“Strange bullet,” he mused. “You find this out here?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
He put it into his pocket and took a swig of beer. “Thanks.”
I hadn’t meant for him to keep the bullet, but I guess it didn’t really matter. I had a hundred more just the same.
“You going to have a seat?” He tilted his head. “Or make me get a crick in my neck talking to you.”
“Sure. I mean no.” What was it about this guy that turned me into a gibbering idiot? I began to sit next to him, and he jumped to his feet.
“Wait.” He yanked off his shirt and spread it on the ground. “You can’t sit here in a white skirt.”
&n
bsp; I tried not to stare at his chest, but it was a really great chest. Ridges and dips, smooth, flawless, the dark circles of his nipples like melted caramel against the paler skin. I fought back a groan—two years of celibacy—then took a quick sip of beer to stop the drool from running down my chin.
“Grace?” He patted his shirt, which was far too close to him for my comfort.
I set my beer down, then pulled the shirt farther away under the guise of smoothing it. However, when I sat, he merely scooted closer, tilting his can toward me. “Cheers,” he said.
I grabbed mine, clinking it against his a little too hard, so that beer sloshed onto my wrist. I licked it off, caught him watching my mouth, and stopped. Silence that wasn’t really silence descended. In it I heard all sorts of things.
Want me. Kiss me. Do me.
“I was surprised you came,” I blurted, then bit my lip at the dual meaning to the sentence. Why did everything have to remind me of sex around him?
Luckily, he didn’t have the same problem, because he answered with an easy curve to his lips. “If you didn’t think I’d show, why did you ask?”
I’d asked Walker here to test him for shape-shifting, but I couldn’t exactly say that. “I—I’m not sure.”
“Are you uncomfortable?”
“What?” Yes. “Why?”
“The wolf. We’d discussed it being rabid.”
Oh, the wolf. Right.
“I don’t think it is.” I wasn’t sure what the beast was, but “rabid” wasn’t on the list anymore.
“They say the wolf is a messenger from the spirit world.”
I started again, sloshing beer, again. This time I left the spill where it was. “Why would you bring that up?”
“A wolf that appears and disappears in a place no wolf should be. Don’t tell me you hadn’t thought of it yourself.”
I hadn’t. Until now.
The wolf wasn’t a shifter—or at least not any kind of shifter I knew about—so maybe it was a messenger. Since I was the only one who’d seen the thing, I had to think the message was for me.
“What do you know about messenger wolves?” I asked.
“Only what the legends say.”
“Which is?”
“Your great-grandmother never told you?”