“How many people know about you? All of you, I mean. How do you keep people from finding out and telling anyone?” Zach leaned forward, his breath smelling of tea, and Gibson bit back a longing to taste his lips. “It really is a secret people would kill to keep. If enough people said a man could change into a wolf, someone would get curious. And if I were you—if I were like you—and I know how people can be about something they don’t understand, I probably would want to murder anyone who threatened my family.”
“The thing about murder is that the universe kind of hates it. Especially in this day and age, people notice when someone goes missing. I suppose it was easier back in the day, but now, especially in suburbia, people notice when the trash piles up or a mailbox begins to overflow. It’s harder to answer those questions than explain away something as simple as a very large dog.” He shot Zach a grin. “You’d be surprised how many Tibetan mastiff-husky hybrids my family brings over while visiting. I’m not saying that people haven’t been killed in the past, but it’s not feasible. That kind of thing follows a family; unexplained deaths can haunt a bloodline. Just ask the Borgias. It’s better to just keep things a secret than spend your life digging graves.”
“I can see that,” Zach conceded. He tried to hide a yawn, but the connective tissues on his throat lengthened and his jaw shifted as he suppressed the instinctive motion. Still, his eyes were bright despite the sleep tugging at their edges. “How long has your brother been… like this? It looked like he was trying to change but couldn’t.”
“Not necessarily couldn’t but won’t.” Ellis’s condition dominated Gibson’s life, and his frustration pressed against the walls of silence he’d been living in. As much as he wanted to confide in someone—anyone—Zach wasn’t a friend, and no matter how much Gibson wanted more, his own life was on hold until something broke with Ellis. “You should probably crash. Rest will do you good, since you’re probably going to hurt like hell in the morning. Well, more than you are now when your muscles realize what they’ve been through. You pretty much went through a car accident, then took the world’s worst ice bath. How about if I get you some ibuprofen and you try to get more sleep?”
“Are you going to let me come back up here?” Zach asked sleepily. “Or are you going to drop me off at the inn tomorrow morning and the next time I come up here to look for you, you’ll be gone?”
“I can’t make any promises, Zach.” God knew he wanted to but… he couldn’t.
There were a lot of promises he would’ve loved to make to the sloe-eyed man falling asleep on his couch, but his life wasn’t his own. There would be no white picket fences, no Saturday morning strolls through farmers markets or rainy afternoons spent reading on a comfortable couch for him. Not now. Maybe not ever. Gibson hadn’t even imagined that kind of future until the moment he laid an unconscious Zach on the quilts his grandmother’d made, and his stomach tightened with the recognition of a kindred soul needing love as much as he did.
“It must be hard, because I get the feeling it’s not that you’re trying to keep Ellis safe from someone like me, but instead you’re trying to keep him safe from himself.” The fire played with the angles of Zach’s face, rippling light and shadow over his cheekbones and across his full mouth. “You must be tired of doing this alone, Gibson.”
“It’s the only way I know how to do this.” It was a quiet confession, but its power felt like a punch to Gibson’s already unsettled stomach. “Get some sleep, Zach, and we’ll talk in the morning.”
“You’re asking me to promise I won’t say anything,” Zach reminded him. “I should get a promise in exchange.”
“You sure you’re not a lawyer?” Gibson laughed under his breath. What Zach was asking was a risk Gibson didn’t know if he could take, but the plea in Zach’s voice held a neediness Gibson couldn’t explain away. The other man was desperate for a connection of some sort, and for some odd reason he felt as if Gibson would reach for him.
“I don’t know why it’s important. I just feel like right now, here with you, I’m not alone anymore,” Zach whispered, his voice trailing off. “I felt alone in a crowd of people, in a house full of my family and friends, but here in a cabin barely big enough to hold two humans and a wolf, I feel like you see me, you hear me, and I’m not just shouting in the darkness hoping I won’t disappear. So yeah, I need to have that promise, because I don’t want to lose this feeling. Even with as much as I hurt right now, I never felt this alive.”
“Okay, then.” Gibson returned Zach’s whisper. “I promise. I will try to be here—to be there for you—whenever you come looking for me. I won’t just disappear—we won’t just disappear—and if I have to go away, for whatever reason, I’ll let you know where we’re going.”
“That’s all I need,” he said, then winced. “Okay, that’s a lie. Because right now, I think I really need that ibuprofen a hell of a lot more than I need anything else.”
Four
IN THE days following Gibson dropping him off in front of the bed-and-breakfast, Zach’s life whirred past him in a complicated blur. The trip down the mountain was more of a covert mission than a homecoming. The storm had fallen back, but its furious touch left its mark. It was an eternity of fallen trees and snowbanks, an obstacle course Gibson navigated with his well-worn black Jeep while Zach clung nervously to the strap dangling from the vehicle’s roof. There’d been more than a few moments when the Jeep tilted dangerously, its tires churning on the uneven road until they found traction. They’d left Ellis behind in the cabin, and Zach worried at the decision nearly all the way down.
“He’s exhausted,” Gibson assured him when Zach asked after the wolf. “Shifting takes a lot out of the body, and it’s hard enough to maintain your strength even with a bunch of sweets and proteins. Ellis pretty much shifted twice in the span of a few minutes, something I would never in my right mind do, but he did, and now he’s paying for it. He needs to sleep the night off. When I get back, I’ll see if I can maybe get some ice cream or something into him, well, that and bacon. The day he turns his nose up at bacon is the day I know he’s really sick. Let’s just worry about getting you home.”
He’d been welcomed back to the inn in a flurry of excited words and tight hugs. There’d been a frown on Gibson’s face when they passed by a couple of sheriffs’ cars parked in the bed-and-breakfast’s lot, but it ghosted away, replaced by a placid, guarded expression. They didn’t talk much, and Zach wasn’t sure if he actually needed to hear anything from Gibson other than goodbye and hope to see you again. Zach got neither. Instead Gibson’s fingers feathered a light touch across Zach’s cheekbone, and his thumb brushed quickly over Zach’s lower lip. An instant later, Gibson drove off, leaving Zach with the distinct memory of regret and arousal in Gibson’s hooded eyes.