“You reported it when you strolled into a meeting six hours late looking like you’d lost a fight with a hedgetrimmer.”
“I won the fight. The hedge trimmer is a separate incident.”
She holds my gaze for a moment, and I can feel her cataloguing what she sees. Rebecca doesn’t miss things. Whatever she’s reading in my face tonight, she files it without comment.
“Get some sleep,” she says, and walks back towards the main house.
I don’t get sleep. I get as far as my cabin before the restlessness takes over, the settled calm from this morning replaced by an itch that starts in my chest and radiates outward until my skin feels too tight. My wolf is pacing again, agitated in a way that has nothing to do with territory or rogues or pack politics.
He wants to see her. He wants to know she’s safe, that she made it home, that the morning’s events haven’t frightened her away from Mistwood entirely.
I tell myself I’m doing a security check. The rogues pushed close to the village last night. It’s responsible to patrol the perimeter, make sure there are no lingering scent trails near the residential areas. The fact that this particular patrol route takes me past Ivy Cottage is coincidental.
The cottage sits at the end of a narrow lane, set back from the road behind a low stone wall and an overgrown garden. There’s a hand-painted sign by thegate:Mistwood Veterinary Surgery. Dr P. Clarke. By appointment.
Dr P. Clarke.
I stand in the shadow of the oak tree across the lane and look at the sign for longer than is reasonable. The downstairs lights are on, warm yellow behind drawn curtains. I can smell her from here, that honey-and-warmth scent drifting through the old stone walls, and my body’s response is immediate and unsubtle. Heat pools low in my stomach, thickens, drops lower still. My wolf presses against the inside of my skin, hardening my cock, and the wanting has nothing to do with conversation or companionship or knowing her name. It’s older than that. Blunter.
She’s safe. She’s home. She’s probably sitting at her kitchen table with a cup of tea, writing up notes about the impossible animal she treated this morning, applying logic and science to something that defies both.
I want to knock on her door. I want to sit across from her and tell her my name and watch her face when she realises I’m the wolf from the forest. I want to know what her voice sounds like when she’s not talking to an injured animal. I want to know if she felt it too. I want every fucking wolf in Mistwood and beyond to know exactly who she belongs to.
I don’t knock. I stand in the dark like something out of a cautionary tale, hard and aching and furious with myself for both, and I watch her light until the wanting becomes something I have to physically walk away from.
Then I turn around and walk home, because I’m not ready, and she doesn’t know, and I haven’t got the first bloody idea how to fix either of those things.
Chapter 8
The Stranger at the Clinic
Phoebe
The morning after the wolf,I throw myself into work.
It’s not difficult. The surgery needs organising, and I’ve barely made a dent in it since I arrived. Boxes of supplies still line the hallway. The examination table needs recalibrating. The autoclave makes a sound like a dying engine every time I run it, and the filing system the previous owners left behind appears to have been arranged by someone who didn’t believe in the alphabet.
I sort instruments into trays. I label drawers. I scrub the examination room floor on my hands and knees with disinfectant that makes my eyes water, and I do not think about golden eyes or impossible wolves or thestrange warmth that settled in my chest when an animal looked at me like it knew my name.
I think about those things constantly.
Between patients, which today amounts to Maggie’s tabby (overweight, unrepentant, hostile to the weighing scales) and a border collie with a torn dew claw, I find myself standing at the window. The treeline is visible from the surgery, a dark border at the edge of the village where the houses give way to farmland and the farmland gives way to forest. I watch it the way you watch a door you expect someone to walk through, even though you know they won’t.
The wolf won’t come back. It was a hybrid, an escapee, probably halfway to the next county by now. The clinical notes I wrote yesterday are factual and sufficient, and I don’t need to add to them. I don’t need to stand at the window. I don’t need to keep remembering the steady thump of its heart beneath my hand.
I go back to scrubbing the floor.
The knock comes just after lunch.
I’m in the back room eating a sandwich over the sink, which is not glamorous but is efficient, and I almost don’t hear it. The surgery is technically closed for the afternoon, and my appointment book is empty until tomorrow morning. But old habits from city practice die hard, and an unexpected knock might mean an emergency.
I wipe my hands on a tea towel and open the front door.
The man on my doorstep is tall. That’s the first thing I register. Tall and broad through the shoulders, with dark hair that looks like he’s run his fingers through it rather than bothered with a comb, and a face that’s all sharp angles softened by an expression of easy, unhurried amusement. He’s wearing a worn jacket over a dark shirt, jeans, and work boots that have seen actual work. In his hands, he holds a wicker basket covered with a checked cloth, something you see in photographs of farmers’ markets.
“Dr Clarke?” His voice is deep, with a local accent, easy. Deliberately so. “Maggie sent me. She said you hadn’t had a proper welcome yet, and apparently that’s a criminal offence in Mistwood.”
He holds out the basket. I take it automatically, registering its weight, the smell of fresh bread, and something sweet underneath.
