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"She pours coffee into both mugs."

I make myself hold her gaze.

"That's why I will never claim you because my wolf wants you. I don't care how badly he wants you. I don't care how badly I want you." My voice drops. "If there is ever a bond between us, Maren, it will exist because you looked at me knowing exactly what it meant and chose me back."

The house makes its small noises. The creature in my kitchen faces the room.

"The pack was supposed to come to me the week he died," I say. "I wouldn't take it for seven years. Tobin held it and got old doing it."

"Why wouldn't you take it?"

"Because everything in that house came with his idea of what an alpha's owed. I didn't want any of it on my hands."

"What changed?"

"The alternative got a name."

She works that out. She's fast. I watch her get to Ansel and decide not to say it, which I appreciate more than I can tell her.

"So when you ask me why I never just claimed you?" I look up. "I have spent years looking at what that did to my mother, Maren. Every morning I sat at that table and ate breakfast in front of it."

Ours, my wolf says. Just once. Quiet.

"I'd have wanted you without any of it. Slower. Worse at it. Probably still standing in my own yard in April of next year working up to it. I'd have gotten here."

She's very still on my stairs.

"The bond isn't why I want you," I say. "But it's the only reason I've ever had to be careful about it."

She doesn't answer me.

She comes down two stairs and takes my face in both hands and kisses me.

I get her off the stairs. She gets her hands under my shirt and up my back and I make a growling sound into her mouth. My wolf, who has been screaming at me since April, goes silent, all at once, the way a room does when the right person finally walks into it. Finally.

Her spine hits the wall by the wood stove. Her shirt goes somewhere. My mouth is on her throat and then lower and she says my name once, ragged, with a hand fisted in my hair, and I would knock this house down for that sound.

I keep one hand flat against the wall. I want her to feel every place I'm touching, and I want her to feel that I'm holding on.

"Gage."

"Yeah."

"Look at me."

I do. Her eyes are wrecked and her mouth is swollen and she has both hands on my jaw.

"Not tonight," she says.

I go still. All of me. I don't let a single thing show on my face, because she gets to say that on any night for any reason for the rest of her life and never once watch me take it badly.

"Okay. That's fair."

"Not because I don't want you. I'm so glad that we finally have that out in the open." Her thumb moves on my cheek. "

But, because when we finally go there, I want it to be a day where nobody's bleeding. And, I want to pick it. I've had one thing this whole month that I picked, and I'd like to have a second one."

"Then pick it."