Page 55 of Wolf Found

Gavin listened to him, looked down at himself, and nodded with a wince. “A day in a car hasn’t been great. Ash, you know this area best. Find us a hotel. We’ll recharge, and then get moving.”

When they pulled away from the enclave and its broken wall, Graham didn’t look back.

30

Breakaway

“How can it possibly be this complicated to merge your stuff with his?” Dez asked with no small amount of annoyance. “He didn’t have anything when he arrived. He’s got, like, one bag of clothes and that book you bought him.”

Ash waved him off. “We had to get him a desk, so he could write. And his own chair for gaming.”

“And a bookshelf for the book, so he can add to his collection,” Gavin added, nodding to where Dez was making said shelf, as though there were a chance the man hadn’t noticed he was in the middle of building a piece of furniture.

Dez just sighed and shook his head. “You’re whipped, Ash.”

Ash snorted, balling up a blank piece of paper from the desk and tossing it at Dez. “Proudly, thanks. And you’re one to talk. If Sawyer asked you to buy him a whole new house, you’d bust out the checkbook.”

“If Sawyer asked me for a new house, it’d be understandable,” Dez muttered.

“Oh please. You’d die of boredom the second you got away from us.”

Dez threw the paper back, and it bounced off Ash right into the trashcan. “You two need to shut up if I’m going to get this done in time to surprise him when he gets home from the shop.”

They worked in silence for a while, until Dez sighed and shook his head. “Fine. Yammer. You know you want to.”

Somehow, despite all the chatter (okay, because Dez was practically a machine) they finished the bookcase before Graham and Sawyer arrived home from closing the shop. Dez had even put away his tools, and they had left Ash alone in his bedroom.

In their bedroom.

“Ash?” Graham called from the game room confusedly. He was so used to Ash meeting him upstairs, or at worst, there in the game room, because he was so distracted playing his game of the day.

Ash was sitting at Graham’s desk, next to the bookshelf.

Maybe it was nothing, just a silly impulse to provide for Graham when Graham did just fine providing for himself. Maybe Ash was acting like some kind of old-fashioned caveman alpha, and he should—

It was a little too late to worry then, because Graham was standing in the doorway, looking at Ash, then the bookshelf, then Ash again. He swallowed hard.

“That’s, um, new,” was all he said.

If Ash hadn’t known him so well—if he hadn’t had a direct line to Graham’s heart through their pack bond—he would have worried he’d done something wrong. Instead, he understood. Graham didn’t know what it was for.

He needed the explanation.

“So I know you’ve only got the two cookbooks,” he said, motioning toward the notebook and the one he’d bought, both sitting open on the desk where Graham had been working on them. “But I figured you could use some room for expansion. Maybe, you know, some more books.”

Graham’s eyes lit, and he launched himself at Ash. “More recipe books? How many?”

Ash chuckled and squeezed Graham tight. “As many as you want, babe. If you want, we can remodel that creepy room with the beer and the antlers into a library for them all.”

Graham pulled back and looked into Ash’s eyes, a tiny, pleased smile on his face. “You’re the best.”

“If I’m any good, it’s only because you make me want to be worth you.” He bent down and pressed his lips to Graham’s. It was just a dry peck at first, but Graham opened to him, and Ash could never resist that.

He walked them backward the few paces to the bed and pulled back long enough to grin down at Graham. “So I did good?”

Graham leaned up and kissed him again, a row of tiny kisses all along his jaw ending with a nip to his earlobe. “You did the best. Now get me naked and do your worst, my alpha.”