Page 46 of The Werewolf’s Study Date

“You’re going to wear a hole in my jeans,” I tell him, staring out at the darkening trees.

“Just making sure you’re still here.”

“I’m in the front seat, Kinkaid. Where would I go? Jump out into the brush at sixty miles an hour?”

“Wouldn’t put it past you if you got cold feet.”

“I don’t have cold feet,” I say, crossing my arms while immediately contradicting myself by bouncing my left heel against the floor mat. “I am perfectly calm. I’m a rational college student accompanying her boyfriend to a standard holiday dinner.”

Boone glances over at me, his lips twitching with suppressed amusement. “Mated partner.”

“Boyfriend sounds less like we’re about to perform an ancient blood ritual in your living room.”

“There are no rituals on Mondays,” he says mildly. “Those are strictly Thursday afternoons.”

“Shut up.”

“My parents are going to love you, Maisie.”

“You don’t know that. What if I spill gravy on your mother? What if I accidentally insult your pack’s territorial boundaries by parking weird? What if I use the wrong fork and your dad challenges me to single combat for dominance?”

Boone lets out a low, rough laugh that vibrates straight through the center console. He squeezes my thigh, his palm radiating that steady, furnace-like werewolf heat that’s basically ruined me for regular body temperatures forever. “My dad doesn’t care about forks. And my mom’s been asking for pictures of you for three weeks.”

I turn my head so fast my neck pops. “She’s been what?”

Boone’s fingers freeze on my knee.

A tiny, fatal beat of silence fills the cab of the truck.

“Boone,” I say, narrowing my eyes. “Did you send your mother pictures of me?”

“I sent a picture.”

“Which picture?”

He clears his throat, suddenly finding the empty, winding asphalt ahead of us utterly fascinating. “The one from the fall festival. With the cider.”

“You sent your mother a photo of me wearing a cheap flannel with powdered sugar on my chin?”

“You looked pretty.”

“I looked like a feral raccoon.”

“You looked like my mate,” he growls softly, his scruff catching the dashboard lights as he shifts his jaw. “And she asked. She wanted to know who was turning her son into a functional human being who actually calls home on Sunday nights.”

“I haven’t made you functional. You still eat four protein bars before breakfast.”

I look out the windshield as the truck turns off the main road onto a wide, crushed-gravel driveway flanked by towering stone pillars. “How many people are actually going to be here tonight?”

“Not many,” Boone says easily, navigating the truck over a timber bridge that arches across a rushing creek. “Just family.”

Famous last fucking words.

The driveway opens into a massive clearing surrounded by old-growth hemlocks and pines. Sitting in the center is a house that looks less like a single building and more like an architectural timeline of the last century. It’s huge—dark timber logs forming the original lower half, expanding upward into a broad, three-story stone and cedar lodge with a wraparound porch, copper gutters, and warm yellow light spilling from dozens of multi-paned windows into the crisp mountain air.

There are also seven pickup trucks, two SUVs, and a Subaru with a dented bumper parked haphazardly across the gravel turnaround.

I stare at the fleet of vehicles. “Boone.”