wrestles me back from his face. “If she thinks a bloke is interested, she runs faster in the other direction than a Derby filly streaks down the Curragh racecourse.”
I sneer at the table—not because I disbelieve what he says, but because I’m ashamed of how unaccountably angry I am that Finn knows Susan better than I do.
“Sue and I have chemistry,” he goes on, and his hand claps down on my shoulder, and when that doesn’t keep me on my side of the table, he barks, “Deek, sit,” and I do, and I glower at his hand where it rests on me, fighting not to bite it, and he continues as if he doesn’t know what I’m considering, “but she shut me down if she so much as saw me looking at her for too long. You are never going to win this if you try the direct approach.”
He shoves my tray closer to me—the same one with the burger that’s ended up on the floor twice, that Finn waved all concerned off by telling them we didn’t need to cook me another one, I was a werewolf and I’d be able to eat mine even if it landed on the floor a dozen more times.
For as furious as I feel, for as badly as I’m struggling not to break Finn’s order and boil to my feet and fling the table aside—my burger just might take another tumble or twelve on the damn floor. No point in making me a fresh one.
“Eat,” he orders, and immediately, I’m looking at my food and not his hand.
I snatch it and tear into the meat, snarling loudly enough he cuffs me upside the head and warns low, “Like a person, you eejit.”
Swallowing, I hunker down over my meal, ripping chunks of hamburger and bread out of fingers that are more lupine toe the more out of control I grow.
I’m imagining Finn’s hand with every bite.
“Stop Changing,” he orders—and to my shock, I feel the prickling on my cheeks and arms and the back of my neck that signals that fur is either growing in or going away. And by the itching, I know it’s going away.
Finn can reverse my Change? That’s new. That takes some serious alpha. But Finn isn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill shifter.
Quieter for the thought (and probably more due to him forcing the human in me to come forward) I’m able to calm down. Relax. Stop wolfing my food down, although my burger is just ketchup-soaked and floor-debris-coated bread now.
I start in on my curly fries, which are covered in the mayo and lettuce my sandwich started out with before it landed on the floor the first time.
“What you need to do,” Finn tells me, speaking under his breath, “is keep doing exactly what you’re doing. She doesn’t see you as a threat. So she’s letting herself get close to you. She’s not guarding herself the same way with you that she does with everybody else.”
“Why is she guarding?” I manage to ask. “Did her husband… did he hurt her?” Maggie said something once about how her father would call Susan names and yell at her. I haven’t forgotten it, and just the idea of her former mate treating her that way is making my hackles rise.
Finn growls now, spurring a responding growl in me. “Stop that,” he warns, flicking a glance at my face, which should force my eyes down faster than it actually happens. His brows raise and a smile plays on his twisting mouth. “That prick she married didn’t lay a hand on her, he says.”
Surprise forces my gaze back to his, and not in a way that makes him check me. “You’ve talked to him?”
Finn’s smile is grim. “More than that.”
An ugly satisfaction bubbles inside me. “Good.”
Finn nods. “Anyway, the maggot didn’t raise a hand to her, but he had a leg over on anything with tits for every year they were married. Susan would find out. He’d try to behave. Couldn’t keep his flute from falling into the next woman though, and it would hurt Sue. Deek, I get it, why you’re growling now, but stop. But they stayed together for the kids until one day, Sue just couldn’t take it anymore. She told him to pack his shite. In exchange for virtually no financial assistance from him, she got full custody of the kids. He wrote her a check, and she used it to get that little house.” He shrugs. “He started crying when he