Page 38 of A Lady’s Guide to Werewolves

“Why are you doing that?”

“I’ve been told my eyes can be unnerving.” Mostly in London.

“They’re pretty.” She shrugged, so easily.

“Pretty.” He kept forgetting how different life was in Lyonesse.

“Now you’re the one who’s offended,” she said, grinning.

“I am not.”

“You’re not about to turn into a wolf, are you? I don’t think there’s enough space in here for that, do you? Shall we move outside?”

His mouth twitched in amusement. “I am not about to wear the wolf.”

“Oh.” She wrinkled her nose, looking disappointed. “What are you tracking?”

“Magic.”

“But as a witch, not a wolf.”

“Precisely.”

“And I expect you’d like me to hush now. Granny says I chatter on like a flock of songbirds at dawn.”

“You can talk all you like, songbird.” He liked the sound of her voice. The way she glowed brighter than any gold threads. The way she was beaming at him right now.

He cleared his throat and returned to the work at hand. The threads twisted through the air, some frayed where the magic petered out, others knotted from being too long unused. He expected them to lead him out of the tent, to the charms hanging from the trees, the spelled wind chimes, the magic of the equinox all over the island. But they did not. Or rather, they did, but not in any urgent, meaningful way.

All of the intensity was reserved for the single thread that glowed sharply, blindingly.

The one leading him to Sorcha.

It did not curl around her throat to his mark, nor travel down her arm to the cut there, already healing—the one that made him want to snarl. But it touched her collarbones, dipped under the neckline, and snaked down between her breasts. The gold glow sharpened, red at the edges. He tasted smoke and fennel in the back of his throat when all he wanted to taste was Sorcha.

He did not like that thread touching her.

Neither did his wolf. Not at all.

“Damn it.”

“What is it?” Sorcha asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

The threads were familiar. They tasted like the forest, like moonlight. Like a wolf. But also like iron and thorns and silver daggers.

Like a warning.

He tugged at the gold thread, and it rippled, shooting sparks of power into his bones.

His wolf stirred again, scratching inside his ribcage. There was a frantic edge to the warning, a flare of power that Aidan struggled to control.

“Lady Sorcha?”

“Yes?”

“Forgive me another impropriety,” he said, before hooking his fingers under the neckline of her dress. Her breath caught, pushing her warm, rounded flesh against his knuckles. He tried very hard not to think about it, not to wonder if she would make that little sound again if he lowered his mouth to her breast and sucked.

Instead, he slipped his fingers slowly into her cleavage until one of the tangled gold threads caught at him like angry little thorns. He reached down a little further and pulled out the charm that burned between her breasts with a poisonous fire she did not feel.

A wolf’s tooth, capped with silver and carved with sigils.

He closed it in his fist, snapping the gold threads with one vicious pull. The shimmer remained, sparkling on Sorcha’s skin, in her hair. Across her lips.

“You have no idea what you’ve done.”