you can never understand.”
“I’ve always known about men like you,” I said. God, I wanted to tell him the truth. The need to show him my true fire made me ache. He made me ache.
He stood just a few inches away from me, nostrils flaring, wolf eyes glinting. I knew what I wanted.
Air. The soft earth beneath my feet. I sensed his urge to shift. So powerful. So primal. We stood in the light of a full, blue moon.
Of course.
A different ache came over me. This one pulsed along my spine, settling at the base of my neck. If he bit me. If I let him. It would feel like heaven.
His eyes widened as if he felt my need too.
I turned away from him, unsure whether I could keep cloaking my magic if he stayed this close. I went to the bar. Yes. A drink was exactly what we both needed. I picked up a bottle of vodka. Cheap stuff, but what difference did it make? I didn’t immediately see any glasses, but that didn’t matter either. I unscrewed the top and took a swig. The liquid burned my insides in a different way. I put the bottle on the bar and slid it toward him. Archer hesitated, but finally reached for it.
I looked back behind the bar to see what else he had. That’s when I spotted the tattered edges of a photograph. Without thinking, I picked it up.
A pretty woman with dark hair sat at the end of a wooden dock, her bare feet dangling in the water. She had her arm around a little boy as he stood beside her. Dark hair. Blue eyes. He couldn’t have been more than three years old, but even at that age, you could see the beginnings of the muscles that would later develop.
“This is you,” I said, showing him the photograph. “Is that your mother? She’s beautiful.”
Archer froze. His eyes went pure wolf. He snatched the photograph from me.
“Where were you?” I asked. The background in the photo seemed vaguely familiar. I knew I’d seen it before. Lush woods. Rolling hills. Pine and maple trees.
“Wild Ridge?” I asked, though I’m not sure how I could guess so precisely. “Archer, did you live in Wild Ridge? Near the Michigan-Canadian border? How? That’s bear country.”
He growled. “Forget it. It’s nothing to do with you.”
“Is your mother still there?” I asked. What in the world was an Alpha wolf like Archer doing in the heart of bear country? And where was his mother now?
“Time for you to go,” he said. Archer charged past me and opened the door. The hallway behind it swirled. My stomach churned. Archer saw the look on my face and took my arm. He led me back to my room across the hall.
“See you tomorrow,” he said. “And do yourself a favor. Don’t leave this room again unless you’re with me.”
Before I could thank him or say anything at all, he shut the door behind me, leaving me all alone.
An Alpha wolf. In bear country. Before the shifter attacks. Did J.C. know?
It was then something bigger dawned on me. Archer was hiding something, that was for sure. But when he stopped to think about what I’d asked, he’d know I was too. Because no ordinary human girl should know the first thing about bears and wolves and Wild Ridge. Shit. I’d slipped up. I prayed Archer wouldn’t go straight to J.C. when he realized I had to be lying to them both.
9
Archer
J.C. gave me the next three nights off. He did it every full moon. One of my built-in benefits like sick days and paid vacation. Even the Ring knew accommodations had to be made if you wanted to employ Alphas.
Most of the time, I took off for the borderlands and into Washington State. Big trees. Open skies. Nobody around bigger than me that I had to fight for territory.
This time though, I didn’t make it two miles away from the Taurus. I just straight up couldn’t let myself get that far from Phaedra.
I’d handpicked Topher to watch over her during her dance sets. I trusted him. A coyote shifter from Arizona, I’d brought him into J.C.’s sphere a couple of years ago. He was solid. Dependable. An asset in a fight. Plus, he had a mate back home. No risk he’d try anything funny with Phaedra.
I thought I was slick, watching from a window during the last ten minutes of Phaedra’s set. I sensed her movements. Adrenaline fueled