told me that. I don’t know if it was the realization finally hitting him that he’d ruined his marriage and tore apart his family, or if it was the clamps I locked on his langer—”
“You guys need anything else?” Susan asks, voice more relaxed and natural with us than she is with her customers.
And just her smell calms me. Not the product she put in her hair, not the perfume she spritzed before work. Under that, the sweet scent that I know so well because I’ve slept with my muzzle over her feet when she watches TV at night. Heck, I sleep in her room on her stolen dirty clothes. She’s become my comfort.
And she’s comforting in a way no one else has been, and no one else will ever be to me. Take Finn for example. My best friend. An alpha—built to be reassuring to a submissive like me. I’ve slept beside him in the grass since we were kids. There’s been no one closer to me than Finn.
Until Susan.
“Nope, we’re all good here,” Finn tells her, flashing her a smile that I want to knock his teeth down his throat for, “but thanks, sweetheart. How are the tips today?” His look is knowing.
Susan inhales, pursing her lips and rolling her eyes. Loudly, she declares, “You were right, Finn. There. You happy?” She spears him with a look. “I’ve made more this morning than I do in a regular full day’s shift. Kelly said it’s the same for her.” A rueful happiness shines all over her face. She glances at me, sharing her feelings.
I don’t look away. It surprises her.
Finn kicks me under the table. “Too much,” he warns in a growled frequency too low for human ears.
I look down immediately.
Out of the corner of my eye though, I catch the disgusted look Susan throws Finn. She whacks his shoulder with a stack of laminated menus. “Don’t growl at him for looking at me! Geeze, Finn, he has a hard enough time making eye contact already! You bully!”
Finn stomps his boot over my bare foot but gives her an apologetic smile. “Awf, sweetheart, you don’t know wolves. Trust me, I’m helping you both.”
Susan is not convinced. Farthest thing from it, in fact. She keeps him pinned with a stern look before glancing at me, sitting bowed over my mess of a tray. “Deek, is there anything else you want?”
“Just you,” Finn low-growls again. There’s a snickered nuance to the sound.
“I’m fine,” I say quickly to Susan, willing her to go back to serving her real customers.
Susan, who can’t pick up on the teasing, takes Finn’s growl as proof of further bullying. “You expletive-bleeped jerk!” she gasps at him. She sounds outraged. “Stop being mean to Deek and let him answer the way he wants!”
Finn sighs. “Oh, he’d like that. But Sue—honest now—I’m just takin’ the piss out of him…”
Susan screws up her face.
“Expletive-bleeped?” I ask, distracting her from Finn’s colorful Irish-speak. And even though I’m not meeting her eyes, she hears the easy way I’m questioning her—and she relaxes instantly.
“Yeah,” she says, waving to the side. “I’m trying to raise Maggie not to have the vocabulary of a drill sergeant. I have to behave all the time so I’m not slipping up and blurting out other words out at home.”
“Plus, it’s cute and it gets you more tips,” Finn declares, thumping down a twenty-dollar bill on the table—an insanely good tip, considering our meals cost a combined amount of six-fifty before tax.
Susan gives him squinty eyes. “I shouldn’t take this bribery money, but I’m going to because it’s yours and you deserve to be robbed like this.” She swipes up the bill and turns to me. So much softer, she asks, “You sure you don’t want anything?”
Finn’s boot makes contact with my foot again—the only safe way to tease me since Sue is being protective of me. I can practically hear him. He wants something, all right.
Susan is my mate. My anamchara. I’d say it happened fast, but a lot of times, wolves know the moment they meet their other half. Unfortunately, because she’s human, she may never return my conviction. “Not right now, Susan. Thank you.”
“Not yet, you mean,” Finn mutters. “Lucky jackal.”
Now it’s my turn to growl.
Susan shoots a suspicious look between us. “Okay. Whatever’s going on here, I’m out. You two can play your weird little werewolf games. I’m going back to work.”
“That’s best,” Finn says. “We will never stop our werewolf game. Not,” he adds