Page 57 of Bound to the Wolf
“Reece,” she said, suddenly serious. He didn’t seem to sense the magic, still playing, still tugging on her to go further.
“Reece, get back here.” She put as much command into her voice as she could, for all the good that did.
A sixth sense had her raising a personal ward just as a blast of magic hit them from deeper in the forest. The impact struck like a wall of compressed air, hot and electric, and it bent the saplings in a ten-foot radius outward from the point of contact,stripping leaves and sending a shower of bark spinning past her face.
She threw up a stronger shield, or she should have, but her magic was still wonky, and a blast of power leveled a sapling in front of her. The young tree snapped at its base with a wet crack, splintering into pale yellow shards, and the concussive force of her own misfire kicked dirt and leaves into her eyes.
Fuck.
“Reece, get back!”
With no better idea, she ran for the ward line, knowing that Reece had to chase or the pain would possibly kill them both.
Branches whipped across her forearms as she crashed through undergrowth she hadn’t noticed on the way out, and the tether screamed between them, white-hot now, dragging him after her. She ran thirty feet past the ward line, just to make sure he would cross into safety before she stopped, then looked back. She cast out her senses, trying to feel where the magic had come from and what it could have meant.
But this far back from the ward, with it keeping them safe, it was useless.
Reece padded up to her and looked at her with a serious face, and it was strange to realize she could read the expressions on a wolf’s face almost as easily as she could on a man’s.
“We can’t go exploring that alone,” she reluctantly agreed. “We don’t know how many of them are out there.”
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
Reece had been a wolf for so long that at that moment he was running more on instinct.
Run, protect, defend.
Delainey tried to take the lead, but he padded back to the pack house instead of heading for the cottage. He had snuck moments in his human form, mostly in the kitchen at three a.m., making himself bowls of cereal and sneaking a yogurt or two. But these days the wolf wore easier than his other skin.
He took her in through the back door and padded up the stairs to his own room. Delainey wasn’t asking questions, and she seemed a bit preoccupied.
Not that he could blame her. He didn’t know how he had ignored the scent of magic as they passed over the ward, which they must have done at some point.
It had smelled a bit like Delainey, he guessed, and that was one scent he was getting used to, one he never wanted to forget.
His room was a bit messy, which he might have felt guilty about in his other form. Dirty laundry was piled in one corner. An empty coffee cup sat on his bedside table, one he’d needto take down to the kitchen before it started growing a science experiment.
But he couldn’t feel embarrassed, not when he had Delainey in his space. His wolf really liked that. He couldn’t ignore it. This thing was supposed to be inconvenient, supposed to be bad. It wasn’t supposed to feel like the most natural thing in the world.
And yet it did.
Alone in the privacy of his room, Reece summoned his other form and shifted back into a man. Delainey’s eyes went wide. She nearly choked and spun around to face the wall.
He stood there naked, and it took him a moment to realize what he had just done.
“Shit, I’m sorry.” The words were gruff and a little hard to form as he was getting used to having his vocal cords back. “I forgot that you’re…”a witch, he almost said.
He could imagine the scowl even though she was facing away from him.
Reece quickly grabbed clothes from the top drawer and slipped on underwear and pants, knowing there was not really a good way to finish his statement. “Not used to naked men,” he settled on. “I’m sorry, it’s not normally a thing in the pack.”
“I’ve seen plenty of naked men in my life,” Delainey shot back.
He couldn’t stop the growl that formed in the back of his throat, but he forced himself to ignore it.
She was testing him, he knew, and she was rattled.
