Cole furrowed his brow. “The second thing?”
“You said there were two things you came home for. What was the other thing?”
Cole grinned sheepishly. “I missed you.”
Maya’s eyes widened. “You did?”
“Yeah, embarrassing, right?”
“Actually, I think it’s kind of cute.”
Cole nodded to the sofa. “So, I guess we’d better have that talk.”
Maya hesitated for a moment before taking a seat. He was right, they needed to talk. She just wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what he had to say.
“Look, I don’t want you to feel pressured about anything I’m about to say, okay?”
“Pressured?” Maya asked.
Cole sighed. “I suppose I should start at the beginning. What I am, a wolf shifter, is not something you can catch. I wasn’t bitten, or turned. I was born this way. I come from a long line of wolf shifters, and I’ve got a big family, a big pack.”
Cole rolled up his sleeve and held out his arm. Right in front of her eyes, hair sprouted out of his skin, until his arm was covered with a thick layer of…no, it wasn’t hair, it was fur. Maya leaned forward in her seat, staring at it with an almost morbid curiosity. When she glanced up to Cole’s face, his eyes had also transformed to the color they’d been earlier in the bedroom, a soft amber. Cole opened his mouth and smiled, and his teeth had changed into fangs. Maya gasped.
Cole immediately closed his eyes and lowered his head for a short while and when he next looked up, his eyes and teeth had returned to normal. Maya checked his arm and it, too, had changed back.
“Anything you want to ask me?”
Maya nodded. “Do you change on the full moon?”
“Yeah, most wolves are too busy to shift into their wolf form very often, so we get together as a pack on full moons and run together.”
“I can’t imagine that.”
“It’s a sight to behold, for sure. Maybe you can come along for the next full moon.”
“You…You want me there?”
“Of course.”
Maya picked at a piece of lint on the seam of her jeans while she digested everything she’d been told. “This is, um, a lot to take in.”
Cole nodded. “I can understand that it would be difficult for someone to hear all this for the first time. For what it’s worth, this is difficult for me, too. I’ve never had to tell my secret to anyone before, so I’m winging it.”
“What about Nash? Doesn’t he know what you are?”
“Ah,” Cole said, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. “Nash and I have been friends for a long time. We went through training together in Quantico. He knew what I was from the moment he met me, and I knew that he was a shifter, too.”
Maya’s eyes widened. “Wow, so Nash is a wolf shifter, too?”
“Not exactly, no.”
Maya frowned. “Not exactly? Surely, he either is, or he isn’t.”
Cole winced. “It’s sort of complicated. You see, Nash, is, well, he’s something else.”
“Something else?” Maya sucked in a quick breath. “Is he a vampire?”
Cole let out a bark of laughter and Maya felt embarrassed to even have suggested such a thing. Although now that she came to think about it, it wasn’t too far of a stretch from a man who got all furry and ran with others of his kind on the full moon.
