Chapter Five
Cole
She leans back against the couch cushions with a contented sigh and pats her stomach. “If you so much as show me a slice of pie right now, I will explode. Spectacularly. You’ll have to explain to your mom why there’s peach cobbler on the ceiling.”
I grin, stretching an arm along the back of the couch. “Guess that means there’s plenty left over for breakfast.”
She gives me that look again—her mouth curled up in a half-smile, but her eyes glinting with vulnerability that makes me want to hunt down and destroy everyone who ever hurt her. “You keep saying things like that—about breakfast, about tomorrow.”
I don’t answer right away. I can feel the pull of her nearness, the scent of her skin—vanilla and coffee and sweetness that I long to taste. My wolf stirs restlessly. It wants to be closer. It wants to claim.
Then she shifts slightly to face me, eyes sharp now. “Earlier,” she says quietly. “You said, I won’t let you fall. Why did you say that?”
I meet her gaze. I should lie. I should make a joke. But I can’t. My mouth moves before my brain catches up. “Because you’re my fated mate.”
Her breath catches. “You can’t mean that, Cole. You just met me.”
I nod in agreement. “That’s the way it always works when shifters meet their fated mates.”
She frowns at me skeptically. “So every shifter has a fated mate?”
I smile at her. “No. Only the lucky ones.” And I am lucky. Right now I’m also panicking, worried about the spontaneous shifting problem, about the Frostbane pack’s increasing aggression, and about how I’m going to help her fit into our world, but despite all that, I know how lucky I am.
Not everybody gets to meet “the one”, but I have. And any time that I can spend at all with her is a precious gift.
She blinks, and I can see the journalist in her scrambling to take notes, categorize, file this under weird shifter rituals. But her pulse jumps in her throat, and I hear it. I feel it. My wolf recognizes it like a drumbeat.
“That’s—” She swallows. “That’s a lot, Cole.”
“I know.” My voice is low, rough. “I wasn’t planning on this. Never in a million years. But the minute I saw you, I knew, and my wolf knew. You’re mine.”
Her eyes flash. “Okay, see, that? That right there sounds crazy possessive.”
“Yeah,” I acknowledge, letting a half-smile curve my mouth. “That’s kind of the brand.”
She stares at me, caught between indignation and curiosity. “And what if I don’t want to be anyone’s fated anything?”
I lean forward just slightly, enough for her to feel my heat but not enough to crowd her. “Then I’ll wait til you do,” I say. “Because we’re meant for each other.”
For a long beat, neither of us speaks. The cabin is quiet except for the ticking of the old wall clock and the soft simmering of the pot roast still keeping warm on the stove.
“What, exactly, does being a fated mate mean?” she murmurs.
I try to think about how to phrase it without sounding like a cliché line in a Hallmark movie.
When I summon up the words, they’re from the heart.
All I can do is hope that they’re enough.
“It means that I feel like I’m built to know you.
That I could spend a hundred years studying your moods and have something new to learn every day—something only I’d get to see. ”
I catch the flicker of wariness in her eyes, the kind that comes from a lifetime of learning not to trust too easily.
I know a little about where that came from—she and my brother’s fated mate had grown up in foster care together.
She’d been one of the lucky ones, if you could call it that; her grandparents had finally found her and taken her in when she was fourteen.
But years of being passed around leave their own kind of bruises, and I could see them in the way she holds herself, always ready to run if the ground shifts beneath her feet.
And then there’s her job. On paper, she’s here to write a lighthearted piece about Cedar Run—the charming little shifter town tucked in the mountains, full of cozy folklore and friendly wolves. But I know she’s chasing more than that. Maybe she doesn’t even know what she was chasing yet. But I do.
She catches her lower lip in her teeth, frowning.
“Penny for your thoughts,” I say lightly.
“I’m thinking…I am not as horrified by the concept as I would have thought. And that makes no sense at all. I should be freaking out and running out the door.”
I let out a low, rumbling laugh. “Thanks?”
She replies with a rueful laugh of her own.
The space between us feels charged now—thick with everything we aren’t saying.
Outside, the night hums with cicadas, and moonlight spills through the cabin windows, silvering the edges of her hair.
She tucks her legs up under her on the couch, and the movement brings her just a little closer—close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating from her.
My heartbeat picks up, steady and deliberate.
For a long moment, neither of us moves. Her eyes flick up to mine, and whatever wall she’s been holding up all evening falters.
I reach out, just barely brushing my fingers over hers.
“What are you thinking?” she husks.
“About how good you’re going to taste.”
Her pulse flutters in her throat, quick and uneven, and the scent of her—warm skin, coffee, something faintly wild underneath—hits me like a punch. I can feel my wolf pacing just under the surface, restless and alert, ready to close the distance between us.
“Awfully presumptuous, aren’t you?”
My mouth curls up in a grin. “That’s my middle name.”
Her eyes spark with amusement. “Oh, really? Your mother must not have liked you very much.”
“Nahh, she could just see what was coming.”
We’re grinning at each other now, comfortable. I want this forever, this banter, this closeness, the scent of her tantalizing me.
I reach up, fingers brushing a stray lock of hair away from her face. My thumb skims her jaw, and her breath stutters out. The sound goes straight to my chest, to the part of me that’s been waiting for her since before I knew her name.
For a heartbeat, everything stills—her breath, mine, the steady ticking of the clock. Then she leans in, just enough that her knee brushes my thigh.
When our mouths meet again, the kiss deepens—no hesitation, no doubt at all. She tastes like coffee and sweetness and mine.
Her hand slides up my chest, over the steady hammer of my heartbeat, and my control starts to fray. I break the kiss just long enough to rest my forehead against hers, breathing her in.
“Alexis,” I growl, “If you want me to stop tell me now, because I’m just about to lose control.”
She shakes her head once. “Don’t you dare.”