Page 32 of A Wolf After My Own Heart
“What were you thinking?” her fiancé, David Auberon, just about shouted.
“I was thinking‘ow, ow, my hands, who lines their bedroom drawer with blades?’”
“My, my, my.” Mama Mac had hustled Annette over to the sink, snapped on the overhead light, squinted at the slashes, started gently rinsing them. David loomed over Mama’s shoulder, glaring down at the narrow, actively bleeding slashes across Annette’s index, middle, and ring fingers. “Such a mess.”
“The blades were in one drawer? Singular?” Oz asked.
Annette hissed as the water ran. “After the first one, I didn’t open any more drawers.”
“Why were you in her house to even openone? Jesus, Annette, we talked about this!”
Annette had the grace to look abashed. “Not this…precise situation, David. Exactly.”
“You said it yourself: Oz has to sink or swim on his own! No matter how he screws up, we’ve gotta let him make his own mistakes!”
Oz coughed. “Thanks for that, I think.”
Then David swung around and locked on (ulp) Oz. “This is exactly why you should have stayed in Accounting!”
“Really?” he replied. “This exact reason?”
Caught off guard, David snorted and dropped his gaze, to Oz’s relief and disappointment. He’d often wondered which of them would still be standing after a fight. David was stronger, but Oz figured he had the bear beat for speed.You’d have to go in tight, right under the chin, and hopefully get a chunk of him before he could get a grip and crush…but it’d have to be quick…like, the fastest-you’ve-ever-moved-in-your-life quick, or he’d claw your eyeballs out of your head and thenreallygo to work.
Worse, David’s ire and Annette’s blood swirling down the drain weren’t his only problems. He had fucked up with Lila, who had every right to assume his only interest in taking her to lunch was to give Annette time to prowl around the Curs(ed) House. There was no coming back from this. There was no nice way to say,Yeah, I needed you distracted while Annette tossed your place, but I also wanted to be with you because I’m obsessed with your scent and mouth and proficiency with firearms, and I think we should get married and make enough cubs to form our own bowling league.
Nope. No matter how he explained it, it was gonna sound unhinged.
He couldn’t stay away from Lila Kai.
He had to stay away from Lila Kai.
The sound of the screen door being wrenched open punctured his train of thought, which was just as well. “Holy shit, we could smell the blood from the driveway!”
“Out!” Annette and David roared in unison.
“Damn,” Oz commented, watching the cubs scramble out of sight. “I didn’t think either of them could move that fast.”
“So the two of you…what? Decided to spy on Stables and be some kind of…I dunno…” David was pacing, and not for the first time, Oz was glad Mama Mac had a big kitchen. “Shifter Neighborhood Watch?”
“Stable,” Annette corrected. “Singular.”
“I’ve only seen her porch and her kitchen and the living room—” Oz admitted.
“And the basement,” Annette added, smirking.
“Kindly go right to hell, Annette. What was the rest of the place like? I wanted to see more of it late last night, but she wouldn’t let me in.”
“You went back again?” Mama asked. “Again?”
“No, not really, but, well, yeah,” he admitted. “Just tying up loose ends. Stuff like that. IPA stuff like that. Y’know, for the job. Nothing weird about it.”
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you, boy,” Mama replied, “but I mean to—”
“Can we focus on how I’m bleeding all over the sink and the floor a bit, too?” Annette asked.
Oz exhaled in no small relief. He’d never wish actual harm on Annette, but at least she was distracting Mama from his runaway mouth.
“You were telling us what the rest of Lila’s house was like,” he prompted, because he was either clinically nuts or had latent stalker tendencies he’d never dreamed existed before this week.
