We're in each other's faces before I register moving. The size difference hits me—I have to crane my neck to meet his eyes, and he has to drop his chin to hold mine. We're both furious, both breathing hard. His scent rolls over me—iron and sweat and underneath that, a heat like sun-baked leather my body recognizes even when my brain screams at it to stop.
"If you two are done flirting, I need to finish evacuating."
Dr. Bryce stands in the side entrance with a forgotten box of files, one eyebrow raised above her glasses.
"We're not—!" The words come out in unison. Identical pitch. Identical indignation.
Dr. Bryce leaves with a smile that makes me want to throw a suture kit at the wall.
Finn steps back. Runs a hand over his braid. The anger bleeds out of his posture, replaced by exhaustion. He moves to the window and stares at the sky, and for a second—just a second—I see the man underneath the act. Tired. Tense. Jaw locked against whatever he's not saying.
The lights flicker.
We both glance at the ceiling. The fluorescents buzz, dim, surge back. Outside, the wind screams louder and the first real rain hits the windows sideways, streaking the glass in sheets so thick I can barely make out Finn's bike alone in the lot below. Everyone else is gone.
He turns from the window. One corner of his mouth lifts, but the humor doesn't reach his eyes.
"Like it or not, Cooper, you're stuck with me."
I fold my arms across my chest and lock eyes with him. The lights flicker again, and in the half-second of darkness his eyes catch a feral amber glow—orc night vision kicking in—before the fluorescents stutter back.
I arch an eyebrow. 'Try not to be more trouble than the hurricane.'
Chapter 2
Finn
I hold the plywood flat against the window frame while Jess drives a screw into the upper corner, her drill whining, her mouth pressed into a line so hard the tendons in her neck stand out. She hasn't looked at me once. Not when I carried the sheet across the parking lot. Not when I braced it and our fingers overlapped on the edge. Not when I saidon your leftand she flinched like the sound of my voice burned her.
Every time she shifts her weight, her scent rolls over me, something underneath both that I've been chasing for eight months like a dog after a car he'll never catch.
I volunteered for this. Knox asked Garrett and Rex. I said no before the names finished leaving his mouth, and my brother gave me that look, the one where his eyebrows don't move but his entire face saysyou're a moron and I'm going to let you prove it.
Knox is right. He's always right.He doesn't even have to try.
Three weeks I've spent trying to scrub Jess out of my head. Picked up extra runs for the club. Rebuilt the transmission onDiesel's bike twice. Once because it needed it, once because my hands needed something to do at two in the morning besides reaching for my phone to text a woman who won't text back.
I even went to Crabby Bill's on the boardwalk with Rex on a Tuesday night and let a redhead buy me a beer and I sat there the whole time smelling the wrong scent, hearing the wrong laugh, looking at a mouth that curved the wrong direction.
She drives another screw. Her shirt rides up as she stretches for the top corner, and a strip of skin flashes above her hip—tan, smooth, a tattoo I've never seen curling toward her spine. My hands tighten on the plywood. I look at the wall behind her. Think about transmission gear ratios and whether Diesel's clutch cable needs replacing.
The drill bites through the last screw and she steps back, brushing dust off her forearms.
"Next window."
Two words, flat and professional, like I'm a stranger she hired for manual labor.
I grab the next sheet from the stack and follow her down the corridor. The clinic feels different empty. Too many rooms, too much echo, our footsteps bouncing off linoleum that squeaks under my boots. Every step pushes her scent toward me in waves. Gunpowder and vanilla. I caught it for the first time at one of Sarah's dinners, across a table loaded with Betty's pot roast, and I'd lost track of the conversation for a full minute trying to figure out what combination of woman smelled like a fired weapon dipped in cake batter.
Now I know. Jessica. Only her. The strangest combination, and my favorite scent in any world.
She holds the plywood against the next window. I line up a nail and drive it through with my palm, no hammer, the wood splitting around the metal, the frame shuddering.
"Impressive, right?" I flex my hand, grin at her. "Who needs a toolbox when you've got orc DNA and poor impulse control?"
Nothing. Not a flicker.
I line up the second nail. "Tough crowd."
