“Are you still going to be here when I get out?”
She looked over at the pizza, then back at him. “Well, I’m starving. So, yeah.”
Reaching out, he cupped her face in his hand. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?” Adam’s entire body was tense as he waited for her answer.
“No,” she told him. “Other than throwing me around a little, he didn’t hurt me.”
The tension left him, and he closed his eyes in relief.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “For helping me.”
“You don’t have to thank me,” he told her. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner.”
She gave him a small smile. “Go shower. You’re bleeding all over my floor.”
He started to turn away. “Hey, Faye?”
Her blue eyes rose to meet his.
“I’m still the same guy you met on New Year’s. Nothing’s changed there.”
She stared at him for a long moment. “I know.”
“Okay. Good.” His eyes traveled over her face. She was calmer. The sour scent of fear gone. “I’ll be right back.”
When he came out, wearing a clean pair of jeans and a couple of bandages over the deepest of the wounds, he found her sitting on the couch, sharing her pizza crust with Rocky. On the cushion beside her was another plate with two slices on it.
“There’s wine on the counter,” she told him.
Adam found the two glasses of red and brought them over. “I’m sorry about your table. I’ll replace it for you tomorrow.”
“You’d better.”
Sitting down beside her, he told Rocky to go lay down by the front door he’d managed to close but couldn’t lock, then he handed her a glass of wine. “So what do you want to know?”
“Everything would be nice.”
He smiled. “Okay. Um. So, my people have been around for a long time. As long as humans.”
“You’re not human?” To her credit, her voice was pretty steady as she asked the question.
“Not completely, no. But how that happened is a long story that I don’t really want to get into right now. Suffice it to say, we’re here. And we’ve lived among you for a long time.”
Faye set her plate on the kitchen counter and then came back to the couch with her wine, sitting down and curling her legs beneath her. He noticed she’d changed too while he was in the shower, and was wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and a maroon T-shirt. She looked adorable. The only thing that would make that outfit better was if it was his pants and his shirt she was wearing.
“And you can just…turn into a wolf?”
He nodded. “Yeah. You can call it magic. Or the supernatural. Or a fucked-up gene pool. But I’ve been able to do it ever since I hit puberty.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Does it hurt?”
She voiced the question so softly and with so much concern in her voice, it made him set his plate on one of the kitchen chairs beside him that made it through the destruction. “Yeah. Sometimes worse than others.”
“Can you control it? The change?”
“Most of the time.”
Her brows lowered in concern. “Most of the time?” she repeated. Although she didn’t change her expression, there was a change in her scent as she thought about that. A wisp of fear.
