The silence lasted too long, and Lydia knew it was over. Maybe the only answer was to disband the Mountainview pack for good. Reeve couldn’t take it over if they were all scattered to the four winds. It would mean losing the only family she had left, but—
“Okay,” Case said.
Lydia couldn’t believe she’d heard him correctly. “What?”
His face was pale, but that was the only sign that he was making a decision that was going to change his whole life.
“I said okay. Let’s do it.”
5
Call him a romantic, but for some reason Case had pictured them having the wedding first.
But that, he realized, was probably a sign of how dazed he was. He wasn’t exactly too stunned to think, but it was probably fair to say that he wasn’t batting a thousand right now.
Lydia needed to marry awerewolf, not Case Jackson, random citizen. If her bite didn’t turn him, there was no reason to go forward with the rest of it.
So the schedule was:
-get bitten
-get married
- familiarize himself with his wolf form as quickly as possible
- complete the normal honeymoon activity of fighting a brutal, bloodthirsty werewolf
Simple. Straightforward. Couldn’t imagine why he was too distracted to keep it straight.
If someone had asked him why he had agreed to all this, he wasn’t sure what he would say.
The simplest answer was that Lydia needed help, and he believed her when she said that he was her best chance for getting it. If he saw a car speeding toward someone, he would try to push them out of the way. This disaster might be unfolding in slow motion, but it wasthere, and no one could count on Lydia having enough time to find another candidate. The shockedrelief on her face when Case had agreed had underlined exactly how bad her position was. So there was that.
For years, Case had lived a life with no strings attached. He knew a lot of people, even the ones who liked him, mostly looked askance at it and assumed he did it to steer clear of any commitments. People who didn’t like him made it clear they believed there was some dark story behind his life—he was skipping out on child support or alimony or trying to hide a criminal record, or he was just trouble and every town eventually drove him out on a rail.
He supposed he was biased in his own favor, but he didn’t think any of that was true. He had skimmed lightly over the surface of the world for years because he liked it—liked seeing new places and meeting new people—but also because somewhere deep inside him, there was an itch that had never been scratched. No place had ever felt like home.
Once, standing on the porch of a ramshackle beach shack he’d rented, drinking coffee and watching the sun rise over the ocean, Case had felt a glowing contentment. He still looked back on it sometimes as one of his favorite memories.
He remembered thinking,This is beautiful. God, it’s good to be alive.
But he also remembered thinking,This isn’t quite it. Not yet.
That thought had startled him. He hadn’t known what “it” was, and he still didn’t know.
But what ifthiswas it? Not many people could afford to rush out to a middle-of-nowhere mountain town, get married to a stranger, and fight for a werewolf pack’s future. They wouldn’t have lives that could accommodate that kind of wild swerve. He did.
If he didn’t use that freedom when someone needed it, what was even the point of having it?
So there was all that, to start with, and it made some sense, if he squinted at it. It felt serious and principled, like a statement of his life’s purpose. He meant it.
But also, Case liked Lydia.
He liked how she’d talked about running in the woods. He liked how hard she was trying and how far she was going to keep her people safe. He liked her earnestness and her pragmatism and her honesty.
He liked her thick, wavy black hair and the way it wafted out a scent of toasted coconut shampoo whenever she moved. He liked her enormous liquid brown eyes, so dark and so intent.
Her muscles. Her curves.
