Still Waters

Sarah Redhawk stopped waiting for a mate years ago. Nobody told her wolf.

She has the eastern watershed, a pack she counts by heartbeat, and six years of Friday bread baked in a kitchen built for one. It's enough. She has arranged herself around the empty chair so completely she no longer sees it.

Then Finn Baird sets his field kit down on her flagline and stays. The visiting geneticist is quiet where other men perform, thorough where they rush, and he notices things about her that she never said out loud. Twelve weeks working shoulder to shoulder on the same slope. Same rock at dusk. Same distance between them, until the distance is the only thing left to measure.

There's a problem. Finn is human, his research is one signature away from a biotech firm's hands, and the truth he's closing in on belongs to her pack, not to him.

Nothing happens. Weeks of it. Then his hand moves an inch across the rock toward hers and stops, and Sarah realizes she has been counting his footsteps since March.

Can a man who lives by evidence accept a truth he can't publish? Will Sarah open the door her wolf already unlocked, or watch him drive back down the mountain? Pick up Still Waters and pull up the second chair.