I almost responded “Older and wiser” but figured I didn’t want to reinforce the (true) perception that I was older than everyone else I was working with except the mentors.

Still, it took me longer than I wanted to admit to climb out of bed, scrounge through my meager clothes, find and put on a bra. No point in letting the girls dangle out the bottom of my shirt. A T-shirt and my capris from the night before followed. That much accomplished, I hobbled down the hall to the kitchen, feeling every step along the way in my calves, thighs, and rear end. At the entry into the kitchen, I leaned against the edge of the doorframe, the old brick wall digging into my bare arm.

A man with his back to me stood at the stove, cooking bacon and eggs by the smell of it. And when I say he had his back to me, I mean he had his bare back to me, just the barest hint of waistband showing that he wasn’t completely naked. His bare back with a giant wolf tattooed across muscles that had no right to look so chiseled. Light from the big windows behind us played across those muscles, beckoning me to run my fingers over them, maybe take a bite and see if the muscles were as hard as they looked.

Have I mentioned that my hormones were in overdrive? Like, I’d never had a libido like this in my life, not even when I was young and stupidly wild for Himself. I blew out a slow breath, trying to calm the twisting in my belly that wanted so very badly to see if the front half of the man looked as good as the back half.

He glanced over his shoulder, and I got a glimmer of amber eyes that had been in a wolf’s face just a moment before. “You eat meat, right?”

While I’d known what he was—a half-man, a type of shifter—I needed a minute to compute everything. And to remind myself that he was not flirting with me.

“Yes,” I managed to croak out through the gutter that was my mind, then turned and walked—okay, limped—back into my tiny room that had been an office just a week before. I’d helped Corb clean it out enough that I could use the fold-out bed. That’s what you get when your world is turned upside down. You end up in the office of someone who doesn’t particularly even like you.

I shut the door and leaned back on it, tipping my head up. It felt like the wood floor under my bare feet was moving, as if the ground itself were trying to throw me off balance.