Page 39 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

“That’s an unfair question. Nobody has a clear head in pre-heat.”

“I’m asking for it anyway.”

I thought about the coin. About balancing it on my thumb, rigging the terms, and being disappointed when sanity took the first round. “I flipped a coin,” I said.

Lincoln shut his eyes.

“It came up tails.”

Hudson asked, “And heads was what?”

“The heat clinic. But…” I paused for a moment. If it had come up heads, I’d have flipped it again.” I made myself say the rest. “I’d have kept flipping until it told me what I wanted.”

Hudson let out a slow breath above me. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For telling us the truth twice inside five minutes,” he said. “You’re improving.”

Hudson rubbed a hand over his face. “Why lie about your age?”

“Because twenty-three sounded better, and I got used to using false ID.” I looked away and decided not to tell him that was all I had because everything about me, my name, my age, was a lie.

“And New York?” Hudson asked.

That was a stupid little lie. Another layer of the person I’d pretended to be, because the real me didn’t live in Boston. “Also a lie.”

Hudson’s gaze held mine. “You don’t work there.”

“No.”

“You aren’t in Boston on business.”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Because the answer wasn’t neat. Not just that I was a student but that I was here because my father had pushed me, and Boston had looked far enough away to breathe in. Because I’d made myself into Marli and let Mary be a name on a passport. Because my boyfriend had looked at me like I was clever and enough, right up until he didn’t.

Because I’d been lonely, and I had wanted to be chosen.

The words crowded my throat, too many and too honest.

“I’m...” I began.

A phone rang. It went through the room sharp and sudden, and it wasn’t mine. The phone vibrated across the bedside table beside the water bottles and the room-service receipt, lit faceup with a name I couldn’t read from where I lay.

Hudson looked at it. Lincoln looked at Hudson as he reached for the phone.

Chapter 8

Hudson

The phone rang and for one second, I didn’t move but watched Mary squirm from telling the truth. A truth she couldn’t take back.

Her body was still soft with exhaustion, tucked between Lincoln and me on the bed. Our clothes were tangled in the sheets. Her hair lay in dark waves over Lincoln’s chest. The scent of her heat had faded from feral to warm, violet tucked under blackberry, whiskey and rain.

Damien’s name had lit the phone again. I knew because only he was assigned that tune.