He’d left his jeans on the screened-in porch, and he stepped into them once he was back on two legs.
“Verdict?” Silas asked.
“We can get ourselves off the mountain if we hike down, around the slide, but the truck isn’t going anywhere. Please tell me the Yeti’s charged?”
“It should be around ninety percent,” Kenny said. “I’ll grab it so we can plug the fridge in. If the sun comes out later, we’ll be golden. If not, we can run the fridge every third or fourth hour. Nothing else is critical.”
“We should check on the hawk,” Silas said. “Offer to keep her perishables over here. Maybe we can all cook together, her supplies with ours. She might not know how to cook over a fire.”
“Let’s not turn this into a contest of who can bed her,” Kenny said. “This weekend is about bonding, not competition.”
Silas blew out a breath. “Yeah yeah. You’re right, of course.”
Boone didn’t say anything, but he was a little disappointed. He agreed with Kenny, and yet, the female hawk had smelled…enticing.
* * * *
The storm had faded to a gentle rain by the time Willow made it past one of her favorite parts inSafeword: Arabesque,whereIsaac gives Cassie her first over-the-knee hand spanking — the surrender, the heat. She could practically feel it on her own skin.
Perhaps it was because this very activity was Willow’s introduction to kink, but she loved that scene.
And now Isaac had her at the old motor-hotel turned private kink club, her wrist cuffs connected to the old monkey bars over her head with Isaac flogging her tits while another man flogged her back.
Willow had already orgasmed at least a couple-dozen times by this point, barely a third of the way into the super-long novel, and she was fully prepared for more in the coming pages. Her body was loose, humming, ready.
Until she heard footsteps approaching. Heavy ones. More than one pair.
She stood and walked to the front wall of windows and saw three men. They wore jeans, boots, and tees, striding out of the woods like they’d been conjured from the digital pages of her book.
She opened the door and stepped onto her porch — barefoot, flushed, still tingling — and even her underwhelming hawk nose recognized the wild, unmistakable scent.
Wolf.
Her system flooded with adrenaline and her pulse kicked hard against her ribs. She didn’t freeze, but every sense sharpened, and every cell went on alert.
Her gun was on the side table by the sofa, so she went straight to threat analysis. At thirty yards out, her hawk vision had no trouble analyzing their intent. She might not have the hearing or scent abilities of a wolf or vampire, but she could spot a mouse in a field from miles away.
She didn’t just see their faces, she tracked the tiny shifts. The flex of a jaw. The angle of a brow. The twitch in the corner of a mouth. Pattern recognition did the rest.
No tension in their shoulders. No fast blinking. No clenched jaws. They weren’t vibrating with hunger or aggression. They weren’t on edge.
They were calm. Curious, but not hunting.
Twenty yards now. The one in front walked with natural authority. The tall one with bulging muscles on the left scanned the cabin like he was mapping it. The third, on his right, hung back a little, watchful eyes narrowed and calculating, but not hostile.
Her pulse jogged instead of sprinting now, a leftover from the sudden jolt of seeing them, but this wasn’t danger.
They stopped fifteen yards away, and the one in front smiled up at her. “Just checking to make sure everything’s okay over here. We have a solar generator for our fridge, and if you need to stow some stuff, we should have room.”
The wolf to his right took a deep breath. “Chili?”
She nodded. “I have it on the fireplace to simmer. I think I’ll be okay until tomorrow. I have a heavy-duty cooler, and I dumped the ice and a few icepacks in. Put it on the back porch.” She sighed. “Assuming the bears don’t come to check it out.”
“The driveway up the mountain is hosed,” the big guy said. “They aren’t likely to have it in shape for us to get our vehicles back down the mountain for at least a couple of days. I know we’re strangers, but…” He looked at the lead wolf, who said. “I’m Kenny, Alpha of the Chattanooga pack. Silas is my beta, and the big guy is Boone, our gamma.”
His micro-expressions and subtle body language patterning told her he was telling the truth, and that information changed everything. “I’m Willow. Please, come in. I have apple cider I put on the porch instead of in the cooler, and a gallon of sweet peach tea.”
One doesn’t make a wolf alpha stand outside and look up to you. Willow wasn’t tight with the supernatural community, butshe knew the rules. He wasn’theralpha, but you showed respect to the large-group leaders.
