Page 31 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
I don't react visibly. I've had years of practice not reacting visibly to things that require a reaction, and I use that practice now, keeping my shoulders loose and my expression level while I track it in my periphery. She's looking at the screen. Looking up. Looking at the screen. The second woman leans in. The man follows.
They're looking at Harper.
Across the table, Harper has gone still in the particular way she goes still when she's clocked something and is deciding how to handle it. She feels the room shift the same way I do—I've noticed that about her, the observational instinct, the waynothing much gets past her when she's paying attention. She's paying attention now.
My wolf, which has been running at a low, steady hum all morning, sharpens into full alert without my permission.
I keep my hands around my coffee mug and breathe through it.
The man is the one who acts on it.
He's the kind of energy that interprets a room reading him as an invitation—mid-thirties, the particular confidence of an existence that has never once been handed a reason to adjust its expectations downward. He stands up from the table with his phone in his hand and crosses toward us with casual entitlement, believing what he's about to do is reasonable.
He stops at the edge of our booth.
"Sorry to interrupt," he opens, in a tone that isn't sorry at all. He's addressing Harper directly, phone angled slightly toward her. "You're Harper Collins, right? Dawson Whitaker's?—"
"No," Harper replies, flat and immediate.
He doesn't take it. "I saw the news coverage. The wedding, the—" He tilts his head, looking her over, and the back of my neck tightens. "—you look exactly like her. Same hair, same face." He grins, and there's nothing friendly in it. "So either you're not her, or you're sitting in a diner in the middle of nowhere trying really hard to look like you're not her."
"I think you should go back to your table," Harper replies, her voice dropping to something flat and final.
"Come on." He leans a hand against the back of the booth, boxing her in slightly, and something in my chest goes very, very cold. "It's a good story. Runaway bride turns up with some guy in a back-country diner while her fiancé's on every channel saying he's worried sick." He glances at me then—a dismissive sweep, already categorizing me as irrelevant—and looks back at Harper with a smirk, thinking he's found leverage. "Does heknow where you are? Because I'm thinking he'd probably pay for that information. Or maybe a photo." He starts to lift the phone. "All I need is one?—"
And my wolf comes fully online.
Not gradually. All at once, the way it does when something it has claimed is directly threatened—a hot, immediate surge that moves up through my chest and into my hands before I can get ahead of it. Every instinct I have fires simultaneously.Get between them. Remove him. She is yours, and he is too close, and that phone is going to —
Stop.
I press both hands flat against the table under the edge and hold there for exactly two seconds, breathing through the wave of it, talking my wolf down the way I've been talking it down from the first moment I set eyes on her—methodically, with everything I've got, because the alternative is not something I can let happen in a diner in a crossroads town.
She is fine. She is handling it. You do not own her. Stand down.
My wolf loudly and without nuance disagrees with this assessment.
But it listens.
I release a slow breath, force my face into something that isn't what's happening underneath it, and speak.
"That's enough."
I don't raise my voice. There's no point in raising your voice when you can do considerably more with the alternative. I simply speak, level and final, and something underneath the words—the Alpha I usually keep contained and am currently not fully containing—does exactly what it's meant to do.
The man stops talking.
He looks at me for the first time. Really looks, the way people look when something in their nervous system is registering avariable they hadn't accounted for. I hold his gaze with the steady, unhurried patience, having no doubt about how this ends and is simply waiting for him to arrive at the same conclusion.
I don't move. I don't stand up. I don't touch him or threaten him or do anything that could be called a confrontation by anyone watching. I simply look at him and let him understand, without a word of clarification, that continuing is not an option he actually has.
The phone lowers.
"I was—" he starts.
"You're done," I tell him, same tone, same quiet. "Walk away."
He holds it for about three seconds—pride and self-preservation negotiating—and then he walks away.
