That was why Reeve spelled so much trouble for Mountainview. He was callous and cruel, and he didn’t need a reason to lash out at whoever was around him. He would cause harm just because he could. And for the last few weeks, Lydia had been begging for help from men who understood that fact as well as she did but who wouldn’t do anything about it because, well, it wasn’t their dog.
But Case had stepped in to save a stranger’s dog. When he had seen trouble on the horizon, he’d done his best to stop it, even though it had meant putting himself on the line. He hadn’t even needed to think about it.
Unfortunately, Case couldn’t be her co-alpha. He couldn’t help her fight off Reeve. Alpha challenges were for werewolves only, and Case was human. Lydia was sure of it. Shifters could sense each other.
He doesn’t have tostayhuman, her wolf said, nosing forward inside her head. Its attention was at its sharpest now.
That ... was technically true. It was possible to turn a human into a werewolf.
Possible but difficult. It was risky to even propose turning someone: the shifter world only survived because it was good at keeping secrets. Telling humans the truth usually only came after years of friendship and careful, thorough vetting. These days, shifter law usually demanded that humans sign formal nondisclosure agreements before they dared to open up to them.
Of course, if magic became public knowledge, suing someone for violating an NDA would be at the bottom of everyone’s to-do list, but at least the documentation underlined how serious it all was. It told the human in question that this was a big deal.
The pack does have a lawyer, Lydia reminded herself, trying to stay hopeful.We can get the paperwork in order.
Unfortunately, the NDA was just the tip of the iceberg. There was also the turning process itself. A shifter’s bite could pass on the potential to transform, but there was only about a fifty-fifty chance that it would actually take. Many humans rejected the change completely: they spent weeks tossing and turning with fever and pain instead, until the bite’s effects faded away. There wouldn’t be any permanent ill effects, but that was still a lot of potential suffering.
And even if it worked—
A lot of humans only thought of werewolves in terms of horror movies. She could be taking a good man and making him feel like a monster.
He’d be saddled with new instincts he wouldn’t know how to deal with. As co-alpha, he would have bonds and obligations that a human could never fully understand.
Asking someone if you could turn him into a werewolf was like asking him if you could break every bone in his body, give him a psychological complex, and then bring him to your family reunion.
And then, in her case, saying, “Now can you marry me and help me out in a fight to the death?”
Even if Case divorced her the second Reeve left town, it was still an appalling position to put someone in. But if it worked out, it could be a thousand times better for her people than some Reeve knock-off. It could save them.
Case would be good for Mountainview; Lydia knew that all the way down in her bones. It might have even been why her wolf had taken such an immediate interest in him.
“Lydia?”
The plan was nuts. The plan wasn’t a plan at all.
But it was all she had.
“You said you move around a lot.” Her jangly nerves had left her mouth so dry that she found it hard to get the words out. “Do you need to move on from here anytime soon? Because I have a problem, and I was thinking that you might be the only person who can help.”
4
When Lydia Vasquez had asked him if he could stick around town for a while, Case’s heart had done a little flip inside his chest.
She was gorgeous, with a warmth and magnetism andpresencethat had effortlessly drawn his attention the instant he’d seen her. He had held off on any flirtation because it’d seemed like she was having a bad time, but he would have felt a pang at seeing her walk away and out of his life for good. But she wanted to see him again? That was incredible. She thought he could help her with something? He was happy to try.
Admittedly, he hadn’t guessed that help would involve him paying a visit to her attorney, but hey, that was on him for not having enough imagination.
Case lived an unusual life, but this was odd even for him. For right now, though, he was willing to roll with all the strangeness, and it wasn’t even because of the way little dark wisps of hair escaped Lydia’s tight braid and curled around the nape of her neck. That was probably part of it, but it wasn’t all of it.
She was in trouble. At first, back at the roadhouse, all he’d noticed was how her breathing had turned choppy and short, but then he’d seen how her eyes were white-walled with panic. There had been real fear there. While getting outside had helped her clear her head, it hadn’t made the fear go away completely. She was just so strong that she could keep a handle on it the second she got even the tiniest bit of help.
Something was up, and he didn’t want to leave her in the lurch. He didn’t know what was going on, but he was willing to put up with more weirdness than this to find out.
So here he was. If Lydia thought the best way forward was for him to talk to her lawyer, then he’d talk to her lawyer.
Turner, Lowe, and Associates had an elegant brick-and-stone building all to itself. Case had expected it to be one high-rise office building among many—this wasn’t the big city, but even plenty of mid-sized towns could scrape together a couple of steel-and-glass behemoths—but, oddly enough, it was instead placed on the outskirts of town. It wasn’t surrounded by the hustle and bustle of business but the gentle swishing of wind in leaves, since it backed up onto a pretty little patch of woodland.
Case liked it, but it was strange. Every choice made here seemed both perfectly right and a tiny bit askew.
