I drop my forehead onto her knee, laughing low. Her hand comes up, fingers threading through the back of my hair, and I stay there with my eyes closed because I am not sure my chest can take this much at once.
When I lift my head, she is looking down at me with that same patient face.
“I’ll show you,” I murmur. “On one condition.”
Her brow arches at me. “Of course there’s a condition.”
“You kiss me first.”
“Why do I have to do that?” she splutters.
“Because.” My hand slides up her thigh through the flannel until my thumb is resting against her hip. “Because I don’t know if you’ll want me to touch you afterward.”
She makes a small, impatient sound at the back of her throat. Her hand curls around the back of my neck and pulls me in.
The kiss starts hesitantly and turns sweet. She tastes like beer, mint, and something underneath that is just her.
I deepen it before I can talk myself out of it. My hand fists in the flannel at her hip as I take her mouth properly, and a small sound escapes her that goes through me like a current. The other hand braces on the armrest by her shoulder, and I lean in, crowding her into the chair, the wolf in my chest stirring once before settling.
A sharp pinch lands on the underside of my arm.
I jerk back from her.
“I don’t think so, Wolfe.”
I give her a forlorn look. “You can’t keep bullying me like this.”
“Have you seen your size? Like I could bully you,” she scoffs.
Standing up, I pull my shirt off over my head.
The bottle stops moving in her hand.
“Why,” she manages slowly, “are you stripping?”
“Because clothes don’t survive the change.”
“The change,” she repeats.
“Just close your eyes for a minute.” I drop the shirt on the chair, and my hands go to my belt. “And don’t open them until I tell you to.”
“Grayson Wolfe, what are you doing?”
“Close them, Carver.”
She closes them reluctantly, with one eyebrow up.
I step off the porch onto the cold wet grass. My wolf surges up to meet me before I’ve fully invited him in. The shift comes hard and clean. My bones reset. The world drops down to four feet, and the smells come up sharper. Pine reaches me first, then wet stone, then the blood on her bandage, then her heart beating fast under her skin.
I walk back to the porch and stop in front of her chair.
The breath I exhale fogs in the cold, fur lifting in the breeze, gunmetal gray, the same color as my mother’s. My wolf wants her to look at us. He wants her to see what we are and decide.
I let out a low huff against the back of her hand.
Her eyes fly open.
The color drains out of her face in one slow wave, but this time, it is not horror. It is wonder undercut by an animal startle, and her mouth opens around a word that doesn’t come out.
