“Web site told you.”
“Yeah.” Heat blasted up her neck and into her cheeks as she thought about how she’d asked Matt to bite her. She’d lost her damned mind in the throes of passion with him because she didn’t really want to be Turned into a bear shifter. She was perfectly happy with her human status.
“What are your intentions with Matt?” Creed asked low. “I need to know. Whatever is happening between you puts my crew at risk, and I need to know you feel the same about him as he feels about you.”
“I miss him when he’s away from me. I feel like he gets me like no one ever has, which I realize makes no sense because we haven’t known each other that long. But that doesn’t seem to matter to my silly heart because I feel like I’ve known him all my life. I breathe for his smile, and when he’s hurting, I hurt. And when I touch his scars…” This was too much. She was sharing things with Creed she hadn’t meant to, but he’d asked her a direct question, and it was as if she’d taken some sort of truth serum. Maybe Creed was magic. She believed in it.
“Look,” she said, pulling the spoon from the pot and looking the alpha right in the eyes. “I’m falling in love with him. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, or next week. And as much as I’ve tried to convince myself this is some vacation fling, I know it’s not. Matt feels…important.”
“And you don’t care about all those other women?”
“I wish he hadn’t been with them. I wish I had all of his firsts to myself, but that was in his past, and I trust him. I don’t care about where he’s been. I care about where he’s going.”
Creed huffed a heavy sigh and lifted his beer. He tapped the neck against hers with a soft clink, then said, “All right, we’ll try this. You can stay here until my crew proves to me they can’t handle having a woman up here.”
“And if they can handle it?”
“You can stay the whole week.”
A week. She turned back to the pot and began stirring it again. Creed had just reminded her that she was a temporary fixture here at the trailer park. Logically, she’d known that. She was here on vacation, nothing more. But suddenly this trip-gone-wrong and the fallout with the bombshells felt big. It felt like fate. This place with Matt was comfortable in ways she’d never expected.
One week, and she’d go back to her life in Minden.
One week, and she’d have to say goodbye to Matt and the people here.
One week was all she had to make memories that would last her whole life.
Chapter Ten
“Clinton, quit!” Willa yelled, trying not to laugh as she pulled a third crawfish out from under her shirt.
Clinton was chortling like a lunatic as he danced out of swatting range.
“See,” Matt called from the road where he and Jason were tossing a football to each other from a ridiculously long distance apart. “This is why I don’t trust them to cook. Food wasters, all of them. Leave her alone, or I’ll eat you.”
“From what we heard all night, you should be full of eating people,” Clinton said.
Willa’s eyes nearly popped out of her head as she scooped rice into paper bowls. “Clinton!”
“The walls are thin. Oh, Matt. Oh!” he crowed in a high-pitched voice.
Mortified, Willa hid her searing face and scooped gumbo into each bowl.
“Where’s Easton?” she asked, desperate to change the subject.
Creed leaned back on the prep table and jerked his chin to the woods. “At his place.”
One, two, three, four. How had she not realized there were only four trailers in the semi-circle and five bears in the Gray Back Crew?
“Why does he live up there?”
“Uh, because when he moved here two years ago, Matt pissed him off day one, and Easton picked his trailer up and dragged it through the woods,” Clinton explained helpfully.
“Picked it up and dragged it through—you mean with his bare hands?”
“Easton needs to live in confinement. His bear does best away from the rest of us,” Creed said as he lifted the draining pot of crawfish out of the water and settled it on the top ledge.
“That’s sad,” she said, heart aching at what could make a man need such solitude.
“Spare your pity for someone who deserves it,” Matt muttered as he approached the fire pit, tossing the football up and catching it. “Beaston lives the way he lives because he chooses to.”
Clinton snorted and repeated, “Beaston.”
Beaston? Willa tossed a look at the trail he’d walked up earlier. She should be afraid of all these men, but for some reason, she wasn’t. Perhaps her instincts were broken.