Page 136 of Beasts of Mine

“Your entire pack is exhausting.” I muttered, though I was smiling by the time the words left my mouth. Their scents surrounded me as we walked—cedar, citrus, sandalwood, wet forest, and traces of myself mixed through all of it. Sex with Malek had changed the way I knew him, but it hadn’t separated him from the other two. If anything, walking between all three of them made it easier to picture what choosing their pack might actually look like.

At the point where the trail widened toward station territory, the men stopped. I changed behind a thick screen of vegetation, pulling my own mostly dry shirt over my head before folding Malek’s charcoal one carefully into the top of my pack instead of returning it. My damp sports bra stayed tucked away with the rest of the wet clothing.

When I stepped back onto the trail, Malek’s eyes went immediately to the closed pack.

“Still keeping it.” Malek observed, his purr beginning again as his gaze settled on the place where I had tucked the shirt.

“I said I was.” I reminded Malek as I settled the pack more securely onto my shoulder.

“Good.” Malek answered, the quiet satisfaction in the single word unmistakable.

That followed me all the way back to the station. I walked onto the station grounds at seven twenty-one, where Mara was sitting at the table with the field log open beside her and one boot hooked around the leg of the chair.

“You made it.” Mara glanced toward the clock before writing my return time into the log. “Please tell me the cover emergency was worth stealing half my evening.”

“I think I got it.” I told Mara as the exhaustion of the walk gave way to fresh excitement, already reaching for my camera. “River otter, clean background, good light, and enough negative space to make an art director happy.”

“That sounded dangerously optimistic.” Mara observed as she closed the log and looked toward my camera, amusement mixing with genuine interest.

“It’s as optimistic as I get before seeing it on a monitor.” I told Mara while heading toward the equipment room. “Ask me again after I’ve backed everything up twice.”

“Now that sounds more like you.” Mara called after me, her quiet laugh following me through the doorway before she turned back to the paperwork on the table.

By nine, both memory cards were copied, the strongest files existed on two separate drives, and I had sent Caroline a small gallery of low-resolution previews. The otter was still my favorite. The juvenile capuchin was a close second, but the moment I opened the otter image on the larger monitor, I knew I had gotten exactly what I had gone out there hoping to find.

Only after the files were safe did I shower and return to my room. Malek’s shirt was still inside my pack, and when I pulled it out, cedar remained strongest. The day had changed the scent, though. There was forest on it now, the faint clean smell left by rain, traces of me, and somewhere beneath Malek I could just catch the edges of Luca and Tavian from the eastern fork.

I stood beside the bed with the shirt in my hands before tucking it into the bedding near my pillow. I knew exactly what I was doing, and the second I arranged the fabric, something in me relaxed. It wasn’t a full nest yet, but it was the beginning of one.

Malek had been the first Alpha I chose to sleep with here, but somehow that hadn’t made Tavian or Luca feel farther away. If anything, lying down with cedar beside my face and faint traces of their pack mixed through it made the idea of all three of them beside me feel less theoretical. For the first time, I could picture joining their pack without picturing myself giving something up, and that thought stayed with me long after I turned off the light.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

EVIE

By the time I finished breakfast the next morning, Tavian had already appeared twice at the edge of the station trail. The first time, I caught a flash of deep bronze skin between two trees while I was cleaning a lens at the outdoor table. He disappeared before I could get a proper look at him, leaving behind only the faintest trace of citrus leaves and warm wood carried toward the station on the humid morning air. The second time, he leaned just far enough around the trunk of a broad tree to make direct eye contact with me, flashed a grin when he realized I had caught him, and vanished again. Unfortunately for both of us, Mara noticed that one.

“You have a very large problem in the trees,” Mara observed from the opposite side of the table, pausing with her coffee halfway to her mouth as she stared toward the section of trail where Tavian had disappeared. The overhead fan barely disturbed the heavy morning air beneath the station roof, and somewhere beyond the screens a cicada started up loudly enough to compete with the generator.

“Monkey?” I asked Mara innocently as I worked a faint smudge from the glass, deliberately keeping my attention on the lens in my hands rather than the trees.

“Too big,” Mara answered, lowering her mug while she continued studying the trail as though whatever she had seen might make the mistake of showing itself again.

“Sloth?” I offered Mara as I turned the lens beneath the morning light to make sure the glass was finally clean.

“Too fast,” Mara replied, turning back toward me with one eyebrow raised. She knew I was enjoying this far more than I should have been.

“Then I’m out of ideas.” I capped the lens and reached for the next one, refusing to acknowledge the grin threatening at the corner of my mouth.

“Whatever it is, it has terrible hiding skills,” Mara decided after another glance toward the trees, taking a slow drink of coffee just as a muffled laugh came from somewhere beyond the first line of vegetation.

I closed my eyes briefly because Tavian apparently had absolutely no interest in helping me maintain the lie. When I opened them again, Mara had turned fully toward me, waiting to see how long I intended to keep pretending nothing strange was happening.

“What?” I asked Mara as innocently as possible, keeping both hands busy arranging spare batteries in their padded compartment.

“Nothing.” Mara lifted her coffee again, but the long look she gave me made it perfectly clear she believed none of this. She took another drink, frowned into the empty mug, then pushed herself up from the chair with a quiet sigh. “I need more coffee before I deal with either you or your unusually large sloth.”

“That sounds wise.” I told Mara as she collected the field log from the corner of the table and headed toward the station building, biting the inside of my cheek when another faint rustle came from the direction where Tavian had disappeared.