Page 68 of Fate, Interrupted

“Don’t tell Henry that,” he says.

“Too late,” I say. “He already knows.”

I walk up the front path without looking back. If I do, I might go right back to the truck. I take the steps and unlock my front door.

Inside, I think about the afternoon that started with turkey and Swiss sandwiches and ended with his hand at my jaw.

Not accidental. Not a series of circumstances.

Chosen. For both of us.

Whatever comes next, including the complicated parts and the wolf-world parts, today started as a choice.

That’s not nothing.

That’s actually quite a lot.

Chapter eighteen

Silas

Istay parked outside her rowhouse longer than I should. Engine running, both hands on the wheel, making no move to leave.

She’s been inside for more than a minute. That’s sufficient time to go.

I stay anyway.

The scent of her is still on my hands. The sounds she made are still in my chest. I sit with both of those things. My mind is spinning.

Regrets? Not exactly. Only the knowledge that I’ve now moved to a point that is past what my father had in mind when he said I’m telling you to be careful. What pisses me off most is that the conversation never would have occurred if the woman was a wolf. What I see as a double standard, though, my father sees as rules of the Coulter Pack.

I slam my hand into the steering wheel hard enough that the vibration travels up my arm. Norah and I are both adults. When she turned toward me in the truck, we both knew what we were doing. I met her with the same clarity. What happened wasn’t urgency or instinct outrunning reason. It was a choice. For both of us. Eyes open.

That’s the part I keep coming back to.

I’ve wanted women before. I know what that feels like, and I know how it works its way out. This isn’t going to work its way out. The sound she made, her hands gripping my arms, the way she looked at me afterward: none of it is fading. If anything, I want her more now than I did five minutes ago.

I don’t want to be careful. I want her in bed. Three weeks of this and I’m done pretending otherwise. The wolf wants her naked underneath me where I can hear every sound she makes. It wants me to take my time with her until neither of us has any patience left.

The wolf doesn’t care about timing or readiness or whether this is the night she’s decided it should be. It decided weeks ago, somewhere in a back room with mismatched mugs. Every controlled choice I’ve made since then has been mine, not its.

I am genuinely concerned about what happens the next time she puts her hands on me like that.

I grit my teeth, my resolve weakening. I look at her front door one more time, then put the truck in gear.

I haven’t let myself think it clearly until right now, alone, no one watching. She is my mate. And she doesn’t know yet.

Larkin changes as I move south and east. The storefronts broaden and become more practical, fewer decorative windows and more loading doors, used car dealerships and gated metal fabricators. The air changes when I roll the window down. It’s thinner, but full of engine heat, brick, and the faint layered scent of wolves moving through their own territory without having to adjust themselves for anyone else.

That part always felt like coming home.

The thought sits differently tonight than it usually does.

Not wrong. Only weighted with the enormity of my father’s expectations and Logan’s admonitions. All that against the juxtaposition of Norah across from me in a rowboat, her shoulders turning pink, eyes flashing with laughter with the poetry book in her lap, her hair loose around her face, the brim of her hat making me work harder to read her eyes.

I turn into the side lot behind the warehouse and cut the engine and sit for a moment listening to the truck cooling down. The back entrance stands propped open, and through it I hear the dull thud of stacked linens being moved somewhere inside, the low rhythm of voices from the work floor, and the steady mechanical percussion of the place running at this hour.

Normal sounds. As far from a calm, glistening lake as I can get.