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The outfit she was wearing… black jeans so tight they looked painted onto her skin, and a barely there red tank top under her leather jacket. High heels that made her generous ass and hips sway as she scurried away from me into the lobby.

Where’s she going, dressed like that? Who’s she seeing? Is some godsdamned male going to have the privilege of sliding those jeans off her later?

It tugs on the wild, feral thing beating against the inside of my chest, and the insistent press of wings beneath my skin makes my muscles burn and ache.

Irrational. I’m being completely fucking irrational right now.

It’s none of my damned business where she’s going or who she’s seeing.

It’s what I keep telling myself, what I keep mentally repeating as I jog down the stairs toward the ground floor. I fully intend to head straight for the parking garage and get in my car, drive home, and lock myself safely in my condo for the evening.

Until I open the front door and catch a whiff of her scent on the breeze. Faint, but there, following her to wherever she’s going.

A whisper, a taunt, the barest essence of her.

It draws the image of her face to my mind, the deep green of her eyes and the rosy apples of her cheeks. A pair of sinfully full lips I can just imagine turned up in a smirk or bitten to deep red temptation. Her shoulder-length auburn curls and the stubborn tilt of her chin.

On a date with someone else.

I told her we weren’t mates, made it clear we weren’tanything. I was a cold, unfeeling asshole to her. I’m the one with the problem, and I don’t need to make it hers as well.

Yet the urge to shift, to follow her, just totalkto her so I can try to understand what’s going on here, won’t leave me alone.

Turning my face to the sky, I wish like anything I could let myself go, take to those skies and soar high, give the dragon his freedom. All the way to my car, the thoughts don’t stop spiraling, hounding me, making me want things I have no business wanting.

And even when I’m in the driver’s seat, hands clenched hard enough around the steering wheel to make my knuckles white, I can’t shake them.

I can’t stop seeing Kenna in all her devastating, ruinous glory, walking away from me like she has every right to do.

7

Kenna

My date with the wolf shifter is not going great.

And that’s being generous.

Throughout dinner, Dylan regales me with every last detail about his weight lifting and bulking routine between taking big, bloody bites of his rare steak.

I’m no vegetarian, but I almost want to become one with how queasy my stomach gets watching him.

After that, I’m treated to an expletive-filled monologue about the state of the wolf packs in the Pacific Northwest. It would be kind of interesting to learn about, actually, but Mr. Wannabe-Alpha struggles to get through a single sentence without interjecting how badass he is, how all the other packs cower in fear, how he’s going to be pack leader in a few years.

God, he looked good on paper. Or, well, onscreenin the dating app I found him on. Good degree. Good job in finance. I can even admit he’s hot, despite the personality. The perfect guy for new-Kenna. If only he wasn’t so absolutely insufferable.

I spend most of the date bored and uncomfortable, resisting the urge to check the time.

Old-Kenna probably would have taken him home anyway. Chances are with as self-involved as he is, he would have been a shit lay, but hey, it would have been worth it to find out.

I might have even still given into the urge tonight, let new-Kenna slip a little and let old-Kenna have some fun, if it wasn’t for one tiny, annoying fact.

I can’t get a pair of sharp, golden eyes out of my memory.

It’s pretty damn inconvenient, too, after how much of an ass I made of myself in front of Blair earlier. The way he just stood there and stared at me as I ran away from him like an idiot, the way he didn’t say a single freaking word.

“So,” Dylan says as we walk down the street outside the restaurant after we’ve finished dinner. “Where to next?”

Home, I want to say. A bath and a glass of wine and a few episodes of a fluffy sitcom on my laptop in bed sound really, really good right now.