Page 2 of Kings of Sherwood

Especially when he appears to be fresh from the shower, that auburn hair still damp and the hem of his T-shirt riding up just enough to reveal the light thatch of hair above his belt.

I swallow. It’s love as much as lust, some complicated thing I could probably unpack if I felt like doing another lifetime or two of therapy.

Besides, nothing compares to her.

An ungodly, downright pornographic image of Maren flashes in my mind.

Fuck me.

I fist a hand in the sheets, will the blood to flow back to my brain, and, once I’ve resigned myself to not getting any more sleep, fumble around for the switch to my bedside lamp. It throws a gentle glow up the walls and over the sheets from behind its rice-paper globe, and, squinting, I glance at what the clock says.

It’s 4 a.m. Jesus Christ. I scrub at my hair and draw my knees to my chest under the covers.

“What do you want?” I mutter, glaring at Rob.

“Oh, you know,” he says, rolling to one side and propping his head on his hand like a girl at a sleepover. “Thought we could gossip and braid each other’s hair and shit.”

I grab a bolster pillow and throw it at him.

“Hey!”

“You’re in a good mood for four a.m.,” I mumble. “Toogood.”

“What’s not to be in a good mood about?” Rob stretches out, looking at the ceiling. “I’m young and healthy, I’m back in my goddamn house, it’s going to be a beautiful Virginia day, and Gisbourne’s a goddamn grease stain on the floor of his own greenhouse.”

At his words, something contracts inside me, tenses. I’ve long come to terms with being a criminal, God knows, but until recently I’d always been very solidly white-collar—or, fine, non-violent, at least—in my crimes of choice. Victimless, you could argue—Iwould argue.

You can’t argue that about murder. I—we—killed a man.

A fellow shifter.

Not that I regret it. Not that we had literally any other choice, the way he was going for Maren.

But still.

I’m a murderer now.

“What do you want?” I say again, a little shorter than I mean to.

Rob springs to standing, somehow full of energy yet moving at that irritatingly languid pace everyone south of the Mason-Dixon seems to favor.

“Inventory,” he says, turning on his heel and fixing me with his grass-green stare. “Just went through the whole ground level.”

“At three a.m.?” I squint. “Are foxes even nocturnal?”

Rob lifts a shoulder, smiling. “Too wired to sleep, I reckon. And I wanted to know just how bad they’d picked us clean.”

It’d been a good few weeks since the night Gisbourne and the sheriff seized the house. A good few miserable weeks of living like, well, animals in the woods, hunting and fighting and—occasionally—rutting. And slightly less time since we’d let Maren face down Guy Gisbourne the way she’d wanted to: with the truth, and no fucking fear.

Thank God we didn’t let her go alone.

Truthfully, I never thought we’d be back here. I was mentally packing my passport, flirting with what it’d be like to change my name, and possibly my entire wardrobe, and live a life on the lam.

But in the chaos of the aftermath, it was easy to flee. And with Gisbourne gone, the sheriff’s department appeared to turn tail and take a self-protective stance, because when we got back here, there was nothing guarding the place but a padlock, a CONDEMNED sign, and a few skimpy strands of yellow tape.

All, for the record, highly flammable.

So we stole our home back.

---