matched with a number of shifter men, and even a human, in ascending order from the lowest percent match to the highest. A one-hundred-percent match was her fated mate.
She held her breath as she scrolled past seventy-two percent, eighty-five percent, eighty-nine percent, ninety-three percent, ninety-eight percent, then finally, she scrolled down to her one-hundred-percent match.
Her breath caught in her throat as she looked at the photograph of the man before her. Her hands were sweaty as she pressed her finger into the man's profile with so much force that it didn't open up at first. She tapped it several more times. Then the profile loaded, bringing up a bigger picture.
He had dark hair, broad shoulders, and a kind smile. A twinkle of mischief lay behind those eyes. He had clear, bright skin and an air about him. She read his profile, and he was the same age as she was.
His profile name was Rebel Wolf. It made her smile. His profile didn't say where he was from, but he said he lived on a ranch with his brothers. He was going to community college and was exploring his passions. That made Cassidy smile broader. Rebel Wolf was a country boy with curiosity and drive beyond the ordinary. That piqued her interest more than anything.
Something about him seemed vaguely familiar. She scrolled through his photographs showing him standing in front of his truck on a farm somewhere, another photograph of him holding a giant trout, another photograph of him shirtless, lifting hay bales into a trailer. That one made Cassidy's mouth water. Her inner lion growled and purred with desire.
She continued scrolling through the pictures, hoping that she would somehow come across a photograph that would give her some indication of where Rebel Wolf was from. Finally, she found it. He was standing in front of a statue in a small town square. Her heart skipped a beat when she recognized it.
It was the statue of the founder of Fate Rock holding a rifle next to a wolf. The humans back then hadn't known their founding father was really a shifter. The statue was over a hundred and fifty years old, and it had been a bit of a joke for the shifter community all those years until the Shifter Council had decided to come out to the human public about their existence over fifty years ago.
So much had changed since then. So much was different now, but so much was still the same. Humans and shifters weren't the only ones to have bad blood. Shifters had plenty of feuds with each other.
Cassidy took her phone and headed up to her bedroom. If this wolf shifter really was from Fate Rock, she wanted to know who he was. He seemed like he was about her age. If she had gone to Fate Rock public schools, she would have known who he was on sight. But after her brothers had gotten into a scuffle with the Wilde brothers, her mom had taken her out of second grade and put her into the school one town over.
Her father had objected at first, but her mother had finally talked him into it. All her mom had wanted was for her to have a normal life and to be safe. She'd thought if Cassidy went to school in the next town over that she would be protected from the family's long-standing feud with the Wildes. In some ways, it had worked.
She still remembered the long drives in winter over the mountain to go to school every morning and then the long drives home. It had been exhausting, but it had also given her and her mom extra time to spend together.
Cassidy sat down at her computer and began cyberstalking. She started by looking at the photographs of different town events, following trails and finding dead ends. Finally, she went over to the Fate Rock High website and searched through the alumni photographs.
She felt like she was never going to find what she was looking for when she stumbled across a random photograph on Google of a Fourth of July celebration by Fate Rock Lake. She found a young man holding a bottle of Red Bull and smiling. It was Rebel Wolf. Her heart stopped when she looked at the caption. “Gunner Wilde fishing with his brothers at Fate Rock Lake.”
“Rebel Wolf is a Wilde?” She gasped and covered her face, her heart beating wildly in her chest. She stood and locked the door. She didn't