Haunted Wolves: Green Pines, Book 2 (13 page)

A spontaneous moment of catharsis, and Colin doubted Shane had planned it or encouraged it. It had happened, and he’d been there, ready to give what he could. If Colin wanted the same for Lorelei, he’d have to stop pushing, stop
trying
, and trust her to come to him if she needed him.

And trust himself to do the right thing.

“Come on.” Shane nodded upwards. “Time to go relieve Jay so he can get some rest, maybe.”

Jay would rest better once he’d checked on Eden, and they all needed their alphas on their feet and ready to deal with trouble tomorrow. After one last look at Lorelei, Colin followed Shane through the door to the kitchen and up the stairs.

Zack was where he’d left him hours ago, kneeling beside Kaley’s bed with his forehead pressed to her hand. Jay was in quiet conversation with Stella, but he waved them over.

“Need anything besides a few hours’ sleep?” Shane asked him.

Their alpha shook his head. “I’ll grab a nap later. Listen, I put in a call to Gavin up in Red Rock. I may need someone to head out to the airport for a pickup sometime over the next few days.”

That had its own chilling sense of urgency. Most werewolves avoided airplanes as much as possible, since spinning to a panic in an enclosed space surrounded by humans could be deadly. “For how many?”

“No more than—”

“Kaley?” Zack’s voice was rusty, and Colin turned to find the man halfway to his feet, hope and terror pouring off him in equal measure. “Kaley, can you hear me?”

For a terrifying moment, she didn’t move. Then she shook her head and shoved at his hands, silent tears seeping out of her eyes and down to dampen the hair at her temples.

A noise rattled out of Zack, a rasping groan that sounded like the pained protest of a wounded animal. He wiped away her tears with hands that shook. “Just open your eyes. Please, honey.”

“No.” But she did anyway, blinking up at him for the span of a heartbeat before rolling to her side. She curled into a ball and began to cry in earnest, big, wracking sobs that shook her whole body.

Everyone in the room stood frozen. Jay looked to Stella, who gave him an exasperated shrug that screamed,
I’m not a doctor
. Shane was rooted in place, leaving Colin to watch awkwardly as Zack reached for Kaley and then stopped, his hand hovering over her shoulder, his face full of such raw pain that Colin pitied the poor bastard.

Zack finally curled his fingers toward his palm. “Someone should get the girls. She needs them.”

“I’ll go.” Shane ducked out of the room.

“I’m sorry,” Kaley rasped. “I’m sorry—”

Zack flinched. “Sorry for what?”

She mumbled a response, but the thunder of footsteps running up the stairs drowned it out. And then Lorelei and Mae burst through the door.

“Kaley!” Zack didn’t move fast enough, and Mae went over him, jamming an elbow into his shoulder without seeming to notice. She curled around Kaley, whispering, and Zack backed away from the bed until he bumped into Colin.

Colin steadied the other wolf with a hand on his shoulder. “What did she say?”

“She said, ‘I didn’t know.’” Zack shuddered. “Jay?”

“I’ve got them,” he said. “It’s okay.”

Zack stumbled from the room, and Colin watched him go. “Should I head after him?”

“No.” Jay leaned against the wall, scrubbed his hands over his face and followed through by dragging his fingers through his short hair. “Leave him alone.”

“He’ll be all right,” Lorelei said quietly, her tear-streaked face bearing a relieved smile. She smoothed a tangled lock from Kaley’s forehead, and her smile widened. “Everything’s all right now.”

Her smile was so brilliant, Colin believed her.

Chapter Nine

Kaley was pale and withdrawn. Quiet. Her normally healthy appetite had dwindled to nothing, and she stayed in her room, sat by the window and stared out at the front yard. She spoke when spoken to, but otherwise she barely made a sound.

After three days, Lorelei was officially freaking out.

“She almost died,” Stella had said, by way of explanation. “My guess? That takes a while to get over.”

But Lorelei had seen Kaley hurt. She’d seen her rage until exhausted and then slip into the depths of depression. Highs and lows, but she’d never seen anything like this.

It became another thing for Lorelei to manage, items on a mental checklist she was too scared to write down. First on the list was Zack. Nothing mattered to Kaley the way he did, but Lorelei hesitated to beg his help. Only one thing terrified her more than Kaley’s dead, flat stare—not seeing it melt into warmth at the sight of Zack.

So she started with a small thing, a meal. She drove to China Star and ordered so much food they had to give her a cutaway liquor box instead of a bag. She nestled the box in the passenger seat of Jay’s truck, pushed down her fear and sang along with the country station on the radio.

The dining room downstairs was too much, but Mae set up a folding table from the craft room, and they ate by the window as Kaley gazed out at the trees.

“I missed this.” Mae ate her Mongolian beef straight from the takeout container, wielding her cheap wooden chopsticks with ease. “Having a Chinese restaurant a block away was the best thing about our apartment in Memphis.”

“Chinese food and bad action movies,” Lorelei agreed. She swallowed a sigh and waved her carton in front of Kaley. “Do you want to try my orange chicken?”

“No, thanks.” She poked at the remains of an egg roll she’d pulled apart.

Mae glanced at Lorelei, worry clouding her blue eyes. “She got crab rangoon too. And fried rice. If you let me eat all of it, I won’t fit in my pants.”

“Share it with the guys,” Kaley suggested dully.

The guys weren’t around—at least, not Shane and Colin. They’d split early that morning, roaring off on their bikes. “They’re gone,” Lorelei murmured. “Official pack business, I guess.”

“Too bad,” Mae said thoughtfully. “You know what I noticed yesterday? Shane has nice hands.”

That
got Kaley’s attention. She arched an eyebrow and reached for her beer. “Isn’t he off limits?”

Mae shrugged and stole a piece of shrimp from an open carton. “No one told
me
not to look. And it’s nice, you know. To like looking again.”

If confessions would pique Kaley’s interest where nothing else would, Lorelei had more than a few. “I kissed Colin.”

“Really?” Mae’s eyes widened. “When?”

“In Memphis.”

Kaley ate a bit of her egg roll, her eyes just as wide as she chewed and swallowed. “You did
not
.”

“Did too. So if anyone’s going to be getting in trouble, it’ll be me.”

Mae’s gaze flickered over Kaley’s slowly disappearing eggroll, and Lorelei could almost feel the effort she put into sweeping aside the past year to create a beautifully mundane moment of gossip over Chinese food. “Well? Don’t be stingy with the details. Is he any good?”

Lorelei’s cheeks heated. “I’d rather hear what you think about the parts of Shane that aren’t his hands.”

“A weak diversion unworthy of you,” Mae retorted, brandishing the chopsticks. “What do you say, Kaley? I think that means Colin doesn’t know what to do with his tongue. Tragic.”

“I think…if it had been bad, she’d be more than willing to say so.” A tiny smile curved the corner of Kaley’s mouth. “Which means it must have been really, really good.”

“Traitor,” Lorelei muttered.

“Whatever.” Kaley peered into the carton of shrimp and selected one. “I’m the one stuck with no prospects.”

“You can have Shane and his nice hands,” Mae said, her tone light. “As long as I get to keep looking. But I thought you were noticing Fletcher, the man with the pretty everything.”

“He’s a sheep in wolf’s clothing. A gentleman masquerading as a scoundrel.” Kaley shrugged. “But being alone isn’t so bad. It might be kind of nice.”

No more chasing Zack.
The sentiment hung in the air, even if she wouldn’t say it outright, and Lorelei’s heart ached. In a perfect world, Kaley could hold on a little longer, wait him out.

But their world was far from perfect. Zack had run out as soon as Kaley had regained consciousness, and he hadn’t come back. Maybe he never would. That was the reality they had to live with.

“There are worse things than being alone,” Lorelei agreed.

“We don’t need men.” Mae offered her cardboard container to Kaley again while reaching for a steamed dumpling. “We’re werewolves, so we can do all our own heavy lifting. And you can stream porn anywhere.”

“Heavy lifting?” Kaley arched both eyebrows. “Do I want to know what that means in this context?”

Lorelei sipped her beer. “You could wait a couple months and ask Shane?”

Mae heaved a melodramatic sigh. “You know what I mean. Furniture and boxes. And pickle jars.”

A rusty laughed bubbled out of Kaley. “This conversation keeps getting kinkier. Save me, Lorelei. Tell me about Colin’s magic lips.”

Her blush returned with a vengeance, and Lorelei occupied herself with another long, thoughtful bite before finally relenting.

The barn had been partially converted to a workshop already, but the thing it lacked most was usable storage space. There were racks and boards on the walls, places to hang tools, but no shelves or cabinets. They’d been working on fixing that, slowly but surely.

Colin was working on it now, and Lorelei hovered in the wide, open doorway and watched him pull a nail from between his compressed lips and hammer it into the side of a solid wooden rack.

He’d discarded his flannel shirt in spite of the cool autumn breeze, and the muscles in his arms and shoulders flexed as he moved. She’d never been a fan of
less is more
when it came to her view of the male physique, but he did something to a tight black T-shirt that she couldn’t help but appreciate. “Hi.”

He pulled the last nail from his mouth and turned to smile at her. “Hey. Kaley and Mae aren’t behind you, are they? This is supposed to be a surprise.”

“Nope. They’re making cookies.” She eyed the rack, laden with shelves that looked just the right size to cure soap. “You’ve been busy.”

“Not just me.” He hammered home the final nail and gave the rack an experimental shake. “If I’d done this on my own, it wouldn’t be this sturdy. But I can follow directions.”

“Mm-hmm.” Lorelei pulled the door shut behind her. With no lights on and the waning sunlight from outside mostly cut off, deep shadows stretched across the barn’s interior.

Colin flipped the hammer onto the nearby table and wiped the sawdust from his hands. His gaze swept over her, lingering on her face as his smile softened. “You look pleased with yourself.”

“I am.” She stepped close enough to touch, folded her fingers around his belt and tugged him across the remaining distance. “Want to be pleased with me too?”

She might have imagined his low growl, but not the way he clenched his hands. “More pleased, you mean?”

This close, she couldn’t keep up the teasing façade. He’d be able to hear the blood pounding through her heart, see it heating her skin. So she skimmed her hand around his waist, slipped it under his shirt at the small of his back.

He shuddered, as if that small touch rocketed through him. His eyes drifted shut, and she heard his pulse hammering in time with her own. “Lorelei…”

“I want you.” The truth, offered in a raw whisper. “But it doesn’t have to go too far. Just kiss me.”

He exhaled shakily and pressed his lips to her temple. “Give me a line. I haven’t been good at finding them myself lately, but if you give me one…I promise I’ll hold to it.”

“Second base.” Silly words, perhaps, but instead of feeling like an awkward kid, nervous about some boy’s hand up her sweater, she felt powerful.

His laughter wrapped around her, low and warm. “What’s that? Anything above the waist?”

The emphasis he placed on the word
anything
was downright filthy. “That’s the line. Think you can do it?”

“Do what?” His hand slid to her hip, edged under the hem of her shirt. She shivered as warm fingertips traced a circle at the small of her back. “Stay above the line?”

“Yeah.” If she didn’t give him the boundaries he seemed to need so much, he’d stop touching her altogether.

He laughed again, the sound so much dirtier with his lips pressed to her ear. “You’re not wondering what else I can do while staying above the line?”

“Wondering? No, but I do hope the answer is long and creative.”

Colin closed his hands around her waist and hoisted her onto the sturdy worktable with an effortless flex of muscle. It was higher than a usual table, high enough to bring her to eye level with him.

Smiling, he smoothed her hair, then spent an endless moment studying her, his gaze tracing her face. Memorizing every feature. “You are so damn beautiful.”

She’d had the words bestowed as a compliment, but she’d also had them hurled at her in accusation. For a moment, Lorelei froze as her mind scrambled to sort out the moment.

“Lorelei?” He stroked his thumbs over her cheeks. “What did I say?”