the situation. “I’m a wolf; I can take a bullet and heal more damage than––”
“That’s bullshit,” he croaked out, swallowing hard, breathing through his nose. “You may heal faster, but you’re just as dead from a point-blank shot as I am.”
I was. No question.
“But you––”
“You’re my best friend, my partner. What do you want me to say?”
When he stepped back, I lunged at him, wrapping him in my arms, and he finally allowed the closeness that had been missing, the last piece in our relationship. Wolves were tactile; we needed, craved touch for true connection. Lots of human and lupine partners didn’t have that, which kept everything professional but also not locked in, not a true pairing. The ones who had that functioned far better than two humans or two lupines, no matter how close they were. Wade had always been strong and independent. His father, a Marine, was killed in action when he was young, and he became the man of the house for his mother and little brother. Leaning on anyone else was not something he did. I was, in fact, the only one he let down his guard with. His mother told me often, when I was alone with her in her kitchen, that she was so thankful for me because, finally, there was someone in his life he could lean on.
“Well, it goes both ways,” I told her.
And then, inevitably, her scowl would appear at dinner as we scarfed down her food. His brother, Ethan, would watch us with wide eyes, and Ethan’s wife, Delilah, would keep her hands in her lap, staring at us as well.
“What?” Wade would ask her.
“I just don’t want to risk getting my fingers between you two and the food.”
His mother would shake her head at us. “You need a wife,” she would tell Wade. “You need a husband,” she would tell me. “The pair of you need lookin’ after and to be fed something decent more than once a week.”
“We both date,” he lied to her the last time we were there.
Her eyes narrowed, and I kicked him under the table because, holy shit, didn’t he know that lying to his mother was a sin?
“What you two do,” she told us, her tone disapproving, like ice water through my veins, “is not dating. You need to stop fornicating and settle down.”
He groaned. I whimpered.
“You both need Jesus.”
And Ethan, that asshole, sat there all smug because he was a lawyer who’d married a doctor, and was basically every mother’s dream child.
“I hate you,” I told him after dinner.
“Me too,” Wade assured him.
“Mom,” he called over to her, “Wade and Avery are going to a strip club after this.”
Only a call for a homicide saved us.
Where I was concerned, she wanted me to find a nice man and settle down. Since I hadn’t told her son about me being an omega, I certainly couldn’t tell her, so I simply did a lot of smiling and nodding whenever the subject came up.
Where her son was concerned…she wasn’t wrong. He was running through women, looking for something, a connection that was just not there. It always started well, hopeful, and then there would be what I called the moment. I’d see it in his eyes when he looked at them or talked about them, and I knew it was done. The last eight or so women, he hadn’t even introduced to me, and if I wasn’t meeting them, that was the kiss of death. I was the step right before meeting his mother. I’d met Meggie, but only by accident. I was coming out of a club, he was going in, and he’d grabbed my bicep and spun me around to face him.
“Where were you?” he snapped at me.
“Here,” I told him, tilting my head at my date, who was waiting with a cab for me at the curb.
“We were supposed to get burgers.”
“Yes, and you know how much I love to watch you wolf down a side of beef…no pun intended,” I teased.
His snort let me know how funny he thought I was, which was not at all. “Huh,” he scoffed. “It’s my fault how that you’re a vegetarian werewolf?”
He was trying to banter with me when he should have been paying attention to his date. That was never a good sign. I grinned at the woman behind him, reminding him that she was there. “You said you had a date, so I made other plans.”