Wild Sign (Alpha & Omega #6)(79)

She got into the SUV and it purred to life. She smiled happily and petted the dashboard. How lovely to have the means at her disposal to complete her task. The smile stayed on her lips as she drove into Happy Camp.

She pulled over at the snow cone stand, which was dark and locked. But that was okay, too. She just had to wait a bit.

He knocked at her window and she opened the door.

“Hello, darling,” said Zander, leaning over to kiss her mouth, one hand at the back of her neck.

That made her stomach tighten—and not in a good way. She stiffened under his hold.

“Shh,” he urged, and kissed her again.

It still felt wrong.

“We’ll give it a little time, shall we?” he suggested, and she could have wept in gratitude. She wanted to make him happy. She just . . . she just needed time.

He released her and gave her an odd smile. “Anna,” he said. “How old are you?”

That was a stupid question, she thought. Who greets someone with a how-old-are-you?

“Jailbait,” she said primly, to punish him.

He laughed. He had a beautiful laugh. She liked to make . . . well, it had to be him, right? She liked to make . . . people laugh.

“How old is that?” he asked.

“Seventeen,” she said.

His eyes were soft and deep. Gentle. He was everything she’d ever dreamed of, she thought. Why was there some part of her that wanted to run? He wouldn’t hurt her. He wasn’t the kind of man to be afraid of. Not like . . . She couldn’t quite complete that thought, and it made her worry.

“Of course,” he said, reaching out to smooth her forehead with a thumb. It seemed as though her worries fled before his touch like birds flushing before a wolf. “Jailbait indeed.”

“How old are you?” she asked, because turnabout was fair play.

“Older than you,” he said with a wry smile. “Here, move over. I’m doing the driving tonight.”

She climbed over the center console obediently and put the seat belt on. She pressed her face into the leather and inhaled. It smelled of mint and musk and . . . something familiar. Something safe.

“What are you doing?” he asked her, a smile in his voice.

“It smells good,” she said, feeling as though she was being held, warmth against a storm. She pulled up the flannel shirt and found herself huddling down deep. Some part of her was lying low, and that part thought that the shirt was a way to hide.

“Are you cold?” asked Zander. He turned up the heat and then started forward without waiting for her answer. “I thought you might bring something waterproof. It’s going to rain tonight.”

“I don’t mind the rain,” she said truthfully, pressing her cheek against the window and staring out into the darkness. Her right leg began bouncing with her growing agitation. It was probably the storm that had her tense. There was such energy in the air.

The dash lights hollowed out his cheeks and hid his eyes. For a moment he looked like a stranger. She averted her eyes and saw the big Sasquatch statue.

“Do you think,” she said, because it felt like the right question, “that Sasquatches are as big as that statue?”

“I’ve never seen one,” he said shortly. He lied.

“I have.” Which was a lie, too, right? But it didn’t feel like a lie. She had never been in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest before.

What was she doing here? In this car with this beautiful stranger? She made a sound like a whine. There was something wrong. She wanted . . . not her dad. She wanted . . . She reached for the door handle, though they were going faster than the thirty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit.

He started singing. There were words to his song, but they weren’t in English. Or any other language she’d ever heard.

“Not Pachelbel,” she said as her hand dropped away from the door.

He didn’t quit singing, but she could hear the smile in his voice.

No. This song that he had been working on did not have Pachelbel’s chord progression at all. She wasn’t sure why she’d been so certain that it had. Her hands moved, as if she were trying to play on her cello, though she wasn’t certain if she wanted to play a harmony to his song—or Pachelbel.

Bereft of cello, she hummed its part in Pachelbel’s Canon—which was boring. She had done it so often that she felt as though the notes were engraved on her bones. People liked to listen to songs they knew, her orchestra teacher used to say. We’ll give our audience a few favorites among the unfamiliar pieces.

Everyone knew Pachelbel.

Zander stopped singing. “Anna, that’s rude,” he chided her. “Don’t sing something else while someone is singing.”

The tone of his voice set her back up. She had to remind herself that he was right. She pressed her hand on the glass as they drove past a hotel/campground on the river, and felt a sharp longing. She wished that she were sitting on a rock watching the river rush by instead of encased in this car heading into the darkness. It felt suffocatingly like the blackness was going to reach out and consume her.

She wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore, she reminded herself. I’ve met plenty of scary things in the light. She heard that last part ringing in her ears in her own voice. As if she’d said it more than once.

But she had been afraid of the dark when she was seventeen. She was seventeen now, right? She couldn’t remember when she’d learned to love the night.