Page 32 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
I pick up my coffee.
My wolf is still running hot underneath everything, possessive and unfinished, and I breathe through it steadily and without expression until it settles into something I can work with. It takes longer than it should.
Harper is watching me.
"You didn't have to do that," she tells me quietly once the man is fully seated back in his booth.
"I know."
"I was handling it."
"You were," I agree. "I know that too."
She doesn't fill the silence, and I can see the calculation happening—the thing that happened, what it means, and what it says about me that I stepped in the way I did. She's sharp enough to be doing that math, and I let her do it without rushing her toward any particular answer.
"He had his phone out," she finally observes.
"Yeah."
"He was going to take a picture."
"That was my read."
She looks down at her coffee and then back up. What's on her face sits somewhere past the edges of the words I have for it. "Thank you," she offers finally.
"Don't mention it."
She almost smiles. "You sound like Mateo when you say that."
"I'll tell him you noticed. He'll be insufferable about it."
That gets a real one—brief and genuine, the corners of her eyes catching the light—and my wolf goes very still in the particular way it does when something lands close to the center of what it wants.
I look at my coffee.
We pay and leave,and I subtly watch the table of three the whole way to the door without being obvious about it. The man doesn't look up. Smart.
Outside in the parking lot, the sky has shifted, and the pale, clear morning has taken on an edge, the cloud cover building from the west, suggesting the weather is moving faster than the forecast suggested. I check my phone while Harper gets in the passenger side.
The main highway east is flagged. The storm system is faster than projected; road closure is likely within the hour. The alternate route runs deeper into rural territory—longer by about forty minutes, less traveled, but clear.
I get in and pull up the map.
"Change of plans," I tell her.
Harper looks at the sky through the windshield. "The weather."
"Main highway's going to close. There's an alternate route that runs through the backcountry. It's longer."
"How much longer?"
"An additional forty minutes, maybe fifty onto our original route." I glance over at her. "It's that, or we wait it out somewhere."
She considers this for approximately two seconds. "Drive," she decides.
I pull out of the lot and take the turn that heads deeper into the rural stretch, away from the town and the diner and the man with the phone, the road narrowing as it goes and the sky darkening above the treeline on either side.
Harper is quiet for a few minutes, watching the landscape change through the window. Then, without turning to look at me, "You knew exactly what you were doing in there."
