Page 34 of Hounded: Ashes to Ashes

I couldn’t take it back, and I wouldn’t apologize. Not for being kind to him. Not for trying soothe his sadness… Or appease the yearning that kept me up at nights, thinking of him in his bed and wishing he was in mine.

I trulydidwant to comfort him, comfort us both, so I extended my arms.

“Perhaps I should embrace you instead?”

“No!” Loren staggered backward, creating a gap I hurried to close.

“I’d like to embrace you, Loren. I…” My throat tightened, and I swallowed past it. “I’d like to do a lot of things?—”

“Enough.” He shook his head roughly, then scanned the cemetery again.

My gaze dropped to the snow heaped around my feet. “I know it’s improper, but I’m quite taken with you.” I shifted, feeling light and breathless and too out of sorts to stop the words from escaping. “I think of you romantically, and I have to ask, I have toknow, if you’ve ever…”

I dragged my eyes upward to find Loren’s expression stricken and his tan skin ghostly pale. It took all the courage I’d been mustering for months to say, “Perhaps you think of me that way, as well?”

His brow furrowed, and he glanced aside, skimming over the grave and the ground around it. He worked his jaw for five seconds, I counted them, then he shook his head.

“It hardly matters,” he muttered. “As you said, it’s improper. Criminal. You could be arrested for even suggesting?—”

Would they arrest me for this?

I meant to ask it, and I would have, but my mouth was suddenly pressed to his, warmed by his breath while my pulse roared in my ears.

With how he towered over me, I shouldn’t have been able to reach. I was on my toes, but he had leaned in, too, pulled by the arms I’d looped around his neck. He bent into me and stayed there, his lean, muscular body curved toward mine, growing closer with the subtle shift of his feet.

I might have imagined that, but I couldn’t fabricate the feeling of his hand on my back, a gentle press against my spine, holding onto me the same way I held onto him.

Another cold gust whipped past, and his fingers splayed across my spine, bracing as though he fearedImight be the one to retreat. I withdrew only far enough to breathe and catch his gaze as he made another wary sweep of the cemetery. Once he was assured that we were alone amongst the ghosts, his attention returned to me. He blinked, then ran his tongue across his lips like he was chasing the flavor of our kiss.

My heart was still thundering, and I was far warmer than a man standing in the snow should have been as my eyes locked on Loren’s deep brown ones.

Did he think of me romantically? Improperly? Illegally?

I thought I knew the answer. Or maybe I felt it in his hand still splayed in the small of my back, keeping me close. So, I said something else.

“Are you lonely, Loren?”

He glanced aside before replying, “I’m rarely alone.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

It wasn’t what I meant, either. There was a deeper question to be posed, but I counted on him to infer it.

The war for his expression came to an end, and something akin to peace took its place as he said, “Not anymore.”

After the bath, I dressed while Loren bundled in a towel to wait for me to bring him some clean clothes. Unlike me, he couldn’t borrow from Sully’s closet, and I was fairly certain he wouldn’t want to.

As I passed through the apartment, I found Sully and Whitney waiting. I was surprised to see the other houndlingering, but Sully put a stop to any line of questioning by declaring, “Whitney is going to stay with us for a while.”

Considering he’d saved Loren, and I owed him for it, I was in no position to protest. So, I hurried downstairs to the gallery’s storage closet and picked an outfit from one of the plastic totes salvaged from Loren’s truck before returning to the steamy bathroom.

Inside again with the door shut behind me, I watched as Loren shaved his face and neck clean. Once he’d finished, he cut a glance at me in the mirror’s reflection that nearly made my knees knock.

I stepped up and brushed my fingers over the curve of his hipbone where it peeked above the rolled top of the towel. My hand skated across his bare skin as he rinsed the razor and set it on the counter, then turned to face me.

Weeks ago, when all this had started, I’d planned what I would say when he came back. Most of it had been superseded by the awareness of our shared century of history. But, while some things faded, others became painfully clear.

“I know you protected me,” I said. “I’m sorry I made that a hard job sometimes.”

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