Harper snorted. Her grandfather used to be a man-eater. She didn’t enjoy the taste of people’s ashes at all. Still, she’d threatened the boys within an inch of their everlovin’ lives anytime they stepped out of line when they were kids.
Harper caught the glove and ball Wyatt tossed her, then watched him saunter off to the side, hand on his hip and back to them as he answered the call.
Ryder was eyeballs-deep in bullshit because Harper had been team captain of their little league team, a title she’d earned. She chucked the ball at him. He squealed and danced out of the way of her zinger, and at the last moment, reached to the side and caught it. Harper smirked when he rubbed his sore hand.
“Damn straight, I throw like a girl.”
A few more rounds of that, and Wyatt hung up. “Okay, so I want to show you all something.”
“Hard pass,” Weston said. “I’m about to leave.”
“I really want you to stay, man. Just for a couple more hours. You’ve all asked me what I’m doing here, and I want to show you.” Wyatt hooked his hands on his hips and gave Weston a pleading look. “Please. It would maybe explain some of the stuff you don’t understand about me.”
Weston slid his hat from his head, then replaced it with a pissed-off sigh. “Fine. Two hours, and then I’m out.” He strode past Wyatt, hitting him in the shoulder with his own, and climbed up in his truck. “I’m driving.”
Harper hugged Wyatt’s waist and smiled up at him sympathetically. “You know Wes. His loyalty is hard to earn.”
“I know. I broke his trust.”
“So get it back,” she murmured through a saucy grin. Feeling bold, Harper reached up on tiptoes and pressed her lips to his.
“Barf,” Ryder called. “I’m barfing right now. I’m barfing in my mouth.”
Wyatt laughed against her lips and angled his face, then thrust his tongue into her mouth once before he eased back with a sexy peck. Then he grabbed her ass hard and turned her toward the truck.
Damn that man could give her a serious case of the butterflies. Her stomach was doing gymnastics right now, and when she made her way to the pickup, she felt as drunk as she had all those years ago at that hotel in Montana.
“I call window!” Harper said, but the boys had already beat her to it. Aaron told her to “climb over” instead of moving his legs out of the way, the bunion.
“Where to?” Weston asked in a none-too-charitable voice.
“Take a right on the main road,” Wyatt instructed.
“Town is left,” Harper pointed out.
Wyatt shot her a quick grin and rolled down the window. “We aren’t going to town.”
He rested his arm on the edge of the door and relaxed back against the headrest. Now Harper had a perfect view of his gloriously chiseled jaw line. He’d shaved this morning, and he was somehow even more handsome under the scruff. And then, as if he could tell she was checking him out, he reached behind him and hooked his giant hand on the back of her calf and squeezed it once reassuringly.
Heat pooled in her stomach, and her cheeks blazed with pleased warmth. Ignoring Aaron and Ryder’s eye rolls, she grabbed Wyatt’s hand as he moved to pull away from her and kissed his palm quick.
Twenty-eight years old, and this man had her feeling like a teenager experiencing first love again. And maybe she was. Maybe this was normal for someone who had been through what she had. She was so infinitely relieved that he was back in her life and showing her the same affection, attention, and care that she felt for him. He wasn’t holding back or treating her like she was temporary.
Instead, Wyatt was bonding them.
Chapter Ten
Aaron was angling his face down instead of looking out the window. He’d ridden like that for the twenty-minute drive into the Smokey Mountains. With a suspicious frown, Harper shoved his face to the side and gasped. His neck had been injured last night in the fight, but she hadn’t even thought to check him this morning. Bear shifters had some of the fastest healing capabilities out of all the shifters, but Aaron’s neck was only half-healed and angry looking.
Aaron lifted icy blue eyes to hers. A few strands of his gelled hair fell stiffly over his face. “It’s not how I thought it would be with the vamps.”
She studied the worry that pooled in his eyes. Aaron had always been the tough one. The quiet one. They’d spent summers and holidays together because their father’s, Bruiser and Cody Keller, were half-brothers. She’d watched him grow up strong, and she’d watched him transition from a happy boy to a tattoo-covered, pierced, scruffy, motorcycle-riding badass. The changes started happening when he went through the Fire Academy to become a firefighter like his father and uncles. Something about his occupation had made him harder, more withdrawn.
She ran her finger over the injury on his throat. Hers looked much better than this, and the queen had her teeth on her longer. “Wyatt?”
Wyatt turned in the front seat, and his eyes dimmed. “Sorry, man. That shit’ll scar. You went head-to-head with Aric, Arabella’s Second. He wasn’t trying to suck you dry. He was trying to rip your throat out.”
Aaron twitched his neck out from under Harper’s probing fingers. “Good. Chicks dig scars.”
She hadn’t missed the bitter edge to his voice. He didn’t want comfort, though, and she’d learned from spending a lifetime around rough-and-tumble dominant shifters not to press him.