Free Longing for Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves Book 5) by Roxie Noir Page A

upset that you took off before he woke up yesterday.
    Sam blinked. What the hell?  
    He and Scarlet rarely talked about their personal lives. Hell, they didn’t talk that much at all; they tended to work together in a peaceful, quiet camaraderie, and Sam liked it that way. He wasn’t surprised that she knew his backstory with Calder and Marie, since that was common knowledge, but he hadn’t known that she had opinions about it.
    There’s a rumor mill? he texted.
    It’s just Annika, actually.
    So the cute girl from the bakery was also involved.
    For a split second, Sam let himself hope. He didn’t really know Annika, but he knew that she’d sparked something in him, even if he was determined to be a miserable bastard about Calder this weekend. He put his phone into his pocket and frowned at the wall of his cabin.
    What if , he thought.
    “Fine,” he said out loud to his empty house. “I’ll go to the bar.”

    Sam parked on Main Street and walked. As he turned the corner, he saw someone sitting on a motorcycle, helmet under his arm, frowning at his phone. Sam stood still, just watching.
    As if he knew someone was there, Calder looked up. He slid his phone back in his pocket without looking at it again and shook his hair out of his face.
    “You heading out?” Sam asked, walking over.
    “Just back to my sister’s,” Calder said. “I’m house sitting while they’re on their honeymoon.”
    “How long is that?”
    “Two weeks,” Calder said.
    They looked at each other for a long moment.
    “Do you have to go over there right now?” Sam asked.
    “No,” said Calder. “It’s a nice night, you want to take a walk?”
    Sam nodded.
    “Yeah,” he said. “That sounds good.”
    They didn’t talk for a few blocks, until they were almost out of town. Sam’s hands were in his pockets, and he felt muted by the sheer weight of the things that he could say. He’d practiced the whole way over, muttering to himself in the car, but now he had no idea where to start.
    Another block, the end of town. They found themselves by the river, on a boat ramp that hadn’t been used for ages, and they looked out at the water.
    Start anywhere, Sam thought. It’s too tangled of a mess for the starting point to even matter .
    “Sorry I left yesterday morning,” Sam finally said.
    “I deserved it,” Calder said. “Thanks for the suit, though. That was a lifesaver. Maybe literally.”
    Sam let himself smile a little.
    There was a long pause before Calder spoke up again.
    “I wish I hadn’t left all those years ago,” he said.
    “I think you needed to,” Sam said. “You couldn’t stand seeing her everywhere, and after a while, you couldn’t stand seeing me see her.”
    “That’s a reason to leave for a week, maybe two,” Calder said. “A month, tops. Not seven years. But the longer I stayed gone, the harder it felt to come back.”
    “What’s done is done,” Sam said.
    “I missed you,” Calder said. “I missed you both.”
    “I miss her too, but not how I used to,” Sam said. “There’s no question mark there. I’m never going to not miss her, but she’s gone. That’s it.”
    “I missed you exactly the same,” Calder said. “I used to go to gay bars looking for men with green eyes and tattoos, but they were always disappointing. I did a lot of sneaking out of apartments early in the morning.”
    Sam laughed.
    “Nobody matches my sexual prowess?” he asked.
    “I never got a hickey the size of a fist from any of them,” Calder said. He looked over at Sam.
    Sam craned his neck around and looked at the hickey, still vivid and purple, on the side of Calder’s neck. Calder hadn’t even tried to cover it.
    “That’s pretty bad,” he agreed. “Sorry.”
    “Don’t lie,” Calder said, grinning. “You’re not sorry. You wanted me to remember exactly where I’d been, and you wanted half the world to know, too.”
    I didn’t want him to be able to think nothing happened , Sam thought.
    “Did