6

Why did I take him into my bedroom?

Lydia forced herself to answer her own question:

Because I didn’t want to bite him in front of my grandmother, for starters. And because I’m going to marry him—and go to bed with him—if this works out, so we might as well start getting comfortable with each other.

All of that was true, but leading Case back into her bedroom still made her feel like a teenage girl whose heart was pounding with the feeling of getting away with something. What made it especially funny was that her teenage years had definitely not been that adventurous—and they had certainly never involved anyone who drew her in as thoroughly as Case did.

Her heart pounded even harder as she shut the door behind them.

This was it.

Case must have been even more nervous than she was, but it didn’t show. He was looking around her room, like they’d only come in here so she could show him around. There was a small, soft smile on his face, and for a second, Lydia imagined what it would be like to press her lips to the Cupid’s bow of his mouth.

If everything goes according to plan, I’ll know , she thought, and she shivered with a kind of hot-cold anticipation.

“What are you thinking?” Lydia said.

He jerked his head towards the door. “That out there didn’t look much like it belonged to you, but this does. I like it.”

Lydia looked around her bedroom, trying to see it through his eyes. Her old, scratched pine furniture, warm and worn; most of it handmade by her dad from local trees. He’d been a lumberjack, like a lot of the Mountainview men had been when she’d been growing up. Now that she thought about it, that had probably contributed to her fondness for plaid flannel. The idea made her smile.

She had never poured much conscious effort into making this room hers, but she could see what Case meant about it being different from the den. Her grandmother had never had much love for color, mostly sticking to neutrals and earth tones, but Lydia had a green-and-blue quilt on her bed, vintage band posters on her wall, and a tiny jewelry tree hung with turquoise and amber. Ruth guarded her privacy fiercely and kept the common spaces of the house free from any signs of who she really was, but Lydia’s bookshelves groaned with old and new favorites. Case could stand in front of those shelves and probably figure out plenty about her tastes and dreams ... and that was before he even got around to looking at her favorites piled up on the lower shelf of her nightstand.

She didn’t know how much of it he’d taken in already, but whatever he’d seen there, he seemed to like.

And he seemed to like seeing more of her, period.

It felt like it had been years since anyone had really looked at her the way Case did. She was a known quantity around Mountainview, not one that invited curiosity. People wondered how she would save them from Reeve, but they didn’t wonder about what her favorite books were.

Alphas, Ruth had said, were like tap water. People cared that they were good and that they worked, but aside from that, they didn’t devote much thought to them.

You’ll be respected as a necessity , she had told Lydia once. But being loved is too much to hope for. You’ll get that from your mate, if you’re lucky, but not from your pack.

She had still gotten a lot from her pack over the years, even so. It was a kind of family, one that had often been more open with her than her own grandmother had. Mountainview’s people had cleaned her scraped knees when she was a kid. They’d braided her hair and told her silly jokes. Now was the time for her to return the favor and take care of them, that was all. She understood that.

But maybe Ruth was right. Maybe that wasn’t quite love, or at least not the kind of love anybody daydreamed about.

Could Case ever come to love her? Was that too much to hope for?

Probably. If the change took, she would be getting more than her fair share of luck as far as he was concerned. It was greedy to hope for more.

“I’m glad you like it,” Lydia said, the words stilted and way too late. “I’d like to see your place sometime.”

“It’s just an RV right now.”

There was something guarded about his voice, like he expected her to sneer at this.

She couldn’t imagine anything further from her real reaction.

“Right, that makes sense. You said you move around a lot. I always liked the idea of living on the road.” She sat down on the edge of her bed. “Don’t get me wrong, I love Mountainview. I don’t feel stuck here—not most of the time, anyway. But I’ve never gotten to roam like that. There’s so much I haven’t seen. And I was always next in line to be alpha, even before my parents died. Ruth chose me for it, and they basically let her adopt me—they were great, but they weren’t really the parenting kind. I grew up knowing that I wanted to be like Ruth, not like them. So there was always this—”

She waved her hand, not sure exactly how to put it.

Case sat down beside her.

“Responsibility?” he said gently. “Hanging over you?”

“Yeah.” Lydia exhaled. “Don’t tell Ruth.”

He smiled. “I’ll avoid it in any of our close personal talks.”

She likes you, for the record , Lydia almost said. You should see how she is with people she doesn’t like.

But even though a lot of people had trouble understanding her grandmother’s prickly demeanor, she actually thought Case got it.

The stretch of silence this time was comfortable, and for a second, Lydia felt as relaxed as she had ever been. Maybe even more relaxed.

Case stretched out his long legs, and this time, Lydia didn’t try to keep a leash on her imagination. She let herself luxuriate in the mental image of settling down onto his strong thighs, undoing the brass buttons of his jeans.

Maybe even if this didn’t work, they could ....

She didn’t think she was imagining the way he looked at her. She wasn’t going to kid herself that he felt the same magnetism she did, because that was too much to hope for, but there was a charge there for sure.

He was her last real hope. If this plan fell through, maybe they could at least salvage a moment of happiness together before she had to go sell herself to some brute almost as bad as Reeve.

But now she was kidding herself. If her bite didn’t turn Case, then he would spend the next two weeks sick and miserable, not giving her one last comforting fling. There wouldn’t be any silver lining to that dark cloud at all. It was this or nothing.

“So,” Case said finally, “how do we do this?”

“I have to shift first,” she warned him. “It would be nice if I could do it like this, but it won’t do anything if I’m in human form. So unfortunately, you’re going to have to hold still while a wolf gently gnaws on your arm.”

“If that wolf is you, I think I can manage it,” he said gallantly. “Go for it.”

Lydia couldn’t imagine anyone else so readily agreeing to all this. Case was really one-of-a-kind.

Even if this all fell apart, she was glad that she’d gotten the chance to meet him. She was happy to know there was someone like him in the world at all.

She shifted and breathed in the now-familiar scent of him. Somehow it was still intoxicating.

“Hey,” Case said softly. He stretched out his hand. “Can I? Before you bite?”

Lydia nodded, even though her wolf huffily informed her that that wasn’t a normal lupine form of communication.

Case stroked her head, petting around her ears. It wasn’t exactly like how someone would pet a dog, not when there was so much awe there. He kept looking in her eyes, like he could still see her, like he’d seen her when he’d looked around the room.

“You’re a beautiful wolf,” he informed her solemnly. “I’ve never seen any others up close, but I feel like even if I had, you’d take the cake.”

We take the cake , her wolf said proudly. I think that’s good? Humans like cake.

We do, Lydia said, speaking on behalf of her human side. And it is.

Her wolf wistfully added, I wish we could tell him he’s beautiful too. You’ll have to do that later.

I’ll try.

Her wolf was in the middle of telling her that she didn’t have to try , she had to do it, it was a simple thing to tell someone, and it really didn’t see why humans had to make everything so difficult, when Case said, “Ready?”

That neatly took away her ability to think about anything else. As much as she wanted all this to be personal, something between her and Case, it wasn’t. Her pack’s future was on the line, and this was one of the moments that would ultimately decide it, for better or worse. Even her wolf felt a sharp, bitter stab of fear at that.

Still, Lydia forced herself to nod again. She wasn’t ready, and he probably wasn’t either, but that didn’t change the fact that it was time.

She was having trouble figuring out how to just go for it and bite Case—she’d never bitten anyone before!—when he rolled up his sleeve and stuck his arm in front of her like it was no big deal. He was serving himself up as a buffet without any hesitation at all. He was overriding every basic human instinct about being around a wolf, and he didn’t even seem to realize how huge that was. How could he trust her so much?

Lydia carefully closed her mouth around his arm, holding him like that for a precious few seconds before she bit down.

She knew it would be impossible to do this without hurting him. Her teeth were sharp, but they weren’t razor -sharp. She would have to apply real pressure to break the skin the way she needed to, and there was no way for that to be painless. And while she didn’t need to savage him, she did need to draw blood.

She’d explained that to him. Declan had too, to make doubly sure everything here was aboveboard and would pass muster with the Overpack. Case understood that it was going to hurt, and it wasn’t like he didn’t have the imagination to visualize the pain before he really felt it. He was just ... facing it down without even a flinch.

She’d never met anyone like him before.

I’ll be so lucky if I get to have you as my mate , Lydia thought again, and she bit down.

He let out a low hiss of pain from between his teeth but stayed perfectly still. Lydia shifted back the second she could, staring with a sick unease at the blood welling up from Case’s arm. She couldn’t believe she’d done that to him.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Case breathed out and shook his head. “It’s okay. It’s not too bad, I promise.”

Lydia didn’t necessarily think he was lying to her, but she could see for herself exactly how bad it was, so she thought they might have very different standards.

“Will you let me disinfect it and bandage you up?”

“That won’t hurt the chances of it taking, will it?”

She couldn’t believe he was thinking about that right now. He was bleeding on her bedroom rug after letting her wolf chomp down on him, and he was worried that getting his open wound sterilized would jeopardize her plan. Did he ever put himself first?

She hated to realize that she couldn’t afford to put him first right now either. Her grandmother had drilled that lesson into her head: the pack always came first. If risking an infection would significantly up the chances of him becoming a werewolf, that was a risk they would have to take.

But—thank God—she’d never heard of any cautionary tales about leaving shifter bites untreated. She was happy to reassure Case on that front. She bustled off to the bathroom and came back with a first aid kit.

“All wolves keep these around,” Lydia said. “You never know when they’re going to come in handy. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea—Reeve-related problems aside, we don’t usually solve things by brawling. But when the pups in the pack are still getting used to shifting, they can be a little rough-and-tumble.”

“I can only imagine the trouble I would have gotten into if I’d been a werewolf kid.”

There was another barely audible hiss of pain as Lydia disinfected the bite, but Case showed no other signs of discomfort as she wrapped his arm up with gauze. She wondered how much of that was him being tough as nails and how much of it was him not wanting to make her feel bad. Both were probably true, but she found herself hoping that it slanted a little more towards the second option.

Case looked down at the stretch of white gauze. It stood out brightly against his outdoorsy tan.

“When will I—know?”

Lydia had done her research on that front. “If it’s going to work, the wound should start healing in about an hour. Shifters have accelerated healing.”

He glanced at the clock. “So we can unwind the bandage at three and ... check? And we’ll know?”

Lydia nodded. “Sorry. I know that’s going to be a nerve-wracking sixty minutes.”

“For both of us,” Case said, and he reached out and took her hand, lacing their fingers together. His usual sureness faltered for a moment. “Is this ... okay?”

“Very okay,” she said quickly.

It’d been a long time since she had held hands with anyone. It had never exactly fit in with any of her awkward one-night stands. Every so often, she’d met someone she had wished she could get to know a little better, but how could she ever be with someone she’d have to hide her whole life from?

For the first time, she was glad that none of those encounters had ever turned into a relationship. If they had, she might not have met Case. She certainly wouldn’t have come up with this plan if she’d already been seeing someone else.

“Can I say something weird?” Lydia said suddenly.

Case’s grin—sillier and more surprised than his smile—threatened to turn her insides to jelly.

“I think to the outside observer, most of what we’ve said to each other so far is probably pretty weird, so sure, lay it on me.”

“Good point.” She tightened her fingers around his. “I like you. A lot. If all of this falls through—if you don’t become a shifter, if I can’t find anyone else to help me stop Reeve, if I have to break up the pack—would you like to have dinner with me?”

She knew how absurd it sounded. Just a few minutes ago, she’d told herself all the reasons that didn’t make any sense. If it didn’t work, he would be sick, and she would be scrambling for options.

If this did work, they would be married as soon as possible. With that possibility there, it seemed silly to be angling for a dinner date. But she meant it. She’d rarely meant anything more.

In fact, some tiny, selfish part of her almost hoped that this wouldn’t work. That nothing would work. It was a new thought, and it scared her, especially since it led to a thousand more. What if she did have to dissolve the pack to save it from Reeve? What if Mountainview scattered to the four winds? She would be devastated to lose the only family she had left, but wouldn’t it also be the tiniest bit ... freeing? She would be relieved of a responsibility that had been hanging over for more than half her life. She would get to make choices without calculating how they’d affect dozens of people around her.

She could go on the road with Case.

Someone who had lived with kind of complete freedom, easily going from place to place and never needing to settle down longer than he wanted to, would never want to stick around in a poky little town like Mountainview, chained by obligations he hadn’t been born into. He would help her out because it was the right thing to do, and he was good in a way few people were, but he wouldn’t stay. She couldn’t blame him for that.

If everything went according to plan, she would marry him and then lose him. And that ... that was fine, wasn’t it? It would have to be fine. He was an incredible guy, and incredible guys didn’t come along every day, especially way out here, but she still didn’t really know him.

Even if she almost felt like she did.

“I’d love to have dinner with you,” Case said.

And then he doubled over in pain.