CHAPTER 1
Fifteen days ago, my mate returned to our pack after six years of absence. Well, the absence was so long only as far as I was concerned – he’d come down from Chicago every summer, always during the month I would spend in California at my paternal aunt's pack. I’d never noticed or realized this before because, honestly, I’d never thought about him at all. The day he returned though, I entered the dining room of our pack house to attend the party in his honor, and as soon as I opened the door, his scent hit me like a ton of bricks.
My entire body started humming, vibrating, and trembling with feelings I couldn't even begin to name. I only managed to lift my head in time to see him running towards me, taking my face in his big hands, and putting his lips on mine. It was my first kiss, and I was glad it was. I couldn't imagine anything else measuring up to the intensity of losing myself in that connection. The heat, the sparks, the all-consuming desire I had for the male, it was all so overwhelming. I wasn't thinking, I couldn't think! All I could do was feel . At some point, I heard applause and catcalls, which caused both of us to sober up a bit, and we just stood there grinning at each other. One of his hands was on my waist, while the other gently brushed my hair out of my face.
“Brandon,” I whispered.
He cleared his throat: “Samantha, right?”
“Yup,” I grinned at him, falling in love with the sound of my name on his tongue.
He was here, he was finally here: my mate. My life could finally start now. Our mates were sacred, the most important bond in our society. From the time we are pups it is drilled into our heads that we are a species that mates for life, that each one of us gets only one mate, and that said mate is hand-picked for us, the perfect counterpart to spend our lives with.
Nowadays, many of our kind have stopped waiting for their mates, but at least in our pack, young wolves didn’t get into relationships with other shifters – they hooked up with random humans in big cities or in high school, but many simply waited. I was one of those. All I ever wanted was to find my mate and to live the domestic bliss that I’d seen my parents live. Not all pairings were happy, of course, there was still the occasional infidelity or alcoholism problem, but those were so rare and so far apart that one could not help but idealize the mate bond. Or in my case, build your whole life around it.
That night, my mate took me back to his room at the pack house where, after a heavy make out session, he pulled away from me, ran a hand through his hair and said: “Wait. We shouldn't.”
I, of course, laughed, and asked: “Why the hell not? I've waited long enough to have sex and I'm not waiting a moment longer.”
Something crossed his face so quickly that I had to blink several times in succession to make sure there was nothing in my eye that would cause me to see weird shadows on handsome faces. Brandon cleared his throat and said:
“If we have sex tonight, my wolf will come out and mark you. I want to do this properly, I want to give you a beautiful mating ceremony first”. I smelled some faint dishonesty in his words, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what he would be lying about and why.
I furrowed my brows: “A mating ceremony? I don't care about a mating ceremony. All I care about is that I finally found you,” I straddled him and pressed my forehead to his.
“I thought every little girl dreamed about her mating ceremony”, he murmured.
“You've lived with the humans for too long,” I laughed and he tensed slightly. “All I care about is the bite,” I said huskily and bit his bottom lip. He moaned, and I felt my pussy clench around nothing, desperate to be filled. Before I could fulfill my desires, he took me off of his lap and got up from the bed.
“I need a shower, it's been a long day,” he said without looking at me, and headed for the bathroom. Stunned, I sat on the bed, and shame reared its ugly head somewhere deep in my gut. I felt like a cheap hussy who threw herself at a male who didn't want her. It was wrong, all wrong. I had heard enough meet-cute mate stories to know something wasn't right. One of my friends found her mate at the mall and they proceeded to mate right there, in a public restroom. Another saw his mate for the first time at a pack barbecue and marked her right then and there. It was hilarious, they made out for a bit after the deed and then learned each other's names. But hey, that's wolves for ya.
After sitting there for who knows how long while he was showering, I decided to head home. I could take a hint, he clearly didn’t want to sleep with me. I grabbed my bag and my phone from the nightstand, waking up the screen to see what time it was, only to realize that it was not my iPhone. It was my mate's. And it had a photo of him with another woman as a screensaver. They were sitting on a beach somewhere, tanned and happy, his arms were around her waist and his chin was on her shoulder. She was nestled into his body and grinning at the camera, while he was looking at her with a heartbreakingly lovesick expression.
Some cold feeling started running through my entire body. I slumped down on the bed, my legs no longer able to support me. My cold numb fingers were squeezing the damn phone like they were trying to choke the life out of it, and then it vibrated. I turned the phone around with shaking hands, and I saw a new message from someone saved as “Hailey 3” pop up:
We miss you 3
I needed to think. I needed to think. I also needed to breathe. I heard Brandon getting out of the shower and I started panicking. I left the phone where I’d found it and tried to act aloof but I still didn’t get up because I couldn’t trust my own legs anymore. My stomach was churning; I was going to be sick. I didn’t know what to think.
“Where are you going?” he asked as he exited the bathroom with a towel around his waist and his beautiful brown locks damp from the shower. He frowned as he looked at my hands gripping my bag.
“Oh, I was going to let you rest,” I lied, and he frowned again because he could tell there was something wrong. My heartbeat could be heard from three houses over.
“Babe,” he sighed and then shook his head. “Samantha. Look, I'm sorry. It's just... I have to go back to Chicago for a month. I still need to take my last exam and finish up some paperwork. It's gonna be hard enough on my wolf to be apart from you as it is, can you imagine being marked and mated?”
“We can go together?” I offered and could immediately hear how pathetic it sounded. Clearly, he would have offered if that had been what he’d wanted.
“I... I already quit my apartment there, I'll be crashing with different friends for the month, so it would be... complicated to bring another person in the mix,” he said, once again speaking truth with an undercurrent of lies in a way that made it impossible to distinguish one from the other.
“Okay,” I said meekly, “when are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow morning”, he said. “I only came today to sign my work contract and attend the party, and then next month, I officially start work here at the pack.”
He sat down on the bed next to me, looked through the window, and suddenly seemed so tired. “Please stay here tonight. We want to hug you and breathe your scent while we sleep,” he said, nuzzling my neck.
I kissed his neck.
“Sure”.
We got ready for bed in silence, each one of us lost in their own thoughts. He spooned me and fell asleep fairly quickly. I stayed awake for hours, wondering what the hell was going on with my mate.