Page 20 of Hunted

Something more than his charm and unwavering kindness drew her to him. It was more than his incredibly gorgeous, chiseled body and smoldering stare.

And she couldn’t help feeling guilty about that because she still felt like she hadn’t gotten closure with Luke. Why couldn’t he tell her how he felt to her face?

Because she was relying on the word of the man who hurt her, a small sliver in the back of her mind still said it was all an elaborate lie—that she couldn’t trust his dad.

However, she knew, through what little she knew of the grieving process, that this was denial.

Maybe she didn’t have a lot to go off of, but she had to move on anyway.

“Give it back!” Isolde shouted, as one of the kids ran off with her hair clip. She chased him over the sandpit and across the playground. He was a bigger kid, probably about Samara’s age, with jet-black hair and an unsettling grin.

“It’s mine now!” The kid cackled.

Abigail looked to Samara, who stood on top of the jungle gym, paralyzed. Gavin was hiding behind the slide.

They weren’t her kids, Abigail reasoned.

But she jumped into action.

“Hey!” Abigail cried out, marching across the playground.

The kid stared back at her, as though coming out of some trance. “I was just kidding around, honest.”

“Don’t tell me that,” Abigail instructed firmly. “Give her back her hair clip and apologize.”

Without any more intervention, the kid shuffled over to Isolde and begrudgingly handed her back her hair clip. He apologized, but he didn’t seem to mean it.

As she quietly wished life in the adult world worked like that, she could feel her rib pain intensifying.

She’d done her job here, right? She could head back home?

Part of her was now tempted to wait until these kids’ parents picked them up, so she could keep that from happening again. She remembered from being a kid and from her college classes how having an adult interfere could intensify the bullying after the adult stopped watching.

That’s when she saw him approach—brown, curly hair… dark blue eyes. And as she felt herself start to swoon once more over Dominic, she also noticed something else…

He looked pretty pissed off.

Eep!

Chapter 10

Dominic

Dominicfeltbadleavingher, but he needed to go take care of some errands at the office. Pack business. The brewery's finances were slightly strained due to a new competitor nearby challenging their sales, prompting Dominic to devise quick marketing and budget solutions. He liked making his own hours, but sometimes, he wished he could go back to the brewing.

He opened the door to the house, some quick fast-food breakfast in hand, to find it completely silent.Odd, he thought.Normally Abigail would be watching television about now.

He looked through all of the bedrooms and the rooms in the house, politely knocking on the bathroom door. She was nowhere to be found.

His temperature rose, his heart rate increasing as he realized she was gone.

Why had she disobeyed him? For all she knew, somebody from her old pack could be hunting her even now. Out in the world as she was, not only was she vulnerable to prying eyes, she was extremely weak and couldn’t defend herself.

If she transformed into her wolf form, which had been allocating all of its strength to healing her, she might simply keel over. That’s not even discounting the public awareness problems with an incident like that.

He was pissed, but mostly, he was worried. He couldn’t live with himself if anything happened to her.

He grabbed his phone on the way out the door and made a call. He was trying to think of places she could reasonably be.

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