Page 13 of Hunter Moon

“Well, I don’t know about you all, but I could use a drink,” Linden said, leaving no room for me to gasp and stumble my way through topics I wasn’t ready to talk about.

I couldn’t help a laugh, weak as it was. Linden’s idea of a drink was basically apple juice. Okay, cider, but he wasn’t going to take us out and get plastered himself.

He smiled back at me. “My treat, you all in?”

Mom licked her lips. Her dark gray eyebrows were furrowed, and she looked at the floor for a second. Then at me. She wanted to go—that was clear—but she didn’t want to push me. Nobody did. They just didn’t want to leave me alone in the dark.

That’d be my night now, if I stayed home—sitting alone with ghosts, my arms wrapped around my legs while I huddled in the corner of the bed staring as Maxim’s mad eyes glinted at me from the shadows.

Or I could go out, and maybe a drink would help, or being with my pack would help, but either way, it would be better than closing myself off with only my fears for company.

And it’d make Mom feel better. That was what really clinched it.

“That sounds really nice, Linden. Thank you.”

Mom perked up at that, and the whole way there, Claudia sat beside me in the back seat of Linden’s SUV, clinging to my hand.

As bleak as everything was, it felt good to be around pack. If I could figure out how to share what I was going through with them, that might make it easier. Moon above, I hoped so.

7

Aspen

“There’s not much in season, unfortunately,” Isaac Tartt told me, sighing and knocking on the glass front of the flower case in Ambrosia Grocery. “Plus, you know, there’s not a lot of call for flowers outside of prom season. People know I don’t have much, so they don’t buy them, so I buy even fewer.”

The sad way he said it, I wondered just how important he thought flowers were in an average day.

Well.

Maybe today wasn’t an average day, but they were kind of important to me just then.

I’d been arguing about it with myself since the moment that Reid asshole walked away and left those damn smelly carnations sitting in the Grille. He didn’t mean to make amends. He meant to remind Brook of what his people had done.

Maybe I was a shitty choice for a leader, but I could tell when a man had good intentions, and Cain Reid didn’t.

That wasn’t the question, though.

“Brook doesn’t like roses,” I told him, glaring into the flower case, to the handful of rose bouquets at eye level. I didn’t know shit about flowers, but I knew that much. He hated the scent of roses. And carnations.

Hell, Brook didn’t like flowery smells much at all.

I turned to Isaac. “Do they all smell?”

He blinked up at me in confusion, and then his eyes brightened. “No!” He threw the case open and started digging around in the loose flower containers at the bottom. A moment later, he came up with a handful of electric blue and purple and fuschia flowers. “Gerbera daisies. They don’t smell like flowers. Or much anything other than a little... green?”

I leaned in and took a sniff, and he was right. They smelled like growing things, but not of anything in particular. The bright blue was darker than Brook’s sky-blue eyes, but I could picture him with them.

Who was I kidding? I could picture Brook anywhere, anytime. There’d never been a more gorgeous person in the world. And I still dreamed of that sweet smile. Or the smug asshole smile he flashed when he’d done something obnoxious. That one was the best.

I nodded to Isaac. “Those. I’ll take ’em.”

He beamed at me, dropping them into a little vase and handing them to me, then leading me over to the register to ring me up. Given the added vase and the prices listed, I guessed at a discount. I’d have told him he didn’t have to do that, but I wasn’t going to insult the man by questioning it.

The only problem left was how to get them to him. I didn’t want to just leave them on his mom’s porch. That’d be a great way to make him think that Reid fucker was stalking him, and scare him out of his wits. But just marching up and handing them to him was kind of a dick move too, wasn’t it? It required him to talk to me, whether he wanted that or not. It implied I expected some kind of interaction, and put him on the spot.

And I’d expected, and demanded, too damn much of Brook just by showing up and not accounting for the possibility that he’d want to hit me with his daddy’s rusty old truck.

I could leave them in our old spot in the grove, but he probably never went there anymore. It would feel too much like leaving flowers at a grave. Plus I wanted him to have them. I wanted to erase that Reid bastard, and tell Brook that people who weren’t trying to torment him might want to get him flowers.

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