Colby joined her while he was still rubbing his head with a towel. She could see him sniffing the air.
“Speaking of heightened senses of smell, you have no idea how much it woke me up in the shower just to get a whiff of that.”
She poured a cup for him, taking a second to appreciate the fact that the US Marshals Office had apparently stocked this particular safe house, at least, out of a collection of garage sales: this was a chipped #1 DAD mug.
He would be a good dad, actually, she thought. And he’ll be really good for Mattie.
She trusted him completely, but she knew she couldn’t rush him into Mattie’s life, no matter how much Mattie had liked him. They would have to take things a little more slowly there, so Mattie would have time to get used to having someone new in her life.
But she had no doubt that Colby would earn a mug of his own before he knew it.
“It’s strong,” she warned him, and he took the mug up in both hands. “I tend to weigh mine down with sugar.”
“Sugar’s good, but right now I think I need this in an IV drip.”
He tilted his head back, drinking so fast she seriously wondered if he was going to burn his throat. He was practically inhaling it.
“I think it might be safer to give it to you in an IV drip!”
He looked sheepish. “Sorry. Normally I have a little more of a sense of decorum. Right now I just feel like I want my eyelids wired open. Facing down some of these old wolves is no joke. They might have liked my dad—everybody liked my dad—but it’s hard to say how they feel about me.”
“It’s hard for me to imagine anyone not liking you. Anyone besides federal fugitives, anyway.”
“Most people like me a normal amount, I think.”
He looked down hopefully at his coffee cup, spurring Ar
ia on to refill it. If he wanted to drink enough high-octane caffeine to stay awake for forty-eight hours straight, that was his business.
“But I’ve been out of the wolf loop lately,” he continued. “They might think I snubbed them. I think everyone expected me to go to the older wolves when my dad died and see what local pack might have room for me. I didn’t do that.”
“Why didn’t you?”
She poured out a bowl of the exact kind of sugary, nutrition-free cereal that she tried not to keep in the house and started eating.
The fruit salad cancels this out, she told herself. Not to mention whatever calories I might burn off if we get the chance to go back to bed today and do something besides sleep.
“I don’t know. I never even really considered it, and I used to sit around wishing I still had a pack. I guess I’d never had one before that didn’t happen organically—either with my dad or with my buddies in the Army. And...” He moved his spoon around in circles in his cereal bowl. “Besides, I already had the pack I wanted. They just weren’t other wolves.”
“Your friends,” Aria said softly. “It’s easy to see how much they care about you.”
That put a small smile on his face. “Easy for you, maybe. I spent a while thinking that I needed to be careful to...” He trailed off.
“Seem human?” she suggested. “Even humans need people. I don’t know what I would have done without my family.”
“You’re allowed to lean on your family.”
“You’re allowed to lean on your friends, too. And even if you feel like it’s more than they’d lean on you—you’re allowed to need things they don’t. I know Eli Hebbert took it way, way too far, but you’re allowed to be part wolf, Colby. It’s part of who you are, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
He ran one fingertip over her knuckles, dipping into the space between each one. His hand was warm from holding his coffee cup, and the gesture made her feel pleasantly shivery.
He looked like he was touching her partly to make sure that she was really there. He shook his head a little, almost incredulously.
“No one would ever guess you found out about werewolves because one tried to attack you.”
“And once, when I was visiting my publisher in New York, I got mugged. But that doesn’t mean everyone there would have grabbed my wallet if they could have gotten away with it.”
She shrugged.