Page 78 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
His patience has run out.
So has mine.
I step out of the treeline and into the clearing, ready to go head-to-head with Harper’s ex.
29
HARPER
Istay in the treeline for exactly as long as it takes Logan to step into the clearing.
Then I follow him.
He hears me the moment I move—I know he does, because his shoulders shift almost imperceptibly and he turns his head a fraction, enough to clock that I'm beside him—and for a moment I brace for the signal to go back. It doesn't come. The gray eyes find me for exactly one second—seeing exactly what I'm doing and exactly why, the way they always do—and then he turns back to the clearing.
He doesn't send me back.
Good.
I stand beside him at the clearing's edge—the lodge at our backs, the treeline flanking us on both sides, holding the specific stillness that means the pack is in it and waiting—and I watch the vehicles.
The engines cut.
All three at once, the silence landing in the clearing like something deliberate, and then the doors open.
Croft went first, from the lead vehicle, doing the thing Croft always does, which is assess before he moves—scanning the clearing, the lodge, and the treeline, his eyes moving in the professional pattern I've watched across a dozen of Dawson's events. He clocks Logan immediately. He clocks me two seconds later, and something changes in his expression that I file away without reacting to.
Then the rear door of the first SUV opens.
Dawson steps out.
I haven't seen him in person since I walked out of the east wing of the venue with my heart somewhere in my shoes and my hands completely steady, which I have always thought said more about our relationship than anything else. He looks exactly like he looks on television, which is to say he looks exactly like he was assembled to look—the dark hair perfectly ordered; the jacket fitted to the specific degree that says money without announcing it; and the posture of an individual who never once entered a room without expecting to be its primary point of reference.
He looks across the clearing and finds me standing next to Logan.
There is a shift in his face. It moves fast, and he manages it fast, and if I hadn't spent years learning the gap between Dawson's public face and his private one, I might have missed it. But I see it—first the calculation when his eyes land on Logan, the brief assessment of someone measuring a threat—and then, for exactly a fraction of a second, something uglier. A curl at the edge of his lips. A quality in his eyes that isn't fear and isn't respect.
Disgust.
Gone in an instant, packed away behind the composed facade, but it was there. I saw it. And from the particular stillness that comes off Logan beside me, I know he saw it too.
Dawson crosses the clearing with the measured pace, deciding the situation is manageable, his security fanning out behind him with practiced spacing. He stops twenty feet away.
His eyes move to Logan again—the assessment is brief, the kind that happens when someone is recalculating—and then they come back to me.
"Harper." His voice is the voice from the television. Measured. Warm at the edges. Calibrated to sound like concern in front of witnesses. "Come back to the vehicle. We can talk privately."
"No," I tell him, and the word comes out cleaner and flatter than I expected, stripped of everything except its own meaning.
His jaw tightens, almost imperceptibly. "You're embarrassing yourself. You've been hiding out with strangers on a mountain while everyone who cares about you has been looking?—"
"You've been looking," I interrupt, keeping my voice level. "Everyone else has been following your lead because you've spent all that time on television explaining to the country that I had a breakdown." I hold his gaze. "I didn't have a breakdown. I walked in on you with your colleague in the east wing of the venue while guests were still being seated. And then I took your phone, and I looked at every message you didn't want me to see."
Something moves through the pack in the treeline. Not a sound—nothing that visible—but a quality of attention that shifts, a collective understanding landing in the silence around the clearing. I feel it without looking.
Good. They heard it.
Dawson's features do something carefully. "Harper, this isn't the place?—"
