He glanced at Aria before he answered, making sure he had permission. “A wolf.”
“Oh,” Mattie said. She sounded faintly disappointed.
“Mattie, we don’t react that way when someone tells us something.” Doreen’s face said she couldn’t quite believe that she was now scolding her granddaughter for not being excited enough about werewolves.
Aria felt an intense admiration for her mom in that moment. How many people would come through an earth-shattering revelation and immediately start trying to figure out how to be polite to supernatural creatures?
“It’s just that werewolves are sort of boring,” Mattie said apologetically. “Everybody knows about them. But I’m sure you’re a very pretty wolf.”
“He is.” If they were boyfriend and girlfriend now, she definitely had to defend her man’s honor. “And he fought that other werewolf very bravely and saved us, and now he’s hurt.”
Even if her daughter wasn’t especially impressed by werewolves, she had a kind heart. Mattie dropped her pencils immediately and scrambled upright, going over to wrap herself around Colby’s legs like she was going to try to climb him.
“I’m sorry, Marshal Colby. I didn’t know you were hurt. You were really brave and you gave me a Rubik’s cube and I was being so mean, I’m sorry!”
Colby patted her shoulder. “It’s okay, Mattie. You’re right: werewolves do get all the press. But we also know all the best people. We try to form packs, so we always get to know everybody. I’m lucky enough to have gotten to meet you and your mom and your grandparents today—and in a couple of minutes, when the people I work with get here, I can introduce you to a dragon.”
“Good God,” Doreen said. “There’s no end to it.”
“Afraid not. But most of us are pretty quiet.”
All the humor leaked out of his voice as he looked at the blanket-covered lump on the floor.
“The Hebberts are an exception,” Colby said. “Every community has its bad guys.”
“We wouldn’t judge the man defending our daughter by the man who tried to attack her,” Ben said quietly. “What we would do—and need to do—is thank you, from the bottom of our hearts.”
Aria was so used to her dad being just her dad—familiar, funny, folksy, and with an endless supply of corny jokes—that she felt a pinch of emotion around her heart at all this. She’d rarely seen him be so serious, but all of a sudden, she was plunged back into remembering all the other times he’d stood up for her and for what was right.
Between him and her mom, she had always been surrounded by people who believed in treating people with dignity and always rolling up your sleeves and pitching in to help. She was pretty lucky in that. It was more than Luke, with his terrible cousins, had ever had.
“Believe me, sir,” Colby said quietly, “I’d walk through hell to keep your daughter safe.”
She was lucky in him, too—so lucky that it took her breath away.
She gently separated Mattie from him. He was way too nice to say anything about it, but she was sure that, as sore as he was, having an eight-year-old girl hugging him with all her strength couldn’t have been too comfortable. She put her hand up to the back of his head and felt the fine, silky hairs at the nape of his neck.
Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have done something this romantic—this intimate—with a man in front of her parents. Especially with a new relationship.
But nothing about this was ordinary. And—outside of the delicious, intoxicating spin of sexual tension whenever she looked at him—nothing about this even felt new. It felt like some part of her had waited her whole life for Colby Acton.
When she looked at him, she felt the way she had when she’d taken her first truly great picture. She had seen it developing in the darkroom, and before it was even all the way there, she’d thought, This is it. This is what I’m supposed to be doing. This is everything I’ve always wanted, and it’s perfect.
He didn’t just make her knees weak. He made her soul strong.
“I’m not going to let you walk through hell alone,” she said.
The moment was dampened by a neighbor suddenly knocking at her doorframe.
In the neighbor’s defense, she couldn’t have knocked on the door, since it was hanging cockeyed off its hinges like it had spent the whole night drunk.
Colby tensed up, but Aria saw right away who it was.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “I know her. It’s safe—you can go hide out in the kitchen.”
As a matter of fact, she could even take the opportunity to try to pump a little bit of information for them, if she could get her head on straight. She was still coming down from all the fear and adrenaline.
But the neighbor in question was Susan Fowler, the same woman who had talked to Doreen about seeing wolves. Aria guessed she owed Susan a mental apology for doubting her, but it was just that Susan Fowler was an easy pe