10

So this was it. This was going to be her wedding day.

“Do you want to—” Lydia made a complicated hand gesture that she hoped somehow conveyed “go ahead and marry me after we apply for the marriage license” so she wouldn’t have to stumble through the awkwardness of spelling it all out.

She didn’t know why she apparently had this unconscious belief that turning the conversation into a bizarre, unexplained game of charades was going to make things less weird.

Great job dodging that awkwardness! You definitely pulled it off!

She hurriedly opened the door of her truck and slipped inside, using the beat before Case joined her to try to calm down a notch. One look at the rearview mirror confronted her with an absolutely flaming blush.

Case climbed in too, and Lydia was both relieved and chagrined to catch a hint of pink on his cheeks as well.

She wasn’t going to make him be the one to say it, so she tried her question again, choosing her words more carefully this time.

“I looked it up online, and there’s no waiting period here. As soon as we have the marriage license, we can have the wedding. Do you ....” She swallowed. “Do you want to go ahead and do that today?”

“Do you want that?”

He kept making the assumption that whatever she wanted was more important. It was sweet of him, and it was appealingly chivalrous in a gallant, old-fashioned way, but it made it hard for her to know what he was thinking.

“I asked you first,” Lydia said lightly.

Case gave her a quick, reflexive smile. “I was guessing that you wouldn’t want to take any chances when it comes to your grandmother’s health. If we wait, and something happens ....”

Now it was his turn to trail off, but he had a better reason than she had. He was leaving his sentence unfinished out of kindness, not embarrassment.

As awful as it sounded, Lydia had almost forgotten about that ticking clock. She’d been focused on getting everything done and dusted because that was how she was—items on a to-do list needed to be checked off, and there was no point in procrastination. Sometimes she thought she should have been a shark instead of a wolf. Some part of her always felt like she should constantly be moving forward. She got tunnel vision that way.

She would have been happy to give him time if he’d wanted it, though. That was why she’d asked. But unfortunately, he had a point. If she decided to implement their own waiting period, even though the state didn’t require one, and Ruth died—

She would never forgive herself. She would also probably die, because she wasn’t going to yield to Reeve as long as there was breath in her body, but that bothered her less than leaving her pack to be slowly crushed in his iron fist.

She had to say yes. She owed it to everybody. But she hated that Case kept having to put her needs above his.

Once all this is over, I’ll find some way to make this up to you , she promised. I know you’ll probably want to get back on the road as soon as you can, but I’ll make it work somehow. I’ll figure out how to put you first.

“I guess you’re right,” she said, pressing her lips together. “We can’t take the chance. But I’m sorry you’re going to have a bride who’s wearing a flannel shirt and jeans that I realized two seconds ago have a paint stain on them.”

Case’s smile seemed warmer and more genuine this time, and it stuck around longer. “I like the flannel.”

“How do you feel about the paint stain?”

“Neutral. But I like the jeans.”

Lydia glanced down at them with transparent surprise, mostly to make him laugh but also because—come on. They were just jeans, and they were old enough that the cut and wash weren’t even in style anymore.

Case did laugh, but more importantly, and more intriguingly, the pink flush in his cheeks intensified.

He said quietly, “I guess what I really mean is that I like your legs.”

Oh. Oh .

“I like yours too,” Lydia said, her voice creeping into a lower, huskier register without her even trying.

She decided to lean into it. It was their wedding day, and that meant that tonight would be their wedding night. Werewolves required mate-bonds be consummated, and Case knew that—it was one of the things she’d made sure Declan explained to him without her there. They both knew what would be happening tonight.

“Do you know one of the first things I thought when I saw you?” she said.

Case mutely shook his head.

“I thought, ‘God, I’d like to climb him like a tree.’ No, don’t laugh, I’m serious. If I hadn’t started freaking out in the bar, I would have switched seats to get a little closer to you. Maybe you would have bought me a drink.”

“I would have,” Case said, meeting her eyes. There was a gorgeous, dark spark of intensity and arousal there that made her knees weak. “I’d noticed you already.”

Now her knees were even weaker still.

“I guess my panic attack put kind of a damper on our night, then,” Lydia said.

But in a way, she was glad it had. If they had hooked up that night, he would have been a wonderful distraction from all her worries, but would she have gotten the same chance to know how kind and brave and unshakably noble he was?

He could have been a one-night stand, but now he was going to be her husband. Her mate .

Maybe he’s —

Lydia forced herself to dismiss that thought before it had even really come together. As far as she was concerned, true mates were a romantic fairytale. They had nothing to do with reality.

Case did. He felt real and true to her in a way no sentimental daydream shifter kids whispered about ever had. And tonight, she would have very definite concrete proof of that. Solid, strong, scorching hot proof.

As if he knew what she was thinking, Case gave her a little hint of that proof now, reaching out to graze his fingers over her cheek and curl a strand of her hair around his fingers. There was a rapt attention on his face, like she was the only thing in the world he was even aware of right now.

He seemed to know exactly what she was thinking, too.

“Do you wish we’d had that? That I’d come over a few seconds earlier and bought you a drink?”

Maybe it would sound more romantic to say that she did wish she and Case had had an easier, less complicated first time, without so much potential doom hovering over it, but that wasn’t true. It was romance she’d learned out of movies, not what her heart was actually saying. Besides, she didn’t want to give him anything but the truth.

“No, actually. What happened that night showed me who you are. It told me that I could trust you with all of this. If we’d slept together then, I would have loved it ... but I wouldn’t really have gotten to know you. I would’ve compartmentalized you as a nice break from everything else going on in my life, and I wouldn’t have known that you could be part of my life. Is that too much?”

He shook his head with such endearing quickness that Lydia had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. Well, that was encouraging.

So was the fact that he was still touching her hair. She liked that a lot too.

“I like how things ended up too,” Case said. “And since my story about winding up in jail that one time was probably a selling point—honestly, if I had to do it all over again, I’d put the beer bottle in that guy’s hand myself. How’s that for too much?”

Lydia smiled. “If it’s because that’s how much you want to have a hasty werewolf wedding with me, I like it. If you have a fetish for getting hit over the head with bottles, I’m a little more concerned.”

“No, thank God. Seems kind of unsafe.”

“Then I think it might actually be the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”

Case’s thumb traveled slowly across her cheek until it reached her mouth, and he drew it across her lower lip in a gentle, lingering caress.

“In that case, do you want to have our first kiss before we’re actually in front of a justice of the peace?”

This time it was Lydia’s turn for a very emphatic gesture. She nodded her head almost frantically: Yes, I do. I really, really do.

Case leaned in, and his lips met hers.

His mouth was softer than she’d expected, given the windburned flush on his cheeks and the calluses on his hands. It felt like heaven. She parted her lips, and Case deepened the kiss. He tasted good, and somewhere deep inside her, Lydia had the sensation of the perfect key going into some lock she’d never even known existed. Some new feeling was unleashed. She curled her fingers into the sheepskin collar of his denim jacket. The brush and slide of his lips over hers set off a train of fireworks inside her, pops and sizzles of sensation racing through her nervous system.

If she didn’t stop now, they were going to commit several acts of public indecency in this truck before they even got out of her driveway.

Pulling herself away from Case’s mouth and Case’s hands took everything Lydia had, and what made it all the harder was that she really didn’t want to do it at all. At this exact moment, she wasn’t sure she gave a damn if half the town saw her get a jump on consummating her marriage.

But what if Reeve came back and saw it too?

That was a dash of freezing cold water to her libido. She couldn’t think of anything that would slam her legs together faster than that.

Meeting Case’s eyes started everything up all over again, though. His pupils were wide and dark, and his mouth was a little smeared with her lipstick.

Lydia was pretty sure she had some common sense and discretion, but they both felt far away right now. All she wanted was to climb into his lap.

She had to wrap her hands around the steering wheel to keep herself in place.

“That was a hell of a first kiss,” she said.

“Very much agreed.”

“But we should probably—”

“Go get married?”

“I was thinking more ‘not fool around in front of my house in broad daylight where anyone can see us,’ but yes, that too.”

Lydia buckled her seatbelt, congratulating herself on how well she was pretending that she didn’t feel absolutely drunk with lust. She was ninety percent sure she seemed functional and everything. Good for her.

Then Case touched her arm and all her pretensions fell apart again, like they had when they locked eyes.

They needed to go to bed together as soon as this sorry excuse for a ceremony was over, otherwise she would die of sexual frustration and Case would have to fight Reeve all on his own. That wouldn’t be very fair.

“What?” Lydia said. She needed to ask before she lost her brain all over again.

“Before you take us to the courthouse, I have a couple ideas. You deserve a lot more of a wedding than you’re going to get, but I want to at least give you the best one we have time for.”

It was hard to argue with that, especially since the words dried up in her mouth when she tried. She really didn’t think anyone had ever taken care of her like this before. No one had ever gone to this much trouble just to make her happy.

She’d been going through life with a tight band around her chest, a responsibility that made it hard to even breathe freely, and then Case had come along and loosened it. She never got the sense that he thought she was weak—not at all—but he didn’t act like she always needed to be strong. He didn’t act like she would disappoint him if she sagged into him for a while and buried her head in his shoulder.

She had turned his life upside-down and inside-out, and he wanted to give her a nice wedding.

He wanted to give them a nice wedding.

God , Lydia thought, with a heartache that felt like it would kill her, it’s going to be hard to give you up when you need to leave. I need to enjoy whatever time you can give me, because I’m never going to meet anybody like you again.

“That sounds good to me,” Lydia said, swallowing down all her emotions. “Just tell me where to drive.”

Case had to quiz her a little about what Mountainview even had to offer, since he hadn’t exactly gotten to see much of it so far, but once they had all that straightened out, he asked for the village’s vintage clothing store.

It wasn’t going to put Dolce & Gabbana out of business, Lydia had to warn him, and it probably didn’t even belong in the same company as some fashionable, superbly cultivated shop in New York, with rack after rack of pristine 1950s dresses and secondhand designer suits. Its owner, Jen Howe, admitted that it was more or less a thrift store, and she only called it a vintage clothing shop because it sounded a little fancier that way.

Case didn’t seem too disappointed by this.

“I like thrift stores,” he said with a shrug. “You can come across some interesting stuff. I like—this is going to sound ridiculous.”

“No, tell me.” It was bafflingly cute to watch him get carried away.

“You can find old books at thrift stores sometimes, ones where people have lost the dust jacket over the years. All you can see is the title and the author, and if you don’t recognize either one, you have no idea what kind of story’s going to be inside. You get to go in without any preconceived ideas about what you’re getting. It’s kind of fun—like a grab bag. Don’t get me wrong, you get some duds, but you also get some winners.”

Lydia indulged in a little daydream about wandering through a thrift store with Case and watching him gravitate towards a stack of slightly dusty books. They could place little bets. Was Summer Lightning a thriller or a steamy romance? (Or a romantic thriller, for a cross between the two?) All Bets Are Off : could that be a casino heist novel?

It was so easy to imagine a life with him. She didn’t care too much about losing the possibility of some picture-perfect wedding that had never really been on the table in the first place, but she already minded losing those afternoons browsing through unknown books.

This drove home yet again that every minute she spent with Case was going to be a problem later on down the line, because every minute made it easier to see how much and how easily she could love their life together.

But that was her problem, so she would have to deal with it.

Or she was going to lose her mind and ask him to be less adorable. That wouldn’t be weird at all.

When they got to Maddy’s, Case said, “I don’t mind the flannel, but it seemed like maybe you did. So if you see something you’d rather wear, grab it. If not, then that’s fine too. I want to see if I can find something vaguely tux-shaped.”

Lydia had a hard time imagining that he would get lucky on that front, but she let him carefully inspect the men’s section. Even from across the shop, she could see that cute, thoughtful crease between his eyebrows as he did his best to hunt down a wedding ensemble.

She leafed through the store’s collection of dresses, considering them carefully. When she’d hit on the idea of a marriage of desperation, it had never even occurred to her that she might want a wedding dress. With anyone else, she probably wouldn’t have. She would have always done her best to make the marriage work in the long run—if there was a long run—but she wouldn’t have come close to getting romantic. Not this early. She would’ve had too many other things on her mind.

All those things were still there, but Case had a way of making them feel manageable, somehow. He made her into someone who knew that even if she didn’t have time to go to a bridal store and pick out something with a train and veil, she had time to acknowledge that today was special.

And she had time to notice that he wanted it to be special too. He didn’t care whether or not she wore flannel, but he wanted a change of clothes.

She wished he could somehow stumble across a tuxedo here that would be a perfect fit. He deserved all the nice things the world could give him.

She waited for her wolf to tell her that she was acting like a sentimental idiot, because it had absolutely pointed that out to her back when she had fawned over middle school crushes. But it was silent. She actually had to prod it.

Well?

Well, what?

Well, aren’t you going to tell me that all this swoony human romance stuff is too much?

It studied her, a curious expression on its face.

It doesn’t seem like too much this time , it said finally. He saved our life. He’s helping us save our pack. He protects dogs, and he smells nice.

All of that was true, and Lydia guessed it made sense that her wolf was as impressed by it as she was. But it was still unusual.

What do you think of the dresses? she asked, just to see if her wolf was going to start having opinions about all kinds of new things now.

Apparently not, because it rolled its eyes at her and hunkered down to take a nap. Humans wear too many clothes.

When Case was around, Lydia found herself agreeing with that. But to be fair, her wolf probably meant that it would be a lot more practical if they all grew fur instead, like sensible creatures.

The dresses she was looking at were all blending into a rainbow blur of “not quite right.” She felt like when it came to a wedding dress, even an unconventional one, she should know it when she saw it. There should be a magical click and some certainty that yes, this was the one.

Like the click I felt with Case. Only I guess I get to keep the dress.

If she could find the right one in the first place—

Oh.

She stopped moving the hangers around when she saw it.

It was a dark wine red velvet that brought out the warm undertones of her skin and would, she knew instinctively, highlight the blush that would rise as she leaned in for their official, deal-sealing kiss. It was outrageously, shamelessly form-hugging, a gown made to draw attention to the bust and hips. Lydia had never worn anything so blatantly sexy in her life, not even lingerie, but ... she liked it. And she did have the bust and the hips or it, even if she’d never imagined showing them off like this.

Of course, it didn’t look anything like a wedding dress. It was the kind of sixties-style glamor gown that Marilyn Monroe should have worn to a slightly sultry Christmas party.

It was red , for God’s sake, even if it was rich and dark instead of stoplight bright. It didn’t make you think, “Oh, what a lovely bride,” it made you think, “Va-va-voom.”

But was that so bad? It wasn’t like it was going to be a church wedding. The dress would raise a few eyebrows in city hall, but it wouldn’t get her kicked out. And if she bought it, it would be the most gorgeous thing she owned, hands-down.

She waved at Case from across the room and held the dress up to her body to let him get a look at it.

She got the only answer she needed when the heat in his gaze could’ve spiked the temperature in the whole store. Either she was going to fit into this, or she was going to die trying.