I waited a minute.
Two.
It was only when I started to turn that he spoke, “I hate solstices.”
I glanced over my shoulder. “You dragged me up here to complain about your distaste for the shortest day of the year?” Or longest, depending on the season.
“No.” He cupped the back of his neck, peered down at his scuffed Timberlands, then back up at me. “Nikki, what happens if you get a mating link tonight?”
“I don’t know.” My stomach squeezed as though speaking those words had somehow activated one. “Honestly, I’m sort of hoping Lycaon forgot about me this season.”
“I thought it was your big dream.”
“It used to be. Might still be. But I’m currently not ready for . . .” I licked my lips, trying to slow my breathing in order to absorb less of Liam’s intoxicating smell. “Another partner.”
“Why?” He stepped toward me.
I stayed rooted in place, not willing to be cowed into pedaling backward. “Because my last one screwed me up pretty badly.”
His neck stiffened. “You said you’d leave me if you were given a true mate.”
I raised my chin up a notch. “I only said I’d leave, because you made it clear you didn’t want me to stay.”
That slender, vertical groove formed between his eyebrows. “You would’ve resisted a bond to stay with me?”
“Crazy, right?” I stared past him at the valley still burnished in sunshine with its gilded orchard, polished pond, and lavender puffs of chimney smoke.
“If you’re given a mate tonight, what will you do?” He moved again, blocking my view of the outside world.
“What are you really asking me, Liam?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed in his rigid throat. “If you’re given a mate tonight, will you choose him?”
I stared beyond his lowered lashes at the eyes, which had captivated me from the very first instant I’d caught their gleam beneath his baseball cap in a dark parking lot. I’d spent weeks willing those eyes to see me. And now . . . now I wanted those eyes to look anywhere else than into mine, because I feared they’d discover the shield forming over my heart had yet to harden.
“I won’t consummate a link for the sake of having a mate, but I also won’t hold out for an emotionally-stunted, commitment-phobic male.”
Liam’s mouth softened. “Emotionally-stunted?”
I needed to look away from that mouth before I did something stupid and allowed it to soften me in turn.
He took another slow step toward me, and another. Until he was so close the beats of his heart unsettled the air between us. “You smell like my son.”
I glared up at him. “Am I not permitted to see him anymore?”
The bite in my voice made his gaze slide to a hardhat someone had left behind. “I was scared, Nikki. He already lost one mother; I didn’t want him to lose another.”
So Mom had been right . . . fear had prompted Liam to break up with me.
Didn’t excuse the insensitive way he’d gone about ending things.
“He’syourson, Liam. Not mine. I never forgot that, and I never tried to use him to pin you down.”
Still scrutinizing the hardhat, he asked, “Could you ever love him like your own?”
My saliva solidified, and so did the oxygen in my lungs. “What sort of question is that?”
“The night I picked him up from your place wasn’t the first time I heard him utter the word Mom. He’d said it twice in his sleep, and once when he got really upset with me. I thought he was asking for Tamara, but he never knew Tamara, so why would he ask for her?” Liam pushed a lock of hair out of his eyes. “It frustrated me at first, because I wanted to be enough for my son, Nikki. And I thought I was until I got here, until you and your mother helped me with him, and he just lit up. He was always such a quiet baby, happy and sweet, but quiet. Now he’s so . . .alive.”
