Nine Seconds

Beck POV I heard about it for five full minutes before I looked. Humans. Two of them, in Matthew's grandmother's house, with a deed filed at the county and a moving truck in the drive. The old man at the fence told me twice, with gestures. I stood there with my arms crossed, thinking about the bar I had walked out of and how much I did not want this to be my problem. Being Alpha makes everything in this town my problem. Then he jerked his chin at the porch, and I turned around. Truck. Gene Abbott, our mayor, sweating through his shirt. Our realtor, Paula Kessler, who was going to be hell to live with for a month. Then her. The world went quiet. I don't mean it felt quiet. I mean the cicadas, the old man, Gene's wheezing, all of it dropped out like somebody had pulled a plug. There was only a woman on a porch in shorts and a T-shirt gone damp at the collar. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She looked young. Younger than me, anyway. Mid-twenties, maybe, flushed from the heat, with sweat shining at the base of her throat. My wolf purred. I didn't know he could do that. In all the years he had lived in my chest I had heard him snarl, and howl, and sulk. Never that. He rolled over, low and pleased, and said one word. Mate. Everything I had been holding since I was twenty-six let go of me at once. My arms came down. I was off the curb before I had told my legs a thing. One step. Two. The air shifted and brought her to me. Warm skin, clean sweat, and something sweet underneath that I wanted to find with my tongue. I'm not proud of how fast my head went there. I wanted my mouth on that damp place at her throat. I wanted those legs locked around my hips and my name coming out of her wrecked. I wanted to know exactly what sound she made when she came, and I wanted to be the reason for it, on that porch, in that truck, I did not care where. I had known she existed for about nine seconds, and I was getting hard in the middle of Alder Lane in front of the mayor. Then the rest of her scent caught up with me. All over her, in her hair and on her skin, worn in deep the way it only gets after years, was somebody else. I stopped walking. He came around the back of the truck right on time, red in the face, with a box in his arms. "Lane? Where do you want the books?" "Oh. Um. I'll take them." And he let her. He handed a full box of books to a woman a head shorter than he was, and he turned back to the truck without even watching to see if she had it. Her arms dipped when the weight hit them. She hitched it up against her chest and held on. It was heavy. He shouldn't have given it to her. You don't ask a woman where she wants the heavy thing and then put it in her hands. You ask, and then you carry it there yourself. That wasn't a man. That was a boy with a moving truck. My wolf wanted to cross the street and take the box from her. He also wanted the boy's throat. I told him no, twice. She wasn't mine. She had come here with somebody, and I don't take what's taken. I never have. That was the end of my rope, and I stood there at the end of it with my hands empty. She looked back. Right at me, over the top of the box. I don't know what my face was doing. I was trying to make it do nothing. Her cheeks went red, darker than the heat could account for, and I felt that color low in my gut. Then she turned, and the screen door slapped shut behind her. It was like a spell broke. The noise came back all at once. Cicadas. The truck engine ticking as it cooled. My own pulse, going harder than it had any right to. I blinked. I looked around. Every one of them was staring at me. Gene. Paula. Walt Pruitt, our notary, with a sheet of paper stopped halfway through a fan. Matthew's father, Donald, in his house slippers. Every neighbor on Alder Lane, in every yard. Nobody was moving. They had all seen it. You can't hide a thing like that from a pack.