There’s something in the way she says it, a brightness in her eyes that goes beyond matchmaking. Maggie is watching us the way you watch a recipe coming together, checking the ingredients, noting the timing. I’d find it intrusive if it weren’t so plainly well-intentioned.
Roan climbs down and brushes leaves from his jacket, and as he passes me to get to the wheelbarrow, his fingers brush against mine. Knuckle to knuckle,brief and light and almost certainly accidental except that his hand lingers for a fraction of a second before pulling away. The contact goes through me like current. Not warmth this time. Sharper than that, more specific, landing low in my belly with a precision that makes my breath catch. I close my hand into a fist at my side, not to keep from reaching after him but because my body is doing things I haven’t authorised and I need it to stop.
“Cup of tea?” Maggie offers, already moving towards her kitchen. “I’ve just made scones.”
“Roan,” I say, while Maggie is inside putting the kettle on and we’re standing by the wheelbarrow in a brief pocket of privacy. “This is the third day in a row I’ve run into you.”
“Small village.”
“The post office. The farm next to my house call. And now my neighbour’s gutters.” I fold my arms. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were following me.”
He has the grace to look caught, which is almost more unsettling than if he’d denied it. “Maggie’s gutters genuinely needed doing.”
“I’m sure they did. But you don’t strike me as a man who cleans gutters for the joy of it, and I don’t think the timing is a coincidence.” I hold his gaze. “What’s going on?”
For a moment, something crosses his face that Ican’t read. Not guilt, exactly. Something heavier. He opens his mouth, and I think he’s going to tell me something real, something that explains the weight behind his eyes and the careful way he positions himself in every conversation.
Then Maggie’s back door opens and the moment is gone.
“Just being neighbourly,” he says, and the smile returns, easy and warm and absolutely impenetrable.
I let it go. But I don’t believe him.
We sit in Maggie’s kitchen, the three of us, eating scones that are somehow still warm and drinking tea from mismatched china cups. Roan is relaxed here, more relaxed than I’ve seen him anywhere else, and Maggie treats him with an easy fondness that suggests a long history. If my accusation bothered him, there’s no trace of it now. They bicker gently about the state of her garden fence. He promises to come back and fix it at the weekend. It’s all so ordinary, so domestic, that I almost forget to be on guard.
Almost. But not quite. Because underneath the warmth and the easy conversation, I’m aware of something building between me and Roan that has nothing to do with warmth. It’s tension. Physical, specific, the kind that makes me hyperaware of where his hands are and how far away his mouth is, even while I’m eating a scone and discussing fence posts with his neighbour.
I haven’t seen the wolf since that morning in the forest. I notice this the way you notice the absence of a sound you’d grown accustomed to, a background awareness that surfaces at odd moments. Walking into the surgery in the early light. Standing at the window between patients. Lying in bed at night, listening to the silence where the howling used to be.
I don’t dwell on it. I have enough to occupy my thoughts without adding a missing animal to the list.
But it’s there. The absence. Quiet and persistent, like a question I haven’t thought to ask yet.
By the end of the week, I know the following things about Roan Mistwood: he takes his coffee black, he reads more than he lets on, he has a dry sense of humour that surfaces without warning, and he is hiding something.
I don’t know what. Nothing about him reads as dangerous. He’s sharp, present and attentive without calculation. But there are gaps. Subjects he steers around with the expertise of someone who’s been doing it his whole life. His family, his work, the reason he finds Mistwood suffocating, but can’t seem to leave. The way other people in the village treat him with something closer to deference than respect, as if he occupies a position he hasn’t told me about.
I should be more concerned about this than I am. A man with secrets should bea red flag, not a puzzle I want to solve. I asked him point blank if he was following me. He smiled his way out of it. I let him. That bothers me more than the following. But when he looks at me with those golden-brown eyes, the colour of them nagging at me the way a half-remembered word nags, almost there but never quite arriving, my concern dissolves into curiosity and my caution dissolves into something I don’t have a sensible name for, and I think:I’m in trouble.
The quiet, uncomplicated life I came to Mistwood for is getting more complicated by the day. And the worst part is, I don’t entirely mind.
Chapter 11
Inevitable
Roan
It’s beena week since the coffee date. A week of engineered coincidences and casual conversations and careful, deliberate restraint that’s costing me more than anyone can see. I’ve walked past Ivy Cottage every night. I’ve found reasons to be in every part of the village where she might appear. I’ve memorised her schedule from the surgery sign in her window and arranged my days around it with a dedication I refuse to apply to pack business. My wolf calls it vigilance. The rest of me knows better.
My wolf thinks this is courtship. My human brain knows it’s bordering on stalking, and the fact that I can’t stop doesn’t make it less pathetic.
Phoebe makes it easy. She laughs at my jokes andasks questions I don’t expect and looks at me with those brown eyes that see more than I’m comfortable with. She’s starting to relax around me, the professional distance softening into something warmer, and every time it does, every time she lets her guard down a fraction, the wanting tightens another notch. It’s not in my chest anymore. It hasn’t been in my chest for days. It’s lower, heavier, more specific. Standing next to her while she laughs at something Tom says is an exercise in controlled suffering I wouldn’t trade for anything.
She touched my arm yesterday. Outside the post office. Telling me about a cat she’d treated that morning, a tom with a torn ear and the attitude of a prizefighter. She’d touched my arm to emphasise a point. Just her fingertips, just for a second. The contact hit me like a closed fist. Heat flooded south, sudden, specific. I’d had to angle my body away from her, stare at the pavement, because the colour shift in my eyes wasn’t the only thing I needed to hide.
It happens when my wolf pushes too close to the surface: the brown bleeds to gold, unmistakable if you’re looking. She wasn’t looking. But she will be, eventually, and I won’t always be fast enough to hide it.
That’s the real problem. Not the wanting. I can manage the wanting, or at least I can contain it. The problem is what happens when I can’t contain it anymore. When the bond tightens to the point wheredistance becomes physical pain, and proximity becomes a test of control, I’m not sure I can pass.
