“Won’t be doing that again,” I muttered.

“Doing what?” Sarge called out.

“Marriage,” I mumbled, somehow knowing that he’d hear me.

“Cynical much?” he threw back.

I almost responded “Older and wiser” but figured I didn’t want to reinforce the (true) perception that I was older than everyone else I was working with except the mentors.

Still, it took me longer than I wanted to admit to climb out of bed, scrounge through my meager clothes, find and put on a bra. No point in letting the girls dangle out the bottom of my shirt. A T-shirt and my capris from the night before followed. That much accomplished, I hobbled down the hall to the kitchen, feeling every step along the way in my calves, thighs, and rear end. At the entry into the kitchen, I leaned against the edge of the doorframe, the old brick wall digging into my bare arm.

A man with his back to me stood at the stove, cooking bacon and eggs by the smell of it. And when I say he had his back to me, I mean he had his bare back to me, just the barest hint of waistband showing that he wasn’t completely naked. His bare back with a giant wolf tattooed across muscles that had no right to look so chiseled. Light from the big windows behind us played across those muscles, beckoning me to run my fingers over them, maybe take a bite and see if the muscles were as hard as they looked.

Have I mentioned that my hormones were in overdrive? Like, I’d never had a libido like this in my life, not even when I was young and stupidly wild for Himself. I blew out a slow breath, trying to calm the twisting in my belly that wanted so very badly to see if the front half of the man looked as good as the back half.

He glanced over his shoulder, and I got a glimmer of amber eyes that had been in a wolf’s face just a moment before. “You eat meat, right?”

While I’d known what he was—a half-man, a type of shifter—I needed a minute to compute everything. And to remind myself that he was not flirting with me.

“Yes,” I managed to croak out through the gutter that was my mind, then turned and walked—okay, limped—back into my tiny room that had been an office just a week before. I’d helped Corb clean it out enough that I could use the fold-out bed. That’s what you get when your world is turned upside down. You end up in the office of someone who doesn’t particularly even like you.

I shut the door and leaned back on it, tipping my head up. It felt like the wood floor under my bare feet was moving, as if the ground itself were trying to throw me off balance.

I swallowed hard and blew out a slow breath. Shifters or half-men, they weren’t uncommon in Savannah, but Gran had kept me from them when I was younger. Her fear was that if I was bitten, I’d be taken from her.

I looked at my hand that I’d just unintentionally shoved into Sarge’s mouth, then stood and went to wash my skin again. Just in case.

The desire to go home and lick your wounds was strong, a drive that my therapist had pointed out to me more than once when I’d been fighting to keep my marriage afloat. Every part of my head said this more than any other reason was why I’d come to Savannah, to where my gran was buried. I’d wanted to capture some of the magic of my childhood. To feel young again. To feel like I still had some magic inside of me somewhere. To remind myself I still had living left to do after forty. I could still hang with the big dogs.

I just really hadn’t expected all of this to be so damn literal.

Everything that had happened the night before was real—I could feel it in my aching bones and my muscles reminding me I was not in shape in any sense of the word unless round-ish and slightly squishy counted as a shape.

But that didn’t make me want to run, which I was pretty sure had been the crux of the test last night. The five men—Eammon, Sarge, Corb, Louis, and Tom—they wanted to throw us off balance to see how we handled change, to see what we did. To see which one of the interviewees would break under the pressure of having their world tipped upside down.

Joke was on them. I’d been living with a quasi-demon for years; last night was nothing.

I pressed fingers on either side of the bridge of my nose even as I smiled to myself.

A tap on the door. “You okay, Bree?” Sarge’s voice was not a wolf’s now. He was a man. A very handsome man with a back I wanted to run my fingers over.

Don’t judge, you’d have wanted to touch too.

But he’d been a wolf ten minutes ago. I increased the pressure on the bridge of my nose.

“Just give me a minute,” I said.

“You’re freaking out.”

“Maybe a little. I’ll be fine. It’s one thing to know something in your heart, another to have it make you breakfast.”

He laughed and I focused on the sound of him walking away. “I’m banking on you being fine,” he said.

Nope, I was not going to be that person who, when confronted with change, got her panties in a wad and couldn’t deal. This was in my blood. Gran had always said that, and I could feel it now that I was back. Now that the spell was gone from me that kept me from seeing.

I blew the last of the nerves out and shook the tingles from my arms. I needed this job, and I was uniquely qualified, more so than any of the others who had been there last night. I was going to blow through the twelve weeks of training like it was nothing.

Sending Sarge to me, having him change from wolf to man . . . that had been a purposeful scare tactic, and I had no doubt it was Corb’s doing.

I’d show him just how many ducks I had to give.

I headed back to the kitchen, but this time I pulled out a barstool and sat. Sarge was at the stove again, a pair of low-slung jogging pants hanging precariously off his slim hips. I fanned myself as my eyes traced the lines of his back, my face, chest and pretty much entire body heating up about ten degrees as I all but drooled watching him cook. Yup, he could give Corb a run for his money. Hell, with the way my libido was running, I’d give them both a run for their money.

I waited for him to speak first, not bothered by the silence one bit. Also trying to calm my hormones.

He cleared his throat after a solid minute of silence. “So. Tell me how Eammon convinced you to come to the interview.” Sarge pulled a plate out of the cupboard and dished up a good amount of bacon, eggs, and a slice of toast slathered in butter. Not too dark. He pushed the plate across to me and leaned on his hands on the counter, that was how tall he was. Damn it, I was having a hard time looking at the food as my eyes traced his upper body, lingering on those very big arms. And he cooked. Himself had never cooked so much as a hot dog for me.

Did I mention I have a thing for well-muscled men’s arms? Yup, I do.

I took a piece of bacon and bit through it, then used the remainder as if it were a pointer stick. “You know how it goes. Girl gets dumped by her husband, said ex dumps all the debt he’s accrued onto her, and then the debt collectors come calling. The ex also took my gran’s house, which is here in Savannah. I plan to get it back. Basically, I came here to get my life together.”

“Right, but about Eammon, how did that happen?”

I took another bite and grabbed a fork. Cold eggs were a no-go for me, so I needed to get on them before they cooled.

“Eammon came by to talk to Corb. Eammon took an immediate interest in me. I thought he was just being an old flirt. Corb left the room to get some paperwork, and Eammon said he wanted to talk to me about a job, but that Corb wouldn’t like it if I talked to him. He suggested we meet at Vic’s Restaurant. Nice place that, good food, and I wasn’t going to pass up a free meal.”

I took another bite, swallowing the still-hot eggs quickly. “So, we met there, and we chatted a bit about the Irish down here. Our families. Then he said he’d overheard me talking about a job that wasn’t going to pay well, that I needed more money.” I shoveled in a couple more bites, savoring the spices he’d put on the eggs. He was a good cook, even if it was simple fare. I wouldn’t kick him out of the kitchen. Or bed.

“What did he tell you, though?” Sarge leaned forward.

“About the job?” I laid my utensils down. “That it was hard, possibly dangerous, and dealt a great deal with the mythology and superstitions of the area. I made an assumption that it was a new kind of tour, considering we were starting at the graveyard. Even if the money seemed stupidly high for a tourism job.” Though, I’d put that aside quickly once I realized Robert was a real skeleton.

Sarge frowned, and even that looked nice on his face. “But why’d you take it all in stride? The others freaked out, just like people always freak out as they start seeing things that their minds say aren’t supposed to be real. I think you might be the first person who didn’t lose their marbles even a little.”

That wasn’t entirely true; I’d almost lost it with Robert at the beginning. And I hadn’t much liked facing down a ravening wolf, although it didn’t seem polite to say so to his face.

I picked up the toast and took a bite. “I grew up here, with my gran. My parents died when I was young.” I felt like that should explain it all. I wasn’t about to tell him how they’d died. That was not something I wanted to remember.

Sarge made a go-on gesture with one hand. I sighed. “When I was little, she’d take me around town and point things out. And . . . I could see them.” I wasn’t about to tell him that I’d ended up in a psych ward for “seeing the bogeyman” and Gran spelling me so I was unable to see the shadow world anymore.

“See them?” His eyebrows were high.

“Don’t you get all judgy on me, man who is also a wolf. Half-man.” I all but spat the words at him around a mouthful of toast. “Also, do you know where the ibuprofen is? I’m hurting after last night.”

Sarge scrounged in a cupboard near the stove and came down with a handful of over-the-counter drugs. I searched through until I found some Advil, popped two, considered it and popped a third, then dry-swallowed them.

He waited for me to keep talking, and I shrugged again. “I left at eighteen, married shortly thereafter, and never came back. I couldn’t afford to, there was no money.” I paused and stared at my mostly empty plate, thinking about Gran, about the few times I’d seen her between then and now. We’d talked on the phone at least once a week, always when Himself wasn’t around. Life was easier that way. “When I stepped into the graveyard last night, it was like I was ten years old again. I could see the monsters.”