“Goddamn it, Ellis,” Zach swore, slamming on the brakes. The SUV’s back tire skidded slightly, hitting a wet or icy patch on the road, and the panic in Zach’s belly turned to a bitter metallic taste on his tongue. Swallowing hard, Zach glared at the wolf through his windshield. Ellis appeared to be laughing at him, a wide toothy grin framing his lolling pink tongue. Rolling down the passenger window, Zach addressed the wolf, “It’s bad enough you tried to kill me once, did you have to go for a second time?”
The wolf remained in the middle of the road for a few seconds, then ambled over to the passenger side of the SUV. Jumping up to hook his massive front paws on the open window’s frame, Ellis stuck his nose in, his enormous head filled the space. A froth of spit marbled his black muzzle and his ears twitched curiously as he reached in to paw at the inside door panel.
“Really? You want a ride? This would be a lot easier if you spoke,” Zach grumbled, reaching over the cab to open the door. “I swear to God, you should be glad the cabin isn’t right around the next bend because I’d shave you so you looked like a poodle.”
The threat was a weak one, and they both knew it, especially since Ellis probably had at least sixty pounds on Zach, regardless of which form he wore. The wolf nudged the door open, then jumped in, making the SUV dip. Ellis overwhelmed the space, sucking up all of the air with his presence, and Zach belatedly realized there was no way he was going to be able to reach past the wolf to close the passenger side door. Muttering to himself, Zach got out, went around to the other side, then tucked Ellis’s long tail into the car before closing the door.
Inside, the wolf let out an audible snicker.
“Sure, laugh it up now,” Zach said, mockingly baring his teeth at the enormous creature next to him. “We’ll see how sorry you are about teasing me once you get a load of the chocolate pudding cake I brought with me. If you’re lucky, maybe Gibson will let you lick the knife.”
All his threat got was another snicker, and when he put the SUV into drive, the taint of a bean-fueled gas cloud filled the cab.
“God, you’re such an asshole.” Zach gagged, rolling the driver’s side window down the rest of the way.
One thing about Ellis’s presence—the best thing, really—was it meant Gibson hadn’t left. If his trepidation about driving up the mountain bothered him before, the anticipation of seeing Gibson again unnerved Zach to the point of a near breakdown. With the bad habit of talking to himself, Zach bit the side of his cheek to keep his words inside his mouth. His world had already been turned upside down with the discovery of a man—two men—with the ability to cloak themselves in a wolf’s body. He didn’t need to sabotage his growing attraction to Gibson by confessing everything in a senseless ramble in front of Ellis.
“You know, if you guys were smaller, you could so eavesdrop on any conversation you wanted to listen to.” Maneuvering the vehicle around a fallen tree, Zach surveyed the damage left by the storm. Or at least he thought it was damage left by the storm. “I never really understood how much I didn’t know until I moved up here. Most of my life was spent in the city, so coming out here is almost like being on another planet. I’m an alien here, you know? It’s like everyone speaks the same language but words mean different things. It’s not bad, just… not what I expected.
“You sure as hell are not one I ever expected,” Zach remarked as he continued to drive. “I still can’t wrap my brain around it—around what you can do. I mean, I saw it plain as day, but I guess it changes my world. It makes me wonder what else is out there that I don’t know. Like, is the Loch Ness monster real? Are vampires? And how exactly does everything work? There’s physics involved, laws of nature we haven’t explored or examined. Well, maybe one of your kind has and we don’t know about it. The world doesn’t know about it.”
Ellis remained silent, not that Zach was expecting him to reply, but a comforting woof would have gone far. Instead, he got a set of pricked-up ears, and then the cabin appeared on the rise.
Gibson met them at the end of the drive, a worried look on his handsome face. He opened the car door to let Ellis out, stepping aside when the wolf rushed past him. His boots crunched through the small patches of snow Zach parked next to, and he was there waiting when Zach climbed out of the SUV.
“Hey,” Gibson rumbled in a sexy, raspy drawl rich enough to intoxicate all of Zach’s senses. “I see you picked up a hitchhiker. Hope he didn’t give you any trouble.”
“No trouble,” Zach said, then grimaced. “But whatever you’re feeding him, you’ve got to stop. He’s like a chemical weapon that goes off every time there’s a bump in the road.”
“Yeah,” he replied, not quite hiding a smile. “He does it on purpose. I guess if you can’t talk, you gotta show your displeasure somehow, and I would rather he do that than chew up my shoes.”
It wasn’t exactly the erotic welcome portrayed in romance novels, and it sure as hell wasn’t a slow-motion run toward each other on the beach, the wind blowing through their long hair while a hippie playing a pan flute warbled off in the distance, but when Gibson’s fingers brushed over the back of Zach’s hand, it awakened a part of him he didn’t know was asleep.
His nose hurt a bit from the crisp air, and there was a hint of smokiness to every breath he took, an acrid taint probably fueled by a roaring fire inside the cabin. The woods around them were wet, a dank black-green decay moldering under the heavy snow-packed leaves, and somewhere in the distance, the rattle of arguing crows grew louder. Then the scatter of black-feathered birds swooped past the top of the tree line.
Zach hadn’t seen the two-storied cabin’s exterior before Gibson had taken them down the hill, and he was struck by how large it appeared from the outside. Its roof was pitched high and steep, a common occurrence in the area and something Zach discovered was done to keep snow from bowing a house’s rafters. Still, the roofline was dressed with icy white scallops and the occasional dark blotch of old leaves. There seemed to be a lot of windows, an abundance of glass panes shuttered against the winter from inside, and the widest part of the cabin’s wrap-around deck jutted out over the small rise the structure rested on, giving the place a spectacular view of the lake and woods below.