Of course there’s a difference.
So what is it?
A true mate,his wolf proclaimed,is a true mate.
Case waited for some further explanation, but it seemed to think that covered everything.
Thanks, he said dryly.You really cleared that up for me.
His wolf, apparently indifferent to sarcasm, dedicated itself to licking its paws.
Lydia came back out of the shop, her face flushed and her purse swinging heavily from her shoulder. She seemed a little short of breath, but since she didn’t offer any reason for it, Case—who had learned his lesson about asking werewolves for clarification—decided to leave it alone.
“So what’s next?” Lydia said cheerfully.
“Bakery.” Case didn’t need any help finding that: it was helpfully marked with an enormous cupcake-shaped sign.
Lydia fell into step beside him. “I should warn you, I’m not a pastry chef or anything—my talents pretty much top out at making brownies from a box—but I don’t think anybody could make a wedding cake in a day.”
“I like brownies from a box, for what it’s worth.”
“Thrift stores and brownies from a box,” she said with a smile. “You’re easy to please, Case Jackson.”
He was, actually. Like he’d told Ruth, he liked a lot of people. He liked a lot of places. He guessed he was pretty laidback, and he naturally looked for the good in things and found it.
But lately—especially today—Case’s ordinary baseline contentment had felt different. Lighter and bubblier, maybe, like he wanted to dance through Mountainview’s downtown, not walk through it. He wasn’t just casually appreciating whatever life threw at him, he was ....
He was embracing how he was experiencing all of it withher.
He did like thrift stores and their books with no dust jackets, and he did like brownies made from a mix, but when he thought about them now, he mostly wanted to share them with Lydia. He wanted to know if she preferred the chewy edge pieces of a brownie bake or the softer, meltier center ones. He wanted to pass an unknown book back and forth between them as theytook turns debating if, say, this camp counselor bedroom farce was going to be suddenly interrupted by a knife-wielding killer.
He was easy to please, yeah. He enjoyed a lot of things. But he suspected that with Lydia, he would enjoy them all even more.
With her, he’d even like the things he would’ve saidnobodycould like.
I want to stand in line with her at the DMV.
I want to clean out a fridge with her.
I want to untangle Christmas lights with her and spend an hour trying to find the one loose bulb that’s causing all the problems.
That was a hell of a lot more than him being easygoing. That was serious.
It was, Case realized, how you might expect a guy to feel about the woman he was about to marry. Maybe the wildest decision of his life was also the smartest.
He laced his fingers through hers before he could stop himself. When he looked down at her wide brown eyes and the gorgeous, thick dark fringe of her long eyelashes, it was hard to resist kissing her, so he didn’t. He wasn’t an idiot. She probably wasn’t fantasizing about long DMV dates with him, as nice as that would have been. Their feelings probably weren’t evenly matched. But that kiss in the truck had made it abundantly clear that they were on the same pagephysically.
Lydia’s mouth was lush and satiny, even when Case tried to stick to the corner of it so he didn’t drag her into a full-on middle-of-the-sidewalk make-out session. Even touching her made him dizzy.
Okay, this is considerably better than standing in line with her at the DMV.
“Mm,” Lydia said happily, her voice a pleasant buzz against his lips as he eased back but didn’t quite pull away. “So youreallylike brownies from a box, huh?”
He did. He was maybe even falling in love with them.
But he couldn’t say that. Brownies probably had too much going on right now to fall in love with him in return.
In lieu of a better, more truthful answer, he nodded. It was hard to say anything more with his heart in his throat the way it was.
