Page 15 of Wolf Found

Graham looked up at him, attention off the menu for the first time since he’d opened it. “What’s that?”

Dez looked confused, but Gavin took the question at face value. “Snails. Escargot is snails.”

Graham frowned and glanced again at the menu. “That’s something people eat?”

“Some people,” Gavin agreed. “But not people who are eating at this diner, because it’s not an option here.”

Graham nodded and turned back to finish reading the entire menu.

When a waiter came to take their order, he went to Graham last. He needn’t have, since when he arrived at Graham, the man seamlessly ordered for both himself and Hannah. It was probably three meals between them, but given how much they’d walked over the last few days, and the fact that Hannah was breastfeeding, it didn’t seem out of the range of reason. The waiter didn’t even blink.

When the food arrived, though, Graham put almost everything in front of Hannah, taking only a bite of each thing for himself. Except the pancakes. Those he put in front of himself and stared at with no small measure of trepidation.

Ash remembered the feeling. The pack had always eaten simple. Bread, meat, vegetables. Breakfast was oatmeal or granola, and if they were lucky, fruit to go with it. Pancakes were an unimaginable luxury.

“You should try French toast sometime,” Ash suggested as Graham watched Gavin pour syrup on his own pancakes.

“French toast? I saw it on the menu. How is it different from regular toast?” At the question, both Dez and Gavin looked up at Graham but quickly away again.

Ash explained his meager understanding of French toast before giving up and cutting off a bite of his, slathered with butter and syrup, and holding his fork out for Graham to eat from. Graham’s mouth fell open and his eyes dilated, and Ash realized his mistake.

Among humans it might be an odd gesture, but sharing food at a Martingale pack dinner was incomprehensible. Married couples didn’t do it. Half the time they didn’t even sit together.

He started to pull his hand back, but Graham leaned forward and neatly bit the toast off his fork before the syrup could drip. He met Ash’s eye as he did it, as though he wanted to be sure Ash watched, but then stared at his own plate as he chewed.

His eyes slid shut, and he looked like someone was feeling him up under the table, he was so damn pleased. “Oh my god,” he moaned. “What is that, and how do they make it?”

Ash shrugged, squirmed in his seat a little uncomfortably, and forced himself to look back at his own breakfast. If he reached down to adjust his pants, everyone would know why, so he opted to stay uncomfortable. It would go back down.

A second later, his valiant effort to think about French toast and not Graham moaning was ruined by, well, Graham moaning again. Damn pancakes.

“You’ll have to excuse Graham,” Hannah whispered, leaning across the table to look at Dez, Sawyer, and Gavin. “This is his first time outside of enclave grounds. He makes the best bread in California, but he’s never tasted syrup.”

“Makes a guy wish he’d never had syrup before,” Sawyer joked, but they let it drop, thank the ancestors.

Ash very much tried not to watch as Graham ate his way through the pancakes, and a tiny bit of everyone else’s breakfast. When he was done with the bits of Hannah’s he’d taken, Sawyer had jumped up, run around the table and grabbed the cleared plate, and proceeded to add a bunch of other things from everyone else’s food for him to try. If his heart hadn’t been in the right place, Ash could have kicked his ass.

Damn it all, Ash didn’t even know Graham. They’d met a day earlier, and before that, hadn’t known each other since one nice, quiet summer of chopping together. He should not be sporting an erection from the sounds the man made over new food items.

He didn’t know how the hell he was going to manage to stand up without giving himself away, but by the time his plate was clear, he was seriously thinking about stabbing himself in the thigh with his fork. The pack would smell the blood, though, so it was not the answer he needed.

Instead, he doggedly returned to his own plate, scraping up every bit of toast, sausage, eggs, and hash browns he’d ordered, trying to focus all his attention on them.

It was hard when Graham leaned forward with a happy smile and said, “Thank you so much. This is amazing.”

“This is breakfast,” Sawyer corrected. “And it’s awesome and all, but wait till you discover pie.”

“There are kinds other than apple and cherry,” Ash added when Graham looked confused. “Chocolate. Lemon meringue. Key lime.”

Graham looked fit to burst from joy. Clearly food was his thing. Ash could relate. He wanted to take Graham over to the bookstore next door to the shop and set him loose on the cooking section, but the owner, Kareni, might have a heart attack over Graham’s sheer innocent excitement.

Well, more over the fact that he was basically just escaped from a life of asceticism. She’d make him hot chocolate and try to give him a stack of books.

Ash himself had gone a little overboard trying everything he could get his hands on after escaping from the enclave. It was a good thing hard drugs didn’t do much for werewolves, and an even better one that Ash was there to help Graham if things went wrong.

Just like he’d been lucky to land in a unit with Dez and Gavin, who’d been there for him. Only unlike him, they hadn’t been trying to hide the fact that they found him gorgeous and wanted to have sex with him. They had thought, kind of still did think, that he was a child.

Oh well. There were worse reputations. If they kept a few things from him that they thought he was too innocent for, maybe he was glad they did it. They were his brothers, and they might be the only people in the world who knew him better than he knew himself.

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