“I believe you.”
She took another step forward, but he didn’t. “Do you want to? Don’t go along with me. Everyone goes along with me. It’s really hard to get people to tell me the truth.”
There was a way out. She could go. She’d warned him. He definitely had the money, pack, and every other kind of power to do something about it. She could walk away from this entire mess. It felt like the Silver Spring valley was the center of the universe, but she knew it wasn’t. She knew they were all insignificant and tiny, and she could start over anywhere.
She took a deep breath. “I like pasta.”
17
Mateo was having a hard time controlling his wolf, who was doing a gleeful dance inside of him at the idea of bringing her home.
Calm down,he insisted firmly. For one, this wasn’t home. This wasn’t anywhere close to home. For another, it wasn’t like he could pull her past his pack and up the stairs to the king bed in the master suite made of sturdy logs that never squeaked.
“They’re going to love you,” he said as he entered the code into the front door, 0023, the last four digits of his zip code in New York, as if the universe was just taunting him at this point.
The door swung open, and a cacophony of scents and sounds rolled over him as he stepped inside. It all ground to a halt as various wolves swung toward them.
The heart of the house was a huge living room three stories high with a stone fireplace to match. It was gorgeous and perfect for a huge family, but it also did not give them any time to prepare. They just stepped right into the melee.
He tried to see his family from her point of view. A passel of Italians of various ages and shifter fitness dominated the room,as well as a few partners with other hair and skin colors around the edges.
Tomatoes and peppers blinded his nose, so his wolf was doing attendance by sight alone. Nicolo was still missing, doing loops of the perimeter, but pretty much everyone else was sitting around waiting for dinner.
“Hey all, this is Cat,” he said as the room slowly fell silent, and a bunch of wolves pivoted toward him. “Cat, this is the pack.”
Belatedly, he realized that he wasn’t in the habit of introducing them as a pack. In fact, that was completely forbidden. “Don’t worry. She’s?—”
“Tesoro,” a gravelly voice said, and Mateo pivoted, his wolf frozen within him.
Rosino Amato, all five feet of her, stood in the archway to the kitchen on his right with an apron around her tiny waist. She was in her eighties with snow white hair and eyes as sharp as ever.
They stared at each other, she with a wooden spoon the length of her arm, and he with his hand around a witch.
“She’s a, um, local,” he said into the silence. “When did you arrive, Nonna?”
“Lupa?” Nonna asked.Wolf.A shifter could generally spot another, but it was harder if they weren’t related.
“Kind of,” he said, thinking of that spell book and the magic within it and what that implied about how they came to be.
Nonna’s eyes sharpened. “Born without?”
He clenched his teeth. He did not lie to her. He had never lied to her before in his life. He said nothing.
Something shuttered in her eyes, taking his silence for assent. Her face was blank as she said in Italian, “You will only bruise your heart.”
As if it were a foregone conclusion that he could not stay with a wolfless shifter.
“Dinner smells good,” Cat said with a forced smile.
Nobody said anything in response until Gianna tripped forward and took her hand. “You can sit with me so no one else growls at you.”
It was like she broke the damn.
People rushed up to introduce themselves, and Mateo tried to make his way toward Nonna. Then a phone was shoved into his hand, and he was suddenly dealing with a security issue for a chip manufacturer in Taiwan. He also never took vacations, and he realized from the helpless questions of his engineering team that he’d made himself more indispensable than he ever wanted to be.
She was quickly surrounded by wolves and was soon standing in front of a fireplace with a fire roaring as high as she stood, and it was totally intolerable.
He wrapped up as quickly as possible and shot the new orders off to his best engineer to try to fix or at least to try to talk them down, when he felt a clawed, anxious hand around his wrist.
