Page 27

He swung down from the saddle, and the easy way he did it reminded me unhelpfully of how much of him there was. He crossed half the distance between us and stopped, closer than he needed to be and farther than he wanted, and put out his hand.

"The fucking seal, Little Ghost…"

I slipped my hand into my pocket, closed my fingers around it. My eyes snapped up to his. "Come get it."

Those three words sat in the air between us far longer than I intended them to.

I watched his eyes change, and his weight settle differently through his shoulders. Something move behind his eye that wasn’t sheriff or hunter.

Alpha, I thought. He took one step closer, which brought him near enough that I could have reached up and touched the stubble along his jaw, and I did not move, because moving would have meant admitting the step had done anything to me at all.

His scent came over me on the cold air, cedar and iron and clean winter. It was familiar now in a way I refused to examine, and my traitorous body answered it before my pride could get a hand over its mouth.

Heat bloomed low in my belly, my breath went shallow and audible, and the warmth that had been sleeping under my skin for days woke and stretched and said something I absolutely could not permit it to say.

He noticed.

I know he noticed, because his pupils blew wide and his hand closed into a fist at his side and the air between us went thick as held breath.

And then he stopped.

He didn’t take the half step that would have finished what my own stupid mouth had started, and he did not use one second of that moment against me, which was his to use and which any other Alpha in England would have taken. He simply stood there and mastered himself. I watched him do it, and something in my chest turned over in a way that frightened me considerably more than his hands ever could have.

Then he looked past me, down into the square, at the children with the bread and the healer with her crate and the quiet line of Omegas along the eastern wall.

"Give me the fucking seal," he said again, and his voice had changed.

"No."

"Robin."

"Bisbane."

He exhaled slow and long, and dragged a hand down his face.

"Tomorrow."

I frowned. "Tomorrow what?"

"Tomorrow I'll take it back." He nodded down the ridge at the wagons standing empty in the square. "Not today."

I turned to look where he was looking, and then back at him."You're letting them keep everything?"

"Taking it back would punish them for something you did." He said it like the simplest thing in the world. "They didn't forge anything. They simply waited in a line for the bread."

That wasn’t the answer I’d expected, not within a mile of it. I’d built three years of my life on expecting the opposite.

"You're terrible at being my enemy," I said.

He looked at me, and the corner of his mouth moved, and he let it.

"I'm beginning to notice."

He went back to his horse, and I let him go four strides before the question came out of me, because it had been sitting behind my teeth since the day I stood in that square and found his wagons there.

"You keep surprising me, Sheriff."

"That sounded dangerously close to a compliment."