Teaching shifters to hunt in the woods was a lot like teaching chickens to lay eggs, but Mick acknowledged the wisdom of having a system in place to ensure nothing got overlooked. He just wished everyone who’d volunteered to help with the search could focus all their attention on it, instead of working their shifts in around work and family schedules. This was his mate’s safety they were talking about.
By the time everyone’s questions had been answered and check-ins had been arranged, the anxiety Mick had mostly shoved aside for two weeks with sex and staying safely denned up with his mate had come flooding back. His skin itched with the desire to get into his fur and find the coyotes threatening Renny. Tearing them into bloody little chunks would go a long way to making him feel better.
Maybe he should drive by the library on his way back home, he decided. He could just check up on his mate and make sure her first day at work was going smoothly. After all, the bears guarding the building had been instructed not to intrude, so he might not know if anything unusual had occurred inside.
Yeah, he’d just stop in for a minute, maybe steal a kiss as an excuse for butting in, he decided as the meeting broke up and shifters filed out of the mayor’s office. He knew Renny had told him not to worry, that she’d be inside a building under guard and by Marjory’s side all day, but it never hurt to double-check.
At least, he hoped it wouldn’t hurt. He suspected his mate’s bite felt a little different when she wasn’t clamping down on his skin in the heat of passion.
“This is really sweet of you, Marjory, but it’s not necessary.” Renny settled into the booth at the Timber Top Café across from her new boss. “I swear I brought lunch with me. We didn’t need to go out.”
The older woman ignored her protests and opened the menu their waiter had left. “And I told you I was taking you out to celebrate your first day at the library. If it makes you feel better, I suppose you can think of it as celebrating my first last day. Personally, I am so excited at the prospect of my upcoming retirement, I wish we had time to do lunch in Seattle at someplace ridiculously expensive and terribly stylish, but our lunch hour doesn’t extend to a ninety-minute drive each way.”
“You can’t be any more excited than I am.” In fact, Renny was still having a hard time not bouncing in her seat. Even after a morning of filling out boring paperwork and doing nothing more strenuous than touring the facility and familiarizing herself with the staff and schedule, her excitement at being back to work was hard to contain. “I feel like I’m finally getting my life back.”
“After hearing what you’ve been through, I can imagine.” Marjory had been briefed on Renny’s background, officially this time, as opposed to just through the grapevine. It wouldn’t have been fair for her to be working at Renny’s side without knowing the danger Geoff and the hunting party still posed. “I hope your mate is contributing to those feelings.”
Renny noticed the twinkle in her companion’s eye and blushed. Mick had left her on the library steps this morning with a goodbye kiss that threatened to set her panties on fire. Jerk. He’d done it in front of Marjory, the bear on guard outside, and all the passersby at the library’s front door, too. She’d been tempted to kick him in the shins, but her knees had been too weak to manage it.
“Yes, well…” She coughed. “I suppose you could say we’re still in our honeymoon phase.”
“Ah, yes. I remember my own, lo those many years ago. My advice is to enjoy it, thoroughly.”
“Did you?” She scanned her own menu, mentally debating between eating like a healthy, responsible adult human and devouring her food like a ravenous carnivore. Breakfast had been a long time ago.
“Oh, lady, yes.” Marjory chuckled, and Renny noticed the older woman didn’t waste any blushes. Maybe someday she’d get past that reflexive coloration. “Of course, it was different for me. Harold and I loved each other, but mating isn’t the same for us as it is for you.”
They placed their orders—stuffed chicken breast for Marjory and a compromising steak salad for Renny—and turned over their menus. “What do you mean?”
“Our animals approach the whole thing very differently, of course.” Marjory shook out her napkin and spread it over her lap. “Wolverines of the mundane variety don’t form monogamous pairs. Usually, males attach themselves to two or three different females and move between them. It’s not the sort of arrangement favored in human society.”
Renny had a fleeting image of sharing Mick with other females and almost let her claws pop out. It wasn’t something she would favor, either, and she had a feeling her inner bitch would try to rip its throat out.
“When wolverines mate, it’s our human halves that choose to be faithful. Our animals aren’t so finicky. Things are different among you wolves. Your animals are even more pair-bound than your human selves. From what I’ve seen it makes for an entirely different level of intimacy.”
“That’s the idea.” Renny tried to hide her grimace behind her water glass, but judging by the older woman’s curious expression, she didn’t think she had succeeded. She shrugged and aimed for casual. “I think it must be different for Mick. I’m his second mate, after all. Most wolves don’t survive losing the first one. I think he’s kind of leery about the intimacy thing.”
“That’s not what I observed this morning.”
Renny flushed at the teasing. “No, physical intimacy isn’t the problem. We’ve, uh, got that covered. I mean emotional intimacy. He doesn’t like to talk, and when I try, he’s always distracting me with something.”
Marjory leaned back to allow the waiter to serve their entrées, and her entire face glowed with humor. Sheesh, at this rate, Renny would end up with her mouth too full of her own foot to eat her salad.
“Get your mind out of the gutter. Do you want me to think of you as a dirty old woman?” Renny picked up her fork and toyed with it. “He just doesn’t want to talk about the past or about anything … deep. He doesn’t tell me how he feels, not about me, not about his last mate, not about anything important. Well, he spilled a little bit, that first night, when he broke down and claimed me, but since then, it’s been a no trespassing zone.”
Marjory looked thoughtful as she chewed and swallowed a bit of chicken. “Does he show you?”
“Show me?”
“Do his actions demonstrate his feelings in a way that makes his emotions obvious? A lot of men have trouble talking about their feelings, humans and shifters alike. We have an entire shelf at the library dedicated to the phenomenon. For our kind, especially for alphas like your Mick, it can be a particular challenge to use words to express emotions when their minds are oriented much more toward physical action.”
Renny’s fork stabbed a slice of rare beef with what could be construed as excessive force. “He expresses possessiveness, but what wolf doesn’t? I know he’s my mate, and I know we’re bonded together. I can feel it. We’re … aware of each other. I can tell if he’s close by, if he’s tense, if he’s healthy. I can even tell if he’s angry, but that’s just part of the bond. It doesn’t tell me how he feels.”
“Have you tried asking him?… No, don’t glare at me like that, young lady. It was a serious question. Of course, you can’t read his mind, any more than he can read yours. If you want to have a discussion about emotions, chances are that he won’t be the one to initiate it. He is a man, after all. They don’t look at things from our perspective.”
“It’s a little awkward, don’t you think? ‘Excuse me, Mick? Are you still in love with your dead mate? Do you think you could forget about her and concentrate on me instead? Because while the sex is amazing, I can’t help but get the feeling at times that you still wish I had never come barging into your life.’ That would be a fun evening at home.”
Marjory patted her napkin against her lips. “Then you have to decide which is more important.”
“What do you mean?”
“Which is more important to you?” she asked baldly. “Is it avoiding the po
tential for an unpleasant scene, or knowing the truth and having the facts of your mating out in the open? That’s your decision, and no amount of advice is going to make it seem any easier to choose.”
Chapter Eleven
Her steak salad turned out to be delicious, covered with enough rare beef to make the vitamin-packed greenery go down like so much gravy. It was the conversation over lunch that threatened to give Renny indigestion.
She hadn’t been able to get it out of her head all afternoon. While she reviewed library budgets, perused catalogs, explored computer systems, and met part-time employees, her mind remained fixed on the problem of one Michael Kennedy Fischer and the electrified, barbed-wire-topped, fifteen-foot stone wall he had erected around his feelings. So far, she hadn’t been able to find any way over it, so now she supposed it was time to consider the other choices: Go under, go through, or go home.
The going home part being figurative, since her home was now beside him. And that, Renny had concluded, was what made the whole damned question so terrifying. However Mick felt about her and their mating, it didn’t change the fact that they were mates. Nothing could change that. They now relied on each other to the point where a lengthy separation would kill them, so her choice wasn’t to stay or to leave; it was to push for more or to accept what he had already given her.
Gah. It made her feel like the heroine of some Hallmark Channel afternoon movie. Desperate for the love of her man, one woman will risk it all for the chance to find the ultimate happiness. Her more cynical instincts wanted to hurl at the sap factor, but she had to admit the question wasn’t going away, and the only way to get an answer would be to take her thumb out of her mouth and ask.
Mick picked her up a little before six. With the time change not coming for another couple of weeks, the sun had already set, leaving Alpha wrapped in a cocoon of evergreen forest beneath the starry northwestern sky. For a while, Renny simply watched it roll past the truck windows in silence. A girl had to gather her courage, after all.
“I thought you’d be chattering like a magpie about your first day.” Mick’s voice rumbled into the quiet, interrupting her brooding. “Didn’t it go well, red?”
“No, it went fine. I’ve just been thinking.”
She let the sentence drop and watched his face in the lights of the dashboard. The road between Alpha and his house in the woods didn’t boast much in the way of street lamps.
“Uh-oh. That sounds ominous.” He didn’t tense up. In fact, he looked more amused than anything else. “Did Marjory spend the afternoon telling you stories of my poor manners and misadventures?”
“Of course not. We did have an interesting talk over lunch, though. She took me out to the Timber Top Café.”
“They make a hell of a steak sandwich.”
“I had a salad. A steak salad,” she clarified when he shot her a look. “It was good. More steak, less salad.”
He nodded. “They know their clientele.”
Okay, Renny decided. It was now or never. She scraped together her courage and hoped like hell that the tightness in her chest and the trembling in the rest of her wouldn’t color her voice. She was striving to sound casual here.
“We talked a little about relationships.”
“You mean about sex.”
Renny rolled her eyes. “No, Mr. Horn Dog, that’s what men mean when they say they talked about relationships. We talked about relationships. She told me a little about her husband, Harold.”
“I only met him a couple of times. He was already sick when I moved here, but I remember him as a nice guy. He let Marjory steamroll her way through everything while he just watched and smiled and found a way to work around her.” He paused. “They were good together. You could see it. She took it pretty hard when he died.”
“He had cancer?” It was one of the few human diseases to which shifters didn’t have any more immunity than any other species.
Mick nodded. “I don’t think he suffered, though. Marjory wouldn’t have stood for that. The end came pretty quick, but I don’t suppose that made it any easier.” He paused and corrected himself. “I know that doesn’t make it easier.”
And there was her opening. She thought for an instant about letting it pass, but her mouth opened before she could stop it. “Yeah, you do know. Beth’s death was sudden, but you didn’t know it was coming. At least Marjory had that.”
She looked out the windshield while she said it, but she could still feel the way he tensed beside her. The raw nerve was no less raw than before. For a while she didn’t think he would even respond, and she searched for a way to muddle forward without his cooperation.
“If I’d paid attention, I would have known,” he finally said. She almost gasped to hear his voice, gruff though it sounded. She hadn’t thought he would continue speaking. “Abraham never made any secret of how he felt about Beth. Tried to forbid me from mating her in the first place, and never let a chance slip by when he could be telling me I should get rid of her. Should have known he’d eventually decide to do it for me.”
Renny clenched her fingers to keep from reaching out and curling them around his arm or leg or anywhere she could reach. She wanted to comfort him, but she couldn’t take the chance that he’d slam this door shut again. This was the first time since she’d worked out his identity that he’d willingly discussed his past with her. Every other time, he’d cut her off at the knees.
Or, you know, someplace between them.
“No, you shouldn’t have,” she said, barely above a whisper. “No one should ever have to expect their own grandfather would have their mate murdered. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”
He snorted. “You never spent time in Abraham’s pack. It worked the way he said it worked, or it bled out.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
Mick lapsed back into silence, but Renny wasn’t ready to give up. She’d gotten this far, gotten him to at least mention the past; that couldn’t be easy for him. Maybe it was time for her to meet him in the middle and mention the thing that scared her the most.
“Mick…” She struggled for words. Goddess, this was hard. And terrifying. And why the hell did she want to go here again? “I know that what happened to you, what happened to Beth, was devastating.”
He said nothing, but she could see his knuckles turning pale on the steering wheel. She felt like she had a knife in her hand and was taking turns stabbing it into each of their chests, just for funzies.
“I can’t pretend that I understand exactly how you feel, how you felt, about it, or about the fact that you … stayed, when most wolves don’t. I can never really get that, not fully.”
She took a deep breath, or tried to, but the fist clenched around her trachea made that kind of tough. She had to settle for what air she could get, but maybe she could blame her slightly dizzy, out-of-body feeling on oxygen deprivation. You know, instead of abject emotional terror.
“But I hope you know how grateful I am that you’re still here.” She forced the words out and let them ring in her ears while she tried to get it all out into the open, instead of letting it fester in her belly. “I know you didn’t want a second mate, but you got one. I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere. I might be a second choice for you, but you’re it for me. You’re what the Goddess gave me, and no matter what happens, I’m going to find a way to do this.”
“Then tell me, red, why does it sound like you’re giving me a great big farewell speech?” His growl made the hair on her arms stand up, made her skin itch to grow fur. It made his wolf sound awfully close to the surface. “You know damn well I won’t let you run now. I already told you all this. You’re my mate now. We are mated. It’s done.”
“I know that, Mick. Trust me, I know. Like I said, I’m not going anywhere. Not ever.” She swallowed hard. “But I need to get a few things clear, because my staying isn’t an issue, but how I stay is still up in the air.”
He glanced at her, and his eyes glowed in th
e darkness. They weren’t human eyes anymore. His wolf stared out at her from under those dark brows. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Shoving her fear down to churn away in the pit of her stomach, Renny revealed her worst fears. She threw her heart out on the road and waited to see if he’d run right over it.
“I need to know how you feel about me, Mick, because I’m already most of the way in love with you. What I want more than anything is to know that you’re able to love me back, but at this point, I’m honestly not sure. Part of me thinks you loved Beth so much that you don’t have anything left for me. And if that’s true, it doesn’t change that we’re mates. It doesn’t change that I’m here, and I’m staying forever, but it does change how I’m going to deal with that. If you can’t love me back, I’ll be building a very different life than I will if you can.”
Mick felt like he’d just had a piano dropped on his head and a mule kick him in the balls, simultaneously. Where the fuck had this come from?
Renny wanted to know if he loved her?
Seriously, she wanted to know if he possessed the ability to love her? What the fuck did she think he was, some kind of robot? Did she think he could just ignore the mating pull and pretend the Goddess hadn’t designed them for each other? Hell, he’d tried that for about seven seconds, and it had gotten him fucking nowhere. They were mates now. They’d spent the past two weeks wallowing in each other, hands on each other more than they’d been off. Did she really think that meant nothing to him?
Was she stupid?
No, he knew his mate wasn’t stupid, but he had to wonder if she might be a little crazy. Or just oblivious. She’d have to be one or the other not to have noticed the way he acted around her. He wanted to be with her all the time, in plain sight if that was all he could get, but preferably touching if he could manage it. He craved her taste and her scent like he craved the feel of pine needles under his paws. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, even when he should be concentrating on other things, like his work, or meetings with the mayor, or keeping her safe from a pack of fucking lunatics.
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