Carter and Trey threw him looks that saidwhat’d you do now?before leaving.
Mike leaned back in his chair, regarding him thoughtfully. “What had you so wound up when you got to the station earlier?”
Hale tensed. “I wasn’t wound up.”
“You weren’t?” Mike countered. “Your heart was thumping a mile a minute the whole time we were standing out front talking.”
Hale opened his mouth to deny it but then closed it again. Maybe he needed to talk to someone about this whole mess with his ex-girlfriend.
“Karissa Bonifay showed up at my apartment a little while before you called me,” he admitted. “I’m not quite sure why, since most of our conversation bordered on hostile.”
“Okay.” Mike crossed his arms over his chest. “What got you so rattled about her showing up? Do you still have feelings for her?”
Hale sat up so fast his rolling chair almost slid out from under him. “What the hell are you talking about? I don’t have feelings for her. She dumped me and I moved on years and years ago.”
Mike lifted a brow. “Obviously.”
Hale winced. “Okay, maybe thereisstill something there. I’m just not sure what it means.” He stared at the DPD logo on his computer screen for a moment before confiding in Mike about what Karissa had told him regarding the job she was on. “I can tell she’s hiding something from me about this guy she’s protecting. Or maybe the hit manwho’s after him. I can’t explain how I know, but there’s something else going on.”
“And what does that have to do with whatever you still feel for your ex-girlfriend?”
Once again there was that instinctive urge to lie his ass off, but in the end, Hale decided to throw himself further into the deep water. “There might be a very small, completely unreasonable part of me that can’t help but be concerned that Karissa is putting herself between a killer and this Patterson guy. I told myself it’s not my concern, but I worry anyway. It’s like an involuntary reflex.”
Silence greeted that confession, Mike studying him with a knowing look that made Hale want to squirm in his seat.
“Anything else?” Mike asked.
“My nose seems to work around Karissa,” Hale admitted, cringing on the inside even as he said the words. “Twice now, I’ve smelled lilac blossoms. It’s the strongest scent I think I’ve ever smelled. Even when I could smell.”
“What do you think that means?” Mike asked casually.
Hale snorted. “You sound like a shrink, you know that?”
“You’re avoiding the question.”
Maybe he was. But what did Mike expect him to say?
“It sounds to me like Karissa isThe Onefor you,”Mike observed, saying the very thing out loud that had been swirling around Hale’s head since she’d walked out of his apartment.
Werewolves had this legend that every wolf had a soul mate somewhere in the world known asThe One,who would accept them, fangs, claws, and all. Considering it was literally a one in a billion proposition, most werewolves considered it an urban legend. Truthfully, Hale had, too.
Until soul mates started popping up around the Pack like daisies. The next thing they knew, everyone in the Pack had foundThe Onefor them—except for Hale, Carter, and Mike.
“She can’t be my soul mate,” Hale said.
His voice was a little harsher than necessary, like he was trying to convince himself as much as Mike.
“Why not?”
Hale cursed. “Because whatever relationship we had fell apart a decade ago. It wasn’t even real. We were two teenagers playing a game we didn’t know the first thing about.”
“I’m pretty sure the soul mate thing doesn’t care about any of that,” Mike pointed out. “I don’t know what brings a werewolf and their mate together, but whatever it is, it doesn’t seem concerned about the baggage either party brings to the table. It puts two people together and the magic happens, whether you want it to or not.”
Hale couldn’t disagree. His pack mates had mettheir soul mates in the most impossible ways, and they’d all ended up together against all odds. In those rare situations when one of the aforementioned couples had tried to fight the force that wanted them together, it had gone epically bad.
“Even if you’re right,” he said, not conceding anything, “it doesn’t matter since Karissa clearly despises the very air I breathe.”
“You sure about that?” Mike asked, again making Hale think that maybe the man had missed his true calling as a therapist. “What if she feels the same way you do—which I admit seems to be mostly confused?”
