She sits up suddenly, and looks toward the window. I take a step back. Fuck. Why did I just come all over the window? Did she hear me?
“Is someone there?” A soft voice cries out, thick with embarrassment and fear, and I cringe. What if it wasn’t me? What if it was someone bad, someone mean? She literally just announced her presence to anyone who might be lurking around her porch.
Not that she was doing a good job of hiding before.
Any wolf within a mile-radius would have found her. Though she caught me off guard because I was distracted, I don’t doubt other wolves will have a hard time finding her.
What is she doing in the darkness of the forest?
Why is she here?
And why, of all places, is she in my cabin and in my bed?
“Go home, little girl,” I grow quietly, but I disappear behind some trees as she rises from the bed and comes to the window. From my position, I see her press her nose against the glass, like a little kid, and I sigh.
She looks fucking adorable.
Her eyes are big and bright and her hair is long and covers her shoulders. She stands there for a minute, peering into the darkness, before giving up and moving away. I hear the lock click and I growl again. She didn’t even have the door locked? Who is this female?
I don’t know why, but I have nothing better to do, so I swear a silent oath to protect her while she stays there. I won’t talk to her and I won’t approach her, but I’ll watch over her.
If I do my job right, I can keep her alive, but she’ll never even know I exist.
While my heart aches to reach out to the female, to be loved, to be accepted, I know that this is the way it has to be.
4.
Nash
The woman in the cabin is called Red.
At least, that’s how she refers to herself. I know this because it’s been three days and she’s spent the whole damn time talking to herself.
It started the second morning. She was looking through the cupboards for something – food, I presume – and couldn’t find any.
“Well, Red, what did you expect? You can’t just barge in and assume all your candy bars would still be here.”
Her candy bars? I gulped when she said it. Those candies had been delicious and I’d devoured them my first day there.
But who is she?
She is obviously familiar with the cabin and the area of the woods, but I can’t understand why she came here. I can’t understand why she came now. I think about approaching her sometimes, but I can’t. Not just yet.
When I watch her, I’m in wolf form. There’s no point in being a human. If she happened to surprise me and see me, it would be easier to deal with her thinking I was a wolf than a naked man who happened to spy on her and jerk off thinking about her every night.
Every night.
At first, I figured she would stay a day or two and then leave, but she doesn’t seem to have any intention of making this easy on me. I don’t want to spend my life as some secret lone wolf protector, but something tells me she’s in trouble.
Something tells me she’s going to need my help one day.
I’m torn between continuing to quietly watch her and revealing myself. I want to march up to the cabin door, tear it off its hinges, and demand she tell me who she’s running from. It must be bad. For a gorgeous woman to come hide in a dilapidated cabin in the woods, it has to be bad.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into things.
Maybe she’s like me and just wanted someplace to have a fresh start.
When I left my pack, I was essentially outcast by the Alpha, but I know the other pack members didn’t want me to leave. Some of them wanted me to challenge him. Some of them wanted me to fight.