Page 5 of How I Met My Mate

I run my fingers through my hair, my gaze sweeping the crowd and then snapping back to focus on Alexis. “What isn’t? We had another…incident…at the coffee shop, I still have no idea what or who is causing it, and even worse, the human reporter almost spotted it.”

“Why don’t you just shut the coffee shop down?”

I groan. “I would, but we need to find out who’s behind it. And also I’m afraid that the reporter might get suspicious.” I don’t want to say her name to my mother, because I’m afraid something in my tone of voice might give me away. “She asked to go to the coffee shop and I managed to steer her to the farmer’s market instead, and I told her we could go to the coffee shop later. If it’s suddenly closed down, she might wonder why. Damn it. The timing of her being here is terrible. Also…what does it feel like when you meet your fated mate? No particular reason for asking.”

“You’re a grown man, dated plenty of women, never asked about fated mates before, but there’s no particular reason for asking?” My mother laughs, this warm, knowing little sound.

“Mom,” I warn.

“All right, all right.” She’s enjoying this too much. “So—meeting your fated mate. It hits you like a lightning bolt. You’re instantly aware, and intensely attracted. It will be like nothing you’ve ever felt before.”

Well, hell. She’s describing it word for word.

“But…what if she’s just hot?” I groan. “I’m a man. What if I just found a woman very, very, very attractive and mistook that for the fated mate thing?”

My mother heaves an exasperated sigh. “Are you listening at all? When you meet your fated mate, you’ll know. It hits like a physical blow—instant, undeniable. Your wolf will recognize her before you do. You’ll find being apart from her unbearable.”

As she speaks, my gaze drifts back to where Alexis is sitting on the bench. She’s got her legs crossed as she watches the crowd. The breeze ruffles her hair, and she takes a sip of coffee, and then her small pink tongue sweeps the foam from her upper lip.

There’s a low hum beneath my skin, a pull deep in my chest that tightens with every breath. My wolf stirs—alert, watchful, claiming. The sounds of the market fade, replaced by the steady rhythm of her heartbeat, the faintest trace of her scent—coffee, vanilla, and something that’s uniquely her. My hands actually curl into fists at my sides to keep from bolting over there and touching her.

I groan. “Fantastic.” Everything she is describing is what’s happening to me.

Alexis’ scent is tantalizing. Her smile undoes me. I saw a Frostbane pack member glance at her in appreciation and I wanted to start a pack war and tear his head off.

She laughs. “But underneath all that frantic intense need, there’s this… click. Like the universe just pushed two puzzle pieces together and said, ‘There you go.’ ”

I swallow. “Right. Thanks. Interesting. The question was totally hypothetical, of course.”

“Mmm-hmm,” she hums, and I can hear the smirk. “Completely hypothetical. So what’s her name?”

“Nothing.”

“ ‘Nothing’! What a lovely name, is that German? Let’s see. Obviously it’s not somebody from our pack because you’d have known it long ago. I imagine it’s someone who came to the Farmer’s Market. Somebody from the Shadowpine Pack, then? Oh, dear, not the Frostbane Pack? Ugh. I mean, maybe that would be good to help us form an alliance, but…ugh.”

Yeah, the Frostbane Pack are a bunch of arrogant fleabags who are going to start a pack war sooner or later with their bullying and their encroachment on our territory. But having a fated mate who’s a shifter from their pack would be easier than this disaster the universe has thrown at me.

I stay silent.

“Wait!” she lets out a gasp of laughter. “The human reporter? You can’t be serious! Oh, this is so beautiful. Your brother will die when he hears this.”

OK, maybe I mocked my brother when he loudly announced that he’d never let our mother hire a human teacher for our pack’s elementary school – and then he met the human teacher. And she was, of course, his fated mate.

Watching himself tie himself in knots trying to woo her was all kinds of evil fun. Maybe I made sure he saw me enjoying the show.

And now, I’ve found out that karma’s a bitch.

“Shut up. Love you, mother. Also, go jump in a lake.” I hang up on my maternal unit. Yes, that was disrespectful, but every last nerve in my body is frazzled like a frayed wire.

I glance over at Alexis, and take a deep breath.

She’s my fated mate. But if she finds out anything negative about the pack, we’re ruined. How is this going to work?

Can a wolf survive without his fated mate? And more importantly, would I want to? Because she feels like a part of my body, a vital organ I can’t live without.

“Alpha Regent.” Dax, our pack’s chief of security, taps my shoulder. One of the few wolves who towers over me and my brother. He’s six foot ten, grim, serious, built like a tank, and as loyal as they come. He’d die for our pack. “I understand there’s some emergency?”

“Enough with the Alpha Regent crap, my name is Cole.” Alpha Regent is technically the term for whoever temporarily takes over when an Alpha is temporarily away from his pack. “It just happened again – the spontaneous shifting. Ryan Thatchford was at the coffee shop and he just spontaneously shifted, and when he did, he was all wolf, didn’t understand anything that pack members were trying to say to him. Then he turned and ran out the door. We’ve got a few pack members running with him in the woods right now, keeping an eye on him. If it’s anything like the past two times, he’ll shift back in an hour or so and not remember anything.”