The age of men was almost over, his da’s authority was fractured or gone, and Jack had already been banished once.
The temptation swelled inside him and then washed away as the soldier stepped into view. A balaclava was pulled down over his head, the gray fabric crusted with ice around mouth and nose where his breath had frozen, and heavy, black-lensed goggles hid his eyes. He carried the black semiautomatic rifle with the butt tucked into his armpit, gloved finger flat against the trigger. The smell of gun oil and sour anger washed off him like BO as he paused in front of Jack to scan the scrub on the other side of the fence for any signs of life.
As a young wolf, Jack had been charged by a stag he’d brought to bay. It had smashed his ribs and broken his jaw when it trampled him. His ribs popped as they broke, a hollow sound as his side caved in, and he hadn’t known whose fear he could smell—his or the stag’s. It tumbled him ears over tail on the hard stone, and by the time it finally made a break for the tree line, he’d not known where his feet were to get them under him. Da had stood back and watched so Jack would learn the lesson. Just because something was prey didn’t mean it was weak.
A bullet wouldn’t kill Jack, but it had taxed his wolf to keep him alive under the old bitch’s knife. Then he’d dragged it into the icy Irish sea—fur frozen in spikes—to drag a half-dead dog back to shore. With the prophets to defang and a showdown with his da on the table, it wasn’t the time to test the limits of his recovery. He’d still heal, but it would take longer than usual.
Danny folded his arm over his mouth to hide the evidence of his breath and pressed back into the narrow threshold of the door.
The soldier stood for a moment, then rasped a rough “All clear” into his radio and trudged back up toward the front of the train. Jack listened for a moment as the crunch of snow and huff of tired breathing retreated, then he reached over and tapped Danny’s elbow.
“Now?” Danny mouthed as he shifted his weight forward.
Jack shook his head and leaned in to steal a kiss from cold lips. He buried his fingers in the matted curls at the back of Danny’s neck and pulled the long, lean body into his. For a second, he could taste the disapproval on Danny’s mouth, and then it softened into something else. They hadn’t been apart since Girvan. The back of Jack’s neck crawled every time Danny was out of his sight for more than a minute. They hadn’t fucked either, too cold or too tired or too bloated with nightmares.
His cock had been the one thing the old bitch hadn’t cut off, for all her threats, but it felt like she had somehow. Jack had never lain down with Danny and not gotten hard.
The tug of tempted heat in his balls was welcome testimony that everything down there was intact. Badly timed as gunfire cracked suddenly in the background, but welcome.
Although, a small voice in the back of his head murmured greasily, in some ways it would have been… simpler.
Jack told himself he didn’t know what that meant, and he ignored it. He roughly shoved Danny away and flashed him a hard, sharp-edged smile.
“Now,” he said.
Chapter Two—Jack
DANNY, MOUTH tender and cheeks flushed from the kiss, the cold, or both, stared at him in confusion for a moment. He’d catch up. He always did. Jack spun on the balls of his feet and jumped off the train. The snow around it had been pressed down under the soldier’s feet, compacted into a hard, slick-frozen crust of ice. Jack’s boots slid when they hit it and nearly went out from under him. He spared a second’s remorse for his decision not to shift—a wolf’s feet were made for the snow—and caught his balance.
“Hey!” someone yelled. Surprise and alarm cracked in their voice, no authority. One of the brakemen, then, not the soldiers. “What the hell…! There was someone on the train! Fuck. Fuck me. Lieutenant!”
Jack bolted for the fence, and some instinct made him glance to the right. They’d made no agreement about when to break for the fence before they split up, but it didn’t matter. They still made the break from the train at the same