Page 90 of A Lady’s Guide to Werewolves

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Are you sure about this?” Aidan grumbled, standing in the sand, the cuffs of his trousers rolled up and the wind tangling his hair. The swirls of his tattoo poked out from under the cuff of his shirt. “This does not seem wise.”

Sorcha’s toes were also bare in the sand and the sun was warm on her nose, even though she could hear her mother’s childhood warnings about freckles and sunburns making her look common. She also wore a simple dress her grandmother disdained. And she was quite certain her braided twist was already slipping from its pins.

And Aidan, the man she would have assumed at one time to be the first to comment, did not appear to even notice. He was too busy glaring at the sea and the white flashes of the kelpie herd. The snap of powerful jaws could be heard over the soft sigh of the water swirling around her ankles.

Not that wearing a bonnet was particularly helpful when one waded into murder-horse territory.

She must have mumbled as such, arguing with her mother who was not here and had not been for some time, because Aidan pulled his gaze from the herd. His stance did not relax. “What’s that?” he asked.

“I forgot my bonnet.”

He looked perplexed. “I wasn’t aware you owned a bonnet.”

Sorcha snorted a laugh despite herself. “My mother would have agreed with you. She despaired over my freckles.” It sounded absurd the moment she said it. The man muddled her head.

He also frowned at her as though she had lost her mind entirely. “I like your freckles,” he said.

The warmth that suffused her was clearly from the sun. It was a warm early autumn day. Very warm.

She knew very well it had nothing to do with the sunlight.

She fought back a silly smile because this was no time for silly smiling. One did not let one’s mind wander when dealing with kelpies. That was how you lost a finger. A hand. Possibly a leg. Your nose.

“Perhaps you should let me try,” Aidan said for the third time in as many minutes.

Sorcha shook her head. “You don’t know how to talk to kelpies.”

“I might.”

“Well, do you? Know how to talk to kelpies?”

“No,” he admitted, his brow thunderous. “But I don’t like this.”

“We need to set the trap properly. There’s no sense in trying to catch the Collector if we can’t keep him.”

“I can find another spell.”

“Not before the full moon, or you would have found one already,” she pointed out. “This will work.”

There were boundaries that kept kelpies from eating the tourists on the beach of Haven or the academics thinking too hard on the pebbled beaches of Hallow, but out here on the shores between the two, there was only sand and sun and the waves.

And Sorcha’s basket of apples, cake, and currant buns.

She maintained that if one survived mostly on fish and kelp and the odd unlucky witch, a sweet bun might be worth a trade. At the very least, worth a conversation before an attempted mauling. It worked with cantankerous humans, so Sorcha did not see why it should not work on kelpies.

However, Aidan standing next to her with his gold eyes and a growl in his thick chest was not conducive to easy conversation. For anyone.

“You’re scaring them away,” Sorcha said as they sliced through the water to approach, then went sideways. Teeth flashed, full of seaweed and fishbones.

“That’s the point,” he rumbled.

The gulls on the beach screeched, agreeing with him. She tossed them crumbs of a lemon pound cake and purple grapes she had found growing over a garden fence. They technically belonged to the haberdasher, but as he liked to throw shoes at the gulls on his walks, Sorcha decided he owed them compensation. The gulls always told her stories, and she believed them.

“You’ll have to stay here,” she told Aidan.

“Like hell.”