“Please.” He scoffed. “You? In love? That fast? With the brother of a victim from a case you worked?”

My pace faltered as each point hammered home. “What about Aunt Dot?”

“Oh, she knows.” He ducked his head to cover his laugh. “She let me listen in on his phone call. You know she’s got a BS meter, and it shot off the charts when he started spinning his yarn.”

“Why did she go along with it?”

“She didn’t believe him.” He cut his eyes toward me. “She figured he was a liar and that you’d tear him a new one, but…you didn’t. You covered for him. You went along with his crackpot plan.” He readjusted his bag. “She thought… She hoped you might…”

Pain slid between my ribs, sharp as a knife. “She hoped pretending might make it real.”

And it had, hadn’t it? Somewhere along the way I had fallen for Graeson. He was mine now, wolf and all.

The look Isaac shot me bounced my words back at me, like he thought maybe that hope hadn’t been one-sided.

“Cammie, you lied to Mom. Me, well, it goes with the territory. But Mom?” His grin was downright wolfish. “You had your head so high in the clouds you didn’t do your homework before a move. Usually you have binders filled with everything from maps to the grocery store to planned emergency escape routes. You always call the local marshal’s office to get a heads-up on the local troublemakers.”

“I didn’t—” I spluttered. “That’s not—”

“You could have told us to turn around, go back to Three Way. You could have said to head west, to Texas, where that new friend of yours is. You didn’t. You let Cord lure you here, because you wanted to come.”

“I put us all in danger.”

He bumped my shoulder with his. “What is love if not a risk?”

I bumped back and sent him careening off to regain his balance. “No one said anything about love.”

“I did. Just now.” He mimed cleaning out his ears. “Weren’t you listening?”

A mud-brown blur darted across our path, and I skidded to a hard stop, flinging my arm out to catch Isaac across the chest.

“Can you subdue him?” He jingled links in his hand. “Pin him, and I’ll give him a new necklace.”

“Will do.”

Isaac sidestepped to the left, and the wolf took the bait. He sprung into the air, and I whirled on him, clamping my hands around his throat and jerking him back like he was a dog at the end of his leash. Jaw clenched, I hit the dirt. The weight of the struggling wolf yanked me to one side, and soon we were rolling in the dirt. “Anytime now,” I ground out at Isaac.

A twist of Isaac’s wrist and a snap of metal, and we had subdued a third warg.