Page 19 of Hunter Moon

Yeah, exactly like that.

I was so distracted, so worried about Brook and considering what, if anything, I could do to help him, that I didn’t pay any attention to where in the woods we were.

Well, not until ahead of me, I heard Alexis stop in his tracks and say, “Oh. Huh. I figured he’d gone into town by now.”

Shit. They’d stumbled onto where I’d left my stuff.

10

Brook

My ass hurt.

Okay, so maybe it’d be more accurate to say my glutes hurt, or my thighs, or my whole damn body.

It wasn’t like I’d never been hiking before. Not all that long ago, I’d flung myself up to the Grovetown View and sulked about, well, everything. But that’d been fueled by desperation and sadness. It was easy to ignore my straining muscles when my heart was broken and I still remembered the pain of claws and fangs so sharply.

Before that, I’d even liked hiking. With Aspen.

So, fine. I’d been smitten. I’d have done just about anything he wanted to and enjoyed every second of it, because love was a drug and I was addicted. I’d never exactly loved hiking or camping or fishing or all the outdoorsy stuff Aspen was into, but I’d gone along for the ride often anyway.

It felt pretty shitty to admit that Alexis’s company didn’t quite make the cut. He was my friend, and spending time with him was a relief after feeling like I’d been letting everybody else down. But as sweet as he was, he couldn’t make me forget how much I missed taking this walk with Aspen, how it’d felt to curl into Aspen’s arms and have him kiss me up where it felt like we owned the whole damn town.

Well, it didn’t really matter. Alexis wasn’t mine for kissing, and as active as he was, he wasn’t a huge, formidable alpha. He was just my friend. My mated friend. And I liked him a lot—he was kind, plucky, and resourceful. Just like his mate.

He and Ridge had come to Grovetown shortly after I’d escaped the Reids. It wasn’t all that often that the Groves took in new pack mates, but as Claudia’s cousin, Alexis slipped right in. And Ridge? Well, it’d been a long time since I’d seen anybody put his head down and get to work for the pack so diligently. Even somber, morose Ford seemed a little better off with Ridge around the Hills’ farm.

They were both good, decent, and generous, and it’d been nice to have new people around who didn’t have opinions on who I’d been from when I was in the cradle until now. But right then, I wanted to curse Alexis’s lithe, twenty-three-year-old legs.

He was right, though. It was beautiful up here. Always had been, out where you could look over the edge of the rocks and see the whole town stretched across the valley.

Aspen had loved it up here, and my steps felt heavier every little bit we moved up the mountain. Only, I didn’t want to ask him to pick another way. It was the best view on the trail, and not everything belonged to Aspen.

I could totally walk up the trail with my friend Alexis, and it didn’t have to make me think about Aspen at all.

Totally.

At first, I thought the scent was only in my head—Aspen’s sharp, masculine smell, like pine and citrus and fresh air, rising to my memory at just the thought of him. I’d gotten a whiff of it that day at The Cider House, and it really was incredible how after ten years, he smelled a little different, but that underlying scent that’d always called to me was all Aspen. Same as ever.

We rounded a bend in the trail and Alexis frowned through the underbrush. He pushed a prickly bush aside and stepped past, and right there was a camp set up around a fire pit.

It was put together well—rocks and sticks and everything looking like the pack’s very best Eagle Scout had been out and about. But there were other things too—a nest of clothes and blankets, no real tent, the skin of a rabbit that looked pretty new, like if I held it up to the light, I’d see the teeth marks left in it from a wolf’s bite.

No one had known where Aspen was staying, because it wasn’tintown. It was above it. Out here in the woods like he was one of those alphas who went off and lost themselves in the wilderness when things got too hard to deal with.

My heart ached. I guess we were lucky he’d shown up on two legs at all, but I hated to think of him out here alone.

Hated more to think about the nights we’d spent camping, where it’d felt like an adventure just to sneak off together. Those times when we hadn’t had any real privacy, so we’d run off to some cave in the woods that only he knew about, and he’d helped me through my heats out here where everything was timeless and wild.

Now, he was just hiding. Alone. Apart from his family and pack and... me. Because the jerk thought that was easier, better, than being part of our pack.

“Oh. Huh. I figured he’d gone into town by now.” Alexis wandered over to the fire pit and nudged one of the carefully arranged rocks with his hiking boot.

I had to bite back a sigh. The whole place really did smell like Aspen, now that I was paying attention. And if anybody could go out and make it in the wild, it’d be him. No way someone sane like Shiloh or Claudia or Birch was going to abandon their belongings and live in the woods munching on bunnies.

Usually, wolves with packs didn’t go out and live in the woods. Everybody in Grovetown expected Ford would disappear one day, but that was different. He’d lost his mate, and he’d never really recovered. That was mourning, it wasn’t... whatever this was.

A Grove going out and living like a wild animal was unheard of. And sure, there was a bag of clothes sticking out under a tarp. He probably had other stuff stored in his car—I’d seen him in the Mustang around town. But too much of Aspen was strewn out over the ground.

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