Page 28

Before I changed.

I moved past her toward the kitchen; standing still while she looked at my home was intolerable. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

“It’s beautiful,” she murmured, but her eyes weren’t on the furniture anymore.

I stopped, my hand on the kettle. Seeing myself through her eyes felt… exposing. Like being naked under a full moon.

When I brought her the mug, she was sitting at the table with three of my jars open in front of her and the journal beside them. She’d been making notes.

“Sit down,” she said, as if it were her table.

The chair gave its usual groan under my weight. I looked at the window, where rain turned the forest into a blur of dark green and gray. My reflection stared back—broad, furred, too large for the chair I was sitting in. I looked away.

“You said the plants feel important. I want to understand what that means. Not the science—the experience.”

Nobody had ever asked me that.

“It felt like... recognition. Like seeing a word you know but can’t remember learning. That’s not a scientific answer,” I said awkwardly.

Hazel’s pen stopped moving. “It’s a better one.” She turned another jar toward the light. “Why ‘winter resilience’?”

“Snowberry. Grows through frost and doesn’t ask permission.” I shrugged. “Reminded me of someone I liked.”

I hadn’t meant to say that.

She smiled at the jar instead of at me, and her face softened in a way that made my chest feel too small for what was inside it.

She glanced at the clock. “The rain’s easing up.”

My stomach tightened. “The roads will probably be clear soon.”

Hazel looked at the clock again, then set her mug down. “I don’t want to go yet.”

Through the scent of warm cedar, wet wool, and my own nervous musk, I could smell her rain-damp skin. Herbal soap, and underneath it, faint but undeniable... adrenaline.

I gripped the edge of the table. I couldn’t stop staring at the pulse fluttering below her ear. Fragile. Human. Mine to protect. My bear stirred in my chest.

“I like it here.” Hazel looked at me. “I like being here with you.”

A growl rumbled through my chest, low enough to shake the mug near my hand. Her eyes widened, but she didn’t move away.

“Barrett?” Her voice had gone soft.

She stood, walked around the corner of the table, and stopped beside me. She moved closer, close enough that I could feel warmth through the damp fabric, close enough to see the silver chain around her neck with its leaf pendant. She reached up to my face, her thumb brushing my cheekbone, skating along the seam where the beard met bearskin. Her fingertips skated higher, tracing the arch of my ear beneath fur.

I felt the path of each pad, each whorl of her fingerprint registering like a brand. Too close to the edge I'd been skating since she’d walked into my cabin.

Hazel watched my face. “Too much?”

“No.”

Her fingers slipped beneath the open collar of my shirt and into the fur across my chest. She combed through it slowly, and my breath left me.

“You tell me if you don’t like that,” she said.

My throat worked. “I like it.”

She was watching my fur ripple with her touch, watching my breath hitch when her thumb found the sensitive spot below my ear. Her gaze held me captive—assessing and accepting.