The black SUV had been gone a full minute before Foster came back inside.
He stopped in the doorway with the cold behind him and looked at her on the floor.
Foster: Can you stand?
She tried. Her legs folded and her knee hit the boards hard enough to knock a sound out of her.
The blanket slipped, and she grabbed it back with both hands.
Foster: Easy. Take my arm. Just my arm.
His jacket smelled like coffee and road dust, nothing like Merrick, and that was the only reason she could breathe.
Nola: Don't tell me it's okay.
Foster: I wasn't going to.
He got her into the gray truck and turned the heater on, and she bit her lip on the way and tasted blood again.
Her jaw ached where Merrick's fingers had dug in. The marks were going purple.
His phone buzzed against the dash. He looked at it, then at her.
Foster: It's him.
Nola: Answer it. If you don't, it's worse for both of us.
He put it on speaker. She never found out if that was for her or for him.
Merrick: Is she in the truck?
Foster: She's in the truck.
Merrick: Then here's how this goes. She gets paid. The file says a rogue trespassed and got sick, and then it's closed.
Merrick: Nothing happened last night.
Merrick: A rogue bitch in heat isn't a person, Foster. She's a mess I want gone by noon.
Her fingers went white around the bottle. She stared at the dashboard and made no sound at all.
Merrick: She opens her mouth, she gets a collar. You know what a collar does to a wolf.
Foster: I know.
Merrick: Then we're clear. Don't let her cry on you. It's a trick they use.
The line went dead. Foster set the phone down slowly, like it was hot.
Foster: He's wrong about that part.
He pulled onto the main road and drove the speed limit, and he did not ask her one question.
The heater filled the cab with warm air, and her body remembered before her brain did.
Two hours ago his hand had been in her hair and his mouth had been at her ear, telling her to take it.
The knot had swelled inside her and locked them together, and she had come so hard the room went white.
Her pussy was still sore from it. Her whole body was still answering him.
She had put her teeth against his throat and asked, and his hand had come down on her jaw and shut her out.
A rogue bitch does not claim an Alpha. He had said it with her blood on his thumb.
She had still begged. That was the part that sat in her chest like a swallowed stone.
Then the window went gray, and he was pulling his shirt on with his back to her.
The word he used for the whole night was mistake. He used it like her name.
She had asked what she was. She already knew.
Foster: You're doing it again.
Nola: Doing what?
Foster: Going somewhere in your head where he can still get at you.
She didn't cry. She wanted to, and her throat ached with it, but she was not going to cry in a pack truck.
When she started to shake, he turned the heater up and said nothing about it.
Foster: There's a blanket behind the seat. It's clean. It's mine.
Foster: For what it's worth, I think he's a bastard.
Nola: Don't. That's not worth anything.
Foster: No. I don't guess it is.
He parked behind her van and walked her to the shop door, and she let him, because her legs still weren't right.
The bakery lights were on across the street. Nobody looked twice at the gray truck.
The town just went on.
Foster: He said to pay you.
He held out a thick envelope. She could see the corner of a bank slip inside it.
Nola: I don't want his money.
Foster: If you don't take it, he'll say you're holding out for more. Take it and be done.
She took it and dropped it in her toolbox without looking at it.
Foster: The file will say you were hired to fix a freezer and you got sick. That's the record.
Nola: And the rest of it?
Foster: There is no rest. That's what he's paying for.
Foster: But listen to me. If you talk, it's not a fine. It's a collar. I've seen what that does to a wolf.
She had seen it too, once, on a rogue in the square. He had not been a wolf after.
Foster: So don't talk. Not to anybody.
Foster: I'm sorry. Not for him. For me. I stood on that step and listened.
Nola: You drove me home.
Foster: That's not the same thing as stopping it.
Nola: Why are you being decent to me?
Foster: Because somebody in this pack should be.
He left before she could thank him, which she was grateful for.
She locked the door and sat down with her back against it until her hands stopped shaking.
Behind her, in the toolbox, an envelope said what the whole night had been worth.
Nola: Nothing happened.
Her wolf stirred under her ribs and did not believe her.