Page 64 of Hungry Like the Wolf

“You ready for tonight?” JJ asked.

“I’m anxious,” Robbie admitted.

“Of course you are. You’re about to become a whole different animal. Well, you are that animal, but you’re about to inhabit a whole different body.”

Robbie nodded.

“Is Nadja nervous about tonight?”

If she was, she hadn’t said so. When JJ had come to pick him up for the run, he’d come inside the cabin and explained to Nadja and Robbie that the run would start whenever the moon rose full. Robbie would shift, and the pack would run around the lake together. Nadja would meet them right here at the boulder by the lake. The pack would watch while they performed the mating ceremony. Because Nadja couldn’t shift, Robbie would do it in his human form. Bites would be exchanged. The pack would escort Robbie and Nadja back to the cabin before going out to hunt together. However they chose to celebrate then was their business.

Nadja had looked at her hands, clasped in her lap while JJ had talked. Robbie had gotten so excited about the prospect of mating her that he’d forgotten that she had only agreed to this to save him, that this was meant to be pretend. But that had been weeks ago. So much had changed since then. They were together now. Maybe they hadn’t had an official conversation or put a label on it, but they were together. They slept tangled together every night and woke the same way every morning. They ate together, brushed their teeth together, folded laundry together. They talked and laughed and she smiled at him when he smacked her ass as he walked past.

“I think I love her,” Robbie blurted out to JJ and the birds and the lake, to the universe at large.

“Of course you do,” JJ said matter-of-factly.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that she’s your mate. She’s your fated mate.”

“How do you know that?”

JJ held his arms out, gesturing at the wild world around them. “You found yourself in her town, out of all the towns in the world. You called her to make an appointment, out of all of the therapists in the world. You were in her office when your shift first started. She knew me. She brought you here. She stayed with you. She cared enough about you, a total stranger, to lie to an entire pack of other strangers and tell them that you’re mates. And don’t even get me started on the way you two smell together.”

Robbie’s head was reeling. “Smell? How do we smell?”

“Like a goddamned carnival. You smell like funnel cake, and she smells like fresh squeezed lemonade. The kind they make at those carts with way too much sugar and put on the crushed ice. She never smelled like that before.”

A little piece of Robbie’s brain told him that he should be jealous, but he wasn’t. He was awed. Robbie leaned against the rock, laid backwards until his back touched the cold stone, stared up at the overcast sky.

“She’s my mate,” he said, his heart pounding in his chest.

“Sure is, pup,” JJ said, slapping Robbie on the shoulder.

“But what if she doesn’t want to stay? What if she doesn’t want to be mates?” The panic that Robbie hadn’t felt in weeks, since coming to the pack commune, rose, sharp and sudden. “I don’t want her to be trapped. What if she wants to leave?”

“There’s nothing keeping either of you here, except community maybe. You’re a part of this pack now. But if she doesn’t want to be, there’s nothing holding you here. You could go with her.”

Robbie felt his mind spinning with possibilities. He loved it here. He loved the woods and the pack and the cooking, feeding so many appreciative people. He loved the lake and this rock and the cozy cabin with the bad lightbulbs and no internet or cell service. He loved it all.

But he loved her more.

It became so obvious in that moment. He loved her infinitely, with every single cell in his body.

What that what it meant to find your fated mate? Finding the person that made you feel so much, so big, that your heart threatened to collapse every other organ in your body?

“I have to talk to her. I have to tell her,” Robbie said, already moving away from JJ.

They’d been gone hours, running all over the woods together, but he found that he couldn’t be away from her another second. He needed to talk to her, to tell her that he loved her, to ask her to stay.

And if she didn’t want to stay, to beg her to let him go with her wherever she went.

CHAPTER 28

What a godsdamned mess, Nadja thought as she wiped flour from her cheek with the back of her hand. The cabin didn’t have abundant counter space to begin with, but what little it had was covered with ingredients and mixing bowls. She’d had to spread out onto the table, too, since there wasn’t enough space on the counter to place the baking sheets.

She knew that Robbie would be able to whip up a four-course gourmet meal with a hot plate and only ingredients he could buy at a gas station, but she wasn’t a cook. She certainly wasn’t a baker, unless you counted cutting the end off of a tub of cookie dough and dropping spoonfuls of it onto a baking sheet.