CHAPTER SIX
Damien
“Dammit!” Kyle said.
Damien cringed, waiting for a hammer to fall on his head. When none did, he relaxed.
Kyle was at the top of the ladder, fastening a wooden slat to the eaves for his cabin. Construction was not Damien’s forte, for obvious reasons. He was just there to hold the ladder.
“I really should have bought a level,” Kyle said. “It’s so hard to tell if this is straight.”
“I think the right side needs to be up a little,” Damien said.
“Really?” Kyle said in surprise. “I feel like the left side is—”
Kyle broke off, remembering that Damien was blind, and laughed.
“It’ll be good if it’s not quite straight,” Damien said. “It’ll add character.”
“I can vouch for that,” Jordan said as he passed by. The planks he dragged along the ground knocked against each other.
“Jordan, can you take a look at this?” Kyle said. “What do you think?”
Damien heard Jordan ease down the planks and step back to get a good look at whatever Kyle was doing.
After a long moment of careful deliberation, Jordan spoke.
“I think you should have bought a level.”
Damien laughed.
“You’re lucky I’m not paying you guys, because you’d both be fired,” Kyle said.
Jordan said something back to Kyle but Damien didn’t hear him. He’d cocked his head. He didn’t know why—some subconscious animal instinct had sent an alert through his body. Perhaps the birds and bugs at the edge of the woods had gotten quieter, or a twig had snapped somewhere off in the distance.
And now that he was focusing his attention toward the woods, he thought he could feel something pressing back against his senses…like the weight of eyes watching him.
“What is it, Damien?” Jordan asked.
“Do you sense that?” Damien asked.
“What?”
“I think there’s something out there. In the woods.”
“Shifters?”
“I don’t know.”
All three of them went silent as they strained their senses. It was scarcely more than a tingle on the back of Damien’s neck but it was still there, and the edge of the forest was too quiet, yes, he was almost sure of it.
It wasn’t a pack. If there were any more than one shifter, Damien, Jordan, and Kyle all would have sensed the presences clearly by now. And it wasn’t a deer or some other prey because such an animal would have no reason to watch them for so long—if it sensed them, it would have bolted. No, the thing watching them was a predator.
It could be a scout, sent to gather intel on Damien’s pack. Or a lone wolf, hoping to get lucky and pounce on a female that strayed too far from the rest of the pack.
Whatever the case, Damien felt that this new presence was a threat.
“I don’t sense anything,” Jordan said.
“Neither do I,” Kyle said.
“Are you sure?” Jordan asked Damien. “Do you still sense it?”
Damien wasn’t surprised they couldn’t sense it. Because he was blind, his other senses were stronger—maybe that was it.
“We need to go after it,” Damien said. He wanted to capture and interrogate the wolf, or if they couldn’t do that, kill it. “Jordan, come with me. Kyle, stay here and keep a lookout.”
Damien pointed to where he thought the presence was and Jordan led the way. Damien went at a fast walk, trusting Jordan to tell him of any obstacles on the ground. As he shifted his attention to trying not to trip, his sense of the presence flickered, but Jordan should be able to detect it soon enough.
As soon as they broke the tree-line, they shifted. Damien cocked his ears and sniffed. Lurking under the heavy, earthy smells of the forest was an alien scent. It was sweet and delicate, almost like a perfume, and quite unlike any shifter Damien had smelled before. It was also so faint that he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t imagining it.
“Do you smell that?” Damien asked.
“I still don’t sense anything, Damien.” There was just a hint of uncertainty in Jordan’s voice now.
Damien started moving in the direction of the scent, as best he could gauge it. The sense of the presence lingered on, but that might have just been an aftereffect, like the way his ears rang after he heard a loud noise. He was starting to doubt himself. Jordan should have spotted the shifter—if it was a shifter—by now. Unless it had fled, but in that case, how could they not have heard it?
Damien went faster and faster, deeper and deeper into the woods. Branches clawed at him. The scent was slipping away. Or was it already gone? Had it ever been there at all? He banged into a tree trunk hard enough to draw blood but didn’t stop. He wasn’t even worried about eliminating a threat anymore—he just wanted to make sure he wasn’t crazy.
The noises of the forest dropped off up ahead. There was something there. Damien pushed forward with a burst of speed—
“Damien!” Jordan yelled, and practically body-checked him to halt him.
“There’s something up ahead,” Damien whispered urgently .
“I know,” Jordan said. “It’s a fifty-foot drop. We’re at the ridge of the valley.”
That made Damien falter. A queasy feeling overcame him. He’d just almost barreled headlong over a cliff in pursuit of…what?
He raised his snout and inhaled deeply one more time.
Nothing.
“You really didn’t sense anything at all?” Damien asked.
“No,” Jordan said.
There was a trace of concern in his voice, concern for Damien’s sanity. Damien shared the concern, with some embarrassment on top. He had been in a hyper vigilant mode ever since Julia had returned with the news that she was pregnant; he was bound to get spooked more often. But he had felt so sure…
“Sorry,” he said, turning back. “Must have just been my nerves.”
“False positives are better than false negatives,” Jordan said.
“I don’t what that means, Doc.”
“It means better safe than sorry, love.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Julia
Julia walked into the house with a shopping bag full of books and found Damien in the kitchen. He was sitting on a chair with his head right next to the open window, listening to the outdoors. Leaning back, he had the front two legs of his chair off the floor in a way that reminded Julia of a cocky high school quarterback. But his face did not match his jaunty posture—his expression was dark, brooding.
“Hi,” she said, putting the bag on the table and wiggling out of her jacket.
“Hey.” He smiled and sat forward. Julia loved that about him. Even when he seemed to have all sorts of weighty things on his mind, as soon as she was with him, all those things vanished and it was only her.
“How was shopping?” he asked.
She had been walking up to kiss him but now she stopped. “What happened to your head?”
Damien frowned. “What’s wrong with my head?”
“There’s dried blood on your forehead.” She reached up and lightly touched the smudge of brownish-red on his temple. The wound, whatever it had been, had already healed.
“Oh, that.” Damien absently placed his hand over her hand on his face, pressing her palm to his cheek. “I just hit my head on something when I was helping with the cabin. A construction site really isn’t a great place to hang around when you’re blind. I was just about to go take a shower, actually.” He cocked one eyebrow while the opposite corner of his mouth slanted up. “Care to join me?” he asked in a low voice that intimated more than a just a shower was going to happen.
“I am feeling a little dirty, now that you mention it,” she said. She took his hand and he led her toward the bathroom. Before they went in, Damien stopped Julia and drew her to him in a deep kiss.
“Hey, listen,” Damien said. “I don’t want you going out into the woods anymore, okay?”
“What? Why not?”
“I’d just be more comfortable if you stayed close to plenty of other people.”
A worm of fear wriggled to life in Julia’s chest.
“Did something happen in the woods?” she asked.
“No.” There was something hidden in Damien’s expression, but Julia couldn’t figure out what it was.
“Then where is this coming from?”
“It’s just to be extra safe. The woods are so big, if anything were to happen, it’d be hard for the pack to get to you to protect you. And it’s harder to sense things coming in the woods. Now that Trax is gone, I don’t think his old pack cares about us at all, and even if they did, I don’t think they’d be organized enough to do anything about it. But you never know. You don’t need to be scared, but as long as you don’t need to go into the woods, I figure, why risk anything?”
“Okay,” Julia said softly. She reached in and turned on the bathroom light. She was still unsettled, but then they were in the bathroom and Damien was wrapping his arms around her from behind and pressing his lips to the nape of her neck. Her worries evaporated as electric shivers branched from the back of her neck all through her body. She rubbed her ass against him, feeling him harden behind her. He slid his hand up under her shirt and cupped her breast while her other hand undid her zipper.
She turned around and started unbuttoning his flannel shirt, peeling the shirt off even as she popped the buttons, her eyes soaking in his body. His muscles bulged tightly against his skin. His body was so hard, hard everywhere. Finally she pulled the shirt all the way off—
And she paused.
There were little brownish-red streaks all over his arms. More dried blood.
“What’s wrong?” Damien asked.
She ran her fingers lightly down his forearm. “Why are you all scratched up?”
He stiffened. Hesitated. The reaction was brief and subtle, barely perceptible, but she could read him well, and she was confident that his voice was not natural when he spoke.
“Huh…I didn’t know I was scratched up.”
A sinking feeling ran through her. He was hiding something.
“You didn’t get that scrape on your head from the construction site, did you?” she asked.
His lips parted and he hesitated. Then his shoulders sagged.
“I just side-swiped a tree trunk. It wasn’t a fight or anything.”
An angry, panicky feeling sprang up in her. He’d lied to her. Why had he lied?
“Why did you side-swipe a tree trunk?” she asked.
“Well, I didn’t do it intentionally,” he said, trying his luck with a half-grin.
Julia did not smile back. “You were running through the woods.”
“Yes.”
“Why? What happened in the woods, Damien?”
“Nothing. I thought I sensed something but I was just imagining it.”
Julia’s heart was thumping now. “What did you sense?”
“I didn’t sense anything—”
“What did you think you sensed?”
“I don’t know. A shifter, maybe. But—”