Chapter Three
Cole
Alexis is sitting on a bench and sipping the latte that I just insisted on buying her, as I frantically dial my mother.
I’m standing far enough away that Alexis can’t hear me.
“Hello, trouble,” my mother says. “How is the farmer’s market today? Pick me up some Sleep Like A Cub tea from the Shadowpine booth if you get a chance, will you?” The Shadowpine pack have a lot of mages, famous for their herbal concoctions.
“Sure, sure,” I mutter distractedly.
“What’s wrong? I can hear it in your voice.”
I run my fingers through my hair, my gaze sweeping the crowd and then snapping back to focus on Alexis. “What isn’t? We had another…incident…at the coffee shop, I still have no idea what or who is causing it, and even worse, the human reporter almost spotted it.”
“Why don’t you just shut the coffee shop down?”
I groan. “I would, but we need to find out who’s behind it.
And also I’m afraid that the reporter might get suspicious.
” I don’t want to say her name to my mother, because I’m afraid something in my tone of voice might give me away.
“She asked to go to the coffee shop and I managed to steer her to the farmer’s market instead, and I told her we could go to the coffee shop later.
If it’s suddenly closed down, she might wonder why.
Damn it. The timing of her being here is terrible.
Also…what does it feel like when you meet your fated mate? No particular reason for asking.”
“You’re a grown man, dated plenty of women, never asked about fated mates before, but there’s no particular reason for asking?” My mother laughs, this warm, knowing little sound.
“Mom,” I warn.
“All right, all right.” She’s enjoying this too much. “So—meeting your fated mate. It hits you like a lightning bolt. You’re instantly aware, and intensely attracted. It will be like nothing you’ve ever felt before.”
Well, hell. She’s describing it word for word.
“But…what if she’s just hot?” I groan. “I’m a man. What if I just found a woman very, very, very attractive and mistook that for the fated mate thing?”
My mother heaves an exasperated sigh. “Are you listening at all? When you meet your fated mate, you’ll know. It hits like a physical blow—instant, undeniable. Your wolf will recognize her before you do. You’ll find being apart from her unbearable.”
As she speaks, my gaze drifts back to where Alexis is sitting on the bench. She’s got her legs crossed as she watches the crowd. The breeze ruffles her hair, and she takes a sip of coffee, and then her small pink tongue sweeps the foam from her upper lip.
There’s a low hum beneath my skin, a pull deep in my chest that tightens with every breath.
My wolf stirs—alert, watchful, claiming.
The sounds of the market fade, replaced by the steady rhythm of her heartbeat, the faintest trace of her scent—coffee, vanilla, and something that’s uniquely her.
My hands actually curl into fists at my sides to keep from bolting over there and touching her.
I groan. “Fantastic.” Everything she is describing is what’s happening to me.
Alexis’ scent is tantalizing. Her smile undoes me. I saw a Frostbane pack member glance at her in appreciation and I wanted to start a pack war and tear his head off.
She laughs. “But underneath all that frantic intense need, there’s this… click. Like the universe just pushed two puzzle pieces together and said, ‘There you go.’ ”
I swallow. “Right. Thanks. Interesting. The question was totally hypothetical, of course.”
“Mmm-hmm,” she hums, and I can hear the smirk. “Completely hypothetical. So what’s her name?”
“Nothing.”
“ ‘Nothing’! What a lovely name, is that German? Let’s see.
Obviously it’s not somebody from our pack because you’d have known it long ago.
I imagine it’s someone who came to the Farmer’s Market.
Somebody from the Shadowpine Pack, then?
Oh, dear, not the Frostbane Pack? Ugh. I mean, maybe that would be good to help us form an alliance, but… ugh.”
Yeah, the Frostbane Pack are a bunch of arrogant fleabags who are going to start a pack war sooner or later with their bullying and their encroachment on our territory. But having a fated mate who’s a shifter from their pack would be easier than this disaster the universe has thrown at me.
I stay silent.
“Wait!” she lets out a gasp of laughter. “The human reporter? You can’t be serious! Oh, this is so beautiful. Your brother will die when he hears this.”
OK, maybe I mocked my brother when he loudly announced that he’d never let our mother hire a human teacher for our pack’s elementary school – and then he met the human teacher. And she was, of course, his fated mate.
Watching himself tie himself in knots trying to woo her was all kinds of evil fun. Maybe I made sure he saw me enjoying the show.
And now, I’ve found out that karma’s a bitch.
“Shut up. Love you, mother. Also, go jump in a lake.” I hang up on my maternal unit. Yes, that was disrespectful, but every last nerve in my body is frazzled like a frayed wire.
I glance over at Alexis, and take a deep breath.
She’s my fated mate. But if she finds out anything negative about the pack, we’re ruined. How is this going to work?
Can a wolf survive without his fated mate? And more importantly, would I want to? Because she feels like a part of my body, a vital organ I can’t live without.
“Alpha Regent.” Dax, our pack’s chief of security, taps my shoulder. One of the few wolves who towers over me and my brother. He’s six foot ten, grim, serious, built like a tank, and as loyal as they come. He’d die for our pack. “I understand there’s some emergency?”
“Enough with the Alpha Regent crap, my name is Cole.” Alpha Regent is technically the term for whoever temporarily takes over when an Alpha is temporarily away from his pack.
“It just happened again – the spontaneous shifting. Ryan Thatchford was at the coffee shop and he just spontaneously shifted, and when he did, he was all wolf, didn’t understand anything that pack members were trying to say to him.
Then he turned and ran out the door. We’ve got a few pack members running with him in the woods right now, keeping an eye on him.
If it’s anything like the past two times, he’ll shift back in an hour or so and not remember anything. ”
Dax’s brows draw together in a scowl. “This is a problem.”
“You think?” I stifle a groan.
Yes, it is a problem. The peace treaty between humans and shifters is an uneasy one, and if humans hear about shifters losing control in any way, they could panic.
It doesn’t matter that so far, none of the three shifters turned violent when they shifted.
The problem is, this is something that has never happened before.
We shift voluntarily, and we always retain our human minds and ability to understand and to communicate when we are in wolf form.
Humans are already afraid of shifters because of our superior strength and healing powers. We can’t afford to make them even more afraid of us.
And yet, all I can focus on is wooing and winning my fated mate.
Focus. The future of the pack may depend on this – and of all packs, I scold myself.
Great. No pressure there.
I take a deep breath. Alexis has set her coffee cup down and she’s taking pictures of a couple of little boys who are eating cupcakes that they just bought from a booth. The soft smile on her face sends longing singing through my veins.
What will our children look like?
Since my brother, the Alpha, is not here, Dax is waiting for orders from me. Also, fuck my life.
“Go to the coffee shop, find out who was working today, compare it to who was working the other days. And I want you to have at least six of your security team hang out at the coffee shop at all times in case this happens again. They need to be undercover, eating and drinking, and after they’ve been there a couple of hours rotate in new guys so it’s not too obvious. ”
“Roger that.” He frowns. “Do you think that the shop owner has anything to do with it?”
The shop owner is one of our pack members, Stephen McFiggins. He has a wife and eight kids. “The shop is his livelihood. I can’t see why he’d do something that would jeopardize his business, and his family. I mean whoever is doing this potentially faces the death penalty.”
Dax’s cold blue eyes blaze with anger. “I’ll be the first in line to deal it out, too. This is unacceptable.”
I’m trying to focus, but my attention keeps being pulled back to my fated mate. “Yeah, it is. Uh…there was something else…” I frown, trying to focus my lust-fogged brain on the urgent problem in front of me.
Why are the fates doing this to me?
“Yes, Alpha Regent?”
“Well, number one, stop calling me Alpha Regent.”
By-the-book Dax gives me a blank look of confusion. “But it is your correct title.”
I shake my head in exasperation. Alexis is drinking the latte again. Sunlight catches Alexis’ short black hair, and her blue eyes drink in the scene with a wonder that makes me want to be the first one to show her everything in our world.
Meanwhile, I’m supposed to be talking about the future of our pack with Dax, but my wolf is frantically pacing and howling with need.
She licks a bit of foam off her lip—just a tiny bit, nothing that would even be PG-13—and my entire nervous system lights up.
She crosses one leg over the other, smooth and unhurried, and my wolf gives a low rumble of appreciation that I have to cover with a fake cough.
Yup. Totally focused on the investigation. 100%. Not at all thinking about how she’s somehow managing to make drinking a cup of coffee look like foreplay.
Dax follows my gaze. “She’s attractive, for a human,” he observes dispassionately.
The words are barely out of his mouth before my wolf loses its mind.
Heat explodes through my veins, sharp and electric. My skin prickles, fur pushing at the surface like it’s fighting to break free. My fangs drop so fast I bite the inside of my cheek. A low, dangerous growl builds in my chest and my lips wrinkle back in a snarl.
Dax stares at me. “Alpha Regent? Were you at the coffee shop too? Nobody told me you were at the coffee shop. Do I need to call for backup?”
I force a breath through my teeth and shove the wolf back down, hard. It takes every ounce of control I’ve got to make my fur recede, to dull the razor edges of my fangs, to pull myself back into something resembling civilized.
When I can finally speak, my voice comes out rough and gravelly. “Don’t look at her.”
“Why not?” Dax stares at me blankly, and then a look of dawning comprehension crosses his face. “Oh…fated mate?”
“Maybe,” I grit out.
His brow furrows as he considers this. “She is not politically advantageous.”
“You think?” I snarl.
He nods. “Yes. That is why I said it.” Sarcasm just bounces off of Dax’s thick skull.
“Do you believe in fated mates?”
Dax shrugs. “My parents didn’t. They believed in useful mating alliances, and duty to the pack. I’ve seen wolf shifters fall for each other instantly, though, in a manner which seems to bypass all practical reasoning such as political considerations, so it seems as if it’s possible.”
I shake my head in exasperation. Focus, focus, focus…
“I remember what I was going to say! While you’re getting the list of who was working at the café every time somebody spontaneously shifted, you also need to find out what every person who’s been affected ate and drank before they shifted.
Go!” Seriously, that is so obvious, so Investigation 101, that I can’t believe I had a hard time remembering it.
Stupid fate mate bond, turning my brain to oatmeal.
He nods and stalks off, and the crowds part for him.
He’s got a grim, no-nonsense energy that very few people want to mess with.
I’d like to say that I’m sending him off so he can hurry up and start investigating for the sake of the pack, and that’s partly true, but mostly I just need to spend time with my fated mate right now before my wolf explodes out of my skin.