“Tell him yourself,” Rick growled.
My breath caught. Kem chuckled. He’d seen Rick approach behind me, quiet as a cat. Rick was unshaven and shirtless, his jeans hanging low on his hips, chest hair sparse and straight and forming a line pointing into the top of the jeans. His black hair had grown, the ends curling at his nape and over his ears. His eyes were shadowed, black as night, steely, pinning me to the path. His torso and shoulders were a mass of scars from big-cats and werewolves, the scarring ripping through his tattoos, nearly obscuring the bobcat and the mountain lion. Except for the cats’ golden-amber eyes and the blood on their claws. There was something about that naked chest and the scars that begged to be touched. I curled my fingers under. Rick’s eyes dropped to them, then back up in a leisurely perusal that made me acutely aware of myself. My breath hitched slightly, and I tightened all over, warming from a lot more than the heat. Boyfriend? Oh my.
Rick LaFleur was a pretty-boy when wearing city clothes. Half-naked, in the wooded site, ungroomed and feral-looking, he was gorgeous. He smiled then, exposing white teeth, one bottom tooth slightly crooked, and I realized I’d said part of that aloud. Crap.
“I’ve missed you too,” he said, amused. He moved past me, and only then did I catch the smell of fresh fish. Even the breeze had been hiding the man. He carried a bait bucket, two rods, a tackle box, and a string of fish. They looked like smallmouth bass, about eleven to sixteen inches long. One still flapped. Rick stowed his gear away and carried a long curved knife and the fish to a board set up between two trees; there were traces of blood on the wood, and part of the dead-fish smell I had attributed to the grindy actually came from the fish-cleaning station.
Movements economical, almost graceful, Rick hung the fish chain from a nail and slid the hook from the gills of the top fish. It moved weakly when he sliced through below the gills and cut off its head. I wondered if Rick thought I’d run at the sight of the casual cruelty, but Beast sometimes ate her food still kicking. I figured she could outdo him in the gross-factor if I wanted. Of course, Rick didn’t know about Beast. Rick didn’t know a lot of things. I hadn’t found a way to tell him most of them. Others were complicated.
Okay. I was lying. I was a coward, that’s why Rick didn’t know a lot of things.
The knife moving with swift, sure strokes, he scaled the fish, the iridescent scales flying everywhere. I thought fishermen scaled fish before they beheaded them, but I wasn’t a fisherman trying to gross out an old girlfriend.
“Beer,” Kem said from behind me. Rick stopped, wiped his hands on a towel hanging in the tree, and walked to the cooler. He took out a beer, opened the top and handed it to Kem without meeting his eyes. It was the action of a submissive animal to an aggressive alpha. Beast hissed quietly inside, the hair of her pelt rising, stiff, the phantom reaction tight inside my skin.
Wordless, Rick returned to the fish. I narrowed my eyes, putting things together. I walked to the hammock, placing my feet without care, so that Kem would know I was coming, if he wasn’t too drunk to notice. I stood over the hammock, seeing his body, lithe and fit, wearing baggy shorts and a sheen of sweat. He smelled of bug spray and old beer. He was watching me with savage glee on his face. Expectant. Eager. “You want a fight, don’t you. Fine.”
Drawing on Beast-speed, faster than he could see, faster than he could react, I flipped the hammock. Rode him down to the ground. He landed on his stomach. Face in the dirt. My knee in his back, pressing him down. I grabbed his short hair and yanked back. Bowing his spine, arching his neck. Shoved the stake I had found under his chin. The hammock spun and settled. The sound of fish scales flying stopped. The beer bottle landed, spilling in a froth. Everything stopped.