She had to say yes. She owed it to everybody. But she hated that Case kept having to put her needs above his.
Once all this is over, I’ll find some way to make this up to you, she promised.I know you’ll probably want to get back on the road as soon as you can, but I’ll make it work somehow. I’ll figure out how to put you first.
“I guess you’re right,” she said, pressing her lips together. “We can’t take the chance. But I’m sorry you’re going to have a bride who’s wearing a flannel shirt and jeans that I realized two seconds ago have a paint stain on them.”
Case’s smile seemed warmer and more genuine this time, and it stuck around longer. “I like the flannel.”
“How do you feel about the paint stain?”
“Neutral. But I like the jeans.”
Lydia glanced down at them with transparent surprise, mostly to make him laugh but also because—come on. They were just jeans, and they were old enough that the cut and wash weren’t even in style anymore.
Case did laugh, but more importantly, and more intriguingly, the pink flush in his cheeks intensified.
He said quietly, “I guess what I really mean is that I like your legs.”
Oh.Oh.
“I like yours too,” Lydia said, her voice creeping into a lower, huskier register without her even trying.
She decided to lean into it. It was their wedding day, and that meant that tonight would be their wedding night. Werewolves required mate-bonds be consummated, and Case knew that—it was one of the things she’d made sure Declan explained to himwithouther there. They both knew what would be happening tonight.
“Do you know one of the first things I thought when I saw you?” she said.
Case mutely shook his head.
“I thought, ‘God, I’d like to climb him like a tree.’ No, don’t laugh, I’m serious. If I hadn’t started freaking out in the bar, I would have switched seats to get a little closer to you. Maybe you would have bought me a drink.”
“I would have,” Case said, meeting her eyes. There was a gorgeous, dark spark of intensity and arousal there that made her knees weak. “I’d noticed you already.”
Now her knees were even weaker still.
“I guess my panic attack put kind of a damper on our night, then,” Lydia said.
But in a way, she was glad it had. If they had hooked up that night, he would have been a wonderful distraction from all her worries, but would she have gotten the same chance to know how kind and brave and unshakably noble he was?
He could have been a one-night stand, but now he was going to be her husband. Hermate.
Maybe he’s—
Lydia forced herself to dismiss that thought before it had even really come together. As far as she was concerned, true mates were a romantic fairytale. They had nothing to do with reality.
Case did. He felt real and true to her in a way no sentimental daydream shifter kids whispered about ever had. And tonight, she would have very definite concrete proof of that. Solid, strong, scorching hot proof.
As if he knew what she was thinking, Case gave her a little hint of that proof now, reaching out to graze his fingers over her cheek and curl a strand of her hair around his fingers. There was a rapt attention on his face, like she was the only thing in the world he was even aware of right now.
He seemed to know exactly what she was thinking, too.
“Do you wish we’d had that? That I’d come over a few seconds earlier and bought you a drink?”
Maybe it would sound more romantic to say that shedidwish she and Case had had an easier, less complicated first time, without so much potential doom hovering over it, but that wasn’t true. It was romance she’d learned out of movies, not what her heart was actually saying. Besides, she didn’t want to give him anything but the truth.
“No, actually. What happened that night showed me who you are. It told me that I could trust you with all of this. If we’d slepttogether then, I would have loved it ... but I wouldn’t really have gotten to know you. I would’ve compartmentalized you as a nice break from everything else going on in my life, and I wouldn’t have known that you could bepartof my life. Is that too much?”
He shook his head with such endearing quickness that Lydia had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. Well, that was encouraging.
So was the fact that he was still touching her hair. She liked that a lot too.
