Page 33 of Fate, Interrupted

She’s outside.

Visible through the front window, still on the sidewalk, mid-conversation with someone beside her, not looking at the storefront yet. The light catches in her hair the same way it did in the back room of The Last Chapter and at Hannigan’s. I stare anyway.

Her outfit is understated. I feel my cock stiffening anyway. Female wolves dress provocatively when in public. It’s a known fact. Thigh-high boots, tight clothes—half the time they’re mistaken for hookers from a distance. I’ve never spontaneously reacted this way to a female wolf’s look.

With Norah, though, I’m as turned on as a thirteen-year-old hiding under the bed with his dad’s Penthouse magazine. Her short skirt has exactly the right amount of flip to it, like she’s going to catch a set of tennis at the club. Her Grecian-style sandals weave up her toned calves, and I find myself thinking about sliding them off. I swallow. Hard.

She’s not alone.

The woman beside her is taller, darker, paying attention to everything around her without appearing to. She says something, and Norah laughs, and even through the glass I feel it more than I hear it, open and unguarded, the authentic kind that makes people stop and stare.

Then Norah glances at the shop front. I watch her eyes read the sign.

She pushes the door open. She sees me the moment she steps inside.

The change in her expression is quick and contained, not surprise exactly, more a recalibration of a situation that changed without warning. She manages it in about half a second.

“Didn’t expect to see you here,” she says, stopping a few feet from the counter, her tote settling against her hip.

“Could say the same. Do you have clothes to drop off?”

“Yep. You handle this one too?”

I nod.

Her mouth curves. “ You seem like a guy who likes to handle things.”

“Not everything,” I say.

“Give it time.”

The exchange runs easy on the surface. Light. The shorthand of two people who have gotten comfortable with a certain kind of conversation and can slip into it without negotiating the terms first.

Underneath it, the wolf is restless.

Her scent hits me differently here than it did in the bookshop or The Beanery or the hardware store on Clement. I feel the hair on the back of my neck rise. It’s a territorial response, but not an aggressive one.

My wolf has been consistent about Norah from the first afternoon. I’ve been less consistent about acknowledging what that means. Standing in my family’s business watching her take a claim ticket from Otto, I’m aware of the curve of her shoulder, the way her hair moves when she turns her head.

Six months of nothing, and my wolf picks a human woman to fixate on. Inconvenient doesn’t begin to cover it.

There’s also the part I don’t let myself think through to the end.

Norah has no standing in the pack world. No protection under pack law. A human woman who mates with a wolf doesn’t inherit his rank—she exists in the space between two worlds with the advantages of neither. The pack would not formally move against her. But pack law doesn’t cover informal hostility, and there are wolves in this city who would read her as a liability, a vulnerability, a reason the Coulters could be leveraged. She wouldn’t know it was happening until it already had.

I know this. I’ve known it since the second time I drove past her shop without stopping.

I haven’t let myself follow it further than that.

She’s talking to Otto now. I watch without making it obvious. Her friend says something from near the door, and Norah answers without turning. The shorthand of people who don’t need eye contact to communicate.

Otto slides the receipt across the counter.

She takes it, folds it once, and tucks it away.

I’m watching her hands when the door opens again.

The bell rings, and the room changes immediately.