Page 16 of The Reveal
“You let me know when you’re tired of playing your little fucking games, Maddox,” Ty grits out, and I don’t know how she manages to simply gaze back at him the way she does. I can feel my knees beneath me like water, and worry they might splash me right over, when he starts talking in that gravelly way of his again. “When you feel like stepping up to what you should’ve done years ago. I’m not the only one you have to answer to.”
“I know exactly what I’m doing,” she replies, and there’s more steel in her voice than I’m used to, because she’s normally so lazy and disinterested, light and easy.
I don’t see either one of them move, but suddenly their mouths are fused together, and I find myself looking away, feeling embarrassed. But also frozen to the spot. I don’t know what to do with myself—and then I hear what sounds like a low bit of laughter, again in that deep register that seems to shiver straight through me to threaten my already precarious knees.
I only realize it’s stopped when he’s moving again and is looming right in front of me. Right there on the other side of the locked gate that seems pretty damn flimsy just now. It’s possible I swallow my own tongue. But I do have the good sense not to point my gun in his face the way every single screaming cell in my body demands that I do.
And fast.
“Good impulse control,” he bites out at me.
It was one thing to look at him through the door. It was another thing to see the back of his head from across the porch—this whole, huge alpha werewolf leader of all he surveys and can hold with his claws.
Staring up at Ty Ceridwen and finding myself the focus of his attention is like staring up the steep side of a very tall mountain. I can feel sheer, shaking terror coil tight inside me—
But I’m also not blind. I’ve never had occasion to look at him too closely before, but it’s unavoidable now. Knowing that he is a wolf—thewolf—means his features make sense, but it doesn’t make him any more easily palatable.
He has long dirty-blond hair currently twisted back out of his way, though parts of it hang down in the front. His beard is slightly darker, and it’s hard to tell if it simply grows that way or if he trims it to lookjustrough-edged enough. He’s huge, and seems bigger up close. Easily six foot five, though I might be underestimating that, and like a wall of muscle. A tank. Everything about him is big and bold, and he’s staring down at me as if he’s imagining frying me up in a pan and eating me like a midnight snack.
“You better be worth it,” he says to me.
“I don’t know that I’m worth anything,” I say, alarmed.
He scowls at me, then looks back at Maddox. “I want a detailed map, babe,” he tells her. “A point-by-point analysis of the road ahead. You get me? Or I’m taking it out of your ass.”
She seems remarkably unconcerned with a threat that would probably have me tossing up my dinner in the nearest toilet. Allshedoes is shrug, still standing there against the porch post with his fingerprints on her throat and a look of complete ease.
“When don’t you?” she asks.
He laughs again, like a reckoning, and then he’s gone.
It’s not that he disappears in a puff of smoke, though that would be alarming enough. It’s that when he moves, he goes so fast that my brain can’t quite make sense of it.
Once again, there’s the slamming grate long after he’s disappeared, and there’s nothing outside but the smell of the wildfires in the distance. And, now and then, the sound of the critters either too brave or too foolish to keep quiet in the dark.
But when I stop scanning the dark in disbelief that anything can movethat fast, Maddox is still standing there.
“So,” I say, drawing out the syllable.
She looks away, letting out a rueful noise that isn’t quite a laugh. “Yeah.So.”
And somehow we end up sitting out on the back steps after it turns out we both think that sugar is the only thing that can get us throughthis moment. I don’t let her walk through the house to get there, and it makes me feel like an asshole, but she doesn’t seem to care. Besides, she gets to the back door quicker than I do. We make mugs of contraband hot chocolate, which is so hard to find these days that I hide it from my own grandmother and would normally share with no one.
Then again, this is the werewolf who lives here now, and I think I feel something like shell-shocked.
Part of that is because we take those mugs and ... sit outside.
“I don’t go out in the dark if I can avoid it,” I say quietly as we hang out there on the back steps. “I’m not sure why I let you talk me into doing it now. Maybe this is an elaborate plan to get me set upon by monsters, after all.”
“I am a monster,” Maddox says serenely from beside me. “And anyway, you’re safe. First of all, there are only a few things that actually scare me, and none of them are likely to be lurking around in your vegetable garden.” She takes a sip of her hot chocolate and makes a little humming noise of approval. “Second, and probably more important where you’re concerned, I live here now. That means this whole house, this whole property, probably the whole hill, is protected. All of Jacksonville, really.”
“Jacksonville is already protected.” I frown at her. “That was the deal. A safe zone for humans.”
“Sure.” She’s not looking at me. She’s studying her bare feet as she flexes them on the step below. “But now, if something happens up here, Ty will take it as a personal attack on him. There aren’t a lot of folks who want that.”
I take that in. I think about that massive hand on her throat and the way she keeps putting her free hand up to touch the fingerprints that I can still see like stains on her neck.
She does not look like she’s touching them because they hurt.
