She slides off the chair, landing on the porch on her knees. The bottle hits the wood and rolls without breaking. Her hand braces on the boards. The eyes she lifts to me are huge.
I lower my head until my muzzle is level with her face, moving slowly enough that any human could have backed away.
She doesn’t back away.
Her hand lifts up between us. It hovers there for a second. Then her fingers touch the fur at the side of my jaw, very lightly, and the wolf in me leans into her hand without my permission.
“Oh,” she whispers.
The smile that breaks across her face is small and shocked, the most beautiful thing I have seen in my life.
“Hi.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Miranda
The wolf in front of me has Grayson’s eyes. The gold isn’t amber, but the eyes are his. The fur is gunmetal gray at the ruff, lighter along the muzzle, dark at the tips of the ears, and he’s the size of a small horse, bigger than a dog has any business being, standing in front of my chair with steam rising off his coat in the cold air.
My grandmother’s voice surfaces inside my head, sudden and complete. The beasts who wore human skin. I haven’t thought of the stories she used to tell me in years. But right now, facing an impossibly large wolf, I do. I recall her soft voice, the secrets in her eyes, the mischievous laughter in her voice as she used to whisper tales of wolves who weren’t wolves.
The memories I had only faintly recalled up till now are roaring back so vividly. She used to sit on the end of my bed with one hand smoothing my blanket, telling me about men who could shed themselves like coats, who walked on four legs when they wished, who could love a human woman so hard the world rearranged itself to fit them. To me, it was always a fairy tale.
Pushing up onto my knees, my injured arm cradled against my ribs, I feel the porch boards cold through my jeans. The wolf doesn’t move. He waits, head lowered to my level, low huffs of breath fogging between us.
“You’re really in there,” I whisper. His ear flicks.
Lifting my hand, I watch his gold eyes track its approach. My fingers are almost touching the side of his jaw when his head tilts and his tongue swipes hot and wet up the entire side of my face.
I let out a startled cry. He does it again, on the other cheek this time, then drops his front paws onto my thighs and pins me back against the chair. “Stop it!” I swat at his enormous head with my one good hand while he licks me with enthusiasm. My hair is going to need professional intervention after this is over.
“Stop it, Grayson!” I complain, trying to turn my head away. “You’re slobbering all over me!”
He doesn’t stop, having decided this is his moment. Somewhere behind the shock and the slobber, there’s another thing happening, something quieter. A small, warm thing wakes up low in my chest and stretches—not fear, not surprise, more a recognition with no words attached, a current running underneath my skin. Some sleeping part of me has cracked an eye open and gone oh, it’s you.
“You’re not a dog,” I gasp, shoving at his shoulder. “Stop acting like one.”
He huffs against my throat, which I’m pretty sure is wolf for make me, then mercifully steps back, padding in a slow circle before dropping to the boards beside me with his chin on his paws. I sit there breathing hard.
The bottle has rolled to the edge of the porch. My braid is half-undone and wet on one side, my arm aches where the stitches pull, and I’m sitting on a wooden porch at ten at night beside a wolf bigger than the kitchen door. The world hasn’t ended.
I reach over to touch him. His fur is denser than I expected, coarse on top, soft underneath, and a low, pleased rumble moves through him when I run my fingers along the ridge of his shoulder.
“You’re very pretty,” I murmur.
His head snaps up. The look he gives me is so deeply offended I burst out laughing. His gold eyes narrow, and his ears pin back, the picture of a man who has just been called the wrong thing. He huffs once, sharply, and stands up.
“What’s wrong with that?” I’m still laughing. “You really are pretty.”
The air around him distorts, the space he occupies folding in on itself for half a second, fur receding, bone resetting, and then Grayson is standing in front of me on the porch with no clothes on whatsoever. I yelp and slap a hand over my eyes.
“I’m not pretty,” he announces.
“Oh my God.”
“Pretty is for the bouquets you arrange. I’m not pretty.”
“Can you put some clothes on, please, right now.”
