Page 84 of Hunter Moon

“Reid kid’s stable. Still not entirely in the clear, but Lin’s hopeful. He asked if we want to go over to Grove House for breakfast.” He only said the facts, keeping his voice inflectionless. If I asked him to stay in, told him I needed him to take care of me or that it was just too much to be around people, he’d have stayed. He didn’t want to ask me for anything.

And I never, ever wanted to ask him to give anything up. And, just maybe, it was time for me to find my footing back where Aspen belonged.

“Are you telling me that if I get my ass out of bed, sweet, darling Ro is going to cook me bacon and pancakes?”

Aspen laughed, the sound filling my ears and tingling down my spine. When he set his phone aside, he rolled so his leg pressed over mine, his hip against my ass.

“What if I like your ass exactly where it is?” His teeth grazed over my ear. I shivered.

“Plenty of time for that later. Bacon now,” I insisted. “Or did you want to tell your pack alpha no?”

His arm slid under my stomach and he pulled me off the mattress. “I’d never dare. But first—” He held me in his arms, his warm mouth slanted over mine, and I was entirely sure that whatever monsters lurked in our shadows, if we were together, they didn’t stand a chance.

55

Aspen

When I’d left, Rowan had been a teenager, who was already a whiz in the kitchen.

Now?

Well, as possibly sacrilegious as it was to say, bacon was the least of Rowan’s breakfast ability. There were homemade cinnamon rolls, and I was pretty sure a choir of angels sang when I took my first bite.

“Oh my god. This must be evil, there’s no other way for it to taste this good,” I mumbled around a mouthful of cream-cheese icing, eyes squeezed shut and leaning back in my chair.

The same chair I’d always sat in as a child.

And Lin, always accidentally proving that I’d been right, still sat in his childhood chair, too, right across from me. He hadn’t moved to the head of the table, like some old-school alpha determined to prove that he was the most important person in the room. Nope. Still just my little brother.

Rowan sat there giggling at me, covering his mouth with a napkin, and Brook nudged me with his shoulder. “He’s your brother, so I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to marry him.”

I scoffed. “Duh. I mean, I love him, but you’re the one I’m trying to sucker into marrying me.” Brook froze, eyes wide, and instead of pushing the point and making it uncomfortable, I swerved. “But since the house is going to be about two minutes’ walk from here, I’ll definitely still be bugging him for breakfast on the regular.”

Brook blinked repeatedly. Distraction achieved. “House?”

“Didn’t I mention it?” I asked, grinning at him as I licked the frosting off my lips. I knew I had said something at the clinic, but it was like this good news, this plan for our future, couldn’t penetrate the cloud of dread until the threat of Reids was gone and we had time for hope. “I bought the old Sedgwick barn. Gonna knock it down and build you a house. I know, it’s almost a five-minute walk from your mom’s, but I figured you’d be willing to have that much space.”

His enormous baby-blue eyes were luminous and glassy, and he stared at me for a long time. Like, until I was worried that he was going to break down crying, or that he didn’t want a house at all. Or maybe he was just sad at the thought of knocking down the barn, dangerous eyesore that it was.

After a moment, though, he flung his arms around me. I had to reach out and grab his glass of apple juice, to stop it from spilling across the table, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was the only thing that ever mattered.

Brook.

He wolfed down the rest of his breakfast at a speed that would’ve impressed even teenaged me, muttering his thanks to Rowan and Linden, and telling them how wonderful the food was, and then he was grabbing my hand, jerking me out of the chair toward the door.

Lin looked like he was smothering laughter, and Ro’s heart eyes were blatant, while Junie just rolled her eyes and ignored us, continuing to daintily chew her slice of bacon.

Me? I snatched up one last cinnamon roll as Brook dragged me off. “Thanks for breakfast. Talk to you all later. Got to show my future mate our future house.”

Finally, Juniper deigned to look at me, lips quirked down and to one side in what could have been either disapproval or unwilling amusement. All she said was, “It’s about fucking time, Aspen.”

A few minutes saw us at the edge of the Sedgwick... my. The edge of my property. Our property.

Brook stared up at the barn, eyes wide and full of the years we’d spent playing in that very lot.

“You were a pretty dashing pirate in the old SS Sedgwick,” he said, voice soft, a distant, half-smile on his lips.

I grinned, swallowing the last bite of spicy, gooey, bready goodness. “And you were an excellent member of Her Majesty’s navy, trying to bring the evil pirates to justice.”

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