His consortium.
Then Detective Sergeant fucking Douglas fucking Sawyer had to turn up and ruin everything.
Now nothing was as it should be.
Everything was different. Changed.
Ciaran was changed.
He didn’t want this. He didn’t want a human mate. He didn’t want a mate at all, let alone a human one.
Least of all a human one.
For fuck’s sake.
And then Hendrix and Dylan had gone to Hobart for a week or two, as they often did. They liked the club scene, to indulge their human side every now and then. Ciaran understood that.He certainly took no issue with it. He wished them well, made sure they had enough money, told them to behave themselves, knowing damn well they wouldn’t.
It was good for Dylan to let loose every now and then. He was higher strung than most, and he usually came back relaxed and settled. Probably from all the human sex, Ciaran assumed.
Not that he needed that, but he certainly understood others might.
But then Hendrix had come back alone.
And for the past six days, Dylan had been unaccounted for.
Six whole days.
And the worst part was Sawyer having the audacity to show up in Ciaran’s town and turn everything on its head.
Hiding out at the hut further up the river was supposed to be a reset, like a breath of fresh air to cleanse his mind, but it had only made it all worse. Because apparently putting distance between them was like adding petroleum to fire.
Then he’d had to come back and listen to Hendrix’s recount what had happened in Hobart—their encounter with the Bass Straight consortium, which was enough to piss Ciaran the fuck off—but then, when Ciaran thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, it got a whole lot fucking worse.
The most delectable, alluring, and frightening scent...
Sawyer’s blood.
Sawyer was bleeding.
How did he know it was Sawyer’s blood?
He just knew.
He knew it like he knew the sun would rise in the morning. As he knew his own thoughts. As he knew his own self.
Well, he thought he knew himself.
Clearly that was fucking wrong too.
But he knew it in his stupid human bones that his Sawyer was bleeding.
There was nothing in this world that could have stopped Ciaran from finding him.
Now, if he had found Sawyer injured, lying in a pool of his own blood, Ciaran knew he wouldn’t have been able to contain his human form. He was barely maintaining it as it was.
It wasn’t until he saw Sawyer standing upright, smiling, seemingly fine, that his need to shift to freeform subsided, thankfully.
But then it all went to hell again when Sawyer walked right up to him, the smell of his blood so potent, so fucking tempting, like the call of the ocean, tenfold.
