“I’ve got tissues inside,” he said. “I’ll go grab you some.”
She sniffled and nodded.
“You lost your house. It’s okay to cry. “
“Did you cry,” she asked, “when you lost yours?”
Wolves had burned his house down. His father had made some shady deal with them, and their pack leader had decided his father hadn’t held up his end to their satisfaction. Unable to pay, they’d torched the family house as retaliation.
When Seth found out, he shifted and went into a violent rage. He’d gone to the wolves’ camp in the woods, which was little more than some shabby cabins around a bonfire. They probably had smelled him coming, because they weren’t surprised to see him. Seth didn’t know what they were expecting, but their guard was definitely down. He lunged at their pack leader and tore out his throat, all before any of the others could even blink. They had thought he’d want to talk. They had thought that since he’d come alone, he wouldn’t try anything. How wrong they had been.
They would have killed him for sure had most of the wolves not also wanted that particular pack leader dead. Still, it wouldn’t do for some “grizzly cub” to be the one who did it. Wolf packs had all kinds of rules for succession, and usually the wolf who killed the pack leader was by default the replacement. So even though Seth had done them a favor, he’d also thrown a huge wrench into things.
The ones who were glad about what Seth did spoke of banishing him, while a select few talked of killing him.
Fearing for Seth’s life, Seth’s father struck another deal with the pack: he would willingly leave Cascadia Falls forever if they left Seth alone. Seth’s mother wasn’t banished, but she followed her husband, of course. Seth had thought of going with them, but he’d just finished high school, and this was his home.
Seeing his father banished for what he’d done, that was the only time he’d ever cried.
“Yeah,” he answered. “I cried then.”
“Seth Stone...crying,” Lily said. “I can’t really picture it.”
Aside from his father being banished, Seth’s actions had started a slow chain reaction within the pack. As the old pack leader's nephew, Dirk, grew up, he had started a rift in the pack. A few years ago the pack had split in two, and Seth had to watch his back now, knowing that the nephew of the man he killed had his own pack.
Seth had made some friends in the other pack, and they kept Dirk’s pack in check...for now.
“Not much for me to cry about these days,” Seth said.
Aside from the drama with the wolves, Seth’s life felt...stagnant. He loved his work, sure, and he had good friends, as well as a nice place in the woods where he could shift and hunt and fish. The only thing missing in his life was his mate. Cascadia Falls was so small, so he’d taken a few vacations around—to Eugene and even Portland. He figured that if he saw his mate, he’d just know. Was she in another city? Did she live in a cabin in the woods in some tiny town, just like him? He’d had no idea what she looked like or how she’d be, and then the dreams had started. He sensed she was near and that he’d find her. He’d find her here. His heart pounded against his chest just thinking about that.
He unlocked and opened the door. Then he smiled and nodded at Lily to let her go in ahead of him.
She smiled back, and that woke something up inside him. He really had missed her. Her green eyes shone even through the darkness, and her smile lit up the house even before he turned on the lights. Maybe she’d play some role in finding his mate. Could it be a friend of hers?
CHAPTER FIVE
Lily
Seth opened the door and held it open for her. She stepped inside, and she realized then that she’d rarely come here. The last time had been at least three years ago, but the place was still mostly the same. It had wood-plank floors, and each plank had its own grain and its own flaws—its own character. She remembered then that Seth had built the house mostly on his own. He’d basically disappeared for a year after graduation, but whenever Lily wanted to find him, she just walked down the street and found Seth either hammering or sawing. He’d always been strong, but building that house for almost a year straight had brought him to a new level. He even felled the trees on his own: no pre-bought lumber. Even in the chill of mid-fall, she’d seen him shirtless and swinging away with a hammer, sweat glistening across his body.
She made him lunch most days. Usually something dumb and easy like a sandwich, but she took extra care to make sure the presentation was just right. Sliced avocados on the side, cutting the sandwich at unique—and sometimes crazy—angles. She looked for pictures online and usually just copied those, but sometimes creativity struck her, and that had always been the best. She worried sometimes that Seth would be so hungry that he’d just pop open the Tupperware and devour the food before seeing how she’d arranged it. Her fear was unfounded, because he always opened the top and studied the presentation. He’d smile at it, then smile at her, and comment on it. Usually he’d just say it looked nice, but sometimes he’d ask her questions about how she came up with it.
Lily shook her head and jolted herself back to the present. Her chest was warm and her head was buzzing. Seth’s scent filled the house, and as he took off his jacket, she saw his thin T-shirt sticking to the bulging muscles of his back. Memories of childhood and puberty and painful longing filled her up. They were dangerous feelings. They’d always filled her with elation and plastered a smile to her face, but sooner or later reality sunk back in, and then those feelings turned to ash in her chest, and they burst out of her as sobs and endless tears.
She shouldn’t be doing this. She could still leave.
“Seth,” she said, “I forgot your place only has one bedroom. I’m really, really putting you on the spot here.”
“No—” he started.
“No.” Lily said. “Look, I can’t stay here. It’s too much. I really appreciate the offer, but if it’s not too much trouble, could you maybe just take me to the hotel?”
He scrunched up his eyebrows, and then he ran a hand through his thick brown hair. It was shorter on the sides and longer on top, and whatever product he used to keep it like that had barely held, so stray strands of hair fell across his forehead. He gave her a nervous smile, one that said he was thinking of what to say. Dirt was caked around the slight wrinkles of his smile, but God, he still looked so beautiful. He was covered from head to toe in ash and grime. They’d wiped her down and cleaned her up at the hospital, but Seth had just sat there by her side covered in ash. And now she was asking him to chauffeur her around just as he was about to take off his boots.
“Okay,” he said. “If you change your mind, my offer still stands.”
He reached for his keys, but Lily cut him off.
“Wait, Seth,” she said. “You probably really want to take a shower, and I’m super hungry.... If you have some leftovers or something, I can eat while you shower. Once you’re cleaned up and have had a bit of a rest, then you can take me.”
“Sure,” he said. “I baked some fresh bread this afternoon before my shift started, and there’s cheese and jam.”
He washed his hands with steaming hot water. He ran the soap up to his elbows, and she saw the sink filling with dark brown water. Lily couldn’t believe she almost made him drive without taking a shower.
When his hands were clean, he reached toward a wooden box on the kitchen counter. It had rounded corners, and he slid it open almost like a garage door. He pulled a half-loaf of bread out and laid it on a cutting board. Then he reached into a basket and pulled out a wedge of cheese. He popped open the fridge and grabbed an unlabeled, hexagonal-shaped jar of jam.
“It’s Dutch cheese,” he said, “and I made the jam and bread myself from scratch. Help yourself! I’m going to go hit the shower.”
“You made this yourself?” Lily said, astounded. “Since when do you bake bread?”
“Well,” he said, “you know how I always seem like such a calm guy?”
“Yeah…” she said, not quite sure that “calm” was the first word that rose to mind to describe him. He’d had a bit of a temper growing up, but she realized then that he had mellowed out a bit since high school.
He laughed. “Yeah, I’m not really the most chill guy. I’ve been dealing with some anger issues ever since we lost the house. That’s why I was building so obsessively...it kept my mind occupied. I loved the process: cut down a tree, then turn it into planks, and then nail planks together to make a wall or a floor. So I took as long as I could to build this place...and then it was done. As soon as I finished building, the anger was back. So I tried woodworking, but it just felt pointless. I already had enough chairs and tables, and I didn’t want to sell anything I made. The whole process of building appealed to me because it was creating something that I could use.”
Lily didn’t know why he’d be so angry...but his family had disappeared after the fire. She’d tried to talk to him about it shortly after, but he’d shut her out, and it had become something she simply never asked or talked about anymore.
“So,” she said, “woodworking didn’t work out, so you started baking?”
“Yeah, basically. I need to eat every day, and so now I get to bake every day. It calms me down, and I’m really good at it now. Here,” he said, handing Lily a knife. “Cut yourself a slice!”
She did so, and he sliced some cheese for her as she did.
“I like the cheese thin,” he said. “Don’t want the cheese to overwhelm the bread.”
It was a dark-colored whole grain bread, thick and solid. And the loaf was hand-shaped, giving it faults and irregularities, much like the planks of Seth’s house. It was nothing like the sad rectangle shape that her bread from the bread machine would have been in.
“You know,” Lily said, “I burned my house down trying to make bread, so I’m really happy that I actually get to eat some now.”
She bit into the bread, and it was wonderful. She was ravenously hungry, which certainly made it taste better, but even if she had been totally full, this would be hard to put down. The texture was full, the crust had a nice crunch to it, and the inside was soft but complex. The taste shifted from grainy to sweet as she chewed, and the thin slice of cheese gave everything a new layer of nuance. It was sharp and buttery, and it seemed to perfectly complement the bread.
“Wow,” she said, “this is amazing!”
Seth grinned widely. “I’m glad you like it. Payback for all those sandwiches and stuff you made me while I was building this place. Sorry the presentation is lacking, but try a slice with the jam too! I’m going to hit the shower now. I’ll drive you back once I’m out and once you’re done eating.”
Lily collapsed onto the kitchen chair. There was a big leather chair in the living room that she was dying to just fall into and pass out in, but she also wanted to finish eating, and she didn’t want to spill bread crumbs all over Seth’s nice chair. So she leaned back in the wooden kitchen chair, which Seth had made himself, and she savored the bread.
She heard the shower running in the background, and a certain image popped right into her head. It was an image of Seth totally naked and covered in steaming hot water. Droplets of hot water were rolling down his skin, and some were pooling up in the hard cut of the muscles between his abs. They rolled down and down and down...and Lily blushed and felt her cheeks burn as she thought of it going all the way down. To there.
“Dammit, Lily,” she hissed to herself, keeping her voice low. “This is why you don’t come here, and this is why you have to leave. As soon as he’s out of the shower, get him to take you to the hotel.”
There was only one bite of bread and cheese left, and she finished it off to take her mind off that steaming hot image of Seth in the shower. But the image was stuck there now, and only time would erase it. Time away from him.
She wanted to try out the jam before Seth finished showering though, so she grabbed another slice of bread and then used the butter knife he’d left for her to spread a thick helping of jam over the bread. The bread was solid and could take the jam; there was no risk at all of it getting soggy or seeping through. This bread was tough...solid...rock-hard.
Lily pinched her wrist until the vision of Seth—rock-hard and glorious in the shower—was shoved from her thoughts. Just eat the jam, you perv. And she did, and it was almost good enough to clear her mind of Seth, but then she remembered that he’d made it himself. It tasted like some kind of wild berries, and she wondered if he even foraged for the berries himself. No, that would be too much, wouldn’t it? The taste though, wow. It was just the right amount of sweetness, but the fruit had a savage and wild bite to it. And it again complimented the bread just right, but in a totally different way from the cheese.
It was so good that Lily just held it up in one hand as she let it wash across her taste buds. While still holding up the bread, she reached into her pocket with her free hand, searching for her phone. She usually kept it in her purse, but her purse had burned down with everything else. The effort of getting the phone out of her tight pants, which couldn’t really contain her ample curves, set her off balance. She tilted too far over, and the bread slid right out of her hands. She heard a wet slap, and when she looked down, it was jam-side down on the wooden floor.
There was a fifty percent chance it would have fallen jam-side up, but it was anything but Lily’s lucky day. She sighed and started looking around for napkins or paper towels. There were none on the counter, and when she opened the drawers she expected them to be in—like under the sink or near the pantry—she didn’t find anything. There weren’t even any washcloths or dishtowels she could use to clean up with. She sighed, peeled the bread off the floor, and winced at the stain on the floor: a jam stain shaped like a slice of bread with a big bite taken out of it.
Lily searched again for anything to clean up with—anything to save her from being outed as a stupid klutz—and came up dry. She’d never been outside the main part of the house where the kitchen and living room were, so she could snoop around and hope to find something. Seth was in the shower though, and that was the only bathroom. Maybe he kept toilet paper or something in a linen closet somewhere? She walked down the hallway and turned a corner. The hallway from the kitchen forked, and to the left was what looked like his bedroom, and to the right was some kind of study. Not wanting to invade his bedroom, Lily turned right and went toward the study. To do so, she had to pass the bathroom, and hearing the hot water flowing just on the other side of the door sent her little mental shower porno playing at full speed in her head. She clenched her teeth and walked past. There was something that looked like a closet just outside the study, and she opened it slowly, trying not to make any noise.
Creak. The hinges were not well oiled, but she doubted he’d have heard that over the rushing water.
Wait, the water was off. Shit. He was done, and she still had to find something to clean with. Clean it and dispose of the evidence. Or, Lily realized, she could stop freaking the fuck out and just laugh it off. Tell Seth she dropped the bread and ask him where some paper towels were. Why was she making such a big deal out of this?
She reached into the closet and probed around on a shelf just above her eye level. She grabbed hold of what felt like a towel or robe, and she pulled it out of the closet. It was a tiny little hand towel. She could probably wipe up the mess and toss the towel in the hamper before Seth finished. Suddenly feeling the urgency, she squeaked the closet shut as slowly as possible—the door letting out a quiet but high-pitched screech—and as soon as she got the door shut, she spun ninety degrees on her heel and jogged toward the kitchen.
Bam! She ran into a wall.
The force hit her, and it felt like a brick wall. Or a steel wall. But then it grabbed hold of her, and she looked up. It wasn’t brick or steel; it was Stone. Seth Stone, naked and hot and looking almost like in her fantasy from earlier, but the real thing looked hotter than she’d even dared to imagine. This was the real thing, and
his muscles were bigger, his shoulders wider, and his...dick—God, she could see his dick. No...she was staring at it. Gawking at it. Her mouth was hanging open as her eyes bulged, and she held that stupid little towel in her hands.
And Seth’s hands, they were touching her. She’d almost fallen over after hitting him, but he’d caught hold of her and steadied her.
She pried her eyes off his manhood, and then her gaze was stuck on his chiseled abs, and so she forced her eyes higher up, but then she got lost in his impossibly wide chest, and her eyes wandered across the Greek sculpture that was his arms. It felt like ages until she met those snowy blue eyes, and those teeth whiter than marble were smiling widely at her.
“You got me a towel?” he asked. He didn’t seem ashamed or embarrassed, but she knew her face must have been on fire.
He took the towel from her hand and said, “It’s pretty small. You think—”
Unbearable Heat (The Grizzly Next Door 2) Page 3
