Another woman might have called him paranoid, but rivalries between species were cutthroat. Should the fae ever set their sights to procuring pack land, and were they aware of how many—or few—wargs were present at any given time, the coups would be bloody and swift.

“I didn’t mean to pry.” There were more wargs here than I could fight off alone, and that was all that mattered to me. “I was just making small talk.”

“I trust you, Ellis.” He glanced back at me, and his lips quirked. “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t tell you if you truly wanted to know.”

I got the unsettling feeling he was challenging me. All I could think of was Imogen.

Did you go home with her?

Home being not what I meant at all.

I didn’t ask. My throat tightened painfully when I tried.

Slowing until I reached him, he brushed his hand down my arm. “I’ve always been honest with you.”

Unable to isolate a particular untruth to hurtle at him, I swatted his hand. “You befriended me under false pretenses.”

“Are we friends?” He caught my hand in his. “Is that all this is?”

“This is a job. We’re hunting a serial killer, remember?” I scraped him off me. “You seem to be forgetting that.”

“This is a job,” he allowed, in a way that made it seem like he was agreeing to something I hadn’t said.

All the years of emotional isolation hadn’t equipped me to deal with the masculine enigma in front of me. The urge to snap off a branch and whack him with it couldn’t be normal, but what was? My parents had an easy love. They laughed and traveled and marveled at the world together. Aunt Dot had never married and never dated after her longtime lover passed more than a year before I was born. Isaac didn’t date so much as plow through available women in a quest to satisfy his drive to discover the limits of his talents in the most pleasurable way possible. His heart wasn’t involved in those transactions. They were calculated and sterile in a way that left him holed up for days after each interlude. Theo, well, his philosophy was much the same as Isaac’s, minus the curiosity and the guilt. So what was normal? The sneaking tendrils of envy that curled into my chest when I thought of Graeson with someone else? With Imogen?

This thing with Graeson wasn’t love or simple lust. It was undefinable, and a thing without definition that technically couldn’t exist without such parameters shouldn’t hurt so much. But it did.