At the end of class she abandoned Tonya mid-sentence and managed to beat him to the front. She turned in her essay and turned to face the room, to facehim.
Wow.
She stood not six feet in front of him, at eye level with his neck. He held one page in his hand, neat printed writing on both sides. Lucy’s gaze rose to his. Blue eyes, deep as a well, dark as sapphires.
“Hi,” she said stupidly.
“Hi,” he said.
He stepped to one side, and his long reach allowed him to set his sheet of paper on Ms. Adamski’s desk without moving closer to it. Then he took an additional step back and met Lucy’s eyes again.
“I’m Jeremy Freeman,” he said.
She was too stupid to tell him her name, but the blame wasn’t hers. His eyes were to blame, and oh my, his smile was too.
Two
Hehadsmelledherbehind him, strong soothing lavender, but he smelled everyone all the time. That her scent was more pleasant than average didn’t register much while he tried to focus on Ms. Adamski’s obligatory syllabus explanations—tried and mostly failed to take notes, his pencil instead sketching a cool logo that had just popped into his head for a bar and grill that didn’t actually exist. Then the girl had rushed around him to relinquish her paper first, and her swinging braid swished across his arm. Now he noticed. First that scent of hers. Second the braid, soft and…lavender. As a human, she didn’t know how she smelled to wolves, not unless one of his kind had told her. Her chosen hair color was a coincidence.
A distracting coincidence.
So he’d blurted his name and now she was blinking and mute, and for a moment he wondered if the shielding of his gaze had slipped somehow. For an adult wolf, even a young adult, shielding ought to be unconscious. Even when that wolf all but collided with a lavender-haired, lavender-scented…
Mine.
His breath caught in his throat. That was…weird.
She is mine.
Okay, wait…
She. Is. Mine.
“Um, I’m Lucy, um, Campbell. Lucy Campbell. Hi.”
“Hi,” he said, not for the first time. But adrenaline flooded his body along with a surge of something else, something he’d never felt before and could not name. Something connected to the howl inside him that insisted Lucy Campbell…
...is mine.
A glad growl rose in his chest, and he had to swallow hard, burn his throat with the unvoiced feelings brimming over in his wolf heart. His hand trembled once as he bent to pick up his book bag. He had to break eye contact with her until he knew he could control this, and he couldn’t know that until he knew whatthiswas.
“Design major?” she said.
He straightened, cast his gaze around the room at anyone but Lucy. The other students were gone or going. Right, it was past seven.
“Yeah,” he said. “You too, I guess.”
“Interior. I want interior decorating, but I also wanted to experience college, so I’m getting an associate’s even though I don’t technically need one to be residentially hirable as a decorator.”
The cascade of words drew his eyes to hers again. The frames of her glasses were dark purple, complementary to her lighter hair. Her eyes were gray, keen as she studied him. Smart woman. And wow, gorgeous, tall and curvy. Tall enough not to make him feel like a giant. Curvy enough for him to…
He hefted his bag onto one shoulder and turned away. Had to. His brain was aware of every soft line of her as if he had touched her, run his hands down her hourglass outline.
Whoa. That’s what this was.
The howling triumph in his head rose until the remaining students and Ms. Adamski ought to be able to hear it.My mate! Lucy Campbell, my mate!
“Hey, sorry,” she was saying behind him. “I overshare sometimes.”
