And then she started humming.
Just a few bars, barely audible, but Marcus’s pen froze mid-sentence. He knew that melody. She’d been humming it the night they’d kissed in the moonlight, Azrael chasing fireflies around her feet.
She stopped abruptly.
Marcus set down his pen and looked at her. She was staring at her grimoire, pink creeping up her neck.
“You were humming,” he said.
“Was I?” Too innocent. Too quick.
Marcus forced himself to pick up his pen. “Of course. My mistake.”
“Right. Mistake.”
They returned to their work, but Marcus couldn’t shake the awareness of her across the room. Every time he glanced up, he caught her looking at him. Every time she shifted position, hisattention snapped to the movement. The morning crawled by with excruciating politeness.
By noon, Marcus had read the same paragraph seventeen times. He could have recited it from memory. He still couldn’t have told anyone what it said.
“We need groceries,”Hazel announced, closing her grimoire with a sharp snap.
Marcus looked up from the case files he’d been pretending to read for the past hour. “I can call for delivery.”
“From where? The nearest supermarket is forty minutes away.” She stood, stretching in a way that made him look back at his files immediately. “We need fresh ingredients if you want actual food instead of whatever’s left in that cabinet.”
“Fine,” he said. “But we maintain appropriate boundaries.”
“Absolutely.” The word came out flat, clipped. “Appropriate boundaries.”
The drive to town was a masterclass in brittle silence. Marcus gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. Hazel gazed out the passenger window like the Maine countryside held the secrets of the universe. Her knee was inches from the gear shift. Her perfume filled the enclosed space.
At the grocery store, they maintained their careful distance. Marcus pushed the cart, which had a wobbly wheel and kept veering left. Hazel consulted a list written on the back of a CVS receipt. He selected items with military efficiency. She spent eleven minutes choosing between two identical-looking bunches of parsley, then put back both and grabbed cilantro instead.
The locals noticed.
“Everything alright with you two?” asked Beth Morrison, the werewolf who ran the flower shop, when they nearly collided avoiding each other in the produce section. Hazel had been reaching for tomatoes; Marcus had been pretending to inspect lettuce three feet away. They’d both moved at the same time, ended up face to face over the avocados.
“Fine,” they said simultaneously, then looked everywhere except at each other.
Beth’s yellow eyes flicked between them. Her nose twitched; werewolves could smell emotions, Marcus remembered too late. The corner of her mouth twitched upward.
“Uh-huh.” She selected a bunch of flowers and moved on, but not before shooting Hazel a look that clearly saidwe’ll talk later.
They made it through checkout by standing at opposite ends of the conveyor belt, Marcus handling payment while Hazel bagged groceries with violent efficiency. But the universe had a sense of humor.
“You’ll need to move closer,” the teenage cashier said, gesturing at the credit card reader. “The cord doesn’t reach.”
Marcus stepped forward. Hazel shifted to give him room. Suddenly, they were standing shoulder to shoulder, her hair brushing his arm as she reached for a bag. The scent of her shampoo, something floral, something that had haunted him since day one, made his head spin.
Her shoulder pressed warm against his arm, and she stopped breathing.
For a moment, the beep of the register faded to background noise. He could feel the slight tremor running through her.
“Receipt?” the cashier asked, barely concealing amusement.
Marcus jerked back to reality. “Yes. Thank you.”
They loaded groceries in tense silence, careful not to let their hands brush, and drove toward the safe house, the heater running and the windows cracked because Hazel hadcomplained about the temperature. The afternoon light poured through the windshield, and for five blessed minutes, Marcus almost managed to convince himself the careful boundary between them would hold.
