Page 2 of The Last True Hero
One
Nine years later....
"ANOTHER," ADAM MCCLAIN slurred, shoving the empty tumbler across the counter.
The woman behind the bar arched a brow and stayed where she was, polishing a glass. Then she pointed to the white line that had been painted across the timber floors.
Adam stared at her. Mia stared back. This was one argument he had no hope in hell of winning, despite the fact she barely reached his shoulder.
If there was one thing that drove him utterly crazy, it was hardheaded women.
Scraping the chair back, he stood and crossed to the start of the line. Holding his arms out, he walked swiftly along the line and then turned with his hands held wide in a somewhat mocking salute.
Mia's dark eyes narrowed, but she poured him another whiskey. That was her rule. Walk the line and you got another drink. But she had to be wondering how he'd downed nearly two bottles of the stuff and wasn't even staggering.
Casual slipups like that might get him caught. He was just drunk enough not to care.
"Any particular reason you're trying to drown yourself in my good whiskey?" She slid the full glass toward him then held it there, her gaze a challenge.
"Nothing I'd like to share."
"You missing that kid that was riding with you? Where'd he go, anyway?"
Adam sighed. Cole had insisted on following him over the past year, ever since Luc Wade clawed the boy up and turned him into a warg. But he'd grown tired of Adam's lack of motivation, and finally decided he was going home to see his family.
There'd be no home for him there. Adam could have told him that. Nobody in the Wastelands welcomed a warg back into their familial embrace.
But some things you had to learn for yourself.
"Kid's gone home. And he's welcome to it." Adam threw the glass back, and the fiery liquid burned all the way down. Within half an hour his body would have burned through it, so he had to drink fast to stay drunk these days. Not that getting drunk made the world any rosier.
"If you wanted to talk about it, McClain," Mia picked her words carefully, "I'm a good listener."
"Why? You want to make it all better?" He leaned closer. "We don't need to talk for that."
Those dark eyes narrowed again, the thick lashes doing nothing to obscure the heat in them. It seemed to be her favorite expression. "Now I know you're drunk." She screwed the cap back on the whiskey bottle. "No more."
Frustration lanced through him but he tipped his head to her. Mia Gray reminded him of another woman he'd once known. Sometimes he wondered if that was why he'd lingered here in this tiny shitforsaken town for over a month. Oh, she looked nothing like Riley, and she had far more tact than Riley had ever had, but Mia's favorite word was also no.
Tracing a puddle of amber liquid on the timber counter, he wondered what Riley would be doing right now. He'd lost his chance with her over a year ago—or maybe he'd stepped aside when it became clear that she was the only person who could find Luc Wade's heart, let alone cause it to beat—but Adam still thought of her now and then.
Of what could have been.
He felt so lost now. At least after he'd first become a warg, he'd had a plan. He'd been driven then, searching for his own redemption, building a town, gathering people together where he could protect them and striving to create a life for himself. He'd thought he'd found redemption, but it was all gone the second his people discovered they had a warg in their midst. Who was he now? A clapped-out bounty hunter who spent more time in bars than hunting?
A brutal lesson to learn. No matter what he tried to make of himself, to everyone else's eyes he was still just a monster.
"That looks like woman trouble in your eyes," Mia noted.
She swiped a rag through the sticky puddle he'd been fingering, then lifted his wrist and cleaned his finger too. Her touch was cool; her bronze-colored skin wasn't as warm as his. The fever burn in his veins promised that the full moon was only three days away.
He could always feel it now.
The full moon was the hardest to ignore, despite the burning cold of the amulet against his chest that kept the monster at bay. And the feel of Mia's skin on his awoke all manner of longing. Before he knew what he was doing, he'd turned his wrist, capturing her own in his strong fingers, his thumb rasping over the sweet kick of her veins. Just a faint caress, but from the sudden shocked flash of her eyes, she felt the burn too.
They stayed like that as the clock ticked out long seconds.
"No women," he said, "but plenty of trouble."
