The problem now was that he didn’t want a good hot fuck. He wanted Laddin. And even more shocking, the idea of putting Laddin in the same category as any of his hundreds of distraction-of-the-moment girls filled him with disgust. Last night’s no-consequences sex aside, his relationship with Laddin had advanced well beyond the for-now category.
He knew what was happening. He’d been in enough serious relationships to recognize what he was feeling. First came friendship. He genuinely liked Laddin, which was hard to believe, given that he usually despised chronically upbeat people. But Laddin made him smile. A lot. And that was rare.
The next step was respect. Laddin had kept his head as he fought alongside Bruce against both sets of fairies, and more significantly, he’d stood up to Nero during that long interrogation. That took balls—anyone could see that Nero was Laddin’s superior officer. In addition, Laddin had seen things that no one else understood. He’d said what Bruce could barely articulate about his childhood—that he’d tried to run interference between his father and his younger siblings. Or he had for a while, until the day his father had cut his balls. At that point he became angry and mean. Like father, like son, right?
He flinched away from that thought and forced himself to chew on something else. He’d eaten the fairy apple. What did that mean? Could he really save the planet? Not likely. As a young firefighter, he’d envisioned himself saving whole buildings of people—imagined a grateful woman dashing into his arms because he’d put out a fire in her house, or rescued her aging parents from who knows what disaster. But even in those fantasies, he’d never saved a planet. He was a paramedic and a firefighter, not a superhero. And he sure as hell wasn’t qualified to solve this mystery. That was Josh’s territory.
He shook his head, trying to clear his mind. Where the hell was Laddin? Why wasn’t he here babbling away about something? The guy was the perfect distraction—a sounding board and comic relief. He was also sexy, honorable, and he made Bruce feel like he wasn’t all that bad. The fact that a stand-up guy like Laddin found something to value in Bruce eased a pain inside him that he’d been carrying for a very long time.
And Laddin ought to be back by now.
Bruce got up from the bed. The apple had given him renewed energy. Hell, his brain was going like a hamster on a wheel. If anyone ought to be resting, it was Laddin, who’d had all the work and none of the extra fairy juice to handle it. So Bruce pulled on some clothes, grabbed a couple of sandwiches from the kitchen counter, and headed out to the barn to force the guy to take a break. Or at least to eat. Neither of them had eaten anything since last night.
He pulled the barn door open all the way before stepping inside. His nose wrinkled at the smell of smoke, but it was familiar enough to be comforting—like coming back to the firehouse after a long day. You could smell the day’s disaster, but you were still home.
“Laddin?”
No one answered, which was weird. He stepped farther into the barn and had a moment of remembered terror staring at the burn marks on the floor. He’d examined every single mark on his body from those fairies, and the memory of being pinned down while Laddin struggled alone to help him made violence burn in his blood. It was a visceral response that spiked his adrenaline and made him want to blow up the entire structure.
But he wasn’t here to relive his personal trauma, he was here to find Laddin, and so he forced himself to look away. He wasn’t going to think about it. He wasn’t going to remember anything. He was going to find Laddin, and they were going to fuck each other senseless to put a good spin on a lousy day.
So where the hell was the guy?
He saw Laddin’s suitcase closed up and ready for transport. It was right next to the closed van, and he knew for damn sure that Laddin had done that. When they’d left that morning, everything had been open, burned, and messed up. So Bruce mentally pieced things together.
Laddin had come in, closed up the van, and gotten his suitcase. But something had distracted him, grabbed him, or turned him into magical goo. Panic rose quick and hard in Bruce’s body. And with the adrenaline already there, the change was quick and fast.
One moment he was a man looking around the barn, the next second he was on all fours as a wolf, sniffing for Laddin. Fortunately he found him quickly. The smell was so strong that his wolf mind wondered what was wrong with his human nose to have missed it. Either way, Bruce found Laddin huddled beside the front bumper of the van. He went straight for him and tried to burrow into his arms.
Except Laddin wasn’t letting him in.
He was sitting curled in on himself, his arms wrapped around his legs and his head buried deep into his knees. He was a tight knot of compressed energy held so hard that he was vibrating with it. Not shaking, but actually vibrating with how hard he was gripping his own body.
And Bruce couldn’t break in. He tried everything a wolf instinctively knew how to do to comfort someone. He nosed in, he blew his breath on Laddin’s skin, and he licked what he could touch. It didn’t help. That was how he knew that Laddin didn’t need an animal—he
