14

Did he want to get started on the honeymoon?

As far as Case was concerned, they could get started on it in the courthouse bathroom .

He dashed that thought. As tempting as it was to consummate their marriage as soon as possible, Lydia deserved a hell of a lot better than that. Case couldn’t give her a midnight flight to Paris and several weeks in the world’s finest hotels, but he was pretty sure that between the two of them, they could come up with a bed .

Lydia agreed: “We can go back to the house. I’ll break some speed limits getting there.”

That sounded pretty good. But it wasn’t good enough. He could get them a couple of steps closer to Paris than that.

As they came out of the courthouse into the cool late afternoon, Case said, “What would you think about getting a hotel?”

Lydia bit her lower lip. “I don’t know if we even have one.”

“If there’s not one in town, there’ll be one within easy driving distance.”

He was reasonably sure of that. Mountainview might have gone through a couple of economically rocky years, so maybe it hadn’t been getting too many tourist dollars, but the landscape around here was stunning. There was no way that someone hadn’t taken advantage of that and set up a resort.

There had to at least be a Holiday Inn.

Case could work with either option, honestly. He just wanted it to feel special. Like the red dress, like the macarons: it didn’t matter if their honeymoon looked like how it was “supposed to,” it mattered that it mattered . That it was different enough to feel like part of a celebration.

“Let me call home and make sure it’s okay for me to stay gone that long.” Lydia made a face at her own words. “I know that sounds like I’m asking for permission, but it’s more like ....”

She trailed off, her wince turning into something more pained. Case didn’t need her to finish anyway. He understood. It wasn’t about asking for permission, it was about wanting to make sure her grandmother would still be alive when she got home. That was more than reasonable.

He knew their relationship was complicated and that Ruth Willmore had played a big role in making Lydia someone who held back from pursuing her own happiness because she thought it was always selfish. But Ruth was still family, and Lydia still loved her. She wanted to be there for her if there was a real chance of things going wrong.

Case put his arm around her, pressing his lips to her temple. Her hair was so silky right there. “I get it. If we can’t, we can’t. But it’s worth asking about.”

She gave him a slightly shaky smile that steadied as he gave her another kiss.

She called and clearly reached the nurse first:

“Hi, Andrea? Case and I tied the knot—”

There was a staticky burst of cheering from the other end of the line, and Lydia laughed at it even as she had to hold the phone away from her ear for a second because it was so deafening.

“Thanks. We’re excited too. Actually, we were hoping we could get away for a night. Take a room somewhere and have a little bit of a honeymoon.”

There was a slight tension in Lydia’s face then that was, to Case, almost heartbreaking. She was asking for so little, and she was still ready for her faint hopes to come crashing down.

He’d meant what he’d said about how they could come back to the house if they needed to, and he wasn’t going to take it back —but at the same time, he wanted to spirit her away. It was good to have a place to belong, but no town or family should ever close around someone’s ankle like a bear trap. Lydia needed a home, but she needed freedom too. She at least needed to be able to ask for it without flinching.

Luckily, whatever answer Lydia got from Andrea made her brighten up.

“Oh, that’s great. Yeah, I’m sure we’ll have a great time. –Wow, thank you, you’re the best.” She glanced at Case with a sexy, mischievous glint in her eyes that derailed all his thoughts for a moment or two. She said to him, “Apparently Andrea actually threw some clothes and spare toothbrushes into the back for us, just in case we needed them.”

God bless Nurse Andrea .

Lydia turned back to the phone. “I’m really glad she’s doing well. Can you put her on the phone for a second?”

Case, watching Lydia stiffen up again with anticipation, surreptitiously crossed his fingers that this part of the conversation would go well too.

“Hi, Ruth. Yeah, it’s official. We’re going to—I know we don’t have to get a hotel. We want to.” Her voice grew tight, and when she reached out for Case’s hand, he took it and held it back just as tightly, sensing she needed a lifeline. “We’ll come home tomorrow, and we’ll get back into all of it—introducing Case to the rest of the pack, practicing for Reeve’s challenge, everything. But we’re taking tonight for a honeymoon.”

His frown deepened, and she pressed her lips together.

She held the phone out to Case. “She wants to talk to you.”

Ruth Willmore was his alpha, but Case hadn’t been a wolf long enough to believe that meant she was above being questioned or challenged. He wasn’t afraid of telling her that Lydia needed a night off.

“Ruth,” he said evenly. “I’m glad it sounds like you’re having a good day.”

Her laugh was a dried-out husk, but he could hear that it had probably sounded a lot like Lydia’s once.

“Don’t waste good manners on me, Case Jackson. I don’t have much use for them anymore.”

“Okay,” Case said—reasonably enough, he thought. “What do you have some use for?”

“Someone who can be a good mate to my granddaughter and a good alpha to my pack.”

“Co-alpha.”

There was that rattling husk of a laugh again. “Co-alpha, that’s right. That was a test.”

Why don’t you worry less about testing me and more about telling Lydia that she’s passed your tests, time and time again, and giving her a gold star for once? Or telling her she’s graduated from your alpha school and can make her own decisions?

“I want to be both of those things,” Case said. “For whatever that’s worth.”

He meant it. He would do anything for Lydia, and he was starting to think he’d do anything for the pack, too.

They were scared and vulnerable, but he’d already seen enough to make him think they could find their strength fast. They were brave at heart, and they cared about each other.

He had just needed to know they all cared about Lydia, too. And Wendy and Polly had convinced him. Lydia’s people were ready to support her and be happy for her. They just didn’t always seem to think they were allowed to chip in like that.

“I want to do whatever I can,” Case added. He wondered if the pack had tried to say that too.

“Wanting isn’t the same as doing,” Ruth said.

“No,” he agreed.

“You’re a hard person to have an argument with.”

“Probably.”

“Like there’s a core of you somewhere deep inside that no one else can get to, no one else can touch,” Ruth said thoughtfully. Case had never expected her to hit on exactly how he felt about himself, and it was a little jarring. “That’s good. Take care of her.”

She hung up swiftly, without even giving him a chance to say goodbye, let alone pass the phone back to Lydia. Apparently when Ruth was done with a conversation, she was done .

“She hung up pretty fast.”

Lydia sighed. “Yeah, she does that. In her ideal world, we’d all still use telegrams, so she could end every conversation with STOP.”

“But she didn’t seem to tell either one of us that the honeymoon was off the table.”

Another sigh. “No, just that I was being frivolous. But she does seem like this morning gave her a good lift. We’re ... I think we’re in the end stages now, even more than we have been for a while, but tonight should be safe. But frivolous, apparently.”

“Maybe a little bit of frivolity is okay sometimes,” Case said. “Maybe it’s even a good thing.”

“I’ve heard that,” Lydia said dryly. “Not from anyone in Mountainview, though.”

Case shrugged. “I’m in Mountainview now.”

Lydia looked down at her rings for a second and then looked up at him, her dark eyes looking deeper and brighter than ever. “Yeah, you are. That’s true. I’m going to take advantage of that ... or at least I will if we can get to this hotel room I’ve been hearing so much about.”

Case smiled. “Say no more.”

*

Lydia clearly knew her hometown like the back of her hand, so Case wasn’t surprised to find that she was right: Mountainview didn’t have a hotel to offer them. It didn’t even have a cut-rate motel or a postage-stamp-sized B he could do it himself. You may not know the whole story, but you know the biggest part. You like Mountainview because it’s home for Lydia, so you want it to be home for you too.

But again, what if Lydia didn’t want him to be at home here?

What if, what if, what if, his wolf grumbled. I know I just got here, but I feel like you weren’t always this unsure of yourself.

I never had anyone else to think about before.

Well, I’m sure you can think about her without being so irritating about it , the wolf said pointedly. For one thing, you could actually ask her.

You’re a wolf! What do you know about good communication?

Wolves communicate! it protested. Just because we don’t yammer on like humans do doesn’t mean we don’t talk to each other. We howl, we sniff, we use body language ....

Case was losing an argument inside his own head.

“The point is,” he said loudly enough to drown out his wolf, “I think we deserve a little splurge for our one-night honeymoon, don’t you?”

“But we’re going to get there so late ....”

Case could actually see the moment Lydia told herself to stop worrying about it and have a little fun for once.

“Okay,” she conceded, cheerfulness creeping in now. “Go ahead and book it, Mr. Moneybags. You know, you never told me what your mystery pen name was.”

He hadn’t, had he? He was always a little embarrassed about it. Actually, he’d never told someone before who didn’t “have” to know, someone who didn’t work with his publisher or his agent. Before Lydia, it hadn’t occurred to him how much of himself he routinely kept boxed away. Mr. “I Like a Lot of People” was a hard man to get to know, and it was his own fault.

Lydia was the first person he had ever wanted to let in like this. He knew her well enough already to say that while she might find that flattering, she would urge him to keep letting people in, when he met people worth trusting.

He also knew it was exactly the kind of thing he could say to her about the pack. They’d been keeping themselves closed off for different reasons, but the end result was the same. They could both use a little more experience opening up to people.

“All right,” Case said, pocketing the phone as his reservation confirmation came through. He motioned towards the truck, and they started back to it. From one milestone straight on to the next .... “It’s pretty basic as far as pen names go. You’ll probably laugh. Instead of being Casey Jackson, I’m Jack Casey.”

Lydia stopped dead in her tracks. “ Jack Casey ?”

“I told you it wasn’t much of a pen name.”

She shook her head so passionately that some of her thick black hair actually bounced.

“No, you don’t understand. I love Jack Casey.”

For a second, Case experienced the bizarre sensation of being passionately jealous of his own alter ego.

He wished she loved him instead.

And the instant he thought that, he knew that he couldn’t be any more in love with Lydia Vasquez if he tried. He’d been couching it in safer, easier-to-handle terms, thinking about liking her a lot, admiring her, and even starting to love her, but this was so much bigger, wilder, and realer than that. What he was feeling now took up his whole heart.

“You, uh.” He tried to act like he hadn’t just had a huge epiphany. “You love Jack Casey?”

It was like Lydia had some inkling of what he was thinking. A rose-colored flush spread across her face.

But surprisingly, she stuck to her guns. She even raised her chin, like she was defying her blush by insisting on this.

“Yeah, I do. I have all his— your —books. I started reading them for the mysteries—the first one I picked up was the locked room murder at the dude ranch—”

That one was still one of Case’s personal favorites. Working out the details of the whodunit plot had been a big challenge, but he’d loved the feeling of pulling it off.

“—but now I think I’m even more obsessed with the scenery. I love how much nature writing you fit in, and for so many different places! It makes me feel like I’ve been all over the west.”

It was a good thing he’d realized he was deeply in love with her because of his brief, totally nonsensical jealousy of his pen name, because if he’d waited another few seconds, he would have worried it was just because she was heaping praise on him with a trowel. (To be fair, who could resist Lydia Vasquez’s compliments?) Thankfully, now he could just bask in what she was saying while knowing that he’d loved her before she’d said it.

Our mate likes our work! his wolf said, pitching the words into a joyous howl.

He felt the same way, honestly. He could’ve howled too.

“I can’t believe you didn’t see your books in my room,” Lydia continued.

Case felt like he had to intervene here to defend your honor. “I wasn’t looking for them when I was checking out your bookcase, for what it’s worth. I always—”

She waved her hand. “Oh, yeah, I always look at people’s bookcases too. I’d especially look at someone’s bookcase if I were marrying them. But that’s right, you were only looking at the shelves, weren’t you?”

“Was I supposed to be looking somewhere else?”

She grinned. “Yeah, if you wanted to see my Jack Casey collection. They’re in my favorites pile on the lower part of my nightstand. I do most of my reading in bed, and that way I can always grab some guaranteed pleasure reading if I need it.”

Case’s mind went blank for a moment, totally preoccupied by the vision of Lydia surrounded by rumpled bedsheets, sleepily reaching for one of his books. Then he forgot all about the book and zeroed in on Lydia and the tangle of sheets. The words “guaranteed pleasure” echoed through his head.

He had to fight his way through the fog of desire that brought on and force himself to focus on the fact that he was, genuinely and sincerely, overawed by this.

Just not as overawed as he was by her .

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever told me,” Case said honestly.

She scoffed, even though she was still smiling. “Come on, no, it’s not. I’ve seen your reviews. I’m not the only one who loves your books.”

“Maybe not, but you’re the only person who’s ever told me I’m in her favorites pile.”

Lydia’s expression got even warmer, and there was a distinctly golden glint of humor and arousal in her dark eyes. Somehow, once again, she’d picked up on what he was thinking.

“You—” The glint faltered for a second, and then it came back, fiercer and brighter than ever. “ You , not Jack Casey, are the entirety of my favorites pile. And I don’t want to keep you next to my bed, I want you in my bed. We can have a mini-book club in the truck, but I think we should start heading to the lodge.”

Case’s breath caught in his throat. Yes, yeah, definitely. They should absolutely start heading to the lodge.

He managed to say, “You’re my favorite too, you know. If you were a book, I’d read you cover to cover a thousand times.”

Lydia’s smile lit her up so brightly that it was like the sun was shining out through her. She was utterly luminous.

Case had completely forgotten about the red velvet dress. None of this had anything to do with what she was wearing, no matter how gorgeous and sumptuous it was. It was all her. It was Lydia through and through.

And the sooner they got to the lodge ....

He pressed down on the gas. It looked like they were going to break some speed limits after all.