The Rogue’s Stolen Bride

Chapter Nineteen: The Hunt

Jace

I needed to run.

That was the truth of it, stripped of any practical justification. Yes, we needed meat. Yes, the boar sign along the upper bank was fresh and worth following. But the real reason I walked into that forest was because my wolf had been climbing the walls of my skin since Kaida Hawkins grabbed my neck and fell into my chest, and if I didn’t put some distance and some exertion between myself and that girl I was going to do something I would regret.

I shifted as soon as the trees closed around me.

The relief was immediate. Four paws on the ground, the world opening up into scent and sound and the clean animal focus of the hunt. No thoughts about the way her hands had felt on my neck. No thoughts about the soft weight of her pressed against my chest, the small sound she’d made when she realized it. Just the forest, and the wind, and the trail of a young boar moving through the undergrowth ahead of me.

I ran.

Rogues were supposed to be diminished by the separation from pack. Thin wolves, patchy coats, the slow deterioration that came from living outside the bond. I had heard it my whole life, had watched it happen to others. It had not happened to me, which was either a point of pride or a warning about what I was, and I had never decided which.

My wolf was large and dark and in full health and currently very unhappy with me for reasons I refused to examine.

I ran harder.

The boar was young, maybe two years, still building his bulk. He was fast and he was smart and he led me on a proper chase through the birch forest before I brought him down cleanly at the throat. The kill settled something in me the way kills always did — that deep animal satisfaction, the body doing what it was built for, the mind going briefly and blissfully quiet as it was completely absorbed in the present moment.

I circled around to the place where I had stripped out of my clothes, shifted back, dressed, and slung the carcass across my shoulders.

The light was still good. I had time. I had told them sunset and it wasn’t sunset yet, and there was no reason to go back early except that I was hungry and the camp was downstream and the boar was heavy and—

My wolf was already turning back toward the river.

I followed the bank downstream, the water running quick and cold beside me, the shadows lengthening through the trees. The camp was perhaps ten minutes ahead. I could smell woodsmoke already, which meant the women had the fire going, which meant—

I stopped walking.

The scent hit me like a hand against the chest.

It came off the water, carried downstream on the current — warm and sweet and completely unmasked. The herbal ghost of the scent potion had been wearing thin all day in the heat, a fact I had been noting with clinical detachment. But this was different. This was what was underneath. What had been underneath all along, waiting.

Raw honey. And something else. Something that had no name in my considerable catalogue of scents — something luminous and faintly wild that made my wolf go absolutely still inside me for the first time all day.

I should have stopped. I should have made noise, snapped a branch, cleared my throat loudly enough to carry downstream. I should have sat down on the bank and waited a reasonable interval and then announced my return with all the warning a gentleman could provide.

I am not, by any reasonable measure, a gentleman.

I came around the bend.

She was standing waist deep in the middle of the creek with her back to me, her dark hair loose and streaming wet down her bare back, her hands moving through it. The setting sun turned the water to hammered copper around her and caught the curve of her shoulders and the dip of her spine and I stopped walking and stopped breathing and stood on the bank like an i***t with a dead boar across my shoulders.

She went still.

That packborn instinct — she felt the weight of being watched before she heard anything, before she could have smelled me over the woodsmoke and the river. She sank lower into the water as she turned, and then she was looking up at me from the creek with the sun at my back and her dark eyes wide and her wet hair streaming around her shoulders and her expression doing several things at once that I didn’t have time to catalogue.

I should have looked away immediately.

I did not. It took a full thirty seconds before I could tear my gaze from the vision of her, like an enchanted water nymph bathing in the shallow creek.

Then I turned around, put my back to the water, and stared at the birch trees in front of me.

“I came back early,” I said. Which was not an apology. It was a statement of fact.

She said nothing.

The water moved. I heard the soft sounds of her wading toward the bank, the rustle of fabric, and I kept my eyes fixed on the birch trees and had the firmest conversation with myself. The same conversation I had been rehearsing for the last two days.

She was a job. She was a client. I had been hired to deliver her untouched and unharmed to Havenhill and collect the remaining two hundred gold coins and walk away and never think about any of this again.

Untouched.

I was extremely focused on that word.

Behind me, she cleared her throat. “You can turn around.”

I turned around.

She was standing on the bank in her clean shift, her wet hair pulled over one shoulder, her chin up and her expression composed with the particular dignity of a woman who had decided she was not going to be embarrassed about this and was daring me to make it difficult for her.

I looked at her for exactly as long as it took to confirm she was decent. If a thin white linen shift could be considered decent.

Then I looked toward the camp. It was just around the bend, out of sight, but I could see a wisp of smoke from the campfire.

“I’ll dress the boar,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “You should do that.”

I moved quickly, climbed into the clearing and set the carcass down and got to work. I did not look at her again, but I was aware of every movement she made with a clarity that the next ten days were going to make absolutely insufferable.

My wolf, for the record, was no longer restless.

He was something considerably worse.