Chapter 14 — Not Her Fear

Grant had learned not to trust the first emotion he felt from someone.

Fear could look like anger. Relief could sit beside resentment. Desire could exist beside regret and tell him nothing about where either feeling pointed.

Hallie had made that lesson harder from the day she arrived. He stood near the work yard with a list in one hand and watched her argue with Caleb over the board they had started testing yesterday. Not really argue.

Caleb pointed to one of the marks. Hallie erased it.

A woman carrying tools said something Grant could not hear. Hallie listened, then wrote a different mark beside the job.

No one asked Grant to settle it. Good. He moved closer.

That was when the emotions reached him. Irritation first. Then concentration, sharp enough to make him glance at Hallie.

He could not know whether either feeling belonged to the board, Caleb, the woman beside them, or something else. His half-Vael blood gave him the emotion and left the meaning alone.

Hallie looked up.

On her first day, fear had hit him whenever he came within range. Controlled fear, buried beneath manners and a straight back, but unmistakable.

Now there was a flicker of it. Then something warmer crowded beside it. Grant stopped several feet away.

Hallie held her ground. That should have been enough. It wasn’t.

“What?” she asked.

He realized he had been staring.

“Nothing.”

Her eyebrows rose.

Caleb snorted. “Convincing.”

Grant ignored him.

Hallie returned to the board. “We’re keeping only the jobs that actually need a fixed number of people.”

“For now,” Caleb said.

“For the test.”

“That’s what I said.”

“No. You said it like you expect to win later.”

“I usually do.”

Hallie gave him a look that made the woman beside them laugh. Grant felt the quick spark of amusement from somewhere within reach. Maybe Hallie.

Maybe Caleb. Maybe the woman. He wanted to know which.

That was new.

The limits of his perception had always been useful. He knew when fear entered a room. He knew when anger thickened before a fight. Enough to pay attention, never enough to pretend he understood people better than they understood themselves.

Hallie had turned the limit into an irritation. He wanted reasons.

He wanted the thought behind the way she stared at the board before changing anything. He wanted to know why she sometimes went still when he came close and why, a moment later, she chose to stay there anyway.

Yesterday she had told him she was not leaving. He believed her. Trust was a different question.

Grant stepped beside the work table. The emotional pressure sharpened with proximity. Hallie glanced at him again.

Her shoulders tightened. Then eased. She stayed focused on the list in Caleb’s hand.

Grant looked at the board rather than at her.

“How’s the test?”

“Messy,” Caleb said.

Hallie answered at the same time.

“Useful.”

They looked at each other.

Caleb gestured toward her. “See what I’m dealing with?”

“You agreed to help.”

“I agreed to test it.”

“You’re very attached to that distinction.”

“I live here. Distinctions keep people from making rules while pretending they’re suggestions.”

Hallie went quiet.

Grant felt something from her then—strong, sudden, impossible to place. Not fear. Not anger.

He knew better than to ask what it meant simply because he could feel it. Hallie nodded once to Caleb.

“That’s fair.”

Hallie neither argued nor appealed to Grant. She took the criticism and went back to work. Grant should have moved on.

Instead he stayed long enough to watch her ask another worker why he had changed jobs that morning. The man explained. Hallie listened.

She asked the worker what had changed and wrote down his answer, leaving Bellamy Creek and Grant’s authority out of it. She wrote down the answer. Grant had married her because marriage gave her choice a public shape other Alphas could not easily dismiss.

That part was done. Her name sat beside his in Cedar Draw’s register. But a signature could not tell him whether she would turn toward him when she had no reason to.

It could not make her stop fearing what he was. It could not make her trust what he would do with what he sensed. Hallie set the pencil down and looked directly at him.

“You’re doing it again.”

Grant frowned. “Doing what?”

“Watching me like I’m a problem you haven’t solved.”

Caleb made a low sound and suddenly found the far end of the board very interesting. Grant considered lying.

“No.”

Hallie gave him the silence to continue.

He corrected himself. “Not a problem.”

“What, then?”

He could feel several emotions now, close and layered. Curiosity. Tension. Something almost like anticipation.

He had no right to assign any of them to the question he wanted answered.

“I’m trying to figure out if you trust me.”

Hallie’s face changed. Grant immediately wished he had chosen silence. Then she picked up the pencil and held it out to him.

“Mark where you’re going.”

He looked at the pencil.

“What?”

“If this is supposed to work, the Alpha doesn’t get to disappear from the board just because everyone knows where to find him.”

Caleb laughed outright. Grant took the pencil. Their fingers brushed.

The contact brought another rush of emotion through him, stronger at that distance. Warmth. Unease.

Interest.

Grant’s own response was simpler: he wanted the contact to last. He knew that want was his.

Hallie let the contact linger for a beat. Grant marked his next task on the board and handed the pencil back.

“Happy?”

“No.”

Caleb laughed again. Hallie’s mouth curved.

“But I trust you to follow the same rule as everyone else.”

Grant looked at her. She had said it casually. Maybe she had not understood what the words would do.

Or maybe she had. For once, the answer could remain hers. Grant stepped away from the table.

The emotions faded with distance until Hallie became unreadable to that part of him again. She was his wife; the register proved that. Trust was harder to measure.

It lived in moments like this, when she could step away and chose to stay within reach. Grant looked back once. Hallie was already arguing with Caleb again, pencil moving across the board.