“Does it bother you?” Aaron said.
“What?” Uncanny the way he could read her. Or…smell her. Her nose wrinkled, and he gave a little smile.
“The way Quinn looks up to other wolves.”
How could she explain without offending him? Why did she care if she offended him? “Not exactly.”
Aaron watched the interaction at the table, then said, “Not the wolves in general then…just Malachi?”
“That shouldn’t surprise you under the circumstances.”
“Guess we have two different takes on the circumstances.”
Before she could dive into an argument, Quinn rocked on the bench, laughing with his head thrown back. Then he jumped up and trotted over to them.
“We were talking about you,” he said with a grin.
Aaron rolled his eyes. “What now?”
“How you got that scar.” Quinn’s finger slashed a line across his own eyebrow and cheekbone.
Aaron gave a rumble that held both displeasure and humor. “Quit asking Mal for stories, will you?”
“Nope.”
“Not fair,” Ember said. “I’m out of the loop.”
“Good,” Aaron said.
“He flipped a four-wheeler when he was seventeen,” Quinn announced. “Going way too fast and trying to jump a big ditch.”
“Threw me thirty feet, right at a tree. The low twigs could’ve blinded me, and I’m thankful I didn’t break my back.”
Ember suppressed a shudder at the image of Aaron’s body flying through the air, headed for a tree. If he’d been permanently hurt… Of course Quinn wasn’t picking up on the cautionary element of the tale.
“Malachi said Trevor dared you to do it,” he said as if this added to the proof of Aaron’s awesomeness.
“Yeah, well, let that be a lesson to you.” Aaron pointed at him with an unconvincing scowl. “Resist peer pressure. Be your own man.”
“I wish I could’ve seen it. You walked away, right? Wolf resilience. I bet you were totally fine.”
“Other than the blood streaming down my face? Dares are generally dumb, pup.”
Quinn raised his voice less than he’d have to do if he were calling a human. “Hey, Trevor.”
Aaron gave a sigh of mock longsuffering as Trevor sprang up from a cluster of camping chairs and ambled over, his plate balanced on his hand. The plate was heaping precariously…with nothing but meat.
“What’s up, puppy?”
“I want to know more about Aaron flipping the four-wheeler.”
Ember hoped for the space of a heartbeat that Trevor would wince at the memory. Instead he laughed.
“That was quite a summer, wasn’t it?”
“Did you dare him to do other stuff too?”
“It was kind of a thing for a while. We were all trying to figure out what we could do, you know? What would and wouldn’t get us killed—of course we figured there wasn’t anything in that first category.” Trevor nudged Quinn’s shoulder with his own as he settled on the grass and continued devouring his chicken and ribs.
