The smirk was way more naughty than possibly intended. “You know quite a lot that Owen doesn’t.”
She kissed him, snuggled back into his side, and they watched the movie together. It was, somehow, even funnier now.
He cooked. She had not seen that coming. He grilled the meat he’d brought the last time he’d been there. So. Much. Meat. They ate at her tiny table in her backyard, where herbs and plants grew, and bugs buzzed as night quietly descended.
“Stay tonight,” she said, while they were washing up. Not a question exactly.
He’d kissed her in answer. Just that. Like there was no other possible answer.
The following few days were heroically survived.
They had responsibilities. Adult ones. Jobs, schedules, and the general infrastructure of lives that had been running perfectly fine before all of this and, apparently, intended to keep doing so regardless. Her shop needed her. His park and pack needed him.
The world, inconsiderately, did not pause.
She’d always been fine, better than fine, on her own. She’d never been one for company at any cost, had never needed people just to fill silence. So the missing caught her genuinely off guard. It wasn’t exactly loneliness. It was more specific than that and more structural. She missed him the way she imagined you’d miss an arm, or a foot—something so integrated into the basic functioning of things that its absence didn’t just feel sad, it felt fundamental.
She limited herself to two dramatic sighs per hour and considered it a personal triumph. She watched the clock with an intensity that was frankly embarrassing and that she would be taking to her grave.
But then she’d be home and hear his truck in the driveway, something in her chest would simply unlock, and she could exist correctly again. The first evening, the one after all of ten hours away from him, she’d opened the door and launched herself at him with an enthusiasm that suggested they’d been separated by war and several natural disasters rather than a single workday. He’d caught her without blinking and held on just as hard.
Which told her a thing or two about how his day had gone, too.
Such was her life now.
And now, days later, it was time to face the pack.
Chapter 9
The day of the pack run had come.
Rex squared his shoulders, rolling his neck side to side the way he would before facing something that was definitely more complicated than a fight. Fighting was easy; the next few minutes would be... layered, and he had to keep the balance of it all.
He could hear her car—the engine, the sound of her tires on the gravel road, still a quarter mile out. The pack heard it too. He felt it move through them like a current, that collective turning of attention as heads angled toward the road without a single word passing between anyone.
He exhaled and smiled at Annabel, a shifter a few years older than him. She was already beaming at him so hard it looked like it might hurt her.
Alright, then. The pack was going to make it weird.
Which was sweet. His scent had shifted, changed in the deep, soul-level way a wolf couldn’t fake and the others couldn’t miss, and it had taken his pack less than a heartbeat to catch it. The questions that followed had been exactly what he’d expected: warm and relentless, thoroughly overwhelming, and a little too personal. But it meant people were happy and wanted to be part of it, so he answered, and talked, and skirted over what they didn’t need to know. A mate bond was always a reason to celebrate. This one had an extra charge to it because this mate bond meant an Omega for a pack that hadn’t had one in a long time.
It was also clear no one had a single problem with her being human, but that wasn’t the weight he’d been bracing against. The ones who might have something to say about it were conspicuously, mercifully absent today. He hadn’t made it an order—showing up today was a choice, not a command—and part of him had relaxed when they’d stayed home. He checked the bond between himself and the pack the way he’d check a rope for fraying. Found nothing. No strain, and no fractures.
Maybe they won't be a problem after all.He wasn’t going to bet money on it, but right now, everything held.
Then her car turned into the lot, and he felt it.
A little spike of nerves through the bond, sudden and a little startling, like the crack when you stepped on ice. Her car stopped just inside the entrance, engine still running, her face barely visible through the windshield. Taking in all the wolves, all the people, all the attention already swinging toward her like a compass finding north.
He was moving before he’d decided to.
He opened her door. Her scent hit him the way it always did—sweet and warm and clean, with that lavender underneath that was only her—and the ache that lived in him when she was away eased.There. Finally.He offered her his hand. “Moonbeam.”
Her smile for him was the real one, but her eyes darted past him to the crowd. “That’s, um, that’s a lot of people. And wolves.”
“Not the whole pack, but a good portion of it. More will come through the day, though.”
That did not help. It wasn’t fear. More like the edge of overwhelm, only tinted with fear. He felt the question through the bond.Are they okay with me being here?
