Chapter 85

Sarah POV

We kept things a bit cooler after that, kissing with little breaks to keep our heads.

“I have to tell you,” he said during one such break. “I’m feeling a faint matebond between us.”

“You are?”

“Yes.”

“Like you felt with Olivia?” I asked, rather tactlessly. I thought I should take the question back, but he just shook his head.

“I never felt a matebond with Olivia. We were perfectly suited to each other, and I knew she would be an excellent co-leader for my pack and a brilliant mother to my children. And I did love her, but we weren’t fated.”

“Fated?” I echoed, unwillingly thinking of Scott. He’d called us a “question of fate” and that he felt “compelled.”

“What is it?” Zane asked.

I told him the bare bones of what Scott said, and he scowled.

“I know that’s not what you’re talking about,” I said quickly.

“It is,” he growled, surprising me. “But I don’t mean it the way he did.”

I rubbed my thumb gently over the furrows his irritation was making over his eyes. “Please believe me, there is nothing I was from Scott except to be left alone. Your dislike of him would be all I needed, but there’s also the fact that I’m sure he was involved in abducting and torturing humans.”

“He belongs in jail.” He whispered the words, but I still heard the disgust in them.

“He does, and eventually he’ll end up there.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry I thought of him. Look at this perfect night.”

He smiled at me.

“I mean it,” I said. “Look around. Hollywood couldn’t make this place any better.”

He chuckled, the cloud over his head dissipating. “Hollywood would have the swans out on the lake.”

I looked over. He was right. The swans weren’t there.

“Don’t they generally sleep on the water?” I asked.

“Mavis insists on an indoor pool for them at night,” he explained, then went back to kissing me, which was lovely. He brought up a hand to cup my left breast, and that was lovely too, especially as he rubbed his thumb over my nipple as gently as I had rubbed mine over his brow.

That let me feel daring enough to reach up on my toes to kiss him just lightly, hoping I was at least a little provocative.

He chuckled again and leaned down, and for long lovely moments it was just us together, like nothing else mattered in the great wide world.

We paused again.

“There’s just so much at stake,” I said, sighing and feeling a little of my happy cloud slipping away. “You couldn’t just be some guy, you had to be a werewolf, and you couldn’t just be some werewolf, you had to be a pack alpha, and you couldn’t just be a pack alpha of some nothing territory, you—”

“All right, all right. I get it, and I’m sorry.” He kissed me again, then pulled back.

“Of course, you couldn’t just be some she-wolf, you had to be a human, and you couldn’t just be any human, you had to be blessed by the Luna Temple and bust up a—”

“Yeah, yeah. Same song, second verse,” I said with a show of being annoyed. “Besides, even if we were just two people, we have the girls to think about.”

He nodded. “Yes. Grace and Chloe are the most important things in the world to me.” He sent me a sly grin. “Although I have to admit someone else is climbing up toward the top of the list as well.”

I put my head forward, pressing my hot forehead into the cool cotton of his shirt.

“If I were a she-wolf,” I said. “What would you want to do right now?”

“Um, well, I’d—”

“Apart from that,” I said, reaching up blindly to smack him on the arm.

“I suppose we’d go for a run.”

“A run?” I leaned back to look into his face and saw he was serious.

“Yes, we’d transform and make use of this ‘perfect night’ by running through this family land, getting to know it together as wolves, sharing favorite spots and scents.” He sounded wistful. “And then I suppose we’d howl a bit at that moon.”

I thought about it, then nodded, and stepped back. I could tell he didn’t want to let go, but he didn’t try to force me to stay in his arms.

I reached around my body and peeled off my top, a casual gray thing I’d thrown on to be comfortable reading to the girls. I looked into his surprised face and then kicked off my shoes and reached for my jeans.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” I demanded. “Strip and transform.”

“Are you serious?”

“You don’t have to be a wolf to run across the grass.”

He waited a beat more, then grinned and pulled off his shirt, kicked off his shoes, dropped his pants, and pulled off his socks. When he was naked, he gave me a wink and transformed. I didn’t think it was cheating to stay in my underwear, considering he had his fur. Besides, running around without a bra was downright painful.

I looked at Zane in his wolf form and admitted he was still incredibly handsome, though I had thought it before. I hadn’t been so close to him while he was fighting, and I realized his head came up above my waist.

Zane looked back at me, and I realized his eyes were exactly the same. I smiled and asked, “You gonna howl at that moon now?”

He lunged at me, and I jumped back with a squeak before I realized it was a feint. Then he ran slightly to my left, then to my right, and then he put his shoulders down while stretching out his front legs. He panted a little, and I got the distinct impression he was laughing at me.

“If we go that way,” I said while pointing to my left. “We’ll end up in Mavis’s poppies, and she won’t like that. So, I suggest we go—this way!” I ran to my right directly awake from the lake. In a moment, he was running along beside me.

It took us a minute to figure out each other’s pace, but we got into a good rhythm and ran over the moonlit grass like a team. As soon as I relaxed, I began to enjoy it, and soon it was exhilarating. The stars seemed brighter than they ever had before, and all my senses seemed to expand until they stretched out to the invisible horizon.

I laughed, and then I whooped, and then, with Zane’s help, I howled.