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“How dare you—” I start, glaring at him.
“She’s a little easy to anger,” Ben whispers, avoiding looking at me as he addresses his brother. “Careful, Topher, or she’ll shout at you next.”
So dickhead number one is Topher—Christopher—meaning the other is Alexander. Lovely. At least now I can direct my insults to the correct man.
My blood pressure is surely rising as I stand here dealing with these idiotic men.
Julie’s lips are tilted up in amusement, but her hazel eyes are wary as she takes us all in.
“I think before we discuss anything for the future,” Julie says gently, “we need to discuss the past. Your daughter is a rogue wolf, Maia, and we need to start identifying her lineage and fast, in case her rightful birth pack comes knocking.”
“And her birth pack is the one Ryan belonged to?” I ask. She nods, and I shiver. “Then tell me what you need to know because that’s never happening.”
Ryan’s parents were abusive and cruel, and he ran away as a teenager. There is not a single chance that I’ll be allowing Phoebe to fall into their hands.
But I get the feeling there’s something about these Wolfes—the mate bond they claim exists aside—that I can’t trust. They’re helpful, almost too helpful, and it all feels entirely too neat for me.
Werewolves exist, and my daughter is one of them, so I need to figure out how we can exist in this world so she can have the stable upbringing she deserves.
But I won’t be a naive fool about this.
Not with her future resting on it.
4
ALEXANDER
“Mate.” My wolf’s desperate plea echoes relentlessly inside my head from the moment we enter our childhood home.
Max’s plea is hard to ignore, when I can feel her presence calling me.
I can smell her, the human my wolf calls his own, and it’s the most delicious scent I have ever had the pleasure of coming across.
Fizzy orange and vanilla sugar.
Her scent is alluring and enthralling, the perfect blend of sugar and spice.
I could drown in this scent, and I’d die with a smile on my face.
I’m desperate to lay my eyes on her, to see her for who she is. I can smell our—her—pup, and the itch is already clawing at me to go to her, to take her, to scent her.
“Mate inside. Baby inside. Mate inside.” Max’s urgency in his voice matches my own desires, but where my wolf is driven by emotion, I’ve got to consider all of the possibilities.
I have no choice but to ignore him—to ignore what my soul craves. We’ve got a mate and a child that needs protecting, and we can’t just race into them. Not until we understand the full scope of what we’re dealing with.
Ben was just going on about how beautiful she is and how the baby is so small. Seb didn’t even bother to reply to mine or Topher’s attempts to communicate. Which left my mum and dad to fill us in, and they didn’t convey the best of news.
Topher’s eyes are flickering between the hazel we all feature and the bright gold of his wolf, and I can feel his own desperation to go and see our mate. His wolf, Orion, is going to feel the urges so much more than Max and I do, due to his status as the eldest.
But, like me, he composes his features into the perfect calm mask as we suppress our instincts and do our best to deny our mate.
We’ve got to hide our true desires from everyone else, for her safety. I can only trust my brothers—no other wolf. My brothers and I share a bond that no other sibling group has—the true strength of our bonds lie in the secrets we share, the blood on our hands that we don’t reveal.
I know that no matter how much I want to be in there with her, our mate is with our brothers, and she will be safe from everyone—even my parents. They’ll defend her and our pup until their last breath.
So, Topher and I need to do our part.
The two of us bypass the opening to the living room, ignoring the alluring scent of my human mate, no matter how hard my wolf cries when we turn from her. Now is not the time to see our mate.
