Her Dark Wolves

Running From Something She Couldn't Name,

Chapter Seven

Running From Something She Couldn't Name

Lily's POV

She made the decision on a Sunday night with a cup of tea, her laptop, and the clear-eyed rationality of someone who had spent the entire weekend being absolutely unreasonable about two men she worked for and needed to stop immediately.

She was going to be professional. She was going to be excellent at her job — she already was and she was going to maintain a clean, appropriate, entirely impersonal distance from Jason and Tyson Addams. She was going to stop noticing which window Tyson chose. She was going to stop replaying the way Jason said her name. She was going to stop feeling that strange, warm, pulling thing in her chest every time either of them walked into a room.

She had a plan.

Rule 1. All communication through the intercom or email. No unnecessary face-to-face.

Rule 2. Coffee deliveries only when directly summoned. No volunteering.

Rule 3. Eyes on the work. Always. Not on amber eyes that catch the light like they were designed to be distracting.

Rule 4. Leave on time. No more staying late. No more accidental forty-minute silences with men who sit too close and say too little and mean too much.

Rule 5. Do not respond to Princess or Kitten. Do not react. Do not give them the satisfaction.

Rule 6. Under no circumstances tell Jerry any of this or he will never let it go.

The plan lasted approximately forty-eight hours.

Not because she failed to execute it she was rigorous and disciplined and her execution was, professionally speaking, flawless. She routed everything through the intercom. She kept her office door at a precise angle that said working, do not disturb without being obviously rude. She sent emails instead of walking the thirty feet to their office. She left at five-fifty-eight every evening without looking back.

The problem was not the plan. The problem was what happened to her body when she tried to maintain it.

It started small. A restlessness she couldn't shake like something in her chest was pulling at her, pointing toward the main office the way a compass points north. She'd be in the middle of a spreadsheet and feel an almost physical tug, sudden and irrational, that made her look up from her work for no reason at all.

She started getting headaches. Low and persistent, always worst in the mornings when she arrived and kept her distance, easing slightly and she noticed this, filed it with deep suspicion whenever Jason or Tyson happened to pass by her office.

She wasn't sleeping well. She kept dreaming about amber eyes and cedar-scented darkness and waking up with her heart already running and a warmth in her chest that faded the moment she opened her eyes and remembered where she was.

This is stress, she told herself firmly. This is a new job and a recent breakup and entirely explainable physiological responses to an unusual situation.

She almost believed it. Almost.

✦ ✦ ✦

"You're avoiding them."

"I'm being professional."

"Lily. You sent Jason Addams an email this morning to tell him his ten o'clock was moved. His office is thirty feet from yours."

"Efficient communication leaves a paper trail. It's good professional practice."

Silence. Then "Are you listening to yourself?"

"Jerry—

"No, Lily, seriously. You emailed a man thirty feet away instead of walking to his office because you have feelings for him and you're terrified and instead of dealing with that like a person you have constructed an elaborate professional avoidance system

"I have constructed no such thing.and it's not working, is it?"

A very long pause.

"It's working fine," Lily said. Her voice came out about three tones less convincing than she'd intended.

Jerry, gently: "Babe. You called me at seven in the morning to tell me you slept badly again. That's the fourth time this week."

"I've been stressed."

"You've been avoiding two people your entire nervous system apparently wants to be near and wondering why you feel awful. That's not stress, that's self-inflicted."

Lily opened her mouth. Closed it. Stared at her ceiling.

"I don't know what's happening to me, Jerry," she said finally. Quieter than before. Honest in a way she'd been carefully avoiding all week. "I don't understand it. It doesn't feel like normal attraction. It feels like — something I don't have a word for. And that scares me."

Jerry was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again his voice was softer too.

"Then maybe stop running from it long enough to figure out what it is."

✦ ✦ ✦

On the forty-second floor, the shift had not gone unnoticed. It would have been impossible for it to the mate bond didn't allow for subtlety. The moment Lily had started pulling back, both twins had felt it like a change in air pressure. A withdrawal that their wolves registered as absence and reacted to with a restlessness that was becoming difficult to manage.

Tyson had stood outside her office door on Tuesday for twenty seconds with his hand raised to knock before he'd put it down and walked away. Twice.

Jason had read the same paragraph of the Meridian contract seven times on Wednesday morning without retaining a single word.

"She's pulling back," Tyson said that evening, stating it plainly the way he did when he'd been sitting with something long enough.

"I know," Jason said.

"The bond is making her uncomfortable. She doesn't understand what she's feeling."

"I know."

"So what do we do?"

Jason was quiet for a long moment. Outside the window, Chicago glittered, indifferent and enormous.

"We give her the space she's asking for," he said finally. It cost him something to say it — she could have felt that if she'd been in the room. "And we don't push. Not yet."

Tyson exhaled. "And when she stops running?"

The corner of Jason's mouth moved. Barely.

"She'll stop running."

"She was running. They were waiting. And the bond between them didn't care about either."

On Thursday afternoon, Lily was in the middle of drafting a correspondence summary when her office door opened without a knock. She looked up sharply.

Tyson. Leaning against the doorframe with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, holding two cups of coffee one of which, she noticed with a complicated feeling, was made exactly the way she took hers. Milk, one sugar, the right temperature.

He didn't come in. Just stood in the doorway and held out the cup like a peace offering and said nothing at all.

She looked at him. He looked at her. The pull in her chest that infuriating, persistent, entirely unauthorised pull surged quietly.

She crossed the office and took the cup from his hand. Their fingers met on the ceramic for the briefest moment warm, deliberate, unhurried and she felt it shoot straight up her arm like something electric and ancient and deeply inconvenient.

"Thank you," she said. Professionally. Composedly.

Tyson smiled not the almost-smile. The real one. The one she realised she'd never actually seen before and immediately wished she hadn't because it was catastrophically unfair.

"Anytime, Kitten."

He pushed off the doorframe and walked away.

Lily stood in her office doorway holding her coffee and accepting, reluctantly and completely, that the plan was over.

You could not avoid something that was already inside you.

She didn't know what it was yet.

But she was done pretending she couldn't feel it.

✦

End of Chapter Seven