Cracked Blue Sky: a dark werewolf romantic suspense (The Lindals) by Shiloh Sloane

Author:Shiloh Sloane [Sloane, Shiloh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2023-10-30T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 25

Fool’s gold

Howie

Wright sleeps on the floor of her trailer now, but they don’t touch.

It started the night they went to Doris’s house, an invitation half-intended to keep an eye on him if he has one of those blackouts again and half-intended to push him to where she could understand his evil, look straight into its eyes, find the point where he won’t listen if she tells him to stop. But now it’s something of a habit.

Weeks in, she’d be surprised to pull into her driveway and not see him sitting on her steps with a brown paper bag of groceries in his hands. All he’s got to protect him from the cold is a knit scarf and a big shearling jacket and her door is never locked but still he waits for her. Sometimes he brings oranges.

He asks her what she likes. She cooks him the type of food she grew up with, and because she lived in Dakota and Texas, that means wohanpi with Stoughton ranch beef, tamales with shredded elk and chokecherries, the history of her life in the steam of the kitchen.

“What do Swedish people eat?” she asked one day, and he looked at her like he wasn’t sure why she was asking.

Wright Lindal isn’t American in the way that his blood comes from the land, but in the way that he only sees the years he’s been alive. He can’t imagine his people coming from somewhere he’s never seen. But the next day he brings in a heftier bag and cooks with a crease in his brow like he’s remembering something. He makes meatballs and buttery mashed potatoes and some kind of sauce with the dried chokecherries she has, and he closes his eyes when he eats, and she thinks she’s in love with him.

When she was married, she slept so close to Darran that if she had a nose like Wright’s she would have tasted the other women he exhaled into her hair. That love left cuts she can’t even see in her skin. Cuts that keep her bed empty, because Wright is a man who falls in love often, she bets, and she won’t let him cut her in half. She won’t let him prove the doubts in her mind that he’ll find someone easier on him, or go back to what he already has.

The other day he called home on the phone in the kitchen and his face lit up bright as pure sunlight. Through the receiver she could hear the sound of a baby wailing. His brother’s wife had twins. Zion and Ajax, two boys. They’ll be wolves one day. His face went soft thinking of them and she knew he’d never stay in Wyoming. February snuck up on them. The end of summer is far away, but she feels it like the muzzle of a rifle aimed in her direction.

They cook side by side. The floor glitters with bottle caps from Coca Cola they drink together. She eats with her feet perched on the bottom rung of his chair, and he watches her with hope in his eyes.

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