Hope bloomed inside her. She threw her arms around her dad’s neck and hugged him. “Thanks, Dad. I’ll take some pain over having to be mated right now.”
She stood from the couch, wanting to dance a jig at how relieved she felt. He looked at her in amusement and then sobered quickly. “You can buy yourself a pass for this heat, baby girl, but next year you’re going to have to choose a male.”
He stood and pecked her cheek, leaving her alone in the apartment. She danced a little bit, letting out a whoop of happiness. A plan formed in her mind and she stopped dancing around the hardwood floors.
I really want Luke, she said to herself. Even a year from now won’t change anything.
She knew what she would face if she chose a human mate. She’d be outcast. Shunned. Vilified. A “here’s what not to do with your life” tale for future generations. If she was honest with herself, she knew that she couldn’t take a wolf for a mate, because no matter who he might be, he wouldn’t be Luke. Her wolf rumbled in agreement in her mind, and she knew that she would choose him.
But she only had a week, and that wasn’t nearly enough time to talk to Luke about a life-altering commitment. It would be unfair of her to spring such a monumental decision on her best friend with so little time to make it. She knew without a doubt that he would help her with this heat, but she didn’t just want his help, she wanted him forever. So she would go through this heat by herself, and then she would spend the next year helping Luke to understand the serious commitment she wanted to make with him. She didn’t want him to think that she was choosing him just because she wasn’t interested in any pack males. Or that she would resent walking away from her pack and family forever because she chose him. She loved him. She didn’t think she would ever make a more difficult decision in her life than choosing him over her pack and family, but she would never be happy in a mating with a wolf. And even if she lost her brother and father and her pack, she would gain Luke, who held her heart in his hands. The thought of walking away from her father was like a knife in her chest. She’d lose the one male who had been there for her for her entire life, had loved her without question, and accepted everything about her. But for Luke she would do even that most difficult thing.
The question was…would Luke accept her? Knowing what she was going to give up for him? Would he wonder at his own value for her to lose so much? There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that he was it for her, no matter the consequences of her actions. It would hurt to never see her family again, or her pack, but facing a lifetime of unhappiness with a male that she didn’t love was an alternative that she didn’t want to contemplate.
Forgive me, Dad, she thought, as she walked to her closet and removed a suitcase to start packing, brushing tears from her eyes.
Chapter 2
Luke Elrich wiped down the bar and looked around the nearly empty room of Poke’s on Tuesday night. He’d been tending bar at Poke’s since he was twenty-one. In the beginning, he’d promised himself that he would only work at the bar until he finished his degree in business management, but at twenty-seven, with a finished degree, he was still slinging suds. The owner, Teddy Poke, was retiring from the bar business at the end of the year, and Luke was in a good position to buy the bar. He’d go from tending the bar to running it. And he liked that idea a lot.
At the first of the year he’d have his own business, and instead of renting the apartment above the bar, he’d own it as well. Then he could expand. He could hire a cook to run the kitchen and some servers to handle the food, and turn the bar from a bar to a place where people came not only to drink, but to eat and hang out. It was the only bar in Wilde Creek. It was foolish not to have it be everything that it could be.
He’d grown up in Wilde Creek his entire life, part of the human population that lived alongside a werewolf pack which had been in the area for many generations. His best friend, Eveny, was the only sister of the pack alpha, Acksel. Eveny was just two years younger than Luke, and they’d been best friends since they were little.
His parents had died in a car accident when he was seven. He’d moved across town to live with his grandma, who had welcomed him with open arms. Down the street from her small Cape Cod-style home was the Moore home, where Eveny lived with her dad and her brother. One night, Luke had been feeling particularly sad about his family and he’d gone out for a walk. He’d been sitting on a fallen log and looking up at the sky when he heard leaves crunching and turned to see a young girl come out from behind a tree.
“You sad?” she asked, approaching him boldly.
“Yeah.”
“’Cause your mom and dad are in heaven?”
The reminder made him even sadder, but he didn’t want to cry in front of her. “Yeah.”
She joined him on the log, her bare feet swinging back and forth. “I think in heaven that you get to do what you want all day. If I was in heaven, I’d want to eat watermelon and watch television.” She looked up at the sky and reached over and took his hand. “You think your momma is watching television?”
He sniffled and smiled, looking up at the stars and picturing his mom and dad doing the things they loved best. “I’ll bet she’s watching her soaps and my dad is working on an old car.”
“You wanna be my friend, Luke?”
“Sure, Eveny.”
Her little hand squeezed his tightly and they stared up at the sky until the night turned colder and it was time to head home. He walked her back to her house and her father was standing on the porch waiting.
“Thank you for walking her home,” Dade said, taking Eveny’s hand. “She said that someone was sad and she had to go make them feel better. I guess she was talking about you.”
He shuffled his feet, not wanting to admit to the big werewolf that he was sad. “Yes, sir.”
“You’re welcome to visit with my daughter, Luke, but make sure that it’s during the day from now on.”
He lifted his head in surprise and Eveny was grinning. “Thanks, Daddy.”
“You’re welcome, baby girl. Now off to bed with you both.”
Luke said goodbye and headed back to his grandma’s. That was just the first time that Eveny had been there for him, and he’d repaid the favor many times over himself. Their friendship had deepened over the last twenty years, but they’d never crossed the line between friends and lovers.
Something was changing between them, though, and he was starting to feel as if their days as friends were numbered. As a human, he was not privy to a lot of what went on in the pack, but he knew that the females tended to get married – or what they called ‘mated’ – in their early-to-mid twenties. That Eveny was still single at age twenty-five was something that he’d heard a lot about lately at the bar. As a bartender, he was fairly invisible when it came to whispered conversations, and he heard a lot more than people probably thought he did.
It seemed like Eveny was hiding something. They never kept secrets from each other. Well, except for the reason why they had never gotten romantic. They’d come close, but she’d always pulled back and he’d gotten to the point where he tried not to think about it anymore. But the thought of her someday hooking up with a wolf made his gut tighten in worry and his vision go red with anger. He wasn’t a wolf, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be a good mate for her. He loved her. He’d always loved her.
He’d always believed that what was on the inside was what mattered, not what was on the outside. But that wasn’t the case with wolves. There were humans that hated shifters. When they ‘came out of the woods’ fifty years ago and began to demand equal rights, there were humans that banded together to form protest groups. There were human-rights lobbyists in Washington, along with wolves’ rights. He wasn’t sure that he’d ever known any human and wolf to marry, but surely in all the time since they revealed themselves, some wolf somewhere had loved a human and they’d made a go of things.
Like he would love to do with Eveny.
So after all this time, after taking her
to both his prom and hers, after visiting each other every weekend while he was in college and talking on the phone every night, he was standing on the cusp of possibly losing her forever.
His gut tightened at the thought. He didn’t even know if she felt the same about him. He was too chicken shit, as she liked to say, to broach the subject. Scared to death to take that first step and lay his feelings out. He’d always thought that it would ruin our friendship excuse for not entering a relationship was bullshit. But if he laid his heart out for Eveny and she shot him down, then it might ruin their friendship, and there was a part of him that was not willing to risk the woman who was the most important person in his life.
I might lose her no matter what, he thought.
There were things that he couldn’t change. He’d never shift into anything furry. He would never be part of the pack. But he could love her better than anyone else. They were made for each other. No two people on earth were more perfect together than he and Ev.
Before his parents died, he’d been out helping his father in the yard one day when his mom called them in for dinner. “Go grab some flowers from the beds over there, kiddo,” his dad suggested. Luke ran over to where the day lilies, daffodils, and daisies filled the flower bed that ran alongside the house. He plucked a bunch of daffodils. His dad said, “Give them to your momma, she’ll love them.”
They walked up the back porch into the house and Luke handed the flowers to her. She hugged him and thanked him for the flowers, and then he heard her kiss his dad. They washed up and sat at the kitchen table, and she brought over the meal for them. It was meatloaf with mashed potatoes, his dad’s favorite.
His mom sat down, and after everyone had helped themselves, he noticed that she hadn’t taken any meatloaf. “Why aren’t you eating any meatloaf?” he asked, taking a bite.
“I don’t like meatloaf,” she answered, spooning gravy on the pile of potatoes on her plate.
Luke was confused. “If you don’t like meatloaf, then why do you make it?”
She had auburn hair that fell past her shoulders in thick curls, and he remembered that she had leaned forward and one curl slipped over her shoulder. “Your dad loves meatloaf, so I make it for him.”
Luke was still confused, so he looked at his dad, who smiled broadly and winked. “Someday, son, you’ll marry a woman who will cook you things she doesn’t like because she loves you.”
Luke had thought that sounded like a good thing. Sometime later, after he and Eveny had become best friends, they’d been sitting in the school cafeteria together and he noticed that she’d picked up a cup of fruit cocktail. She didn’t like fruit cocktail, because even if she didn’t pick the cup with the cherry in it, she swore that all the fruit tasted like cherries and she absolutely hated them. He was surprised to see that not only had she picked up a cup, but she’d gotten one with a cherry on top.
She leaned across the table and put the cup on his tray and smiled at him.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She shrugged and picked up her fork. “You like that stuff.”
“But you don’t.”
She wrinkled her nose as she looked at it. “Nope. But you do.”
“Thanks, Ev.”
She rolled her eyes but smiled broadly. “It’s just fruit, Luke, don’t have a cow.”
“I won’t. I just think you’re nice.”
It was that day that he’d first started to think of Eveny as more than just his friend. Or at least that perhaps someday they might become more than friends. But neither of them had ever moved forward. There had been times, when they’d been at the movies, or watching TV on the couch, or even when she’d fallen asleep with her head in his lap, that he had ached to touch her and hold her. Be more to her than he was. But he’d been scared, and now he felt like a noose was tightening around his neck.
He didn’t know what would happen to him if he lost Eveny, but he knew that it would be a dark spot in his soul forever.
“I can’t take that chance,” he said.
“What?” Henry, one of the regulars, asked, looking up from his beer.
Luke began to wipe down the bar. “Just thinking out loud, Henry. You need a refill?”
Determination filled him. He would not go down without a fight. If Eveny needed to mate someone, why couldn’t it be him? If he lost her without even throwing his hat into the ring, then he had no one to blame but himself. Eveny never cared that he was human, and he didn’t care that she was a wolf.
He just needed to step out onto the ledge and hope that she would be there with him. If not, then he could at least say he tried. And he’d rather try and lose her, than never try and never know.
Chapter 3
Eveny looked at the impossibly high stack of paperwork that her boss, Jerry, had just laid on her desk. She couldn’t even see the man behind it. “Jerry?” she asked, leaning to the side and looking at him.
“You’re leaving in a few days and will be gone for a week. I really want to get some of this stuff taken care of before then. I can’t pay you vacation time because you’re not full-time, but I can pay you for whatever extra hours you work this week so you won’t miss the missing paycheck.”
“Did my dad put you up to this?” she asked suspiciously. It sounded like something her dad would do – ask his friend to help her out financially even though she hardly had any bills at all. Just her car payment, cable, and cell bills, and whatever incidentals she had.
Jerry quirked his brow. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, Eveny. Now get to entering all that into the computer. When you’re done with this stack, they get filed by date in the tall filing cabinet in the storage room.”
She didn’t press him about whether her father was instrumental in the extra hours. She was glad for them, regardless of whether it was Jerry’s idea or not. Pulling the first page down from the stack, she looked at the old customer order, and began to enter it into the computer. Jerry had just recently upgraded the computers in the tiny office and started doing more things digitally. Part of the reason, she assumed, was because he was running out of space in his filing cabinets. She didn’t mind. Busy work would keep her hands moving but her mind free to figure out what to do about her coming heat and Luke.
By the time she was done working for the day, her fingers ached from typing, her back was in knots from sitting in the chair for so long, and her eyes hurt from staring at the computer. “You got a lot done today, Eveny,” Jerry said as he walked her out to her car. “I think by the time you take off, you’ll have really made a dent in what needs to be done.”
“Goodnight, Jerry,” she said, not enjoying the thought of another brutal day in front of the computer.
Luke was already at work, and she never called him when he was working unless it was an emergency. Like the time she swerved to avoid hitting a squirrel and smacked the front of her car into a guardrail. He worked at the bar until closing five nights a week.
She promised herself that she would call him tomorrow morning.
But the next day, Acksel woke her up early and asked her to join him for breakfast at Luna’s, a tiny diner in town. She couldn’t remember the last time that Acksel had asked her to breakfast, so she went, promising herself that she would call Luke at her earliest opportunity.
But that opportunity didn’t come that day, either. Or the next. They texted each other, because it turned out that he was extra busy at work, too. She couldn’t explain about her heat through texts. And she definitely couldn’t tell him that she wanted him to be her mate. She needed to talk to him. But the universe was conspiring against them.
As the time for her to head to the cabin drew closer and closer, she decided that she’d have to save the conversation between them for after she got back from her heat. He would understand how she’d gotten swamped at work. Between Acksel’s sudden need to have breakfast with her every day, Jerry’s never-ending stack of paperwork, and her utter exhaustion at the end of each day, he would
forgive her for not having a chance to explain about the heat before she left.
She definitely wouldn’t have told him about wanting to be mates before she left. He’d want to really talk. And she would feel compelled to spill all her secrets. It wasn’t that she didn’t think he felt the same way about her, because she could tell that he cared for her. She just didn’t want to have to get into all the nitty-gritty about choosing him and leaving the pack. More than what she would lose, was that he most definitely would have to reconsider buying the bar. If she left the pack, then anyone associated with her – even her mate – was considered persona non grata with the pack, and they wouldn’t use the bar if he owned it. So she wasn’t the only one losing something.
She could feel the heat coming on. It was part of being a female, a gift of sorts, from whoever was in charge of werewolf heats. She could tell to the day when her heat was going to start, and had known for several weeks when the time would come. Now, she knew that at some point tomorrow she would start to feel pressure inside her body and the need to have sex and create a life would soon overwhelm her. Without letting a male come inside her, she would suffer through the entire heat-cycle, which lasted seven days. The only way to shorten a heat-cycle was if she became pregnant before it had run its course. If a male used condoms the whole time, or if the female handled it herself, then it wouldn’t ease the number of days. One female in her pack was out of her heat the first day. Another went almost six days.
She had said goodbye to Jerry the night before and promised to let him know when she was back in town. Acksel had woken her up for breakfast once more that morning; this time her father was with him, and they talked at the house instead of going to Luna’s.
Mate of Her Heart Page 2
