“No,” she answered quietly, and Xavier’s wolf side immediately settled down. “See that’s the thing. I don’t think we ever really loved each other. It had just become sort of a habit for both of us. I’d never given any serious thought to what I wanted to do in life because I’d simply chosen to follow Nick wherever he went.”
And finally things started to make sense.
Except that now she was being asked to do it all over again. She’d found her niche and had built a life on her own terms. One that she’d found completely satisfying, and now Xavier had no choice but to drag her away from it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, pulling her back into his arms. His mind raced with ideas, plans, desperate schemes, but in the end the only safe way to handle a newly made werewolf was to bring her to the compound. It would be years before she learned to control her wolf fully. Even the most willing and skillful members of their pack had difficulty at the beginning. It was no easy task to integrate the instinctive and sometimes violent behavior of a wolf with the reasoned behavior of a human. “If there was another way…”
“Believe it or not, I do understand that you’re only trying to protect me and the rest of the pack. And to be honest I don’t even want to contemplate what sort of damage I could do to the people in this town in wolf form.”
“It’s not like it was with your ex-husband,” he promised. “Maybe in a few years you can set up a shop closer to home.” It probably wasn’t fair to dangle that sort of carrot in front on her. It was liable to take a lot more years for her to gain control over her wolf side, but he simply didn’t have it in him to take away all of her hope.
“Maybe,” she agreed halfheartedly. “Isn’t there some responsibility that goes hand in hand with being the alpha’s mate? I got the impression from Isaac and Daegan that my life would have been less complicated if I’d only been their mate and not yours as well.”
“Just what every man wants to hear,” he said with a laugh. “That he’s a complication in a woman’s life.”
She laughed as well, squeezing him harder as she whispered, “Yup, you’re a major pain in my ass.”
“Hmmm,” he said reaching down to caress her bottom through the denim of her jeans. Lust curled through his groin, memories of the loving they’d shared last night before Daegan and Isaac had left fueling the fire, stoking his need higher. “That thought has merit.”
She reached up to kiss him, but the bell on the front door jangled, and she winked and moved away instead. He watched as she greeted her customer by his first name, asked about his family, and offered suggestions for a gift for his wife to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. Andrea was incredible, everything he’d ever wanted in a wife and mate.
And somehow he needed to find a way to give her back everything she was about to lose.
Chapter Seven
Wednesday couldn’t come fast enough. Usually Daegan was able to lose himself in the code, but not today. Today—the last several days in fact—he stared at the computer and saw only letters, numbers, and symbols. He’d designed and written computer code most of his life, actually understood this particular program better than anyone, but no matter how many times he went through it, he couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working properly.
“Maybe you should head home for a while,” Isaac said, obviously sensing Daegan’s frustration. “The new bed is being delivered today. You can go make sure the delivery guys don’t damage anything.”
Hell, no. They’d already arranged for their mother to meet the delivery truck. No way was he going to subject himself to the million “suggestions” that woman had for them. He loved his mother dearly, but Olivia Cloveck was an alpha’s wife—even if their dad had stepped down for Xavier to take over—and as such, his mother expected to get her own way.
The biggest trouble was that Daegan’s emotions were too close to the surface at the moment. It hadn’t made the separation any easier when his mother suggested that they talk their older brother out of mating with a human. She’d suggested that Xavier was mistaken about Andrea, that she couldn’t be his mate as well, and had actually used Isaac and Daegan’s status as identical twins as an explanation for what she termed an “unfortunate mix-up.”
Of all the people in the pack superstitious enough to hold the identical-twin thing against them, Daegan had never guessed his mother was one of them. It had shaken him to the core. Isaac had brushed it off as poorly phrased motherly concern for all three brothers, but Daegan knew that deep down even Isaac didn’t quite believe that either.