Page 14 of Bound to the Wolf
By the time they finished eating, the Nevins were gone.
Delainey hoped she never saw them again.
Chapter
Six
Reece needed to blow off steam.
It had been a few days since Nico’s little housewarming party, and he’d been running double patrols every day, looking for more interlopers or more signs of magic on pack land, but there had been nothing.
While running through the woods normally cleared his head, doing it for over six hours every day was starting to make him feel paranoid.
Well, more paranoid—some of his pack mates would say. It wasn’t Reece’s fault that he was always on high alert. That came from a life hard lived.
Rumors were swirling around the pack about why they might have had increased patrols, and the people who weren’t talking about that wouldn’t shut up about the drama of Nico and his little witch and their little love nest.
The pack functioned on gossip. Reece understood that, but it didn’t mean he wanted to sit around and chit-chat.
Which brought him to the Brass Tap.
It was a trendy bar on neutral territory. There were witches, there were weres, there were even humans who all came to drinkand have fun. It wasn’t super fancy, but no one started shit. Several years ago it had been little more than a hole in the wall that always made Reece a little worried he would get tetanus or some other unpleasant disease if he stuck around too long. Then the original owner had died, and his daughter had inherited the place, and she had a knack for business.
What had once been the grunge of neglect was now the clean grunge of aesthetic. The exposed boards on the walls didn’t have rusty nails poking out of them. One of the neon signs behind the bar flickered, but that was a brand decision for the cider that was being advertised. She’d added an axe-throwing arena in the back of the place, updated the music selection to play things other than country from the nineteen-seventies, and fixed the booths—no longer patent leather that was bursting and taped over with poorly matching duct tape.
He’d been disappointed at first when the renovation happened, sure the place would become unbearable, but Reece had to admit it was nice to drink out of glasses that were always clean and hear songs he recognized over the speakers.
He took a seat at the bar and ordered a beer, just as the hair on the back of his neck prickled. He turned his head to the left and saw dark curls in one of the booths. It took a moment for him to make out the features of her face, but—Reece’s wolf growled in recognition, and there was something else under there.
Satisfaction. Annoyance. Hope.
His wolf needed to fucking get it together.
Delainey was off limits.
Of course she was at this fucking bar. That was just his luck these days. As far as he knew, she wasn’t a regular—he came here every couple of weeks and had never run into her before. But it was neutral territory, and she had just as much right to be there as he did.
“Is there something wrong with your beer?” the bartender asked.
Reece glared up at her. Dana, a wolf from the Iron Runner pack, though he didn’t hold that against her, tapped her temple in warning. She was a compact woman with muscular arms covered in colorful ink and close-cropped hair dyed platinum, wearing a black tank top with the Brass Tap logo across the chest.
His eyes must have been glowing. He squeezed them shut and forced himself to calm down a beat.
“Just a bit of stress,” he said.
“Well, you’re in the right place to get rid of that,” said Dana. She flipped a bar towel over her shoulder and moved down the rail to the next customer.
Reece sipped his beer and refused to look back over at Delainey. He’d already seen enough. She was dressed up in a way he’d never seen before, at least from the waist up—a sparkly red top, lips shining with lipstick, eyes looking bigger with whatever makeup she was wearing. Her hair was held back by a large band that made her face stand out even more and let her curls halo from the back of her head. Gold hoops caught the bar light each time she turned her head, and the red top had a wide neckline that sat just off her shoulders.
She was imprinted on his mind. It was pissing him off.
He should just leave, he knew. There were other neutral bars in town.
Hell, there were werewolf bars he could go to that would guarantee he wouldn’t run into a witch. But the Brass Tap was his joint. She didn’t get to come in here and make him leave. Besides, he still had half a beer left, and he wasn’t going to waste his money by abandoning it.
Several minutes later, with his beer down to the dregs, he felt her move. Reece kept his eyes forward, but his wolf strainedunder his skin to sense her as she got closer and closer and closer. She slid onto a stool at the bar, two seats down from him, but no one was sitting between them, and even over all the myriad smells in the bar he could make out her scent—floral, roses maybe, with a hint of fire beneath it. She crossed one leg over the other; her heeled boot hooking on the stool’s footrest, and rested both forearms on the edge of the bar.
Delainey waved down Dana and ordered a shot. Some instinct had Reece ordering the same.
