Page 45 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

“It’s a family trait, apparently.” The words landed, but regret flashed over her face immediately. “I didn’t mean...”

“You did.”

She looked down.

I made my voice softer. “It doesn’t make it untrue.”

Lincoln set the plate aside. “Damien has work to do.”

“So do I,” Mary said.

“Aye,” he said.

She curled her fingers around the robe. “I can’t stay here.”

I wanted to say yes, you can. I wanted to say this is already your room, your bed, your nest, your place between us. I wanted her too much. But I gave her the only thing safer than wanting. I gave her a choice.

“Then we’ll take you back to your room,” I said.

“I can do this alone.” Her gaze shot to mine. Her eyes were now bright and wounded, and my own heart moved toward her with the quiet certainty of a door closing behind me.

The old wound had been the worst thing that ever happened to this pack. It had just been replaced.

She swallowed. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

“No,” I said. “We need to speak to Damien, but we need your number.”

She stared at me. Then the corner of her mouth moved, weak but real. “I’ll send you a text with it.”

Lincoln smiled as Mary looked between us, wrapped in the robe, sitting in a nest she’d denied building.

Then my phone buzzed again with Damien’s name on the screen.

Mary’s smile vanished.

I turned the phone face down.

Chapter 9

Mary

Two weeks later, I was in the lecture hall which still smelled of coffee, too much cologne, and some students who really needed a stronger deodorant. The professor clicked through slides with the joyless stamina of a man determined to make market analysis sound appealing. The girl in front of me twisted her hair around her pen until I worried for both the hair and the pen.

I sat in the third row with my notebook open.

I’d written three words in forty minutes.

Competitive advantage is...

I pressed the back of my wrist to my mouth and stared hard at the slide until the letters stopped swimming. My stomach rolled, slow and vicious. Not heat. I knew the symptoms of my heat very well now. This was different. Lower. Sourer. Like a sick, soon-to-be lurch. And the brightness of the fluorescent lights felt like they were burning my eyelids.

The professor said something about customer retention.

I wrote: Don’t vomit.

My phone buzzed against my thigh.

I’d ignored Damien since my heat, blocked him permanently, but he had found several routes to get to me. Email. Campus messages. One deeply tragic handwritten note pushed under my dorm room door, as if he read a Victorian novel and thought it romantic, and expected me to swoon over his poor penmanship.