Page 6 of Secret Pucking Unicorn

“Okay, thanks,” Miranda says before turning to Carter. “I’ll be in my office. My bags are with the security guard upstairs.”

“We’ll get them on the way out. I’ll be twenty minutes, tops.” Apparently, Carter doesn’t remember I drove us here today. I rush through my shower and am dressed first.

“Oh, shit. You’ll drive us, Mac, right?” he asks after his shower as he comes back to his stall with a towel around his waist.

“Aye,” I say. “Wondering when you’d remember you don’t have your wind-up car.”

Carter drives a BMW sports car instead of the SUVs and trucks the rest of us prefer. It’s like riding in a clown car. I did it once, with my knees around my ears, and will never do it again. If I want to do yoga, I’ll go to the class Brick runs in the gym at home. I don’t need to ride in a tin can to get twisted into a pretzel.

I rap my knuckles against Miranda’s door.

“Come in,” she calls.

I open the door and walk in, Carter on my heels.

“Mac is driving us home. I forgot he drove today,” he says.

Looking around her office, I furrow my brow.

“Let me know if you want your furniture rearranged,” I say.

“Why would she do that? It looks nice in here,” Carter says.

“Her view is the shower and there’s a door at her back. If she flips her desk, then the wall is at her back and if she looks out that door”—I point out the door to the dining room—“she can see out the window.”

Miranda’s smile tells me she likes my idea.

“Declan is right, Trev, that’s a great setup.”

“Okay. Randi, do you want us to do it now?” Trevor asks.

She laughs. “No. It’s not a priority. I want to get settled, eat, and collapse. I’m flexible on the order, but I need to at least eat and collapse.”

“You slept on your flight, right?” Carter asks.

“No. I don’t sleep on planes. I haven’t slept in almost forty-eight hours and I’m not sure what day it is.”

Carter reaches out his hand and Miranda takes it and rises from her seat behind her desk. I swallow the growl my wolf tries to make.

“Then let’s get you home, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart? Oh, hell no. He helps her put on her coat and it is a massive feat of willpower not to punch him when he lifts her hair where it’s trapped in her coat collar to allow it to fall around her shoulders in a waterfall of black silk. The intimacy in the gesture twists my stomach. Are they in a relationship? Have they been? There’s so much about Miranda’s life once she left for boarding school and then university that I know nothing about.

I may have been waiting for her but that doesn’t mean she’s been waiting for me. My poor wolf wants to howl in despair. Me too, wolf, me too.

4

MIRANDA

A half hour later I’m about to collapse. I’m in my new room and there’s a bed, but Trevor keeps asking a question I can barely register as I stare at the naked bed.

“Sheets?” I shake my head, feeling like it’s moving through molasses. “I have a computer. And some clothes. That’s all I own.”

Then Declan’s big body is behind me, and his reassuring voice is saying, “No worries, Miranda. I have extra sheets and blankets. We’ll get your bed made, get you fed, and let you collapse. Almost done.”

He gives my shoulder a gentle squeeze before turning and going through a door.

“That’s the closet. You guys share it too,” Trevor says.

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