Page 36 of Hunter Moon

When Aspen got in, I don’t think he even looked at me. Maybe he was thinking about me differently now, or maybe he just didn’t want me to see the guilt and shame in his eyes. The same that every other alpha in the pack had been throwing at me for months.

He turned the engine and the air came out of the vents, already warm. The car’d only been off for a few minutes.

It was the car starting to move that knocked me out of my silence. “I’m sorry she said that,” I whispered, my throat too tight and dry to manage more sound.

“She has every right to be mad at me for leaving,” Aspen said, his voice cool and controlled.

I pinched my hands between my knees and blinked quickly, trying to keep tears from falling. “Sure. Yeah. But not for everything else. You didn’t do that. Harmony’s just—she’s mad I got hurt. Looking for someone to blame. But that shouldn’t be you.”

Aspen didn’t say anything, but I heard him take another breath and glanced over to see his nose flare.

“I’m serious,” I said. “What happened isn’t your fault. Of course it’s not. Who knows whether or not me being mated would’ve mattered to Maxim Reid, but he’s—he’s still the man who decided to steal somebody off the street. If you’d been here, you’d have been right at your dad’s side. You could’ve died.”

Aspen didn’t do that alpha thing where he insisted he was too damn strong to die, but I figured that was fair enough. He’d probably seen plenty of people get killed since he’d left Grovetown, and he knew damn well that it wasn’t all about strength. Sometimes, it came down to luck.

I took another shaky breath, and my eyelids fluttered shut. That was it—warm tears rolled down my cheeks and I sank in the seat, feeling too big for it all the sudden. The front seat of a Mustang wasn’t deep enough for me to hide inside. “And it was hard, after—coming back here and seeing everybody look at me different, with pity or guilt, but not like I was the same guy I’d been before. One horrible week, and it was like I came back someone who didn’t fit. I—I wouldn’t want to see you look at me like that. I wouldn’t have been able to stand it then.”

And my pulse ratcheted up at that, because there was no way, after what Harmony said, after me sitting in his car crying, he was going to look at me like he used to.

I couldn’t bear to check, but when I opened my eyes, I saw his hand on the console between us—not for the gear shift, but down beside me, like he was offering to hold my hand.

With a sick, clenching feeling in my gut, I tucked my fingertips underneath his palm, and his hand covered mine after a second.

He didn’t say anything, and soon, we were pulling into a parking spot outside Chadwick’s Grille. He turned the car off, and we sat still in the dark.

“You smell different,” Aspen finally said.

“Ohgod.”

I jerked my hand away from his, instinctively covering my shoulder. Linden had made sure the mark Reid left on me looked nothing like a mating mark, but I could still feel it there.

Everyone wasright. I wasn’t the same anymore. I couldn’t point at what was different, but what Maxim Reid had done had clearly buried deep inside me and changed something integral—as integral to me as my scent.

I whined, ducking my chin and pressing against the car door. I wanted to open it, or crank down the window, but that’d let the whole world in, and I couldn’t stand that either.

Aspen twisted toward me, reaching for my hand. “No—Brook, no. I just meant you—you smellsad.”

I choked on a sob and let out a laugh. That was so much better than to think I carried Reid’s scent around with my own, like that awful week had really made us mates, no matter what I’d wanted.

“Iamsad,” I rasped, staring into his eyes.

He nodded, holding onto my hand even when I kept it pressed against my shoulder. Slowly, I relaxed, let him pull it down and across the car.

“Do you still want to go in?” Aspen’s voice was gentle, his thumb making a warm, slow sweep across my knuckles as he clung to my hand.

What I wanted was to sink into the seat and disappear for a while, but that wasn’t something I could manage. Wetly, I laughed, shrugged, and caught his gaze from the corner of my eyes.

“I mean, I’m sad, right? What’s better for curing sad than hot chocolate?” Okay, I could think of a few things, but all of them involved staying there with Aspen’s hand in mine. Even if people could tell I’d been upset, I didn’t want to go back home and shuffle my feet across the house with my whole family knowing how broken I was. Better to stay out here with my splotchy face in public.

If that meant I could see Aspen, assure that part of me that thought that he was still gone that he wasn’t, all the better.

And there it was, Aspen’s full smile, crinkling the corners of his eyes. “You always were the clever one. Sounds good, but I’m getting whipped cream in mine too.”

“Good thinking! Extra sadness protection.” I reached for the door handle, but I didn’t want to let go of his hand so we could both get out. I hung on for a few seconds longer than I needed to, and Aspen just sat there patiently, staring at me.

It took effort to let him go, but when I did, he didn’t disappear. He got out of the car and when he came to my side, his hand settled on the small of my back as he walked us toward the Grille.

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