Page 1 of Fate, Interrupted

Chapter one

Prologue

Larkin, Spring 1987

She arrived late in the afternoon with her scarf wound twice around her neck and her dark hair carrying the chill of outside. The bell above the loading dock tinkled brightly as the door swung open, signaling her arrival. The front entrance was too visible to the public. They’d agreed months ago for her to use the loading dock off the alley.

He was at the window when she came in—watching the sky turn from pink to mauve to a dusky purple. The white dogwood flowers on the corner stood out in contrast to the darkening April sky—almost glowing against the backdrop.

“Are you watching that beautiful sunset?” she asked, coming through the door.

“I was thinking.”

“I hope it’s about you painting it. The view is too amazing not to capture before they build that new apartment building.”

“I was thinking about tomorrow.” He turned and couldn’t help the smile that came to his lips. Audrey, his fated mate. “Now this is a view worth painting.”

He met her in the middle of the receiving area and swept her into his arms. Leaning her back, he gazed at her. This extraordinary woman, whom he was going to join with, loved him and was willing to walk away from her family if that was what it took to be with him. He kissed her long and deep, then held her tight before letting her go.

“Now that’s what I call a greeting,” she quipped.

She unwrapped her thick, red scarf and casually draped it over the hook by the door. It was his father’s hook, the one he used every morning for the last thirty years. She turned to face him. Her eyes were dark and direct. Those eyes had been too much for him from the first afternoon he’d seen her at the feed store outside Larkin, arguing with the man behind the register about the price of seed corn. Her chin had lifted in defiance, completely unbothered by the line forming behind her. He’d stood in that line for eleven minutes and not minded a single one of them.

The laundry was quiet behind them—the pressing machines still for the night, the delivery manifests stacked by the dock door, the van keys hanging on the wall hook where they always were at this hour. His father had built this place from a single machine and two restaurant contracts. The restaurants were gone, bulldozed to make room for a hotel to support the growing town. Since becoming involved four years ago, Elias had expanded Coulter Cleaning to twelve employees and three delivery routes running six days a week. A commercial contract with the new hospital going up on the north side would triple revenue by year’s end. He had plans for a second facility, a fleet, the logo on the sides of delivery vans that people in Larkin would see all over town. He was twenty-three years old, and he was going to build something his family would be proud of.

He was going to build it for her.

“Mrs. Harrigan from two farms over was on the bus,” she said. “She was suspicious and kept looking at me until I told her I was spending the night with one of my girlfriends.”

“Did it settle the old biddy down?”

“Maybe, but she’s just the type to go back to my mother and plant a seed that I was off to see a guy.”

“Your mother already knows you’re seeing someone.”

“She doesn’t know what tomorrow means.” Audrey crossed the room and perched on the edge of a worktable, her coat still on, watching him finish organizing delivery tickets on the old wooden receiver’s desk.

“Tell me again. All of it. I want to hear you say it.”

He smiled inwardly at her eagerness. He found it endearing that she wanted to hear it over and over again. Growing up as a human girl, Audrey had been protected from the wolf pack by her family and community. Not just through physical separation, but through lies and misinformation about the wolf pack’s history and norms. Elias had always thought how sad it was that the humans operated on fear and exclusion with the wolves, the people they shared a town with.

But he would tell her three hundred times if she asked, because the telling mattered—because what happened tomorrow required that she understand what she was accepting, not simply what she was agreeing to. His mother had made this clear to him when he was old enough to have the conversation. The fated mate bond was not something imposed on a woman. It was offered. She felt it, and she chose it or she didn’t, and the choosing had to be real and informed and entirely hers.

“It means the wolf recognized you,” he said. He moved to stand in front of her, close enough that she had to look up at him. “Before I had a name for what was happening. Before I understood it myself. You felt it through me, but for you it was attraction, or love at first sight.”

She punched his arm playfully. “You presume too much.”

“What I mean is that, for me, I had no control over it. My wolf had chosen, and there was no breaking that. You were the only one I would ever love.”

A blush that wasn’t from the cold, crept into her cheeks. “Tell me the rest.”

He pulled a stool from under the worktable and sat so they were level. “The ceremony tomorrow makes it formal. It’s in front of the pack, the elders, in front of Greer, my very best friend, in front of my parents. But the formality is for the pack, not for us. What’s already between us…”

He stopped, then found the right words. “There’s no undoing it. It doesn’t dissolve, and it doesn’t fade. Whatever happens after tomorrow, you’re mine and I’m yours without condition.”

Audrey gazed at him steadily. Outside, a car moved slowly down Clement, its headlights sweeping briefly through the window before it turned north. The machines on the other side of the wall ticked as they cooled. The building smelled of clean linen and the faint cedar of wood stacked against the wall.

“And if I had said no,” she said. “When you told me what was happening. If I had said I didn’t want it.”