Page 4 of I Don’t Believe In Fated Mates!

It's two miles to the pack lands, and pack headquarters, a sprawling building where we carry out all pack business. Many of our pack members live there, and our farmlands are there too. Our pack, like most, is made of dozens of family clans.

Lane will live with me on those pack lands. We will raise our children there. She just doesn't know it yet.

I jog effortlessly, the wind rushing through my fur. I imagine her lying underneath me, kissing her, biting her…

She's glorious. Sexy. Feisty. Takes no bull. Just what I need. All my life, I've met simpering yes-women who just want to bag an Alpha. They want my status, they want the prestige of being the Alpha's mate, and they'd say or do anything to lure me in.

Not her. In the very very short time I've known her – okay, in the minutes that I've known her – I've seen that she's honest, she's proud, and she's strong. I'll have to earn her. Every glorious inch of her.

She's just…right. She feels like the missing piece who will fill a hole inside me that I never knew was there.

Now all I have to do is convince her not to hate me after making the worst possible first impression in the history of…ever.

Chapter Three

LANE

"And then the son of a bitch called me a skinbag, can you freaking believe it?" I'm making a hands-free cell phone call to Alexis as I drive. She's at work at the daily newspaper where she just got hired. Before that she was working at a much smaller weekly, so she's moving up in the world.

"You're not still going to take the job, right?" she says. "You're coming home?"

I heave a sigh. That would be the smart thing to do, wouldn't it? "I need this job. I told him where to shove it. Well, no, I thought that, but I didn't say it out loud. What I did tell him was that I was going to take this job and nothing was going to stop me."

"Wait, you said that to the Alpha?" Alexis sounds nervous.

"Yes, and?"

"And, he's the Alpha. They don't like it when you challenge them."

"It'll be fine. I think," I assure her. Nerves flutter in my stomach.

The road narrows as I drive deeper into the forest, the trees soaring into the sky. Sunlight filters through the thick canopy in golden streaks, illuminating dust motes that drift lazily across the air. My window is rolled down. The scent of damp earth and fresh wood fills the air.

Ahead, an enormous iron gate stretches across the road, black wrought-iron bars topped with elegant spikes. A sign stretches across the top, letters jagged yet commanding: MOONSTONE PACK. It's big and dramatic and more than a little terrifying.

My stomach twists.

"You should just come back home," Alexis says, but the gate swings open and I drive through.

"I'll find a way to avoid him."

"How?" she scoffs.

"I'll figure it out. Don't worry about me." There's an edge to my voice now, but I'm irritated at the situation, not her.

"I am worrying about you. You can't stop me. So there. Neiner neiner neiner. Also, come home! You could just…waitress or something, until you get a teaching job. You can sleep on my couch."

"But what I really want to do is teach, I love working with kids, and I might have a job here."

"What if the kids bite you?"

I heave an exasperated sigh. "You remember that shifters can't shift until after puberty, right? And at that point if they're trying to bite me, they've got other issues. Anyway, I'm the first-grade teacher, and no shifter in known history has shifted before age 12. Most don't shift until age fourteen on up."

"'Ooh, I'm a teacher, I'm smarter than everyone'," Alexis jokingly mocks me. Then her voice turns serious. "How many humans have ever taught at a shifter school?"

"My research shows that I'm the first. But I think that's a good thing. It could open up a new era of trust and cooperation between shifters and humans."

I slow the VW as the pack headquarters building comes into view, my stomach flop-flopping and my heart thudding in my chest.