Page 79 of Wretched Thorns

She walked out the back screen door.

***

The path through the preserve at night was the same path she’d walked at dusk yesterday with a male she hadn’t yet decided what to do about, and she walked it now in a different frame of mind, with the moon up and the cypress shadows long and the wrought iron at the property line catching the moonlight in the same slow seam her witch-trained eye had caught it in the first time.

The cypress smelled greener and colder than it had during the day.

The herb garden gate was propped open the way Dex had left it the night before.

She didn’t stop at it this time.

The caretaker’s cottage was lit.

She had known it would be. Grandmère had been calling that kind of knowing “body-knowing” since Tara was old enough to hear the word, the intuition that came before evidence. She had known he wouldn’t be sleeping either. The lamp through the window was a soft yellow he’d turned low on purpose, and there was the slow rhythmic sound of stone on metal coming through the screen, and Tara stopped at the bottom of the porch steps and let herself acknowledge what she was about to do before she did it.

She was about to open a door she’d already walked through once. She was going to walk through it with a different form of intent this time.

That was the only thing she let herself acknowledge.

She climbed the porch.

She didn’t knock.

***

Dex was at the kitchen table.

A long blade lay across a folded towel. A whetstone in his right hand. He was sharpening a shorter blade with the slow patient passes a man used when he was using the work to think.

The lamp was at his elbow. He was shirtless.

She’d been keeping a careful distance from his shoulders in her head all day. The lamplight ran along them now in a way that made the carefulness pointless. The scar across the back of his left shoulder caught the light when he moved, an old, long line that disappeared into the muscle of his back.

He was a big man. Her body had recognized that the way you knew a wolf was a wolf. The lamplight made it specific. The spread of his chest. The breadth where shoulder met arm. The depth of chest to back where those delicious lat handles were waiting for her to hold onto. His hands at rest looked too big for the small whetstone they had been holding.

He didn’t look up.

“You sharpening for tomorrow?”

“I’m sharpening because I’m not sleeping, chère.”

“Same.”

He set the whetstone down. He looked up. His eyes weren’t gold yet, just the warm brown they got in low light, and his mouth moved at the corner in the slow, knowing way it had moved at her in every room they’d been in together since her grandmother’s porch.

“Bed’s in there,” he said. He nodded at the inner door of the cottage. “I was going to lie down on the kitchen floor in a minute.”

“Oh, were you?”

“I was.”

“Liar.”

Dex snorted. “Where am I lying down, Tara?”

She crossed the room in three slow steps and put her hand flat to the bare skin of his chest where the lamplight was warm. She let her palm rest there for a long beat without saying anything, because what she was about to say needed her hand to be on him first.

His chest rose under her palm.