Come nightfall, Jack’s mood still hadn’t lightened. And that in itself irritated him. He was a fast healer. From everything. Pain and heartbreak had never left a dent on him. But it was midnight, he was stuffed full of grilled chicken and veggies, he had this whole adventure sprawling out in front of him, and he was grumpy.

All because some little chickadee had decided that his priorities were not her priorities.

He didn’t even know her, for God’s sake!

He. Did. Not. Know. Thea. Redgrave.

He was not the kind of man who liked to keep a leash on a woman at all. He was a true lone wolf. He’d been that way for twenty years. Jack liked to walk into a poker game knowing exactly how much he had to put on a table, so to speak. A man simply couldn’t do that if he was making tabulations for two.

He had never had any ambitions for a woman past a pleasant, sweaty evening or two. Which was why it perplexed him as to why he was so bothered that this Thea Redgrave apparently had the exact same laissez-faire attitude.

She’d made the decision that was right for her. Jack respected that. Hell, he lived by that code himself. So why did he keep replaying the moment she’d disappeared out the front door? What made her so special?

He rolled over so as not to face the bed she’d slept in the night before, and laughed humorlessly at the wood-paneled wall. He knew exactly what had made her so special—

“You’re killing me.”

Jack sat bolt upright as his door swung open and Tre sagged against the doorjamb, his red hair a burning blaze in the silvery moonlight and his eyes squinting without his glasses. He wore no shirt, just pajama bottoms, and Jack saw that his entire torso and arms were covered in tattoos.

“‘Scuse me?”

“I said, you’re fucking killing me with all this obsessing you’re doing in here.”

Jack furrowed his brow. “What are you talking about?”

“I mean,” Tre said and knocked his forehead into the doorjamb just enough to make a few good thumps, “that that asshole sent that blue light straight through our idiot-gentlemanly hearts and now you and me and Goliath are all cosmically connected. Which means that I can feel you in here obsessing about something when I’m tired as hell and I just want to sleep. So I came in here to tell you to let it fucking go and go to sleep already so that I can finally relax, alright?”

Jack blinked at Tre for a minute. “Damn. This shit really runs deep, doesn’t it?”

“You mean this link between us? Yeah. Did you feel it when Jean Luc went into town today?”

“Yeah. I felt it.” And he’d hated it. A displaced estrangement from even his own body. He’d wanted, needed, Jean Luc to get back here already. When the big guy had returned, two bags of groceries in each arm, then and only then had Jack felt like he could breathe again. It was terrible. Especially for a lone wolf.

Tre studied Jack for a second. “It’s the girl, isn’t it. The one who left?”

“Huh? Yeah. She’s making me toss and turn. Not sure why, though.” Jack dragged a heavy hand over the back of his neck. He was exhausted.              

“You have a crush on her. And you wish she’d stayed,” Tre said, shrugging, as if it really were just as simple as that.

“Is that right?”

“From where I’m standing.”

Jack looked up at Tre then, really looked at him. This whole time he’d been looking at him as more of a boy than anything else. With his blush and glasses and millennial skill set. But Jack couldn’t deny that standing in the doorway with his five o’clock shadow and skeptically raised eyebrow was a grown man.

“Not used to having my thoughts picked apart like this,” Jack said.

“Hey, I’m just trying to get some shuteye.”

“I’ll try to keep it down on my end,” Jack agreed.

Tre nodded and knocked his hand against the doorjamb. A kind of goodbye without having to say goodbye.

“Hey!” Jack called after him, making him pause.

“Yeah?”

“Why do you think I’m not keeping Jean Luc awake?”

“The guy ran seven miles when he got home from errands, ate a chicken and a half at dinner, and weighs 260 pounds. Something tells me that giant isn’t having sleeping problems.”

They grinned at each other for half a second before Tre banged the doorjamb one more time.

***

 

Jack forced himself into a fitful sleep, more for Tre’s sake than his own, and awoke with a blue light in his eyes.

He blinked blearily and realized he was standing in the middle of the room, sort of swaying. He was in his underwear and knew that he should probably get some shoes on. And pants and… no need.

He followed the blue light out into the hallway, palming the walls as he passed like he was aboard a rolling cruise ship.

He hesitated first outside of Tre’s door and then outside of Jean Luc’s, wondering if he should wake them and invite them along on this journey of his, but there went that blue light and damn. Couldn’t let it go, could he?

Always had been a sucker for those shiny, pretty things.

Like Thea. Beautiful and delicate and strong and shiny. He swayed for a second on the back porch, barefoot and shivering in the night even though it was warm.

Thea.

Huh. He stuttered on the steps, wondering, for a single clear moment, what the hell he was doing in the backyard, down by the lake. Shouldn’t he be in bed? Wouldn’t Thea tell him to get back inside?

Didn’t matter. Girl was gone and that blue light felt like home. It beat in his chest and led him into the forest. It was so easy to follow. Just step by step by step. He ignored the stinging of the raspberry bushes against his exposed arms and legs and didn’t even notice when he stepped into the springy moss, bitterly cold with the clear spring water, fresh from the earth.

The woods were darker back here, more ancient, the trees close enough to block most of the wind off of Lake Michigan.

He was so tired. So tired. And there was the light, so gorgeous he could almost taste it. Jack swayed in the dark, squinting. There was something behind the light, too. A figure. Dark and watching. Jack heard words on the air. Beckoning him? Warning him? He wasn’t sure.

All he knew was that he wanted to touch the light, swallow it down, bring it inside him.

He stepped forward, his eyes half open, one hand extended.

“NO!”

The scream seemed to come from every side of him. Jack felt the Earth rotate in ecstatic fast motion, spinning him off onto the edges of the merry-go-round.

His eyes opened and closed. There she was. His girl. His Thea. She was crouching over him like a lioness. She was springing forward, grappling with a man, her teeth bared and snarling.

Jack tried to stand, he crawled forward. She was in trouble. He rose and Thea stumbled backwards, shouting, a horrible red blooming across her arm, dying her white shirt scarlet.

The color jolted Jack and he held her in his eyes, trying to blot out that glowing blue. The figure lunged at them, almost on them, but pulled up short when they heard a crashing through the woods behind them.

The dark figure whirled, focusing down into the size of a dime. He took his darkness with him, into the blue light, and it all dissolved away.

 

***

 

“Here!” Thea shouted, sagging under Jack’s weight. “We’re here!”

He was half holding her, half leaning on her and along with the wound on her shoulder, she wasn’t going to be able to support them much longer.

The brush exploded to her left and Martine burst through, followed quickly by an underwear-clad Jean Luc and Tre in pajama pants.

Jean Luc rushed forward and took Jack’s weight off of Thea while Martine marched a tight circle in the area where that asshole had just attacked them. Martine sniffed the air, testing it, almost, for wind.

“He was here?”

“Arturo?” Thea couldn’t help but spit the name. “Yeah, he was here alright. Damn near lured Jack into some sort of blue-moth-light trap thing. Like he was hypnotized or something. I got here just in time.”

“Yes,” Martine eyed her shrewdly. “You did.”

“You’re bleeding, Thea.” Tre came up beside her and gestured to the arm she had clamped to her stomach. The wound was in her shoulder but she didn’t want to jostle it too much.

“Yeah. The bastard got one good lick in.”

“Get her back,” Jack gasped, surprising them all with a moment of consciousness. “We have to get her back.”

“Me?” Thea exclaimed in indignation. “It’s you we have to get back!”

But he was out again, dead weight for Jean Luc and Tre to carry back through the woods.

“You came back,” Martine said, falling into step beside Thea as the group picked their way back through the forest.

“Looks like it.” Apparently, this chick had a gift for stating the obvious.

“Why.” It was barely a question.

“Don’t know.”

Martine huffed out a breath. Humans! So stubborn. “Please try and explain, Thea. It might not seem like it to you, but we’re in a battle here, with some pretty high stakes.” She shook her head back toward where Thea had rescued Jack from the blue light. “Any information you have could be the difference between life and death for one of us. Please try and explain.”

Thea let out a long, low breath. “I really can’t describe it. I was headed toward the airport in Harbor Springs when something just said ‘go back’.” She didn’t mention that that thing had sounded an awful lot like Jack Warren.

“Intuition? A vision? Someone’s voice in your head?” Martine prompted.

“I can’t explain it, I said!” Thea was getting frustrated, her arm ached and her one friend in this group was getting hauled, unconscious, through the woods, after an attack by a demon. “I was just walking up to the cabin when I saw this weird blue light and Jack following it in his underwear. They moved fast. I barely caught up in time.”

“I didn’t expect this, Thea, but it seems you have a connection to the group. I wonder if the other women do as well.”

“Connection? What kind of connection?”

Martine eyed her. “The kind that has you turning around and heading back when you’re dead set on leaving.”

Thea couldn’t deny that it hadn’t felt a hell of a lot like a choice. She’d wanted to go and hadn’t been able to. Simple as that. “How long do you anticipate this connection to last?” She tried to keep the ire out of her tone and didn’t fully succeed.

“I imagine until the new moon,” Martine replied thoughtfully. “Their transformation will be complete and the nature of their connection to one another should change. They’ll be able to leave one another’s company. And I can only imagine you’ll be able to as well.”

The new moon. Just short of two weeks. She could do that. A second longer and she was out of there. But she could do two weeks.

They broke through the woods and were back on the lawn of the big house. Thea stooped and scooped up her bag, right where she’d dropped it when she’d beelined through the woods after Jack’s retreating form. Only Jack would have been able to truly understand what that gesture meant. To leave one’s bag behind. It meant that she would have left everything behind in order to make sure he was safe.

“How did you know to come to the woods?” Thea asked as they all made their way up the porch.

“I didn’t,” Martine confessed. “I heard the boys wake up. They knew he was in trouble. I followed them through the woods and then outstripped them the last little bit of the way.”

“Huh.”

Martine said nothing, sensing that Thea had more to say.

She did, in fact, have more to say. “Why are you here, Martine?”

“I’m a demon hunter.”

“So you’re using us to find Arturo?”

Martine looked surprised. “What would make you say that?”

Thea gestured around, to everything, as if to say, everything, but before they could speak anymore, Jack groaned up ahead where they were hauling him into the house.

Thea left Martine behind and charged ahead, where she could see Jack, his eyes just green slits.

“Bring him to his bed,” she demanded.

“He’s all dirty from the forest,” Tre said, huffing from his half of Jack’s weight.

“I’ll change the sheets in the morning,” Thea said. “Just get him there.”

She hurried after them, dumping her bag on the floor. Tre dumped Jack’s feet on the bed and Jean Luc, much more gently, laid his torso down.

“Ah,” Jean Luc said, shifting his feet. “You want us to stay?”

“No,” Thea shook her head. She didn’t know how she knew, but it was supposed to be just her and Jack. “We’re fine. He needs to rest.”

She closed the door behind the men, her head spinning, dead on her feet, and crouched next to the bed.

She carefully peeled away her T-shirt and was relieved to see her shoulder wound was more surface level than anything. There was a soft knock at the door.

“Thea?” It was Martine. “I brought you some stuff for your arm.”

Thea opened the door, not caring that she was standing there in just a sports bra and jeans. Martine had a bowl of water, a few rags, antiseptic, and bandages.

She quickly cleaned up Thea’s wound. “I don’t think it’ll scar.”

“Fine if it does,” Thea shrugged. She observed the bandaged wound and her now-clean arm. Not a spot of blood left on her. Thea looked up at Martine and nodded, just once, but sincerely. “Thanks.”

“It’s what I’m here for,” Martine said and closed the door behind her.

It was a common phrase, one that people often said. ‘It’s what I’m here for.’ But somehow, down in her gut, Thea knew that it was really true. Martine meant that phrase in a lot of ways, all at once. Before she could think more on that, though, Jack shifted on the bed.

“You came back,” he croaked as she tugged a clean T-shirt on.

“You’re wildly observant.”

He chuckled and groaned. She wasn’t 100% sure he was completely awake.

“You need sleep,” she told him, pulling the covers over his stomach.

He grunted, but didn’t protest.

Thea rose from her crouch, kicking off her shoes and shucking off her pants. She took a step toward the other bed, her bed, but Jack groaned and reached out for her. “No.”

“Jack.” She lifted an eyebrow at him and spoke as if he were an errant child. He couldn’t possibly be asking her to sleep in bed with him.

“Please,” he whispered, his eyes just slits and his forehead still gritted with pain and confusion.

She sighed and slid under his covers without ceremony, basically having to lay on top of him in the tiny twin bed.

The second their legs tangled, her smooth skin against his wiry, blond hair, something went silent in Thea’s head. It was an insistent, low-level grating note that had apparently been ringing in her head all day. She touched Jack, skin to skin, and it went silent.

He tightened his arm around her shoulders, mindful of her injury, and brought her head in to the crook of his neck. Her nose was filled with the scent of him. Pennies, she thought, listening to him fall out of consciousness into what she hoped was a peaceful sleep. He smells like pennies.

 

***

 

Jack woke knowing that whatever that blue light had been, it must have killed him dead. Because he was lying with an armful of sweaty, sleeping Thea Redgrave. And that meant that he’d gone to heaven.

It wasn’t until she shifted in her sleep, slowly waking up, stretching out one of those long legs and then the other, that Jack let his mind drift back to what had really happened.

“You saved me,” he told her, knowing just from his view of the top of her head, that she was awake. He could feel her yawn against his chest.

“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled, shifting around again.

He grinned at the ceiling. “You’re grumpy in the morning.”

She lifted her head and scowled at him, those clear blue eyes just a few inches from his and her black hair swimming every which way. “I’m used to waking up without someone yapping in my ear.”

He shifted her so that she lay just a bit more firmly over his chest. “I’m gonna take that to mean you don’t got a man at home.”

She scowled at him again. “None of your business.”

Thea rolled off of him and sat up, stretching her arms to the sky, her white T-shirt lifting up her back and exposing a few pale inches of skin above those black underwear she wore.

“Maybe I’d like it to be my business,” he told her.

“Is that right.” She used the same phrase that he’d used countless times with other people.

“Yeah. That’s right.” He gripped her at her waist and sent her tumbling back onto his chest. They were eye to eye, her hands braced on either side of his face. There was one tenuous second when she could have pushed away from him. She didn’t. Instead, she stretched that long body out over his and let herself go ahead and be nose to nose with Jack Warren.

“I’m thinking I might give you a chance to say thank you for saving your life,” she said to him, her eyes wry and half-mast.

At first he just grinned at her, liking the view, the long, ropy feel of her, her surprising softness under his hands which had begun to roam over her. But that smile faded, little by little, as her words started to really sink in. She had saved his life. She’d come back, charged after him into the woods, stopped him from getting dead and faced a demon dead on. Then she’d snuggled up to him the rest of the night. All mirth was gone from that lined face of his by the time his large, rough palm found its way under her hair to the back of her neck.

“Thank you,” he said, in such a serious, intentional voice that Thea rocked back just a tiny bit, surprised. She’d expected a joke, but she was getting intensity.

Their eyes held fast on one another’s for a full ten seconds, their legs tangled and bare, her softness pressing into that lanky muscular chest of his. And then they simply met in the middle.

Thea’s hair slipped forward and fell all around them. The first touch of their lips was soft, but not chaste. They were already sliding into one another. Their mouths were half open and silent, and their eyes still focused on one another. And then Thea’s tongue traced at the inside of Jack’s lower lip.

A grunt left his mouth the same second his hands tightened at her hips, holding her even closer to him. The bottom two fingers of his hand slipped underneath the band of her underwear. He grunted again. She was so quiet. It was driving him nuts. This fierce, solid, intrepid woman and she was quiet as a church mouse.

Thea, barely bothering to pull her mouth away from his, spoke against him. “Why doesn’t this feel like a first kiss?”

He knew, instinctually, that she wasn’t really asking him. She was asking the universe. A cosmic question. She was right, though, that there was nothing testing about this kiss. There was no maybe this or maybe that. There was no learning each other. This was just about melting. A full-bodied heat.

One of his hands slid a little further into her underwear and the other tangled back up into her hair, anchoring her to him. He had the distinct impression that they were fusing together, a slow, inexorable, messy melt. He was losing the boundaries of himself and he never lost the boundaries of himself. His person was all he had. No home, no regular job, barely a handful of distant family strewn across the planet. There was nothing more to Jack Warren than Jack Warren, and here he was, smudging all the lines of who he was. Because he couldn’t shake the feeling that this warm, pliant woman, currently exploring his mouth with her tongue, was a part of who he was.

He might have expected her to be sharp. To bite and pull and take from the kiss. She was so fierce after all. But this kiss was all about giving and sliding. Things got bright and dozy and dangerous, like they were falling asleep in a hot car. He wasn’t breathing, he knew he wasn’t breathing. His fingertips grazed the cleft of that plush ass and kept on going. He felt first her heat and then, with something akin to a bolt of lightning jolting his body, he felt her wetness on his fingers.

In the dining room, Tre snorted coffee up his nose at the same moment Jean Luc dropped his bagel face down on his plate.

“Je-sus,” Jean Luc muttered, catching Tre’s eye as the feeling radioing in from Jack swamped them both. Now, they couldn’t tell exactly what Jack was doing. Not well enough for it to have been an invasion of privacy or voyeurism. But they certainly had a pretty good guess as to what he was currently up to.

“Wow,” Tre shook his head and wiped coffee off his chin. “Good to know, I guess.” He and Jean Luc raised their eyebrows at one another, shared a good laugh.

“What is?” Caroline asked, stepping into the dining room with a bagel in one hand and a cup of tea in the other.

The men both shifted and cleared their throats. Tre found that he simply couldn’t speak anymore. He’d forgotten how.

So it was Jean Luc who offered up a quiet, “Ah, nothing important. Did you sleep well?” he asked, hoping to distract her.

“Oh, definitely. Can’t believe I missed all the action, though! Just like me to sleep right through it. I can’t believe Thea came back! Is Jack alright?”

Tre snorted more coffee while Jean Luc cleared his throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I think he’s just fine.”

Back in the bedroom, Jack abruptly sat up and took Thea with him. The blankets pooled around them and her legs naturally came around his waist.

“Shit,” he growled, one hand still down the back of her underwear and his forehead pressed against hers. “We gotta slow down, sweetheart.”

“What?” she asked dazedly, as if he’d just woken her from a deep, intoxicating dream. He saw, with no small burst of pride, that her eyes were currently pinned down between them. His dick was making his briefs redundant, considering he was currently hard enough to be surging out of the waistband. She pressed forward, in what seemed like an almost involuntary reaction, and landed her heat against the base of him.

Jack grunted again and his eyes momentarily rolled back.

“Sweetheart,” he tried one more time. “We can’t.”

“Why?” She looked at him like he was a crazy man.

“We got company.” He took his hand from her hair and tapped himself on the chest. “Pretty sure they can feel what I’m feeling right now. And I might not care if you were someone else. But seeing as you’re you, I’m not sharing.”

She noticed that the wilder, more heavy-lidded and dilated Jack’s eyes had gotten, the heavier his drawl had become. It took a minute for his words to sink in.

When they did, she just tipped her head back and laughed. “You’re kidding.”

“Nawl.”

“So what happens now?” She was incredulous and stumped and horny as shit. She couldn’t believe this!

“Well, in a minute, after I figure on how to get my dick a little decent, I’m gonna go out there and find out exactly how much those two chumps can feel. Of this.” Jack couldn’t help but pump his hips up just a little. “Of you.” He leaned forward and nipped at the bit of collarbone that the collar of her T-shirt had pulled aside to expose. One of his hands worked its way to the side of her breast. He wanted nothing more than to press his face into the soft heat of her.

But he wasn’t going to. Not until he was positive that Tre and Jean Luc weren’t also going to be vicariously pressing their faces into the soft heat of her.

“Yeah,” he growled, more to himself than to anyone else. “Yeah, alright.”

He shifted and she slid off of him. They both froze for a moment, disoriented at how wholly wrong it felt to separate. Neither of them particularly liked that. That it felt better together than it did apart. They were two lone individuals who’d always preferred solitude to company at the end of the day.

He couldn’t miss her, he told himself. She was standing right there, for fuck’s sake! He couldn’t miss someone who was shimmying into her jeans an arm’s length away.

“You gonna do something about that?” she asked, nodding toward the taut, angrily hard cock nearly bursting out of his briefs.

He looked down at it philosophically then back up at her. “Figured I should wait until you were done wiggling into your jeans or else I was just going to have to start all over again.”             

She pursed her lips and nodded, as if what he was saying was logical enough. She grabbed her flannel and slid into it, buttoning it up and sliding her boots on at the same time. “Alright then, I’ll get out of your hair.”

“Hey!” He reached forward and grabbed her by the back of her jeans. “Hold on a minute. I don’t want you going out there without me.” He jumped off the bed and grabbed his own jeans from his bag. He tucked himself into them with a little wince and hopped into one sock and then the other.

“Why?” she asked him, once again looking like he was crazy.

“Because you heard me. I don’t know what those guys felt when I was feeling on you.”

“And that’s a problem because….”

“Because I don’t want you waltzing out there without me if they just got their jollies from perving on us!”

Thea looked at him very calmly, maddeningly so. “I can take care of myself, Jack. And I don’t get the impression that either of those guys are the take-without-asking type. I think the chances are, they’re probably more embarrassed than they are turned on.”

He heard the sense in her words, knew she was most likely right. But he wasn’t risking it. The idea of her walking out there and being the recipient of some kind of knowing stare from one of those two stooges, well, it filled Jack up with a rising protectiveness that he could never have predicted.

Jack glanced at her face as he yanked his shirt over his head. He wasn’t an idiot, though. “Let’s just go out together, alright? Not because you can’t handle yourself, but for my sanity.” He reached for her again, but instead of tugging, waited until she’d stepped toward him. “All of this is pretty new for me.”

She nodded, understanding coming into her eyes. The man had just been transformed into a bear shifter, for God’s sake. He was linked to two friends in a strange feelings-exchange. And now his whole life was different. She supposed she could indulge him a bit. She had no idea that the ‘this’ he’d been referring to had had more to do with her than with the bear shifter thing.

They went out together to find everyone eating breakfast at the big table.

“Morning!” Caroline chirped. “There’s bagels and coffee in the kitchen if you’re hungry. How’re you feeling, Jack?”

“Just fine. Thanks for asking, Caroline, darlin’.” He responded kindly, but his eyes were on Jean Luc and Tre. Both of whom were a little pink in the cheek. Actually, Tre was about as red as his hair. “Gentlemen? Maybe we could speak out on the porch?”

The three men ignored the curious looks from the ladies and found themselves on the porch, standing in a triangle. Jean Luc scratched the back of his neck, Tre studied the sky, and Jack looked back and forth between them.

At once, they all looked at one another and burst out laughing.

“Oh Lord,” Jack said through a rolling chuckle. “What the hell have we gotten ourselves into, boys?”

Jean Luc scrubbed a hand over his face and just kept laughing. This had to be just about the most awkward thing that he’d ever been through in his life.

“Nothing to be embarrassed about,” Tre said, taking his glasses off to wipe his eyes. “It’s perfectly natural. You see, Jack. When a man loves a woman very much, and he wants to be close with her—”

They all burst out laughing again.

“Well, so what the hell are we gonna do about it?” Jack wondered aloud, one hand clamped onto Jean Luc’s shoulder for support as he straightened back out from laughing so hard. “I’m not trying to have an audience every time I’m trying to get a taste.”

Jean Luc winced at Jack’s wording. “Jesus.”

And that just set them all off again.

Finally, after a few hysterical—admittedly juvenile—moments, they all found themselves sitting on the porch steps and looking out to the dark lake in front of them. Houses and lawns winked at them from the other shore.

“It wasn’t like we were in the room with you,” Tre finally said. “We didn’t even know who you were with.” Tre cleared his throat. “I mean, I assumed it was Thea, considering the way she slammed the door in our faces last night, but there wasn’t any… other information I was getting to back that up.”

Tre cleared his throat and put his glasses back on. This was so awkward, but they had to clear it up, get it out of the way.

“You mean that you weren’t… experiencing what I was experiencing?” Jack asked them.

“Nah,” Jean Luc said, picking up a rock from the garden next to him and casually throwing it forty yards into the lake. Jack and Tre blinked at him, but he didn’t even seem to notice he’d done something particularly impressive. “It wasn’t like that. It was almost like when you overhear somebody getting busy. You know what’s going on, but it’s not happening to you.”

“Yeah,” Tre nodded. “Exactly. We knew what you were feeling, but we weren’t feeling it ourselves.”

“Huh.” Jack scraped a palm over his stubble. “I guess I can live with that. Long as Thea can.”

“Martine says that after our first, uh, shift thingy we’ll be able to control the connection a little better. Maybe give each other some more privacy,” Tre said, tossing a rock from one hand to the other, deciding not to throw it and thus directly compare himself with Jean Luc.

“In the meantime, boys,” Jack said, clapping the others on the shoulder, “we’re grown men amongst some very good-looking women and we might have to do what grown men are inclined to do, if given the signal from said good-looking women.”

Neither Jean Luc nor Tre considered that prospect with quite the swagger or certainty that Jack did, but they both nodded.

“Fair enough,” Jean Luc said, understanding that they were acknowledging the awkwardness and choosing to give one another a little space on the issue.

Jack paused. “Yeah, don’t think I probably need to say this but—”

“Understood,” Tre said immediately.

“She’s yours, man,” Jean Luc agreed.

The three men froze as someone cleared her throat from behind them. They all turned slowly to see Thea leaning against the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest and her eyebrows raised.

“I’m just gonna go… away,” mumbled Tre. “Forever.”

“Yup. Yeah. Bye.” Jean Luc was up and after Tre who scooted past Thea in the door.

She let them go without a glance and sidled up to Jack who stood a step down on the porch stairs. They were eye to eye.

“Got everything straightened out, did you?” she asked, deceptively casual.

“Sure did,” he answered, hands on his hips, trying to get a good read on her and failing.

“Jack,” she said, and something in her tone made his stomach drop. “If we’re gonna do this, there’s something you should know.”

“Alright.”

“I’m not interested in having a man,” she told him, point blank. “And I never will be.”

He raised his eyebrows and waited, figuring she most likely had more to say.

“In two weeks, when you three are all through your transformation, or whatever, I’m going back home. To Montana. To my homestead. Because that’s where my life is. Trust me. I would have gone yesterday if this curse of yours hadn’t kept me here. The second the new moon hits. I’m home. Are we clear?”

Her words weren’t a surprise to him. Not really. But that didn’t make it any easier to hear them. “I suppose the same could be said for me.”

It was true. He wasn’t interested in turning his life into a team sport. He had no business having a girlfriend. Not with the lifestyle he led. No real place to call home, no regular business hours. Any given moment he could be slogging through the La Digue Swamps in the Seychelles or climbing mountains in Japan. That was his life and that was how he liked it.

Her stance loosened a little bit, like she was relieved, and that irritated Jack, too. It was irritation that burned bright for a moment and then melted away when she swayed forward, into him. “Good.”

She pushed those unbelievably soft lips against his and he grunted, in that way of his.

She pulled away and stepped back and any of the residual irritation Jack might have felt dissolved when he saw the fuzzy look in her eyes. She was just as revving for him as he was for her. His feathers smoothed back into place, Jack kissed her one more time and jogged up the stairs, into the house for breakfast.

Thea stayed on the porch and looked at the lake for a while.