Page 18 of The Wolves of Forest Grove

“But I wasn’t,” I said.

He rolled his eyes at me. Just then Viv appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, “What happened?” she demanded. “Someone just told me you got shoved down the stairs.”

She searched me for injury, and I shook my head. “Nearly, but Clay—”

I turned to gesture to him; to give him the credit for saving me, but he wasn’t there.

I stood on tiptoe to see over the crowd, but he was gone.

That was when I noticed the sliding door several paces down the wall was slightly ajar, letting the cool air of the night into the house.

I turned to the window just in time to see him vanish into the tree line.

“What?” Viv asked, her brows lowering. Her eyes were unfocused, and I knew she’d likely had a few shots with her lacrosse buddies in the kitchen while the whole ordeal played out.

“Never mind,” I said instead of explaining. “I’m good.”

She squeezed my shoulder, letting loose a very exaggerated sigh. “Good, because I just saw Devin come inside.”

I stiffened. He wasn’t supposed to be here. Why was he here? Could she have mistaken someone else for him?

“He looked pissed. He was asking Thompson if he’d seen you.”

Shit.

“Thanks, Viv,” I said, rushing to sling my pack over my shoulder again, but leaving the tequila behind on the sill. “Layla just went to the bathroom. Said she’d be right back. If you see him, can you tell him I left. I don’t want to deal with that tonight.”

A little whining voice in my mind bleated this was supposed to be fun.

This was supposed to be like old times.

Viv just nodded. “Okay, where are you going?”

“Just out back,” I told her, squinting out the window into the trees to see if Clay was still there. Hopefully Devin wouldn’t think to look outside for me. And hopefully if he did, Clay was still around.

I couldn’t fathom why, but I felt like if I was in trouble and Clay was there, regardless of what he thought about me, he wouldn’t let Devin hurt me.

He may be a brute and total ass. But the reason he’d fought an entire football team that summer a few years back was because one of the guys thought it would be funny to get a girl named Stacy drunk and fool around with her.

Except from what I heard, it wasn’t only the one guy, but the whole football team who’d planned to have their way with a drunken female student a couple years younger than most of the players.

I didn’t know if that was true, and I doubted Clay did either, but that didn’t stop him from knocking out three guys and sending two more to get stitches. He was suspended for two weeks and nearly flunked that year because of it.

I slipped out the sliding door without saying goodbye to Viv just as I spotted Devin coming through the doorway to the kitchen. I jumped back from the door before he could see me and took off at a sprint into the shadows of the trees.

“Clay,” I whispered harshly into the woods.

There came no response and I listened for the sound of his footfalls, or his wolf ’s hot, heavy breaths from the brush, but there was nothing. He was already gone.

I shivered.

Once I was fully under the tree’s canopy and the dappled moonlight was blocked enough to conceal me in the embrace of prickling pines and withering elms, I took a steadying breath.

I could hardly see a thing through the window, but I tried to make out the shapes of Viv and Devin standing together as he questioned her.

If it was Layla he was grilling I’d have been a bit more worried, but Viv could take care of herself.

I had no doubt that if Devin even made a move to hurt her, she’d have him on the ground faster than he could blink.

She wasn’t held back by the same constraints I was. She wouldn’t be thrown into a state of hurt and shock if he raised a hand to her. She wouldn’t vanish into herself, diminishing into a back corner of her mind while her body quaked like an empty husk in a strong wind.

“Allie?”

I screamed, whirling around at the sudden sound.

His hand came over my mouth, muffling the last of the scream.

His lightly calloused hand was warm against my mouth and my eyes took in his glowing amber ones in the dark.

He was shirtless but had a pair of jeans riding low on his hips.

A belt, a pair of flat converse shoes almost identical to mine, and wrinkled t- shirt lay against the cold earth by his feet.

He seemed to be studying me almost as intently as I studied him. Taking in the low cut of my navy top beneath the unzipped jacket and the tight-fitting jeans with hunger in his stare.

The bang of a door flying open back at the house made me jump and Jared’s hand was jostled away from my face. I looked between him and the house where Devin was frantically scanning the forest, his eyes bright and shifting.

It took me all of a heartbeat to realize how this looked.

I knew Jared had run here in wolf form. That was why he was carrying clothes with him. That was why his jeans were barely on and his warm, solid chest was bare.

But that wasn’t what others would see…

Jared glared at the place where Devin stood in the doorway, his upper lip curling back into a snarl. “What did he do to you?” Jared hissed.

I shoved his chest back and he barely moved, but his glare broke and he focused his gaze on me, confused. “Go,” I urged him, breathless as I heard Devin’s descent down the steps and onto the lawn. “Go!” I whisper shouted a little louder, trying to get through to him.

Jared was barefoot, with his jean all but falling from his hips. He was shirtless and his clothes were in a pile on the ground. He was with a girl in the woods, and the girl had screamed.

It didn’t matter what I said now to defend him. I knew what it looked like and Jared’s eyes widened as he finally figured out why I was urging him to fucking move.

“I won’t leave you with him, it isn’t safe.”

“No fucking shit,” I managed, still shoving his stupid hard chest without being able to move him more than an inch at a goddamned time. Damn, it was like trying to shove a man-sized block of cement. “Get the fuck out of here, Jared.”

“No.”

“I’ll get inside. I won’t stay out here alone with him, now go,” I urged him as I saw Devin stalking toward the trees, his head lifting as though he caught the scent of me on the air.

A group of a few people followed behind him, wondering what all the fuss was about.

“Look, he isn’t alone. Go around to the front and meet me inside,” I added, thinking maybe the suggestion might make him move if nothing else did.

Jared tore his gaze away from Devin and his jaw flared as he clenched his teeth. “If he hurts you, I’ll kill him.”

Jared backed away and shifted in the blink of an eye.

One second he was man, the next he was wolf.

Somewhere in there he’d managed to pull down his pants and avoid shredding them to denim ribbons and I somehow managed to be both relieved and a little disappointed I hadn’t caught it.

The enormous white wolf flashed its amber eyes at me before it lifted the pile of clothing into its mouth and sprinted away into the dark, like a white streak of lightning through an inky sky.

But I was still reeling from what he’d said to wrap my mind around the fact that this time I’d actually watched as a man became a wolf. In the same breath. In the same heartbeat. If he hurts you, I’ll kill him.

It was what my father had said to me when I had my first date. Bobby and I were only fifteen. He was taking me to see a movie at the park.

My eyes stung at the memory.

It seemed so unlike Jared to say something so insidious. It was something I would expect to come from the foul mouth of Clay, not the sweet, sensitive Jared. But when he’d said those words, there had been no trace of doubt in his gaze. He’d meant it. And I believed him.

My pulse was still pounding when Devin found me standing there dumbstruck with my breath clouding the air in front of my face.

“Allie.”

I flinched away from his touch and stumbled back, shaking off the gloss of incredulity and almost falling in my haste to get away from him. “Don’t touch me,” I managed before I bumped into someone else.

Her name was Mandy—she was super drunk, but I knew her, she was in my Philosophy class. “Are you, like, okay?” she trilled in her high-pitched nasally voice. “Devin said he heard you screaming.”

I didn’t know how the hell he could have heard me. I distinctly remembered closing the door behind me and the music in there was too loud to hear the person next to you, never mind what was going on fifty feet away outside.

Someone must have opened the damned window.

Fuck, Allie, why did you have to scream?

“Babe, look at me,” Devin said, reaching for me again with a crease between his brows and a worried depth in his gaze. Fake. All of it was fake. He didn’t fucking care about what happened to me. He couldn’t. Not after what he did to me, himself. “Did someone hurt you?”

Did someone hurt me?

He had to be fucking with me.

Maybe it was the tequila still lingering in my bloodstream, or maybe it was the fact that I wasn’t alone out here with him, already a group was forming near the back door of the house and I could see Layla and Viv hustling out onto the back lawn.

But no matter what sparked it, what I was feeling was pure rage and I couldn’t contain it any longer. The fucking audacity.

“Did someone hurt me?” I repeated the question back to him, urging him to see his colossal mistake in asking me such a rhetorical question.

Devin’s eyes flashed at me in warning, his gaze darkened.

I didn’t care.

“Yeah,” I spat, twisting out of Mandy’s clammy grasp. “You did, asshole.”

My chest ached at the admission and something in my heart snapped. “You did,” I whispered again, and my voice broke.

The warning in Devin’s eyes vanished and his face fell. The devilish Devin I’d seen him a moment before gone and replaced by the one I knew. “I…”

“Save it.”

He stepped forward. “I’m so sorry, Allie, I—”

“Just leave me alone,” I managed through the bleary haze of tears coating my eyes, rushing to meet Viv and Layla halfway across the lawn.

Viv folded me under her wing and Layla wrapped an arm around my other side, the pair of them effectively shielding me from the prying eyes of the drunken students watching from all sides.

“Fucking prick!” Viv snarled back at Devin over her shoulder and I flinched, imagining how many eyes would be turning on him with accusing stares.

I couldn’t help myself, just before we reached the door, I turned, catching a glimpse of Devin standing with his face pinched and hands like talons at his sides.

He wasn’t looking at me, though, he was looking back into the trees, to where I could just make out the gleaming white of Jared’s converse sneakers discarded against the brackish leaves on the ground.