arrow shaft.
The prickling on her neck became painful in its intensity.
Then he turned to her, and it somehow got worse.
His eyes were indeed the exact same blue as Leif’s, but brimming with mischief, his lips mobile, a repressed grin presenting itself as the smirk she’d expected. Had he been Southern, all in silks and pomaded to within an inch of his life, the matrons would have called him arake. As a wild man with a silver collar and a mane laced with bones, she called himdangerous.
“Don’t mind Vidar. He’s a bit jumpy is all,” he told her. “He gets a little worked up where Harald’s concerned.”
“H-harald?” Her voice cracked embarrassingly, and his grin sharpened at hearing it. She schooled her features, grasped desperately for authority, and said, “He’s not dead, is he?”
Her question seemed to please him, for some reason. “Oh no. He’ll be fine in another day or so.” His gaze cut dramatically toward his packmates, then back, and he leaned in, suddenly, tone dropping to conspiratorial levels. “Poor Harald: not all of the lads are as resilient as me.”
Up close, the animal-musk smell was more intense, his eyes even bluer. Amelia wasn’t sure if she wanted to take a step back, or–
Another growl cut through the tent, this one sharp, and forceful, and left Ragnar ducking his head and stepping neatly back from her, his expression wiped clean.
Leif stepped into the space he’d vacated, and his presence was as overwhelming as it had been in the trees, in the moment she’d first approached him.
With his attention on Ragnar – who was shrinking down even further, making himself small in a show of deference to his alpha – she had a chance to study him without being studied in return.
His hair was lighter than Ragnar’s, a true, coin-grade gold, and though snarled and snagged with bits of twig and leaf from the forest, had been braided at some point, three braids arching over each ear and falling onto his shoulders, the ends marked with fine, carved silver beads.
His sleeveless tunic revealed that he wore the same sort of thick, gold arm bands as Ragnar – and that the arms within seemed ready to burst the metal, so thick were the muscles there. Likewise, the leather ties of his tunic strained in the front, a deep V of bare chest visible, bronzed by time spent in the sun. Boots caked in mud, and trousers fitted over strong thighs…a Northern hero straight from a storybook. The big, strong barbarian here to save the day.
Then he turned his head and caught her staring.
The fall of his gaze was as thrilling as it was terrifying. He locked eyes with her, and there was no question she’d been snared by the gaze of a predator. The closest point of comparison was the night she’d met Alpha and his females; the fear, the sense that she was staring down death, and somehow surviving it.
Stop!she scolded herself. She would have expected this sort of behavior from one of the silly girls at a springtime ball or house party; would even have expected it from her sister. But Amelia didn’tdo this. She didn’t getoverwhelmed, not in anyone’s presence.
