“He knows who he wants to spend the rest of his life with—what, after one date?”
“Usually before.”
“You’re telling me wolves fall in love at first sight.”
“Not love, Willow. Love’s got to be cultivated. But…rightness. Knowing. Yeah.”
She folded her arms, slowly shook her head. He waited for another question, an attempt to contradict him, but she stayed quiet now, waiting for the rest of his explanation.
He sighed. “I haven’t talked much about this to the mates I know, but I’m pretty sure there’s a strong sense of it—of rightness together—for them too. The thing you asked about…if you’re sensing it too, that’s the best answer I have.”
“Mates you know,” she said, challenge in her voice now.
“The ones who’re part of my pack.”
“They’re not wives? They’re mates?”
“We’re fairly old-fashioned about marriage, so yeah, they’re wives. But they’re also mates. It’s… Well, it’s what you said. A bond that’s next-level. It’s made formal before the wolf pack, a ceremony not unlike a wedding.”
Willow pushed her fingers through her hair, tugged one finger loose from a snagging curl. She tilted her head back against the seat and stared up through her car’s sunroof for a long minute. Ezra waited for her, his heart beating hard, his fingers pressing into his palms. He hadn’t planned to spell this out for her, not so soon. He wouldn’t mention the fated nature of the thing, the irresistibility. She would always have a choice, and he would do everything he could not to blur that.
At last Willow sat forward and met his eyes. Her scent was strong with amazement, discomfort. “I need you to be completely honest with me right now.”
“I have been.”
“I’m talking about right now, my next question.”
He nodded.
“Ezra Sterling, do you think you’ve found your mate? Do you think I’m her, and did you think so even before the fair?”
It had all moved so fast. Willow’s scent was rising and dipping and shifting with the chaos of a stormy sea, and his head was in such a muddle by now he could hardly identify her mood at all. His strategies lay shredded at the bottom of his heart. His next answer might send his mate away from him, but he had promised her the truth, and regardless he could never lie. Not to Willow.
“Ezra.” The quiet calm in her voice freed his from where it had stalled in his throat.
“Yes,” he said.
Nine
When,attheendof their date, Willow said“I hope you know I’m going to talk to Saffron about this,”one part of her expected Ezra to protest. A guy you barely knew insisting on secrecy was both a red flag in all cases and also not entirely unreasonable in this case. Her mind had already jumped forward to determining which of those elements would outweigh the other when he balked.
But he didn’t.
Instead he said,“Of course.”
For an entire day, she itched to spill all to her sister, but her next work shift ended just as Saffron was seeing a movie with friends. By the time Saffron’s key rattled the back door, it was nearly ten-thirty and Willow had been cleaning her room obsessively for the last hour. Before that, she’d been scouring the internet for reputable scientific data on wolves.
Through her closed door, Dad’s and Saffron’s voices came too muted to decipher the words. The tones didn’t sound strained. Saffron had made it home half an hour before curfew, after all.
At last a soft knock sounded on Willow’s door. On the chance her sister wasn’t the one knocking, she shut her laptop, browser still open to an online wolf community that mostly functioned to find safe “confinement-equipped housing” for wolves traveling away from their packs during the full moon. Fascinating.
“Come in,” she said.
“I’m dying for details,” Saffron said as she slipped inside and shut the door.
“Yeah, well, my room is now sparkling like nobody lives here.”
“You could have texted me the basics, at least.”
