“They’re happy,” he said, keeping his voice low, just for her. “The pack loved you before, that hasn’t changed.” He let someof the warmth of it pass through to her. “If anything, they’re relieved.”
“Relieved?”
“A mated Alpha is good for the pack’s stability.” He shrugged. “They’d mostly given up on me finding mine.” He glanced back at the crowd, at the eager and barely-contained energy of so many wolves trying to look casual and failing. “My mate—their Omega.”
She looked past him again. He could see her reading the crowd, looking for something specific or, more accurately, the absence of someone.
“None of them are here today," he said quietly. He didn’t know whether that was caution, cowardice, or something worse on their part, and right now, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the bond between him and his pack sitting smooth and untroubled in his chest, and Zoe’s scent starting, slowly, to ease.
The tightness in the bond shifted; she took a breath. Another. “Okay.”
And then she rose on her tiptoes and pressed a quick, bright kiss to his mouth. It was more like a stamp than a kiss, but...
The pack erupted.
Wildly.
Disorganized and slightly rude, it was the pure, uncontained noise of people who had been waiting for something and finally, finally gotten it. Howls and cheers and sounds that could only be described as triumphant. It rolled over them both like a freaking tsunami.
Zoe smiled right through the blush climbing her cheeks and neck, and it hit him—the two of them in the bond and the pack’s joy folding together into something big, deep, and not completely comfortable yet. Every thread of connection that made up his pack, the living whole of them, with her at the center of it. Belonging there.
The oldest part of him that didn’t have language, settled and shifted. ‘This. Finally.’
For that, for all of it, he took her face in both hands and kissed her properly. And all was forgotten for a second. It was her, her scent, the constant need to be in her, heart and body and.... Yeah, he got a little carried away.
“Get a room!” someone hollered. Owen, possibly.
He pulled back, and she was still smiling when he took her hand and turned toward the rest of the pack. “Ready to lead them?” he asked.
“I don't know about leading,” she said. “But I'm ready to show them how to help the forest.”
It was exactly the right answer. This woman. His woman.... He was going to drop everything and go find that room if he thought about her for too long.
But—mind over matter.
They walked toward the group together, and he felt the pack... receiving her. It wasn’t a dramatic instant; it was a ripple, moving outward from where they stood, of wolves adjusting and settling around a place she was meant to occupy.
Zoe didn’t feel any of it—couldn’t, the way they could—but it didn’t seem to matter. She was already doing what she was supposed to do.
Bring them together and lead them.
Whatever nerves had been spiking her scent a minute ago burned off entirely within a thought, and were replaced by focus and heart. She squared her shoulders, reached into her bag, and became the person she always was when something mattered: clear-eyed, professional, with no room for anything that wasn’t the work.
She divided the pack into groups without thinking twice, like she wasn’t standing in the middle of wolves who could each bench-press a truck. Gently and completely unintimidated,she pressed samples into hands—or paws, for the ones already shifted. Gave directions without hedging; described the plants with an easy specificity that made even the most restless of them pay attention. Within an hour, wolves were vanishing into the tree line with collection bags in their mouths, ears up and purpose driven, while Zoe set up what could only be described as a small field office on the tailgate of his truck.
Rex stood back and watched. Nothing else for him to do, actually, which was new.
But the pack was at ease and busy. The bond to them had the mellow texture of acceptance.
And underneath all of it, threaded through everything, he felt her. Content and absorbed and in her element, the nerves entirely gone, replaced by happiness.
He’d known she would step up for them–she’d been there for them, for the town, long before he got in the mix—but he hadn’t anticipated it happening as fast as it did.
His Omega.
He turned the words over carefully, the way he had for days now. Tasted them. And the ache that had always lived in his heart, the grief of something he wasn’t sure would ever arrive, was gone.
There was just her. Sunlight on her hair, her voice carrying back to him in the warm summer air, one wolf crouching patiently in front of her while she showed him something in her open palm.
