“I thought I wouldn’t. Because I’m safe here.”
She had said it. Some part of her knew it. The victory was no small thing, especially right now in the aftermath of her dream. “Wounds don’t always work that way, not so soon. You won’t dream forever.”
“Are you sure?”
“Not from my own experience, but from someone else’s.”
“Tell me. Please, your voice helps for some reason.”
He shifted off his knees to sit against the door instead. April’s breath was so close, her scent so close. He stretched out his legs and let his head fall back. He could tell her the story without revealing whose it was. Aaron wouldn’t mind that.
“As teens all of us pups used to run around outside most of the summer. We camped out so often, the adults hardly expected us home at night. The spring I was sixteen, a new wolf pup came to the pack. He was fifteen, and he joined the rest of us during the day, but he wouldn’t camp with us. He’d go off on his own, just disappear without a word. Of course the others wanted to track him, but I said no. If he wanted privacy, he had a reason.”
“And your friends listened to you? For teen boys, that seems unusual.”
A rumble filled his chest. “They had just found out I was their future alpha. Made things interesting for a little while. I told them I didn’t want anything to change between us, not while we were pups, but…well, they had to get used to it.”
“Didn’tyouhave to get used to it? Finding out you’d be alpha?”
“I knew I’d be alpha from the first time I changed under the moon.”
“Oh… When you were eleven, when you came here.”
“Yes.”
“Still so little.”
“I wasn’t little.”
He kept the edge from his voice, hoped she assumed he meant physically. But he hadn’t beenlittlein his mind, hadn’t thought like a child, in so long by then he couldn’t remember ever thinking like one. These days he looked at Jeremy and Lucy’s children—Zane, Callie, Tori, Gigi—and he marveled. Their trust, their sense of safety in the world, their lack of worry or fear. Jeremy and Lucy were good parents. As Aaron and Ember would be.
“And?” April’s voice sounded sleepy.
“We can resume the story in the morning.”
She sat up straight on the other side of the door, her shoulder blades brushing it with bare skin. Malachi’s mouth went dry. Her shoulders were bare. Whatever pajamas of Kelsey’s she was wearing had no sleeves.
He mastered himself, controlled his focus. He refused to picture her arms and shoulders—creamy skin, freckles no doubt—No. Focus.
“Please keep talking,” she said. “That young wolf—what happened to him next?”
“I didn’t want him to feel ganged up on, but I was concerned. It wasn’t only that he wouldn’t camp with us. He was too quiet, wide-eyed…and he smelled wounded.”
“Ohh,” came his mate’s soft voice, and her scent swelled with compassion. “Is he all right now? Is he still here, one of your pack?”
“He’s here, and he’s well.”
Relief washed through her citrus essence. She cared so much about someone she had never met—about a wolf no less. A rolling wave of feeling washed over Malachi in turn. Respect for her. Appreciation and affection. And the igniting of a desire to wrap his arms around his sweet mate and cradle her close.
“What did you do?” she said.
“I tracked him one night. Loudly, to be fair to him, but when I reached him he was asleep. So I bedded down with enough distance between us that he wouldn’t feel stalked, and I stayed awake. In about an hour he…” Malachi swallowed. The details of the story felt too private now. He had lost himself in the past. Talking to April was too easy.
“He had an awful dream,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And you helped him through it?”
